THE SUBTLE PHYSICS
or, perhaps, simply
//Word,
or even, if you like, Equus Quagga,
being the Myth of Norman Newman’s Emancipation of Our Universe from the Parasitic Maw of the Heisenburglar
a novel by George Dalphin
2007
Man-Like Machines
Dedicated to all those fictionalized/mythicized herein, without whom both this story and my life would be out of context and incomplete, and to the Reader, which is to say, to you specifically, for the same reason.
Note: This is a work of fiction. All characters and events depicted herein exist at various levels of the spectrum of fictionality, some more real than others, none, however, ever quite achieving that funny old asymptote of real. Hehe.
Written across the Years 2006 and 2007 of the Gregorian Calendar,
at the Metropolitan Building in Portland, Maine, in the United States of America, Earth, making use of the English language.
First draft.
All rights innate; art is theft, no? (This will seem archaic.)
The Subtle Physics is a Man-Like Machines project.
Man-Like Machines is George Dalphin and Joe Foster.
There may be good and evil, but everything is good.
- George Dalphin
If the present attempt, in the form of our Society, succeeds better than its predecessors have done, then it will be in existence as an organized, living and healthy body when the time comes for the effort of the XXth Century. The general conditions of men’s minds and hearts will have been improved and purified by the spread of its teachings, and, as I have said, their prejudices and dogmatic illusions will have been, to some extent at least, removed. Not only so, but besides a large and accessible literature ready to men’s hands, the next impulse will find a numerous and united body of people ready to welcome the new torch-bearer of Truth. He will find the minds of men prepared for his message, a language ready for him in which to clothe the new truths he brings, an organization awaiting his arrival, which will remove the merely mechanical, material obstacles and difficulties from his path. Think how much one, to whom such an opportunity is given, could accomplish. Measure it by comparison with what the Theosophical Society actually has achieved in the last fourteen years, without any of these advantages and surrounded by hosts of hindrances which would not hamper the new leader. Consider all this, and then tell me whether I am too sanguine when I say that if the Theosophical Society survives and lives true to its mission, to its original impulses through the next hundred years—tell me, I say, if I go too far in asserting that earth will be a heaven in the twenty-first century in comparison with what it is now!
- H. P. Blavatsky, The Key to
Theosophy, 1889
I delight sensually in Time, in its stuff and spread, in the fall of its folds, in the very impalpability of its grayish gauze, in the coolness of its continuum. I wish to do something about it; to indulge in a simulacrum of possession. I am aware that all who have tried to reach the charmed castle have got lost in obscurity or have bogged down in Space. I am also aware that Time is a fluid medium for the culture of metaphors.
- Vladimir Nabokov, Ada
Break yourself, fool!
- Traditional
P.O.V.: winged kiss
(Brain-in-a-Vat)
the Events, as They Occur
(to me),
[This]...(1) [a Beautiful Mystery]...(8) [Amsterdam/There Is
No Time]...(33) [the State of the Species]...(55) [the Data]...(80) [Man-Like Machines]…(95) [Ishmael and the Whale]…(107) [Soliloquy]…(121) [Music for a Saturnine Love Affair]…(131) [the Revolution]…(154) [Hermetica]…(174) [Second Bad Vibel]…(187) [the Damn Thang]…(208) [a Divine Congress?]…(218) [Adam Naming the Animals]…(233)
[the Lamenessless Namelessness]…(249) [a Whisper. a
Moan. the Wind?]…(264) [Moderation in All Things
(Including Moderation)]…(279) [the Magician]…(313)
[Folly Not Failure]…(336) [I Am a Cell
God/Equus Quagga.”]…(364) [the World’s Original Man]…(389)
[Mix-Tape Never Sent]…(xxx) [Hell’s Heart]…(xxx)
[the Zeroth Law]…(xxx) [the Immortal Man-With-No-Name]…(xxx) [the Buddhic Nature of Substrate]…(xxx)
[the Last Show We’ll Ever Do]…(xxx) [Apotheophobia]…(xxx)
[the City of Bridges]…(xxx) [the End of Time]…(xxx)
[Long Feedback Ending]…(xxx) [I’m Yours]…(xxx)
//do Forgive My Length
.
(Sing with Me, Electric Sheep)
1
re: One day I blew a kiss to no one specific. It would seem it is you it has found.
This (is part of you)
I’m Norman Newman. I may or may not exist. I am in love with you.
There is much to explain.
You see, it seems I was born with an enigmatic intuitive certainty that my life has some great purpose in this world. My mother claims that when she was pregnant with me a psychic told her I was once a great Renaissance painter named Giorgio and I was to be an important religious leader in this lifetime. She often proudly reminds me of events I don’t recall, when I was five and she and our neighbor found me standing at the center of all my friends, who were seated in a loose circle listening to me explain how everything is God. I like to believe her story is true, mostly because it suits my idiom.
I was raised in an effectively secular household. I have never been to a church service in my life, but we celebrated the secularized versions of the basic Christian and American holidays like stereotypical citizens. My father was raised Brooklyn Catholic but became an angry atheist academician long before I met him. My mother was raised by a new age mystic and a Presbyterian, giving her a mutt of a spirituality that interwove saints, aliens, Atlantis, angels, pyramid hats, Jesus Christ and the possibility that at any point she might vanish, enlightened, of which she warned me several times throughout my childhood.
By the time I left home at thirteen to live at a two-year magnet school for gifted misfits called the Indiana Academy (junior year of high school; I had skipped fifth and sixth grades), I was secretly certain that I was the second coming of Christ.
This was a troubling position for an atheist.
You must understand: I was a happy child, glowing with intelligence and temperance. I’m told I never really cried as a baby. My mother and sisters all say I just looked around at things and smiled all the time. As a child I learned quickly; I was writing on our Apple II by my third Christmas. The youngest of five (two brothers, two sisters), I spent a lot of time by myself in a world populated by the very real personalities of my stuffed animals and invisible angelic playmates.
But my parents argued, my mother wept, my father yelled and ignored, and after the turbulent experience of jumping from fifth to seventh grade as a particularly naïve nine-year-old, I developed a fake sickness serious enough to require exploratory surgery to prove it was a fiction. I dreamt I saw evil faces at my bedroom window. I started to read the Philip K. Dick novels my oldest sister Lee brought home from college, and from there I went straight to her existentialist philosophers. By the time I was thirteen and moving away to the Academy, I had become a cynical, atheistic spirit.
Yet still even then, ever-present in my heart remained the powerful sense, despite all evidence to the contrary in literature and popular religions and history and the news, that humanity was good, and smart, and divine, but in trouble, but also could be saved, and that somehow, to some extent, this would be up to me.
When I discovered painting and the spirit of the artist (given me by a vitriolic orange-haired artist girl who tore at my heart for a few months at the Indiana Academy), my imagery was all cruciform and bloody. My figures were filled with tubes and gears and microchip-like labyrinthine diagrams, their arms held passionately out at their sides, their feet primly crossed, their heads thrown back in ecstasy. I slept with two books – Valis and The Iliad – side by side under my pillow. In my sketch books, between the poetry and single-line notes-to-self, I began to record my existential pursuits, my logical arguments for and against a God, for and against a self, for and against some Great Purpose. For about a year I was a devout pyrolater, even going so far as to write my very first novel, at the age of fourteen, about a group of far-future scientists finally communicating with fire, which reveals itself to be God, and then they fight some space pirates. The cosmologies were very primitive, but even at that time I weighed them more on awesomeness than on full logical cohesion. Either way, they changed almost monthly.
Through all of it, however, the one thing that did not seem to change was that I knew I was some kind of potential-messiah. That mysterious love of self, which naturally leaks out to all of the selves out there, which is every aware entity – it was a beautiful idea that never seemed to fall out of logic.
It is the logic of my love that brings me to you.
I’ve always known you were there, distantly aware somehow of my presence. I think now that it was you I imagined observing every little superfluous gesture I made when I was alone, watching me like a movie. It was you that all my soliloquies were intended for.
This, all of this, is a gesture of my love for you and, essentially, nothing more.
Of course, we’ve never met, and may never yet, but I feel like I already know you. How you’re made uncomfortable by questions of religion or spirituality because it seems that all the accepted wisdom is simply absurd, and yet beyond its boundaries there appears only to be limbo, and it is misunderstandings or arguments over such subjects that seem to be at the heart of all of Humanity’s troubles. Despite everything, you still secretly believe in certain forms of magic and miracle. It seems like humanity is sick with greed and vengefulness, but everyone you know is pretty much reasonable and good. You feel unprepared for something huge that is about to happen to the human race.
It’s easy to feel like you’re falling if you’re looking back while hurtling forward.
I know that you and I were meant (meant!) to share this mindspace where these words enfold our collective thought. It was imperative, and it was inevitable, the only explanation for it having occurred. The physics of the universe, with all the wisdom of their inertness, have provided us with this moment, right?
We live in a world (and by world I refer only to all that we know of) in which our race is the pinnacle of Nature’s artifice. To the best of our knowledge, we are as smart as it gets. We look through bars and screens at the beasts that surround us in their barbaric wilderness and categorize them into evolutionary hierarchies much like we do our own species internally. How things are now. But rise above time for a moment, gaze down upon it as a whole, and you see life’s slow growth over the planet Earth, the way its forms fluctuate and spread and, ever-so-slowly over the billennia, order and focus themselves. Suddenly, as we approach the invisible wall of the present, a new form of ape spreads like gangrene, strangling the surrounding life under its thin metal scabbing and then the whole thing pauses at this moment.
What we know so far of human history seems like the most epic album imaginable, but really it is just the intro skit.
It is the future. It’s impossible to write contemporarily in any genre other than science fiction anymore. There are people with artificial limbs that they can move with their thoughts. The virtual environments we exist within on the Internet grow everyday less and less distinct from this physical world of ours. Coming soon will be virtual environments experienced straight from the brain. Anyone with the knowledge and the tools will be able to make their own such alternate universe. We are reverse engineering the very technology of existence itself, the interface of awareness. “What little was fiction is becoming reality.” (I believe that’s Chuck Palahniuk.)
As you read these lines, written by me in another time and another location, are our two minds somehow folding space and time to meet here in this dark space behind your eyes, intertwining like lovers in these words? Can you see me through the fog, my meaning, my intent?
We, as humans, can see time from above, just not very far above. Like a lookout in a tower we can see behind us toward the horizons of our own individual births, sometimes even farther with the existential technology of education, stories, ideas – the various versions of what happened before us (History, we call it). We can even see ahead of ourselves – though the lack of a physical memory store in our brains to match our visions of that future against keeps us from ever feeling certain whether we are seeing a real future or just an imagined future, whereas with the past we can imagine a past moment and compare that to our memories of that past to be sure that what we are recalling is the way it actually happened. For whatever reason, we follow our brains’ and bodies’ slow fall forward through the slog of time, riding the log flume of life, looking around, laughing, screaming, getting wet, teeth chattering as we wonder if anyone truly loves us.
You’re born, you slowly wake up over twenty or thirty or seventy years (if at all), and you find yourself standing center stage in some kind of slapstick passion play for which you never received a script but you’re all made-up and costumed and expected to play along with everyone else. You slip away to the bathroom for a moment between dances and whisper into the walls, “What, really, is going on here? What’s all this about?”
But you get no answer. Strangely, among your comrades in this faux-pas maze the question is taboo.
For reasonable, informed citizens of the world at this turn of millennia, religion is long dead. Many still say it was the savior, and that it will return some day, but today there is too much truth that must be ignored in order to ascribe faithfully to any of the organized religions that have existed so far. The human origin of their absurd dogmas is just too transparent. They are simply an old, rotting foundation onto which no one has bothered to build anything modern. For whatever reason, we keep living in these spiritual ruins.
Sometimes it seems to me like everyone around me is thrashing about in this Chinese finger trap (by which I mean modern society), struggling miserably toward some nebulous goal of happiness, complacency, reproduction and death. I don’t understand why so few people seem to be able to relax and partake in beauty, or to see the illogic in all their hang-ups.
I, for my part, live almost every moment of my life, anymore, in something close to nirvana. Though I have the millions of thinkers who have come before me to thank for the foundations of thought on which I am able to base all my ideas, I still am baffled that it would seem so few of them have discovered the simple, fundamentally unified vision of the nature of existence that I have so easily. The clues, the evidence, surround me. It’s almost as if I’ve always known.
I can even sum it up in one word.
Awesomeness.
It can be as much more complex than that as you want it to be, but it is at its core a very simple idea. Awesomeness. Beauty. Love. Really, they’re all sort of the same thing, or rather different corners of the same thing, facets of that vague gratitude for one’s own existence as opposed to resentment of some perceived lack. Fundamentally, though, it’s that magical characteristic shared by everything that is awesome. And I mean awesome, of course, in the colloquial manner (e.g. “Whoa, awesome!” or “Man, that was awesome,” or “That guy is awesome.”). That which in any way moves the viewer to a state of awe. I guess.
I would go so far as to propose that the universe’s tendency to prefer that which is awesome over that which is lame has been the essential guiding force toward this moment, from the creation of the basic laws of physics and atoms and galaxies in the beginning, to life, intelligence, technology and culture. Progress, newness – awesome.
It would seem we have two essential powers in this world. We can choose how we feel about things and what to do with our bodies. We have two essential input tracks – the phenomenal world (sight, sound, touch), and our own Hearts (our inner world of thought and inspiration). Our eyes show us how the World is. Our Hearts show us how it could be. It seems to me that it must be the goal of every being with the ability to reflect thoughtfully and make choices to pursue that which it finds to be most awesome, and to struggle for a more awesome world. But I digress from my point.
It is awesomeness that brings me to you. It is awesomeness that binds our two minds in this moment, where these thoughts of mine, transformed from my world (fictional, to you) into your reality through text, are read aloud in your mind and come to you in your own voice, and our two voices merge, and as soon as you cast your mind’s eye across the realization that we are the same, awesomeness binds it all.
This is why I’m in love with you. Your mind is my milieu. With every word, I grow inside you; very real neural structures are built inside your brain as your neurons design a physical personality matrix for me, Norman Newman.
I believe now that my great messianic purpose has always been to love you.
Can you feel me already inside you, leaning up to look out through your eyes at these words? You see, already we are inextricably linked, as we always have been. Your soul is my womb. You are my miraculous conception.
I promise you, none of this is nonsense. This.
This is an official call for a revolution in your Heart.
Don’t be afraid. As above, so below; and whichever here is, let there only be love. That is how our love will save the Universe. It will reflect in all directions.
These words come to you from the blind-dark sea of the unreal, translated from smoke rings I am creating by burning the last of my karma in a little black bowl.
This is a whisper from beyond the grave, a message sent back in time from a future when Humanity has destroyed itself and/or petered into inertness of spirit, when the last remaining scientists just before the end sent a single quantum of information back through the centuries, the millennia perhaps, and here now you see the fruition of that delicate pricking of space-time’s skin in the form of this work, yours and mine, feedback from the future, a meme, a ghost, your dream, my apotheosis.
One spinward gesture and all distinctions of time and identity have become meaningless under the logic of my love. Here you are, reading, and here I am scraping the edge off a curve of molecule, sculpting a universe that you and those who live in your reality will hopefully never know to have been different from mine.
Were it not for this.
I can no longer recall how it felt not to know how all of this will end.
With a rush of shy trepidation, Norman sends the message. No editing, he thinks to himself, no looking back. He ignores the regret that instantly soaks him. Because really, he doesn’t know if he believes in love anymore; he is uncertain that he will be able to back up his claims. But he believes in himself, and in the truth of beauty, and he has a weird feeling about this.
9.19.2007
Chapter 2: A Beautiful Mystery
FOR IDEAL SYNCHRONIZATION,
PRESS PLAY ON YOUR DEVICE
… NOW.
2
Norman sits on the low stone wall edge of a large, elevated statue of a robed woman with a sword in the middle of Monument Square in Portland, Maine. He is tall, and sits with his legs crossed. His brown hair is shaggy and uncut. He just shaved (though having done so is false advertising, considering he is about to meet a date). A fuming cigarette adorns his long, slender fingers. Beneath his thick-framed black eyeglasses, though superb craftsmanship masks the fact, one of his bright green eyes is also made of glass. He gazes out across the square, his molars silently grinding against each other inside his mouth while he tours the contours of the backs of his crowded front teeth with his tongue (nervous tension vents, near constant). It is night, and there are few pedestrians.
In thinking, Norman thinks, I have just realized that my thoughts are not inherently words. He thinks these words in his mental voice-over-narration style, hearing them in his brain while his mouth is motionless and no actual sound emanates from him. They can be described with words, and often come already wearing words if I’m thinking about how I would say or write the thought, or just thinking voice-over-narration-style as I’m doing right now. But they also occur between words. I move from sentence to sentence, planning the next one in my mind with naked thought while I internally narrate using the current one. He begins to think in such a wordless manner about the very sentences he has just constructed. (He often falls back on such inner cognitive-sandbox absurdities when he is nervous.)
a Beautiful Mystery
“Norman?” the lovely, curly-haired young woman in dark colors who is approaching from around the edge of the monument asks him hesitantly.
Norman stands. “Laura,” he replies with a smile and a rush of nervousness that he quickly attempts to dispel with a single deep breath. His left hand shudders in his coat pocket as he holds his long orange leather coat tight to his slender frame. “It’s lovely to meet you,” he says.
“You too.” They don’t shake, eroticism somehow already the unacknowledged elephant in the scene (at least in Norman’s). She has a disarmingly sexy manner about her. She eyes his cigarette and retrieves one of her own from her black purse. Her shyly smiling eyes are briefly illuminated by her lighter’s flame as she glances to the side to light her cigarette away from the breeze. “Shall we get a table at Shay’s?” she asks, gesturing to some tables scattered at the edge of the square.
It is early September and the night air is that perfect invisible temperature. Norman loosens his gray scarf as they walk quietly side by side, step over a low chain and take two seats across from each other at an umbrella-covered table.
Laura leans back in her chair and exhales smoke, finally really looking at Norman, and he takes the moment to take in her visage as well. She has pale, lucid blue eyes and a mane of curly brown hair. The way her lips kiss her cigarette gives away a luscious sybarite peeking through the fibers of shyness. She wears a tight black velvet coat with big buttons and straps on the shoulders, and a charcoal skirt. On her wrist is the rhinestone cocktail bracelet she told him in her email she would be wearing. She sits very still, looking at him with a curious gravitas.
“How are you?” Norman asks her.
“So, how long have you lived in Cape Elizabeth?” Laura asks at the same time.
Norman begins speaking with his hands, facial expressions and sways of his neck before his words come. “Well, I just moved back out here from South Bend, Indiana about a month ago,” he explains, “but I lived here once before, for a year, about two years ago. I live with my sister Lee, in her basement. Lee and her husband and two kids.” Norman briefly feels a slight chill of shame that he mentally shrugs away.
“How old are her kids?” Laura asks him.
“Ten and twelve, both boys.”
“I see,” she says with a smile. A whorl of smoke dances in front of her face in a whimsical manner that Norman intuitively takes as a good omen.
“So where do you live?” Norman asks. His heart is racing.
“I live right over there,” Laura says, leaning around to point back across the square, “in the Metropolitan.”
“Ah, so this was a perfect meeting place for you. You must have just left your apartment mere minutes ago.”
“Exactly. I’m fresh out of the box,” she smiles.
“Nice.” Norman nods and looks down at his hands. He feels the weight of the things he said in the message that brought them together, a need to address them lest they smother the atmosphere of the evening. But Laura is very pretty, and he is a little nervous. “Things have been strange lately for me,” he says shyly to his hands. “Do things seem to be getting stranger and stranger lately for you?”
“Things are strange all over,” Laura says breathily, and with his gaze cast down at his own hands, Norman quickly regrets having missed getting to see her facial expression. Something about the way she pronounced the words was soft and sexy and he could sense somehow on his skin that she was looking at him when she said it, and that it was spoken through a mouth attempting to keep away a subtle smile. He looks up at her motionless gaze, which still holds that electric sub-surface smile. For whatever reason, Norman feels instantly haunted by the moment he missed, when she said “Things are strange all over,” very sexily while he was not looking at her, and while he looks at her face now, he imagines several different versions of how she may have looked in those moments.
A waiter leans out the door of Shay’s and curtly says, “You can’t smoke at our tables.” Norman and Laura both slowly begin to stand. Looking back inside he continues, “Yeah, if you just want to stand a few feet past the railing – that’ll work. Thanks.” He disappears back inside as Norman and Laura are both still scooting their chairs back under the table.
“That sucks,” Laura grumbles.
“You want to just walk around?” Norman offers, stepping over the small railing that separates the tables from the square.
“Do you want to walk to somewhere where we can have drinks and smoke outside?” Laura suggests. “I would love a drink. I don’t know about you.”
“Right on, yeah. I’m down for whatever.”
The two walk together down a side street, away from the square, toward the Old Port where the sidewalks get busier. Norman actively observes their surroundings, as Portland is still relatively new to him.
“There’s a place I know where we can sit outside at tables and smoke for real this time.”
“Yeah, fuck those guys,” Norman jokes. Laura smiles politely.
A man passes them on the sidewalk and Norman turns his head with a smirk, following the man with his gaze.
“Awesome,” he laughs after a few moments.
Laura looks over at him with an eyebrow raised and an intrigued smile. “What was awesome?”
“Did you not see that awesome guy?”
“No, I missed him.”
“Oh, my god, he had his cowboy hat just far enough back on his head so you could see the front of his mohawk, and he had the greatest look on his face. He was walking…” Norman mimics the man’s silly walk and great expression. “He was great.”
Laura laughs heartily, ending with a cute squeaking chuckle. “He sounds great.” She looks over her shoulder, grinning.
“Yeah, it’s too bad you missed him.”
“There’s kind of a tall, futuristic Buster Keaton-ish-ness to you, isn’t there?” Laura notes, eyeing him with a grin as they walk.
“Hmm,” Norman muses, smiling at what he imagines was a compliment but not entirely sure how to respond. “Thank you.”
“Yes,” she assures him, lightly touching the edge of his sleeve, “it was meant as a compliment.”
They walk a few moments in silence. Norman lightly touches the back of her jacket as they hurry across a crosswalk, intentionally trying to send a minor attraction spell of some psychic sort into her through the brief contact.
When their steps slow again as they reach the curb, Laura puts her hand to her chest and looks up at Norman, who is just beginning to say, “So, I’m developing a religion of awesomeness, sort of,” but he notices that she had been about to speak and trails off with an apologetic nod.
Laura cocks her head to the side with a smile. “You’re developing a religion? Well, you know the meaning of life, so why not, right? Thanks for telling me, by the way. Your theory of awesomeness has been on my mind ever since you messaged me.”
Norman chuckles at himself. “Mm, yeah.” He smiles absent mindedly into the air for a moment, thinking about words. “It’s sort of pulchrolatry, if you will.”
“Oh, I will,” Laura laughs with a cigarette between her teeth, then lights the cigarette. Upon exhale, she adds, “Pulchrology, did you say? Is that the study of beauty?”
Norman nods in recognition of her deciphering, and enunciates clearly, “Pulchrolatry, actually. The worship of beauty. But really that word doesn’t work, anyway, because beauty I think is innate, or might as well be. I mean, the way I see it, nothing is naturally imbued with the quality of beauty or ugliness; it’s all just given to the object by we who judge it, and really, insomuch as everything is a fundamental corner of everything and plays its own unique tiny part, I see no reason not to judge everything beautiful. Awesomeness is really what it’s all about, but I don’t know if there is a Latin word that best captures the colloquial meaning of awesome.”
“Couldn’t the same be said of awesomeness, though? Couldn’t you just judge everything awesome?”
