Chapter 14: A Divine Congress?

14

No way of knowing if she’s ever coming back
No way of knowing if I care or not
No way of knowing if she’s right or if she’s wrong
No way of knowing if I’ll carry on

The Chemical Brothers song Alive Alone rings out at a Halloween party in a dreamscape of interconnected rooms taken from every corner of Norman’s memory. He stands with a Jack and coke in one hand and a cigarette in the other, Sylvia and Imogen on either side of him. Sylvia is a nun and Imogen is supposedly ‘the dove of peace’ though she looks more like an angel or something. Norman can feel both of them loving him at once. He wonders suddenly if he has some sort of psychic organ that picks up such energies, or what.
“I wonder if I have some sort of psychic organ, or whatever,” he says aloud to the two women, “that picks up vibes and feelings and such.”
Imogen and Sylvia eye him and each other suspiciously, smiling.
“Feels like I do sometimes,” he continues, looking back up at the party surrounding them. Many of the young artists and musicians from the South Bend scene are here, as are a smattering of Laura’s friends whom Norman has met in passing while with her, and even some Indiana Academy students whom Norman has not seen in several years. They are all dancing to the Chemical Brothers in Lee’s basement, but not the way it looks now – the way it looked when he shared the space with Imogen, with the walls covered by her drawings and Hindu cloths.
“Aww,” Imogen sighs, “being here makes me miss Lee and the boys.” She looks up at Norman with a smile, but he finds he cannot sympathetically smile back at her like he once would have. All he can do is shake his head apologetically and pull away from her grasp.
Imogen and Sylvia both watch Norman questioningly as he walks backward away from them, toward the basement stairs. He ascends carefully, passing his Academy girlfriend Karen, who is on her way down into the party.
At the top the stairs open up into the middle of a public square in Budapest late at night. Norman recognizes the space instantly, as he has often fondly recalled romping recklessly there with Lou, but in this dream he doesn’t remember quite where it is or even that it was in Budapest specifically (Eastern Europe was among the more drunkenly experienced of the parts of his trip).
Norman finishes the cigarette that he had been smoking and flicks it away to the side as he ambles out into the square. High up in the sky, the full moon illuminates some surrounding clouds. He can still feel the bass of the Chemical Brothers song coming up from below, and quietly he sings along to himself as he thinks about Imogen and Sylvia and how fucked the whole situation is.
“…and I’m alive, and I’m alone, and I never wanted to be either of those…”
Then Norman stops in his tracks, as standing in front of him is his old teacher entity from his dreams at the Pool – that white-haired man in the white suit, gray shirt and black tie.
“Hello, Norman,” he says with a smile.
“Dude, who are you?” Norman asks the entity. “I must be dreaming, huh? That…” He looks around himself at the Budapest square, the surreal sky. “Yeah, that explains things. Interesting.” He turns back to the teacher entity. “What’s up? Why are you here? Things aren’t like this anymore. It’s the future now.” It strikes some higher version of himself that he is being very strange in this dreamscape, and can’t seem to connect thoughts to each other as normal.
“I have to show you something new,” the old man replies. “Something you may need.”
“I don’t know if I’m in good shape right now mentally to take in new information,” he admits, somewhat embarrassed.
“You’re fine. You’ll retain it whether you realize it or not. I promise.”
Norman furrows his brow in mild awe and nods.
“Alright now, keep your mind’s eye open,” the old man instructs, and closes his eyes. He stands perfectly still, his head lowered slightly as if in reverence.
Then the old man opens his eyes and looks up, smiles and steps toward Norman. When he steps off to the side another version of the old man is revealed, still standing there with his eyes closed and head lowered. The version that stepped forward touches Norman’s shoulder and looks back at the one whose eyes are closed.
He opens them and nods to Norman. “Do you see?” he asks.
“All too darkly,” a cynical voice booms in Norman’s ears, causing him to look about himself to find the origin of the voice. When he looks back at the two old men, they are both gone.
