Apologue Three

There's a story in this, you think. A parable with which to explain something important. There isn't. Look up and see the night sky, look upon the stars and know that you are in the universe and the universe is within you; your vomit and piss is everyone's vomit and piss and is all the vomit and piss that has ever been or will be. Oliver Cromwell does indeed run with your crew. We want your atoms, we want all your atoms, and we can wait. We're coming for you on a timescale that you can't possibly imagine. The universe becomes sadder as it expands; every point knows that in the beginning it was one with every other point, compressed into an infinitely dense singularity. The sense of loss is unimaginable. We're here to put it back together. Attempts to sabotage our operations will be met with extreme entropy. Only one of us will be here in twenty trillion years and we both know that it isn't going to be you.

Excerpt: channel surfer.

I turn on the television. The opening theme of The Simpsons. Change channel.

We've secured an interview with a sydney drug dealer on condition of anonymity, and he says he's got some real hot tips for staying healthy this summer.

Wow, Sandra

click

a blurry figure counts backwards from ten, nine-

click

-philosophy and physics book so compelling, it's changing the world and possibly the entire universe. We speak with the author-

click

Soldiers run through a crowd of bored school children. One gets taken out by a sniper.

click.

A noise like static. Hundreds of numbers flashing on the screen at random. The noise noise the noise fills my head to bursting point and the numbers flash faster and faster like static the noise-

Cut to a man on a couch, seen from behind. He is watching television, like me. I raise my hand. So does he.

Now turn around.

See:

The cameraman's eyes are huge

He stares at me and starts to smile as I pass out...

...and come to. The end credits of The Simpsons. I feel like I've witnessed something important, but can't remember what it was. There is a knock at the door, and I let it slip my mind.

The Aeroplane Graveyard

It was in the aeroplane graveyard that I found myself, strung out and crazy while I roamed the aisles infinite of dead flying machines. The sky was so blue that I was afraid it would become an ocean and crash down on top of me, or that all these jet fighters and Boeing bombers and I would fall into it. There was a girl sitting in a cockpit, smoking. I’d never seen her before, but despite the total lack of physical resemblance I knew she was the same girl from Quincko’s party. I waved at her. She waved back.

‘Where am I?’ I yelled up at her. She laughed, flicked her cigarette away and jumped down.

‘How can you not know where you are?’

‘I’m in a bad way.’

‘Fair enough, I suppose. This is the aeroplane graveyard, where all decommissioned aircraft come to rest.’

‘How big is it?’

‘God, I don’t know. I've been trying to find my way out for years now.’

‘Naturally…’

I felt dehydrated and weird. Look around. Nothing but metal wings in all directions as far as the eye can see.

‘Some of them would even still fly, if you fueled them.’

‘I find that disturbing.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they’re still alive. Paralysed. Rotting away and able to do nothing but watch.’

‘You make it sound like they have a soul.’

‘Shit, why not?’

‘I don’t believe in souls.’

‘Neither do I. I don’t have one, you don’t have one, these aeroplanes don’t have one. We’re all on the same level. My existence is worth as much and no more than theirs.’

She crushed her cigarette into the dusty ground and asked me if I played chess. I said yes and followed her to the seven-four-seven she’d converted into a sort of home. The first class cabin was full of books and tables and board games.

‘Who do you normally play against?’

‘People drop by.’

Light streamed in at different angles from every window. The minute hand was slowly running backwards but the hour hand was skipping forward days at a time. We played chess in total silence until she won by sacrificing her queen, both rooks and a bishop.

‘So,’ she said.

‘So.’

All I’d eaten in the last twenty four hours was half a sandwich, and even that sitting in my stomach felt intolerable. My vision was getting blurry. I asked for some water but when the glass was brought out I remembered that, in statistical terms, all water contained some molecules of the same water drunk by Plato, Jesus, Oliver Cromwell. Any water was all water. My blood everyone’s blood.

‘All dust is stardust’ said the girl quietly, staring into the glass.

‘I can’t drink it.’

‘You have to.’

‘I’ll destroy the universe.’

Silence. Then:

‘We should go.’

And we ran away from the first class cabin and between the rows of neatly ordered, rusty aeroplanes, and I hoped that they were just sleeping.

Virus

We were stood there, drinking our goon and talking to one another as and/or was or will be the occasion on any friday saturday sunday night of the week. The way everyone just wantonly was interacting, absolutely appalling. People and places infringe on our memory, forcing themselves into our head like they have a right to be there; they change us and I say that I will take my brain back, no longer leave nothing to chance about the sort of unspeakably shady character I might become all because one day I met so-and-so in such-and-such a place. Just a fifteen second encounter it was but that's all it takes these days and then they're IN. I am a virus too, infecting everyone I meet with a tiny part of myself that they're doomed to carry around forever.

Patterns and codes shift; I am paralyzed by fear. Paralyzed by my own treasonous psyche. Words don't fail; you do. Sentences change as I read them, trapping me in labyrinthine paragraph that I slowly, and with great terror, realize is my own biography. Choose Your Own Adventure: all the pages ripped out. We can cut out fear with a scalpel, delete it with a drug. Everything's getting got will get to me. In a dream I pull worms out of a hole in my foot as we're stood there, drinking our white wine and muttering to ourselves as is was will be the occasion every night day dream. The way everyone was melting and dissolving, disgusting. People and places infect us, sticking to the bottom of my shoe like they have a right to be there.

Maybe I'm just cold and I've had too much coffee. I can feel my guts, dead weight in my belly, I can feel them squirming and writhing. I think they want to get out. All life support systems fail. My brain drips out my ears and slithers off to parts unknown. I say I will take it back. Codes and scenery shift; I am paralyzed by my total lack of internal organs. Memories fade and recapitulate, trapping me in a labyrinthine mind which I slowly, and with great terror, realize is my own.