“Well, I guess my personal distinction between the two words is that beauty is that quality that everything shares, that uniqueness, that essentialness, that sort of thing, and then awesomeness is a more subtle quality – a quality that I only give to things that seem particularly awesome, which naturally must be contextual. However, as it turns out, I do still seem to find awesome shit just about everywhere I look. The problem is, there’s also lame shit just about anywhere you want to look. Very fine line at times.”
Laura laughs. “Indeed.”
“Lame being, of course, in my lexicon, the antithesis of awesome.” He chuckles.
“Naturally. You want to grab a table?” They are approaching a corner pub down at the edge of the Old Port with outdoor seating under blue neon.
Norman inspects the tables as Laura wordlessly slips inside the building, which is visibly very busy inside its glass walls. The tables outside are all full except one, which Norman slowly steps toward, smoking his cigarette to the filter. He flicks it into the street and sits down.
A very thin, pretty woman in a black apron steps toward Norman holding a tray of drinks. “Hi,” she says, “can I get you anything?”
“A Jack and Coke, thanks.” Norman lights another cigarette.
“Pepsi alright?” The question is rhetorical, delivered as she is turning away.
Half a cigarette later, Laura returns from inside and sits down across from Norman with a wide, beautiful smile. He can’t help smiling back, and takes in the sight of her for a long moment. Her smile is wide and bright and her neck is long. She has a shy stiltedness to her movements, yet her intrinsic grace glows through in the delicate gestures of her fingers and eyes.
“So tell me about your book,” Laura says, placing a cigarette between her lips. “Hope you don’t mind if I chainsmoke.”
“Not at all. Yeah, the novel. Well, I wrote this novel last year – from December Two-thousand-three to December Two-thousand-four – called Under the Undertow.”
Laura raises an eyebrow and one side of her mouth. “Under the Undertow?”
“My original title was Gigantomachy, which is a term that refers to a battle between gods and giants.”
“Is that what the book is about?”
Norman smiles and considers for a moment. “Not literally, no.”
Laura gestures interest with her face.
“It’s – no, it’s not about giants and gods battling,” he explains, adjusting his position in his seat and gesturing again suddenly with his hands. “It’s about this guy and his daughter who are fleeing status quo society in similar ways at the same time, and they go through these corresponding odysseys and … it’s sort of a philosophical fiction type of thing, if that means anything – although I’m terrified of damning my work for mass appeal by dubbing it such.”
“It does,” Laura assures him. “The philosophical fiction part, at least. Why the title change?”
“That’s a very complicated story,” he half-mumbles. “But so I finished it in December and tried to send it to some various publishers and agents and such, but … I guess I got disheartened by the whole process. So. I’ve got a new novel I’m working on now, but I’ve been ‘working on it’,” (quotation marks Norman’s, made in the air with his fingers) “ever since I finished Gigantomachy and don’t feel like I would be able to explain any of it in any way, yet.”
“By Gigantomachy, do you mean Under the Undertow?” Laura asks with a smile.
Norman nods, “Right. I still interchange the titles sometimes.”
“Does it have a title, this new one?”
The waitress returns to their table with Norman’s drink.
“Thank you.”
“A Diet Coke?” Laura asks the waitress.
“Diet Pepsi?” the waitress interrogatively corrects. Laura nods.
Norman takes a sip of his drink, his eyes low, his body leaning on his left arm. He does not realize how much his height makes him slouch.
“What are your middle and last names?” he asks her.
“I am Laura Elaine Solscz-Pinkerton-Eyre,” she says with a confident smile in her eyes.
Norman squints and half-grins. “Which of those were middle names?”
“Only the second one, Elizabeth,” she replies. “The rest was my last name. It’s doubly hyphenated. My father’s side is Solscz. My mother’s maiden name was Pinkerton-Eyre. So they became the Solscz-Pinkerton-Eyres.”
“Wow. I don’t think I’ve met anyone who was double-hyphenated before.”
Laura laughs, maintaining an enchanting eye contact. After a moment’s pause she leans back in her chair and asks him, “Can I ask you something personal?”
“Sure,” says Norman.
“So, please don’t be offended if I’m mistaken, but – do you have a glass eye?”
Norman smiles to distract from the biting of the inside of his lower lip. He raises his hand to his mouth and nervously touches the pointy edges of his slightly askew front teeth with his thumb. Generally, having to answer questions about his glass eye is among his three most hated social situations, beside having to explain about skipping grades and being asked to explain a piece of his artwork. But he wants to be open with this woman. “Yeah,” he finally says with a nod. “I lost the original organic one when I was fourteen. But this one works just as well.”
“Really, you can see through it?”
“Oh yeah.” He takes a sip of his drink, then lights himself another cigarette. “Darkly,” he adds and shrugs, “but yeah.” He comically winks over the glass eye and instantly regrets it, because he knows winks are creepy.
Laura laughs, reaching across the table to touch her fingertips ever so briefly to his and says, “Oh my god, winks are the creepiest.”
Norman laughs, nodding. “Agreed. I realized that right as I was doing it.”
“Well, anyway, it looks very real.”
“My glass eye? It is real.”
“I mean it looks natural.” She eyes him closely. “It moves, doesn’t it, with your other eye?”
“Often,” Norman nods, sensing her attraction to him powerfully enough to feel comfortable gazing at her for several moments without looking away. Laura keeps her eyes on his as well, and for a while they silently look at each other. Her eyes are striking, beautiful. Her lips curl quixotically in reaction to each tiny change of the expression on his face, itself a translation from his inner world, and Norman is momentarily extremely intrigued by that.
“So I hardly know anything about you so far,” Norman notes, taking a sip of his drink. “I’ve been rambling on about myself.”
Laura leans forward, holding her cigarette away to the side. “I’m a mystery,” she says.
“A beautiful mystery.”
Laura smiles into Norman’s eyes and blushes a little, leaning back again. “You’re sweet,” she says. Though her body is motionless, Norman can subtly sense her writhing in her chair, as if her spirit is swimming in spirit money. He can feel from her vibe how the eye contact they are sharing is intoxicating to her, and why she seems to be letting herself hold that eye contact a little longer each time they share it.
Inwardly, Norman promises himself that the next time he has extended eye contact with Laura he will throw a little psychic lasso across the distance between them and then maybe he will try to send thoughts across like tight-rope walkers, and see if she reacts to them.
“Can I ask you something?” Laura asks him.
“Something other than that, you mean?” Norman jokes.
Laura acknowledges Norman’s joke with two moments of barely visible head shaking, then asks him, “What made you message me?” and looks him in the eye with a charming fragility.
“My own volition,” Norman replies. He looks down at the table between them, not letting his face express anything until he thinks about how to explain himself. “I, um,” he begins, “I’m not entirely sure. I came across your profile. You had that … that kissing-the-camera picture. And under ‘Who I’d Like To Meet’ you wrote, You. I just want to meet you.” Norman smiles to himself, then raises his gaze back up to meet Laura’s. “Well that was me. I didn’t know who you were, but, I wasn’t going to turn you down, you know? You seemed lovely. You seemed literate. And really, I just don’t know anyone here and I wanted to meet somebody cool. You seemed cool. And here I am, having met you slash meeting you, and … you are indeed cool. And lovely.” Laura’s soft laughter settles into a smile and a warm gaze that shyly flits away from time to time but consistently returns to Norman’s eye. “And although it may have sounded absurd and a bit over the top, I want you to know,” and for this bit of dialogue Norman makes sure to put on his most smolderingly restrained, sublimely charming face, “that everything I wrote in that message, I meant.”
Their eye contact is now electric and he remembers suddenly his plan for the thought lasso. “I mean,” he says to stall for a split second while he inwardly prepares the lasso (which is to say, thinks about it until he understands it), then he snaps his eyes onto hers and can’t keep a tiny, quivering bit of smile off the corner of his mouth, “I don’t know you,” and he casts the lasso across the divide, “but I have a strange sense about you; I have ever since I first came across your picture online,” and the lasso lands and is pulled taut – and she seems to come forward a few centimeters, leaning heavier on her arm. Gazing into her eyes, it feels as if he is falling into them. His mind is suddenly overwhelmed by an image of a grassy, hilly area and blue sky, and he says intuitively, before understanding why, “It’s like I knew you once when we were both cavemen.”
Laura’s eyes light up at the word cavemen. She sits up straight and recoils her neck a bit; she seems startled or intrigued.
“I’m being obtuse, I’m sorry,” Norman apologizes instinctively.
“No, it’s just – you’re going to think this is weird.” Her shyness has returned to the forefront within her body’s inner politics. She holds her cigarette close to her chest. “I had a dream last night about being a cavewoman, and you were there, and you were a caveman.”
“I know exactly what you’re talking about,” Norman exaggerates.
“Yeah…” The thumb of the hand Laura is smoking with idly spins a silver ring on her long ring finger. Norman’s eyes move down from her eyes to that ring.
He rubs his thumb against the same spot on his own ring finger. “I used to have a ring, this bat ring. Ring with a little … bat on it.” He mimes a bat over his right hand with his left. Laura smiles at the image. “I kept my familiar in there.” He grins inwardly, and after a few moments it escapes to his face as well.
“Your familiar?” Laura asks incredulously.
“Yeah, you know.” Norman chuckles to himself, always feeling self-conscious at first when he speaks to someone new about such things. “I experiment with the, sort of, interface of existence and what you can really do to your experience with your mind, and creating, like, spiritual pseudopods, and for a few months last year, over these past few years really, I spent a few thoughts every day on trying to build this,” he mimes with his hands in front of him, as if holding an invisible puppy, “this sort of spiritual pseudopod, this familiar entity. That I could, you know, maybe do things with or, maybe, like, communicate remotely with, even maybe on different planes or whatever. You know, who knows? It was an experiment. But I kept it in my bat ring. In my imagination I did, that is.” He shrugs. “And then I think I left that in Indiana when I moved. It’s not here; I didn’t bring it. I don’t know what happened to it.”
“Oh, that’s awful,” Laura coos with a smile. “You lost your familiar’s house.” Norman can’t tell if she is being sincere or mocking in her tone.
“Yes,” Norman agrees, sipping at his drink, “yes it is very sad. But really, what I think we all want to hear about for a while is you, because I still know nothing about you. Only that you’re a mystery.”
Their eyes meet, both coming in at the same moment and not expecting to find the other’s. Each starts to look away but sees the other starting to do the same and instead remains, and they do this jerking eye dance of almost looking away several times within the course of a moment, then both laugh at what they’ve just shared and fall into a comfortable eye contact.
Laura rests her chin on her knuckles, giving her smile a curious shape. “Who are you?” she asks him. “You’ve just come out of nowhere.”
“I’m Norman Newman,” he says carefully. He struggles to make his face express the genuineness behind his words without looking ridiculous as he adds, “And I am in love with you.” He holds his idiom with confidence and grace (knowing that it requires playing a part, but also that, after stripping away every layer of illusion, being anything is merely pretending).
Laura looks at him silently for a while. “You don’t even know me,” she finally says with an appropriately dramatic flourish to her cigarette smoking that indicates to Norman that she is accepting the casually epic character he is giving to these moments.
“That’s why I’m here,” he replies. “But all we’ve done so far is talk about me.”
She looks at him for a while longer, an intrigued smile barely kept off her lips. He sits trying to think of a good question that won’t sound trite while distracted by her loveliness.
“What’s your new book about?” she finally asks him.
“It’s about all this, actually,” Norman replies, indicating the scene they are sharing. “My great spiritual hero epic.”
“So will it be a memoir, or, like, fictionalization?”
“Both. To be honest, after my first novel became self aware I can’t seem to write anything that doesn’t end up twisting in on itself in a cyclone of meta, so I’ve given up fighting it, really. Anymore, I write a character and it seems the first thing he or she does is look up at me and go, ‘Wait, who are you? What’s going on? How did I get here? You can’t write me; what do you know?’”
Laura laughs.
Norman shrugs. “It’s silly.”
“It is silly, but it’s cool. It’s very interesting. It makes me think about my own life, and if I might just be some fictional character in a book somewhere, or just a fleeting thought in someone else’s mind.”
“Or your own, exactly,” Norman says with a smile, overjoyed that he is successfully communicating his ideas (it isn’t always so easy, nor he so eloquent – indeed, Norman cannot deny that the potency of communication, the web of synchronicities and the ease of existential motion within the scene he is sharing tonight with this woman all have the distinct metallic scent of destiny). He continues, “Because, really, these are issues which are becoming relatively pertinent as the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ has to be given to things in our actual lives that we actually interact with – like the virtual environments on the internet and ideas of machine intelligence and our own imaginative musings and things like that. But how can you interact with something unreal? That makes no sense. I think everything can be said to be real as much as anything else; it’s just not all necessarily within view, you know, or of the same nature. Like, for instance, my friend Lou recently told me that Sony has patented the technology to simulate sensory experience in the brain using wireless ultrasound. If that ends up being the way we interact with our computers – just a visual display in our actual vision, and simulated touch, sound and sight in our brains, simulated emotions – then how is a simulated experience less real than a non-simulated experience, if both are just what you get from your brain, what you perceive, you know what I mean?”
“I think so,” Laura nods, frowning.
Norman touches his tongue momentarily to his left-upper wisdom tooth, and feels a hole in the side. He wonders about that for a moment, then shakes it out of his mind and says, “So even if you are a fictional entity in some book or movie-version-of-a-book or simsense-version-of-a-movie-version-of-a-book-that-is-based-on-reality or whatever, it makes no difference. You’re just you, wherever you are, here in this story, whatever it ends up being about. You see the world, you make your choices, you think about stuff, and that’s all you can do. But you get the unimaginable power to create yourself any way you want to be, to play the role of you however you see fit. But then again at the same time you’re also just this one thing, just this human or whatever you happen to be, this specific person. I don’t know. So I want my novel to begin with this whole revelation – the insignificance of the label of reality, the revelation that everything exists, that there is nothing that doesn’t exist, and that the engine of existence is choice and interaction – and then build from there and see where we can take our ideas. And of course, all of this is played off the fact that the fictionalized usses in the book would actually be fictional, and yet would exist in the Reader’s mind, as the Reader’s mental voice, making a connection there too…” He trails off, unable to tell if he is boring her or badly editing his thoughts.
“Interesting,” Laura says, nodding.
“Anyway.” Norman scratches an itch on his face.
“Did you just pluralize a plural? Is that what ‘usses’ was?”
“I did, and it was,” he grins.
“It’ll never sell,” Laura jokes. She waits a few moments before she adds, “You know what does sell?” just before Norman is about to ask her what she writes (her online profile vaguely mentioned it). Her gaze becomes like a thick beam of intoxicating sexiness.
“What?” he asks, dropping the aborted question from his mind in the light of her eyes.
“Romance,” she says with a sexy grin, then looks down at her cigarette. “Will there be any of that?”
He sees, for a split second in his mind’s eye, her naked body writhing so close to him that it is out of focus, hears in his mind’s ear her mellifluously moaning voice, and the warm confidence that they will soon be lovers fills his heart. Some barely-noticeable bit of data in the vision has the scent of genuine prophecy, of a different mnemonic character than fleeting fantasy, and this is something he has learned to notice and to trust.
“Oh of course,” Norman replies playfully, “it will be the most erotic novel ever written if I can come even close to accurately capturing the neverendingly blissful experience of fully, fearlessly being a living being (which, in my experience, is constantly arousing).” He laughs slightly with the hope of indicating his comment’s intended comedic nature, somewhat charmingly attempts to suppress the grin inside and glances for just a moment at Laura’s blue eyes. “But seriously, yeah, it’ll have to have an element of romance,” Norman continues, gradually feeling more comfortable and cool with his vision of her intimate flesh now in his mental inventory. “I mean, it’s the story. It’s this story. I try to make sure that nothing I do is lacking in romance. I don’t want a world without love.” He grins to himself, as he is secretly referencing a lyric from a song he wrote a few years earlier, from his first album, The World’s Original Man. “Even when I’m alone, I’m constantly charming and seducing myself. I mean, the book is really about love. Love of the world, love of self, love of that great metaphorical macro-entity I call the Reader – which refers to, potentially, all of future humanity, the unity of all those potential individual minds who could ever read the book based on these moments, or the meta-book that I don’t even write, but that is our experience and that somehow every other human being has subconscious access to through the zeitgeist. I’m using metaphors, of course, but there’s science to it, too. Even if just biologically, we have a certain genetic access to all the successes and failures, experiments and follies of our ancestors, from the beginning of … life, really. And, of course, the search for something like true love in the classic sense of it.”
Through the course of their conversation, Laura’s shyness has shed itself to reveal a woman with an enormous, gorgeous spirit that shines magnificently through every subtle mannerism, every glance of her eyes and curl of her lips. His intuitive vision of the two of them as cavepeople has remained with him through their conversation, and at this point he feels comfortable enough with her to calmly take her by the hand and lead her to bed. He wonders how she feels.
Laura is shaking her head, holding back a smile. “You are something else,” she says.
Norman smiles. “I still hardly know anything about you.”
“You can see through that glass eye, can’t you?” Laura asks him playfully.
“I don’t see how that would be possible.”
“I don’t see that stopping you.” She scans him with her eyes, holding back a charmed smile. The waitress passes by, having just dropped off a neighboring table’s drinks, and Laura stops her with a glance. “Excuse me, can I get that Diet Coke, please?”
“Oh yes, sorry, ma’am,” the waitress apologizes. Just before she disappears inside, she turns back around and reiterates, “Diet Pepsi okay?”
Laura nods politely in the woman’s direction.
“I feel preternaturally comfortable with you,” Norman remarks, stubbing out his cigarette. “I feel like we’ve been lovers before.” He moves his eyes up to her from the ashtray. “Forgive my forwardness. I don’t know. I feel like I’ve known you before.”
Laura bites her bottom lip, her eyes fixed on him.
Norman holds his fingers up to his lips as if holding a joint. “Do you smoke weed?”
Laura raises both eyebrows slowly and nods. “Why do you ask?”
“Well, I’ve got some, and I would love to continue this conversation while smoking it if you would be interested.”
The look on Laura’s face belies the debate going on in her head. She takes a recess from having to reply by retrieving and then lighting a new cigarette. It is a long moment, during which Norman feels the overwhelming presence of the uncertainty of her response, despite his intuitive confidence, until she exhales her first drag, looks into his glass eye and says, “Do you want to go to my apartment?”
“Sure,” Norman agrees with a biological rush of glee.
He stands and puts a ten dollar bill on the table. Hands in his long coat pockets, he extends an elbow for Laura to take in her hand as she stands. She picks up her purse and they walk off together back the way they came from Monument Square.
For a while they walk in silence, both introspecting over the suddenness of it all. Norman wonders what she is thinking, and feels briefly as if he can sense her thoughts on him. Other city dwellers pass them on the sidewalk, some silent and alone, staring forward, consumed by their own stories, some coupled, talking quietly to each other.
At a street corner where they have to wait for the light to change, a man pulls up in front of them in a car, yawning softly to himself (just barely audible to Norman and Laura through his open window) as he slowly turns right down a sidestreet. Something about the moment the moment makes them both laugh intermittently, like call and response, each continuing to laugh at the other’s continued laughter as they cross the street and continue walking.
Laura looks up at Norman; he can see her in his peripheral vision as he gazes ahead. “Where did you come from?” she asks him rhetorically.
He laughs and looks over at her, meeting her charmed gaze. He slows his walk, bringing them to a stop in front of a large window that glows yellow from the open dance studio inside. A tango class is in session. They both notice it at the same time. She takes his hand.
A silver-haired gentleman in a navy pea coat passes them and pauses just long enough to comment, “You two ought to be dancing. You would look good together,” then continues on.
Laura smiles to the man, who continues along away from them. She looks up at Norman, who has just noticed that she is holding his hand. It is as if natural forces of gravity and magnetism pull their faces together for a kiss. Laura’s lips take his hungrily into their midst and caress them softly, modestly shuddering but confident. The closeness of their two faces seems to create a tiny baby universe, a milieu where the only physical forces are thought and love, within which he is certain he can feel her thoughts (they are focused on the kiss and feathered with awe). He puts his free hand under her coat and the shirt beneath it, finding the warm, soft skin of her stomach. Her fingers flex, squeezing his knuckles together. Her tongue touches his teeth.
“Mmm,” Laura purrs, smiling as she pulls away, all beautiful blue eyes.
“Tell me about your book,” Norman requests. The two slowly begin walking again toward her building. “You’re writing one, right?”
“Well,” she says, softly holding his arm with both hands and looking up at the buildings of downtown Portland, “it’s a mystery, and it, too, is kind of half-memoir, half-fiction.”
“Isn’t everything?”
Laura smiles. “Perhaps,” she muses. “But, so, my protagonist is obviously fashioned after me, and she has to solve a mystery of some sort. But I haven’t figured out what the mystery is yet.”
“I guess that’s the mystery,” Norman jokes.
“My idea is that she is this fabulous, independently wealthy young woman who loves mysteries and wants more than anything to be a great sleuth, but she doesn’t know where to begin. So she puts out an add for a Watson and ends up hiring this kind of nerdy young guy who just takes the job to have a job, you know? And he gradually falls in love with her, even though she’s kind of crazy – eccentric, though, really, is all – and he invents mysteries to solve with her, sort of. That’s the idea so far, anyway.”
“That’s wonderful,” Norman laughs. “I totally dig that. Have you begun it?”
“Perhaps,” she smiles with almost arbitrary mystery. Laura stops and Norman stops a few paces ahead, turning around to face her and taking the moment to pull out a cigarette. “What on Earth?” she laughs.
He looks where she’s looking, which is inside the small shop they were passing – a tiny one-room record store in which a small crowd is gathered, sitting on the floor around a frantic man in an enormous tinfoil fish costume who is dancing/flailing while making some cacophonous kind of music by manipulating two turntables with his long, fin-like tinfoil arm extensions. Only his face and legs stick out of his costume. He turns away from the decks for a moment to gesture wildly with his fins in the air, then turns back and makes another series of grating, scratching sounds on the turntables with his dangly limbs. He dances about like a cartoon witch doctor.
“Awesome!” Norman declares exuberantly. He is astounded by the bizarre, staggeringly wonderful sight. “Word,” he can’t help but add as he and Laura stand closer together and both peer into the window at the performance.
“What is that he’s wearing?” Laura asks, laughing.
A plainly pretty girl with short black hair and dark eyes who is sitting among the crowd inside the record store catches Norman’s eye through the window, and though she looks away when his eye meets hers, she soon looks back at him and smiles when she finds his gaze still on her. They watch each other across the crowd and through the glass.
“I think he’s supposed to be a big fish,” Norman says without removing his eye from the girl. “See the fish eyes above his face, up on his hat?” Somehow in this girl’s glance he can see the universality of love, and he is reminded of the fact that there are millions of individual lovely girls with different stories, different things on their walls, different issues left over from childhood, each a unique potential love affair with its own taste of beauty and truth. And yet here he stands with this woman he has known for an hour or less, whom he has already kissed with passion, for whom he has already professed a sort of preemptive love. All love is true, he thinks, almost saying it aloud. “See, it’s a fish, I think,” he says, if only to keep himself from saying anything else. The girl inside glances at Laura, makes a cutely disapproving face at Norman with her eyes low and then returns her attention to the performance.
“He looks like an Aztec god or a Doctor Who alien,” Laura laughs.
“He’s the most badass person I have ever seen,” Norman declares. “Rarely do I find myself so moved by performance art, honestly, but this guy fucking rules. Look at him; he’s so manic and insane and … and, like, drenched in meaninglessness that becomes so over-the-top it almost becomes meaningful in this weird, beautiful anti-way.”