“Back to sleep,” the Heisenburglar whispers, ebbing in, superimposed over everything for the long final moment of Norman’s dreaming.

Awakened in the dark by a mysterious sound like a hundred fax machines all sending his brain information at once, Norman suddenly sits up in bed. The sound rings in his ears metallically. A curious energy fills his body with a certain weightlessness, causing him to stand out of bed with what feels like no effort.
He turns on his computer and puts on his headphones. The bright screen soon eclipses all ambient light from the window to his left, shrinking the scene to just Norman lit by his monitor. He opens up a media player on his computer and puts his music on shuffle.
Whatever dream had been happening in his mind just before the strange sound, it briefly ebbs back into Norman’s awareness – no visuals or sounds, just the feeling that he had in the dream. It is one of preternatural peace. He feels like he may have been having some kind of epiphany that was interrupted, and he becomes angry at the sound that awakened him. In defiance of it, he decides to try to return to the dream.
Sitting naked in the dark, whitely illuminated by the screen, headphones on, Norman escapes again into his mind. His mind is a place where Norman feels very comfortable. He has spent a great deal of time here throughout his life. For him, it is as if he simply turns around while his body remains still, seated, smoking a cigarette coolly with its eyes half-shut and fluttering under their lids.

a Divine Congress?

The first barrier is simple darkness. Crossing through this lens has become as simple for Norman as brushing aside a curtain. This time, in his mind, he does so with a grand flourish of a gesture. He has recently orgasmed inside a woman, so he is calm and confident.
The second room is always new, never quite what he remembers it to have been. It seems to him as if it is there to hypnotize, to mystify, to confuse the traveler away from further exploration. The second room is where visions and sounds of seemingly random origin overwhelm the mind. One’s fears and desires take every unexpected shape and rattle their subconscious implications like they’re trying to frighten demons. The daimonic psychic-guardians of the Outer Realms?
The song War, What Is It Good For? rolls aggressively into his headphones as Norman astrally steps forward into the second room. The air is bright orange and yellow, foggy and out of focus. The harsh funk of War, What Is It Good For? brings a chorus line of quivering ape soldiers forward from the mist, each gripping a rifle in its powerful black hands and shaking it as the row dances toward Norman.
Norman dispels the illusion with a dart of thought. The apes become masses of butterflies that dissipate in an instant into the aether.
He glances momentarily behind himself, back through the window of his eye, at the dark room in which his body is sitting. Despite the potency of his illusion-shattering thought dart, Norman can feel the ghosts of the apes, his memory of them really, still fluttering about his head. His experience has taught him that he needs to get through to the third room before long, or the psychedelic automatons of the second room will enrapture him enough that he will have to come out of trance to remember what he was doing and then go through it all again.
He retrieves a spiritual mnemonic device he has developed for this very moment – a small white disc that his spirit can find at any time in its pocket (when he reaches for them, his spirit has pockets) that is endowed with the ability to remind him of the fundamental unity of existence, the infinity of its dimension, and the delusion of distinction. He wonders briefly where in the multiverse his disc waits for him to grope for it, if it could ever be stolen, or if it is simply a part of his own greater soul material. Before he forgets, he creates a lever in front of himself that will turn the second room on its axis, allowing him access to the third room.
He puts the disc back in his pocket, pulls the lever, and then takes off, away at a ninety-degree angle from this space-time of ours.
It takes only a moment of mental effort.
Norman is now floating in empty space. Terror is an instinctive reaction to one’s sudden entrance to the third room, but Norman’s faith in himself allows him to bear it.
So far, none of this is new to him. But the third room is an unsettling place. As far as Norman understands it, he is no longer within Our World. The silver cord that keeps him alive in his body during this whole endeavor is still warmly glowing against his spirit’s back, but the fear is still ever-present that he might not be able to return. Norman has only been to the third room six times before, and has never felt confident enough to explore. His previous excursions have all been little more than peeks through a keyhole. The impact of the void feels like the sky must for Atlas, impatiently ushering him back down into the world. This time, however, with the inspiration of his dream in his hands, Norman is able to weather the uncertainty and remain.
