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Fragment 1: Specific Intersection 0x61
Date: 02/19/2020
Time: 03:00
Location: Metro DC/DMV (Precise Location Indeterminate)
Subject: A(84)
*
I cannot well tell you how I entered there, except that I can and I will. Before, things didn’t make sense, but they were linear (or at least we said they were). When you’ve been two places at once you lose the ability to lay it down in a straight line. It’s a knot that can’t un-knot. You’ve got to follow it through each kink and crink. Not a path less-traveled, it was well worn when the world was young. It’s a passage that exacts a cost. This was in the before times, my before and yours, when the ‘Rona’ was “over there” and people in a lot of other places pretended it would stay. Before the isolation, the grief, the numbers, and the graph that looked like a roller coaster. Between the worry and the wrath. Before the bubbles and the pivot and the lonely and the shots and the masks. My world ended right when ours caught a cough that wouldn’t be, couldn’t be.
4 am first alarm then second. Slap the phone and roll my spine off the rebar futon. Down the hall, a bedroom door is a barricade: her majesty’s portion of 600 square feet of laundry, unopened mail, and roach motel. We are still married. Same apartment, separate worlds, different cigarette brands. Independent laundry piles. I want to lay outside her door like the dog in that sad bastard children’s book kids don’t read any more. Coffee cup in hand, bread crust in wet beard. Ash on the pants already. I am supposed to educate teenagers. Today, it will be a workplace writing exercise, a love letter to your middle manager. Be sure to sign it with the proper number of ‘x’s’ and ‘o’s’ kids. It’s actually worse than that sad bastard book about the dogs. While I am gone, my wife will wrestle with academic things, elbow patches and ideas that I can’t carry any more. She is an anchoress in the bedroom, the cat for companionship and the roaches bringing the news of the day. I am in exile on the couch, and it’s not clear by whose decree.
It snowed overnight on the endless suburban grid. Skid down roads slick with slush and salt brine. I work three towns over. That’s three sets of the same chain shops owned and patronized by three iterations of the same people with different names. Drive to work karaoke drifts, last-century car creaking, a silver sedan coasting on ghost labor. Dry the shower off my hair sticking my head out the window like a dog.
There’s a retaining wall to a nondescript on-ramp that never has any cars on it, serving no purpose, and seemingly connecting to no other roads. Every time I pass it, if I pass it, GPS cuts out, radio stutters between stations. Sometimes I hear a woman reading listed numbers, pronunciation cold, clipped. Take the same route, faithfully every-day-four-years-faithful, except I don’t see this on-ramp every day. It’s only there when the straight line curves, when the hose kinks, when the town glitches and parallel lines look like they want to kiss. The belt-way goes empty except for me and two headlights behind, the hair on neck stands, and I have to use visual cues to remind myself I am not upside down. It’s an inner ear thing, I say. I am hoping to see it today: the strange on-ramp.
I don’t have “work” in me. And if I see my on-ramp, I think I’ll kill myself. I’ve dreamt this and know what to do: when the road leans right, I will let go of the wheel and accelerate it straight. Road goes right, I’ll go straight catch the dirt rise banked turn like a ramp, leave the road on a ballistic arc over the ditch and cattails. The car’s nose kisses the wall, starts compressing like a beer can, I object-in-motion-stay-in-motion until the engine greets my center of gravity. So much damage to me. So little mess left on the road to endanger others.
I thought it a good plan. The way anything sounds good when you’re starving, the way drinking seawater seems right. I was fully committed when I saw the ramp and the retaining wall just off it, inviting me. Accelerate the wheel straight, number station from nowhere starts blaring on the radio and I think I hear “I’ll be Seeing You”, and here comes Flannel Man.
I’ve seen him before, out of the corner of my eye right before I fell asleep as a child. When I came-to after almost drowning, butt naked in lake Michigan on new years. Every ill advised sleepless span, he’s in the corner of my eye. Suddenly unsuddenly, here he is again, standing in front of a car hurtling to its doom through the snow. He’s right there on the dirt ramp that’s going to send me flying into my wall. I take the wheel back from Jesus, shitbritches stand on my brake pedal, time lurches long, I am going to hit him.
