Published by The Future Fire (2008.14), dedicated to “Social, Political, & Speculative Cyberfiction. An experiment in and celebration of new writing.” It’s s always a treat to be published in a magazine that you also like to read! The story was illustrated nicely by Chris Cartwright of Digital Design. See it at FutureFire.

This story is a chimera. All incidents, encounters, speculative or philosophical riffs, are based on actual events. To unify them on the three levels of the story – our relationship to “ultimate realities,” other intelligent life, and the intelligence community’s impact on its most committed professionals – they must be presented as fiction. “Fiction,” as the narrator says, “is the province of the fantastic ….”

The initial pages illuminate the state of the narrator’s mind on all three levels, lest they be thought extraneous … some editors did not understand how that constituted “fiction” rather than an essay. I suggested to one that he think of “Notes from Underground,” please, as an antecedent, and its two parts. He acknowledged that was fair, but still didn’t like the story. It made me wonder if anybody reads fiction from before 1960 these days; then I learned that one can get a degree in English literature at “good” universities without having to do so.

A dear friend, on the other hand, who spent decades as an intelligence professional, highly respected and honored by his peers, told me he kept saying, “Bingo!” as he read it. I guess it helps to understand the territory.

A riff on this text, a different way of saying it, call it what you will, Northward into the Night, is now making the rounds.

Less Than the Sum of the Movable Parts

by Richard Thieme

Nothing gets us through a long day more than an image of a constant self.

My life is one long day, so believe me, I know. It helps. Thinking that “I” was here “yesterday”, “I” am here “now”, “I” will be here “tomorrow”—it’s wonderful, isn’t it? Using an imaginary temporal index linked to a mirage of an equally illusive self to manage an inchoate flow of impressions which turn into pictures in the “mind” to simulate fixity?

I think it’s wonderful, anyway. I think it helps us stay engaged with tasks that might otherwise drive us to despair.

Or worse.

There’s a bigger question, however: is there a connection between the connections? A real one, I mean? A single template that works from top down, instead of bottom up?

Otherwise, it’s just a coding trick—memories encoded in chemicals programmed to disclose aspects of what we call “selves” like origami unfolding to that same subjective self. This recursive program would be a stroke of genius, if a genius existed. A reflexive self, embedded in its own structure, suggests continuity; seemingly real memories frame the phantom self like planes in a cubist painting constructing odd geometries—inside of which we, all unassuming, happily thrive.

Or—to put it another way—it thinks, therefore we are.

Or, in cases like mine, agencies think for us, relieving us of some of the work.

OK. We emerge from braided twists of code like cookies from flour water and sugar. But where does the recipe come from?

Well—who knows? Maybe it evolved. Maybe we were cooked up in a kitchen. I prefer fun hypotheses like Charles Fort’s. It sounded crazy when he said it; now it sounds reasonable, now that we know that UFOs are real and have been around for a long time. Fort, you recall, combed through newspapers and periodicals in the New York public library in the early twentieth century, filtering anomalies into his notebooks. Then he bound them into a vision. He suggested that we might be property, owned by an alien race. He didn’t know if they won us in a lottery, inherited the planet as part of a bequest, claimed us after a battle, or agreed to accept us in lieu of cash in a game of intergalactic poker. The reasons, whatever they may be, are unthinkable because we have no point of reference. They relate to memories in the storage banks of the alien race(s) linked by connections as invisible to us as dark matter. We don’t know if or how they design histories or store memories to preserve identities distributed through folds of space-time. We can’t even see them, much less understand how they evolved. We don’t even believe in them yet. All we can do is suppose that they, too, construct peculiar geometries in the blank space of the zero point field. Perhaps the multiverse unfolds in their imaginations like origami too, a multidimensional canvas on which they paint or sculpt the equivalent of art.

Who knows? Anyway, the first steps are the hardest: believing that they exist, and then, believing in our belief. At this point in time, we don’t believe. We believe in disbelief. By design, I believe.

In a court of law, lawyers tell me, three witnesses who say the same thing are considered the best evidence. Well, witnesses have testified to the presence of our watchers, owners or visitors, whatever they are, by the thousands. The data points are voluminous. They plot countless visits by beings in luminous discs, silent triangles or elongated craft with portholes; they have been documented for decades, perhaps centuries, they have been here anyway a long long time—they or their robots or clones—but we act as if they don’t exist. We can’t map what we can’t comprehend. We have impressions, images of conspicuous displays, stored in collective memory banks, but we turn them into myth. We make fiction instead of history. Fiction is the province of the fantastic and distracts us—and their manipulations of energy or matter seem fantastic, make no mistake. The effects we have observed imply an understanding that we can not apprehend. And they seem to hide and show themselves, they seem to play a game of cosmic boo and peek—but to what purpose?

Once again… who knows?

Anyway… the DNA came from somewhere. Whatever the source, perhaps our owners think of us as dairy farmers think of their herds. Perhaps they sip like emotional or intellectual milk our cultural excrescence which is useful in some way, or tasty, an occasional treat, a distraction from the task of searching for meaning. Maybe we add a page to the choral songbook of the multiverse. Maybe they feel affection when we head for the barn at the end of the day, the sun steeping the pasture with its lone oak tree slanting in shadow. Maybe the twilight sky that brightens before it fades is a liminal image that stirs them, too, a portal to something they have lost and can not recall.

Or maybe they are proud of our halting progress as parents delight in a child’s first steps, watching us splutter into our neighborhood in primitive machines, skipping to the moon or Mars like toddlers coming downstairs and walking around the block for the first time, seeing with wonder that there is something real indeed across the real street.

Seeing the street at the same time for the first time. Seeing the bridge and seeing the distant bank in the same moment.

We have been born or bred to believe we are individuals, discrete entities, selves with will, feeling and intention, and more than that, that we are the apple of God’s eye or—in a more secular vein—the top of the food chain, something special… instead of transient manifestations of energy and matter in complex relationship to everything else.

But it’s not true.

We are more mist than mountain, more metaphor than mist.

Disorienting, isn’t it, thinking like this? It gives me a headache too. Better to believe our beliefs, believe we are the selves that we experience reflexively as points of reference for the shifting contours of our so-called interior lives.

The task then is to manage the threat of chaos. There are three ways to do this: the Small Way, the Big Way, and the Biggest Way. My colleagues see management of the Small Way as their job. We leave the Big Way to visitors by default. The Biggest Way, we leave to It.

Okay. So… are we the sum of our moveable parts?

Who knows? And does it matter? We will do what we do, think as we think, regardless, take comfort in what we call “cultures” which like “selves” exist as higher branches on a fractal tree and also seem to be sums of, more or less, all of their moveable parts.

The machinery breathes. That’s what matters. People believe in their beliefs.

I was walking home the other night at dusk. It is November, and the weather is changing. The dry leaves of maple and ash and oak were blowing on the pavement, the bare branches of trees clean and leafless against a luminous sky. Clouds streamed from the northwest, obscuring moon and stars, low clouds illuminated by light from the distant city. The road was empty. There are no streetlights in the village, and I trusted the pattern of the pavement to channel my walking toward the bridge across the ravine without bumping into something or stumbling into the shallow ditch along the road.

High on the right, through a tall hedge marking a line of property, windows blazed from a mansion built to the right scale for the land. It was an old home, brick and stone, and its high windows glowed. I flashed back to a cold night when I was a child sent to buy a loaf of bread at a commissary in a high rise. The white bread was in a paper sack in my gloved hands, and coming back, the wind stinging my cheeks, I saw through the blurry prisms of my tears high on the right the bright window of a mansion above an elaborate entrance. Through the window a portrait on the wall of a library filled with books lining shelves from ceiling to floor, a woman in a dress in a chair in a golden frame, a picture light illuminating the portrait, the bright window signifying a refuge. A nexus. A place. A node. A home.

That mansion is gone. It was torn down years ago to make way for a high rise, a glass stack of lighted windows fronting the city on the dark water. Now a bluish candescence spills through glass walls floor-to-ceiling into the night and dissipates before it reaches the ground.

The image of that mansion is a memory, don’t you see, a chemical trace. There’s nothing there. The house no longer exists. It never did. Oh, something was there, once upon a time, something that we agree to call a mansion, but I don’t know what it was. Or what kind of life was lived inside. Or who that woman was. And neither do you. You think you know but you don’t.

You believe in your beliefs.

We presume so much, don’t we? We presume everything. These little slides or luminous images in our minds are slotted into a matrix made to hold them like tiny panes of painted glass, buttressing the belief that we inhabited a past and that the past existed. We believe in the reality of vanished landscapes.

If history is a symphony played in a hall with dead spaces, so are individual lives. The chemical bonds between memories weaken, bleed into one another, leak through once-firm walls of cells of a database housing a house of self. The diminishment of memory contrasts with the illusion of fixity of purpose and self-definition that sustained us. The terminator, the line on the moon where darkness meets the light, throws mountains into sharp relief, but the light and darkness on either side of the line are absolute. Only by contrast do we see anything at all, and then, only for a moment.

The darkness and light, as the man said, are one.

A plumb line of gravity sinks as a point of reference for the floor on which we think we walk. Everything, it seems. We are always in freefall in the deep well of the night. We project imaginary patterns onto stars but cannot see our nearest neighbors, even when they cross the street and walk into our yard. We see them if at all through a glass darkly. Civilizations more ancient than we can imagine, invisible because they are unthinkable.

“Ants can’t get that dogs exist.”

That’s what the professor said.

The professor is also named Paul. When I last saw him, he sank into the billowing cushions of his immense wing chair. His white hair flamed from his face like Einstein’s. He is more massive than Brando, he is huge, but embarrassed by the obsession with obesity. It’s only a fad, he says, dismissing it with a wave. Then reaches for something to nibble on, something to suck.

The professor is a loveable cuss who cannot stop looking. He says he’s retired but doesn’t know how. He can’t help it. He still wants to know. He calls it blessing or curse, depending. What else would I do? he asks in mock exasperation. Play golf?

The idea is funny. I imagine clubs like little sticks in his huge hands, his enormous bulk as solid as a building as he whiffs. I laugh.

The professor is always in the grip of some confounding event. He thrives on irregular shapes, feeling rough edges with his fingers, liking the occasional ouch. He wouldn’t know what to do with a smooth surface or a curve that didn’t challenge him. He prefers to live in hair shirts of perpetual perplexity. Itchiness makes him feel alive.

