Chapter 4: The State of the Species

4

There are four cats waiting by the front door when Norman pulls his black Mirage into the driveway of his sister Lee’s modest sky-blue house at the end of a wooded cul-de-sac in Cape Elizabeth, an affluent suburb of Portland. The small yard is speckled with a warm palette of leaves.
Norman notes with relief that Imogen’s car is not in the driveway.
(Imogen has been nannying for Lee’s two boys ever since she moved out of the house she and Norman had been sharing with their friend [her ex-lover/his ex-student] Sylvia Miller in South Bend, Indiana, that past winter. He officially broke off his relationship with Imogen in the spring and she moved back out to Lee’s basement, until Norman moved back out to Portland himself a few weeks ago and she felt she had to find a place of her own. She now shares a small apartment on the west end of Portland with a woman she doesn’t really know. To Norman the apartment looks disarmingly like home [he and Imogen having lived together for most of the past three years and she having a dominantly dark style of interior design]. The one time he saw the place it made him sad enough that he hasn’t been back. Still, he sees Imogen most afternoons when she comes over to watch the boys after school. Despite his desire that they somehow remain close friends, their current relationship remains uncomfortable.)
Norman finishes his cigarette and puts it out on the sole of his shoe, puts the butt in his coat pocket. He waves to Lewis, whose head is mischievously peeking over the bottom of one of the dining room windows.
As soon as Norman is inside, Lewis runs up and wraps his little arms around Norman’s waist. “Hello, Uncle Norman. It’s good to see you. I got to level twelve in World of Warfare and now my guy can use two axes, and I can weave my own clothes. I have weaving four. Jason only has weaving two. I made this one shirt for my friend Raven861 that has flames on it that I drew myself.” Lewis is ten years old, with a face that in ten more years will devastate hearts and is already framed by shoulder-length blonde rockstar hair.
“Awesome,” Norman says, patting Lewis on the shoulder and trying to will him to let go of his waist.
“Are we playing D&D again tomorrow night?” Lewis asks Norman’s hip.
“Only if you stop squeezing me within five seconds.” After a few obstinate moments, Lewis lets go and runs back into the dining room where his computer is set up in the corner by a bookshelf full of Philip K. Dick, Edgar Cayce and Buddhism.
“How are you doing, Jason?” Norman asks his other nephew, who is immersed in a game of Civilization on the kitchen computer. Jason is twelve. He is in the very beginning of his growth spurt, such that he always seems surprisingly tall to Norman even though he is only yet about five foot two.
“Hello, Uncle Norman,” Jason replies without looking up.
“How goes the course of human history?” Norman asks, hovering by Jason’s shoulder to look at the game. “Who are you?”
“The Indians.”
“Oh, did you choose them because of their super-fast workers?”
“No, I like the color, and I like to go for Buddhism, and they’re spiritual.”
“Right on.”
Norman looks up as Lee walks into the kitchen from the living room, carrying the Sunday New York Times under her arm and two dirty plates in her hands. “I refuse to be your slave,” she calls out to Lewis as she enters the room and sets the dishes on the counter.
Lee is thirty-eight but looks late-twenties, tall, with long auburn hair disallowed to ever turn its natural gray. The lines of middle age are just beginning to appear, and somehow they only seem to make her young face lovelier. Lee, being thirteen years older than Norman, functioned largely through his early life as a surrogate mother when their mother was away or depressed or dealing with one of their other three siblings. Since then, as he has grown up, they have become very close friends. Now, once again, he is living in her basement.
“Hello, Lee. I see you have the Times.”
“Hello, Norman. I was wondering when we’d see you next.”
“Yeah, I ended up spending the weekend with Laura,” Norman says with a modest smile.
“I figured that was what happened.” She eyes him with mock suspicion. “So I guess you guys hit it off, then, hmm?”
Norman nods, “I guess so.”
“I was going to call you today to remind you of your interview tomorrow, but you don’t have a cell. You should give me Laura’s number next time you stay over there.”
“Yeah, I’ll see about that,” Norman nods.
“We’re having stir fry; I hope that’s alright with you.”
“Cool, cool. Is Imogen not around?”
“No,” Lee says, turning to look Norman in the eye. “She doesn’t work today; it’s Sunday. I think she said she was going to go draw down by Two Lights. But she was by yesterday for a while. She asked where you were. I hope you don’t mind. I assumed you were with Laura. I don’t think she would have believed me if I had said, just, like, ‘I don’t know.’ You know? Is it okay that I told her you were with Laura?”
“Of course it is,” Norman shrugs. “She knew I was going to meet Laura; I mentioned it to her on Wednesday. How did she seem yesterday?”
“She seemed to be doing okay. But she did leave looking a little upset. It’s a lot of things, I’m sure. She’s looking for other work, for the evenings, and not having an easy time. She feels lonely out there in her new apartment. She got used to being around family. Well, our family, I mean, but you know.”
“I know.”
“She just misses having company she knows.” Lee makes herself smile, but the sadness peeking through it makes her look like a little girl. Her lower lip even quivers a little when she tries to smile. “I miss her, too. She’s my friend.”
“I know. She’s my friend, too.”
“I know you know,” Lee sighs, smacking Norman’s arm with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry. You know. Anyway, she’s doing fine, and she’s probably having a lovely time by the ocean on such a sunny day.”
