Chapter 13: The Damn Thang

13

Over the long feedback ending of the Pentatonik song Zeitgeist, which is playing from the iPod speaker station beside Laura’s bed, Norman interrupts the long, introspective, sigh-heavy post-coital speechlessness by saying, “In some role-playing game systems, when your character gets enough experience to level up you will have to sleep, rest or meditate in order to finally do so, usually so that the game can have time, if it’s a computer game, to step aside from the action and let you choose your new skills and spells or whatever…” He trails off, smiling to himself. “I feel like I just leveled up and now I need to meditate to choose how to spread my karma.” Laura scratches cutely at the side of his hip, where her long fingers are dangling limply. He can hear her smile.
A cover of the Björk song Hunter comes in next with its warm bass and maraca opening, fading into ethereal ooh’s and a slow, smooth beat.
“You know, Norman,” Laura says as she inches her body closer to him on the bed, “there is no time like the present.” He is naked, lying on his back with his arms folded under his head. She is wearing only a ruffled white shirt. “This moment is perfect,” she adds with a purr.
“I agree,” Norman says, staring up at the ceiling with his eye but looking at her in his mind.
“I cannot imagine a more beautiful world.”
“You can’t?” Norman turns his eye questioningly to her.
“Right now, no. Not at all. There could be bombs falling and I would be happy.”
“That’s easy to say when there aren’t any bombs falling.”
“Let them fall,” she says as she presses her nose against his shoulder and kisses his skin. Underneath the sheets, he can feel her knuckles lightly approaching his hipbone. They touch down softly, and then the hand unfolds and turns and she presses her palm against him so her fingertips are just at the edge of his groin. “I would make love to you through it all. I think that’s how I’ll enlighten, if I ever do. In the middle of hot sex with you, I would just,” and she does a little flourish with the fingers of her exposed hand, “turn into birds.”
“That would be gorgeous,” Norman says, and then, with a smile and a bit of a laugh, he adds, “but I can just imagine that moment for me, when I’m fucking you and you’re getting really into it and then all of a sudden you turn into a bunch of birds, and I’m there in the middle of a thrust and suddenly I’m thrusting into this batch of birds packed into your shape and they all start to flap and squawk and fly around this tiny bedroom.” Laura giggles, burying her face into his shoulder, her whole body shaking. “I would have to go open a window and try to herd them out.” He begins laughing hard enough that it slurs his words. “But would I? I don’t know. Because for all I know that’s you – those birds were just you. Jesus. What a scene. I have no idea how I would react to that. I would probably keep the birds in the apartment in case you formed back into you or something. I would have no idea what to think.”
Laura’s laughter eases, and her hand’s slow safari toward the base of his cock resumes. After a few moments she whispers, laughing softly to herself, “You better watch out. I could turn into birds at any moment.”
“I love the idea of having a nanocloud robot body for just such a reason. To be able to suddenly turn into birds, but for real. What an exit. Or entrance. To have a bunch of birds fly in and form me, and then there I am? Dope. Like, think about that game Second Life, and how in it people sell skins and clothing for your avatar, and gestures you can make and items that let you do stuff and things like that. It would totally be the same way for our nanocloud robot forms. Like, you could teach yourself to do basic stuff obviously, but there could be more complex, beautiful things you could do, like going from birds to your human form, things like that – that could be designed by the artist-engineers and you could trade them on the wireless neural internet, which at that point will be basically like this other dimension where we all can coexist in whatever form we want to an even more abstract level … mmm, it will be so badass.”
“You know, Norman, that’s one thing I adore about you. You have such clear vision. I don’t think I know anyone who thinks about the future as much as you do.”
“Oh, man, talk about vision,” Norman laughs. “Lou and I have basically come up with an idealized version of the next century for us that is hilarious and amazing and realized to a pretty absurd level of detail. The Damn Thang. I love it. It’s quite detailed.”
“Can I hear about it?” Laura sidles up close to Norman’s body and lays her head on his chest.