His eyes often look into the distance. Sometimes people turn to see what he is looking at and can’t see anything at all.

On the other hand, the professor often trips over his own feet.

He obsesses about our owners. He knows they come and go. He has been immersed in the data for decades. He has written hundreds of papers, good ones with careful documentation, reasonable conclusions, and of course, he is ignored. His work is published in periodicals that nobody reads. He lectures to empty rooms but no one puts it on YouTube.

He doesn’t know how long they stay or to what end. Even if we analyzed the metal from a crash or their flesh, it does not tell us anything important. We can do that analysis, it is well within our competence, but to what end? We want to know the story, and the story is a muddle without a point of reference. Where’s the narrative? That’s what we need. A narrative, not abstractions. They seem to want to make it a muddle too and so do we, our own people, guardians of the interface, he winks, meaning our colleagues, who muddle the muddle more.

Ideas can be as alive as people, more alive than some. The people who appointed themselves guardians of the interface, keepers of the secrets, do nothing but dream them up. They invent and alter and manage perceptions and images and ideas in the battle space of our minds. They create relationships between things, then fill in the blanks.

Most keep the faith and die in silence. But once in a while one will have misgivings. Then there’s a crack and a little light gets in, as the song says. Someone gets an itch that has to be scratched.

My friend—call him Herb—is a social scientist. Like the professor, Herb is a tenured academic. But he has worked on contract for years. People like Herb say they distrust us but believe me, they’re easier to recruit than hookers. They talk the talk, but they always take the money.

Herb looks like an academic. Can you picture one? Got it? That’s Herb.

Much of his research has been funded in the dark. Of course, a lot of research in social sciences has been done that way for fifty years; everything is dual use, there are always plausible reasons, and then there are the ways the “intelligence community” as we call it with a laugh can use it, too.

You think I am alluding to something small. You have no idea. We have spun a vast dark web for generations through media, research in and out of industry, entertainment, universities—you cannot imagine how vast it is. Because they turn everything typical into an anomaly. That keeps you from seeing it whole. You never see it all mapped out.

Try. Go ahead. Try to imagine how big it is.

See what I mean? You can’t even come close.

Herb works in the blur between social and psychological, looking for means of manipulation, although he doesn’t call it that, and partners with experts in particle beams, lasers, electromagnetic energy—there are many interesting effects. Like stopping people in their tracks. Making them vomit. Or heat up. Or their brains go fuzzy. Or putting voices in their heads.

Memory, too. Herb works with memory. It’s a passion, not a duty. He works with individual memories, not “memory” in the abstract. He makes memories and he makes memories go away. Or he keeps them intact but breaks up the index so they can’t be retrieved without a good program. You have to know the code that unlocks the code. Herb can intensify some memories and reduce the intensity of others. It’s like using a mixer, he says, recording a song. A little more bass, a little less trumpet, and you wouldn’t know it’s the same song.

‘Of Mice and Men’, he calls his current research.

Herb can make mice forget what they just learned. It looks like magic if you don’t know the science. He distinguishes short term and long term encoded proteins and plays games with them. He has a blast. His playground is small at the moment, just little mice minds, but as Herb said the other night, looking at the streetlight refracted through his glass of sherry, “Just you wait.” Then smiled at me and I smiled back.

His wine looked like liquid ruby from across the study. The wind rattled the ornamental shutters on his three story brick colonial home. His neighbor had raked that afternoon but the leaves blew from his piles onto Herb’s lawn. We could see the leaves swirling in the wind. A neighbor was waiting for his dog, scooper in one hand and leash in the other. The dog was a blur. Then the man and the dog moved away, their distorted images flowing along the thick panes of antique glass.

Herb sipped his sherry and smiled again. He and his colleagues had moved a memory from the brain of one mouse to the brain of another. Then they distributed memories randomly in a dozen mice, busting up the culture in a way, the group still knowing everything but not in the same way. The different juxtaposition in time and space changed the frame. The memories could all be retrieved and resequenced in the proper order, restoring the right tilt to the world. But as I said, you had to know the code.

But that wasn’t why he wanted to talk. That was gossip. He invited me over because he had an itch he needed to scratch. When he turned at last to the subject on his mind, his smile faded.

Herb had been invited somewhere for the weekend. They came through a friend with a channel to the place for the meeting. They wanted to discuss disclosure. That’s all he would say. A tap on the shoulder came like an invitation to Skull and Bones, and off he went. A weekend away, expenses paid. He never says no. When he flies, sometimes windows are blacked out. Sometimes elevators take a long time to go down. You can’t even see the road into the mountain, that’s how good they are. Google Earth is their toy, too, and all the mapping platforms, so unless you have your own satellites, or code to correct the altered images, you haven’t got a reference—don’t you see?—so you can’t really see the earth. All you see is the floor they have given you, seemingly concrete.

A weekend away with men and women from diverse disciplines was a treat. There were several dozen, I think he said. Or did I fill in a blank? We make connections without thinking, fill in the blank spaces. Without thinking consciously, I ought to say. Narratives complete themselves. No, I think he did say a couple of dozen. The agenda at any rate was simple: should they tell? They talked over the pros and cons. How long can we sit on this? How long should we? More people know now, despite our work, how well we have hidden it all in plain sight, but they don’t know that they know. That’s the kicker. Some know but don’t know that they know.

But—how long should we keep it up?

Then their facilitator said—now, this is a direct quote, and Herb looked perplexed as he said it, his affect appropriate to the words—”What will the cattle do? Will they stay inside the fence or will they stampede?”

Hm. I see that the metaphor cattle might be confusing. I use “cattle” as a metaphor again, but not the way I meant before. The cattle to which I am referring here is the whole herd of humanity, the mass of all humankind, our shared mental space. Not the cattle I meant before, when I said that we humans might look to our owners like cows. Then I meant cows. That was a simile. This is a metaphor. That was speculation. This is historical fact.

So let me back up and say it again.

One morning my friend Herb received a call. There is going to be a meeting, he was told. People will come together. Then the meeting will not have happened. There will be no minutes, no memory of the meeting.

We need to discuss disclosure—again. Again we must make a decision.

Your expenses, he was told, will be paid as usual through the Department of International Studies at Oberlin. They will request a paper and you will send one. It won’t be published so it doesn’t matter which.

Then the caller became serious. Things have been warming up. You understand what I mean? Yes, exactly. We don’t know how hot it will get. It’s not in our control.

The question is, has it percolated long enough through the mind of the herd to bring us to a tipping point? Will people understand and adjust? Or will they go through the barb wire?

I did it again. That wasn’t much help, was it? Of course you don’t know that point of reference, either. How could you? It’s from another story. So let’s go there, okay? It’s a detour, but the shortest route to all goals is the detours.

Once upon a time, I was waiting at a neighborhood bank—it doesn’t matter, but it happened to be Midwest Bank, a local institution with a dozen branches. I have lunch with some of the officers now and again at a nearby club. Some play tennis, we all play cards. I was waiting that day to renew a CD. A new vice president was helping me, middle aged, mostly bald, a little fringe of gray and darker hair, a paunch pushing at the tight belt of his not very expensive suit, starting to edge over the belt like a shelf. He was friendly enough, the kind of fellow who might manage the branch someday; he was processing papers to renew my CD. A sheet of paper and a couple of cards were on the glass top of his desk. His eyes moved back and forth between a computer screen I couldn’t see and a pad on which he made notations. We chatted as he calculated interest.

My last conversation with the professor—we had gone to a local casino and walked in winding paths among the noisy slots, turning this way and that as we talked, altering the curve of the interface, in case—was on my mind. In the past, I wouldn’t have said anything. But now, I’m old enough so I don’t care. Let people think I am crazy. Besides, it’s part of the job, part of the latest persona. My current job is thinking about things and saying stuff. At least, that’s how it looks. Like Paul the professor, my puppet “Paul” is intended to look creative, eccentric, be genius-level at times, but always what up here they call “different.”

So as I waited I said to Glen, that’s the new V-P, I said, Glen, you know, I read this article the other day, and told him about the sighting I heard from the professor how pilots and air traffic controllers and radar stations all reported the same thing, how huge the thing had to have been to make a blip like that, how huge in fact it was according to both pilots, they literally soiled themselves, I said, and he nodded, filling in my name on a blank.

We had something happen on our farm, once.

Oh? I said.

Yes, he scribbled on a card, up north, on the family farm. One night this trooper came speeding along the road chasing after this bright light flying low along the hills. The thing glowed with incredible intensity, not like something with a light, but like the thing itself glowed from the inside out. It was white but it was so white, the purest white light, and he skidded to a stop, which is when we heard him outside on the loose gravel and went out to see. This thing whatever it was had apparently come down behind our barn. The trooper was a guy we knew, everybody knew Luke, he was standing at the open door of his prowler, behind the door like he was hunkering down, looking at this bright light behind our barn illuminating trees and everything back there. We stood there looking at it with him for a long time. He told us he chased this thing from the other side of town through town and out along the highway by our farm.

Are you going to go back there? I asked.

Hell, no, he shook his head. No way in hell he’d go back there alone.

Then whatever it was suddenly rose up so silent and it moved fast so we couldn’t really see or it disappeared. But one minute this bright white light was hovering over the barn and then it was up there looking like a star and then we couldn’t see it anymore. It was like night descended suddenly upon the house, the pasture, on us, everything, and everything was still again. Then the insects started chirping and we realized they had stopped.

I’ll never forget it, he said. He turned two cards toward me and handed me a pen. I signed the cards on the lines at the X.

That was the end of it, then?

Well, no, he said, see, the next morning we went out behind the barn to see was anything there, and we found broken branches in kind of a circle like something had snapped them off, grass scorched and the edges of the branches burnt too and some of the leaves.

But—do you know much about cattle?

I shook my head.

He said, something scared hell out of the cattle. Cattle know about barb wire. They know what it is. But that night, so many of our cows went through the barb wire, they went right through it, they tore themselves up so bad, udders and all; we had to destroy most of them, they were so cut up.

Nobody ever saw anything like it.

He folded the CD and put it in a plastic sleeve.

OK. So I told you the name of the bank where we had this conversation. I can tell you we put money into that bank or another, but money is another null set, isn’t it? Money doesn’t exist, either. Money is energy stored in a form we pretend. We act like money is real, interest will be paid, businesses exist, and that’s the thing—it’s all held together by couplers that are imperfect but good enough and it stays together because nobody pulls at it too hard.