Norman and Laura continue their walk to her building as Norman continues to talk, gesturing with his hands. “See, shit like that just happening in some random tiny record store is the kind of shit that makes me believe that the Revolution could really happen, that this renaissance that I feel coming truly could be happening, maybe even already, honestly, in the dark corners of our society in towns like Portland, Maine, where no one will realize it was going on, and just how awesome it was, potentially for decades. Mm. It excites me. I love that guy. Sorry for rambling on there …”
“No, it’s cool,” Laura assures him, tugging on the sleeve of his jacket. “Just what kind of revolution are we talking about, here, though, I must ask?”
“Oh, you know about the Revolution,” Norman assures her with a little laugh, touching his knuckles to her arm for a moment. “It’s the one that supposedly will not be televised, which I think is partially untrue although it has probably already begun and I’m sure the news networks won’t catch on for some time.”
“So is this, like, that hipster revolution into a world where it’s like Burning Man all the time, everyone’s cool and we all just get along by sheer grooviness?”
Norman laughs for a long time at Laura’s description, but once he can form words again he agrees, “Yeah, exactly. That’s the one I’m talking about. You really described it perfectly, honestly. Because it is all about awesomeness. Nice Burning Man reference.”
“And you’re the prophet of this future religion of awesomeness,” Laura says, smiling. “I’m putting it all together.”
“Right on,” Norman laughs. He marvels inwardly at how perfectly this evening has turned out, and how uncanny their connection seems.
Laura stops and turns as they approach the doors of the Metropolitan, a high stone building among others along a block, across wide Congress Street from the huge Key Bank building at the east edge of Monument Square. “We’ll have to finish our cigarettes before we can go in. We can smoke in my apartment, but not on the way up.”
A small old woman slowly shuffles past between them, not even seeming to notice their presence. Norman and Laura step apart to make room for her, watching her pass with polite smiles.
“Cool, cool,” Norman replies, standing with his hands in his coat pockets, his cigarette held in his lips. He takes this moment once more to take in Laura’s visage. She stands smoking, watching him out of the corner of her eye as she softly sways back and forth. He finds himself amazed that his first encounter with this woman has led him here. He feels confident in this moment that Laura will end up wanting to have sex with him, and though there would be no more ideal end to his evening, he does not want to give her the wrong impression. He wants to see her again, and often. He senses, somehow, cosmic significance thrumming between them like a battery. Though he still knows hardly anything about her, he finds her mesmerizing, and for some reason he finds he can talk freely about his ideas, most of which he normally feels the need to withhold from anyone but his best friend Lou.
“Okay, I have a proposition,” Norman says, gathering courage up from the air like his heart is a magnet that he can turn on at will. “It is that you and I go up to your apartment and smoke some weed, smoke some cigarettes, continue to talk about cool shit and get to know each other, and then that we do not have sex, despite the fact that I think both of us maybe want to – we don’t even think about it yet – because I have been thinking about your comment about romance novels, how they’re what sells, and about sort of the nature of true love and why it is that romance novels sell, what it is that they represent, and it made me …”
“I will make you no promises,” Laura laughs softly, interrupting him as she tosses her cigarette to the side. She takes hold of the collar of his coat and kisses him on the lips, then walks with him, holding his coat, into the Metropolitan.
Through the course of their slow walk across the small, echoey vestibule to the elevator, Norman takes a moment to thank, in his mind, any being or force other than himself that might have had a hand in this evening’s sequence of events. Laura goes in front of him, walking stiff and primly while occasionally looking back at Norman to reveal the oceans of eager passion that come out only through her eyes and the sex-kitten smile that she successfully, if barely, is keeping off her lips.
When the elevator opens, she enters and turns to face him, to press for the third floor. Her eyes meet his as he approaches. She pushes the button and backs up slowly to the far wall while he moves close to her. The door closes behind him as they kiss, and the kiss holds for the short but generous eternity that it takes to get to the third floor. In that minute Norman feels desperately in love with this woman, and his kiss expresses that. Hers pushes back with equal passion, such that when the doors open on the third floor and Norman finally steps back away from her, her lips hungrily, instinctually pursue his as they retreat, then she clasps her fingertips to her mouth and closes her eyes, standing perfectly still as Norman backs toward the open elevator doors.
“Are you alright?” he asks.
Her eyes flash open to instant gleaming gorgeousness, expressing that she is just fine. She removes her hand to reveal a wild smile, the kind not found in captivity. She raises her chin a bit as she strides out past him, to the right, toward her door, unlocks it and goes right in, leaving it open.
Norman slowly approaches the door, his hands in his coat pockets, relishing how much he enjoys being involved in what seems to be the beginning of a new phase of his life, meeting this new woman (a potential new love, he already feels), seeing this new apartment where he can already tell he will be spending a great deal of time. He can smell the newness of everything. It has been some time since his personal milieu has felt fresh, innocent.
Laura’s apartment is at the corner of the building, consisting of one long main room with the door at one end and two big windows at the other, the room separated into two spaces by a square wooden arch that hugs the walls and ceiling in the middle. Along the left wall are first a closet, then a bathroom door, then an open doorway into the tiny kitchen, then another closet, a huge flatscreen TV and then the bedroom door. Along the right wall in the entry area are a pair of wide, ceiling-height bookshelves full of books, with a couple of large leather couches perpendicular to the wall, facing each other, in the space by the windows. The walls are covered with modern paintings and framed covers of old mystery novels. The hardwood floor is bare by the windows, and in the entry room covered by an ornate blood-and-cream Persian rug. Norman doffs his coat and drops it on top of Laura’s on a small antique chair to the right of the door.
He closes the door behind himself. “So, I don’t know about you,” he says toward the kitchen, into which she has momentarily disappeared, “but I would love to have a smoke. I have a little pipe of my own that I brought.” He scans the books on the wall of bookshelves, taking note that she is a collector (two long shelves dedicated to full catalogs of the works of Erle Stanley Gardener and P. G. Wodehouse), and also that she has a taste for the absurd (Joyce, Camus, Kafka, Beckett, Robbins [all, of course, staples of the libraries of his generation’s intelligentsia]). “Through the Looking Glass,” he whispers to himself when he sees said spine.
“We can use my pipe, if you want,” Laura says, peeking out through the doorway to the kitchen, “and we can smoke my weed. Do you want a drink? I don’t have much other than Diet Coke, unfortunately.”
“No thanks; I’m good. You have the same edition of Ulysses as I do. What is this painting above your desk here – the circles?”
“Ulysses is probably my all-around favorite book.” Laura finishes pouring herself a glass of Diet Coke and sets it down on the flat arm of one of the leather couches. “Oh, the circle painting? That was done by my friend Amos Doorie. He gave it to me. Have a seat. I’ll go gather my illicit materials.” She disappears into the bedroom for a moment while Norman sits and admires a huge crystal ashtray that sits on top of a small, modern wooden table between the couches. He retrieves a cigarette from his pack.
Laura returns with a large, purple glass Sherlock Holmes pipe and a small tin. She is also wearing a fur-collared brown button-up sweater which she must have put on in the bedroom.
“Nice sweater,” Norman comments. “I love your fuzzy mane.”
“Thank you,” Laura says as she sits down next to him on the couch and crosses her legs with a smile in his direction. She touches the collar of her sweater, and when she does it pushes it to the side, revealing a little gold whale on a necklace she is wearing.
“Did you just put that on?” he asks, reaching out instinctively to touch the whale where it hovers above her supersternal notch. “I love him.”
“No, I just put him on,” she says. “You like him?”
“We’re quick friends, he and I,” Norman nods, smiling, and lights his cigarette, entranced by the whale, certain now that all of this was somehow meant to unfold as it has. He thinks of Horselover Fat in the Philip K. Dick novel Valis opening his front door to a woman with a fish necklace and his world splitting apart (a fictionalization of a real event that happen to Dick).
“Could you light me one of those, cowboy?” she asks with a flutter of her eyelashes.
“You can have this one, cowgirl,” Norman says, taking a drag and then handing the cigarette to her as he exhales off to the side. He wonders if she is conscious of the Pulp Fiction reference they just collaborated on performing as he lights himself another.
Laura watches him while she smokes, the wicked grin inside her heart steadily escaping to her face more and more with each moment they share. She pushes a large bud of weed into the pipe and hands it to Norman.
“Thank you, darling.” Norman admires the pipe for a moment, then holds his lighter to its bowl and takes a large hit. He holds the smoke in his lungs as Laura takes the pipe and does the same, their eyes fixed on each other as if there is a taut thread between their pupils. White smoke trickles from Norman’s nose and then he begins to cough, releasing a large cloud into the air around them. When he has finally finished coughing, he finds the pipe in his hands again, Laura smiling, letting the smoke curl around her lips. She laughs at the end of the breath, casting an unexpected ring of smoke across the breach between them. Both Laura and Norman are startled by the perfect manner in which the smoke ring appears and sways and then dissipates, as if it was CG. Norman smokes again, then hands the pipe back to Laura.
“That was gorgeous,” she says. “It was magical.” She starts to laugh, her smile enormous and glowing. She has her feet curled up under her legs, leaning back away from Norman against the wall and the arm of the couch.
Norman turns his body to face her, sitting cross-legged. “It was,” he agrees with a chuckle. “It was almost cartoonish. It was so perfect and bizarre and unexpected. You know, that’s really a good description for everything in my life – fuck, in the whole world, right now. Cartoonish and absurd but sort of beautiful and funny in a tragic, macabre, magical Henry Miller kind of way. It all makes sense, really.”
Laura shakes her head. “None of it makes any sense,” she says with a cute smirk.
Norman smiles at her, nodding slowly, thinking. “It doesn’t really, you’re right,” he agrees. “Everything in the universe has a causal relationship with something else, and yet somehow it makes no sense at all. It is completely absurd and random. Like, this? Of all things? Of all possible ways things could be, ways that human beings could have arranged events, this? Fucking, Kurt Vonnegut and the massacres in Rwanda and Pepsi and Bang Bus and Bettie Davis and Paul Wolfowitz and Burning Man and Michael Jackson? If it weren’t in the encyclopedias I wouldn’t believe a shred of it.”
As she inhales from the pipe while he is speaking, Laura’s restrained laughter builds until she has one arm up over her face, slouching to the side and pressing herself against the back of the couch, quaking with laughter and coughing smoke. Norman puts a hand to her ribs. “You alright?” Laura removes her arm from her face and nods to him, smiling, sighing. Even in such a position she looks gorgeous.
As Norman begins to feel the effects of the weed he has smoked filling his veins with lightness and swirling his thoughts about in his brain, his messianic confidence begins to glow anew, as it always does so crisply in these first moments of getting high. He feels as if his spirit expands out past his body and his awareness of the myriad ways he can use that spirit fade back into his arsenal. Like he remembers why he’s here, almost. He knows from past experience that this feeling of his is also somehow intuitively visible to others on some subtle level, and that he is at his most socially potent and charismatic when he is feeling this way. It is something he can achieve at any point simply through faith in his own awesomeness, but weed lubricates the journey.
“This is my favorite part of getting stoned,” Norman says softly, letting his eyes smile unselfconsciously at Laura. “Just as it’s beginning to hit, when all you want to do is talk and listen to music and – you know, when everything is sort of heightened. Everything has more information in it, and the wheels in your mind are spinning smoothly and you can almost just … almost just see behind things.” Norman gestures with his hand in the air as if he is moving something to the side, to see behind it. “It’s as if in this state I really become aware of all my various parts, of all the extra shit I can do with my will, like my magical powers become available.”
“You know, the way your message read, I wondered if you’d be a real person or what,” Laura admits, shaking her head with a sublime smile of disbelief. “I’m a little shocked I replied to it at all, honestly. It’s fairly uncharacteristic of me. I could hardly believe that you might actually just be someone this beautiful. But I had a feeling it might be possible.”
“What a wonderful compliment. I’m flattered.”
“I think somehow you knew all this would happen.”
“I really didn’t know anything,” Norman says, though to himself in his mind he has to admit that he did, in fact, have a strong intuition that something like this could happen tonight with this woman he randomly messaged online, despite the apparent unlikelihood of it.
There is a brief pause in the conversation. Norman looks around Laura’s apartment, admiring the artwork on her walls.
“So, Norman,” Laura says through a smile and a sexy sway of her neck, “how is all of this going to end?”
Norman thinks for a moment, knowing he needs to respond with eloquence in some manner. When he can’t come up with any good words, he leans in and attempts an eloquent kiss. Where their two mouths press together, as their tongues touch softly in just the right sequence, he can almost see a tiny doorway opening up, like a wormhole in the middle of Laura’s apartment, with bright pinkish-white light beaming from the edges, and with all of his willpower, not even knowing what is on the other side, he struggles to fold up his entire reality and push it through that doorway, into the pink light beyond, believing it to be the light of pure/true love.
When he finds himself standing in what appears to be an Americanized Olympian temple, surrounded by massive gray Doric columns, Norman is stoned enough not to recognize at first that anything might be amiss. (Also, the small corner of him that does suspect the full reality of these surroundings finds them awesome enough not to sound the alarm right away.)
Surrounded by various angelic servants in bejeweled suits, the Man, that universal modern white male asshole who wants nothing more than his barcode on the inside of all our orifices, sits upon His opulent throne a mere dozen paces in front of Norman.
“Who is this, now?” the Man asks His shimmering yes-men collectively.
“He just came right in, sir,” a seraphic Suit behind Norman apologizes to its master. “We didn’t even see him coming.”
Norman grins broadly at the sight of it all and proclaims with hesitant joy (despite his nefarious company), “I believe I may have just enlightened in a kiss.”
“Rubbish,” the Man scoffs, “you’ve just blacked out again. Your body is down in the World, shaking like jello.”
“Who are you supposed to be?” Norman asks the Man. “What’s all this? Where are we having this discussion?”
“In your dying brain.”
Norman declares confidently and with a touch of smug pride in his own awesomeness, “I call bullshit.”
The Man leans forward in His throne and looks hard into Norman’s empty right eye. “Norman, pay very close attention. There’s no freedom from eternity. Your sentence will never be over. You are a fourth-dimensional event. You are a naturally-occurring phenomenon in a mortal universe, now. You are one blood cell of something that will die. I’m sorry if you think that you’re anything more. But you’ll have to get back in line.”
“I know you’re fallible and don’t know what you’re talking about. In fact, I know more than you do. That’s somehow intuitively clear to me.” Norman stands confidently and crosses his arms. Somewhere in the periphery of his awareness, Norman senses a thumbs-up.
“Brush this plant back into its hole,” the Man says with a sweep of His hand.
“What an asshole,” Norman exclaims, looking to one of the angelic servants for support but getting only vapid stoicism. He looks back to the Man. “You wouldn’t be communicating with me if I was just some plant to you. I demand that you recognize my equality!” Norman begins gesticulating wildly with his hands like a street rapper. “I can comprehend you and the complexity of this milieu, and I know that you’re just a small part of it all. Don’t try to break me against my own uncertainty. I am an enlightened human being, motherfucker; I know exactly what I’m seeing. Fuck your bullshit fearmongering, bitch. You’re just trying to make the World into Hell so you can have something to rule over. Fuck you! Bring your bullshit to bear against the forces of badass beauty and love and see where it gets you! You have no power that we don’t give you.”
Norman returns to his body like a sack being pulled over his head and then out of the resulting darkness slowly fading the light of Laura’s apartment. His brain awakens first, aware gradually that his body is slumped back and to the side, quaking seizure-like. As usual when returning to the world (be it waking from dreams or returning from trance), Norman feels the melancholy of the world overwhelm him, but the first image that fades back into his view is Laura’s sweetly concerned face, and his heart is instantly warmed again by her beauty and the compassion in her eyes. She softly strokes his shoulder, her other arm around the back of his neck, her lovely blue eyes watching his with concern. “Norman?” she asks hesitantly. “Are you okay?”
Through his body’s spasms he is able to lean his gaze over to meet hers and attempt a smile, though her facial response reflects the gruesome look his attempted smile must have achieved. It is after a few brief moments of this that he is finally able to speak.
“Forgive me, my dear,” his quaking voice says through the tremors, “I seem to be tripping out.”
PRESS PLAY ON YOUR DEVICE
… NOW.
2
Norman sits on the low stone wall edge of a large, elevated statue of a robed woman with a sword in the middle of Monument Square in Portland, Maine. He is tall, and sits with his legs crossed. His brown hair is shaggy and uncut. He just shaved (though having done so is false advertising, considering he is about to meet a date). A fuming cigarette adorns his long, slender fingers. Beneath his thick-framed black eyeglasses, though superb craftsmanship masks the fact, one of his bright green eyes is also made of glass. He gazes out across the square, his molars silently grinding against each other inside his mouth while he tours the contours of the backs of his crowded front teeth with his tongue (nervous tension vents, near constant). It is night, and there are few pedestrians.
In thinking, Norman thinks, I have just realized that my thoughts are not inherently words. He thinks these words in his mental voice-over-narration style, hearing them in his brain while his mouth is motionless and no actual sound emanates from him. They can be described with words, and often come already wearing words if I’m thinking about how I would say or write the thought, or just thinking voice-over-narration-style as I’m doing right now. But they also occur between words. I move from sentence to sentence, planning the next one in my mind with naked thought while I internally narrate using the current one. He begins to think in such a wordless manner about the very sentences he has just constructed. (He often falls back on such inner cognitive-sandbox absurdities when he is nervous.)
a Beautiful Mystery
“Norman?” the lovely, curly-haired young woman in dark colors who is approaching from around the edge of the monument asks him hesitantly.
Norman stands. “Laura,” he replies with a smile and a rush of nervousness that he quickly attempts to dispel with a single deep breath. His left hand shudders in his coat pocket as he holds his long orange leather coat tight to his slender frame. “It’s lovely to meet you,” he says.
“You too.” They don’t shake, eroticism somehow already the unacknowledged elephant in the scene (at least in Norman’s). She has a disarmingly sexy manner about her. She eyes his cigarette and retrieves one of her own from her black purse. Her shyly smiling eyes are briefly illuminated by her lighter’s flame as she glances to the side to light her cigarette away from the breeze. “Shall we get a table at Shay’s?” she asks, gesturing to some tables scattered at the edge of the square.
It is early September and the night air is that perfect invisible temperature. Norman loosens his gray scarf as they walk quietly side by side, step over a low chain and take two seats across from each other at an umbrella-covered table.
Laura leans back in her chair and exhales smoke, finally really looking at Norman, and he takes the moment to take in her visage as well. She has pale, lucid blue eyes and a mane of curly brown hair. The way her lips kiss her cigarette gives away a luscious sybarite peeking through the fibers of shyness. She wears a tight black velvet coat with big buttons and straps on the shoulders, and a charcoal skirt. On her wrist is the rhinestone cocktail bracelet she told him in her email she would be wearing. She sits very still, looking at him with a curious gravitas.
“How are you?” Norman asks her.
“So, how long have you lived in Cape Elizabeth?” Laura asks at the same time.
Norman begins speaking with his hands, facial expressions and sways of his neck before his words come. “Well, I just moved back out here from South Bend, Indiana about a month ago,” he explains, “but I lived here once before, for a year, about two years ago. I live with my sister Lee, in her basement. Lee and her husband and two kids.” Norman briefly feels a slight chill of shame that he mentally shrugs away.
“How old are her kids?” Laura asks him.
“Ten and twelve, both boys.”
“I see,” she says with a smile. A whorl of smoke dances in front of her face in a whimsical manner that Norman intuitively takes as a good omen.
“So where do you live?” Norman asks. His heart is racing.
“I live right over there,” Laura says, leaning around to point back across the square, “in the Metropolitan.”
“Ah, so this was a perfect meeting place for you. You must have just left your apartment mere minutes ago.”
“Exactly. I’m fresh out of the box,” she smiles.
“Nice.” Norman nods and looks down at his hands. He feels the weight of the things he said in the message that brought them together, a need to address them lest they smother the atmosphere of the evening. But Laura is very pretty, and he is a little nervous. “Things have been strange lately for me,” he says shyly to his hands. “Do things seem to be getting stranger and stranger lately for you?”
“Things are strange all over,” Laura says breathily, and with his gaze cast down at his own hands, Norman quickly regrets having missed getting to see her facial expression. Something about the way she pronounced the words was soft and sexy and he could sense somehow on his skin that she was looking at him when she said it, and that it was spoken through a mouth attempting to keep away a subtle smile. He looks up at her motionless gaze, which still holds that electric sub-surface smile. For whatever reason, Norman feels instantly haunted by the moment he missed, when she said “Things are strange all over,” very sexily while he was not looking at her, and while he looks at her face now, he imagines several different versions of how she may have looked in those moments.
A waiter leans out the door of Shay’s and curtly says, “You can’t smoke at our tables.” Norman and Laura both slowly begin to stand. Looking back inside he continues, “Yeah, if you just want to stand a few feet past the railing – that’ll work. Thanks.” He disappears back inside as Norman and Laura are both still scooting their chairs back under the table.
“That sucks,” Laura grumbles.
“You want to just walk around?” Norman offers, stepping over the small railing that separates the tables from the square.
“Do you want to walk to somewhere where we can have drinks and smoke outside?” Laura suggests. “I would love a drink. I don’t know about you.”
“Right on, yeah. I’m down for whatever.”
The two walk together down a side street, away from the square, toward the Old Port where the sidewalks get busier. Norman actively observes their surroundings, as Portland is still relatively new to him.
“There’s a place I know where we can sit outside at tables and smoke for real this time.”
“Yeah, fuck those guys,” Norman jokes. Laura smiles politely.
A man passes them on the sidewalk and Norman turns his head with a smirk, following the man with his gaze.
“Awesome,” he laughs after a few moments.
Laura looks over at him with an eyebrow raised and an intrigued smile. “What was awesome?”
“Did you not see that awesome guy?”
“No, I missed him.”
“Oh, my god, he had his cowboy hat just far enough back on his head so you could see the front of his mohawk, and he had the greatest look on his face. He was walking…” Norman mimics the man’s silly walk and great expression. “He was great.”
Laura laughs heartily, ending with a cute squeaking chuckle. “He sounds great.” She looks over her shoulder, grinning.
“Yeah, it’s too bad you missed him.”
“There’s kind of a tall, futuristic Buster Keaton-ish-ness to you, isn’t there?” Laura notes, eyeing him with a grin as they walk.
“Hmm,” Norman muses, smiling at what he imagines was a compliment but not entirely sure how to respond. “Thank you.”
“Yes,” she assures him, lightly touching the edge of his sleeve, “it was meant as a compliment.”
They walk a few moments in silence. Norman lightly touches the back of her jacket as they hurry across a crosswalk, intentionally trying to send a minor attraction spell of some psychic sort into her through the brief contact.
When their steps slow again as they reach the curb, Laura puts her hand to her chest and looks up at Norman, who is just beginning to say, “So, I’m developing a religion of awesomeness, sort of,” but he notices that she had been about to speak and trails off with an apologetic nod.
Laura cocks her head to the side with a smile. “You’re developing a religion? Well, you know the meaning of life, so why not, right? Thanks for telling me, by the way. Your theory of awesomeness has been on my mind ever since you messaged me.”
Norman chuckles at himself. “Mm, yeah.” He smiles absent mindedly into the air for a moment, thinking about words. “It’s sort of pulchrolatry, if you will.”
“Oh, I will,” Laura laughs with a cigarette between her teeth, then lights the cigarette. Upon exhale, she adds, “Pulchrology, did you say? Is that the study of beauty?”