He pivots paper flat, shit you not, slices the car in half with a hot knife hiss. Turn, and he’s sitting there in the passenger’s seat, a living LCD screen of a man, scruffy black hair and beard, red flannel, jeans and work boots. He’s always on his way to work or from it. Sitting in the passenger seat, two dimensions in three, a creased piece of paper. “Buckle up” he says, and I fasten my safety belt in the impossibly long moment, two halves of my car flying in formation toward a concrete wall that seems woven out of textile. Each half of the Ford finds a hole in the weave, noses through. The airbag is taking it’s time, barely out of the steering wheel, not even half full, when I hear the sound of thunder, roller skates on wooden floor and fade to black.
*
Fragment 131
Date: 05/07/2053
Time: 03:00:00 PST (Most recent edit)
Source: Wikipedia Entry “Temporal Events” (Excerpt)
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“Proximity to Strangeness”:
Proximity to Strangeness is a key factor in determining the severity of the cognitive and perceptual effects of a time/space event, most commonly associated with Specific Intersections (SI). Simply put, the closer one is to an SI, the more severe the physical and cognitive effects on a body. Note: proximity includes but is not limited to measurable physical distance. One can be “causally” proximal to a Specific Intersection, part of the chain of events that led to a “time space incident”, and encounter the physical/mental effects one would expect (aphasia, loss balance and disorientation, lost sense of smell, breaking into song). Based on the behavior of entangled particles (and entangled systems) at vast distances (and time(s) this is a spacio-temporal phenomenon), physical distance to the SI may be completely irrelevant to whether one is “caught in the strange.” Conversely, one could be standing “in” the SI without necessarily interacting with the phenomenon.
The earliest efforts at theorizing Specific Intersections Incorrectly imagined them as analogous to black holes, a singularity (the SI “proper”) and an event horizon at some physical distance from it. There is speculation (Markov, Kettle, et. al) and superstition, that posing the question of whether or not one is “in/out” of a SI (the act of measuring) can entangle a person in that SI’s chain of events.
See Also:
- “Los Alamos Exclusion Zone”
- “2nd Tunguska Event”
- D.B. Cooper
Fragment -3
Date: 7/1/2009
Author: NEGATIVE
Location: SE Michigan (Multiple)
Subject: A(99)/A(*NIL)
“I didn’t say you were stupid, I said choosing between weed and you was stupid”, to an irritated cell phone. There’s a smirking shadow outside his window smoking a cigarette, cherry obscured by his palm always. He pinches the butt dead, drops it, skirts the pool of light soundless. The man comes around, creeping smoke-quiet to the front side entrance of a shit apartment, half hill buried basement somewhere in Michigan. He’s visited this place several times, on this Earth and others. He’s quite good at it, lurking and seeing what is to be seen, and better at what comes after.
Two leaking windows frame a drafty door. Hovel grows out of a leaning house like a tumor. Mood shot house, background for a horror flick. From a shrub shadow beside the door, the man creep-watches through a window as a twenty something kid begs through his phone to keep his weed habit and girlfriend. It’s not going well.
“Hon, it’s not a problem, it’s a herb. It’s a problem when you run out.” And the kid with big schnoz stands in his doorway. Threshold of a lit bedroom and dark front room, the only two in the place. Lights a pin joint, coughs. “No, I’m not smoking right now.” Chokes out: “Hand to god, baby.”
The man stares at the coughing kid from the corner of the window, traces every familiar detail of his face, feels his stomach clench, breathes through the lurching disorienting, churning strange.
“Can we waffle this painter. Wow. Can we talk about this later? Yeah, I mauled you.” Kid back to the wall, clutches at the Uni-E on his shirt, sings: “After laughter, comes tears.” Sings it, perfect pitch, heartbreakingly beautiful, for the first and only time in his life, he truly sings. Then he vomits.
Flop sweat fear on his face “No. No, mate.” He begs, examining the joint in lighter light, phone pinned on his shoulder. ” We cuff Lou. Matzo, mate. Mate! We cuff Lou.” Cut-off call and thrown phone.