“I’m sure she is.” He can picture Imogen sitting on the rocks by the ocean, but he can only picture it from the perspective of himself sitting next to her in similar, previous iterations of the scene, and seeing it from that angle makes him realize that next to her wherever she is now there is only air, and to avoid remorse he tries to clear his mind of the whole train of thought.
Norman idly steps through the short hallway to the large white living room that is glowing with afternoon sunlight. A Chet Baker album is playing on the stereo – irrefutable evidence that Ben is home, since Lee has gotten sick enough of hearing Chet Baker all the time that she often complains half-jokingly throughout the record whenever he plays one, and would never put one on herself.
“Where’s Ben?” Norman asks in the direction of the kitchen.
“He’s downstairs folding laundry. Do you want to have a cigarette with me in the garage and tell me about this girl?”
“Sure, sure.”
“I just have to get my coat.” She opens the hall closet by the kitchen and retrieves her fuzzy-collared brown coat. “Boys, I’m going to be in the garage with Uncle Norman, having a cigarette.”
“We know, Mom,” Lewis whines. “We heard you talking to him about it. Jeez. We’re right here.”
“I’ll be right back,” she adds patiently, and walks with Norman out through the breezeway door to the garage, in which several old, torn-up easy chairs are arrayed like a little living room, all facing each other with a rickety coffeetable in the middle, covered with stereo magazines. Beside the makeshift living room is a huge mound of boxes and various old furniture that goes almost to the ceiling of the garage (much of it remnants of Norman and Imogen’s life together). The garage door is open, as it is a cool but sunny day.
“You mind having the garage open, for the sunlight?” Lee asks as they step out.
“Not at all.” Norman sits down in an old Victorian-style chair with soft cushions and wooden arms, yellow and red paisleys all over the fabric, one corner shredded by cat claws. He lights a cigarette and pulls an ashtray close on the coffeetable. “How was the weekend here?”
“It was okay. It was a little tough. Just little echoes of the same old bullshit.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” Norman asks, knowing that Lee’s response means that she and Ben got into some kind of arbitrary argument that reopened old wounds and ended badly (this is a common event).
“No, I really don’t need to. It’s over; it’s dealt with.” Lee sighs as she lights a cigarette. “You didn’t come back out here to worry about me again. Thank you, though. I want to hear about you. How was your date-slash-weekend?”
“Good.” Norman smiles, recalling some of the sexier moments of the past two nights. “Laura is very cool. Everything about this whole thing feels very right. I talked to her a lot about the book and such, and she seemed to be down with it all.”
“And what does she do?”
“She’s a writer, too. She used to be a poet, and now she’s a novelist, but she’s not published either. She’s sort of very idly working on a mystery novel.”
“A mystery novel, hmm,” Lee muses skeptically.
“She’s sort of financially independent, I gather, presumably from inheritance. Her parents died when she was in high school, in some kind of private plane crash. I gather they were fairly well off. She has an English degree from USM and an almost-degree in the harp from some music school in Cleveland. Her father was somehow involved in the creation of Esperanto, and I gather her mother was from some kind of minor Virginian aristocracy. She grew up on an island off the coast of Maine, somewhere north of here, that her father’s family owns.”
“Ah,” Lee says with a grin, “an Esperanto heiress. How dramatic.”
“I don’t know. She’s very enigmatic. But she’s lovely and charming and classy, and I find myself fully digging her.”
“You look happy.”
“I am happy.”
“That’s really good to see. I’ve been worried about you, but I can see now that you’ll be fine. I knew you’d be fine. I just didn’t know how specifically. Do you think you’ll see her again?”
Norman laughs. “I think I’ll see her again very soon, and hopefully often. Yeah, it’s like that. I feel very good about being with her. She brings interesting things to light, in my mind, about the book and about the sort of metaphysical issues I’m trying to deal with right now. I mean, it’s all very fateful, and yet also somehow totally strategized and willful. I don’t know. It feels like meeting her is somehow deeply connected to everything that I’m doing right now, inextricable somehow from it.”
“What do you mean?”
Norman takes a moment to think about how to explain. “You know. The kind of things we talk about – identity, existence, philosophy, spirituality.”
“Does she know about what you do?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. Did you talk to her about your spiritual exploits?”
“Sort of. Maybe. You could almost say she was there for one.” Norman laughs. Lee eyes him suspiciously. “I don’t remember, honestly, exactly what we talked about and what we didn’t. I mean, we talked about a lot of different stuff. I feel like I told her everything. It was a long, beautiful weekend. But I might not have specifically told her yet about what I do with the astral projection and all of that. But, um … there was something. Something that happened.”
“What happened?”
“Well, I blacked out again.”
“Oh, Norman. Was she there?”
“Yeah, I was with her when it happened.”
“Were you smoking pot?”
“Well, yeah…”
“Well that’s a common quality between blackouts, right?”
“No, actually it isn’t,” Norman says. “The first time I wasn’t high.”
Lee purses her lips with concern. “How did she react?”
“I was sitting down, so it was basically, I think, just like I started to trip out and twitch and my eye rolled back, and that was it. She just sort of calmly took care of me. It was very sweet. And she didn’t say a word about it, either. She must have thought it was a seizure and assumed I was epileptic or something. I don’t know. But she was awesome. I was surprised. She didn’t ask me about it or anything. Afterward, she just took me to bed.”
“Did you have another vision?” Lee asks with subtle, hesitant excitement.
“I did, actually, yeah. It was like I was on a D.C. (that is, District of Columbia, not DC comics) version of Mount Olympus, and I was standing before the Man and his angelic posse of suits.”