Norman nods in recognition of her deciphering, and enunciates clearly, “Pulchrolatry, actually. The worship of beauty. But really that word doesn’t work, anyway, because beauty I think is innate, or might as well be. I mean, the way I see it, nothing is naturally imbued with the quality of beauty or ugliness; it’s all just given to the object by we who judge it, and really, insomuch as everything is a fundamental corner of everything and plays its own unique tiny part, I see no reason not to judge everything beautiful. Awesomeness is really what it’s all about, but I don’t know if there is a Latin word that best captures the colloquial meaning of awesome.”
“Couldn’t the same be said of awesomeness, though? Couldn’t you just judge everything awesome?”
“Well, I guess my personal distinction between the two words is that beauty is that quality that everything shares, that uniqueness, that essentialness, that sort of thing, and then awesomeness is a more subtle quality – a quality that I only give to things that seem particularly awesome, which naturally must be contextual. However, as it turns out, I do still seem to find awesome shit just about everywhere I look. The problem is, there’s also lame shit just about anywhere you want to look. Very fine line at times.”
Laura laughs. “Indeed.”
“Lame being, of course, in my lexicon, the antithesis of awesome.” He chuckles.
“Naturally. You want to grab a table?” They are approaching a corner pub down at the edge of the Old Port with outdoor seating under blue neon.
Norman inspects the tables as Laura wordlessly slips inside the building, which is visibly very busy inside its glass walls. The tables outside are all full except one, which Norman slowly steps toward, smoking his cigarette to the filter. He flicks it into the street and sits down.
A very thin, pretty woman in a black apron steps toward Norman holding a tray of drinks. “Hi,” she says, “can I get you anything?”
“A Jack and Coke, thanks.” Norman lights another cigarette.
“Pepsi alright?” The question is rhetorical, delivered as she is turning away.
Half a cigarette later, Laura returns from inside and sits down across from Norman with a wide, beautiful smile. He can’t help smiling back, and takes in the sight of her for a long moment. Her smile is wide and bright and her neck is long. She has a shy stiltedness to her movements, yet her intrinsic grace glows through in the delicate gestures of her fingers and eyes.
“So tell me about your book,” Laura says, placing a cigarette between her lips. “Hope you don’t mind if I chainsmoke.”
“Not at all. Yeah, the novel. Well, I wrote this novel last year – from December Two-thousand-three to December Two-thousand-four – called Under the Undertow.”
Laura raises an eyebrow and one side of her mouth. “Under the Undertow?”
“My original title was Gigantomachy, which is a term that refers to a battle between gods and giants.”
“Is that what the book is about?”
Norman smiles and considers for a moment. “Not literally, no.”
Laura gestures interest with her face.
“It’s – no, it’s not about giants and gods battling,” he explains, adjusting his position in his seat and gesturing again suddenly with his hands. “It’s about this guy and his daughter who are fleeing status quo society in similar ways at the same time, and they go through these corresponding odysseys and … it’s sort of a philosophical fiction type of thing, if that means anything – although I’m terrified of damning my work for mass appeal by dubbing it such.”
“It does,” Laura assures him. “The philosophical fiction part, at least. Why the title change?”
“That’s a very complicated story,” he half-mumbles. “But so I finished it in December and tried to send it to some various publishers and agents and such, but … I guess I got disheartened by the whole process. So. I’ve got a new novel I’m working on now, but I’ve been ‘working on it’,” (quotation marks Norman’s, made in the air with his fingers) “ever since I finished Gigantomachy and don’t feel like I would be able to explain any of it in any way, yet.”
“By Gigantomachy, do you mean Under the Undertow?” Laura asks with a smile.
Norman nods, “Right. I still interchange the titles sometimes.”
“Does it have a title, this new one?”
The waitress returns to their table with Norman’s drink.
“Thank you.”
“A Diet Coke?” Laura asks the waitress.
“Diet Pepsi?” the waitress interrogatively corrects. Laura nods.
Norman takes a sip of his drink, his eyes low, his body leaning on his left arm. He does not realize how much his height makes him slouch.
“What are your middle and last names?” he asks her.
“I am Laura Elaine Solscz-Pinkerton-Eyre,” she says with a confident smile in her eyes.
Norman squints and half-grins. “Which of those were middle names?”
“Only the second one, Elizabeth,” she replies. “The rest was my last name. It’s doubly hyphenated. My father’s side is Solscz. My mother’s maiden name was Pinkerton-Eyre. So they became the Solscz-Pinkerton-Eyres.”
“Wow. I don’t think I’ve met anyone who was double-hyphenated before.”
Laura laughs, maintaining an enchanting eye contact. After a moment’s pause she leans back in her chair and asks him, “Can I ask you something personal?”
“Sure,” says Norman.
“So, please don’t be offended if I’m mistaken, but – do you have a glass eye?”
Norman smiles to distract from the biting of the inside of his lower lip. He raises his hand to his mouth and nervously touches the pointy edges of his slightly askew front teeth with his thumb. Generally, having to answer questions about his glass eye is among his three most hated social situations, beside having to explain about skipping grades and being asked to explain a piece of his artwork. But he wants to be open with this woman. “Yeah,” he finally says with a nod. “I lost the original organic one when I was fourteen. But this one works just as well.”
“Really, you can see through it?”
“Oh yeah.” He takes a sip of his drink, then lights himself another cigarette. “Darkly,” he adds and shrugs, “but yeah.” He comically winks over the glass eye and instantly regrets it, because he knows winks are creepy.
Laura laughs, reaching across the table to touch her fingertips ever so briefly to his and says, “Oh my god, winks are the creepiest.”
Norman laughs, nodding. “Agreed. I realized that right as I was doing it.”
“Well, anyway, it looks very real.”
“My glass eye? It is real.”
“I mean it looks natural.” She eyes him closely. “It moves, doesn’t it, with your other eye?”
“Often,” Norman nods, sensing her attraction to him powerfully enough to feel comfortable gazing at her for several moments without looking away. Laura keeps her eyes on his as well, and for a while they silently look at each other. Her eyes are striking, beautiful. Her lips curl quixotically in reaction to each tiny change of the expression on his face, itself a translation from his inner world, and Norman is momentarily extremely intrigued by that.
“So I hardly know anything about you so far,” Norman notes, taking a sip of his drink. “I’ve been rambling on about myself.”
Laura leans forward, holding her cigarette away to the side. “I’m a mystery,” she says.
“A beautiful mystery.”
Laura smiles into Norman’s eyes and blushes a little, leaning back again. “You’re sweet,” she says. Though her body is motionless, Norman can subtly sense her writhing in her chair, as if her spirit is swimming in spirit money. He can feel from her vibe how the eye contact they are sharing is intoxicating to her, and why she seems to be letting herself hold that eye contact a little longer each time they share it.
Inwardly, Norman promises himself that the next time he has extended eye contact with Laura he will throw a little psychic lasso across the distance between them and then maybe he will try to send thoughts across like tight-rope walkers, and see if she reacts to them.
“Can I ask you something?” Laura asks him.
“Something other than that, you mean?” Norman jokes.
Laura acknowledges Norman’s joke with two moments of barely visible head shaking, then asks him, “What made you message me?” and looks him in the eye with a charming fragility.
“My own volition,” Norman replies. He looks down at the table between them, not letting his face express anything until he thinks about how to explain himself. “I, um,” he begins, “I’m not entirely sure. I came across your profile. You had that … that kissing-the-camera picture. And under ‘Who I’d Like To Meet’ you wrote, You. I just want to meet you.” Norman smiles to himself, then raises his gaze back up to meet Laura’s. “Well that was me. I didn’t know who you were, but, I wasn’t going to turn you down, you know? You seemed lovely. You seemed literate. And really, I just don’t know anyone here and I wanted to meet somebody cool. You seemed cool. And here I am, having met you slash meeting you, and … you are indeed cool. And lovely.” Laura’s soft laughter settles into a smile and a warm gaze that shyly flits away from time to time but consistently returns to Norman’s eye. “And although it may have sounded absurd and a bit over the top, I want you to know,” and for this bit of dialogue Norman makes sure to put on his most smolderingly restrained, sublimely charming face, “that everything I wrote in that message, I meant.”
Their eye contact is now electric and he remembers suddenly his plan for the thought lasso. “I mean,” he says to stall for a split second while he inwardly prepares the lasso (which is to say, thinks about it until he understands it), then he snaps his eyes onto hers and can’t keep a tiny, quivering bit of smile off the corner of his mouth, “I don’t know you,” and he casts the lasso across the divide, “but I have a strange sense about you; I have ever since I first came across your picture online,” and the lasso lands and is pulled taut – and she seems to come forward a few centimeters, leaning heavier on her arm. Gazing into her eyes, it feels as if he is falling into them. His mind is suddenly overwhelmed by an image of a grassy, hilly area and blue sky, and he says intuitively, before understanding why, “It’s like I knew you once when we were both cavemen.”
Laura’s eyes light up at the word cavemen. She sits up straight and recoils her neck a bit; she seems startled or intrigued.
“I’m being obtuse, I’m sorry,” Norman apologizes instinctively.
“No, it’s just – you’re going to think this is weird.” Her shyness has returned to the forefront within her body’s inner politics. She holds her cigarette close to her chest. “I had a dream last night about being a cavewoman, and you were there, and you were a caveman.”
“I know exactly what you’re talking about,” Norman exaggerates.
“Yeah…” The thumb of the hand Laura is smoking with idly spins a silver ring on her long ring finger. Norman’s eyes move down from her eyes to that ring.
He rubs his thumb against the same spot on his own ring finger. “I used to have a ring, this bat ring. Ring with a little … bat on it.” He mimes a bat over his right hand with his left. Laura smiles at the image. “I kept my familiar in there.” He grins inwardly, and after a few moments it escapes to his face as well.
“Your familiar?” Laura asks incredulously.
“Yeah, you know.” Norman chuckles to himself, always feeling self-conscious at first when he speaks to someone new about such things. “I experiment with the, sort of, interface of existence and what you can really do to your experience with your mind, and creating, like, spiritual pseudopods, and for a few months last year, over these past few years really, I spent a few thoughts every day on trying to build this,” he mimes with his hands in front of him, as if holding an invisible puppy, “this sort of spiritual pseudopod, this familiar entity. That I could, you know, maybe do things with or, maybe, like, communicate remotely with, even maybe on different planes or whatever. You know, who knows? It was an experiment. But I kept it in my bat ring. In my imagination I did, that is.” He shrugs. “And then I think I left that in Indiana when I moved. It’s not here; I didn’t bring it. I don’t know what happened to it.”
“Oh, that’s awful,” Laura coos with a smile. “You lost your familiar’s house.” Norman can’t tell if she is being sincere or mocking in her tone.
“Yes,” Norman agrees, sipping at his drink, “yes it is very sad. But really, what I think we all want to hear about for a while is you, because I still know nothing about you. Only that you’re a mystery.”
Their eyes meet, both coming in at the same moment and not expecting to find the other’s. Each starts to look away but sees the other starting to do the same and instead remains, and they do this jerking eye dance of almost looking away several times within the course of a moment, then both laugh at what they’ve just shared and fall into a comfortable eye contact.
Laura rests her chin on her knuckles, giving her smile a curious shape. “Who are you?” she asks him. “You’ve just come out of nowhere.”
“I’m Norman Newman,” he says carefully. He struggles to make his face express the genuineness behind his words without looking ridiculous as he adds, “And I am in love with you.” He holds his idiom with confidence and grace (knowing that it requires playing a part, but also that, after stripping away every layer of illusion, being anything is merely pretending).
Laura looks at him silently for a while. “You don’t even know me,” she finally says with an appropriately dramatic flourish to her cigarette smoking that indicates to Norman that she is accepting the casually epic character he is giving to these moments.
“That’s why I’m here,” he replies. “But all we’ve done so far is talk about me.”
She looks at him for a while longer, an intrigued smile barely kept off her lips. He sits trying to think of a good question that won’t sound trite while distracted by her loveliness.
“What’s your new book about?” she finally asks him.
“It’s about all this, actually,” Norman replies, indicating the scene they are sharing. “My great spiritual hero epic.”
“So will it be a memoir, or, like, fictionalization?”
“Both. To be honest, after my first novel became self aware I can’t seem to write anything that doesn’t end up twisting in on itself in a cyclone of meta, so I’ve given up fighting it, really. Anymore, I write a character and it seems the first thing he or she does is look up at me and go, ‘Wait, who are you? What’s going on? How did I get here? You can’t write me; what do you know?’”
Laura laughs.
Norman shrugs. “It’s silly.”
“It is silly, but it’s cool. It’s very interesting. It makes me think about my own life, and if I might just be some fictional character in a book somewhere, or just a fleeting thought in someone else’s mind.”
“Or your own, exactly,” Norman says with a smile, overjoyed that he is successfully communicating his ideas (it isn’t always so easy, nor he so eloquent – indeed, Norman cannot deny that the potency of communication, the web of synchronicities and the ease of existential motion within the scene he is sharing tonight with this woman all have the distinct metallic scent of destiny). He continues, “Because, really, these are issues which are becoming relatively pertinent as the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ has to be given to things in our actual lives that we actually interact with – like the virtual environments on the internet and ideas of machine intelligence and our own imaginative musings and things like that. But how can you interact with something unreal? That makes no sense. I think everything can be said to be real as much as anything else; it’s just not all necessarily within view, you know, or of the same nature. Like, for instance, my friend Lou recently told me that Sony has patented the technology to simulate sensory experience in the brain using wireless ultrasound. If that ends up being the way we interact with our computers – just a visual display in our actual vision, and simulated touch, sound and sight in our brains, simulated emotions – then how is a simulated experience less real than a non-simulated experience, if both are just what you get from your brain, what you perceive, you know what I mean?”
“I think so,” Laura nods, frowning.
Norman touches his tongue momentarily to his left-upper wisdom tooth, and feels a hole in the side. He wonders about that for a moment, then shakes it out of his mind and says, “So even if you are a fictional entity in some book or movie-version-of-a-book or simsense-version-of-a-movie-version-of-a-book-that-is-based-on-reality or whatever, it makes no difference. You’re just you, wherever you are, here in this story, whatever it ends up being about. You see the world, you make your choices, you think about stuff, and that’s all you can do. But you get the unimaginable power to create yourself any way you want to be, to play the role of you however you see fit. But then again at the same time you’re also just this one thing, just this human or whatever you happen to be, this specific person. I don’t know. So I want my novel to begin with this whole revelation – the insignificance of the label of reality, the revelation that everything exists, that there is nothing that doesn’t exist, and that the engine of existence is choice and interaction – and then build from there and see where we can take our ideas. And of course, all of this is played off the fact that the fictionalized usses in the book would actually be fictional, and yet would exist in the Reader’s mind, as the Reader’s mental voice, making a connection there too…” He trails off, unable to tell if he is boring her or badly editing his thoughts.
“Interesting,” Laura says, nodding.
“Anyway.” Norman scratches an itch on his face.
“Did you just pluralize a plural? Is that what ‘usses’ was?”
“I did, and it was,” he grins.
“It’ll never sell,” Laura jokes. She waits a few moments before she adds, “You know what does sell?” just before Norman is about to ask her what she writes (her online profile vaguely mentioned it). Her gaze becomes like a thick beam of intoxicating sexiness.
“What?” he asks, dropping the aborted question from his mind in the light of her eyes.
“Romance,” she says with a sexy grin, then looks down at her cigarette. “Will there be any of that?”
He sees, for a split second in his mind’s eye, her naked body writhing so close to him that it is out of focus, hears in his mind’s ear her mellifluously moaning voice, and the warm confidence that they will soon be lovers fills his heart. Some barely-noticeable bit of data in the vision has the scent of genuine prophecy, of a different mnemonic character than fleeting fantasy, and this is something he has learned to notice and to trust.
“Oh of course,” Norman replies playfully, “it will be the most erotic novel ever written if I can come even close to accurately capturing the neverendingly blissful experience of fully, fearlessly being a living being (which, in my experience, is constantly arousing).” He laughs slightly with the hope of indicating his comment’s intended comedic nature, somewhat charmingly attempts to suppress the grin inside and glances for just a moment at Laura’s blue eyes. “But seriously, yeah, it’ll have to have an element of romance,” Norman continues, gradually feeling more comfortable and cool with his vision of her intimate flesh now in his mental inventory. “I mean, it’s the story. It’s this story. I try to make sure that nothing I do is lacking in romance. I don’t want a world without love.” He grins to himself, as he is secretly referencing a lyric from a song he wrote a few years earlier, from his first album, The World’s Original Man. “Even when I’m alone, I’m constantly charming and seducing myself. I mean, the book is really about love. Love of the world, love of self, love of that great metaphorical macro-entity I call the Reader – which refers to, potentially, all of future humanity, the unity of all those potential individual minds who could ever read the book based on these moments, or the meta-book that I don’t even write, but that is our experience and that somehow every other human being has subconscious access to through the zeitgeist. I’m using metaphors, of course, but there’s science to it, too. Even if just biologically, we have a certain genetic access to all the successes and failures, experiments and follies of our ancestors, from the beginning of … life, really. And, of course, the search for something like true love in the classic sense of it.”
Through the course of their conversation, Laura’s shyness has shed itself to reveal a woman with an enormous, gorgeous spirit that shines magnificently through every subtle mannerism, every glance of her eyes and curl of her lips. His intuitive vision of the two of them as cavepeople has remained with him through their conversation, and at this point he feels comfortable enough with her to calmly take her by the hand and lead her to bed. He wonders how she feels.
Laura is shaking her head, holding back a smile. “You are something else,” she says.
Norman smiles. “I still hardly know anything about you.”
“You can see through that glass eye, can’t you?” Laura asks him playfully.
“I don’t see how that would be possible.”
“I don’t see that stopping you.” She scans him with her eyes, holding back a charmed smile. The waitress passes by, having just dropped off a neighboring table’s drinks, and Laura stops her with a glance. “Excuse me, can I get that Diet Coke, please?”
“Oh yes, sorry, ma’am,” the waitress apologizes. Just before she disappears inside, she turns back around and reiterates, “Diet Pepsi okay?”
Laura nods politely in the woman’s direction.
“I feel preternaturally comfortable with you,” Norman remarks, stubbing out his cigarette. “I feel like we’ve been lovers before.” He moves his eyes up to her from the ashtray. “Forgive my forwardness. I don’t know. I feel like I’ve known you before.”
Laura bites her bottom lip, her eyes fixed on him.
Norman holds his fingers up to his lips as if holding a joint. “Do you smoke weed?”
Laura raises both eyebrows slowly and nods. “Why do you ask?”
“Well, I’ve got some, and I would love to continue this conversation while smoking it if you would be interested.”
The look on Laura’s face belies the debate going on in her head. She takes a recess from having to reply by retrieving and then lighting a new cigarette. It is a long moment, during which Norman feels the overwhelming presence of the uncertainty of her response, despite his intuitive confidence, until she exhales her first drag, looks into his glass eye and says, “Do you want to go to my apartment?”
“Sure,” Norman agrees with a biological rush of glee.
He stands and puts a ten dollar bill on the table. Hands in his long coat pockets, he extends an elbow for Laura to take in her hand as she stands. She picks up her purse and they walk off together back the way they came from Monument Square.
For a while they walk in silence, both introspecting over the suddenness of it all. Norman wonders what she is thinking, and feels briefly as if he can sense her thoughts on him. Other city dwellers pass them on the sidewalk, some silent and alone, staring forward, consumed by their own stories, some coupled, talking quietly to each other.
At a street corner where they have to wait for the light to change, a man pulls up in front of them in a car, yawning softly to himself (just barely audible to Norman and Laura through his open window) as he slowly turns right down a sidestreet. Something about the moment the moment makes them both laugh intermittently, like call and response, each continuing to laugh at the other’s continued laughter as they cross the street and continue walking.
Laura looks up at Norman; he can see her in his peripheral vision as he gazes ahead. “Where did you come from?” she asks him rhetorically.
He laughs and looks over at her, meeting her charmed gaze. He slows his walk, bringing them to a stop in front of a large window that glows yellow from the open dance studio inside. A tango class is in session. They both notice it at the same time. She takes his hand.
A silver-haired gentleman in a navy pea coat passes them and pauses just long enough to comment, “You two ought to be dancing. You would look good together,” then continues on.
Laura smiles to the man, who continues along away from them. She looks up at Norman, who has just noticed that she is holding his hand. It is as if natural forces of gravity and magnetism pull their faces together for a kiss. Laura’s lips take his hungrily into their midst and caress them softly, modestly shuddering but confident. The closeness of their two faces seems to create a tiny baby universe, a milieu where the only physical forces are thought and love, within which he is certain he can feel her thoughts (they are focused on the kiss and feathered with awe). He puts his free hand under her coat and the shirt beneath it, finding the warm, soft skin of her stomach. Her fingers flex, squeezing his knuckles together. Her tongue touches his teeth.
“Mmm,” Laura purrs, smiling as she pulls away, all beautiful blue eyes.
“Tell me about your book,” Norman requests. The two slowly begin walking again toward her building. “You’re writing one, right?”
“Well,” she says, softly holding his arm with both hands and looking up at the buildings of downtown Portland, “it’s a mystery, and it, too, is kind of half-memoir, half-fiction.”
“Isn’t everything?”
Laura smiles. “Perhaps,” she muses. “But, so, my protagonist is obviously fashioned after me, and she has to solve a mystery of some sort. But I haven’t figured out what the mystery is yet.”
“I guess that’s the mystery,” Norman jokes.
“My idea is that she is this fabulous, independently wealthy young woman who loves mysteries and wants more than anything to be a great sleuth, but she doesn’t know where to begin. So she puts out an add for a Watson and ends up hiring this kind of nerdy young guy who just takes the job to have a job, you know? And he gradually falls in love with her, even though she’s kind of crazy – eccentric, though, really, is all – and he invents mysteries to solve with her, sort of. That’s the idea so far, anyway.”
“That’s wonderful,” Norman laughs. “I totally dig that. Have you begun it?”
“Perhaps,” she smiles with almost arbitrary mystery. Laura stops and Norman stops a few paces ahead, turning around to face her and taking the moment to pull out a cigarette. “What on Earth?” she laughs.
He looks where she’s looking, which is inside the small shop they were passing – a tiny one-room record store in which a small crowd is gathered, sitting on the floor around a frantic man in an enormous tinfoil fish costume who is dancing/flailing while making some cacophonous kind of music by manipulating two turntables with his long, fin-like tinfoil arm extensions. Only his face and legs stick out of his costume. He turns away from the decks for a moment to gesture wildly with his fins in the air, then turns back and makes another series of grating, scratching sounds on the turntables with his dangly limbs. He dances about like a cartoon witch doctor.
“Awesome!” Norman declares exuberantly. He is astounded by the bizarre, staggeringly wonderful sight. “Word,” he can’t help but add as he and Laura stand closer together and both peer into the window at the performance.
“What is that he’s wearing?” Laura asks, laughing.
A plainly pretty girl with short black hair and dark eyes who is sitting among the crowd inside the record store catches Norman’s eye through the window, and though she looks away when his eye meets hers, she soon looks back at him and smiles when she finds his gaze still on her. They watch each other across the crowd and through the glass.
“I think he’s supposed to be a big fish,” Norman says without removing his eye from the girl. “See the fish eyes above his face, up on his hat?” Somehow in this girl’s glance he can see the universality of love, and he is reminded of the fact that there are millions of individual lovely girls with different stories, different things on their walls, different issues left over from childhood, each a unique potential love affair with its own taste of beauty and truth. And yet here he stands with this woman he has known for an hour or less, whom he has already kissed with passion, for whom he has already professed a sort of preemptive love. All love is true, he thinks, almost saying it aloud. “See, it’s a fish, I think,” he says, if only to keep himself from saying anything else. The girl inside glances at Laura, makes a cutely disapproving face at Norman with her eyes low and then returns her attention to the performance.