the Damn Thang

Norman brushes back a strand of her hair which is tickling his nose. “Well, it begins with the beginning of our success and fame as artists. This beginning has had many different forms through the course of my artistic life. As a fifteen-year-old college freshman being taken to Europe by the art professor who wanted to be my mentor, to show my catalogue to a wealthy factory owner/art collector, the easy assumption was that my success would begin with painting. Three years in a row I won the local annual art competition in which my competitors were largely my professors. The last year that I did that, my junior year in college, the competition’s guest judge gave me her number with the suggestion that she set up a show for me at some contemporary art museum in Miami where she was curator. Bonnie Clearwater. I never ended up calling her, though I kept the scrap of paper with her number in my pocket for months.”
“Why didn’t you call her?”
“At that point, Norman basically felt like he had mastered painting too easily, or rather I,” he laughs, catching himself accidentally speaking in the third person, “I felt like I had mastered painting too easily, and also in terms of reaching an audience as an artist, painting is pretty much a dead medium, I felt. I was getting into screenwriting and electronic music on my computer. So one day, not long after I got back from Europe with Karl and Lou, I gave away all of my artwork to students and faculty at the Academy in a whirlwind of righteous impermanence.”
“That’s hot. I wish I had been there that day.”
“It felt hot. It felt sexy. For a while after that, the beginning of my artistic success, it seemed, might come from my music. Briefly, the beginning was supposed to be a pyramid scheme brought into the scene by Karl, out in Seattle, where it seemed to be working for him. For a summer, the beginning was supposed to be the inevitable publishing of Under the Undertow. Then, in South Bend, it seemed for a seductive month like Sylvia was going to fund the filming of The Turing Registry with the inheritance left her by her mother, but in hindsight I don’t know how I could have ever truly believed it could have happened that way. It was too good to be true. And anyway, we were romantically involved, so it was certainly destined for unsuccess. Now, I guess, the big idea is Vivian and her romance novels.”
“I love the idea of you as a romance novelist. If you can write anything like you speak … and fuck, and love, I’m sure you’ll create miracles of romance fiction.”
“Thank you, baby.” He pets her neck softly with the backs of his fingers. “But anyway, however it begins, the first big project is The Turing Registry, which is only a minor financial and/or festival success, but ends up becoming a media conversation topic that brings up a lot of interesting questions about identity and freewill among the public. Word begins to spread about Man-Like Machines.
“The modest success of The Turing Registry allows Lou and me to get a few million dollars to take a small crew down to Mexico to shoot Death and the Ladies, which premieres at Cannes and blows everyone’s minds by how bizarre, hilarious and brilliant it is. It wins at Cannes and we celebrate by spending a month or two in Amsterdam writing the script for our third film, When the Levee Breaks – have I described that one to you yet?”
“No.”
“It’s our post-apocalyptic road-movie romance, which we then proceed to make.
“Through all of this, of course, I obviously also continue to work on my music under the pseudonym Box. Box never quite achieves chart success of any notable kind, but it develops a steadily growing cult following. I also continue to write novels from time to time, between films, and travel the world with my lovers and friends.”
“Lovers?”
“And/or lover,” Norman half-corrects, making a face at himself in his mind. “Along the way, cool people who are down with enlightenment and the Revolution gravitate into the larger friend group. The movement, the tribe, steadily grows.
“Media visibility is inevitable, of course, and within that idiom I, and I hope Lou as well, will be forthright regarding our metaspiritual technological experiments slash wisdoms.
“The first ten films are all planned in a specific order, growing with each step in scope and brilliance toward a culmination with Agamemnon, our five-part science fiction cosmological epic which neither of us have told anyone else about, nor will we until we’re in a position to be making it.”
“How mysterious,” Laura says with a smile.
“Exactly. We drop the name in conversation from time to time and make faces at each other across the room, basking in the brilliance that will be that no one else has any idea about yet. We’re very serious about Agamemnon.”