Journal

When I was sixteen and very angry I opened a file on my computer and called it 'Journal', because that's what a friend had told me to do. Then I began to fill it with predictably angst-filled ramblings in entries which I dated to the second of their conception, because there was a function in Word which allowed me to do that automatically, and I thought it was cool. Over the course of the next year or so, the day-to-day details of my uneventful life were transcribed in a ritualistic fashion, interspersed with various personal reflections. I became a little more self-aware, a little better at writing, a little less angry. The contents of this journal were interesting only insofar as they represented a viewpoint; the events recorded were common to everyone aged sixteen.

After a while, I changed the name of the file to 'Hamish', because that was my name. I did this because I realized I was growing up, fast, and when the file at the end of every entry asked me if I wanted to save the changes made to 'Hamish' I felt like I was in somehow in control of this process - I could simply say 'no', and the day would be erased. Soon I'd forget about it myself, and it would be as if that it had had never happened at all. I set my memories in stone - but only some of them. Only the parts that I could put into words. By placing my in control of the past, I figured to place myself in control of the future, and the person that I would become.

A year passes this way and as I shape the journal, it shapes me.

One day I came home from school and found that the entry for that day had already been written. It was dated to the very second that I had opened the file, and described my day exactly the same way that I would have, omitting or emphasizing the same trivial incidents at school, trying to express my angst and boredom in the same tepid language. 

Nothing else happened for months, and I refrained from mentioning this event to anyone else, or in the journal itself. To write it down would have been to confirm the reality of the incident with much more confidence than I could muster - and crazy people are always certain of their delusions. I gave myself the benefit of the doubt. A lapse of memory, is what had happened. I'd simply forgotten the act of writing the entry. When it happened again, however, I all but broke down. It was the same as before; the day's entry was already written when I opened the file, and had ostensibly been written by me. The gross impossibility of such a thing was almost offensive. And it kept happening; every few months, the day would be written automatically.

I had my brain investigated. MRI scans, hypnotherapy, drug-assisted psychonautics and endless counselling sessions could find nothing to explain what I assumed, and hoped, to be episodic memory loss. This was a process that took some time, and while I was bouncing from clinic to clinic, acid-dealer to meditation retreat, the rate of entries that appeared in my journal increased until every second or third day was written for me. More symptoms developed: when I looked at mirrors, my reflection would sometimes act before I did, reaching for a toothbrush a fraction of a second early or taking off the sunglasses I was trying on before it occurred to me that they looked bad. These incidents always caused me to jump back in fright, my reflection now in time, and then examine the mirror, and myself, closely.

Then journal started to deviate and I began to go insane proper. Minor events would be recorded that had not occurred; I would remember them anyway. My mind split into two parallel streams. One contained what I actually did during the day. Then, I would read that day's entry - I didn't have to write anything at all by now - and then my second memory would be brought up to speed. I cried over a movie that I'd never watched and that may not have even existed. I felt simultaneously hungry and full, because I remembered both skipping lunch and eating it. Minor events became major ones; in the journal I began an intense relationship with a girl who I'd been introduced to at a party - a girl I'd never met and at party I didn't attend.

For, I suspect, the purposes of convenient storage, my brain treats the times when the journal and my actual life match each other as a single memory. These respites have become increasingly rare, however, and also bring into question what now constitutes my 'actual life'; the convergence of the two memories blurs my ability to tell them apart. It is hard to tell whether I have actually written this, or if I just remember writing it. Soon, I will be able to do nothing but read my journal and try to keep time with mirrors; one of me will cease to exist.

The Good Spider

'Drink more water. Take less drugs. Get more sleep. Only some people are crazy. You will be ok.'

Hardly, if ever, true. Everyone is crazy all the time. They never stop. Look. The process of growing up entails many deaths - that is to say, you don't mature, you're merely cut down to size. Your soul is taken and molded and whittled. It used to be big. Pointy. It had bits. Now it's a delicate little thing, and utterly bland. I'm terrified of spiders, but I imagine that there must be a good one somewhere. It sits over a gigantic pool of water. A huntsman as big as a truck. Huntsman, the way they move, you know, so fast - it scares people, makes them jump, but the Good Spider is perfectly serene. It just sits over a pool of water, eyes gazing out into the forest where I imagine that this must take place. To find the Good Spider is very hard, but trust me, the journey is worth your time. We only think of knowledge as an abstract concept because we were born with the wrong kind of eyes. The Good Spider has eight eyes that can see knowledge like dust moving through the wind. It can tell you anything, so be careful what you ask; the Good Spider is very old, and you weren't meant to die so many times.

Vision

First I went to bed, and then I started to feel, overwhelmingly, that something was about to happen. Seconds later I found myself standing in the Savannah at sunset. Something was wrong. I knew that I was dreaming, but couldn't move. Or rather, I could move my real limbs - slowly, as if through some viscous liquid - but the ones I could see, the ones that were with me in the desert, were unresponsive. Something was wrong. The ground was perfectly flat, save for the odd rock or shrub, but I began to fall. Gravity reversed direction and I tumbled into the sky. Writhing, and staying still, I brought my hands - my real hands - up to my face. Blackout. I opened my eyes; the room was dark.

***

My head hits the pillow and the desert overtakes me like a tidal wave. My limbs are far away, and though I can feel them move through some sticky liquid, they stay perfectly still by my side. Something is wrong. A boulder tumbles past, but the landscape is featureless. The sun dips below the horizon; the ground has become a vast pool of water, perfectly reflective, and I fall, or sink, into the sky.

***

Something is wrong. Sand dunes roll over my bed and I am buried up to my neck in the desert at midnight. Gravity vanishes and I evaporate slowly, into ten hundred million rising grains of sand.