“He looks like an Aztec god or a Doctor Who alien,” Laura laughs.
“He’s the most badass person I have ever seen,” Norman declares. “Rarely do I find myself so moved by performance art, honestly, but this guy fucking rules. Look at him; he’s so manic and insane and … and, like, drenched in meaninglessness that becomes so over-the-top it almost becomes meaningful in this weird, beautiful anti-way.”
Norman and Laura continue their walk to her building as Norman continues to talk, gesturing with his hands. “See, shit like that just happening in some random tiny record store is the kind of shit that makes me believe that the Revolution could really happen, that this renaissance that I feel coming truly could be happening, maybe even already, honestly, in the dark corners of our society in towns like Portland, Maine, where no one will realize it was going on, and just how awesome it was, potentially for decades. Mm. It excites me. I love that guy. Sorry for rambling on there …”
“No, it’s cool,” Laura assures him, tugging on the sleeve of his jacket. “Just what kind of revolution are we talking about, here, though, I must ask?”
“Oh, you know about the Revolution,” Norman assures her with a little laugh, touching his knuckles to her arm for a moment. “It’s the one that supposedly will not be televised, which I think is partially untrue although it has probably already begun and I’m sure the news networks won’t catch on for some time.”
“So is this, like, that hipster revolution into a world where it’s like Burning Man all the time, everyone’s cool and we all just get along by sheer grooviness?”
Norman laughs for a long time at Laura’s description, but once he can form words again he agrees, “Yeah, exactly. That’s the one I’m talking about. You really described it perfectly, honestly. Because it is all about awesomeness. Nice Burning Man reference.”
“And you’re the prophet of this future religion of awesomeness,” Laura says, smiling. “I’m putting it all together.”
“Right on,” Norman laughs. He marvels inwardly at how perfectly this evening has turned out, and how uncanny their connection seems.
Laura stops and turns as they approach the doors of the Metropolitan, a high stone building among others along a block, across wide Congress Street from the huge Key Bank building at the east edge of Monument Square. “We’ll have to finish our cigarettes before we can go in. We can smoke in my apartment, but not on the way up.”
A small old woman slowly shuffles past between them, not even seeming to notice their presence. Norman and Laura step apart to make room for her, watching her pass with polite smiles.
“Cool, cool,” Norman replies, standing with his hands in his coat pockets, his cigarette held in his lips. He takes this moment once more to take in Laura’s visage. She stands smoking, watching him out of the corner of her eye as she softly sways back and forth. He finds himself amazed that his first encounter with this woman has led him here. He feels confident in this moment that Laura will end up wanting to have sex with him, and though there would be no more ideal end to his evening, he does not want to give her the wrong impression. He wants to see her again, and often. He senses, somehow, cosmic significance thrumming between them like a battery. Though he still knows hardly anything about her, he finds her mesmerizing, and for some reason he finds he can talk freely about his ideas, most of which he normally feels the need to withhold from anyone but his best friend Lou.
“Okay, I have a proposition,” Norman says, gathering courage up from the air like his heart is a magnet that he can turn on at will. “It is that you and I go up to your apartment and smoke some weed, smoke some cigarettes, continue to talk about cool shit and get to know each other, and then that we do not have sex, despite the fact that I think both of us maybe want to – we don’t even think about it yet – because I have been thinking about your comment about romance novels, how they’re what sells, and about sort of the nature of true love and why it is that romance novels sell, what it is that they represent, and it made me …”
“I will make you no promises,” Laura laughs softly, interrupting him as she tosses her cigarette to the side. She takes hold of the collar of his coat and kisses him on the lips, then walks with him, holding his coat, into the Metropolitan.
Through the course of their slow walk across the small, echoey vestibule to the elevator, Norman takes a moment to thank, in his mind, any being or force other than himself that might have had a hand in this evening’s sequence of events. Laura goes in front of him, walking stiff and primly while occasionally looking back at Norman to reveal the oceans of eager passion that come out only through her eyes and the sex-kitten smile that she successfully, if barely, is keeping off her lips.
When the elevator opens, she enters and turns to face him, to press for the third floor. Her eyes meet his as he approaches. She pushes the button and backs up slowly to the far wall while he moves close to her. The door closes behind him as they kiss, and the kiss holds for the short but generous eternity that it takes to get to the third floor. In that minute Norman feels desperately in love with this woman, and his kiss expresses that. Hers pushes back with equal passion, such that when the doors open on the third floor and Norman finally steps back away from her, her lips hungrily, instinctually pursue his as they retreat, then she clasps her fingertips to her mouth and closes her eyes, standing perfectly still as Norman backs toward the open elevator doors.
“Are you alright?” he asks.
Her eyes flash open to instant gleaming gorgeousness, expressing that she is just fine. She removes her hand to reveal a wild smile, the kind not found in captivity. She raises her chin a bit as she strides out past him, to the right, toward her door, unlocks it and goes right in, leaving it open.
Norman slowly approaches the door, his hands in his coat pockets, relishing how much he enjoys being involved in what seems to be the beginning of a new phase of his life, meeting this new woman (a potential new love, he already feels), seeing this new apartment where he can already tell he will be spending a great deal of time. He can smell the newness of everything. It has been some time since his personal milieu has felt fresh, innocent.
Laura’s apartment is at the corner of the building, consisting of one long main room with the door at one end and two big windows at the other, the room separated into two spaces by a square wooden arch that hugs the walls and ceiling in the middle. Along the left wall are first a closet, then a bathroom door, then an open doorway into the tiny kitchen, then another closet, a huge flatscreen TV and then the bedroom door. Along the right wall in the entry area are a pair of wide, ceiling-height bookshelves full of books, with a couple of large leather couches perpendicular to the wall, facing each other, in the space by the windows. The walls are covered with modern paintings and framed covers of old mystery novels. The hardwood floor is bare by the windows, and in the entry room covered by an ornate blood-and-cream Persian rug. Norman doffs his coat and drops it on top of Laura’s on a small antique chair to the right of the door.
He closes the door behind himself. “So, I don’t know about you,” he says toward the kitchen, into which she has momentarily disappeared, “but I would love to have a smoke. I have a little pipe of my own that I brought.” He scans the books on the wall of bookshelves, taking note that she is a collector (two long shelves dedicated to full catalogs of the works of Erle Stanley Gardener and P. G. Wodehouse), and also that she has a taste for the absurd (Joyce, Camus, Kafka, Beckett, Robbins [all, of course, staples of the libraries of his generation’s intelligentsia]). “Through the Looking Glass,” he whispers to himself when he sees said spine.
“We can use my pipe, if you want,” Laura says, peeking out through the doorway to the kitchen, “and we can smoke my weed. Do you want a drink? I don’t have much other than Diet Coke, unfortunately.”
“No thanks; I’m good. You have the same edition of Ulysses as I do. What is this painting above your desk here – the circles?”
“Ulysses is probably my all-around favorite book.” Laura finishes pouring herself a glass of Diet Coke and sets it down on the flat arm of one of the leather couches. “Oh, the circle painting? That was done by my friend Amos Doorie. He gave it to me. Have a seat. I’ll go gather my illicit materials.” She disappears into the bedroom for a moment while Norman sits and admires a huge crystal ashtray that sits on top of a small, modern wooden table between the couches. He retrieves a cigarette from his pack.
Laura returns with a large, purple glass Sherlock Holmes pipe and a small tin. She is also wearing a fur-collared brown button-up sweater which she must have put on in the bedroom.
“Nice sweater,” Norman comments. “I love your fuzzy mane.”
“Thank you,” Laura says as she sits down next to him on the couch and crosses her legs with a smile in his direction. She touches the collar of her sweater, and when she does it pushes it to the side, revealing a little gold whale on a necklace she is wearing.
“Did you just put that on?” he asks, reaching out instinctively to touch the whale where it hovers above her supersternal notch. “I love him.”
“No, I just put him on,” she says. “You like him?”
“We’re quick friends, he and I,” Norman nods, smiling, and lights his cigarette, entranced by the whale, certain now that all of this was somehow meant to unfold as it has. He thinks of Horselover Fat in the Philip K. Dick novel Valis opening his front door to a woman with a fish necklace and his world splitting apart (a fictionalization of a real event that happen to Dick).
“Could you light me one of those, cowboy?” she asks with a flutter of her eyelashes.
“You can have this one, cowgirl,” Norman says, taking a drag and then handing the cigarette to her as he exhales off to the side. He wonders if she is conscious of the Pulp Fiction reference they just collaborated on performing as he lights himself another.
Laura watches him while she smokes, the wicked grin inside her heart steadily escaping to her face more and more with each moment they share. She pushes a large bud of weed into the pipe and hands it to Norman.
“Thank you, darling.” Norman admires the pipe for a moment, then holds his lighter to its bowl and takes a large hit. He holds the smoke in his lungs as Laura takes the pipe and does the same, their eyes fixed on each other as if there is a taut thread between their pupils. White smoke trickles from Norman’s nose and then he begins to cough, releasing a large cloud into the air around them. When he has finally finished coughing, he finds the pipe in his hands again, Laura smiling, letting the smoke curl around her lips. She laughs at the end of the breath, casting an unexpected ring of smoke across the breach between them. Both Laura and Norman are startled by the perfect manner in which the smoke ring appears and sways and then dissipates, as if it was CG. Norman smokes again, then hands the pipe back to Laura.
“That was gorgeous,” she says. “It was magical.” She starts to laugh, her smile enormous and glowing. She has her feet curled up under her legs, leaning back away from Norman against the wall and the arm of the couch.
Norman turns his body to face her, sitting cross-legged. “It was,” he agrees with a chuckle. “It was almost cartoonish. It was so perfect and bizarre and unexpected. You know, that’s really a good description for everything in my life – fuck, in the whole world, right now. Cartoonish and absurd but sort of beautiful and funny in a tragic, macabre, magical Henry Miller kind of way. It all makes sense, really.”
Laura shakes her head. “None of it makes any sense,” she says with a cute smirk.
Norman smiles at her, nodding slowly, thinking. “It doesn’t really, you’re right,” he agrees. “Everything in the universe has a causal relationship with something else, and yet somehow it makes no sense at all. It is completely absurd and random. Like, this? Of all things? Of all possible ways things could be, ways that human beings could have arranged events, this? Fucking, Kurt Vonnegut and the massacres in Rwanda and Pepsi and Bang Bus and Bettie Davis and Paul Wolfowitz and Burning Man and Michael Jackson? If it weren’t in the encyclopedias I wouldn’t believe a shred of it.”
As she inhales from the pipe while he is speaking, Laura’s restrained laughter builds until she has one arm up over her face, slouching to the side and pressing herself against the back of the couch, quaking with laughter and coughing smoke. Norman puts a hand to her ribs. “You alright?” Laura removes her arm from her face and nods to him, smiling, sighing. Even in such a position she looks gorgeous.
As Norman begins to feel the effects of the weed he has smoked filling his veins with lightness and swirling his thoughts about in his brain, his messianic confidence begins to glow anew, as it always does so crisply in these first moments of getting high. He feels as if his spirit expands out past his body and his awareness of the myriad ways he can use that spirit fade back into his arsenal. Like he remembers why he’s here, almost. He knows from past experience that this feeling of his is also somehow intuitively visible to others on some subtle level, and that he is at his most socially potent and charismatic when he is feeling this way. It is something he can achieve at any point simply through faith in his own awesomeness, but weed lubricates the journey.
“This is my favorite part of getting stoned,” Norman says softly, letting his eyes smile unselfconsciously at Laura. “Just as it’s beginning to hit, when all you want to do is talk and listen to music and – you know, when everything is sort of heightened. Everything has more information in it, and the wheels in your mind are spinning smoothly and you can almost just … almost just see behind things.” Norman gestures with his hand in the air as if he is moving something to the side, to see behind it. “It’s as if in this state I really become aware of all my various parts, of all the extra shit I can do with my will, like my magical powers become available.”
“You know, the way your message read, I wondered if you’d be a real person or what,” Laura admits, shaking her head with a sublime smile of disbelief. “I’m a little shocked I replied to it at all, honestly. It’s fairly uncharacteristic of me. I could hardly believe that you might actually just be someone this beautiful. But I had a feeling it might be possible.”
“What a wonderful compliment. I’m flattered.”
“I think somehow you knew all this would happen.”
“I really didn’t know anything,” Norman says, though to himself in his mind he has to admit that he did, in fact, have a strong intuition that something like this could happen tonight with this woman he randomly messaged online, despite the apparent unlikelihood of it.
There is a brief pause in the conversation. Norman looks around Laura’s apartment, admiring the artwork on her walls.
“So, Norman,” Laura says through a smile and a sexy sway of her neck, “how is all of this going to end?”
Norman thinks for a moment, knowing he needs to respond with eloquence in some manner. When he can’t come up with any good words, he leans in and attempts an eloquent kiss. Where their two mouths press together, as their tongues touch softly in just the right sequence, he can almost see a tiny doorway opening up, like a wormhole in the middle of Laura’s apartment, with bright pinkish-white light beaming from the edges, and with all of his willpower, not even knowing what is on the other side, he struggles to fold up his entire reality and push it through that doorway, into the pink light beyond, believing it to be the light of pure/true love.
When he finds himself standing in what appears to be an Americanized Olympian temple, surrounded by massive gray Doric columns, Norman is stoned enough not to recognize at first that anything might be amiss. (Also, the small corner of him that does suspect the full reality of these surroundings finds them awesome enough not to sound the alarm right away.)
Surrounded by various angelic servants in bejeweled suits, the Man, that universal modern white male asshole who wants nothing more than his barcode on the inside of all our orifices, sits upon His opulent throne a mere dozen paces in front of Norman.
“Who is this, now?” the Man asks His shimmering yes-men collectively.
“He just came right in, sir,” a seraphic Suit behind Norman apologizes to its master. “We didn’t even see him coming.”
Norman grins broadly at the sight of it all and proclaims with hesitant joy (despite his nefarious company), “I believe I may have just enlightened in a kiss.”
“Rubbish,” the Man scoffs, “you’ve just blacked out again. Your body is down in the World, shaking like jello.”
“Who are you supposed to be?” Norman asks the Man. “What’s all this? Where are we having this discussion?”
“In your dying brain.”
Norman declares confidently and with a touch of smug pride in his own awesomeness, “I call bullshit.”
The Man leans forward in His throne and looks hard into Norman’s empty right eye. “Norman, pay very close attention. There’s no freedom from eternity. Your sentence will never be over. You are a fourth-dimensional event. You are a naturally-occurring phenomenon in a mortal universe, now. You are one blood cell of something that will die. I’m sorry if you think that you’re anything more. But you’ll have to get back in line.”
“I know you’re fallible and don’t know what you’re talking about. In fact, I know more than you do. That’s somehow intuitively clear to me.” Norman stands confidently and crosses his arms. Somewhere in the periphery of his awareness, Norman senses a thumbs-up.
“Brush this plant back into its hole,” the Man says with a sweep of His hand.
“What an asshole,” Norman exclaims, looking to one of the angelic servants for support but getting only vapid stoicism. He looks back to the Man. “You wouldn’t be communicating with me if I was just some plant to you. I demand that you recognize my equality!” Norman begins gesticulating wildly with his hands like a street rapper. “I can comprehend you and the complexity of this milieu, and I know that you’re just a small part of it all. Don’t try to break me against my own uncertainty. I am an enlightened human being, motherfucker; I know exactly what I’m seeing. Fuck your bullshit fearmongering, bitch. You’re just trying to make the World into Hell so you can have something to rule over. Fuck you! Bring your bullshit to bear against the forces of badass beauty and love and see where it gets you! You have no power that we don’t give you.”
Norman returns to his body like a sack being pulled over his head and then out of the resulting darkness slowly fading the light of Laura’s apartment. His brain awakens first, aware gradually that his body is slumped back and to the side, quaking seizure-like. As usual when returning to the world (be it waking from dreams or returning from trance), Norman feels the melancholy of the world overwhelm him, but the first image that fades back into his view is Laura’s sweetly concerned face, and his heart is instantly warmed again by her beauty and the compassion in her eyes. She softly strokes his shoulder, her other arm around the back of his neck, her lovely blue eyes watching his with concern. “Norman?” she asks hesitantly. “Are you okay?”
Through his body’s spasms he is able to lean his gaze over to meet hers and attempt a smile, though her facial response reflects the gruesome look his attempted smile must have achieved. It is after a few brief moments of this that he is finally able to speak.
“Forgive me, my dear,” his quaking voice says through the tremors, “I seem to be tripping out.”
Chapter 3: Amsterdam/There Is No Time
3
It can’t be denied that marijuana may have had something to do with it.
Amsterdam/There Is No Time
Weed came into Norman’s life in the summer of Two-thousand-one, in Amsterdam, on a backpacking tour of that continent with his two best friends from college, Lou Carlsen and Karl Major. Amsterdam book-ended the two month European tour – they were there for two days at the beginning of the trip, and the original plan was to return to Amsterdam after circling the continent and stay there for another two days at the end.
Norman had smoked weed a few times in college with a couple of older girlfriends, but had never really gotten high for whatever reason. Lou, with whom Norman had recently begun to collaborate on screenplays, had never even smoked a cigarette. Karl, the third part of the old triumvirate of friends who had all met back at the Indiana Academy and then gone to college together at Indiana University, had begun smoking weed when he had moved to Seattle six months earlier, and in Amsterdam this allowed him to function as the expert among them.
The first time Norman and Lou got high was in a small sidestreet coffeeshop in Amsterdam called the Blue Moon. Karl, as the experienced one, bought two joints of something called purple siensa and the three young men sat in a corner of the coffeeshop, passing the joints in a circle until both were smoked away. For a few minutes, Norman wondered if maybe he was just immune to the effects of marijuana.
Then the Massive Attack song Risingson came on on the joint’s little radio and at that same instant, everything changed about the nature of Norman’s perception. With the opening sounds of the song – a sort of eerie howling over a stuttering, swirling guitarpeggio – the bits of information in the world around him all seemed suddenly to stand up and reveal that they had in fact been a sea of individual people wearing hats with pixels of said information printed on them, all crouched together to appear as a material world, and they all suspiciously eyed Norman and then just as instantly crouched back down and became the phenomenal universe again (this, of course, is metaphor). When the beat came messianically in, the whole scene around him seemed to begin to move perfectly to it. It was as if a lens had been removed from Norman’s vision which was there to make the world appear as it normally did (to dampen its gorgeousness/fullness from the eyes of we spiritual mole-people, perhaps), and now the image of Karl was just a puppet, and Lou too was a puppet, and when Norman looked at his own hands it was more like looking at a screen with the image of his hands from his perspective. His eye was now clearly but a window. He wondered momentarily how one would get this shot for a film; the camera would have to fill his head. When he turned his head, his vision joined him jaggedly, as if time had been folded up and little pieces snipped out like from a paper snowflake. But through those metaphorical holes, some weird information-light almost seemed to come. Norman’s thoughts were swirled by the ‘weird information-light’ and seemed to bloom in previously darkened dimensions, expanding his awareness of the three-point-one-four-one-five-nine-dimensional world around him into something he could not even begin to know how to describe.
“Dude,” Norman said aloud to his comrades.
Karl laughed. “Yes, Norman?”
Norman held up a puppety finger to Karl and raised one eyebrow, attempting an incredibly serious expression with his lips. He held this for a moment, his eye darted to Lou, then he sat back and said with passionate eye contact and his finger still in the air, “Dude.”
“I think I know what he’s talking about, man,” Lou said with a knowing half-grin under a brow-furrowing blank gaze of awe.
“Hold on, oh my god, gravity is pulling me backwards,” Karl coughed, then burst out laughing and grabbed tightly onto the table in front of him.
They spent the next half hour trying to describe to each other what exactly was happening inside their heads with much wild gesturing and raucous laughter. For Norman, it was as if the aperture through which he experienced the information his brain sent his soul was usually a tight sphincter which the weed had somehow relaxed, allowing more information than just sensory input through to his awareness. It was as if all the shadowy corners of thought that Norman reached his hand into for inspiration were now lit greenly as if in night vision, and it became intuitively clear that these thoughts were not just in his head but actually part of the world.
“…so at first the extraneous information is exciting, but for Norman it’s still novelty enough to seem like a fluke, an experiential hallucination (not a hallucination of anything per se so much as a hallucinatory perspective).”
“Norman’s speaking in the third person,” Karl snickered. “Maybe he’s someone else now. Who is he? Who have we become?”
They all laughed uncontrollably. The experience was mentally intriguing, but also somehow joyously hilarious.
This jovial atmosphere was brought abruptly to an end by the mysterious fainting of a woman beside their table followed suddenly by a fight breaking out between the woman’s male companion and the coffeeshop’s proprietor, a scene from which the three baked young backpackers quickly, if awkwardly, extricated themselves.
Outside, Norman felt the sun beaming life/logos/joy down upon him. Everyone on the street appeared to glow with beauty, uniqueness, with self in a way that he had never truly grasped before. It struck him there, standing at the edge of the swarming summer streets of Amsterdam, that in some magical/paradoxical way everyone must be essentially existentially the same self.
On the shockingly-stoned tram ride back to their hotel, Lou was close to freaking out, certain they’d miss their stop and end up riding the tram eternally, but by the time they were sober the next morning at the hotel, he was the first to suggest they do it again before leaving for Hamburg.
Since the Eurail tickets they had bought allowed them a certain itinerary flexibility, the boys ended up truncating Budapest and Vienna and altogether skipping Madrid so that their time in Amsterdam at the end of the trip could last longer. By the time they got back to Holland six weeks later, they had accrued a small troupe of fellow-backpackers from assorted geographical origins, and they all shared a large, cheap apartment in Amsterdam’s Turkish neighborhood for two future-mythic weeks.
Norman was twenty years old. He had begun smoking cigarettes and gotten truly drunk on alcohol for the first time both only within the past year, having skipped that in college, being so young. He was new to the concept of altered states. His parents had always been virulently, mindlessly anti-drug, and as a young prodigy he had followed their rules. But in Amsterdam it was legal. There was no reason not to try it. He and Lou had researched it online before the trip, intrigued by Karl’s hilarious stoned phone calls/email rants. It had been but one of many various European adventures that they had been eagerly anticipating in the days leading up to the trip, but after the experience it clearly eclipsed everything else. They would often fondly recall cavorting in the Budapest bathhouse with those three British girls, being in the middle of a crowd of two million in the Circus Maximus all celebrating a Roman football win, drunkenly carousing through the streets of Barcelona singing There’s a Hole at the Bottom of the Sea, but the memories faded from immediate significance over time. Marijuana, however, had officially become a part of their lives. It was very much like waking into a wondrous dream.
Norman and Lou would never truly be the same again.
“Hey man.”
“Hey, man. How you doing?”
“Man, alright.” Pause. “I could be better, obviously.” Chuckle.
“I hear you, dog.” Knowing laughs.
When Norman and Lou returned to Indiana from Europe in the late summer of Two-thousand-one, it felt as if everything had changed. Norman returned to his big corner room in the dorm at the Indiana Academy, his co-counselor girlfriend Karen who lived a floor below him, his paintings, his photographs, his music. At first, the cover of the Tupperware container of modern American society sealed back over him smoothly and life was soon just as it had been.
But on his nights off, when he would go see Lou at Lou’s mother’s house across town, the conversation would inevitably lead back to weed.
“Man, wouldn’t it be great if we could get some weed? I miss it, man, I gotta admit.” Laughs. “I know, but, fuck – right? You know what I mean. I know you know what I mean.”
“Word.”