You don’t want something scaring hell out of the cattle so they go right through the barb wire and cut themselves to pieces and have to be put down.

Anyway, that’s what the facilitator meant when he said about cattle, will they stay inside the fence or stampede? He meant what Glen at the bank meant but Glen meant real cows.

So Herb went to the meeting. Now, I know Herb. I know him as well as one can know another. Or oneself, as I have been saying. Herb went to the meeting intending to weigh in on the side of telling people everything. It’s our planet, he said. People have a right to know what’s happening. It’s time, he chimed like he was an alarm and humanity a clock. Like he knew all about it.

Then he went to the meeting. And when he came back—I never saw anything like it. He had turned completely around. He went away one hundred per cent in favor of disclosure. He came back just as adamant against.

I asked him what he had heard that changed his mind but he wouldn’t say. Well, I asked, who was there? He wouldn’t say. I wouldn’t say, myself. Lots of different ones, he said. Most knew a lot more about it than me. He was leaning forward in his wing chair looking like that trooper might have looked, as I imagine him looking in the memory of Glen the vice president of the bank, staring at the light behind the barn.

He wouldn’t face me exactly. His gaze was at an angle. He was looking out the window but looking at nothing. There was nothing there to see.

That’s all I’m going to say, he said. Then he said, they’re afraid it won’t hold.

What won’t?

He looked at me with sorrow and I believe pity.

Paul, we wake up and get dressed and go to work. We have breakfast and watch TV. We buy stuff and cut the grass. It’s the little things, the things you can’t make people do. They have to want to do them. They have to believe in them. They have to believe in their beliefs.

The way we do it, it’s good enough, it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough. You know that. We can’t take the chance.

He sat back, sinking into the billowing cushions of his immense chair. His white hair flamed from his face like Einstein’s. I knew why he was upset. And he knew I knew why. The loop completed, as it will.

Is it just chemical, I wondered, looking at it from the outside? Looking at Herb leaning in his chair, looking at how I must have looked, looking at Herb. The way fear is transmitted, I mean? Is it some primordial pheromone that triggers fight-or-flight? That makes the hair stand up on the back of the neck? The heart race and the palms sweat?

That makes us want to get out while we can?

Except that what we’re in is ourselves. And there are no boundaries between us. Each the bridge, each the other side.

And we’re in it together. Us and them and then some.

Old men have the luxury of telling the truth because no one pays attention. Old men are irrelevant to currents of action, reflection beside the point when life is brutish.

People concede to us wisdom or perspective only because they don’t matter.

It was right around that time, if I remember correctly, that I met Susan for lunch in Chicago. I have known Susan for years. Susan is a social worker which can mean lots of things. She worked for community services for a while, had a stint at County Hospital, and I think she worked for a time at New Life Counseling Center. Now she works mostly with addicted women who get beaten up a lot. She has done it for some time so she must have learned how to use herself as a tool and still go home, kick off her shoes, and watch TV the rest of the night.

We had lunch at a trendy restaurant on the near north side. We laughed when we read the names of the fancy vegetables. “California stuff,” I said, looking at a waiter setting down a plate of white and pale green stalks and leaves.

Susan had a sandwich with three kinds of cheese and asparagus and a red paste on yellow bread with lots of seeds. The little bit of salad on the side was full of curled greens and coiled carrots. I went for something hot. I had my leather coat zipped up the whole time. I was still cold from walking from my car in that wind.

Susan looked good. She sounded solid. She was into a new relationship so she was hopeful—again. She usually picked horses that came out of the gate strong but faded in the stretch.

I listened a lot and seldom spoke, nodding to indicate what she called “empathetic listening.” Through the plate glass window the gray sky had lost all definition. The discoloration became rain and then the rain turned into snow. There was sleet too and slush along the sidewalks by the time we finished eating, ankle-deep and cold. Susan had parked in front of the bistro and drove me to my car parked a couple of blocks away.

My cold feet flexed in my wet shoes as she turned on the heater. The sleet squeaked on her worn wipers. She turned all the way around to pull out and went slowly down the narrow street.

There it is, I said.

That one? I was looking for the Ford.

The Ford’s long gone. There was even a Mazda between.

She pulled in behind the old Toyota and turned off the wipers. The end of the scraping sounded good. Sleet ran in thick rivulets down the clean windshield.

Susan continued to talk about what she wanted to do next, wondering was it too late, and should she give this guy a chance? Elmo was his name of all things. Maybe it was made up.

She lowered her window an inch or two, letting the car idle and keeping the heater on. Warm air flowed from the vents while a thin stream of cold air from the open window felt like white icing on a cake.

It was one of those conversations. You can’t make it happen, but when it does, you don’t ever want it to stop. First, there was the meal, hot chowder and crab cakes for me, fresh hot bread with drizzle to dip, a delicious sauvignon blanc from Cloudy Bay, the chatter and glasses and silver around us at precisely the right level. We hadn’t seen each other for a long time, and it felt so good just to be with her, eating quietly, taking our time, letting the ambient noise be a cushion for the pauses. It was like a real community filling in the blanks so we didn’t have to do everything ourselves. Beyond Susan at the next table, a young couple were playing footsie, the movements of the draped cloth betraying their game, looking at each other with little smiles. Made me nostalgic. Outside, the snow and sleet were really coming down, the snow blowing slantwise across the window and people hurrying through the mess, holding their coats closed at the collar, dipping their heads in the bitter wind when they had to wait for a light. But we were inside, warm and dry. Susan talked on as she often did about her life. I had heard a lot of it before. It wasn’t what we talked about so much as knowing one another for all those years.

Sitting in the car afterward, I thought I was doing OK, nodding a lot like I said, paying attention most of the time, when she turned off the heater and gave me a look.

“You haven’t said much about your work.”

“Oh?” I shrugged. “I told you some things, what I could, what I thought you might find interesting.”

“Paul,” she said, her eyes not letting me off the hook. “Paul, you told me you were talking to people who were tortured. You were working with people doing it, too. You told me about it last time. How it affected them. Then you were off about where the planet might be headed, other kinds of life forms and God only knows what. But I keep going back to what you said about the Turks. And the Uzbeks. It was chilling.”

I shrugged and shivered. I leaned over and turned on the heater.

“The techniques aren’t the thing. It’s pretty cut and dried.”

She looked at me for a long time.

“Paul,” she said, reaching and taking my hand. “Do you remember what you said once? About people going over the line?”

I did, but forgot I had said it.

“I guess.”

“Paul—you’re over the line.”

I had a sinking feeling and looked down at her hands. Her hands are where the aging showed most.

“You told me yourself, you don’t know how to talk to normal people anymore. You don’t share their points of reference.”

I turned to look outside. “I said that?”

“Yes,” she smiled, getting inside. “You said you live in a world that people don’t want to know. You didn’t want to talk about it, either, but you did, some. Do you think I would forget something like that? Do you think I can’t see what’s going on?”

“Why? What am I doing?”

“Oh, Paul,” she sighed. “For someone so smart, you sure can be dumb. Do you remember the books I gave you on trauma? How it affects people?”

“Sure.” I nodded. “I read some of it. It was interesting.”

“Why do you think I asked you to do that?”

I shrugged again. “Because the people I talk to, whether its ones doing interrogation, or ones who have been worked on, or ones who have had encounters, or the ones who keep the interface, manage the deception, whoever it is, they all show signs of trauma, right? You wanted me to understand what symptoms they would have.”

“Yes, but why else?”

I shrugged a final time. “I don’t know.” I was truly blank.

“Because,” she said, squeezing my hand, “you’re showing symptoms too. From listening. It’s almost the same as being there.”

I guess it was obvious to her, doing the work she does. But have you ever not known something so completely that when someone says it, the recognition of it is like all of the air rushing out of the room? You can’t breathe, you can’t even think of breathing. Then, when you do speak, your emotions are so raw, like someone sank a shaft and hit oil, because they have been buried for so long, you can feel the sobbing rising inside but refuse to let it out.

Susan could feel it, too. She took my other hand and I saw she had lost weight. I noticed for the first time that her navy skirt didn’t pucker as much on her belly.

“Paul, you can’t not know what you know. You can’t unlearn it. It’s who you are. But part of you must know what it does to you.”

I nodded. She was wearing a ring, not an engagement. Then I looked up into the deep well of her eyes.

Everything let go.

“Do you have any idea what we do? Or what they do? Or how long it’s been going on? Do you have any idea who we are? How much we are not what you think? Or who you think?”

She had unleashed a beast and realized it now. The fear in her eyes was evident.

She shook her head. “Do I want to know?” She had lost the offensive and knew it. She was looking for a place to hide. I watched her cover and duck.

“I’m concerned with what it’s doing to you. You say you kind of retired but you still talk to all these people, and –”

“No,” I shook my head. “You think you’re concerned but you don’t know. You don’t know. You’re concerned about the wrong things. That’s how it’s designed, Susan.”

The floor on the deep well of the night gave way. Her eyes darted back and forth looking for something to hold. During that transient glimpse into my life, into all life, she understood, felt it like a sudden chill and almost went into panic mode. She almost headed for the barb wire. Then her eyes shifted from my face to the window where snow was dropping from the trees and she found a reprieve. Everyday people passed on the walk in overcoats and parkas, a woman tottered by in sheer hose and four inch heels, comic relief, watching her step through the melting slush. Behind her, the old stone of a brownstone mansion was whitened by snow blowing off the roof. Susan saw as she tilted her head and looked up an elegant doorway with its black wrought iron gate and above it a second story window blazing with electric light.

“Paul—” she said.

I shook my head.

“Susan, my name isn’t Paul. It never was.”

She looked for a connection. That’s what people do. Try to plug in.

“I remember a few years ago,” she almost laughed although nothing was funny. “Someone called you Herb. You made a joke of it, saying they were getting old.”

I shook my head again. “It isn’t Paul and it isn’t Herb. And I am not a professor. I never was.”

After thirty-seven years. Thirty-seven years.

“I’ve had so many names, Susan, I can’t remember them all.”

She let my hands loose and they came back to my side of the car. I believed she accepted my confession and all of the things that it shattered with professional equanimity. So I leaned closer, hoping to hold her in my arms. I wanted to feel her and inhale her scent. I wanted her warmth. That was all. I just wanted to be close. But the fracture was too abrupt. In the moment, I thought I confessed in order to be real, but as she drew back, her eyes receding into the distance, I realized that she saw more clearly than I ever would that I had, as always, simply needed to prevail.

