*
Fragment: 0x77
Location: Nowhere’s Endless Antechamber/ Washtenaw County, MI
Date: July X, 1973/EOT (End of Time)
Subject: A(84)
*
The luminous being: a featureless humanoid shape wreathed in blue flame. They gesture, the HVAC man and I follow and duck into the door of the comically small chapel. The inside stretches too many empty pews, three-times-three the size the building ought to be. Unadorned walls with simple oil lamps. Inside too, no holy symbol, just a black slab altar where the pulpit should be.
The flame fades, whirls around the creature as it fissions. Two women in a cloud of smoke. Instantly a congregation. “Be not afraid.” All of their many eyes on the HVAC man and myself walking down the aisle. The pews filled with heretics and witches from every age, each an aspect of the luminous being, now sitting Gemini, twin selves on the altar. In the congregation, I think I see Half-Hanged Mary and Alan Turing. Zamyatin in the back marking his favorites in a hymnal next to Sally Ride. A few in the audience seem to bear the mark of having been burned at the stake.
“Be not afraid” Again, many arms on these strange twin women. The two, Durga wearing a bathrobe, jammies and slippers. “Who are you?” I ask. Her twin aspects smile, each mirror offering one of the two travelers a cup of perfectly prepared coffee with one hand and a sublimely rolled honey joint in the other, a third and forth arm offer lighters. The congregation speaks: “she of coffee and the consolation of philosophy, they that comforts heretics.” Nic, collector of the could have been, should have been, never-bothered-to, broken things, and all Schrodinger’s cats. “Amen,” solemnly from the congregation. The Twin sisters, equal and opposite in all things, arms waving spectrally behind them, fanned like peacock feathers.
HVAC man in Flannel and I sit on the altar between the strange sisters, light our joints and sip the coffee sublime to applause from the congregation. The specter-vespers in the pews seem to be Nic’s other aspects, the ghosts and echoes collected by them. The joint is strong as fuck. We fall through the altar, coughing. It feels like having the tip of one’s nose pulled through one’s asshole. Amen.
*
I land on a sofa in a familiar apartment in an unfamiliar time. Nic, the women in the bathrobe, flanking me while Flannel Man sits cross legged, levitating inches over a low coffee table. There’s college kids sitting-talking cross-legged around the table or kneeling, a few dozen in the place and on the side-lawn of the house with the tumor apartment half buried in a hill. “This is my college apartment. One of them.” But they tell me it’s 11 years before I was an impure thought: 1973.
“In a Sentimental Mood” just started playing and the same-titled album spins on a turntable in the corner. Flannel Man and Nic’s aspects seem ignored by the party-goers. Flannel contorts himself to hit a joint passed around the table without passer or passee noticing. He doesn’t flinch as a beer is passed through him. “There’s a conversation you need to hear” the wondrous strange women gesture to the table and the man rolling the spliffs, poorly. Flannel Man, goes transparent to aid our view.
Four nerds around the table. One nerd with outrageous sideburns just used a piece of paper and a pencil to demonstrate a wormhole. “You make a straight line short”, he pops the pencil through piece of paper. The woman next to him gets tired of listening to mutton chops and watching Jimmy three-thumbs mangle the spliff. So she grabs the joint from him politely with a smile and says, “I think you have it wrong.”
M. Chops defends the “shortest distance is a straight line..” logic. But the woman is illuminated: Darling, on a globe the shortest path between “A” and “B” is a curved line hugging the surface of the spheroid, following the geometry. Yeah, your wormhole demonstration is cute, but in that thought experiment your hands are the hands of god pulling and rending the fabric of space together so you can shove your pencil through. She holds the joint, runs the tip of her tiniest finger down the “U” shape. “Takes me less effort to slide down then “jump” across.” Performs a little slight of hand and twirls the joint in her hand, not a grain of green moves, minor miracle.