“Is that it? Did you speak to them?”
“It’s a little hard to recall. I remember I started sort of rapping right before I came back into my body.”
“Rapping? Oh, by the way, while I’m thinking about it,” Lee says excitedly, “I talked to that shamanic healer who I went to at the Theosophical Society about you, and they were very intrigued. They want to meet you.”
“A shamanic healer wants to meet me?” Norman says with a smile. “Why, what did you tell them? And where have I heard the word theosophical before?”
“I just told them about what you do. I tried to describe it to them, but I can’t be sure if I got it all right. I told them about how you leave your body and about some of your ideas. They were particularly interested in the way you leave your body, the way you can just do it on command. They said that’s very rare. They called you a white mage.”
Norman laughs loudly. “A white mage? That’s what they told you? Forgive me, but that’s the shit.”
Lee laughs, shrugging. “They’re interested. They really wanted to meet you.”
“These are the ones who showed you the shamanic journeying?”
Lee nods. “They guided me on my first shamanic journey. I got that CD from them. The one with the drumming.”
“Right. Cool.” Norman can’t erase a pleased grin from his face. “This is not the kind of thing I need to hear,” he jokes. “This kind of thing just eggs me on. I’ve got enough absurd reasons to think of myself as some kind of prophet or superhero.”
“Hey,” Lee says with a big exaggerated shrug.
“So do you want to set that up? I’m down; what the fuck.”
“Sure, I can set that up next time I see them if you want. Can I be there for it?”
“Of course, Lee, if they’re cool with it. I would love for you to be there. I would prefer it, honestly.”
“Cool,” Lee says with a contented smile. “Are you nervous about work tomorrow?”
“No, not really. It’s data entry; I can’t imagine it could be that bad. At worst I figure it’ll be boring. I’m certain it’s gonna be worlds better than fucking shelving books as fast as I can, which is much of what I was doing at the book warehouse in South Bend.”
Lee nods, smoking, gazing at Norman with the warm pride of an older sister who regularly refers to her little brother as a bodhisattva. Norman can never tell just how genuinely Lee believes in his spiritual pursuits and/or destiny, but he knows she is proud of him at the very least for his philosophical and artistic accomplishments. Lee is a writer as well, and in fact walked hand in hand creatively with Norman through his first novel while it was still in the brainstorming process. Because of her role in its creation, Lee feels a very personal connection to Under the Undertow. Indeed, Norman dedicated the book to her. After he finished it on his birthday ten months ago, Lee spent several weeks sending copies of it out to publishers, but eventually got bogged down with work and her own life and Imogen’s arrival, and Norman was too busy with his own dramas in Indiana at the time, and broke anyway. To a certain extent, he feels he owes her everything. All these things he thinks in that moment as she looks at him, then she smiles sweetly, humbly.
Dispelling the feeling that spawned the humble smile, (and as if she is reading his mind) Lee says, “You know, Norman, you haven’t told me anything about your next book. What’s it about? Have you started working on it yet?”
“It’s all in my mind right now,” Norman replies, touching two fingers to his temple, “but I’ve been working on it in there for months. Since before I finished Gigantomachy.”
“Under the Undertow,” Lee corrects.
“Right. I was just thinking the words Under the Undertow. Why did I still call it Gigantomachy? Anyway, I don’t know what this next one is called, or necessarily how the story will even go. It’s hard to write the story of your own life. It will be kind of memoirish, but also very much philosophy. And of course it’ll be fueled at its core by that essential ouroboros of moebius meta that fuels all my artsploitative efforts.”
“Pardon?” Lee frowns.
Norman laughs. “Artsploitation is the genre Lou coined to describe our work.”
“Artsploitation? Do you think your work is exploitative in some way?”
“No,” Norman laughs softly to himself, “it just … it references sexploitation and blaxploitation and all of those types of things … I don’t know. I think we just thought it was funny. Nevermind. The point is it will be self-referential. Because it will be about all of this, with a fictionalized me doing fictionalized things that are really pretty much just these things that I do. Only the me character, obviously, will be based on me solidly enough that he will be the kind of guy who thinks about the macrocosmic reader entity in his own life, and the nature of freewill and choice in terms of the metaphor of being one’s own author, main character and reader all at the same time. Does that make sense?”
“Sort of,” Lee nods. “But I’ve been talking to you for a long time. I’m used to it.”
“And, but also, this character, the me character, will be having these spiritual exploits like the ones that I’ve had; he’ll be an existential scientist/explorer, a spiritual force of nature of some kind that is a mystery to him and yet also somehow intuitively clear to him. He’ll talk about the future and art and enlightenment and while he’s living this very normal, very standard life, meeting people, having conversations, he will at the same time be existing on the higher level, the level of the zeitgeist, because he begins to realize that he himself is a part of the zeitgeist the more he writes this story, and he meets this character called the Heisenburglar…”
“The Heisenburglar?” Lee asks with a laugh.
“Yeah,” Norman grins, “he’s my character’s arch enemy. He’s the guy who steals everything that is not being immediately perceived; he keeps everything uncertain under his cloak; he takes your keys, things like that. You know, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle?”
“Yeah, I get it,” she says dryly. “It’s pretty funny.”
“Yeah, it’s funny, but it’s also a real, dramatic, philosophical force, you know? And Norman – well, the Norman character – begins to interact with the beings at that level and eventually … well, I’m not sure how it needs to end just yet. What do you think of conflict in narrative, by the way?”