His eyes slowly adjust to the void, revealing that it is in fact no void. Distant points of light fade into view like stars in space. He knows not to turn around in the manner that he did to enter this mindspace, as doing so would reveal the blinding light of everything and every moment of our universe, the light from which he has just emerged, the super-eye through which he is looking, perhaps. He moves forward, out, focusing his intent on a random point of light in the distance.
He does not even realize what has happened for a moment; he’s suddenly standing in the center of a huge marble room in a world where it seems like there is another axis of space. Everything feels inappropriately curved, yet straight.
Considering the nature of his experiences at the moment, it strikes Norman that he does not feel like he is in a dream. From thin air he finds he can produce a small box that contains the experience of his physical body’s floor spasms. He raises a spiritual eyebrow and puts the box away, back into thin air.
“Norman?” comes a voice from behind him.
Norman is hesitant to turn around. He tries to dispel any illusion around him with a thought dart, but the dart simply sails forward and sticks into the floor several meters away from him as if it is no longer a thought-metaphor he is creating in his mind, but a real thing that travels a real distance and then collides with something that is real.
Now the fear is able to get one of its stingers under Norman’s skin. He feels his distant body’s instinct to pull him back, and for a moment he wonders if he will be thrust back into the world, but he remembers some potent quality of the mystery dream from which he recently awoke, squeezes it in his hand, and remains where he is. It feels as if all of the power of his personal coolness is being routed into this strange bubble that keeps him here despite the many levels of absurdity and paradox contradicting it.
“Where am I?” he asks the air, looking up and around himself. The ceiling is at least four stories up, painted bright blue.
A thin young man in a black-and-white-striped shirt and black pants steps around Norman from the side, eyeing him with uncertainty.
“I’m Norman Newman,” Norman says shakily to the man. “What’s your name?”
The thin man quixotically shrugs with his mouth and raises one eyebrow (a curious, Normanish gesture). He shakes his head. “Do you remember me?” he asks. The man’s voice is familiar somehow, and a glimmer of recognition comes upon Norman, but he can’t sense from where.
“You look familiar,” Norman notes. “Have we met?”
“We have,” says the man with a satisfied smile. “You do remember.”
“Is that you, Sam?” Norman asks, thinking about the entity that he evicted from Ben’s heart a few days earlier in his imagination/the astral plane.
The man shakes his head and he smiles a bit. “No, Sam’s right there on your shoulder.”
Norman looks right (he usually has to strain his neck to see his right shoulder [having no right eye], but in this space, in whatever sort of body he is in, it does not hurt to do so) and there he sees Sam, only about two inches high now, perched on his shoulder. Norman smiles and says, “Oh. Hey there, Sam.” Sam’s little demon head turns and looks up at Norman, then back to the young man who Norman has been talking to. Norman, too, turns back to the thin man.
“He must be there all the time,” Norman says with a pleased smile.
“You should go through that door,” the thin man says, pointing across the room to a small archway that leads into a nebulous space.
“Where am I?” Norman doesn’t give him time to answer before he asks, “Are you Ishmael?”
“No. You really shouldn’t hesitate too much longer. It’s important that you go right now.”
“What’s in there?”
The man shrugs as if he is unsure how to describe it. “A divine congress?” he says like it is a question.
Norman stares at the man for a moment, then, with his dream in his fist and a demon on his shoulder, strides across the wide marble room and out through the archway into a great, glowing arena. Once he steps through it, Norman realizes that nothing is what he is accustomed to where he is now. The arena is unlike anything he has seen before. Its colors are all new; he has words for nothing he can see. It is all in the same color as whoever was sitting in that booth at the side of the road in the Upper World in Norman’s shamanic journey. Here, however, even the shapes and forms of what he sees are near-indescribable. He looks back through the doorway for a moment at the marble room on the other side where he first appeared, and wonders why that room didn’t seem as alien as the outside now does. A sort of airlock?