But Norman and Lou were not drug people. Not yet, at least. Norman was a live-in residential counselor at his pre-college boarding school alma mater, and Lou was an unemployed college graduate drifting between his mother’s house (not far from the Indiana Academy, in Muncie) and various friends’ couches across the state. Norman had known drug people in his life, been friend and even lover to them, but had never really joined in that milieu. Neither Norman nor Lou had any idea how to get marijuana in the United States. Their attempts led only to folly. They tried talking to people in weed chat rooms online, hanging out too long in head shops, even stood nervously, expectantly in a corner of the Muncie bus station for about five minutes before they realized how absurd they were and left.
Focuses changed, of course, less than a month into the semester, when American society itself was rudely awakened by the blood-caked rapiers of four very angry angels. (To be fair, there had been written warning in the halls of the zeitgeist, though this written warning had been pasted on the inside of a stall in the bathroom at the bottom of the stairs behind a door that said “Beware of the leopard,” as it were [for Americans at least].) Fear threaded through the fibers of the world, and the conservative clamps seemed to take hold everywhere, even in previously liberal institutions like the Indiana Academy. Norman began to butt heads with the administration in an effort to retain a progressive atmosphere of tolerance and liberalism there.
One afternoon, overwhelmed by the sheer amount of artistic power that remained inertly in potentia in his room, Norman gave away all of the hundreds of paintings he had created throughout his college adolescence to students and coworkers.
Another month later, Lou found a job up north at Scornell Systems, a software company in South Bend, Indiana. He rented a one bedroom apartment in a themed apartment complex called the Enchanted Forest. Norman drove three hours each direction to visit him on most weekends that he wasn’t on duty at the Academy. In the Enchanted Forest, the conversations became more specific.
“We need to go back to fuckin’ Amsterdam.”
“I hear you, dog.”
For the sake of weed, plans were made. Soon, tickets were bought. That next May, right after the end of the Academy’s school year, Norman and Lou returned to Amsterdam.
Most of the four days they were in Amsterdam the second time was spent in their hotel room. They ventured out into the city to buy more weed, or just to walk around and enjoy the beauty of the buskers and bridges and buildings and bicycles, but not often. The pretense was that the two of them were working on the screenplay for Death and the Ladies (their planned second film in the fantasy future where they are filmmakers). Mostly they sat on their beds with the television on across the room, smoking joint after joint and talking about whatever.
Whatever, however, became something miraculous. The weed seemed to open access to some sort of super-sense that demanded exploration, and the two of them were eager to do just that. Significant progress was made on the dialogue for Death and the Ladies (and an epiphany achieved in the realization that one of the characters was the Devil), but much more unexpected avenues of thought were probed as well. They discussed metaphors for what they were experiencing as the weed took hold. Their preferred metaphor was a series of rooms: the First Room being the awareness of their separation from their bodies, when the effect they dubbed ‘puppetiness’ set in; the Second Room being the space where you go when you have completely broken away from reality, when you can float in and out of your body’s awareness but also reach out into the aether of your thoughts or feelings, or of the cosmos, or whatever else might be out there (this phase appearing to an outside observer as some kind of intermittent catatonia); there was a Third Room mentioned a few times, but only hypothetically (Lou mused that as broken as he felt in the Second Room, the Third Room must be “all-four-limbs-off-the-floor-out-of-this-universe” [his words]). The two also developed a working model for what they referred to as the ‘interface’ of existence, the way we perceive and interact with the sensory input of the world and our own thoughts (using mostly computer operating system and role-playing game inspired metaphors and terminology to describe it).
All that remains written down from these conversations are two lines of tiny text at the top of an otherwise blank page in one of Norman’s sketchbooks.
Norman dual class, Artist (level 6) / Prophet (level 4)
Lou Logician (level 7)
Through this process, Norman and Lou achieved an intimidating level of efficiency of communication. It was almost as if the two young men began to act as a single mind. They could share complex thoughts with the briefest fragments of words, accompanied with their shared lexicon of cultural references, tones of voice, hand gestures and facial expressions.
Each of the three nights, Norman and Lou were awakened by a tiny mouse that noisily hopped up and down in one corner of the room, by the window, from about three to four a.m., squeaking softly each time it landed back down on the floor. The second and third nights, Norman and Lou sat up to watch the whole performance, noting that after about an hour of jumping each night the mouse would vanish from view, though a thorough search of the room the next morning revealed no mouse holes.
At one point on their last evening, during a long pause in the conversation, Norman’s thoughts came to the concept of the oneness of all things, and how that relates to compassion as a feeling, and for the briefest of moments, while he was looking at Lou and thinking these things, he felt perfection in his compassion in a manner that seemed to rush in on him suddenly, filling him with peace and joy.
Lou seemed to recognize the moment in Norman’s eyes, and he smiled and gasped a little.
“Did you see that?” Norman asked him happily.
“Yeah. You just, like, became Buddha for a second.” Lou also seemed overjoyed by the experience.
“Like, you really saw it?”
“Sort of,” Lou nodded. “Yeah. It was, like, just for a moment. But it was real. I actually saw it, for a second.”
Norman pulled a pen from his pocket and wrote on his left forearm, I just actually became Buddha. Lou saw it. It was only for a moment.
The Amsterdam experience in Two-thousand-two was pivotal. Norman and Lou had been gaining this indescribable mental connection through friendship and artistic collaboration for years, but during those few days it was as if the connection itself became self-aware. It was like an ascetic time of reflection for the greater super-self that somehow included them both. It was there and then that Norman and Lou decided to create an art group called Man-Like Machines that would be an umbrella concept for all of their creative collaborations – art, music, literature, film, philosophy, et cetera. They even came up with a tagline for it that Norman wrote in large block letters down his arm as they were riding the subway to the airport: ART / ENLIGHTENMENT / THE FUTURE.
When they were checking out of their room on their last morning they mentioned the mouse and the pretty desk clerk girl simply nodded, smiling, and said, “Yes, mouse room,” as if it was some kind of special room they had been given.
The big epiphany, at that point, however, still was yet to come.
A few days after they returned from Amsterdam, Norman and Lou picked up Karl from O’Hare and all three drove up to Magnetawan, Ontario, where Lou’s step-father owns a cabin on a lake in the middle of the woods. It was there, late that same night, after a full day of driving, that Norman and Lou “leveled up” (their words, a role-playing game reference).
After a full day and evening of driving, they all sat around the big wooden table in the middle of the cabin with a candle in the center of the table as the only light. Through the windows came the sounds of the forest at night, but only void could be seen. Despite the fact that they had just come from Amsterdam, the big excitement for Lou and Norman was that Karl had brought weed from Seattle, and they were eager to stay up and smoke some.
“I just keep it in this film canister,” Karl said as he presented the grey-topped black cylinder, “and put it in my pocket.”
“That’s balls,” Lou said, gratefully eyeing the green powder Karl was dumping out of the canister onto a white piece of paper. “What if they searched you?”
“I don’t set off the alarm.”
“But what if you accidentally did? And aren’t they doing random searches now?”
“My sister Lee gets searched every time she flies now,” Norman added.
Lou accepted the packed bowl from Karl. The three young men passed Karl’s little pipe around the table for several rounds in silence. Each time Norman received the pipe from Lou, they made pleased, knowing eye contact, and each time, he found he could read more and more from those brief moments. He began to realize that no words were passing between the two of them, and yet communication was very much occurring, and in torrents now with each glance. Their facial expressions mirrored a mutual awe and confusion. Norman could tell that Lou was sharing the experience. Through all of this, Karl silently watched them.
“Are you?” Lou stiltedly asked Norman after the bowl had passed around for the seventh time.
“Yes,” Norman agreed, somehow understanding. “It’s like I can … see more.”
“Yes,” Lou nodded, his expression serious and excited, but cautious.
“It’s almost like I am suddenly aware of an extra level of awareness, like I’m looking down on the universe from some dimension that I didn’t realize I could go up along. And this is often, I realize now, the feeling that accompanies all those great eureka moments, or moments of great communicative or creative ecstasy. It’s like … it’s like I’m peeking my head above the water into the realm of the zeitgeist, like all the pantheistic concept spirits of everything just became visible.” Norman could indeed feel the presence of each thing that had a name (the Chair, the Wall, the Night, the Silence, the Intrigue) as a greater spirit of itself, and their sudden collective presence raised the hairs on his skin, though it was at the same time very beautiful to exist within.
“I know exactly what you mean,” Lou responded in the same tone of voice that Norman had been using, “only I was going to use a Cartesian coordinate system as an example. I was thinking it’s like, like if you imagine a three-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system, and think about how a cube in that system would have a shadow that would be two-dimensional – a square, or a parallelogram or whatever – but this three-dimensional world, then, is the shadow of the universe of time. Each moment frozen – all that three-dimensional spatial information – is the shadow of that system in time. So all of eternity and space – what is that, then, the shadow of?”
“Shadow puppets, man – fuck yeah. It’s the allegory of the cave! It’s like … okay…” Norman grabbed a sheet of paper from the darkness to his left and began to draw diagrams. “Here’s a two-dimensional plane, right? And then, but we’re in this three-dimensional space, the universe. But really we’re in a four-dimensional space, right, because time is that fourth dimension. And … but, we can’t see time from above. You know? We can see the surfaces of the universe from any angle, but time, we can only see out from time. Sort of. You know what I mean?”
“Yes, go on, but I know where you’re going.”
“Yeah, right? Awesome! So check it out. It’s like,” and he continued drawing his series of diagrams, “like if time and space were this two-dimensional plane, like being able to see it all from above. But not time, really, almost like – identity! Like, there can’t be just one identity. And identity is totally another dimension we can’t see but out from. See what I mean?”
“Identity as a dimension?” Lou asked as he glanced down at Norman’s drawing with an uncertain purse of his lips, but then he suddenly gestured wildly with his hands and pulled the sheet of paper closer to himself. “Okay, we’ll get back to that.”
“Well, think about it. Perspective is just one dimension of the fuller consciousness.”
“Okay okay okay,” Lou said as he assessed Norman’s somewhat goofy diagrams, “so the Universe began, right, as a singularity…”
“Of infinite density. Which is absurd – I mean, it’s eternity, right? Like, how can eternity exist within a moment; how can there be infinity? It’s like nothingness; it can’t exist; it’s inert, because it’s non-distinct; there can be no information in true homogeny. Or homogeneity, rather. Is homogeny a word? Does that mean anything?”
“Wait wait wait. Okay, so either the Universe is supposed to expand, then stop, then come back in on itself and maybe do this repeatedly as some great cosmic cycle, or it will just keep expanding into a cold soup of homogenous matter…”
“But think about that for a second,” Norman interrupted. “The heat death of the universe is no less a singularity than the Big Suck or the Big Fall or whatever it would be called.”
“Big Crunch,” Lou corrected with a laugh.
“But, because, in the heat death of the universe, it peters out toward an asymptote of inertness, right, into a cold soup of electrons or whatever, like you said, but in a universe with less and less distinction, isn’t that really just like the flipside of the singularity, the infinite space holding an infinity of homogenous matter as opposed to the single point in space, you know what I mean? Does that make sense?”
“Sort of, yeah,” Lou nodded, seeming surprised that it did.
Norman was not surprised. He had never felt so strong a connection with another human being. It was as if a mind river flowed from each of their heads to a glowing pool between them in space. He could almost see it. He felt like if he took another hit of weed, he would be able to.
“I’m going to smoke more,” Norman said, and picked up the pipe.
“Word; me too.” Lou smiled eagerly, shaking his shoulders and sitting forward in his chair to be closer to Norman and the pipe. Norman handed it to him after he had taken a hit. He held the smoke there and watched with awe as the metaphorical rivers of thought he had just imagined actually appeared before him, half-real, half-visual, half-just-impression, but very present in his awareness.
“What is thought?” Norman asked the collective pool of mind that glowed between himself and Lou. “What makes me my brain, instead of anything else? Why am I me, instead of someone else? Why can’t I move around and experience things from the perspective of others? Why am I anchored to this body?”
“Are you?” Lou asked. “I mean, there is real evidence, supposedly, of things like astral travel and remote viewing and things like that. I think there must be much more to mind than just the brain – and this is something I’m really just beginning to explore, ever since, well, since Amsterdam, really. Since weed.”
“I’m with you, man,” Norman assured him. “Everything is changing. I’m seeing so much more. I don’t know that I could describe it to anyone but you just yet, really, but I have this intuitive certainty that you know what I mean.”
“I’m pretty sure I do,” Lou nodded.
“It’s like – it’s like I’m figuring out the mathematics, the physics of existence, of everything. The subtle physics, you know what I mean? It’s like – you can measure the real world, you can measure the spatial distinction between, say, me and you – we occupy this specific space. The measurement, the experiment could be duplicated, et cetera, scientific method, you’re with me; anyway. And, of course, it’s all just metaphor, really, we’re all just vibrating energy, just waves of information about where things are and how much charge each electron has or whatever. It’s like we are whatever force it is that translates all this various information into a phenomenal world, into an experience. But still, in the context of our world and our perception, this, the World, is everything that we can agree exists, and we can measure, and such.”
“Right.”
“And then, there’s time, the fourth dimension, which is really just an expression of the change of things; it’s delta, as it were, along which we seem to be traveling in a current of some sort. The current of time. Because we can’t stop and go the other direction. So this seems to be the dimension in which we’re trapped – this iceberg in time that we’re trapped in – these bodies, really. We can’t seem to assert our will at that dimension.”
“But we can, though,” Lou said excitedly. “If what you’ve said about our imagination, our mind’s eye, seeing real things is true, about how thoughts and imagination and such are just you looking at real things, real places, somewhere in the multiverse of everythingness, you know? Because all we’re seeing with our eyes and ears and all that is really just in our mind’s eye, too, they’re just the loudest conduits into it, as it were.” Lou laughed and gestured frantically. “If we go with that idea, which seems to make sense, since perception is the only engine of existence, like we’ve agreed, then thoughts must be things-perceived. If we go with that model and extrapolate from it, then we can move about in time, with memory, and imagination of the future. I mean who knows if it’s the real future you’re seeing or not, but who knows if it’s the real past or not, when you recall something. No way of knowing.”
“Except our collective agreement that it is. That’s interesting; that’s true.”
“So, our bodies can’t go back and forth through time, only forward, but we can with our minds.”
“But still, in reality,” (Norman still clung fiercely then to a stable concept of reality as a place with borders), “our bodies and everything else seem to have to travel this one direction through time. What is this gravity toward the end of time? Why is that not a physical law like spatial gravity?”
“Well what you’ve just called ‘spatial gravity’ does affect time, if you believe relativity.”
Norman laughed at the idea of not believing in relativity.
“Maybe it is a tendency to be pulled toward that which is more awesome.”
“That’s fucking interesting, man, thinking about dimensions,” Norman said, “because there are infinite dimensions, right? Presumably. I mean, there is everything; everything exists.”
“String theory demands like ten or so.”
“Right, so – what are they? I mean, they exist, they are here, but what are they?”
“Reality,” Lou posited.
“Reality, yes,” Norman agreed, “as in alternate realities. All the possible choices of every quantum in the universe, all those things they could have done probabilistically but didn’t, and that includes us complex systems and our choices as well. Ooh – tell me something: supposedly every quantum in the universe exists as basically a wave of the probability of where it could be and what characteristics it has until it is perceived, right, and so really the mind of a choice-making perceptive eye like a human being really must have some sort of power over those probabilities. That must be the control we have to make choice – because it’s like, based on what we choose to do or to see, the universe arranges itself as much as it can so that whatever needs to have happened for it to be that way then has happened. But we’re all making different choices, seeing different things, struggling back and forth with the state of the universe. And so, it’s like all of our various willful spirits are pulling the universe this way and that like the strings on a puppet. So, one could almost say, couldn’t one, that another dimension would be mind?”
“Mind as dimension? How do you mean?” Lou asked.
“Well, or perspective. Like if you consider the distinctions of space the bottom three dimensions, then there’s time, and then you rise above time and where can you go?”
“Along different timelines, different realities,” Lou suggested.
“Okay, right, but even then above that, you and I, and you and Colin Powell, and me and Koko the gorilla if she’s still alive, all share this reality, but we don’t share perspectives. By mind, I am referring to that distinction of perspective. Like if you could make a five-dimensional shape of every bit of space throughout time that I was aware of, that being my greater five-dimensional mind shape. But then, what about things I’ve forgotten? I guess, really, my existence or awareness or whatever is something more like a …”
Lou interrupted, shaking his head and laughing, “This is making my concept of the universe wrap in on itself. It’s like – so if perspective and reality are both dimensions, then one could move along between perspectives within one or many realities?”
“Perhaps.”
“What would be evidence of this?”
“Well, Quantum Leap,” Norman joked with a straight face, and then after a moment of comic pause they both laughed. He continued, “No, but seriously, like I’ve said before, perception is the whole engine of existence. The fact that we perceive it is the fundamental initial proof of anything-at-all. So thoughts, imagination, our mind’s eye, must be seeing something that is real, even if it’s not here. But what is here? It’s brought here by the mind – when you think about it, you’re there. You can’t perceive something that doesn’t exist, because all it takes for something to exist is for it to have been perceived. In the brain there is no distinction between seeing something and imagining it.”
“I know, right,” Lou nodded.
“Right, so, these thoughts which are real parts of the … the multiverse or whatever, these thoughts are evidence of our ability to perceive along that dimension of reality. We can imagine fictional events, we can dream of alternate worlds, et cetera. You know? And perspective – sure your awareness can move along the dimension of perspective. It’s called fuckin’ empathy, right?”
“Ah, interesting,” Lou nodded.
“Compassion, empathy, you know?”
“But still, you’re not actually getting it from their perspective,” Lou notes. “Just from your version of their perspective, how you imagine it must be.”
“Maybe identity is not a black and white distinction but instead is an analog change, is gradient,” Norman proposed. “Or maybe there’s some sort of thin elastic barrier keeping us inside our bodies and unable to truly coexist with others, like we just bounce off each other.”
“There is, Norman; it’s called skin,” Lou laughed, and Karl began to laugh at this idea as well, startling Norman who had lost all perspective on where he was. Lou mocked him, still laughing, “It’s like I’ve got this fleshy substance covering my bones, keeping my organs in … I, I don’t know how to describe it.”
“No, but, you know what I mean?” Norman said excitedly. “It’s like, imagine an octopus or some kind of creature with tentacles dipping its tentacles into a pool of water, and that water is this world and those tentacles are us. It’s like the roots of a tree – that explains the jati. It’s like, as you go further up, certain people who might be spiritually close somehow join in spirit, and groups join, and distinctions fade, the further up away from all of this you go, if you can somehow see it from above. You know what I mean? And everything does that, the further up you go, until you’re at the top of it all, at that impossible eternity point.”
“But eternity is just like void – it’s realistically impossible. The only way anything exists is through its relativity to everything else.”
“Exactly, which is why it must be a toroidal kind of thing, where however far toward one edge of any concept you go you come around to the other side.”
“A closed system, would that imply?” Lou rhetorically interjected.
“The singularity before the Big Bang is characteristically indistinguishable from the matte void of the heat death of the universe. It’s just a given space with an eternity of homogeneity. It’s some bullshit, is what it is. It’s inert. ‘Wherever you go, there you are.’”
“So, really,” Lou continued, “it’s that fundamental duality of everything’s illusory nature juxtaposed against the fact that all there is is illusion, and that everything is nothing, and that A both is and is not A. There’s always another dimension, along which there are infinite A’s that are just not that A.”
It was as if everything went white except that idea for Norman, and the idea hung in perfect dark focus against the whiteness of everything. The fundamental paradox of existence looked him in the eye and winked, naked, its arms spread for him to look upon it without shame. “That’s what it is,” he said as he held the quivering truth of the essential paradox in his mind. “A is both A and not A. Everything is really the same, and there’s just here and now and me, but there’s also everything else, and really everything is different, and through time everything is just getting more and more different, and yet more and more ordered, and more awesome. And yet, time is also just an illusion, and really we’re just here now, doing this.”
“A both does and does not equal A,” Lou repeated with genuine intellectual passion in his voice. He seemed to be staring at the same place where Norman was when he was looking into his mind’s eye, that spot right between them in space.
“We are the force of order, of awesomeness, we aware beings.” It sickened Norman how barely his words did justice to his thoughts, until all he could bring himself to say through the rush of epiphanies was, “Oh my god, dude.”
Norman leaned back away from Lou and watched a huge eye open in the center of Lou’s forehead, shuddering with energy. It looked slowly to each side, then directly at Norman.
“I just saw a huge eye open up on your forehead.”
As soon as Norman said it, Lou’s real eyes widened, his mouth dropped open a little, and his third eye shut and disappeared. “And it just shut,” Norman said, held motionless by his awe.
“Yes.” Lou nodded, staring at Norman. He spoke hesitantly. “I felt it. It was terrifying. I couldn’t hold it. I couldn’t take the step. As soon as I realized it was really happening, I got scared.” He gazed off into the darkness around them, a mystified look on his face. “I got right to the edge and I could … see it all.”
The last several minutes of the evening, before they all retired to bed as the sun rose, were completely silent as Lou and Norman and Karl all sat together in the wake of the epiphanies that had just been experienced, each occupied by his own thoughts.
Through it all Karl had simply watched and listened, perplexed, and afterwards he claimed to recall only gibberish. He simply frowned, shrugged or shook his head at Norman and Lou over the next few days as they, as if in religious ecstasy, dissected and discussed what had happened that night. It made Norman wonder how he and Lou could have shared such a potent experience in the presence of someone who had experienced nothing.
Nothing about life was the same after the big epiphany in Canada. The understandings Norman and Lou had come to while stoned that night remained with them thereafter; they never dissipated or became nonsense in hindsight. Internally, Norman considered himself to be an enlightened being from that point on. Though it took a while, Lou eventually admitted feeling the same way.
For several days after they returned from Canada, Lou besieged Norman’s inbox with rants and equations and matrices all attempting to describe what they had experienced (good son of a logician that he was). Norman had a similar reaction. He sat up with Karen at the Academy until the early morning the night he got back, trying futilely to explain what had happened.
His calls to Lou were frantic and excited.
By the time the new fall semester began at the Academy, Norman had not come down from his enlightenment high. He couldn’t stop himself from discussing with his students the concepts he had explored that night with Lou (carefully omitting any part played by recreational/experimental drug-use). Not to his surprise, the guys on his floor got into it and threw their own ideas into the makeshift symposia. Each would bring a different perspective, mostly scientific or mathematical (being that it was primarily a math/science academy). An unofficial club emerged that gathered in Norman’s corner room to listen to rock records on Norman’s turntable and discuss identity, metaphysics, art, enlightenment, the future. The kids (barely younger than Norman) called it the Revolution. Norman would always call Lou in the evenings (when he used to always call Karen) to talk about whatever new ideas he had come up with or discussed that night.
When the first extended weekend came around in September, Norman drove north to see Lou, bringing with him some weed that a lovely, raven-haired female co-counselor who was new that year, Imogen, had given to him. Imogen was also an alumna of the Academy; she had been in the class just behind Norman, Lou and Karl but they had not really known her back then. She and Norman had recently become good friends over a discussion about Frank Zappa records and she quickly became an unspoken but clear and present threat to Karen’s position as Norman’s girl. (Seeds were being sewn in those days that would be reaped with much drama over the next several months.)
Norman surprised Lou with the weed he had brought and they immediately began smoking it. Norman still had his jacket on when he found himself sitting on Lou’s couch, stoned beyond belief. Reality once again gave way to a clear understanding of the nature of the illusion that lay before his eyes. He could actually feel and intuitively understand the way his soul interacted with his brain. It was as if he could read the coding of the game.
Lou sat beside him on the couch, the pipe in his hand hovering somewhere between his mouth and the coffeetable.