Chops tries to object, “That makes no …” but she steamrolls him. The music stops The whole party focuses on her and the words pour out while she rolls a perfect cone-shaped joint: Sweetie, I know you want to think your hands are the hands of god, but they aren’t. What if it’s cheaper, easier, more efficient energy wise, to go sideways or down instead of out and through? She stops to lick the joint. I’m saying, don’t go “from A to B” but from “A to C to B” to follow some kind of curve, go with the flow we haven’t learned to perceive. I’m saying the shortest route is not straight, and if you want to be Captain Kirk, “go fast!” is perhaps not the answer.
She lights the joint and passes it to Mr. Chops. Nic’s aspects applaud, the conversation continues. The first track on the album ends. The scene resets for the portion of the room that exists in 1973. “Are these some U of M math nerds?” Three of the four. Mutton Chops aspires, but dies in a snow bank trying to learn to hunt in Northern MI, out past the forests with the perfect grid shape. The one staring at that woman’s tits ends up a software tech bro, and the Chuckle Fuck who can’t roll a joint is big shit in private aerospace. The fourth, their weed dealer, just took the first step toward accurately conceiving of faster-than-light and time travel in your iteration of Earth.
What’s she do? Occupation other than sometimes weed dealer? Why do you give a shit about her job? Nic contemplates a moment, rummaging. She’s a student at the other university in town, takes her sweet time there. Ends up teaching high school English in a public school for 30 years before pissing off with her “roommate” and falling through to explore the multiverse. “For fuck’s sake” in stereo from the strange women. You show him the sketches for the Sistine ceiling, and he wants to know how many shitters the building will have. In some times and places it’s people at polytechnics and those who sleep under blankets made of money that do big and/or think big. In others. It’s her. It’s people like her. Both sisters in unison: “I’m here when they do. I’m here when they do not.”
“Are you not amazed, mortal?” Yes ma’am and amen. We fall through the sofa, nose through asshole. The mortal among the procession, me, leaking brain function as we go. I hear Nic, the strange sisters, and Flannel Man speak in unison: “we need you to know so you can do a thing for us, for you, for all of you.”
*
Fragment: 0x54 “The Cruel Tutelage of the HVAC Man”
Location: Nowhere’s Endless Antechamber/
Date: NEGATIVE (EOT)
Subject: A(84)
*
Land back on the scorched plain at the End of Time. I’m on my knees in the ash snow in the headlights of my Ford. Shake off the disorientation, empty a nostril of a blood clot. Wipe a bit more blood from each ear. Flannel Man, working-stiff resplendent hovers cross legged over the hood. “What now?” We train.
He puts the sedan in neutral and makes my scrawny nerd ass push a 4013 pound Ford across the gently rolling plain while he hovers over the roof, smoking my cigarettes. I perform my first miracle: replenishing smokes. There are 13 cigarettes in the partial pack quiver every time I reach for one for Flannel or myself. When I ask our destination he points to a particular pool of light on a plain specked with them, the distance between them seeming to expand and contract in a ghostly half light. When I ask to drive he tells me driving is for winners. He snacks and refuses to share, hovering stoic while I push. “What are we training for?”
The correct question, “the student becomes the student.” He rotates in the air to face me at the the back bumper. I stop pushing. He floats near, produces a cell phone that projects a ghostly image above it in stunning detail: the Earth, from orbit, half illuminated. The night side gone dark, the light side choked in black smoke from a thousand times a thousand fires. “The actual worst timeline, not yours, but that’s where the worst ‘you’ came from.” The image changes : looks like me, but not scattered or scared or anxious, just angry. Well educated and wore a flag pin to work for a fascist state. Flannel man tells me he tortured people, professionally. Did worse, much worse. What’s worse? He sleeps like a baby at night, unburdened by conscience. When I light a smoke and rest: “Push on, Neophyte!” No. I refuse. He throws me the keys to the car. “The student is not as stupid as he looks.”
He’s in the car by the time I get there, buckled up. He hands me a green slushy, takes one of my smokes.