Norman reaches over Laura to her bedside table, from which he retrieves an ashtray and his cigarettes.
“Do you want a cigarette?”
“Sure.”
Norman lights them each a cigarette.
“Somewhere along the way, a mansion is bought somewhere near Barcelona that is big enough to be shared by all the various members of our tribe and their families – the Communal Mansion, we call it in foresight. Each couple/family has its own wing, except Sylvia, who has said she was to live in some kind of loft apartment above the stable where she keeps both horses and super-intelligent apes.”
Laura laughs.
“That comes to bear later. There’s a net room, consisting of a high-ceilinged room with several levels of nets with square holes spaced evenly about so that one can move up and down between the levels of net, and there are screens on the walls and pillows all over.”
“Awesome.”
“Also, presumably nearer to the end of the course of the films that we have already planned, which would take maybe a couple of decades to make, there is an observatory and a sub base on the coast where Lou’s personal submarine’s mini-sub can park in a secret grotto.
“So, it’s Twenty-twenty-five, maybe Twenty-thirty at this point, assuming we get started in the next few years with novel money or whatever.”
Hunter comes to an end on Laura’s iPod and the Orbital song Style comes on with its softly triumphant eight-bit organ and bouncing beat.
“This is a well-planned future.”
“Yeah; we laid it all out one day. So Agamemnon has blown the world’s mind, and in combination with the decades of awesome underground music, brilliant, bizarre artsploitative films, and metaspiritual novels, there is a small demographic who basically sees us and our crew as effectively prophets of this new post-human renaissance, or at least figureheads of the Evolution. Because it is around this time that, technologically, the distinctions between reality and fiction are falling in the virtual world, in the way that we are able to interface directly with the operating system of existence and the slow transfer from biology to technology is approaching its big moment when we are literally able to immortalize the human soul in a machine brain hundreds, even thousands – hell, to the nth degree – times faster and more powerful.
“The old fundamentalist guard is still in power at this point in most countries of the world, though in a few insignificant Asian and European kingdoms the post-human revolution seems to be taking some sort of genuine form already in terms of a very modern sort of virtual socialist antiocracy.
“By this point, the success of our art and philosophy, and our call for a Revolution of the heart and an Evolution of the mind have brought Norman and Lou to a certain level of bizarre fame and they begin to be seen as key characters within a significant movement in world culture as well. Technology is progressing quickly toward the Machine Enlightenment, more and more of the body is being replaced/redesigned, and Norman and Lou are by this point close in touch with those at the cutting edge of this progress.
“So anyway, after Agamemnon, Lou and Norman take a few months under the rapidly shrinking polar ice cap in Lou’s sub. They meditate and talk and get stoned and write. The way Lou and Norman see it, this will be another time of reflective enlightenment, like in Canada and Amsterdam.”
“You’re using the third person again,” Laura notes with a smile.
“Oh, right.” He shakes his head to clear it. He finds that as he tells this story, he can picture it more clearly than he has ever been able to before, as if finally, somehow, it is approaching a nearness in reality, as if it could actually happen this way now more than it could have in previous moments. This feeling energizes him with an inexplicable potency of spirit.
He continues, “We at some point befriend Sings to Crows, the next Dalai Lama, a Native American boy born in upstate New York who is our biggest fan and through his teenage years wants nothing more than to hang out with us, since we’re so cool. He is an amazing man with staggering wisdom, obviously, even as a kid. Through his adolescence Sing to Crows struggles with finding a balance between Buddhism and the philosophies Lou and I have presented, which he loves but which his Tibetan monk teachers cannot entirely agree with. I like the idea of him at one point acting sort of annoyingly teenaged, and Lou and I relishing the opportunity to ditch the Dalai Lama and go off to a bar or something.”
“I love the Native American Dalai Lama idea. That’s really interesting.”