Norman turns back to his surroundings and stands still for a moment while he takes in the sight. He can see an enormous rise in all directions like the bleachers of a coliseum or the hills around a huge crater, and perched along the top of this rise are seven colossal figures as beautiful as he would imagine the greatest of gods would be. They glow like suns and are covered with gorgeous details, none of which correspond to any earthly image. Below the huge seven at the top of the ridge, hundreds of smaller beings crowd the hill in all directions, spreading all the way down to the base of the rise, about ten steps ahead of Norman in any direction. The great mass of beings writhes in the field of his vision, striking awe in Norman’s heart that almost sends him instantly back into his body.
The gods are engaged in a web of heated discussions about the World. Norman can hear them arguing, though it is difficult to follow any single thread.
“The time has come for final measures!”
“The three toughest levels still await them.”
“They don’t even know where to put the key…”
“Your lies do no good, Sir, for any of us.”
“Did you hear what I heard about Google?”
“Never! Never! I will burn it down!”
“There just aren’t enough beating hearts. It’s that simple…”
“We still have one working. His orders are not yet fulfilled.”
“I will miss the World.”
The longer he looks around, the more information he sees in the shimmering scene before him. Each individual entity seems to flash with concepts, archetypes, ideas, just like words do when Norman is astrally projecting.
Norman takes three steps forward into their midst and confidently holds his recent dream high above his head in a tight fist.
He is about to speak his name, but a moment’s fleeting voice from his shoulder dissuades him from revealing it yet. “I am Vivian Nin,” he declares, and the voice he imagines Vivian Nin would have seems to echo a thousand times from every direction (though in his head, his voice is his own, making him wonder if he also appears as Vivian to this crowd). “I come in peace from the human race. May I speak?”
The mob of gods seems to turn and all their conversations quickly fall away, spreading silence. Norman brings his fist back down to his side.
A few long moments of silence pass as Norman thinks about what to ask first.
“Where did you come from?” asks a small, plain-looking (in comparison to the fabulous gods around it) being near the base of the hill, not far from Norman. When Norman looks closely at the being, it flashes with information in the form of intuitive zeitgeist-half-impressions that here seem to take a kind of subliminal visual form: Peter Jennings, Socrates, Philip Marlowe, Jean-Luc Picard…
Norman thinks for a moment, unsure quite what would be the appropriate answer to that question in his current situation.
“I’m a human being. I’ve just come from our world.”
Laughter begins with the one that had asked Norman the question and quickly spreads among those around it. When the entities laugh, the archetypal images that are flashing within them also laugh (Princess Diana laughing, The Time-To-Make-The-Donuts Guy laughing, Poseidon laughing, Fred Ward as Henry Miller laughing…).
“I come from the essential duality at the core of all things, just like you,” Norman says hesitantly.
Li Mu Bai laughing, Elizabeth Wurtzel laughing, Annie Oakley laughing, Thothmes III laughing…
Norman realizes suddenly that he is naked, but bears the pangs of embarrassment until they dissipate. In fact, as all the gods laugh around him, it strikes Norman that, even naked and confused, he is cooler, more potent somehow, than any of them. He feels his cock swell a bit as a chill of erotic pride passes through him.
“I’m an explorer. Where am I, please?” He directs the question further up the hill toward the big seven at the top. They seem to ignore the query. “I believe I may have been summoned here in a dream. I don’t know. Or maybe I received a message of some sort. Is this some kind of divine congress?” He feels that repeating the specific words used by the man in the marble room might give him some kind of credibility here, for some reason.
“What is your name?” a particularly friendly-seeming being (William Burroughs, Marcus Aurelius, Buddha, Magnum P.I.) at the top of the hill asks Norman.
“I am Norman Newman,” Norman replies, making sure to enunciate clearly and carry himself with confidence and grace though in truth his mind is completely blown and there is an overpowering desire in his heart to just remark, “Dude,” with enthusiasm at all that is surrounding him.