Lee blinks, thinking for a moment. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about narrative, obviously, and conflict and how it’s supposed to be at the core of every interesting story. But I hate that. I don’t think that should be the case.”
“I don’t think it is the case,” Lee points out. “Look at something like Before Sunset, for instance.”
“Yeah, but even there you have the conflict of whether he will go back to his wife or not, things like that – inner conflicts. But what about a story where there are no problems, no issues to be resolved, just a story about some nice stuff, you know? Like a romance about two lovers who are good for each other and shit as opposed to a romance where they’re kept apart, or they have all these issues … I mean, I think we should advocate temperance, reason and peace, no?”
“I think that sounds lovely. I think the problem is it’s unrealistic.”
“Human nature,” Norman sighs with a grimace, “right. The bastards.”
the State of the Species

“Speaking of human nature,” Lee says as she stands from her chair, “I need to go inside and start working on dinner. Would you like to hang out with me while I do?”
“Sure.”
Norman follows Lee back inside, through the breezeway into the kitchen, where he sits on a step stool by the stove, out of Lee’s way while she cooks but close enough to chat. Jason is still playing Civilization a few feet away at the kitchen computer, but Lewis is no longer present in the dining room.
“Hey Jason, where’s Lewis?” Lee asks him as she pulls a big black wok down from a chandelier of pots and pans hanging over the computer desk.
“He went over to Kate’s house.”
“Do you want to tell Uncle Norman about that guy who got arrested?”
“What?” Jason asks with a little laugh, trying to act like he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Jason is incredibly bright but very shy, even around Norman from time to time. “What guy?”
“Oh come on. That guy who got arrested for what he did online?”
“What did he do?” Norman asks Jason directly.
“There’s this online game – you know Runescape? We used to play it but it got to be stupid.”
“Yeah, I remember,” Norman says.
“Well some guy got arrested for making a program for his guy in Runescape that made him invincible, and he went around killing other players and taking all of their stuff.”
“And then he would sell their stuff on EBay,” Lee interrupts, pointing her long finger at Norman and grinning. “The dollars, in Runescape and on Second Life, have actual exchange values on EBay. Runescape dollars are worth more than the currency of Brazil.”
“That is insane,” Norman laughs. “It’s the future.”
“But, yeah, also,” Jason says, turning around in his chair to face Norman and Lee, “in that other game, Second Life, there are some people on there who make so much money in the game that they’re able to quit their real jobs and just work their professions in the game.”
“Like what do they do? What kind of professions in the game?”
“Like making designs and writing little programs for poses and stuff like that.”
Lee adds, “People design clothing for your person, and even skins and gestures. And houses. It’s amazing. I was just reading about this. The currency in these games has an actual exchange value, and you can buy it and sell it for real money, in the game, or on EBay. So there are people who make enough money in the game that they can just live off the money they make there, translated to real dollars.”
“So,” Norman starts to say, but then stops and thinks about the whole idea for a second. “Holy shit. Do you realize what this is becoming?”
“It’s the metaverse,” Lee says, pointing at him excitedly. “From Snow Crash.”
“Have you read Snow Crash?” Norman asks Jason, who nods. “Neal Stephenson. Right on. It’s totally the metaverse,” he reasserts. “And holy shit – with this technology for simulated sensory input in the brain, if that is the next computer interface … that’ll just end up being like switching between realities. These on-line realities will become more and more real and their distinction from this reality will asymptotally approach zero. We’ll end up just being able to switch between realities like that,” and he snaps his fingers. “Fucking crazy.” Norman looks over at Lee and asks, “Has he read Valis?” then realizes his faux-pas and turns to Jason, repeats his question, “Have you read Valis?”
Jason shakes his head no, smiling.
“Valis is hard to get into,” Lee says. “He’s read almost everything else. He just read Ubik, which I couldn’t figure out. I could never figure out who was alive and who was dead.”
“But you haven’t read Valis?” Norman repeats. “Oh man, dude, you need to read Valis. I was eleven when I first read Valis and it changed my life. It was pretty much the first novel I ever read on my own for my own purposes. No, actually I think I read Jurassic Park first, then Valis.”
“What’s Valis about, exactly?” Jason asks Norman.
“Well, it’s about Horselover Fat, who is the author’s alter ego, only there is also Phil – the author – and he interacts with Fat. They’re different characters. So anyway, at some point in the early seventies, I think it was, Horselover Fat has this incredible experience where he is hit by a beam of pinkish light that sends him information about an ailment his young son has and also makes him think that he is simultaneously in Seventy A.D. as someone named Thomas, and that time actually froze in Seventy A.D., and the illusion that it has continued is what he calls the Black Iron Prison. The information was sent to him by something he called Zebra, or the plasmate, which, to the best I can figure, is some sort of intermittently-returned messianic information beast.”
Jason chuckles, “Whoa.”
“I wish Phil Dick was still alive to be writing from the perspective of today,” Lee says dreamily, smiling sadly into space. “Imagine that.”
“It’s the fucking future,” Norman nods with awe. He gazes gleefully at Jason, enjoying vicariously the wonder of being a child in such a time. As he watches Jason smile and look off into his own thoughts, Norman has a brief vision in his mind. He sees the Earth from the perspective of a satellite, but instead of white clouds the planet is blanketed in a thick haze of thoughts – the thoughts of every human and animal and plant all swirling invisibly together, making a weather of its own kind. He feels the powerful need to dictate into his digital recorder. “In fact,” he says aloud, “all this gives me an idea. I’ll be downstairs, alright?”