A splendid slipstream anthology (Subtle Edens, from Elastic Press: London, November 2008) includes this breakthrough story, which received this review:

“Silent Emergent, Doubly Dark” by Richard Thieme opens with a quote from James Joyce, whom I consider to be a primogenitor of slipstream. Thieme, fortunately, doesn’t try to match Joyce for wordplay and instead gives us a calm, flat look into the psyche of an alien being. Thieme explores various levels of reality through his protagonist, moving farther and farther away from the seen, into unglimpsed realms. The story itself, like Joyce, is a bit difficult, but Thieme’s beautiful descriptions and intriguing concepts keep things interesting. This is a piece that truly deserves the slipstream label.

Silent Emergent, Doubly Dark

by Richard Thieme

What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

- Ulysses, James Joyce

I wanted to leave the Earth the minute I knew I could.

Didn’t everybody? Well, no, I learned. Everybody didn’t.

So most don’t. They’re wired by design to like their home planets. I was wired differently. I hungered to plunge into the cultures of other worlds.

First, however, I had to matriculate, study psi and physiology, physics and symbol systems. I had to learn how to weave words, then learn how to weave the wind.

Lacking siblings and close friends, restricted to the precincts of the spaceport by my mother’s work, I played inside my mind in a gravity well of necessary solitude. That, I discovered, was a precondition for the bounce.

“That’s you, there, when you threw the dice,” my mentor said, showing me a retro of a toddler in a room. A doctor entered, and the child’s eyes – my eyes – filled with fear. Then the apprehension vanished and the child rushed into the doctor’s arms.

“That’s when you went off-world,” my mentor said. “That’s the platform, that moment, there. We provided the wiring but you had to make the splice.”

#  #  #

The first culture I explored on my own was the whrill-ggg! or the whirlibangs as I called them. The whrill-ggg! lived in one of the small planets at Sirius B. They lived inside the dirt like ants in a huge hill.

They had ritual memories of when the dwarf roared and they lost all but the most roastable of ancestors. Memories were enacted in the darkness twice each year and then the little ones exchanged hugs and touches. The dark carapace-encrusted ones and the thickly feathered remnants of the flyers were the only ones to survive. The pinkies, the fair-ones, all died in the flames.

Two major races built inside and moved mountains literally, turning everything upside down. Whereas before there had been towers in the sky, there were towers inverted, plunging into the Earth. Tunnels connected them in fractal-branching patterns that looked for all the world like self-luminous trees. They cultivated luminescent bacterial gardens and learned to breed thousands of different batches. The inner darkness glowed with every imaginable color and hue. The inner world became diverse, nuanced with colors that the day-star would never have revealed, had the Roar not happened.

Unfortunately the feathered ones and the encrusted ones decided that they were more bonded to being feathered or encrusted than they were to being a single species. So the tribal divide coincided with the near-completion of the initial work on their inner world. They fractured in two. Still, both tribes spoke glowingly of the beauty of their habitat when seen in a flash, an intuitive flash better than a visual, and that was the precondition of recombination. Even after they fractured, paradoxically, a single luminous web unified their common life.

This is what they did. They built a framework of bonded earthworks that absorbed extraneous light. Absorbent pebbles sucked in the light and left a blackness so thick it was nearly visible. Then they engineered a number of levels by programming tiny animals, then bigger ones, then ones that were unimaginably big, to dig patterns they wanted to etch in several dimensions. Then they lined the tunnels with liquids that thickened and held to the walls as they dried. Then they released luminescent bacteria that found the right walls and began to live and multiply in and on them. But because of the pressure as the gradient increased, there were apertures over and around each section. So from any vantage point in the primitive grid they could see every hallway and tunnel, all glowing with various colors and depicting the entire planet in precise miniature. Then when they altered or as they called it “played upon” one part or another, they could see the effect on the whole as the luminous life-forms adapted themselves to the changes. Then they would execute the changes or not, depending on consequences.

I had just arrived when they took me to see the First Matrix. It had long ago crumbled when they stopped repair-work and built the Second. But its smudged colors and broken walls and portals made it somehow even more exquisite to behold. It was breathtaking, really, coming down the locks and through the gates that held the heat up or out and entering the cooler darkness then being taken by the hand and led through the lightless maze around and up to a platform where suddenly as one came around the last bend the ancient remains of the First Matrix glowed with indescribable beauty. Blues, corals, yellows, pinks, these I remember most. But when I named the colors I saw they laughed. My frog-eye and frog-brain couldn’t come close to saying what they saw with their million-faceted dark-adapted eyes.

The feathered ones and encrusted ones rebonded after the Great War which is why I was able to go. They never sent newbies to war zones or even to temblors, which is what we called cultures that gave signs of impending disaster, war, catastrophe, or collapse. They tentatively called themselves the whrill-ggg! which was an amalgam of their racial names like Serbo-Croatian or Anglo-Franc had been on Earth. You could tell that the name still sounded strange on their tongues, except of course they did not have tongues. They had hundreds of vibrating cilia around their mouths and inside what we called their lips. When they sang together at council, harmonized on hug-days, or aroused themselves for a planetary change, the humming sounded like cellos and bassoons to me, then violins when the younger ones joined, then instruments for which I have no names when the ready women, neuts, and crawlers all joined the chorus.

I learned a few sounds which I made in different ways with my agitator, my cheeks, my sound banks, and my thrummers. I learned how to ask for something to eat or drink, inquire in at least seven levels of formality after their health or well-being, admire with appropriate restraint the nubile budding of their ready ones, and of course ask for directions to the channels of elimination. “Tubes and cools” we called it in the seminar room. There, however, it sounded more like “RRggghhh—hroopeff!” and “Wwwwrilllling-upsss?”

The feathered ones fascinated me because they still had wonderful stories of soaring. Their feathers had thickened for better insulation and most were unable even to flutter or primp. But their hug-fests were filled with images of soaring in the twin-sunned skies before the Roar and their young ones twittered and danced with excitement.

I lived there only for one month. That was the term for the first journey and no matter how much you loved the culture, there was no changing it. I can understand now how impressionable we were, coming out of the academy, so eager to translate or adapt. The danger of falling in love with your first culture and going native, particularly since the target is chosen to be congruent with your hunger for belonging, was too great.

I hated to leave. Since they had seen academicians come and go on a monthly basis for centuries now, they never grew attached. Their hive mind did not entertain attachment in the same way, anyhow. You were either part of the hive or you weren’t. If you weren’t, you were food or enemy or guest. Guests were never loved inordinately or adored during hug-fests beyond their limits.

My eyes had barely begun to open, don’t you see. When I saw the First Matrix it took my breath away but it was as if I was opening my eyes under water for the first time. A week later I returned to the vista and used it as a benchmark. Already I could see why they laughed. There were hundreds of luminosities, nuanced gradations of brightness and dimness I had totally missed when they asked what I saw. They only asked questions, I know now, that the academy provided. They weren’t just being polite, they were taking part in a program the rules and objectives of which they understood thoroughly and had for many generations, too many to count. By the end of the second week I wanted to stay and move my eyes from color to color, light to light. After the third week I was cocky and described the harmonies I could discern with glib triumphalism. This too they tolerated, saying nothing, giving me hugs and strokes with their lateral cilia. Then at the end of the fourth week when I knew I would leave the next “day” I stood there and wept at the beauty of it, the inexplicable patterns I had just begun to notice, and all I wanted to do was stay inside that planet and learn and learn and see and see.

But rules are rules. Through the gates we clambered and through the locks growing hotter and hotter until they bade me farewell and I came up into the tube that sucked me like milk in a straw into the ship and before I knew it I was home.

#  #  #

“Hey! Alien Brain!”

It happened outside the academy walls after I returned from my first excursion. Youth from the spaceport barracks, three of them, made bold when they saw how I walked. I was growing accustomed to Earth weight but still lurched from side to side. I was more aware of the bright light. Everything was glaring! Everything on Earth looked whitewashed in too-bright sun, unfiltered. Colors bled and shadows were shocking and harsh.

The three of them blocked my way. I looked at their faces. They seemed pinched, narrow-nosed. Their eyes were like slits and their mouths gushed words. Humans, I was learning, are a funny species. They think talking is doing. Their souls ride floods of vocables like rafts in rapids.

“So how’s Alien Brain, huh?”

I measured the distance. I withdrew my head toward my shoulders, my neck shortening. My hands rose at my sides like winged claws. My eyes burned with defense-of-nest rage.

The talker cooled and stepped back. His face lost color, nostrils flaring, eyes opening wide. He rose to his height, flexing his fists. But then his fingers unclenched, his expression relenting.

“Big important alien brain, huh!” he said, but he backed off. The others backed off with him, feigning grace and style. “Watch yourself!”

I hunched my shoulders in an unmistakable take on encrusted ones entering the feeding ring and facing down the feathered ones. Ritualized, to be sure, but there was no mistaking the menacing implication. The encrusted ones were fierce. Inside I felt my carapace shift plates and adapt to the diminished threat.

They backed off, honoring their fear. They knew that I knew and knew I knew they knew. It is never disreputable I learned on B to honor one’s fear. Fear is noble when it is honored. It is ignoble only when dismissed.

I didn’t know why they called me Alien Brain. Whatever I had learned from the whrlll-ggg! in one month was still percolating into my personality, still inflecting how I held myself as a possibility for action. I couldn’t see myself yet.

Had nothing to do with a brain, anyway. Brains are physical, I thought then – before I lived four earth-years among the Tzdow in artificial orbiting cities.

After my excursion to Sirius B, I wrote a paper which caught the attention of professors. I emphasized not so much the adaptation of the two dominant cultures to the interior of the planet but the relationship between the symbolic matrix they continued to rebuild with greater and greater refinement, the nuances of the colors, the ripples of luminosity and flux, the fact that a snapshot of the symbolic system at any moment produced a static image of near-perfect symmetry, regardless of the point of view from which it was taken. This meant that the blended cultures had an ability to synthesize diverse thought-forms at successively higher levels of abstraction and was able to think more than multi-dimensionally. They were able to see their mental representations as dogs having not tens or dozens but hundreds of tails, as it were, and they were able to imagine all the dogs chasing all the tails both in a dynamic simulation always in flux and as a static snapshot, a map of the interior of the planet and more importantly of their own well-integrated hive mind.