Norman gazed out the sliding glass balcony doors. The Enchanted Forest was quiet and streetlight orange. The apartment’s water system grumbled.
“We should play a game,” Norman suggested, “or do an experiment.”
“Whoa,” Lou groaned as he slowly stood and got his bearings. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. I know. Let’s do some sort of existential experiment. Some soul exercise, you know what I mean? Cut away the brush of the unknown.”
“Okay, cool,” Lou said with a little clap of his hands. “I like this idea. What should we do?” He picked up a long wooden staff that remained from his martial arts days in college and held it on his shoulders with his arms around it.
“How about this,” Norman said in thought. “You write something on a piece of paper. Don’t show me or tell me what it is. Don’t give me any kind of clue. Then put it somewhere where I know where you’ve put it but I can’t see it or read it. Put it in your room or something. And then I’ll see if I can read it psychically.”
“I should put it in my room?” he asked, tearing a piece of a page of lined paper.
“Yeah.”
Lou thought for a few seconds, grinning at Norman who watched him from the couch. He bit his pen, then wrote on the bit of paper.
“No, actually,” Norman said with his hand in the air, “don’t put it in your room. Put it somewhere where there is light on it. Somewhere I could see it if I was over there, but where I can’t see it from here. Because I think what I’m going to try to do is go into a trance and then leave my body and see if I can find it and read it.”
“Okay, yeah, right, that’s cool,” Lou said as he walked over to his small kitchenette and placed the sheet of paper on the other side of a box of knives.
“Is the writing facing out?”
“Yeah. If you were standing here you could read it,” Lou said, standing there and looking at it.
“Okay, leave that light in the kitchen on but turn off the one over here, would you?”
“What the fuck am I, your slave?” Lou joked as he turned off the lamp next to Norman and then sat back down on the couch beside him.
“Okay, now, we should put on some good trance music. Not shitty trance, something good. Something really dark and dope.”
“Yeah, I know what you need,” Lou said excitedly as he leaned over the coffeetable and switched the CDs in the changer. He hit play, turned it way up and sat back.
Norman closed his eyes. The Underworld song Dark Train came on, and he smiled appreciatively when he recognized it. Its beat was dark and hypnotic and turned out to be at just the right tempo to put Norman almost immediately into a trance.
He imagined his soul in his body as a white cloud that clung lightly to his head, heart and crotch. He tried to move around, to pull away from the body, but didn’t seem to know what spiritual muscles to use. In the darkness of his closed eyes, everything felt cramped and immobile, heavy with flesh. He could feel that tethering fear that kept him tight against his own heart.
But the longer he sat calmly, the music thumping rhythmically through his body, the marijuana lubricating his spirit’s grip on his blood, the more he was able to gradually sigh away from his own spine and let his awareness float slowly down to his feet. He kept the sensations of his body loose at the periphery of his awareness like a flowing cloak and let the center of himself slip away, gently letting go of his body like a leaf losing its last grip on a tree in the autumn. For a few moments Norman felt like he was falling, but he held onto his calm and trusted the idea that nothing could actually hurt him in this state.
As a loose spirit, Norman experienced the world as impressions, as dream-like half notions. At first glance, it felt like there was nothing, but a gradually widening aperture revealed subtle characteristics in the nothing. Through the static of this bodiless lack of input Norman could feel – and in his state it was translated to him as a sort of sight – the room around him, the locations and basic characteristics of the furniture and walls and everything – everything that had a name. The television in front of him loomed high like a drive-in movie screen thrumming with energy even though it was not turned on. While he was inspecting it he moved up close to the screen without realizing.
Norman turned his view around to face the couch and saw his body sitting there, Lou beside him, watching him from the corner of his eye. Norman’s body was slumped a bit to one side and his arms were folded limply in his lap. He noticed that his body looked lifeless, almost broken, without him in it, and it was clear that this was unnerving Lou as well. Lou sat very still with his hands on his knees, waiting patiently. A faint wisp of white soul material seemed to cling tightly to Lou’s heart and eyes. Norman had an intuitive sense that this was Lou’s spirit.
Wondering if he could hear Lou’s thoughts in this state, he opened his imagination’s ears for such a thing.
Thought-voices came into Norman’s perception. Unfamiliar voices, almost like lines of text on a screen in his mind more than voices, and this made him realize that he and Lou were not actually alone in the room. Surrounding them were two other entities, similarly wispy and half-there, yet rather than the whitish haze of Lou’s soul these seemed to be darker, charcoal-colored conglomerations of swirling spheres, and when Norman noticed their muttering, the voices stopped and there was thought-silence for a moment.
Then, distinctly, one of the entities seemed to think to another, Wazzz!
Norman was taken aback at first by the word, until it was followed by, Does he know he’s here? Then, very clearly, Shit Ax, he can see us.
A weird nerveless trepidation gripped Norman’s spirit and he instantly found himself retreated into the bedroom, by the big bay windows that looked out across the Enchanted Forest (the view: an essentially featureless apartment complex).
The bedroom did not have any such entities as far as Norman could tell, which calmed him for a moment. He remained spiritually still while he considered how to move in this frame of reference, and then tried to do so. He found himself instantly in the bathroom, then in the shower.
Norman realized that he was moving instantly with a thought. His being, no longer constrained by simple rules of time and space, could move from point to point without actually having to move. It was as if he was just entering new information into the location field for the database of his spiritual characteristics.
Norman went to the kitchen, by the box of knives, where the piece of paper was waiting to be read. The presence of the entities that he had sensed before felt close again, and he could hear their bodiless thoughts remarking about his presence and wondering what he was up to, but he ignored the fear their nearness instilled in him, assuring himself that ‘in reality’ he was just sitting calmly on the couch in a perfectly safe situation. He focused on his goal of reading what was on that piece of paper so that he could confirm for himself at least some remnant of actuality in the whole experience.
He found the paper easily. As soon as he recalled where exactly it was, he was there, seeing it as if he were crouched right next to the kitchen counter, his face right up to the box of knives. He could see the paper and recognize that there was text on it, but for some reason the text seemed to be out of focus. He tried hard to focus his eye on it so he could read it, remembering only after a few moments that he was not seeing with that eye over on the couch.
His inability to read what was written on the paper confounded him. He had come all this way, seen so much; Norman hated the idea of coming out of it with no proof. He stared at the piece of paper leaning against the box of knives, putting all of his willpower into the attempt to read that writing.
Slowly, the out-of-focus blur became writhing symbols, then letters and even words, but the message seemed to flicker from one set of words to another, never quite stopping on one.
Norman realized that what he was able to read was somehow the idea, the intent behind the writing, the remnant of logos that Lou had left on the paper. He tried to capture a few of the notions that he got from the flashing words. It was something about time.
Norman thought once about being back in his body and was suddenly there, opening his eyes, leaning over to Lou who was sitting next to him, quite startled by Norman’s sudden revival. “Dude,” he said excitedly, “what did you write? Was it something like, timelessness, or time has gone away, or something to that effect?”
Lou got up from the couch without a word and jogged over to the kitchen, retrieved the piece of paper.
“It totally worked,” Norman recounted as he waited, his perception dizzy though he felt energetic, revived. He felt like he had just awoken from a dream. “It took a while to figure out how to move around at first, but eventually I figured out that I could move just by thinking about it, just by thought. I think what I was effectively doing was just willfully changing the position of my aware self, even though those places I wanted to go to didn’t have a brain there for any information to attach to, but somehow there is still this subtle current of information that if you trust it, if you just listen really carefully, you can see slash hear slash feel the world, the surroundings, and these subtle energies and such that exist on that level. I think we can experience them all the time, but they’re usually drowned out by all the shit going on in our brains like sight and sound and thought and such.”
Lou returned, listening and nodding, with the slip of paper. He looked at it, then looked at Norman. “What did you tell me you thought it said?” he asked.
“Well, it was weird,” Norman tried to explain. “It was like I couldn’t actually read the lines of graphite or ink or whatever on the paper, because it wasn’t actual light I was seeing, but somehow what I could read was the impression, the thought that you had left on the paper, or something like that. It was like it was flashing these various similar ideas, the way I saw it.”
“So what did you say you thought it said, though?”
“It was something about time. Something like timelessness or time has gone away, or the end of time.”
Lou handed the piece of paper to Norman. It said, in Lou’s sloppy handwriting, THERE IS NO TIME.
It had been real, sort of, Norman realized with wonder.
It can’t be denied that marijuana may have had something to do with it.
Amsterdam/There Is No Time
Weed came into Norman’s life in the summer of Two-thousand-one, in Amsterdam, on a backpacking tour of that continent with his two best friends from college, Lou Carlsen and Karl Major. Amsterdam book-ended the two month European tour – they were there for two days at the beginning of the trip, and the original plan was to return to Amsterdam after circling the continent and stay there for another two days at the end.
Norman had smoked weed a few times in college with a couple of older girlfriends, but had never really gotten high for whatever reason. Lou, with whom Norman had recently begun to collaborate on screenplays, had never even smoked a cigarette. Karl, the third part of the old triumvirate of friends who had all met back at the Indiana Academy and then gone to college together at Indiana University, had begun smoking weed when he had moved to Seattle six months earlier, and in Amsterdam this allowed him to function as the expert among them.
The first time Norman and Lou got high was in a small sidestreet coffeeshop in Amsterdam called the Blue Moon. Karl, as the experienced one, bought two joints of something called purple siensa and the three young men sat in a corner of the coffeeshop, passing the joints in a circle until both were smoked away. For a few minutes, Norman wondered if maybe he was just immune to the effects of marijuana.
Then the Massive Attack song Risingson came on on the joint’s little radio and at that same instant, everything changed about the nature of Norman’s perception. With the opening sounds of the song – a sort of eerie howling over a stuttering, swirling guitarpeggio – the bits of information in the world around him all seemed suddenly to stand up and reveal that they had in fact been a sea of individual people wearing hats with pixels of said information printed on them, all crouched together to appear as a material world, and they all suspiciously eyed Norman and then just as instantly crouched back down and became the phenomenal universe again (this, of course, is metaphor). When the beat came messianically in, the whole scene around him seemed to begin to move perfectly to it. It was as if a lens had been removed from Norman’s vision which was there to make the world appear as it normally did (to dampen its gorgeousness/fullness from the eyes of we spiritual mole-people, perhaps), and now the image of Karl was just a puppet, and Lou too was a puppet, and when Norman looked at his own hands it was more like looking at a screen with the image of his hands from his perspective. His eye was now clearly but a window. He wondered momentarily how one would get this shot for a film; the camera would have to fill his head. When he turned his head, his vision joined him jaggedly, as if time had been folded up and little pieces snipped out like from a paper snowflake. But through those metaphorical holes, some weird information-light almost seemed to come. Norman’s thoughts were swirled by the ‘weird information-light’ and seemed to bloom in previously darkened dimensions, expanding his awareness of the three-point-one-four-one-five-nine-dimensional world around him into something he could not even begin to know how to describe.
“Dude,” Norman said aloud to his comrades.
Karl laughed. “Yes, Norman?”
Norman held up a puppety finger to Karl and raised one eyebrow, attempting an incredibly serious expression with his lips. He held this for a moment, his eye darted to Lou, then he sat back and said with passionate eye contact and his finger still in the air, “Dude.”
“I think I know what he’s talking about, man,” Lou said with a knowing half-grin under a brow-furrowing blank gaze of awe.
“Hold on, oh my god, gravity is pulling me backwards,” Karl coughed, then burst out laughing and grabbed tightly onto the table in front of him.
They spent the next half hour trying to describe to each other what exactly was happening inside their heads with much wild gesturing and raucous laughter. For Norman, it was as if the aperture through which he experienced the information his brain sent his soul was usually a tight sphincter which the weed had somehow relaxed, allowing more information than just sensory input through to his awareness. It was as if all the shadowy corners of thought that Norman reached his hand into for inspiration were now lit greenly as if in night vision, and it became intuitively clear that these thoughts were not just in his head but actually part of the world.
“…so at first the extraneous information is exciting, but for Norman it’s still novelty enough to seem like a fluke, an experiential hallucination (not a hallucination of anything per se so much as a hallucinatory perspective).”
“Norman’s speaking in the third person,” Karl snickered. “Maybe he’s someone else now. Who is he? Who have we become?”
They all laughed uncontrollably. The experience was mentally intriguing, but also somehow joyously hilarious.
This jovial atmosphere was brought abruptly to an end by the mysterious fainting of a woman beside their table followed suddenly by a fight breaking out between the woman’s male companion and the coffeeshop’s proprietor, a scene from which the three baked young backpackers quickly, if awkwardly, extricated themselves.
Outside, Norman felt the sun beaming life/logos/joy down upon him. Everyone on the street appeared to glow with beauty, uniqueness, with self in a way that he had never truly grasped before. It struck him there, standing at the edge of the swarming summer streets of Amsterdam, that in some magical/paradoxical way everyone must be essentially existentially the same self.
On the shockingly-stoned tram ride back to their hotel, Lou was close to freaking out, certain they’d miss their stop and end up riding the tram eternally, but by the time they were sober the next morning at the hotel, he was the first to suggest they do it again before leaving for Hamburg.
Since the Eurail tickets they had bought allowed them a certain itinerary flexibility, the boys ended up truncating Budapest and Vienna and altogether skipping Madrid so that their time in Amsterdam at the end of the trip could last longer. By the time they got back to Holland six weeks later, they had accrued a small troupe of fellow-backpackers from assorted geographical origins, and they all shared a large, cheap apartment in Amsterdam’s Turkish neighborhood for two future-mythic weeks.
Norman was twenty years old. He had begun smoking cigarettes and gotten truly drunk on alcohol for the first time both only within the past year, having skipped that in college, being so young. He was new to the concept of altered states. His parents had always been virulently, mindlessly anti-drug, and as a young prodigy he had followed their rules. But in Amsterdam it was legal. There was no reason not to try it. He and Lou had researched it online before the trip, intrigued by Karl’s hilarious stoned phone calls/email rants. It had been but one of many various European adventures that they had been eagerly anticipating in the days leading up to the trip, but after the experience it clearly eclipsed everything else. They would often fondly recall cavorting in the Budapest bathhouse with those three British girls, being in the middle of a crowd of two million in the Circus Maximus all celebrating a Roman football win, drunkenly carousing through the streets of Barcelona singing There’s a Hole at the Bottom of the Sea, but the memories faded from immediate significance over time. Marijuana, however, had officially become a part of their lives. It was very much like waking into a wondrous dream.
Norman and Lou would never truly be the same again.
“Hey man.”
“Hey, man. How you doing?”
“Man, alright.” Pause. “I could be better, obviously.” Chuckle.
“I hear you, dog.” Knowing laughs.
When Norman and Lou returned to Indiana from Europe in the late summer of Two-thousand-one, it felt as if everything had changed. Norman returned to his big corner room in the dorm at the Indiana Academy, his co-counselor girlfriend Karen who lived a floor below him, his paintings, his photographs, his music. At first, the cover of the Tupperware container of modern American society sealed back over him smoothly and life was soon just as it had been.
But on his nights off, when he would go see Lou at Lou’s mother’s house across town, the conversation would inevitably lead back to weed.
“Man, wouldn’t it be great if we could get some weed? I miss it, man, I gotta admit.” Laughs. “I know, but, fuck – right? You know what I mean. I know you know what I mean.”
“Word.”
But Norman and Lou were not drug people. Not yet, at least. Norman was a live-in residential counselor at his pre-college boarding school alma mater, and Lou was an unemployed college graduate drifting between his mother’s house (not far from the Indiana Academy, in Muncie) and various friends’ couches across the state. Norman had known drug people in his life, been friend and even lover to them, but had never really joined in that milieu. Neither Norman nor Lou had any idea how to get marijuana in the United States. Their attempts led only to folly. They tried talking to people in weed chat rooms online, hanging out too long in head shops, even stood nervously, expectantly in a corner of the Muncie bus station for about five minutes before they realized how absurd they were and left.
Focuses changed, of course, less than a month into the semester, when American society itself was rudely awakened by the blood-caked rapiers of four very angry angels. (To be fair, there had been written warning in the halls of the zeitgeist, though this written warning had been pasted on the inside of a stall in the bathroom at the bottom of the stairs behind a door that said “Beware of the leopard,” as it were [for Americans at least].) Fear threaded through the fibers of the world, and the conservative clamps seemed to take hold everywhere, even in previously liberal institutions like the Indiana Academy. Norman began to butt heads with the administration in an effort to retain a progressive atmosphere of tolerance and liberalism there.
One afternoon, overwhelmed by the sheer amount of artistic power that remained inertly in potentia in his room, Norman gave away all of the hundreds of paintings he had created throughout his college adolescence to students and coworkers.
Another month later, Lou found a job up north at Scornell Systems, a software company in South Bend, Indiana. He rented a one bedroom apartment in a themed apartment complex called the Enchanted Forest. Norman drove three hours each direction to visit him on most weekends that he wasn’t on duty at the Academy. In the Enchanted Forest, the conversations became more specific.
“We need to go back to fuckin’ Amsterdam.”
“I hear you, dog.”
For the sake of weed, plans were made. Soon, tickets were bought. That next May, right after the end of the Academy’s school year, Norman and Lou returned to Amsterdam.
Most of the four days they were in Amsterdam the second time was spent in their hotel room. They ventured out into the city to buy more weed, or just to walk around and enjoy the beauty of the buskers and bridges and buildings and bicycles, but not often. The pretense was that the two of them were working on the screenplay for Death and the Ladies (their planned second film in the fantasy future where they are filmmakers). Mostly they sat on their beds with the television on across the room, smoking joint after joint and talking about whatever.
Whatever, however, became something miraculous. The weed seemed to open access to some sort of super-sense that demanded exploration, and the two of them were eager to do just that. Significant progress was made on the dialogue for Death and the Ladies (and an epiphany achieved in the realization that one of the characters was the Devil), but much more unexpected avenues of thought were probed as well. They discussed metaphors for what they were experiencing as the weed took hold. Their preferred metaphor was a series of rooms: the First Room being the awareness of their separation from their bodies, when the effect they dubbed ‘puppetiness’ set in; the Second Room being the space where you go when you have completely broken away from reality, when you can float in and out of your body’s awareness but also reach out into the aether of your thoughts or feelings, or of the cosmos, or whatever else might be out there (this phase appearing to an outside observer as some kind of intermittent catatonia); there was a Third Room mentioned a few times, but only hypothetically (Lou mused that as broken as he felt in the Second Room, the Third Room must be “all-four-limbs-off-the-floor-out-of-this-universe” [his words]). The two also developed a working model for what they referred to as the ‘interface’ of existence, the way we perceive and interact with the sensory input of the world and our own thoughts (using mostly computer operating system and role-playing game inspired metaphors and terminology to describe it).
All that remains written down from these conversations are two lines of tiny text at the top of an otherwise blank page in one of Norman’s sketchbooks.
Norman dual class, Artist (level 6) / Prophet (level 4)
Lou Logician (level 7)
Through this process, Norman and Lou achieved an intimidating level of efficiency of communication. It was almost as if the two young men began to act as a single mind. They could share complex thoughts with the briefest fragments of words, accompanied with their shared lexicon of cultural references, tones of voice, hand gestures and facial expressions.
Each of the three nights, Norman and Lou were awakened by a tiny mouse that noisily hopped up and down in one corner of the room, by the window, from about three to four a.m., squeaking softly each time it landed back down on the floor. The second and third nights, Norman and Lou sat up to watch the whole performance, noting that after about an hour of jumping each night the mouse would vanish from view, though a thorough search of the room the next morning revealed no mouse holes.
At one point on their last evening, during a long pause in the conversation, Norman’s thoughts came to the concept of the oneness of all things, and how that relates to compassion as a feeling, and for the briefest of moments, while he was looking at Lou and thinking these things, he felt perfection in his compassion in a manner that seemed to rush in on him suddenly, filling him with peace and joy.
Lou seemed to recognize the moment in Norman’s eyes, and he smiled and gasped a little.
“Did you see that?” Norman asked him happily.
“Yeah. You just, like, became Buddha for a second.” Lou also seemed overjoyed by the experience.
“Like, you really saw it?”
“Sort of,” Lou nodded. “Yeah. It was, like, just for a moment. But it was real. I actually saw it, for a second.”
Norman pulled a pen from his pocket and wrote on his left forearm, I just actually became Buddha. Lou saw it. It was only for a moment.
The Amsterdam experience in Two-thousand-two was pivotal. Norman and Lou had been gaining this indescribable mental connection through friendship and artistic collaboration for years, but during those few days it was as if the connection itself became self-aware. It was like an ascetic time of reflection for the greater super-self that somehow included them both. It was there and then that Norman and Lou decided to create an art group called Man-Like Machines that would be an umbrella concept for all of their creative collaborations – art, music, literature, film, philosophy, et cetera. They even came up with a tagline for it that Norman wrote in large block letters down his arm as they were riding the subway to the airport: ART / ENLIGHTENMENT / THE FUTURE.
When they were checking out of their room on their last morning they mentioned the mouse and the pretty desk clerk girl simply nodded, smiling, and said, “Yes, mouse room,” as if it was some kind of special room they had been given.
The big epiphany, at that point, however, still was yet to come.
A few days after they returned from Amsterdam, Norman and Lou picked up Karl from O’Hare and all three drove up to Magnetawan, Ontario, where Lou’s step-father owns a cabin on a lake in the middle of the woods. It was there, late that same night, after a full day of driving, that Norman and Lou “leveled up” (their words, a role-playing game reference).
After a full day and evening of driving, they all sat around the big wooden table in the middle of the cabin with a candle in the center of the table as the only light. Through the windows came the sounds of the forest at night, but only void could be seen. Despite the fact that they had just come from Amsterdam, the big excitement for Lou and Norman was that Karl had brought weed from Seattle, and they were eager to stay up and smoke some.
“I just keep it in this film canister,” Karl said as he presented the grey-topped black cylinder, “and put it in my pocket.”
“That’s balls,” Lou said, gratefully eyeing the green powder Karl was dumping out of the canister onto a white piece of paper. “What if they searched you?”
“I don’t set off the alarm.”
“But what if you accidentally did? And aren’t they doing random searches now?”
“My sister Lee gets searched every time she flies now,” Norman added.
Lou accepted the packed bowl from Karl. The three young men passed Karl’s little pipe around the table for several rounds in silence. Each time Norman received the pipe from Lou, they made pleased, knowing eye contact, and each time, he found he could read more and more from those brief moments. He began to realize that no words were passing between the two of them, and yet communication was very much occurring, and in torrents now with each glance. Their facial expressions mirrored a mutual awe and confusion. Norman could tell that Lou was sharing the experience. Through all of this, Karl silently watched them.
“Are you?” Lou stiltedly asked Norman after the bowl had passed around for the seventh time.
“Yes,” Norman agreed, somehow understanding. “It’s like I can … see more.”
“Yes,” Lou nodded, his expression serious and excited, but cautious.
“It’s almost like I am suddenly aware of an extra level of awareness, like I’m looking down on the universe from some dimension that I didn’t realize I could go up along. And this is often, I realize now, the feeling that accompanies all those great eureka moments, or moments of great communicative or creative ecstasy. It’s like … it’s like I’m peeking my head above the water into the realm of the zeitgeist, like all the pantheistic concept spirits of everything just became visible.” Norman could indeed feel the presence of each thing that had a name (the Chair, the Wall, the Night, the Silence, the Intrigue) as a greater spirit of itself, and their sudden collective presence raised the hairs on his skin, though it was at the same time very beautiful to exist within.