“Yeah, thanks. That’s actually part of a story we came up with called Sings to Crows that we were going to make into a graphic novel, but at some point it got merged into our planned future because in the story of Sings to Crows, the actual man Sings to Crows grows up reading a graphic novel by Man-Like Machines that basically presages his existence, and that ends up being a big part of why he is so into us.”
“Weird.”
“You know, the Dalai Lama, the living one, Tenzin Gyatso, has already said that he plans to reincarnate next time in America.”
“That’s really interesting.”
“So eventually real estate on the Moon is purchased, and over the course of several years a moonbase is built by Man-Like Machines, which is what Lou and I call our collective artistic Unimind. It is during these years that the majority of the mechanization of our bodies, and those of many of our comrades presumably occurs. The process is slow and gradient, of course. Parts are replaced one by one. I should let you borrow my copy of The Age of Spiritual Machines. By the time the moonbase is ready, I assume the brain has been entirely upgraded.
“Now it’s Twenty-sixty, maybe Twenty-sixty-five. Norman and Lou are both clouds of foglets that can take any form that is called for, run by a central mind thousands of times more powerful than our original human brains and consisting of a two-inch crystalline nucleus in the center of the nanocloud, or whatever it ends up being. Much of the time, at first, of course, we would presumably hold the shapes of somewhat-idealized versions of our young human selves.”
“Mmm, I should hope so,” Laura says, gliding her palm along the skin of his stomach.
Norman is getting progressively more wrapped up in his story and less aware of the real scene around himself. He can see, in his mind’s eye, all of the things he describes happening. Though he does not notice at first, in his mind the role of Norman is played by someone else, someone at once familiar and unfamiliar to him.
“So Norman, Lou and the rest of the Revolution all move to the moonbase. There, society is set up in whatever enlightened way they have collectively designed throughout the previous forty years or so, and everything is hip. All the old greed and violence and vengefulness that was brought about by human need is utterly absent on the Revolution area of the moonbase.
“There are other settlements, other nations, where things hold on a while longer to the old ways, mostly settlers from China paid by their neo-capitalist government to live in the dangerous conditions on the dark side of the Moon.
“Now down on Earth, the Dalai Lama, who ended up choosing Buddhism instead of the Revolution/Evolution – perhaps there is some minor falling out between us at some point, but he comes back to our vision later on and totally transcends the two – he is voted into office in Twenty-sixty as the youngest president in American history. The United States, after the political fallout from China’s nuking of Taipei, has become legally split into five distinct regions with different federal laws – New England with its capital in New York City, the South with its capital quite controversially in Houston, the Midwest with its capital in St. Louis, the Northwest with its capital in Portland and Southwest with its capital in Phoenix. These regions share only the Constitution and a language, anymore, and one of those is falling away. When Sings to Crows wins the election, the South proclaims once and for all that they are officially seceding again. All but the southern politicians leave Washington, forcing the new president to be inaugurated in and thereafter work out of New York City.
“Sings to Crows’ first act as president is to cut the entire military budget as a gesture of peace to the rest of the world, and propose that they, the rest of the world, do the same. In shock, more than half of the rulers of the rest of the world follow suit almost immediately, because over the past several decades obviously the general state of mind in the human Zeitgeist has seen that this is achievable, indeed necessary for the human race, and this is, of course, partially influenced by the messages in the artwork of Man-Like Machines as well as other Revolution/Machine-Enlightenment artists and thinkers. By the end of his first year in office, only four countries in the world still have militaries – China, who simply refused to go along, and Japan, India and Mongolia who all have promised to join the world in peace only once China agrees as well.”
In the middle of Norman’s storytelling, Style moves into the Flaming Lips song A Spoonful Weighs a Ton.
“How far into the future does this vision go?” Laura asks.
“I’m sorry; I’m boring you.”
“Not at all,” she replies cutely, with an extra-soft caress to assure him she means it. “I was just curious. Go on.”
Norman laughs, “Because it goes a few billion more years into the future.”
“Oh wow.”
“Yeah. So anyway, that’s the plan.”
“You never got back to the apes. How do they play in later? Just tell me about the apes.”