I drive on the gently rolling scorched plain, not even a road now. Between pools of light, we pass the lonely liminal: an empty gas station, half its fluorescent lights dead. There’s the skeleton of a roadside diner. Everywhere, falling ash that never collects on the dead plain, seeming to melt into it, becoming part of the hard-pack. “Tell me about the worst me.”
FTL, Time/Space travel, the multi-verse, their Earth doesn’t really ponder them too much until the place is in worse shape than yours. “From what?” The gleeful embrace of fascism is not enough? There’s a roadside motel with a flickering “No Vacancy” sign and no cars. We pass a non functioning escalator, stairs to nowhere. Flannel empties a slushie, tosses it in the back seat, continues: There’s a virus in your time, it’s going to be bad, starts with pneumonia. In his world, it’s worse, comes at a worse time, and they’re dumber. They say “it’s just pneumonia” and celebrate the cull until it starts eating rich people, which is almost immediately. The whole thing eats itself in about two years. He whistles. Makes bomb noises.
“How does he survive the end?” We arrive at the pool of light: put the car in park in front of our destination: ash falling on wooden floor, one dojo wall. Two humanoid, faceless figures in jumpsuits are mopping the floor, as if the ephemeral ash could somehow tarnish it. We sit in the idling car.
“Rage is how he survives.” A few of them, some of his people thought they had a solution, really the only solution those people ever find: don’t fix a dying world or find an uninhabited one. No, take someone else’s by force. As soon as they figured it was energy cheaper to ‘fall through’ instead of ‘fling out’? They decided to kick in their neighbor’s door: take over another Earth in the multiverse and dispose of those that live there.
“Holy shit.”
Indeed, there are beings who make sure fascists don’t spread laterally that way. He unbuckles his belt, snaps his fingers demanding a smoke. “Except, that version of you survived. Perhaps because you, you little shit, across all known timelines, have a higher-than-average likelihood of experiencing non-zero events. Since I noticed you weren’t planning on doing anything ever again, I recruited you to help deal with him.” He exits the vehicle and calls for me to follow onto the dojo floor.
When we approach, the two custodians stand at the ready, each one a mop in hand, eyeless faces staring straight ahead. Flannel man places a fist in a flat palm and bows to them. They bow curtly, hand him the mops as he rises and they blink out of existence. He passes a mop to me, solemnly, and rolls his bucket across the floor.
He stands at 23 paces, mopping the floor. I do the same, trying to gain some deep insight from the act. I don’t. I feel foolish. I listen: other me is a world killer. A menace working on a baker’s dozen apocalypses out of pure nihilistic spite, and if some collection of me does not stop him, a small force of iterations named *****, he will intersect with my world and end all that I have ever known or should have.
“Training? You expect me to stop fascist Rambo me?” I stop mopping. “I’m sensitive, fuckup, Ehor emo me.”
“The student underestimates their potential.” He pulls a joint out from behind his ear, lights it, takes a long puff. The joint on his lip, he breaks his mop over his knee, katana length and tosses the bottom aside. “Before I was in HVAC, I was a custodian.” He stretches, comically, as stiff-backed as I am at first. I ask for a puff of the joint. “No.” He parries an invisible opponent swiftly, with grace. He turns to me, lifts the stick high. “Defend yourself.”
Footfalls, work boots on wood floor. I’m still ‘wait what?’ looking at the mop in my hands when he begins beating my ass with a stick. He kicks my legs out from under me and hits me a few more times with the mop-handle before helping me to my feet.
Again, we square off at 23 paces. While he is demonstrating the basic forms and motions of mop-dueling. I ask how fighting with sticks is supposed to help me stop a world killing fascist-Rambo version of me. “And I ask the gods daily how they could send me a fool apprentice who knows nothing of Kung-fu movies, Anime, or Chinese Opera. Let alone a fuckin’ JRPG or a comic book.” He rolls his neck, stretching the muscles and flexing before lifting his mop handle high overhead. “You aren’t even forklift certified.”
He crouches low, weight on his back foot. Stern eye contact, weapon high, leans back further. I squint cinematically, break the mop over my knee. I hold left stick high, mop end whipped right hand low. Crouching, “Let the training montage begin in earnest.”