“I know exactly what you mean,” Lou responded in the same tone of voice that Norman had been using, “only I was going to use a Cartesian coordinate system as an example. I was thinking it’s like, like if you imagine a three-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system, and think about how a cube in that system would have a shadow that would be two-dimensional – a square, or a parallelogram or whatever – but this three-dimensional world, then, is the shadow of the universe of time. Each moment frozen – all that three-dimensional spatial information – is the shadow of that system in time. So all of eternity and space – what is that, then, the shadow of?”
“Shadow puppets, man – fuck yeah. It’s the allegory of the cave! It’s like … okay…” Norman grabbed a sheet of paper from the darkness to his left and began to draw diagrams. “Here’s a two-dimensional plane, right? And then, but we’re in this three-dimensional space, the universe. But really we’re in a four-dimensional space, right, because time is that fourth dimension. And … but, we can’t see time from above. You know? We can see the surfaces of the universe from any angle, but time, we can only see out from time. Sort of. You know what I mean?”
“Yes, go on, but I know where you’re going.”
“Yeah, right? Awesome! So check it out. It’s like,” and he continued drawing his series of diagrams, “like if time and space were this two-dimensional plane, like being able to see it all from above. But not time, really, almost like – identity! Like, there can’t be just one identity. And identity is totally another dimension we can’t see but out from. See what I mean?”
“Identity as a dimension?” Lou asked as he glanced down at Norman’s drawing with an uncertain purse of his lips, but then he suddenly gestured wildly with his hands and pulled the sheet of paper closer to himself. “Okay, we’ll get back to that.”
“Well, think about it. Perspective is just one dimension of the fuller consciousness.”
“Okay okay okay,” Lou said as he assessed Norman’s somewhat goofy diagrams, “so the Universe began, right, as a singularity…”
“Of infinite density. Which is absurd – I mean, it’s eternity, right? Like, how can eternity exist within a moment; how can there be infinity? It’s like nothingness; it can’t exist; it’s inert, because it’s non-distinct; there can be no information in true homogeny. Or homogeneity, rather. Is homogeny a word? Does that mean anything?”
“Wait wait wait. Okay, so either the Universe is supposed to expand, then stop, then come back in on itself and maybe do this repeatedly as some great cosmic cycle, or it will just keep expanding into a cold soup of homogenous matter…”
“But think about that for a second,” Norman interrupted. “The heat death of the universe is no less a singularity than the Big Suck or the Big Fall or whatever it would be called.”
“Big Crunch,” Lou corrected with a laugh.
“But, because, in the heat death of the universe, it peters out toward an asymptote of inertness, right, into a cold soup of electrons or whatever, like you said, but in a universe with less and less distinction, isn’t that really just like the flipside of the singularity, the infinite space holding an infinity of homogenous matter as opposed to the single point in space, you know what I mean? Does that make sense?”
“Sort of, yeah,” Lou nodded, seeming surprised that it did.
Norman was not surprised. He had never felt so strong a connection with another human being. It was as if a mind river flowed from each of their heads to a glowing pool between them in space. He could almost see it. He felt like if he took another hit of weed, he would be able to.
“I’m going to smoke more,” Norman said, and picked up the pipe.
“Word; me too.” Lou smiled eagerly, shaking his shoulders and sitting forward in his chair to be closer to Norman and the pipe. Norman handed it to him after he had taken a hit. He held the smoke there and watched with awe as the metaphorical rivers of thought he had just imagined actually appeared before him, half-real, half-visual, half-just-impression, but very present in his awareness.
“What is thought?” Norman asked the collective pool of mind that glowed between himself and Lou. “What makes me my brain, instead of anything else? Why am I me, instead of someone else? Why can’t I move around and experience things from the perspective of others? Why am I anchored to this body?”
“Are you?” Lou asked. “I mean, there is real evidence, supposedly, of things like astral travel and remote viewing and things like that. I think there must be much more to mind than just the brain – and this is something I’m really just beginning to explore, ever since, well, since Amsterdam, really. Since weed.”
“I’m with you, man,” Norman assured him. “Everything is changing. I’m seeing so much more. I don’t know that I could describe it to anyone but you just yet, really, but I have this intuitive certainty that you know what I mean.”
“I’m pretty sure I do,” Lou nodded.
“It’s like – it’s like I’m figuring out the mathematics, the physics of existence, of everything. The subtle physics, you know what I mean? It’s like – you can measure the real world, you can measure the spatial distinction between, say, me and you – we occupy this specific space. The measurement, the experiment could be duplicated, et cetera, scientific method, you’re with me; anyway. And, of course, it’s all just metaphor, really, we’re all just vibrating energy, just waves of information about where things are and how much charge each electron has or whatever. It’s like we are whatever force it is that translates all this various information into a phenomenal world, into an experience. But still, in the context of our world and our perception, this, the World, is everything that we can agree exists, and we can measure, and such.”
“Right.”
“And then, there’s time, the fourth dimension, which is really just an expression of the change of things; it’s delta, as it were, along which we seem to be traveling in a current of some sort. The current of time. Because we can’t stop and go the other direction. So this seems to be the dimension in which we’re trapped – this iceberg in time that we’re trapped in – these bodies, really. We can’t seem to assert our will at that dimension.”
“But we can, though,” Lou said excitedly. “If what you’ve said about our imagination, our mind’s eye, seeing real things is true, about how thoughts and imagination and such are just you looking at real things, real places, somewhere in the multiverse of everythingness, you know? Because all we’re seeing with our eyes and ears and all that is really just in our mind’s eye, too, they’re just the loudest conduits into it, as it were.” Lou laughed and gestured frantically. “If we go with that idea, which seems to make sense, since perception is the only engine of existence, like we’ve agreed, then thoughts must be things-perceived. If we go with that model and extrapolate from it, then we can move about in time, with memory, and imagination of the future. I mean who knows if it’s the real future you’re seeing or not, but who knows if it’s the real past or not, when you recall something. No way of knowing.”
“Except our collective agreement that it is. That’s interesting; that’s true.”
“So, our bodies can’t go back and forth through time, only forward, but we can with our minds.”
“But still, in reality,” (Norman still clung fiercely then to a stable concept of reality as a place with borders), “our bodies and everything else seem to have to travel this one direction through time. What is this gravity toward the end of time? Why is that not a physical law like spatial gravity?”
“Well what you’ve just called ‘spatial gravity’ does affect time, if you believe relativity.”
Norman laughed at the idea of not believing in relativity.
“Maybe it is a tendency to be pulled toward that which is more awesome.”
“That’s fucking interesting, man, thinking about dimensions,” Norman said, “because there are infinite dimensions, right? Presumably. I mean, there is everything; everything exists.”
“String theory demands like ten or so.”
“Right, so – what are they? I mean, they exist, they are here, but what are they?”
“Reality,” Lou posited.
“Reality, yes,” Norman agreed, “as in alternate realities. All the possible choices of every quantum in the universe, all those things they could have done probabilistically but didn’t, and that includes us complex systems and our choices as well. Ooh – tell me something: supposedly every quantum in the universe exists as basically a wave of the probability of where it could be and what characteristics it has until it is perceived, right, and so really the mind of a choice-making perceptive eye like a human being really must have some sort of power over those probabilities. That must be the control we have to make choice – because it’s like, based on what we choose to do or to see, the universe arranges itself as much as it can so that whatever needs to have happened for it to be that way then has happened. But we’re all making different choices, seeing different things, struggling back and forth with the state of the universe. And so, it’s like all of our various willful spirits are pulling the universe this way and that like the strings on a puppet. So, one could almost say, couldn’t one, that another dimension would be mind?”
“Mind as dimension? How do you mean?” Lou asked.
“Well, or perspective. Like if you consider the distinctions of space the bottom three dimensions, then there’s time, and then you rise above time and where can you go?”
“Along different timelines, different realities,” Lou suggested.
“Okay, right, but even then above that, you and I, and you and Colin Powell, and me and Koko the gorilla if she’s still alive, all share this reality, but we don’t share perspectives. By mind, I am referring to that distinction of perspective. Like if you could make a five-dimensional shape of every bit of space throughout time that I was aware of, that being my greater five-dimensional mind shape. But then, what about things I’ve forgotten? I guess, really, my existence or awareness or whatever is something more like a …”
Lou interrupted, shaking his head and laughing, “This is making my concept of the universe wrap in on itself. It’s like – so if perspective and reality are both dimensions, then one could move along between perspectives within one or many realities?”
“Perhaps.”
“What would be evidence of this?”
“Well, Quantum Leap,” Norman joked with a straight face, and then after a moment of comic pause they both laughed. He continued, “No, but seriously, like I’ve said before, perception is the whole engine of existence. The fact that we perceive it is the fundamental initial proof of anything-at-all. So thoughts, imagination, our mind’s eye, must be seeing something that is real, even if it’s not here. But what is here? It’s brought here by the mind – when you think about it, you’re there. You can’t perceive something that doesn’t exist, because all it takes for something to exist is for it to have been perceived. In the brain there is no distinction between seeing something and imagining it.”
“I know, right,” Lou nodded.
“Right, so, these thoughts which are real parts of the … the multiverse or whatever, these thoughts are evidence of our ability to perceive along that dimension of reality. We can imagine fictional events, we can dream of alternate worlds, et cetera. You know? And perspective – sure your awareness can move along the dimension of perspective. It’s called fuckin’ empathy, right?”
“Ah, interesting,” Lou nodded.
“Compassion, empathy, you know?”
“But still, you’re not actually getting it from their perspective,” Lou notes. “Just from your version of their perspective, how you imagine it must be.”
“Maybe identity is not a black and white distinction but instead is an analog change, is gradient,” Norman proposed. “Or maybe there’s some sort of thin elastic barrier keeping us inside our bodies and unable to truly coexist with others, like we just bounce off each other.”
“There is, Norman; it’s called skin,” Lou laughed, and Karl began to laugh at this idea as well, startling Norman who had lost all perspective on where he was. Lou mocked him, still laughing, “It’s like I’ve got this fleshy substance covering my bones, keeping my organs in … I, I don’t know how to describe it.”
“No, but, you know what I mean?” Norman said excitedly. “It’s like, imagine an octopus or some kind of creature with tentacles dipping its tentacles into a pool of water, and that water is this world and those tentacles are us. It’s like the roots of a tree – that explains the jati. It’s like, as you go further up, certain people who might be spiritually close somehow join in spirit, and groups join, and distinctions fade, the further up away from all of this you go, if you can somehow see it from above. You know what I mean? And everything does that, the further up you go, until you’re at the top of it all, at that impossible eternity point.”
“But eternity is just like void – it’s realistically impossible. The only way anything exists is through its relativity to everything else.”
“Exactly, which is why it must be a toroidal kind of thing, where however far toward one edge of any concept you go you come around to the other side.”
“A closed system, would that imply?” Lou rhetorically interjected.
“The singularity before the Big Bang is characteristically indistinguishable from the matte void of the heat death of the universe. It’s just a given space with an eternity of homogeneity. It’s some bullshit, is what it is. It’s inert. ‘Wherever you go, there you are.’”
“So, really,” Lou continued, “it’s that fundamental duality of everything’s illusory nature juxtaposed against the fact that all there is is illusion, and that everything is nothing, and that A both is and is not A. There’s always another dimension, along which there are infinite A’s that are just not that A.”
It was as if everything went white except that idea for Norman, and the idea hung in perfect dark focus against the whiteness of everything. The fundamental paradox of existence looked him in the eye and winked, naked, its arms spread for him to look upon it without shame. “That’s what it is,” he said as he held the quivering truth of the essential paradox in his mind. “A is both A and not A. Everything is really the same, and there’s just here and now and me, but there’s also everything else, and really everything is different, and through time everything is just getting more and more different, and yet more and more ordered, and more awesome. And yet, time is also just an illusion, and really we’re just here now, doing this.”
“A both does and does not equal A,” Lou repeated with genuine intellectual passion in his voice. He seemed to be staring at the same place where Norman was when he was looking into his mind’s eye, that spot right between them in space.
“We are the force of order, of awesomeness, we aware beings.” It sickened Norman how barely his words did justice to his thoughts, until all he could bring himself to say through the rush of epiphanies was, “Oh my god, dude.”
Norman leaned back away from Lou and watched a huge eye open in the center of Lou’s forehead, shuddering with energy. It looked slowly to each side, then directly at Norman.
“I just saw a huge eye open up on your forehead.”
As soon as Norman said it, Lou’s real eyes widened, his mouth dropped open a little, and his third eye shut and disappeared. “And it just shut,” Norman said, held motionless by his awe.
“Yes.” Lou nodded, staring at Norman. He spoke hesitantly. “I felt it. It was terrifying. I couldn’t hold it. I couldn’t take the step. As soon as I realized it was really happening, I got scared.” He gazed off into the darkness around them, a mystified look on his face. “I got right to the edge and I could … see it all.”
The last several minutes of the evening, before they all retired to bed as the sun rose, were completely silent as Lou and Norman and Karl all sat together in the wake of the epiphanies that had just been experienced, each occupied by his own thoughts.
Through it all Karl had simply watched and listened, perplexed, and afterwards he claimed to recall only gibberish. He simply frowned, shrugged or shook his head at Norman and Lou over the next few days as they, as if in religious ecstasy, dissected and discussed what had happened that night. It made Norman wonder how he and Lou could have shared such a potent experience in the presence of someone who had experienced nothing.
Nothing about life was the same after the big epiphany in Canada. The understandings Norman and Lou had come to while stoned that night remained with them thereafter; they never dissipated or became nonsense in hindsight. Internally, Norman considered himself to be an enlightened being from that point on. Though it took a while, Lou eventually admitted feeling the same way.
For several days after they returned from Canada, Lou besieged Norman’s inbox with rants and equations and matrices all attempting to describe what they had experienced (good son of a logician that he was). Norman had a similar reaction. He sat up with Karen at the Academy until the early morning the night he got back, trying futilely to explain what had happened.
His calls to Lou were frantic and excited.
By the time the new fall semester began at the Academy, Norman had not come down from his enlightenment high. He couldn’t stop himself from discussing with his students the concepts he had explored that night with Lou (carefully omitting any part played by recreational/experimental drug-use). Not to his surprise, the guys on his floor got into it and threw their own ideas into the makeshift symposia. Each would bring a different perspective, mostly scientific or mathematical (being that it was primarily a math/science academy). An unofficial club emerged that gathered in Norman’s corner room to listen to rock records on Norman’s turntable and discuss identity, metaphysics, art, enlightenment, the future. The kids (barely younger than Norman) called it the Revolution. Norman would always call Lou in the evenings (when he used to always call Karen) to talk about whatever new ideas he had come up with or discussed that night.
When the first extended weekend came around in September, Norman drove north to see Lou, bringing with him some weed that a lovely, raven-haired female co-counselor who was new that year, Imogen, had given to him. Imogen was also an alumna of the Academy; she had been in the class just behind Norman, Lou and Karl but they had not really known her back then. She and Norman had recently become good friends over a discussion about Frank Zappa records and she quickly became an unspoken but clear and present threat to Karen’s position as Norman’s girl. (Seeds were being sewn in those days that would be reaped with much drama over the next several months.)
Norman surprised Lou with the weed he had brought and they immediately began smoking it. Norman still had his jacket on when he found himself sitting on Lou’s couch, stoned beyond belief. Reality once again gave way to a clear understanding of the nature of the illusion that lay before his eyes. He could actually feel and intuitively understand the way his soul interacted with his brain. It was as if he could read the coding of the game.
Lou sat beside him on the couch, the pipe in his hand hovering somewhere between his mouth and the coffeetable.
Norman gazed out the sliding glass balcony doors. The Enchanted Forest was quiet and streetlight orange. The apartment’s water system grumbled.
“We should play a game,” Norman suggested, “or do an experiment.”
“Whoa,” Lou groaned as he slowly stood and got his bearings. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. I know. Let’s do some sort of existential experiment. Some soul exercise, you know what I mean? Cut away the brush of the unknown.”
“Okay, cool,” Lou said with a little clap of his hands. “I like this idea. What should we do?” He picked up a long wooden staff that remained from his martial arts days in college and held it on his shoulders with his arms around it.
“How about this,” Norman said in thought. “You write something on a piece of paper. Don’t show me or tell me what it is. Don’t give me any kind of clue. Then put it somewhere where I know where you’ve put it but I can’t see it or read it. Put it in your room or something. And then I’ll see if I can read it psychically.”
“I should put it in my room?” he asked, tearing a piece of a page of lined paper.
“Yeah.”
Lou thought for a few seconds, grinning at Norman who watched him from the couch. He bit his pen, then wrote on the bit of paper.
“No, actually,” Norman said with his hand in the air, “don’t put it in your room. Put it somewhere where there is light on it. Somewhere I could see it if I was over there, but where I can’t see it from here. Because I think what I’m going to try to do is go into a trance and then leave my body and see if I can find it and read it.”
“Okay, yeah, right, that’s cool,” Lou said as he walked over to his small kitchenette and placed the sheet of paper on the other side of a box of knives.
“Is the writing facing out?”
“Yeah. If you were standing here you could read it,” Lou said, standing there and looking at it.
“Okay, leave that light in the kitchen on but turn off the one over here, would you?”
“What the fuck am I, your slave?” Lou joked as he turned off the lamp next to Norman and then sat back down on the couch beside him.
“Okay, now, we should put on some good trance music. Not shitty trance, something good. Something really dark and dope.”
“Yeah, I know what you need,” Lou said excitedly as he leaned over the coffeetable and switched the CDs in the changer. He hit play, turned it way up and sat back.
Norman closed his eyes. The Underworld song Dark Train came on, and he smiled appreciatively when he recognized it. Its beat was dark and hypnotic and turned out to be at just the right tempo to put Norman almost immediately into a trance.
He imagined his soul in his body as a white cloud that clung lightly to his head, heart and crotch. He tried to move around, to pull away from the body, but didn’t seem to know what spiritual muscles to use. In the darkness of his closed eyes, everything felt cramped and immobile, heavy with flesh. He could feel that tethering fear that kept him tight against his own heart.
But the longer he sat calmly, the music thumping rhythmically through his body, the marijuana lubricating his spirit’s grip on his blood, the more he was able to gradually sigh away from his own spine and let his awareness float slowly down to his feet. He kept the sensations of his body loose at the periphery of his awareness like a flowing cloak and let the center of himself slip away, gently letting go of his body like a leaf losing its last grip on a tree in the autumn. For a few moments Norman felt like he was falling, but he held onto his calm and trusted the idea that nothing could actually hurt him in this state.
As a loose spirit, Norman experienced the world as impressions, as dream-like half notions. At first glance, it felt like there was nothing, but a gradually widening aperture revealed subtle characteristics in the nothing. Through the static of this bodiless lack of input Norman could feel – and in his state it was translated to him as a sort of sight – the room around him, the locations and basic characteristics of the furniture and walls and everything – everything that had a name. The television in front of him loomed high like a drive-in movie screen thrumming with energy even though it was not turned on. While he was inspecting it he moved up close to the screen without realizing.
Norman turned his view around to face the couch and saw his body sitting there, Lou beside him, watching him from the corner of his eye. Norman’s body was slumped a bit to one side and his arms were folded limply in his lap. He noticed that his body looked lifeless, almost broken, without him in it, and it was clear that this was unnerving Lou as well. Lou sat very still with his hands on his knees, waiting patiently. A faint wisp of white soul material seemed to cling tightly to Lou’s heart and eyes. Norman had an intuitive sense that this was Lou’s spirit.
Wondering if he could hear Lou’s thoughts in this state, he opened his imagination’s ears for such a thing.
Thought-voices came into Norman’s perception. Unfamiliar voices, almost like lines of text on a screen in his mind more than voices, and this made him realize that he and Lou were not actually alone in the room. Surrounding them were two other entities, similarly wispy and half-there, yet rather than the whitish haze of Lou’s soul these seemed to be darker, charcoal-colored conglomerations of swirling spheres, and when Norman noticed their muttering, the voices stopped and there was thought-silence for a moment.
Then, distinctly, one of the entities seemed to think to another, Wazzz!
Norman was taken aback at first by the word, until it was followed by, Does he know he’s here? Then, very clearly, Shit Ax, he can see us.
A weird nerveless trepidation gripped Norman’s spirit and he instantly found himself retreated into the bedroom, by the big bay windows that looked out across the Enchanted Forest (the view: an essentially featureless apartment complex).
The bedroom did not have any such entities as far as Norman could tell, which calmed him for a moment. He remained spiritually still while he considered how to move in this frame of reference, and then tried to do so. He found himself instantly in the bathroom, then in the shower.
Norman realized that he was moving instantly with a thought. His being, no longer constrained by simple rules of time and space, could move from point to point without actually having to move. It was as if he was just entering new information into the location field for the database of his spiritual characteristics.
Norman went to the kitchen, by the box of knives, where the piece of paper was waiting to be read. The presence of the entities that he had sensed before felt close again, and he could hear their bodiless thoughts remarking about his presence and wondering what he was up to, but he ignored the fear their nearness instilled in him, assuring himself that ‘in reality’ he was just sitting calmly on the couch in a perfectly safe situation. He focused on his goal of reading what was on that piece of paper so that he could confirm for himself at least some remnant of actuality in the whole experience.
He found the paper easily. As soon as he recalled where exactly it was, he was there, seeing it as if he were crouched right next to the kitchen counter, his face right up to the box of knives. He could see the paper and recognize that there was text on it, but for some reason the text seemed to be out of focus. He tried hard to focus his eye on it so he could read it, remembering only after a few moments that he was not seeing with that eye over on the couch.
His inability to read what was written on the paper confounded him. He had come all this way, seen so much; Norman hated the idea of coming out of it with no proof. He stared at the piece of paper leaning against the box of knives, putting all of his willpower into the attempt to read that writing.
Slowly, the out-of-focus blur became writhing symbols, then letters and even words, but the message seemed to flicker from one set of words to another, never quite stopping on one.
Norman realized that what he was able to read was somehow the idea, the intent behind the writing, the remnant of logos that Lou had left on the paper. He tried to capture a few of the notions that he got from the flashing words. It was something about time.
Norman thought once about being back in his body and was suddenly there, opening his eyes, leaning over to Lou who was sitting next to him, quite startled by Norman’s sudden revival. “Dude,” he said excitedly, “what did you write? Was it something like, timelessness, or time has gone away, or something to that effect?”
Lou got up from the couch without a word and jogged over to the kitchen, retrieved the piece of paper.
“It totally worked,” Norman recounted as he waited, his perception dizzy though he felt energetic, revived. He felt like he had just awoken from a dream. “It took a while to figure out how to move around at first, but eventually I figured out that I could move just by thinking about it, just by thought. I think what I was effectively doing was just willfully changing the position of my aware self, even though those places I wanted to go to didn’t have a brain there for any information to attach to, but somehow there is still this subtle current of information that if you trust it, if you just listen really carefully, you can see slash hear slash feel the world, the surroundings, and these subtle energies and such that exist on that level. I think we can experience them all the time, but they’re usually drowned out by all the shit going on in our brains like sight and sound and thought and such.”
Lou returned, listening and nodding, with the slip of paper. He looked at it, then looked at Norman. “What did you tell me you thought it said?” he asked.
“Well, it was weird,” Norman tried to explain. “It was like I couldn’t actually read the lines of graphite or ink or whatever on the paper, because it wasn’t actual light I was seeing, but somehow what I could read was the impression, the thought that you had left on the paper, or something like that. It was like it was flashing these various similar ideas, the way I saw it.”
“So what did you say you thought it said, though?”
“It was something about time. Something like timelessness or time has gone away, or the end of time.”
Lou handed the piece of paper to Norman. It said, in Lou’s sloppy handwriting, THERE IS NO TIME.
It had been real, sort of, Norman realized with wonder.
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