I was well into the Gray Zone. That’s what pleased my mentors.

The ultimate task for the Cosmos as we arrogantly called our pan-galactic collective was to narrow the Gray Zone. The Gray Zone exists between our mental multi-dimensional maps and the things they represent. Because the hive on B, for example, is dynamic, there is a always latency or lag time between the frequently reiterated map and whatever is “out there” or rather “in here” as in fact was literally true on B. That latency was down to a few nanoseconds for the hive mind which is remarkable considering that the representations were made almost exclusively of wetware, flows of luminous bacteria that constantly shaped and reshaped themselves through spontaneous telepathic connection to subtle alterations in the composition of the materials of the planet – shifting strata, changing chemical balances, fluctuations in temperature – somehow they factored all of it in, devising quantitative measurements for relationships that others had not yet discovered.

As a recent graduate, this taught me how hastily I had applied words like “primitive” and “unsophisticated” to a feat that no other civilization to our knowledge had achieved.

No wonder the denizens of B were honored and were always the first stop of anyone endeavoring to understand how the Cosmos understood itself.

I left the academy infrequently after returning because contemplation of what I had seen, attempting to re-member it, became a preoccupation. This is not unusual, so deeply imprinted is the cadet by the living rainbow arcs of that inner world.

A post-excursion exercise illustrates how difficult it is to re-member what we saw.

I was using movables and mindscreens to plot the points I recalled of the First Matrix. I chose the most basic because it would be simpler, I thought. I smudged colors with an artist’s fastidious hand, moving pastel whorls along cracking lines between zones. The form of the whole emerged in four dimensions. I could run it in real time or let the slide show snap through the cycle.

Watching the weekly run one morning, I suddenly sat up and hit Block. A rainbow bridge spanning the chasm of the third divide did not look right. I took it ahead frame by frame, squinting as the bridge shifted in slow time and arced over a canyon I did not remember seeing.

“That’s funny.”

I buzzed for a Master and waited patiently until she came.

“I don’t remember it this way,” I explained, “but it works in the simulation. How could I have missed it?”

She ballooned her white skirts which seeped air as they settled to the floor as she arrived beside me. Her eyes were magnificent, telescopic and slightly tubular, protruding with the apparatus that enabled her to see little and big in the same scan.

“What happens if you remove the bridge?”

“Remove it entirely? Obliterate the link?”

“Yes,” she said. “What do you think would happen?”

“It would fall down.”

She twinkled. “Give it a try.”

I obliterated the bridge and backlashed parameters as if it had never existed. I fell back to a prior position and let the simulation race. To my surprise, the canyon was at first dark but slowly became self-luminous over time as bacteria flowed along its walls. It began to brighten about the time the bridge would have invented itself and the light arced through the air and formed a different bridge where there had been nothing, growing along a luminous flow. A dozen frames later, the bridge was there, made it seemed of light, pure light.

I sat back, hitting Block to stop the movement, staring at the bridge of light.

“What happened?” she asked.

“It built what was needed,” I said. “I understand that. But there was no material! How did the flow of information create a tangible structure out of thin air?”

“Well,” she said, smoothing her skirts and indrawing her stalks. “What would have to be true in order for that to happen? What kind of universe would it be if this simulation is correct?”

I thought for a moment. “Thought forms!” I said. “Thought forms as real as the material out of which …” – my mind was racing – “out of which everything is made.”

“Which means …?”

“Talpas!” I thought of that nasty monk taunting Madame de Neal. “The simulation forms so-called ‘reality’ in its own image – creates it, in a way – which means that the imagination, the mind, not only half perceives, but also half-creates.”

“And where does one begin and the other end?”

I looked inside my mind to see. After a moment, the Master laughed.

“Can you see? And if you can see, can you say what you see?”

I peered into the darkness, feeling deflated.

“I don’t think I can see, no,” I said. “And I have a hunch that if I could I could not say what I saw without distortion.”

“Without building bridges out of thin air, in other words …”

Suddenly I saw. “Yes!”

“So you do see?”

The moment passed. My mind was clanking machinery again, gears grinding. “I thought I saw …”

“No,” she gently corrected. “You saw, and now you think you saw.”

“Ah!” I said, growing excited. For a moment my mind flickered back and forth like a hologram being seeing and thinking I saw then seeing myself thinking then thinking I saw myself thinking I saw … collapsing into infinite regress.

Then I was sitting there again merely, the Master riffling her skirts as she rose.

“A good day for remembering,” she said with a twinkle. “A good day for forgetting, too.”

My laughter rang out as someone threw a switch in the control room and her simulated image vanished.

#  #  #

The Memory Game, the less pious call it. This is how Harambee, a senior classmate, explained it in a seminar.

“You didn’t grow up with siblings,” he said, “so you don’t know. I had a brother who was four years older. Once he asked if I remembered an incident that took place when I was four. It was very depressing, he said, how our parents lost control of their emotions. They went wild that night.

“That’s funny, I told him. I don’t remember it that way. I remember an argument full of good will, a respectful exchange that ended with a perky little kiss.

“Maybe we’re talking about two different things, he said.

“He was right, but not the way he was thinking. He always thought our home was insane.

So he remembered the story in a way that fit that decision. I always thought there was plenty of affection and good will. That’s how I approach life generally and I remembered the ‘same event’ in a way that was congruent with my happier self, my happier life.

“But is it the same event at all? Even if we agreed in the way we told the story, even if we got the planet or the galaxy to agree on how the story is told, would that do anything other than inflect the way we co-create the Cosmos, surrounding ourselves with seamless agreement that determines how we hold ourselves as possibilities for action?”

“Are you suggesting,” I asked, “that there is nothing ‘out there’ except what’s ’in here?’”

“Well, what kind of universe would we inhabit if that were true?”

I laughed. “That’s Theology. We’re in Cultural Studies, remember?”

“Are we?” he smiled.

#  #  #

The middle period of my learning was full of wonder. ‘You are learning so fast it is making you giddy,’ read one evaluation. ‘You can not absorb the lessons in other cultures fast enough to satisfy your hunger. Your need to connect is relentless. Unless you create and recreate the Big Picture, always using more data, you feel as if your life is meaningless. Your mind moves at a speed most cannot comprehend.’

I felt like I was balancing on the tip of a gyroscope spinning on a hair stretched between suns. Naturally, I lost balance and fell. The boundaries between disciplines that I had studied as if distinct disciplines – physics, exobiology, astrochemistry – blurred. Everything, I discovered, related to everything else.

Cultural Studies require at some point familiarity with the major research areas of exobiology. It is impossible to separate the physical from behaviors that seem to manifest what some call spirit and some call soul. Those are names for an integrated whole or the image of the whole projected by the perceiving being. Drill down through levels of abstraction defining behaviors of subcellular automata, cells, individual beings, colonies, or communities of all shapes and sizes and you find they are layers around a planet’s core. At some point they collapse and you plunge into nonspecific awareness where cognition becomes ill-defined prior to self-identification through reflexive consciousness.

The Universe begins and ends in consciousness that half-creates and half-perceives. Consciousness like the Universe is finite but unbounded. Therefore we must grieve not …

But I digress.

Exobiology is fascinating. The Gray Zone is even more important in that discipline. The proper study of biological entities, after all, is form. Form determines identity and identity is destiny. But form disappears in the Gray Zone. That means destiny as an intentional trajectory is impossible to trace to its source. It happens at the quantum level and it isn’t certain whether it’s a function of what’s there or how the mind sees what’s there. The dividing line between them is another Gray Zone.

The holographic brain flickers between distinctions until it gets a bad headache.

The important things in the Universe happen in the Gray Zone, between low and high tide, on the edges of things. That’s where we see most clearly that choices become decisions and decisions are engines of self-definition.

That’s where/when a species stops fooling around and plays the game with real money.

These insights evolved after I visited gas planets where higher beings float. They emerged apparently from the soup as membranes around chemical processes. They look to earthly eyes like gelatinous jellyfish, flexing in the currents of their atmospheres, as adapted as fish in a sea. Their forms are translucent, resilient, tough. They live at all levels of the float. They signal in all frequencies.

At one point they communicated through the exchange of gases but began specializing, making trade-offs. Energy became information and information discovered more appropriate forms for self-expression. Some ingathered nutrients, others defended the distributed network from chemical assault. As nutrient fishers became more efficient, the colony needed fewer of them. That allowed the defenders to evolve elaborate structures that looked more offensive than defensive. At some point in their evolution the distinction became meaningless. Floaters that did not participate in the collective memory disappeared and a single membrane that looked like an immense brain without a skull flowed in the winds and storms of the hot giants.

The only way to study such planets from the inside was to participate in the flow. We had tried to establish observatories (with consent, of course) on their many moons and listen to radio waves, synapses crackling with static, as we learned to distinguish the flow from the colors of the upper atmosphere. It didn’t work. We wound up describing processes as if they were merely physical.

They worked with us to establish modules that synched with their habitats. We designed skeins of tough flexible polycarbons into which we knitted ourselves, brains afloat in translucent fabrics that moved with the winds. We connected our floaters to the planetary being by multispectral communication that enabled us to see, feel, hear, receive, link and – we hope – think as they did.

Visiting the gas giants was a highlight. I practiced for two years in tanks and sims before I was inserted. Still, the first shock of flying was as terrifying as it was exhilarating. I kept feeling for ground under my feet and couldn’t find it. I kept trying to focus my thinking right in front of my face as if I were a brain seeing the world through physical eyes. But the information that mattered wasn’t coming in from the front. It was coming from behind, around the edges, and I had to learn to listen as it were with antennae that extended out and back, gathering signals and processing them in a part of my brain that at first did not feel “real.” I knew theoretically that it was just habit. I had learned from my fetish that images however enticing floated beyond the core reality I sought. I applied that lesson a thousand times on the gas giants. The part of my brain that processes images as if they are real became something I could observe. Instead of seeing things, I saw myself as a process generating images of things. Then I knew how my mind structured or created realities in which I lived as if they were real. Meanwhile I dropped down into a listening place below the level at which images were generated. It felt like letting go of a struggle to stay above the water and breathe air. I let myself sink into the silence of the deep, sink down into the darkness, except instead of dying, I discovered myself more alive, more aware than ever.

I hung between points of gravity in equipoise, listening.

Then I became part of the flow. There was always a level of intentionality that had to happen for connections to be made, but once I learned where that happened and could go there at will, I could always find the reins when I dropped them. Once you know how to regain the reins and know that you know, you have mastery.