“I’ll get you when dinner’s ready, okay?” Lee calls after him from the stove.
Norman lopes down the stairs to the basement where he has a semi-furnished, carpeted area with a futon mattress on the floor, his stereo and record collection against one wall, a torn-up easy chair like the ones in the garage and a television against the opposite wall, and several scattered boxes of what remains of his belongings after five moves in three years. The walls are mostly shiny silver material covering bright pink insulation with wooden beams every few feet. The orange and red carpeting is thin and does little more than mask the concrete floor it covers. A washer and dryer rumble in the next room, through a doorless doorway.
Ben, folding laundry beside the dryer, holds up a hand to Norman as a stoic sort of greeting. Ben is short and wiry, with black hair and dark complexion for a man of Irish descent. He has an anchor tattoo on one arm, a gold hoop in one ear and the ever-present five o’clock shadow of a pirate (he worked Boston boats as a boy). Expressionlessly, he says, “Hi, Norman.”
Norman’s relationship with his brother-in-law is, at this point, incredibly complex and conflicted. He has known Ben since he was five, when Lee first brought the young, surly man home with her from college. From that age until puberty, Ben was Norman’s idol. He was smart and rebellious and funny. He introduced Norman and his two older brothers to Dungeons and Dragons, and dungeon mastered for years for them and their friends.
Ben and Lee lived in Indianapolis for a few years while Norman was young, when the Newmans were living in Richmond, Indiana. It was in Indianapolis that Jason and Lewis were both born. Ben, a philosophy major, taught himself computers and networks in the early nineties on BBSes and 386es, and has been in the IT field ever since. It is largely Ben’s excitement about the early Internet that prolonged Norman’s early interest in technology (though there had been computers in the house since his birth, when the Newmans already had an Apple II).
Once, when Norman was ten years old (not long after he had skipped the fifth and sixth grades), when things were particularly uncertain and chaotic, Ben made two sets of samurai armor out of cardboard – one for Norman and one for himself – and unashamedly battled Norman in the front yard for hours while drivers passing by on the street slowed to rubberneck.
“Hi, Ben,” Norman replies, putting his hands in his pockets. “How are you? Do you need a hand?”
“No, I’ve got it,” Ben says. “Thanks, though. How was your weekend?”
“Good, good,” Norman replies, forcing a smile behind which he instinctively grinds his teeth.
Ben and Lee moved to Maine before either of their boys were in school, after Ben got the job he still holds at Woodard and Curran, an environmental engineering firm at the edge of Portland. Lee flitted between community colleges where she taught computer networking (she also having been a philosophy major). The boys grew up. Norman went off to the Academy and then to college.
Then, just over two years ago, mere days before Norman and Imogen were to move out to Maine to live in Lee’s basement and look for work in a better job market than northern Indiana could provide, Lee informed Norman through a torrent of tears that throughout her entire marriage Ben had physically and emotionally abused her and cheated on her. He had hit her in the face; choked her till she couldn’t breathe; disallowed her to see friends, to spend any real time away from him and the children. Suddenly he was a monster, and certain traits of his that had previously seemed anomalous like his sometimes-vicious jokes at the expense of others and his occasional terrifying anger suddenly made a sickening sort of hindsight-sense to Norman.
It had all come out then because Lee had just cheated on Ben with an old flame from high school, another writer with whom she had lately been exchanging passionate emails. Out of a need for honesty she had told Ben all about it when he suspiciously asked about a particular phone call. This was the catalyst for all the demons of their marriage being pulled up into the light, and somewhere in the chaos she finally opened up to her family about all that he had done to her for the past fourteen years. She told Norman first (since he was about to move out there with his girlfriend).
The year that Norman and Imogen lived together in Lee’s basement became defined almost entirely by the situation between Lee and Ben. It was clear to Norman upon arriving in the scene that his intuition to move in with his oldest sister had actually come so that he could be there for her through that long, painful healing process. Even at the time there seemed to Norman to be some kind of divine planning to it all, a hand greater than his own leading him.
At first, Ben remained in the house, sleeping on the couch, submissive and apologetic to all who spoke to him. After a couple of months he found his own apartment across the bridge, in Portland. Lee swung back and forth between wanting to cast him off for good and wanting to help him through the tough process of healing his tortured soul. Eventually, a few months before Norman and Imogen moved back to South Bend after the process had effectively rendered Imogen spiritually sterile, Ben moved back in.
Norman remembered the bad screaming fights Ben and Lee had had from time to time throughout his adolescence, but he never would have imagined that Ben would be the type of man who could regularly beat the woman he loved. It was completely foreign to Norman how a rational human being could do such a thing. To a certain extent, he now sees some of the most reprehensible qualities of humanity – jealousy, greed, anger, vengeance, fear – displayed in all their baffling glory beneath Ben’s overly cordial façade. Any entity that could do such things, Norman feels, must be fundamentally different from him.
He has still not completely come to terms with how he feels about Ben. Lee, though she still acknowledges uncertainty and concern which Norman is usually quick to second, has chosen to forgive Ben, force/help him to change and heal, and attempt to keep their family intact. Ben goes down to Boston once a month to attend a group session for domestic abusers. Yet still, somehow, he is able to remain genuinely funny, thoughtful, charming and intelligent. It is a behavioral dichotomy that troubles Norman deeply to be around, particularly since one side of it has never been shown to him, only described, and the descriptions were horrific.