“This is not a place for mortals, Mr. Newman,” a minor god (Jeeves, Launchpad McQuack, Wyatt Earp, John Cleese as the ultra-polite man in the Muppet Movie) not far from Norman whispers to him, as if to help him avoid embarrassment.
“Hey, I’m here; I’m talking to you guys,” Norman says with growing frustration. “Why should I be shut out of your thing? I want to be recognized here. I am not just a man. I’m whatever more this is that I am, and just because my people don’t really have a word for this, or a clear understanding of it or whatever, doesn’t mean that I can’t understand it, that I can’t be here and do things up here. I’m here. I’m talking to you guys. Where are we?”
“Let the human speak,” booms a powerful voice from the far end of the big seven gods at the top of the rise.
“Maybe he can help,” remarks a voice in the crowd, “be a hand.”
“You would burn yourself again, reaching a hand into Hell?” another Big Seven god (Magneto, Steve McQueen, Laertes, Anansi) retorts.
“Wait,” Norman shouts, trying to be heard over the bickering deities, “what is it you need help with? What’s going on? Is it the Machine Enlightenment? Global climate disaster? The future of mankind? Is something wrong?”
“Stop wasting our time asking questions to which you already know the answers,” Blackbeard/Bukowski/Bach/de Beauvoir bellows. “You think you’re the Son of Man, but you’re just a man. Fall back to your mortal world.”
“Mortal?” Norman shouts back, annoyed. “You must not be very prescient if you can’t see what the human race is about to do. Can you not see the Machine Enlightenment coming? We’re not mortal for long, motherfuckers. I’m here from a stack of bones and skin. Just wait until we have our robot bodies.”
“Robot bodies?” asks one of the minor gods (Rick Moranis’ character in Ghostbusters, Li’l Abner, King Solomon, B. A. Baracus) on the bank of the hill above.
“That’s right, amigo, robot bodies,” Norman shouts across the opalescent crowd. “We’re opening up new realities; we’re developing the technology to actually travel, with ever-growing existential resolution, to other dimensions, indeed, to create such dimensions. Immortal machine bodies with potentially thousands, billions of times the power of the human brain. I think you are about to see the human universe blow up in a big way. I can’t believe you guys don’t know about the coming Machine Enlightenment.”
“They cannot see it,” comes a voice from above that causes all the gathered gods to turn their heads up toward the shimmering sky, “because they will not survive it.”
Nervous whispers spread through the crowd of gods. Norman follows their gazes and sees a blackness like no blackness he has ever seen before spreading in the sky, almost throbbing with life like a breathing void. With a pang of fear in his heart he intuitively recognizes the presence – it is the Heisenburglar.
“Your humans are already dead. The singularity will be the final great failure. Give up, my friend, and gratefully feed a superior being your soul.”
The void pulses and retracts in on itself like an undulating jellyfish, then disappears again. The sky becomes a screen displaying images from various earthly news channels of war, famine, greed, misery.
Norman rejects the spiritual instinct to be ashamed.
“Fuck you, man. That shit is out. You’re showing me the scars from a rash that is healing! You’re showing me the lamest parts of a mostly totally awesome species. What you’re not showing is things like the Paris Commune, or the film Waking Life, or Guernica, or David Lynch and that foundation he’s starting to advance transcendental meditation education, or that guy who invented the micro-loan! I’m talking about the shit that is going to bring us together, to advance the ideals of peace and knowledge and empathy and compassion that will allow us to enlighten as a macro-entity, to bring our interests to bear against you meddling god-beasts! You’re the ones who are inferior – you’re in my mind!”
He tries to cast another thought dart to dispel their illusionary forms, if there are any, but again the dart flies out of his hand a real thing and is swiped out of the air by a glowing, invisible tendril of one god or another’s. “Look out; he’s shooting at us!” someone yells. This startles Norman, reminding him that he does not know how things work where he is, and it brings up just enough doubt within his heart that his firm presence here becomes uncertain. He feels himself beginning to blink back to his body.
