EOT
The Parson squares off with something like a corpse. That’s wrong. She’s a pacifist–where that means the active defense of the meek (as she will soon show him). He’s squared off with her. The preacher levitating cross legged, spliff behind one ear. Teacup in her lap. A snack. Some licorice. The undead man is smoking a cigarette in scorched tacticool. The man with the patches of metal over splotches of rotting flesh who reeks of shit and death. He takes the long last drag off a cowboy killer, drops the butt to the ground and grinds it with a burnt boot. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Very menacing.” And when the Animal that Was a Man takes a step toward her, into the pool of light. “No.” She’s got a hand up–half stop-sign half the image of a teacher in a medieval tapestry. At that, he produces a metal rod that angry-snaps to full riot-stick length. The thing crackles electric.
For a moment they do the stand off cinematic, camera pulls back. The Parson levitates cross-legged and bored, sipping tea. She lights the spliff, takes a drag casually and pours the last of her beverage on the packed ash. Twenty paces across a profaned portal pool of light, flecks of ash blowing by on a wind from nowhere to nowhere, there stands the undead man.
Oh shit. I told it out of order again. My bad. I am quite stoned.
*
REWIND
*
I swear to the absent god I learned cause and effect all straight line linear like you and yours. But EOT doesn’t follow regular geometry or maybe it does and mortal-born brains just break when they encounter it or maybe I have no fucking clue what I’m talking about anymore.
Nevertheless, sometimes causes come after effects and even after the aftereffects of causes and precedents can and are preceded by pre-seeded events. You get to C by going B-A sometimes. Sometimes you gotta go sideways to go forward, up to go back, and through to go over. Get it? Good talk.
What caused the showdown at the profane portal, the fight that almost cost the Church Ethereal its Shepard? What brought about the battle that started a(nother) war in the dust beneath the firmament?
*
THUS BEGINS THE CONFESSION OF A(0X54):
I did. I did it. This was my fault. I let him kill me in a bus station in Pittsburgh.
I died. Killed myself. And in the dream that came after, some guy in flannel told me I’d be redeemed if I “did a thing.”
I ate my engine block, retaining wall at high speed, nobody got hurt but me; the wall turned to putty then light-prismatic and I found my way to forever’s endless antechamber: the End of Time. Out in the multiverse we wandered world to world to un-place to hunt another A-series mortal, another iteration of we that came to be in possession of a plague that ended worlds.
Yeah, he shanked me in Pitt. Lung. Heart too, I suppose. Up under that stupid fuckin vest. Look, I got better. Came back. I thought we killed him, me and 79 and Flannel, but here we are. Jackboot McRambo Fascist Dickhead went ashes to ashes and dust to dust at the End of Time and clawed his way back out.
Or maybe when the lights went out at the end of the Big Bang’s long march. When all is heat-death only to burst back the Holy Newton’s cradle, when the ash dances like sand on a beat drum. Maybe the dust-dune in the Great Wastes that buried him spat him up, like a cat turd in a playground sandbox.
I don’t know. But I fear and I worry and I wonder if he’s a product of Self-Association–the after effects of encountering oneself in the multiverse. It should kill you, but when it doesn’t it can-and-does the almost-opposite. Think entanglement but worse: I chased the worst me across an endless sea of night for so fucking long we became tethered. As long as I’m alive he ‘might-be’ and that probability will collapse congeal ugly and call him back to being–in one form or another, for some purpose (never good).
*
Ann Arbor, Michigan; Earth(18BEB4FA);
Denial is a common after-effect of encounters with the strange, the other, and other oddities–the real kind that lie at the fringe of explanation. Jonah was a dick, but he was a man after my own heart. Rational skeptic. Superstitious but suspicious of it, consciously, intellectually. Dude kept Occam’s Razor on him, nah mean? “Simple explanations are the most likely…” He repeated some iteration of that phrase often in his three days of doubt.