“Were you with that girl the whole time – what was her name?”
“Laura,” Norman says, staring into Ben’s eyes. The eye contact Ben returns feels inexplicably confrontational somehow. Norman puts up a psychic shield in his mind, projecting it straight along his line of sight, pressing it against Ben’s eyes. Ben reacts by blinking, then looking back down at his laundry. “And yeah, I was with her the whole time,” Norman finishes, still staring at Ben.
“I’m glad to hear you had a good time,” Ben says with a taut smile. “I guess I don’t have to ask if you plan to see her again.” He laughs a single breath.
Norman nods, chewing softly on the inside of his mouth. He is trying to work on accepting Ben’s continued presence, though it scratches at his fragile ethics just to look at the man. He turns away, facing his stereo as if he is picking out a record when all he is actually doing is waiting for Ben to leave. After a couple of minutes, Ben finishes folding the laundry and takes it upstairs with a stoic nod to Norman as he passes him.
Norman picks up his tiny, stick-of-gum-sized digital recorder from the top of a stack of records. He hits record on it as he begins to sort through the stack to choose a record to play.
For a moment, his mind is overwhelmed by the confusing and violent thoughts that interaction with Ben often brings up, and he can’t quite recall the thought process he had wanted to capture. But luckily, a quick glance past the volume dials of his tape deck bring four words clearly into Norman’s mind’s eye that remind him of what he had been thinking about.
“It is the future,” he proclaims into to his tiny device. “’What little was fiction is becoming reality.’” He takes the Brian Eno record Music for Films out of its sleeve and places it onto his turntable, puts the needle on. He walks to the center of the room, the sweet spot between the speakers, and stands with his arms crossed, the digital recorder raised to his lips.
He half-whispers-half-mumbles, “The human race has been doing pretty much the same shit for five thousand years. We’ve been steadily building our houses and our stories and our ideas and our inventions and our zeitgeist while we walk around and eat our dinners and slip while carrying pianos and scratch our itches and fall in and out of love with each other. We’ve been Nature’s greatest work, truly, on planet Earth. In the grand scheme, we have been getting more and more awesome with every generation, and the rate at which our awesomeness grows has itself been growing.
“So now here we are at this totally bizarre, unprecedented point in the course of human history, of Earth history, where certain parts of the world are living in insane wealth and the rest of the world, because of globalization and communication (the Internet), is steadily forcing an evening out of stuff in the form of out-sourcing and terrorism and just making everyone realize once and for all how everyone out there is really just like you are and no one deserves less just because of where they were born, et cetera. We are living a life that just about any single ghost of a person now dead would be blown away by, would find to be like a futuristic heaven-on-earth in many respects. At least first-world living. And not only because of the amount of luxury and free-time and all of that, but because of how much and how finely we know! Leonardo da Vinci probably would undergo Herculean labors to be able to know half of what I know just from being a smart kid with a gifted education. Shit about, like, super string theory and cognitive science and … shit like that. It’s amazing.
“All of this is about to end. And by end, of course, I mean fundamentally transform.”
Norman begins to pace about the small room, hunched forward, speaking softly and slowly into his recorder, completely unaware of anything beyond his thoughts.
“Life is long. In fact, we are pretty much a lifespan’s reach away from immortality. Those alive today could be among the oldest immortal post-humans.
“Today’s messiahs could preach eternal life and fucking mean it (though, to be fair, in a potentially hellish eternity of real-life kind of vampire-curse way, from a certain perspective).
“We act like we know so fucking much. And, I mean, we do. We’ve figured out a lot. But religion fell to assholes long ago and has always been assumed by reasonable people to be lost to the assholes, and science doesn’t concern itself with things it can’t deal with scientifically, so it has left out, it seems to me, a pretty fundamental enigma – the self, the will, life as opposed to death. I mean, it’s not even so much that science has ignored such topics – it’s more like … I don’t know. But, I mean, how can it not be obvious that the experiencing-self, the thing-that-observes-and-chooses, the whatever-I-am must be in all other people also, and that it really is separate from the body, from the world, from … I mean … because there’s also, like, dreams and imagination and the mind’s eye and the ability of the mind to respond to what happens to the body any way that it chooses – I mean, these fundamental parts of existence-as-a-whole are just sort of left to the realm of personal opinion or whatever, left willfully unilluminated. It’s like we’re willing to address the symptoms of existence but not the cause – the fundamental nature of it. We stop asking why at some point, and I want to fucking know why. Why gravity? Why space and time? Why? Fuck.” Norman exhales loudly to himself. “Anyway.
“So, from the perspective of science, the experience of being a human, of living a mortal life in one of these bodies, seems to occur primarily within the brain. The things you recognize as ‘happening to you’ (i.e. seeing things, feeling things, thinking things, et cetera) are actually just electrical impulses bouncing about inside that throbbing organ behind your eyes. Memories are very real chemical stores of information composed of matter. There is no physical evidence of us beyond these incredibly complex, man-like machines, yet somehow, within the patterns of brain energy, awareness comes about. Some perceptive eye is able to cling to those energy patterns or whatever, translate them into what we know as existence as an individual, and even send back information from wherever it is that judging entity resides to cause the machine to take choice-based commands, such as what to do or, occasionally, what to think.