Then the synapses crackled not with static but with multichanneled signals layering information into patterns, weaving immense tapestries the size of moons. The signals were like threads built into a pattern and at a higher level of abstraction they became images heard not with the ear but with the entire organizing brain.

When I returned to the academy for a sabbatical after that sojourn I had the most difficult time translating what I knew into language that others could understand. I had to “layer up” from the primary way of knowing to the metaphors and symbols that made sense in another domain. It was as if I was describing life underwater to people who had never left the land, or worse, did not know that two thirds of their planet was under water.

Still, I knew it would be a cop-out to blame a lack of communication on the receiver. I knew that communication was a function of my intention; I learned that on the gas giants, wrinkling and sliding in the upper air. If you did not want to connect, nothing came your way but noise. But if you did, the sense of well being issuing from multispectral multilevel communication among all the cells of that planetary body was a source of ineffable joy.

I realized I would never again be who I had been. The points of reference for my core identity had shifted as a result of changes I had not even realized were happening.

Here’s how I discovered that.

One evening I went for a stroll outside the academy walls. The twilight sky was indigo and the breeze was light. The fragrance of blossoming trees was pale, whitish pink and rosy red. The street was empty until, turning a corner, I found myself facing the three louts who had called me “Alien Brain” so many years before.

I recognized them instantly, but not they me. I flashed on fear, but they were oblivious. I stopped, looking into their faces, making them stop too.

The leader was still the leader. The followers were still followers. But they were much older. I wasn’t, however. They were a hundred and I was thirty. The face of the leader retained its youthful ignorance and disdain for the different. They worked at the spaceport, had worked there all their lives. They were as happy as they could or would be. Their dislikes were necessary, I suddenly understood, for self-definition. Without so many ways of saying who they were not, they would never know who they were.

“Don’t I know you.” the leader said as much to himself as to me.

I flowed in the twilight, feeling the currents of the cool moon.

“You’re one of those Alien Brains. You see different.”

The words were hot but his heart was cold. The differential created an electric charge. I did not object to his memories or need to be right.

“We kicked your ass.” another said. “Years ago, we kicked your alien ass.”

My smiling flowed in and out of their eddying disturbance, contouring itself to their posturing. Felt like going down the drain. Felt like a dark adrenalin-driven hurry-up flow racing to the tip of a spiral and stopping.

“Guess you know who’s king of the street,.” a follower said.

“Guess he does.” said the leader.

We waited in silence in the twilight. The moon rose golden through limbs of a redbud tree. The breeze died, night ready to spring.

I walked toward them then through them as they flowed around me and down the street. Before they turned the corner, one shouted: “Alien Brain!”

The night was alive with triumphal acknowledgement. Ways of saying anything, anything at all, dissipated with the afternoon heat. The flow was all.

Darkness gathered us in, knitting the leaves into an opaque mass.

#  #  #

The Tzdow were a gift, an opportunity, a benevolence.

Because they had been around for so long, the Tzdow had drilled deep into the levels of consciousness that informed and animated the Cosmos. They were one of the oldest races in the Universe. They were quasars of sentience, the furthest fastest manifestations of divergence and convergence as they became one thing.

And I got to go. By the grace of all that is holy, I was able to live for four years in the orbiting cities of the Tzdow.

The Tzdow had gone artificial when the word still had currency, that’s how long ago it was. No natural disaster or catastrophe, no crisis or upheaval forced their decision. They simply looked and saw what was necessary. Mutation and accident had taken them a long way. They wanted to take control of their destiny and did.

It’s easy to say this after thousands of centuries. It had not been easy to do, however. The Tzdow say they invented the words “trial and error.” Billions died, billions were warped or distorted, billions wept before their cities became workable. Was it worth it? The Tzdow say yes.

The transition from appendage cities to orbiting cities took six months. I was immersed in acclimation studies. I was at the peak of my abilities. Still, I nearly lost my mind when I made the jump.

A mind is a precious commodity. You can play all you like with the way it plays, but there comes a time when you have a nightmare in daylight. The light of the sun turns into blood. Then you play the game with real money.

They bombarded me with information, insights, simulated wisdom. They gave me exactly the right amount of time to integrate what I was learning. They did it perfectly and made sure I knew that. But the day came when I couldn’t stand anymore.

I began to flip from modality to modality. I used all the wings of cognition, all the arms and legs of my senses, but began thinking as I had as a child. I thought about the makers of the Matrix and the floaters. I remembered battlewagons, how information became the cornerstone of war, how the hive mind became target and weapon. Illusions crashed into illusions in halls of mirrors, then the mirrors shattered, shards on the floor of my trembling soul.

I thought I would find a point of reference from which to understand what I was supposed to be learning but couldn’t. Then I dropped down to the next level, and the next, and the next, and at each it became clearer that they weren’t kidding. This time they were going to drive me mad with cascading images that overwhelmed my efforts to understand. They did not want me to understand how the Tzdow had learned to construct their worlds. They wanted me to go crazy.

Something broke. Something shattered. Something came apart that would never again come together in the same way.

If one can sob hysterically in silence while the soul falls asunder, that’s what I did. The wings of darkness ingathered my fragmented being and tore it away from whatever illusory center had held it together. The dissolution of my soul felt like lightning striking. I could not think because no one was there to think. I could not imagine because no one was there to imagine. I could not be clear because clarity dissolved into nothingness. When I reached into that nothingness, there was … nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Nor was I in freefall because I was not present to my own dissolution. Nothing was present. Nothing at all.

Then … a point of view ignited from which the event was observed. A point of view from which it could be seen. Said. Described, even.

Then the portal opened and the Tzdow welcomed me to their orbiting cities.

#  #  #

I felt as if I were entering the landscape of a minimalist building. Curved white walls of an immense arc turned to either side. I looked for a guide, a mentor, an ambassador. No one showed.

I centered myself and extended into the environment. I attended to each of my senses in turn, mapping the landscape. The walls were so white they looked like plasmas generated by ships accelerating to lightspeed. I heard white noise in which as I listened I could discern a subtle rhythm. Pattern almost happened but not quite. I smelled nearly nothing, just atmosphere filtered and scrubbed. Felt walls which were smooth smooth smooth. Sampled the air. Spliced the non-sounds. Linked to the flow which meant I could crimp the multi-stranded tangled veins of a deeper organic structure of what had seemed to be merely a mechanical habitat.

The deeper organic structure fascinated, held my attention. Veins were like colored wires tangled in a pipe. The pulsing energy in them sounded like beating hearts but faintly, faintly. Heat generated by processes was cooled by invisible gases hung in luminous blue traps. From that fact I could infer the form of more elaborate processes under it all. Wetware and dryware were one, all of the processes merely a means of maintaining equilibrium, managing the entire system.

Walls floors and ceilings were alive with light.

Along the white curving wall I discerned suddenly – had it been there all the time? Or did it just appear? – a faint off-white line that traced a distant echo. It disappeared around the curve around the bend and I followed, keeping it in sight but not forgetting the other extensions. I was immersed, still astonished. I did not know. I calculated distance and duration, creeping along the wall.

All unknowing. White on white.

The off-white line either ended or grew too faint to make out. In the unvarying light, distinctions were difficult to make. But at my feet I saw an opening in the floor and without thinking, plunged into it head first.

What I saw as I fell was like the First Matrix raised to the Nth degree. The entire fabric of their universe had been simulated in miniature but a miniature, I suspected, that extended across the span of a galaxy. The scale of the enterprise was beyond comprehension.

Still I flowed through empty space until the tunnel became the entrance to a cave in the side of a mountain. The mountain was immense, the cave an opening into its side. I crawled into the cave or tunnel, feeling like a miner crawling on hands and knees, my path illuminated only by a dim light on my hat. The pathway twisted and I had no choice but to keep moving.

After a time, the tunnel glowed faintly with an outside source of light. I paused to get my bearings, making sure I was not imagining. I was not. The light grew brighter up ahead and I quickened my pace, the light growing brighter and brighter until I burst out in candescence like a welder’s torch except it illuminated a vast cavern. The cavern was full of technology I did not understand and myriads of beings tending it with care. The machinery looked like the control room of an immense starship. Except everything was white, the doors opening onto the sources of energy were white, the white fire, the beings in white coveralls attending to duty with loving precision.

I moved through rooms harboring the technology of consciousness both aware and unaware of what I saw, felt, heard. The rooms went on and on but had an end. The deep structure was finite but unbounded. Another entrance appeared that was also an exit because one could go in either direction. I went through and exited the halls, emerging on the other side of the mountain. Instead of darkness, however, the night skies blazed with galaxies spiraling in pinwheel magnificence. I forgot for a moment to breathe. The glowing stars so dense they were like fire whitening the skies. The spirals of light echoing the matrix I had just traversed.

“This is how much you saw,” said a voice. “Imagine a span from the center of the Andromeda Galaxy out to the four-fifth spiral on its distant edge. If that is the scale of the simulation, then you saw but seven inches.”

I felt my mentor beside me and turned as he appeared. He wore an ancient cloak and hood in a humorous reference to the mythic dimensions my entrance into their city had elicited from my soul.

“The myth is your own projection,” he said. “The city – well, you have not yet seen the city. That’s why you will be here for four years, Earth equivalent. That’s the bare minimum for beginning to understand how technologies of consciousness are manufactured and linked. We build floors under floors under floors in infinite regress toward the core of unknowing.”

“I have started the tour, then.”

“Oh yes. But unlike your other tenures, where you had more and more to do, this one will require that you do less and less.”

I laughed aloud.

“You begin to understand,” he said. “You must explore and as you explore explore all of the means by which you explore. By which you see perceive and understand. You must see yourself seeing yourself seeing yourself. You must learn to discern subtle stirrings in the deep currents of consciousness. Minute perturbations in the background radiation that became everything. Then you will understand how and even why, perhaps, this city is alive.”

“My destiny, then” I said, “is not to take action.”

“No. And yes. You do not belong to the city of sentient beings. You belong to what once was called the city of god.”

“But that’s not cultural studies! That’s theology!”

“Isn’t everything?” he said. “All studies become studies of consciousness. The means of deceiving dissolve as the knowing mind comes to know itself. The proper study of self is Self. Except – as you study your self – it disappears.”

“And …?

“You study what is left.”

“But … nothing is left.”

“Correct. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

He took my arm gently and led me back into the halls of light.