The phone pings, three pieces and three paths, off the wall. The blank screen skips, skitters, lays there catching the sickly streetlight peeking in the window. Sounds like someone has got a key stuck in the door. The handle clanks twice, falls off on the third twist, swings open, for the first and only time in its life silently. The shadow that is a man steps through the threshold.
The light finds his schnoz first, my schnoz on another man’s face, the worst yet to wear it. The kid thinks it’s long like a plague doctor’s beak, familiar. He dizzy fixates on the schnoz, the bushy brows, the sad eyes. Illuminated, dead center of the room, the kid is looking at middle age and the actual-worst-timeline version of himself, of me, of we. Rangy, hook-nosed, hobo-skinny, ready to shake apart. Wearing a beat up kevlar vest and assorted discreet tacticool that looked, that was, scorched. He coughs, hard and hacking, like he’d held it and it took effort. Leaves a glob of mucus on the floor.
“Mop?” The kid struggles, “cop?”
“Probably the exact opposite.” Staring through the young man.
“Man, I melt you?” Piss fear clear in the kid’s voice.
“Try again.” Snake smile.
“Maine I missed it.”
“Again, again.” Fake patient.
“Can I fuckin’ help you, Rambo?” Kid’s voice cracking.
Too-strong drags the kid to his feet, “You can, young man, and you will.”
*
Fragment 17
Definition: Host-Hedron
Commentary on Dice Cult Devotional (Excerpt)
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What/who is the Host-Hedron?
In theological terms the infinitely faceted god of chance. In rational terms, a shared and repeated delusion commonly repeated by those claiming to have experienced “temporal events.” To believers, it is an infinitely sided polyhedron, rolling, roiling. From the literature of the “Dice Cultists” (Devotionals Canto 3) : “The probability engine, the beating heart, the chance engine that guides our universe from bang to a crunch to a bang in an endless super void of sparks, blinking the same. Each universe a bit of self similar multiverse, the barest grace note in a fractal symphony. The Hedron set every Atom in your body in motion and it will welcome them back home when all that is or ever was is cold. When the last star dies, the Holy Shape will rebuke entropy, drag it all along paths inscribed in the most sacred geometry. And when it’s done and all is quiet and singular, the Host-Hedron sets the fire again. Guide our feet, oh sacred shape. Let us perceive thy geometry, sublime and sacred.”
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Fragment 119
Location: Nowhere’s Endless Antechamber (NEA)
Date: EOT (End of Time) N/A
Subject: A(84)
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My silver Ford spits out onto perfect flat blacktop. Either side of the road is a scorched plain. The car, cut in half down its length keeps rolling, press the gas and both halves accelerate in tandem. It’s snowing ash. The wipers drag it across the windshield. Light a smoke and drive on in the dark, glancing at my passenger, hands shaking.
“You’re welcome.” Deep voice. Long legs struggling to stretch in my car trash. My passenger is three dimensional now: black beanie, black beard long and loose, red flannel jacket smokes poking out the chest pocket. Work pants and boots. “For a smoke I will explain some things.” I remind him of the pack he carries. “These are eternal. That really means stale.” Hand him a cheapie from my pack. He examines the precious antiquity, sniffs it like a cigar, “oh god, it smells like fuckin’ raisins.” Lights it, he digs my travel mug out of the car trash by his feet, takes a swig of my morning coffee. I remind him he doesn’t know where I’ve been.
“I know precisely where you’ve been, turn left here.” Out in the ash a fork in the road, put on the turn signal and take the low road left, road spirals down in a long banked turn in the dark. The two halves of the car seem held by magnet, an invisible electric slinky. They stretch and wobble but hold, a few inches apart as the car creeps down the spiral making its normal death noises. Road straightens. “There.” He points. “That’s the explanation.” A prism, faint in the falling ash at first. Come close and it’s piercing the permanent night, the prism belching from two smoke stacks over a brick building. “Pull over.” Both halves of the car creak stop by an old power plant, red brick stained gray. Old factory calendar windows missing panes let in the ash. From inside there is the sound of grinding and cracking, of hard drive fans and tired ball bearings. “Brace yourself.”