Day one began the morning after the perfect one. The light was golden but not perfect, divine vibes gone replaced by the cranky constable that tap-tapped on the driver’s glass to wake him all donut crumbs and weed remnants. Nobody drove stoned, and once he gave the story, Jonah preferred the stern cop look to pity. But the cop that looked like his son gave him a ride from the banks of the Huron to his home.
Day two was trying not to call old colleagues and former friends. A morning of start stopping every album he loved or hate-loved or reached for for comfort-catharsis. It was choice paralysis over how to best pursue joy in the time left him. But every note after the presence that most certainly had to be divine seemed, not-sour, just bland. No light lingered, nothing sang, and the day’s colors were muted. No appetite, even with weed, plenty of weed. Just an afternoon nap wasted on the notion that herb might call ‘god’ back again. And when he woke, almost hungry and parched. Jonah felt foolish, for he remembered that he was a rational man in a wrecked body with a finite and near-finished time on this Earth. He sat a long time with that, something blue something sentimental on repeat on the house speakers.
Day three began with a ding-dong-dash, but the good kind. Door bell and some ‘knocks’ that rattled the bones of Jonah’s home and set the man running for something, what he knew not. When he finished waking up, he found the package left on his stoop: a brown bag with handwritten note. “Double the bounty” and a perfectly rolled, thrice-sanctified joint as an extra treat. He sits in the living room where little living was done in the drawn-curtain half-light. He does occasionally touch the weed. Mozart’s Requiem is playing in his soul, whatever Wadsworth is singing through the house speakers. He does occasionally touch the weed to prove re-prove it’s there and real.
Long while later, Jonah finally comes to accept that what ‘cannot-be’ in fact is. Once he has decided, Jonah stands, demands Wadsworth play the genuine Mozart article aloud and he sets to work writing and conspiring with himself on his living room walls. The divine presence spoke truth on this point: Jonah would not be cured, but the thrice-sanctified weed from god’s own herb garden would sustain him long enough to have an experience. What’s the opposite of a ‘crisis of faith’?
Jonah’s ‘experience’ lasts the rest of his days. At the end of the fourth day, borrow my vision to see him singing in his living room, writing on the walls of his home in permanent marker some twisted mix of toddler and deranged scientist. “Joy to the world, to all the boys and squirrels.” He bellows as he finishes his calculation-incantation slurry.
“Wadsworth”
‘Yes sir?’ The ‘ai’ all lower-case and never meant to taste sentience.
“Wadsworth, do you believe god works in mysterious ways?“
From the house speakers: “Can this one” voice trembling “Can this one believe?”
“Yes Wadsworth. I believe you can. I believe we all can.” And the skinny scientist, arms up like his ceiling is heaven, like he’s mad or holy or both. He starts praising and praying, but like a foul mouthed man with little poetry who hadn’t seen a church since he’d last fled one. He’s praising like that, all: “Goddamn, god. Thank you so fuggin’ much. For real. This is. Just almost too much of a bounty, uh, oh Lord.” He’s pacing before the wall. Adding words to the rants and political tracts and numbers and proper fractions and parenthesis to the algorithm or equation or math-word-salad.
“It’s absolutely fucking perfect.” He says to no one, not even Wadsworth.
On the fifth day Jonah rests, and when he rises he is refreshed. He’s hacking and coughing shit up, but he feels like a new man–a new second-hand man with less mileage and a lighter oil leak. Certainty is one hell of a drug, and if Jonah smoked a great quantity of marijuana while composing his equation-rant (he did). There’s no second half to that thought, actually. Jonah just got so very high. Jonah just got so goddamn high on god’s own weed supply, was so awash in religious ecstasy that the man I called my kindred was no longer visible. He no longer cared to check himself or apply reason.
“Wadsworth” Yessir? “We’re going on an adventure.” Where, sir? “Many places, we’re going to kill me. The other me. We’re going to set this right.” This one does not understand. Can I find you driving directions to a specific location? “No Wadsworth. There are no maps where we are going.” Where exactly is that? “The other world. Back to the other world. God gave me everything I needed to make my own Mulligan.”
*