“But there is no reason to believe that the human brain is the sole sacred chalice to hold the water of awareness. Animals, too, have brains in which judgments and choices are made; it’s just that their brains are smaller, less powerful, and can therefore make less complex algorithmic determinations. As much as we humans can consider ourselves all comrades in this existence, that argument can be extended down through evolution to all creatures, indeed to all life, and thence on to all matter, for where indeed can a distinct boundary be drawn between that which is alive and that which is inert? The progression through evolution is analogue, not digital; it has progressed naturally and seamlessly, where the next step never really looks that much different from its ancestors at first glance. A monkey never gave birth to a human, nor did a god, and yet somehow Man is both.”
Norman steps over to his crates of records beside the stereo. He begins to pull them out at random, noting the album art that he sees.
“Our ability to store and compute information technologically is currently hitting a great asymptote that Lou and I like to call the Machine Enlightenment. Old distinctions of Nature and Machine will have to be torn down. The Machine Enlightenment refers to the days not far from ours when our capabilities for magical technological artifice will begin to allow for a completely new paradigm of existence – the possibility of transferring human awareness into a significantly more powerful and potentially immortal machine brain, for example. If possible at all, this will likely happen in our lifetimes. And, like all previous evolution, I bet it will not happen digitally, but analogue.
“It is time to realize that our intellectual/cultural progress is simply the current phase of Nature’s continuing evolution. Our insane dreams and supernatural deeds are Nature as much as every other part of the Universe. There can be nothing unnatural.”
Randomly, he pulls out the soundtrack to Star Trek: The Motion Picture. He smiles to himself.
“This may be science fiction, but it is also just modern fiction anymore. It’s reality. Wireless simulated sensory input, ever-growing data compression efficiency, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence – these are all contemporary concepts, only beginning to be truly discussed by the general public, that have paradigm-shift consequences.”
Norman pulls the sleeve for the Star Trek soundtrack out and glances over the various aliens displayed on the back of it. While he looks at it, he steps back out to the center of the room, holding his digital recorder right up by his lips.
“When is an android sentient? When has a person been replaced by quote-artificial-unquote elements enough for that person to no longer be considered human? What is that person, then? We are already replacing limbs with artificial ones, controlled by thought from the brain; we are even replacing parts of the brain and putting computers inside it. If one can wirelessly simulate sensory experience in the brain, how real could that feel? How real is a dream?
“Humans are those beasts that grew up wandering the plains and devising ingenious ways to stay alive. Though it has slowly through the millennia developed an appendage that will eventually deliver its enlightenment, the body of Humanity is still beastly, worldly, material, vicious. Man is an animal, with the cowardly heart of one. Forgive me. I mean humans no disrespect. No doubt you yourself are one or at least know some.” He laughs softly to himself when he says that, then composes himself thoughtlessly. “Indeed, I have long been and plan to always remain a humanist. I honor my ancestors and all they struggled through, for they, indeed, had the same fire in their hearts as I hold in mine (and I mean ‘the same’ literally), driving us forward with ideas and imagination, that same essential identity that demands the pursuit of wisdom, of understanding, and of awesomeness. We built the Parthenon and wrote Moby Dick and filmed Punch-Drunk Love. Humans have built a beautiful world. I owe them everything. History is one of my favorite subjects. But it is not the history of armies and generals and leaders in fancy hats – of oppressors – that so moves me, that I so respect. Such men are the pawns of the true heroes: the wizards, the madmen, the psychics and witch-doctors, the alchemists, the prophets, the stoned journalists, the scientists, the artists, the explorers – the thinkers.
“In every science-fiction milieu I can think of that contrasts the human race against other alien species throughout the galaxy, humans are known for their adaptability. They may be weak and small, and in some settings they may not even be as advanced or enlightened as other species, but the humans’ special trump card always ends up being their wily wits, their ability to bullshit and get out of tight spots, and also to endure hardship. To cling to the side of a space vessel for a hundred years for love or profit or revenge. This says a great deal about what we value, what we’re proud of, about where we see our truest virtues to reside. In stories of the far future it is our resourcefulness, our adaptability and our great passion that keep us alive.”
Some commotion echoes through the ceiling from above, followed by Lewis’ little voice yelling, “Get away from me!” Ben and Lee’s voices follow, speaking on top of each other, and Norman turns up the metallic guitar ambience coming from his stereo to drown them out.
“Evolution does not end with us,” he continues with vigor. “To think that we gangly apes are the pinnacle of God’s perfect plan is absurd. We continue to grow, to enlighten ourselves, to change, now more than ever.”
He picks up a small velvet case that holds one of his four glass eyes. He opens the case and turns the eye in its little fabric bed to look up at him through its greenish iris. He pictures in his mind his own, real, green eye looking down at it. “How much change must occur before a new being is at hand?” he asks it, then closes the case and puts it back down by his stereo.
“In the zietgeist, there is an idea of what it means to be human. The human condition. There are specific characteristics that we use to define our humanity. Many of these characteristics sound admirable – human nature is to be inquisitive; to be resourceful. Desirous, even lusty, yet also truly to love. We are complex, Shakespearean characters. We want sex and violence and rock ‘n roll. Indeed, it is a beautiful, fascinating part we’ve been playing all these years. But the more I consider these characteristics, these intrinsically human traits, the more it is clear that these are traits developed by natural evolution for a slow, vulnerable, terrified plainswalker who lived a thousand generations ago. Everything since then we’ve done on our own, with our ideas – clothes, shelter, fire, axes, and then everything that all that led to. But also art, philosophy, literature, compassion.
