arobotlivesdownstairs

The rest of David’s journey is incidental. The important part is the destination. Sort of the opposite of what we’re taught.
Where he emerges, it’s Star Trek set design, too much blackness behind the foreground, unfinished, unpainted. Columns and arches that could be cardboard or marble. The figures sit on high, blocky chairs like thrones, all angles and hardness. They may be absurdly tall and broad but they seem mostly human, red clothes more uniform than robe, and though they exist apart you get the feeling they’re all holding hands in another dimension. With voices many-layered, feminine, masculine, animal, water and wind, ticking clocks, vast drums, they speak in unison: “It’s not that we don’t want you here, but no one has dared for so long that your presence concerns us.”
And then individuals.
“Why here?”
“Why now?”
“What do you hope for?”
And David notes that they don’t ask him who he is, or how he came to be here. “Did you expect me?”
There’s big eyes in these giants, it’s easy to register reactions. They are affronted. Probably.
“Answer ours.”
I am here against most probability, should I be humble now? He wonders. These beings have lived so long that he can puzzle indefinitely. What’s that song stuck in his head? Remember that boat, how sick you got? How many worlds did I visit to get to this one? Why do I think I’m this important?
“I hope you will change how death works.”
“Audacity. It’s what we love about you. Your little hands and your big ideas.” That one seems more male, if you have to engender androgynous beings.
“You mean people?”
“Of course. All of you. You’re a hubristic bunch.” And this one more female, because you have to, like David, having grown up with guns or dolls. But what is it about her that makes her her?
“But we cannot change death. We’ve tried.”
“It doesn’t work. Then the one that should have died suffers, and the ones who would have been left behind suffer too knowing the sufferer should have died and they themselves will suffer the same. That’s a lot of suffering in a sentence or a life.”
“Then I don’t want you to change death, I want you to change time. I’ll explain, but first, answer my first question. Did you expect me?”
“Yes. No. Someone, but not you. But you make us curious. Please explain what you are asking for.”
“Allow time to be relative and elastic according to the will of its observer, and not just like when you’re distracted and it seems to move faster. Actually alterable. Then you’ll fix the broken thing about death.”
“More.”
“Everyone would get to say goodbye when they were ready, and if you weren’t ready but the other was, time would just get altered for the two of you, one sped up and one slowed down, and the remaining years for you would be a blink for them.”
“You sound like a child asking for this. It can’t be this simple.”
“Ruth. She was the one. And she got cancer and died. And at the end, she chose death. I saw her stop fighting. I saw her decide it was enough. Have you ever felt her fucking skin after she dies? And I’m not stupid enough to think that if we cured cancer we’d cure giving up on life. Something is bound to make us tired and give up at some point in our lives. I don’t think that will ever change. And I don’t think it’s right to stop someone from giving up when they’re ready. But this is how it should have happened. Ruth should say, ‘I’m tired David, I really need to go.’ And I would say to her, ‘I love you, and go.’ And I would mean it. And for her, she’d go. But for me, I’d see her get better, and we’d spend more years together, and I would say to her, forty years from now, ‘I’m tired, Ruth, I really need to go.’ And she would say to me, ‘I love you, and go.’ But my life with her beyond her being tired, a blink right before she died. And for her, she got to say goodbye when she was ready. It’s just relative time. You make a second for her actually be forty years. There’s all kinds of configurations that would allow for the minimum amount of suffering. And judging from your manner, and your uniforms, and the weird voices, and the mythological levels of difficulty it took for me to get here and talk to you, I’m guessing you can make that happen. At least. If I am a child, fuck it. Fix it. Fix this nonsense.”
It stops there. I think that’s all we can ask.

There’s a room under your room. That’s where they build things. That’s where they tinker.

There’s a cold under your cold. The one that means it’s not just seasonal. It’s colossal, universe-ending.

Behind the boards, through the heat, beyond your purpose, are things unthought, unbound, dark and dim but full, round, expanding, moving constantly with design.

I couldn’t see any of it because I was busy painting my nails. And you were scratching just beyond my hearing, begging to get out before they got in.

“I haven't seen the end of that one,” she says, “but I've seen enough to know I won't care about the ending.”

There's a train within that train, running the luggage racks, knocking bags off the tiny tracks and onto unsuspecting heads. But every train is a mystery, and recursive trains are like mysteries where the narrator is the murderer.

Some day I will talk to her about something other than sleep, maybe just before nodding off on her shoulder, 2000 kilometers west of here, on a train in the dark. You'll have shut up by then, I trust, and laid down yourself, in your place. And the growing, cobbling, industrious things will stay behind, below.