“Oh, well Sylvia ends up becoming some kind of messianic queen of the apes, and Evil Lou – at some point, after we’re in machine bodies, our friend Steve creates an evil Crew, which is to say opposite versions of me and Lou and him and our other friend Darren – Evil Lou ends up sort cyberifying the apes, through which they sort-of partially enlighten, but Sylvia trains them to be full-on Catholic also, so they’re these super-intelligent Catholic cyber apes, and they have crucifix nunchucks and shit.”
“Awesome,” Laura laughs. “Is that it?”
“I think maybe they help defend the Moon when China invades the moonbase, or something.”
“China invades the moonbase?”
“Well their colony declares independence, wants to join the Revolution.”
“Nice,” Laura nods.
“And we, of course,” Norman says with a wry smile, shifting into a mock-Texan impression of President Bush, “we have an obligation to Lunar freedom.”
Laura laughs and sits up a bit against the pillows so she can retrieve another cigarette from her pack on the bedside shelf. “You know, Norman,” she says, then stops and looks at him for a moment, glowing with that partially-repressed smile that always seems to accentuate her sublime beauty, “I’ve never felt this way so quickly, so passionately with someone. You’re really somebody special. There’s something wonderful about you. I can hardly believe it sometimes. I’m so lucky you really love me.”
“I know, it’s been weird,” Norman begins.
“It’s been wonderful,” Laura assures him with three fingertips to his shoulder.
“I know it all began very weirdly and … though,” he stutters, feeling like a director who wants to discuss the play with the audience in the middle of the performance somehow without breaking the suspension of disbelief. “I mean, I’m just really grateful that you’re willing to rock things this way with me.”
“How could I not be willing?” Laura laughs. “This is so gorgeous. I’m so passionate with you … about you. You’re an incredible lover; you have an incredible mind. It’s like I never really dreamed that love could be like this, even though I always felt like the possibility … that ideal of love, like the Aristotelian perfection of it … I think in my mind that kind of love I always imagined was just like the kind I’ve found with you. I love loving you.” She shakes her head in disbelief, gazing at him. Then she leans quickly in for a kiss that ends up lasting several minutes and brings them back down to a supine position, their legs and bodies entwined, their faces inches apart.
“I really am in love with you,” Norman says.
Laura gets an uncertain look on her face. “Did you,” she asks slowly, “did you really know that you would love me, before you met me? When you wrote me that message?” She looks like a girl speaking to her first real unicorn.
Norman takes a moment to think seriously about her question. He goes back to those moments at Lee’s kitchen computer, writing those enigmatic words that somehow just seemed to flow from him, as if he was channeling some other spirit. But the words were very much his own, and about him, so the idea that he had been channeling didn’t make sense. Either way, he remembers something very genuine about the artistic spirit he was in at the time, and in his memory of writing the words I am Norman Newman, and I am in love with you, he can remember the way he felt, the total compassion and love for his reader, and at the time perhaps he did not realize the distinct characteristics that reader would have, these soft hips and warm eyes, but yes, he was already in love with her then, absolutely.
“Yes,” he says with certainty, looking down into her waiting eyes, and then he kisses her again.
After their kiss has ended and Laura is lying with her head on Norman’s chest, she says up to the air, “You did lie about one thing, though. You do exist.” She squeezes his body in her arms. “Anyway, don’t pinch me if it’s just a dream,” she adds after a moment’s introspection, still looking at the air above them.
In his imagination (though not by his own willful choice, he notes), Norman senses the presence of Sam the Demon sitting on his shoulder, sweetly licking his earlobe like a happy kitten. Having heard Laura’s comment, apparently, Sam pinches Norman’s earlobe and whispers playfully, but with a hint of cynicism, “Don’t pinch me, don’t pinch me…” while Norman tries to pretend he is imagining no such thing.

Giving more than they had,
the process had begun;
a million came from one;
the limits now were none.
Being drunk on their plan,
they lifted up the Sun.