LOCATION: EOT. TIME: END OF EVERYTHING; BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING
The be-end-ginning is the long late season when the last are first, forever-first (a few forevers last): cosmic autumn. Heat death come rebirth for a universal garden. One text grown multiversal in unattended abundance. Some few billion years soon comes the crack of ur-thunder, the din of ball bearing on a leash bashing other bearing-tied-same in some sixteen-dimensional Newton’s Cradle. Great sag-sigh and the sad empty balloon rebounds big bang like it’s never happened before (before (before (before)))). The End is when Betelgeuse and Antares and all the Super giants have gone to bed, and even the fuel efficient ones are tired. When the low-cool dwarf stars cold-smaller than Sol rest their heads, when cosmology (all of it) prepares for its resounding rebound. In the Archives that Catalogue All, that’s when Archivists go mad and long to leap off the Escher walkways that crisscross-hatch their borehole libraries (holes which are very deep (functionally-forever deep)).
End-ginning is when the Stewards become the brightest bits of anything left in existence. Then the little orbs of light execute their duties with great vigor, singing dirges to boost morale and administering reward beatings to the best librarians and calling ‘exemplar’ the failures. That’s when library folk long to go on a certain kind of sedentary pilgrimage into their stacks for the choicest archival cuts.
When all in-Time has burnt out, withered, and died Archivists hide and ride out the be-end-ginning’s long epochal boredom by telling stories. If it sounds mundane or banal, congratulations, you’ve got the plot. Boredom and loneliness, like every sickness of the soul, become quite serious when one is dead. The only antidote known is to do the dance Decameron: tell stories that might beguile plague-time and boredom until such a time as cosmic spring allows for more interesting universal material than hot howling hydrogen.
Where-un-where we are is a matter of matter out-of bounds. We are beyond words like “when.” Beneath the packed ash plain at EOT, in impossibly tiny salt shaker formation, is a series of functionally forever deep bore holes. Bunker is wrong. Fortified library. Archive of All Things. Borges Babel Stacks and Escher stairs and cozy reading rooms. This late in cosmic autumn the library-bore smells like flinty, parched pages and burnt hair from Stewards turned tazers. Every reading room a shelter for soul sick Archivists (ghosts). Every balcony has its desk wagons circled full comforts and books and snacks. Every ghost shackled by management to an albatross desk. Apocalypse cozy. Punishment survival. Life-past-life as unending irony.
A woman, a fresh human ghost so recently deceased, and so far from the time and space in which she lived, wins the dubious lottery. She’s shook, in that ‘shit-what-an-underwhelming-afterlife‘ way we all are. She calls herself Bartleby because she cannot remember the self she was, but damnit what wits she’s got are kicking.
“I’d prefer not to.” Presses one nostril. Launches brain-clot out the other. Spits wicked. Works wavy black hair bedhead into some kind of bun.
Steward in front of Bartleby rages and threatens. Old timers. Docile archivists try to calm the old angry ball-lightning: “Boss, the translator can’t keep up when you get this furious!. Let her go next. Let the kid get a feel for how we do…”
“Feel this.” Two middle fingers from Bartleby, still wearing the jammies she died in. “Fuck you. Fuck your afterlife. I didn’t ask to be born, let alone any of this Jung and Frued Circle Jerk….” gesturing to a sentient cephalopod shade floating above a desk to her left. “It’s not my job to entertain my eternal jailers.”
The Stewards take umbrage and rage. The autotranslating squawk-boxes on every Archivist’s desk burst into flame, and more experienced shades translate their chitters and terpsichorean rhetoric for Bartleby: “Miss, you are about to carry a beating a few billion year she says the blasphemous magic words that save-and-damn her ass-ethereal-and-eternal: “god save me from your bullshit.” Verily, some force strange and unseen does just that.
Bartleby’s arm mutinies. The left arm leaps from the ghost body curled fetal and protective beneath the Stewards. Limb runs off to snatch a single sliver plate off a shelf no one present knows how to read. When Bartleby the terrified ghost starts singing the acid squiggles etched on the slab (though she’d really rather not), all present listen (even the stewards).
Bartleby begins, unwilling rictus grin on her face: “Let me show you my ship…”
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MORE TO COME