[I “adopted” the word “agonyclite” at savethewords.org and could think of no better way to use it than to write something inspired by it.]

A list of heresies, jotted down on a scrap of notebook paper in mini-golf pencil. Standing up in class to question instead of answer the blackboard scrawls. Looking up instead of down during moments of silence, a salute offered with sincerity by your left hand. Refusing the complementary breadsticks at the Olive Garden. Leaving a film half-way through that you've “paid good money” for. Telling your friends you love them and meaning it. Clambering into abandoned buildings, pulling down the temporary barriers, blinking dust in the portal-light. Sleeping well. Deciding not to run.

(more…)

In the shadow of his imposing, beige-grey, brutalist computer monitor, Joseph read this:

“Seek simplicity, and distrust it.”

It was a quote from Alfred North Whitehead that came up on his quote of the day calendar. The gift from his sister at the moronic Christmas of six months ago.

Who in Christ’s holy name is Alfred North Whitehead? His complete set of revised 14th-edition Encyclopedia Britannica was an – on average – 17-minute drive from the office, tattered from extensive reference and outdated by at least two decades. Assuming this Whitehead character pre-dates the 70s, he decided to look it up in the evening. That would mean around eight hours of mystery today.

(more…)

I’ve known since I was 11 that I existed in a finite idea space, since my father informed me from his death-bed, which is what he called the living room couch where he used to lay in the evenings, pontificating to his children, the three boys and one girl, of which I was older than my sister, and younger than my brothers, the truths and contentions surrounding his world view that he shared with precisely no one outside of those he could control, those being us, his motherless children who listened out of a form of fear, closer to dread, that he was steadily losing his mind after the death of his wife and our mother, the woman he had loved deeply for just over 19 years before holding her blood in his arms after the driver and the snow and the windshield had taken the part of her he loved out of her in front of him and left just the body and the blood, knowing instinctively that we would do better to forget his rambles as we grew if we were to be healthy, functioning adults, but also knowing that we’d have no real choice in whether his words would affect us, and we would essentially be doomed to think in the ways he prescribed as adults until we could systematically recognize and destroy each of his teachings as their effects revealed themselves in the contexts of future situations, that each person will have exactly 35 moments of convergence in his or her life, which was the term he used to describe that periodic experience where several seemingly disparate ideas we’ve consumed through readings, conversations, films, and other media fit together in an unexpected way and we are suddenly capable of creating something truly interesting that has not existed before because of that combination that no one else has in their heads in precisely the same way, but he clarified that usually those moments only exist in the brain and, due to external factors like working life, relationships, apathy, and psychological problems, most of us unfortunately will never manage to manifest outside ourselves, but that we were nonetheless assured that we’d be able to exploit if we simply listened to his other death-bed advice, which included avoiding long-term romantic relationships, committing to a regimen of mindfulness meditation, and undertaking menial, well-defined, blue- or entry-level-white-collar work as our career foci where we would have well-defined borders between the necessary element of labour and the evening opportunity to explore the ideas we generate, and that these strategies would not only benefit us, but also the rest of the world, because of the rarity of this possibility in others, and the “inertia of civilization”, but still it was important to remember that there was a limit of 35 times that that would be possible for each individual, a maximum he calculated by averaging the lifetime output of those whose ideas and inventions he respected, so that even my and my sibling’s well-trained capabilities were finite, like a countdown clock starting at 35, where our ideas would decrement the counter until we would one day reach 0 and know definitively that we would no longer be useful to ourselves or society, like my father, who claimed to have already had all his moments, the last of which had been this one.

“I want you to keep your face, so I’ll start just under the centre of your chin. Keep still.”

Trace a flat, 1-inch-wide, blade-shaped brush, semi-transparent, soaked in blue-violet ink. Spiral just under my jawline, around the nape, back again, now tracing below that first line, the edges just bleeding together. Like being coiled in masking tape with no gaps, but my skin and body hair show through. Around again, clockwise, five times, ‘til the collar bone is nearby.
(more…)

He was prescient. The proprietor. He didn’t cap the entrance on the front of his store. He left a square hole in the roof, creating an open-aired foyer, and didn’t bother with a door. The neighbouring merchants laughed at the rain and snow pooling on the tile while their own entrances stayed dry. His customers appreciated the lack of door when packmuled with enough shopping bags to require both arms, but always asked him about how he avoided theft, incredulously listening to his answer that people are basically good, and his cryptic assertion that infrequent theft was still part of his bargain with the future.
(more…)