A dozen doves fly from nowhere to nowhere. Silence on the scorched plain broken by footfalls, work boots and Chuck T’s on the wood floor. Our sticks meet with the crash of thunder. There is no surprise in my teacher’s eyes. I swipe with the mop end, but he parries and dances away. Lifts his stick high, smiles, “again.”
*
Exile
Fragment: -11
Date: 8/13/2011; N/A
Location: Michigan, Central Lower Peninsula/EOT (End of Time)
Subject: A(99)
*
Trees on a perfect grid in the middle of Michigan, the pleasant peninsula, put there by the Civilian Conservation Corps. There’s an incandescent line shimmering down the trunk of one. The bark splits prismatic and out falls a skinny man with a hooked nose, backpack on and duffle strapped to an arm. He crawls to a tree, sits exhausted, back to a trunk to watch whatever bit of a bloody sunset can sneak through the red pine.
He likes to wait for the wrap up of the end of a world here: the forest on a grid. He finds the perfectly spaced trees comforting, ordered, rational, the product of people set to work and an image of nature bent to a will. He checks his kit: Iodine, Prussian Blue, NBC gear in the duffle, just in case. He ditches the backpack and digs out a copy of Moby Dick taken from an iteration of himself who was a literature professor in the very first world he killed. The man had spent their drive together trying to reason with him and humanize him, had called him ‘Ahab’. He left that iteration gasping for breath in an ER the next day.
He thinks it’s mercy what he’s doing: culling weaker worlds with the germ he carries, making space so that others might thrive. He opens the book to the last chapter, “The Chase”, produces a flashlight and proceeds to pine for Ahab. Oh, “from the depths of hell” and “for hate’s sake” he wishes to be the wounded captain, but he is the ship, the vessel Pequod, a fuckin’ tool. The man would not come to realize this until he too had sunk to hell and taken half of creation with him.
At first, upon “falling through”, the man thought himself in the afterlife or the victim of a cruel accident. But in the consumption of worlds, in the consumption of art and culture along the way, for he consumed art but was not touched by it, A(99) came to see his vector or path as fate. His world had been tested by the Coronavirus and failed. He had not failed. He was an instrument of God carrying the test to other worlds. Twelve had failed and this one was about to.
There’s enough sunlight left to see the big-missile contrails at high altitude. He is close enough to a town to hear the tornado-become-air-raid sirens. The one bar cell signal on the phone in his pocket is enough to receive the emergency alert. He breathes deep, closes his eyes, and leans back through the tree so sternly pressing against his spine. It’s not the tree but his spine become-soft, fluid, a wet rag wrung out as he falls through the tree and comes to with his kit on the scorched plain.
He fell through, the first time, just after screaming into a phone at his wife for refusing her spot in the illusion-of-continuity-of-government-bunker. He was a professional jack-boot and party-important enough to warrant a spot in the hole. Turns out, in the present-absence of their marriage, she had come to find his company and that of other party elites distasteful. So distasteful, in fact, she would rather be incinerated than endure with them. He threw his phone against a wall, felt something in his head snap, and woke on the scorched plain.
Now, what is “now” but a field of weeds choking out tomorrow. He stands, re-sets his pack and lifts the duffle onto his shoulder. He lights a cigarette and walks on in the falling ash. Direction doesn’t seem to matter here: from one pool of light to another where he will start the process again. He is no simple plague rat. No, the fascist takes pride in his craft.
From experience, he’s learned to weave a web of Specific Intersections across a world and let the virus consume those caught in it. He appears, as if by magic, in places secret and secure, bases and bunkers. He passes through places where people gather, fairs and churches, watering holes and stadiums. He profanes them all. He walks along the scorched and gently rolling plain, past the skeletons of lonely liminal spaces, the ghosts of trains and buses and interchanges and the falling ash, to the next pool of light and the oblivious world beyond it. He finishes his cigarette and reaches for the next in the now-never-ending pack, takes a deep drag, and the pool of light behind him dims then dies.
*