“There will be no enlightenment for mankind,” the voice of one of the Big Seven gods, who seem to have been just as terrified by the Heisenburglar’s display as Norman was, softly blares from on high. “You are the one who is blind to the future. Your weeping universe does not awaken. It is a rock. You are swamp gas, aurora activity. You will fade from here like a note in the air. There’s nothing we can do.”
An invisible hand reaches down from above and plucks the silver cord leading back into Our World on Norman’s back like a string on an instrument, at which he awakens, seizing, on the hardwood floor of Laura’s apartment, headphones blasting one of his own Box songs which, at the moment of his waking, consists only of a manic breakbeat accompanied by his own falsetto wail.
Over the music Norman murmurs (shouting, in his mind), “Damn it, damn it, fuck you, and fuck you, and fuck you…” at the gods before him, who he slowly realizes are nothing more than fading afterimages on his retinas.
He lies there on his side for some time after he has fully come back into his senses, staring torpidly and shuddering with what he has just experienced. His brain feels heavy, full of blood.
While he is in this state, Norman experiences a quartet of little red shapes of light like the remnants of staring at a candelabra in the dark, and a distinct impression of specific words comes to him, in his own inner voice, but as if it has been passed to him from those four bits of light on a note.

HEISENBURGLAR GENUINE THREAT TO UNIVERSE
IMPERATIVE THAT YOU COME TO END OF THE EARTH
HELP US STOP HEAT DEATH OF THE SOUL
REAP AT LAST WHAT YOU HAVE SEWN

The Box song that had been playing in his headphones whistles its long, slow denouement, ushering in the next song in the randomization, the furiously nihilistic song Last by Nine Inch Nails. Norman’s left earlobe stings suddenly, causing him to adjust the way the headphones rest on it. He remembers when it stung before, in the garage with Ben, and pictures the demon Sam. He touches his earlobe between his thumb and forefinger. There is a small lump there that is slightly tender to the touch.
Norman climbs up into the chair from which he must have fallen while in trance, one hand to his headphones to keep them on. He wakes his computer with a shake of its mouse; the white monitor snaps back to brightness. Though he does not recall opening it, a blank Word document awaits him. Without really thinking, he writes.

I am more human than human. I am some kind of angelic beast returned. But from a higher dimensional perspective, ‘returned’ just means aware of my future portions, right, sort of?
They know me up there. I could tell. They were expecting me. Did they summon me?
Something is actually happening. “This is something that happens.”
Everything is fuzzy/magic/art.
I Am the World. I Am the Author, the Audience, the Protagonist and the Paper and the Ink and the
I am You.
All I’m really ever trying to do is convince whomever I can that I am actually them, that they are thinking these things.
Look yourself in the eye, Norman. There I am. We never really lost contact.
See, how I can speak and hear through you? These words, mine, in your brain? We’ve already divided up the Earth. Let’s not claim ownership over a thought, hmm?
Jesus. Something is actually happening.
HEISENBURGLAR GENUINE THREAT TO UNIVERSE
IMPERATIVE THAT YOU COME TO END OF THE EARTH
HELP US STOP HEAT DEATH OF THE SOUL
REAP AT LAST WHAT YOU HAVE SEWN

He looks at the words, now actual words in the world and not just echoing impressions given to him by four little blobs of fading light on his mental retina. Now that they are real words, it strikes Norman that they might actually mean something.
He sits in quiet thought for some time with the Word document open in front of him until his screensaver begins cycling slowly through pictures from one of his folders, fading between images from the past few years of him and Lou and Eleanor and Imogen and Sylvia peppered with the occasional Card reading photograph or Turing Registry storyboard page or Box album cover.
After a few minutes he removes his headphones, turns off his monitor and returns to bed, where Laura, though fast asleep, presses her back and ass against him and softly whimpers, instinctively inviting him to hold her in the darkness.