“For the next four years,” he said, “walk these halls. Nothing more. Walk slowly in a way that enables you to see. Then see, taking note of what you see.”

He smiled and vanished into thin air.

The first eighteen months were spent learning to walk so I could forget that I was walking. Then I could pay attention. The next eighteen months were spent walking and seeing. Then I could forget that I was seeing. The last year was spent neither walking nor seeing. All the while walking. And seeing.

#  #  #

By the end of the fourth year, I glimpsed the relationship of organic materials to their sources. The sources of the sources, however, were elusive. No language enabled me to say what I saw when I glimpsed an intention that bootstrapped a point of reference out of nothing.

The rhythm of the cities became the rhythm of my body and brain. The cities calibrated my machinery to its own. I learned in four years what I had learned in the first month.

When I left, I was at last a beginner.

I imagined I would weep when I left but didn’t. I was calm and happy and grateful. Four years were just right for the first term.

My three friends were in the street as I expected when I returned. “Hey! Alien Brain!” shouted the leader.

I walked up to face them and saw how they had aged. Their faces were ancient. Had I really been afraid when we first met? Did I really think they meant to harm me? These bearers of my destiny, builders of the ship of my soul?

I saw that they had done exactly as intended. They were not deficient in any way. They were perfect as they were. And seeing who they were, I loved them all.

We smiled at each other. We embraced and held one another tightly. We touched and hugged, twittered and danced. Then the three of them flowed, transparent to their purpose.

I watched them dissolve. Just like that, they disappeared into thin air.

Well … maybe they did not disappear, exactly.

To disappear, you have to be there in the first place.

# # #

by Richard Thieme

[This story was published in the Spring 2008 edition of Karamu (Vol. XXI, No. 1), a literary magazine published by the Department of English and the Office of Grants and Research at Eastern Illinois University with additional support from the Illinois Arts Council. It was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.]

Harry or Eddie or Robert or Lew woke up one morning in a bedroom that had grown so familiar over the years that he didn’t see anything in it anymore. The little bedroom in his head, however, had stayed the same for more than a decade, and that was the bedroom he saw when he opened his eyes, a tiny doll’s house model of a bedroom that had once existed, one in which nothing ever disappeared.

Eddie’s eyes were open but felt a little bleary. Knuckles pressing into his eyes, feeling flakes of sleep.

Vague light had diminished the perfect darkness he required for deep sleep. At first he was barely aware of having awakened. The ceiling was white, cobwebby with shadows. The pillows under his head were white and stay puffed because he spared no expense when it came to pillows. Lifting his head, he saw the top sheet and blanket crumpled in a tangle on his chest; turning his head, he saw sunlight limning the edges of the white shade. The shade made movements in gusts of wind that filtered through the imperfectly glazed glass, slapping the sill with a jerky rhythm.

He threw off the blankets and swung his legs in blue cotton pajamas over the edge of the bed.

He made a noise he had seldom made in the past—the distant past, that is, for the noise must have started sometime which must have been the recent past. He made one now as he pushed up against the pull of gravity, a pull that seemed to have increased over the past few years due to some unexplained but cosmic kind of cause, and he went into the bathroom. Every morning the first thing he did, after opening his eyes and getting out of bed, was go to the bathroom.

Harry had been fortunate. In all his life, it never felt anything but really fine to take a leak.

He flushed when he finished and came back into the bedroom.

There had been two tables, one on either side of the king-sized bed, but now there was only one, on the near side, on which could be seen a slim white telephone, a lamp with a coral pattern, and a paperback book. The book was Raymond Chandler’s “Lady in the Lake,” published in the seventies, the shiny florid cover, one of Tom Adams’, beckoning to him to reach out and feel it.

The glossy cover still felt slick and the inch-thick book felt solid as a rock.
The table on the other side of the bed had disappeared. But Harry or Eddie, certainly not Lew and probably not Robert, didn’t notice. Instead he yawned and went back to the bathroom and showered and then returned to the bedroom to dress.

His clothes were familiar and hung in their customary spots in the closet. They might have been fashionable fifteen or twenty years before. Harry could have been blind and still been able to pull the shirt he wanted from a hangar to the right, his old jeans from the top left hook, then sneakers from the hardwood floor. Leaning to reach them, he made the noise again. He put on a seventies long-sleeved shirt with narrow stripes, blue on white, not noticing that three other shirts had disappeared sometime in the night or the weeks or months before. Fewer and fewer, these ancient shirts of the ages, five or six of them hanging still, yet they filled the space as if they were more.

Harry or Eddie combed his hair and shaved with an electric razor, then shook the hair into the toilet and flushed it again. His face felt a little prickly still but good enough. Then he went down the hall to the small yellow one-window kitchen to make breakfast.

He opened the front door first, however, and picked up a morning paper. Then he went to the kitchen. Cloudy daylight filled it with countertops and a white table with two white wooden chairs. He took a banana from the myrtle wood bowl on the near counter, peeled the banana, and ate it slowly over the newspaper (before that, he threw the peel in the garbage through the swinging swinging white top) . Harry did not notice that three pears had disappeared from what had been a pear-and-banana bowl, leaving it just a banana bowl and a little dusty.

After he finished the banana and had scanned a few stories of scandals (most were political, some were obviously placed for publicity, and one really angered him – it was totally unnecessary, wasn’t it, now? it must have been an editor holding a grudge) he rose and put two pieces of whole wheat toast in the toaster oven and pressed a button. An orange light on the toaster lighted and through the small dirty window on the front of the appliance orange coils glowed, radiating heat. He stood at the toaster enjoying its warmth and read more irritating stories while waiting for the toast to toast.

The newspaper used to have many more stories written by real journalists but most of them had disappeared. They disappeared incrementally, little by little, so Harry did not notice until it had happened. He did notice that once he removed the advertisements for which the newspaper served as a container there was little left. The news hole grew smaller and smaller. Even on Sunday, when he scanned what he called templates, stories that were so familiar they were nothing but fill in the names and blanks sorts of repetitious silliness, he could make it through the huge paper in less than ten minutes.

The orange light went off and the toaster beeped. He slid the hot-to-handle well-toasted toast onto a plate and opened a jar of orange marmalade. Harry didn’t notice that the raspberry jam beside it had disappeared. He thickened the marmalade spread with a double dose and replaced the sticky jar, not noticing that strawberry jam and blackberry jam were also no longer there. He washed his hands because marmalade was always sticky and read the toast over the rest of the newspaper and the paper too, eating the toast until there was nothing to read except old stories and other filler intended to keep him from thinking too much about what wasn’t there.

What wasn’t there was so much bigger than what was.

He cleaned up everything in less than a minute. Then he faced the day.

The day was a vast empty space. He teetered on the edge of it as if it were a pit. With the shades raised, the bed made, the curtains pulled, autumn daylight was everywhere in the apartment, diminishing the sharp edges of the furniture, whitening the titles on the spines of books, illuminating the artifacts on his knickknack shelf. Some of the knickknacks were still there and he looked at them for a long while instead of thinking about how many had disappeared.

The ones that had disappeared were, oh, these or those, the sorts of things one associates with this or that. Some of the ones that were left were bigger than others, some were almost works of art. Their denotation was irrelevant, however. They were less objects in themselves than labels stuck onto events that had flowed by like leaves on a stream – connotations broadcast into a null space, signifying something but Harry wasn’t sure quite what.

Some mattered, however. However, how? He continued to gaze into the space they created by defining the nodes of a geometric shape without a name as if he were reading a crystal ball. There were still a few doodads, little somethings, pieces of things and several small figurines made of stuff like plaster clay or some composite. Plastic things, too. A Tudor house, half-timbered, attached to an image of the Cotswolds, cold and rainy, and warm bread pudding in a tea room at noon. A copy of a big fat Venus, her immense belly and breasts he had turned around and around in his hands and then purchased from a slim jeune fille at the old Museum of Man in Paris France, the one that has disappeared. Or not? Eddie was uncertain. The original, he knew, was twenty-five thousand years old, more or less. His was a copy, of course, a memory of a memory, and much younger. Most real Venuses had long since disappeared. The people who made them had disappeared. The language with which they conveyed their thoughts and feelings had disappeared. The culture that thought up the people had also disappeared. Then twenty five thousand years of a flowing muddy river buried all but a few, found on the ground. Recent people gave them a name recently (“Venus”), a label big enough to let them pretend that nothing had disappeared. Their precise academic language occluded the immensity of the vast dark cave in which they had been discovered. Their words constructed temporary boats like arks to contain the few bulbous females found and now bobbing along in a flooding river of time, markers of some illusive time and space contained in boxes made of black lines that they drew in their white minds.

The fixity of print dissolved in a digital flow like ice in water running in what Harry and his peers still call a sink and will for a while yet.

One thing there on the shelf was a little rectangular square on which one rested a knife or another thing. There was also an igloo or more likely an Anasazi hut (Harry had never gone to Alaska so it wouldn’t be an igloo). Other things faded in the process of staying or disappearing even as he looked at them, flickering like holograms into and out of visible existence, some with quasi-names and some already nameless. He could see the connotations and could smell the connotations but he couldn’t quite reach their deceptive meaning. Harry felt a vague pain, a dissonance, noticing how many barely existed, half-here and half-not. He hung under them, holding onto the disappearing balloons for dear life, his arms growing exhausted. The tags that identified what they were and where they had been purchased, neither paper nor digital fonts but chemicals, molecules, cells, had disappeared.

Harry now gave the day a salute, a long arms-over-his-head sort of yawn and stretch and he turned and the shelf went out of sight. He forgot it quickly and absolutely. His eyes filled with whatever was illuminated inside his apartment by the pale daylight. The sun therefore had not yet disappeared, nor had his furniture vanished, nor his apartment, its painted walls or mortared bricks. The galaxy was still intact, more or less. Inside (the galaxy, the world, his apartment) he sat and picked his teeth with a plastic pick to stimulate his gums. He took an inordinate pleasure in the dislodging of crumbs from between his teeth which he felt with the tip of his tongue before he swallowed. Then he washed again, wiping maybe marmalade from his mouth and hands. As he dried them in a faded kitchen towel he saw that his hands loomed larger than any hands had ever loomed or looked before. His hands looked huge. Turning them, his palms and the backs of his hands, Harry clenched his fingers, numb with sudden tingling, until the tingling had not quite disappeared but was much less.