He activates the flashlight on a cracked cell phone, holds it high and illuminates the scorched plain for miles. On one side of the plant, the scorched plain dips lower to a pit: packed ash is littered with dead and dying iterations (repeating like .gifs) iterations of me. I walked down from the lonely highway out among them clutching chests, having fallen from height or swallowed a pistol, one smoking a cigarette through a hole in his throat. A few died smiling and old, and one even young and pleased with himself. In the distance faceless ephemeral figures lift the limp rag bodies onto a silent conveyor that crawls toward the prism factory.
I yell back toward the highway: “Spirit, what is this place?” He remarks “spirit” is a new one and an odd way to address the HVAC man. The multiverse abhors waste apparently. And as sure as a forest would use my corpse to feed a tree, the less quantifiable and measurable stuff has a way of being repurposed as well. Waste potential that isn’t waste. The offer: take a ride with him or lay down and die and get ground into rainbows.
He follows me back to the car, “I’ll drive” and I don’t put up a fight. We cruise a long time on the lonely road. “I had to show you what you almost became. If you want to be raw matter, I can turn the car around.” I don’t respond. The wipers still work. Number station whispering from the radio. Belt whine from the engine.
The road opens up to empty freeway, tall halogen topped lights on either side. Signs and markings present and precise, but no words, only numbers and irrational arithmetic and formulas. Every third sign suggests dividing by zero. Beyond the road great pale searchlight circles of light fall from nowhere onto the scorched plain. The ash always falls but never collects. We drive a long time, a silver sedan leaping from pool of light to pool of light until exit zero, off ramp and service drive into a dim wood. Dead skinny trees lean low over the road.
There, up a drive, clutched by the dead trees is a small stone chapel. It bears no cross, crescent, or star. No holy symbol adorns its bare half-burnt walls. It looks to have been plucked from a fire, sacred enough to be saved. The door opens and a luminous being stands in the doorway, beckoning.
*
Exile
Fragment: -5
Author: NEGATIVE
Date: 7/5/2009
Location: Multiple
Subject: A(99) AKA “Rambo”
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Toledo to Cincinnati, the man and the kid and the cargo: a respiratory virus. Cincy to Pittsburgh. You would recognize this germ’s little cousin a decade later. Pitt to Baltimore. They set off that first night in the kid’s white and rust Hudson carrying microscopic hell. He would ditch the kid, choking on snot and fever-delirious at an ER in DC.
DC to Baltimore to Philly. The man was a “mildly symptomatic” carrier of a variant of that virus good fortune never showed your world. He was the best an infected person could hope for in his world: permanent walking pneumonia and long term infection. He was a carrier in his context, In all others, he is a weapon.
Southern Ohio, the Upper Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic. By now, a whole lot of people are entangled in a web of causality they can’t quite understand. He starts appearing many places, jumping oceans. Across the Sunbelt to the great American southwest. “Have you seen this man?” sightings in a dozen countries, stepping out of closets and through walls. He’s vanished into thin with the cops and the Feds on his tail a dozen times. The devil with the cough who can pull you through a fucking phone. He drives up the California coast, last spotted everywhere. International outbreaks, and panic buying, and a pisspoor effort to “pivot” digital.
You know the drill. But add a pale horse riding hook-nosed broken thing stoking the flames. They had the same bug as we did, as you did, at first. But the man’s world was tapped-out and made no vaccine for this particular variant: Omega. Things ended for them ugly, but one got away: the worst one. His name is *REDACTED*.
The Earth he was currently undoing would have neither the time nor the technological capacity. He was confident, a dozen times over confident, he would bury the thirteenth. By the time he crossed the Mississippi the first time, headed West, hospitals were already clogged. Conspiracy theories flew, he stoked them, in several languages and across social media (as it was in this space/time). Paramedics pumped false hope out of stomachs. Panic and wailing and the rending of garments. The man drove on, teleported on, pushing the pale Hudson sedan over the Rockies, death in his wake.
*