He forgot about his hands as soon as they were down at his sides. He remembered his tingling fingers intermittently throughout the day, flexing them when he did. Otherwise he forgot them completely.

He went to the window of his livingroom and looked out. Once he had owned an automobile and parked it at the curb on city streets. In fact he had owned a dozen, more or less, and he saw them along the street in the gray light, a white Dodge Dart, an orange little GM something sporty, a blue Mazda wagon, a big dark Buick, a white Tercel. Then there were Fords, a whole lot of Fords, Taurus upon Taurus, all the way to the end of the street. Then the autos one by one winked out until the street was empty again except for the autos of others, and along the curb, piles of leaves waiting to be vacuumed into a truck.

The wind whiskered dry leaves from the tops of piles and danced them away.

“Darling, don’t! –“ he remembered Malcolm saying. Malcolm was a character in a story he had written fifty or more years before. For a class? A college course? Perhaps. Malcolm had watched his wife Agatha enfolded by the dying light, taking her away. Malcolm was breaking things in the story, unable to cope with the loss—a prescient image for an adolescent at the early, other end of the rope, a tether attached to his youthful self who had twirled it like a lasso with a smirk. Harry or Eddie, Harry, say, Harry once and for all was looking now at the frayed other end of the rope, a rope made of words, words that had held him spellbound in his youth when he believed deeply in so many things that had disappeared. He did not know then that words too were artifacts. Nor that Agatha was a type, a form or a mold like the red rubber ones into which he had poured plaster of Paris, waiting impatiently until he could peel away a white bear, a lion, a dog, still wet and already crumbling.

And a wife.

Harry had believed then in things like enchantment, meaning, the persistence of memory and self.

Harry saw visions of shades or wraiths among the pouring light and the leaves, dust devils suddenly swirling them toward the trees from which they had fallen. Harry suddenly felt, suddenly experienced not remembered the sounds of his childhood kitchen and he smelled kitchen smells, he heard muffled voices and frying sounds and then the entire kitchen was in his head, a perfect miniature kitchen. He ceased seeing the light and the leaves and never saw the young woman walking her small white dog, pausing while it sniffed and pissed, then walking on. That memory must have become someone’s, however. Someone must have seen them come and go. But if it were Harry, he saw the walking woman, the trotting dog, as afterglow, a faint ghostly image among the people in his head-kitchen who were so much more vivid, his mother and his sister, the linoleum looking like a bad Jackson Pollock splashed with red yellow white and black as the feet of his mother crossed the floor and disappeared.

Then the entire miniature disappeared. It simply vanished into thin air. He heard in the long hallway of his aloneness their echoing footfalls fading away. Then he saw leaves again in the light of an overcast sky. He saw the day as it disappeared. He saw the little girl, the jeune fille, the same or another, for a moment before she disappeared.

He would in all likelihood never see that girl again.

The earth shifted suddenly. The floor tilted and slid up until it was nearly vertical. His hands slid down the slick surface. He teetered on the edge of the abyss, flailing his arms, and fell.

Mail didn’t come until late afternoon.

By then the day had for the most part disappeared. Where had it gone? Had the abyss into which he had tumbled improbably become a cornucopia? Had the darkness suddenly poured forth light? Apparently, perhaps. Harry would never know. But one way or another, one thing or another had taken place, something had gotten done, there had been a sequence of things linked in his life or his mind by a thread of happenstance or intention, one. Something must have happened.

Had you knocked on his door in the late afternoon and asked, what did you do today? he would have told you something and you would have gone away with his story seamlessly spliced to the other stories you hear from Monty or Jessica, Max or Loretta, any or all of the others. The stories you have heard have been edited into one long story, the story you tell yourself or tell others if asked or maybe you keep some of it to yourself and tell the rest, the story of your historic climb or tragic fall, your itinerary with all its interesting (to you, to you) detours, the story of your always ending adventure. Harry’s story would have sounded enough like those to disappear almost as soon as you heard it. By the time you said good-bye and went down the short half-flight of worn-carpeted stairs to the inner door of the three-story walk-up, through the mail hallway, out the outer door into the suddenly chilly fading light and blowing leaves and bare trees, Harry like his story would have disappeared and he wouldn’t have held it against you. Harry understood how it is.

Not much flesh left on his bones. Not much story left in his story—pretty much anyone’s story, like his face—pretty much anyone’s face.

The stories, all of them, seem to exist for a purpose. Stories are containers like newspapers for the advertisements of selves. The next day the newspaper is at the bottom of a cage or pulped or burned. Even if saved and pasted, the pages flake and decay. Scrap books don’t last. Tombstones grow moldy and inscriptions disappear. The eroding stone and the faded names dissolve into the odor of yew trees’ litter and duff. Then the nose goes too.

It is not an offense, then, merely a fact that your story too is a template, nothing but a fill-in-the-blanks sort of repetitious silliness.

Still, for a moment, someone listens. Someone listens. Then forgets.

That’s why Harry would never have held it against you. Harry knew.

The real Venus, Harry thought, looking again at the unreal Venus in his hands or his head, had been carved by someone too. The Venus was a story about woman, lust and fertility, a pretty good story, he had to admit, as far as it went.

Once upon a time the carver(s) had heard stories of this or that, but now, there weren’t even echoes. If ever a page, now it’s blank. If ever a kiss, now it’s a whisper.

Flatulence, unanticipated, became a cause for quiet spontaneous celebration.

And mail! So did mail. Mail as little as it was was quite an event. Even when it didn’t come, the anticipation was something. Even the disappointment of receiving nothing, nothing at all, was something to experience. Nothing filled the space as much as something. Getting nothing could take hours. Achieving nothing could last for a lifetime. And having nothing was axiomatic, Harry suspected, his vision clearing even as it dimmed.

The mail fluttered into a box in the mail hall (or not), then his hurrying hands retrieved it and carried it carefully upstairs before it was torn and tossed into the garbage (or they didn’t).

One piece of mail lived for a short while in his head. No, two.

It came from a place he had once worked. It was all about a change in the pension and stories about people coming to work there, starting a new life, people just starting out, advertisements for people thinking they were fixed once and for all but who in fact were carried along in the flow of the life of a newsletter sent mostly to folks who threw it away unread. Pictures of some of them however made a brief impression on Harry’s eyes or brain before they disappeared.

The booklet or newsletter, pamphlet, whatever it was, was quite impressive to Harry, here. There were plenty of photos and someone had taken time because they must have cared. There were stories arranged by decades about different people and what they were doing. As he read however it became more apparent that this missive had not come from his former employer at all. That was the four page benefit explanation or letter already set down on the round mahogany table with the green lamp. This was something else, a second letter, this had come from his old school, and it told some of their stories but mostly consisted of sound bites from people still taking the trouble to send them in. The ones he read said little or nothing of much interest; they were advertisements for the still living in the eight-page black-and-white rag called The Old School News. Reading the names felt like kicking at dirt with the tip of his shoe. A little puff of dust went up, then disappeared back into the earth. Each name an image dissipating quickly and sinking into the ancient ground.

Some names stayed for a moment, however, as if they were typed in boldface. Susan Loomis and John Jensen were alive and had written advertisements for that happy fact. Harry Doskell who sat near him for two years or maybe more was simply dead. The beautiful Gustafson girls, blonde objects of adolescent lust that stirred an echo of an erection in his tented brown trousers, were also dead. Bob Rutkowski who had shared a room with him for a year at college, a strange bird who hated to be away from home, who went home, who left again, who had his life, he too was dead. Jerry Schwartz either German or Jew he was never sure which, he had had a nice smile, was also dead. Their names were printed in the dead list in the newsletter he held for a long while as the light fell and the leaves fell and the curtains he refused to pull so long as there was even a little twilight were as ghostly white as his mother’s nightgown when she came roaring down the hallway in the morning from her bedroom.

The hallway, the bedroom, his mother and father, his sister, had disappeared. Agatha had disappeared, his wife had—Harry turned away from a memory he refused to entertain and forced himself to focus.

The daylight was dying and yellow candescent streetlight painted his space. Day into night.

He remembered once more the linoleum on the kitchen floor and the voices of the few who loved him then the very very very few who were like cries in the twilight like birds ready to roost for the night and he realized, sitting there in the twilight, it was birds making the sounds, crows ready to roost, and all other sounds of the day disappeared. So Harry rose from his chair, leaving the newsletter and explanation of benefits letter on the round mahogany table with the green lamp and went to the window and felt the cold glass with the undeniable fact of the tips of his fingers. The new streetlights were severe, a brutal illumination of darkness that had covered the earth for eons long before night meant electric light. A car went past or a person or two hurried by, their collars up against the wind and their hands deep into their pockets. He felt himself small inside a snow globe that was no longer being shaken, the large flakes settling quietly in the night as the earth ran around the sun and the sun circled its galactic center, a big black hole, and the galaxy wheeled as it would for as long as the stars had not yet disappeared as he himself had not yet disappeared.

These stars, Harry remembered, were the third or fourth round. Stars exploded and their pieces became more stars. If anyone was there to name the next generation of stars, they gave them different names. Likely there will be many more stars, many generations of more stars. Many stars had planets and many planets had life. But Harry would never know their names or why their visits had so far been benign or what would happen next. Epsilon Eridani. Zeta Reticuli. Names once magical now were little pieces of worn paper on slides needing careful cleaning. On each smudged slide was a star and its planets. Labels or cradles of infinitely variable life.

Harry closed the curtains and tried to half-remember the day but the day had disappeared. He went into his bedroom and turned on the light. The bed and the table and the paperback book were still there. A bookmark stuck out, halfway through. He would have that story, then, to know momentarily. Even if it ended.

The floor trembled, he slid onto the bed before the floor could tilt. The edge of the pit was variable, advancing, and he did not understand the kind of geometry that tried to define it. Nobody did.

Harry felt that his bed or a chair was safer than the floor but of course, he knew.

Harry knew.

He closed his eyes and held his face in his hands. The world inside his apartment disappeared, the snow globe world in his head appeared. He was player and field, figure and ground, and all of the advertisements or stories were torn pages in a magazine or comic book blowing down an alley in a black wind, an empty black wind defining glimpses of pictures on flapping pages changing from moment to moment in the wind and the shadow-and-glare of the minimal light, the form of the lost stories framed by whatever, whatever had been, whatever names or labels had once been pasted onto the torn pages disappearing now in the sudden calm windless still of a disappearing planet.

# # #

Published in Karamu and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.