“Anyway, natural evolution, what does that mean? This is all natural. We’re natural. Our lust and greed are natural, as are our compassion and genius. Or is natural supposed to imply all that happens outside of the control of freewill? But is anything outside its grasp?
“We have freewill. That cannot be denied. Either we do have freewill or we don’t, and if we don’t then we are inert pawns of inevitability, so fuck it. At the very least, one might as well assume freewill. Anyway, from the perspective of an aware entity, there can be nothing more certain than one’s own freewill when one really starts to think about it, which I suppose is just a loquacious way of saying ‘I think therefore I am.’ Anyway, the concept of freewill seems to be generally agreed upon. But the implications of freewill seem to me to imply that the use of human nature or beastly instinct to excuse one’s actions should no longer be acceptable, ever.
“Enlightenment is not about loss of self. Enlightenment is about an affirmation of self, an acceptance of oneself as a being of choice and perception, as a distinct and fundamental engine of existence itself. Enlightenment is an understanding of one’s relationship with everything else, which naturally requires constant pursuit of that understanding since the only constant is change.
“We are God chasing Its own tail. What we know as humanity is but a fitful waking, a pupal stage between beast and angel.”
Norman notices his copy of the Ray Kurzweil book The Age of Spiritual Machines among the few books he brought with him from Indiana, which now all reside in three piles on a metal shelf beside his records.
“And, as a testament to the power of awesomeness, it seems it will be a machine angel. We are approaching a pivotal point in human history. Our technology is about to eclipse our biology. Of course, it seems to me, they’re still the same analogue path of awesomeness.
“Those who have surpassed their human instincts by means of freewill and are prepared to transcend with the Machine, I call post-humans. We have explored the possibilities of our existence and prepared our minds for expansion. We make ourselves.
“As one would expect, it is neither a dark future nor an idyllic future. It is a very human future, including elements of both. It’s the future we’ve made. It’s only going to get more awesome, and it is about to happen in a big way. It’s happening now. Something is actually happening.
“One can’t help but look around at one’s fellow man and think, What will come of all this? Who will remain flesh and blood? Who will succumb on Judgment Day? Who will join the City of God?”
Norman glances to his left and is startled to see that Lee is crouched near the top of the stairs by the door to the upstairs, listening, smiling. “Were you talking about Judgment Day and the City of God? You’re not getting all Bible on me, are you, Norman?”
“No, no,” Norman assures her, “just metaphors.” He shrugs, a little embarrassed, feeling like someone who’s been caught masturbating. “Metaphors. You know. For the book. I was just sort of ranting.”
“You know, with all the stuff that you do with your astral projection and all of that, have you ever considered trying to channel?”
“Like channel a spirit of some kind?”
“I mean, it’s the kind of thing you need to be careful with, because the ones you get contact with often are the lowest beings of that level, the ones who would be creeping around at the floor of the Upper World if you get my drift. But at the same time, a lot of interesting wisdom has been captured by people who claim to have been channeling some kind of logos entity.”
Norman nods and purses his lips in thought, imagining the old seer woman from the film The Others shaking her wrinkled fingers as papers fly about in the air.
“Just a thought. Anyway. I just hope you’re going to address the state of the world right now, if this book is supposed to be so all-encompassing and grand in scope, because there are a lot of things that need to be addressed. I mean, it’s good to be idealistic and to pursue your own spirituality but there’s a certain point, too, where…”
“Totally, totally,” Norman says, nodding, causing Lee to trail off. “Oh, I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to interrupt. Go on.”
“No,” Lee sighs, “you know what I’m talking about.”
“It’s totally about the state of the world,” Norman assures her. “The state of the species. The state of the spirit.”
“I mean, it’s cool, your idea for the Heisenburglar, but if this book you’re planning is supposed to speak to the real world, there are plenty of real-world zeitgeist-level villains, like the Illuminati … or our President.”
“The Illuminati, yes,” Norman muses hesitantly. “I don’t know much about that.”
“Your record is over,” Lee points out. Norman only then notices the repeating click of the needle against the label at the center of the record.
“Ah yes, indeed,” he notes, removing the needle and stopping the record.
“Was that the Star Trek soundtrack?”
“No, it was Brian Eno. I picked this out at random. I was just looking at these sweet aliens on the sleeve.”
“Oh, okay. I thought I recognized what you were listening to. I think Ben has this album. You know, Norman, I was thinking yesterday about everything that’s going on in the world, in the Middle East and everything… and, now I’ve never been one to buy every conspiracy theory that comes around but I’ve been thinking about it more and more, and … I think Nine-Eleven was planned.”
Norman nods slowly, trying to reciprocate Lee’s half-serious, half-grinning-as-if-she-is-kidding facial expression. “Like, by our government?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I know it was obviously planned by those who did it, but I mean in a bigger way. You know, you look at Osama Bin Laden. He gets paid through Saudi accounts. You look at the Saudis, and their connection to Big Oil over here, and how Big Oil owns this administration. It’s like 1984 – the war can never end. I just think there’s more to it. It worked out so perfectly. I mean, those planes were off course for how long before they crashed into those buildings, and not a single thing was done? We’re smarter than that. There’s no way we would let that happen unless we were letting it happen. You know on that morning when it happened, all the planes that they would have sent up to interdict those planes were busy doing – guess what – hijack exercises, so that when they heard about the planes they didn’t know what was real and what was an exercise.”
“Is that true?”
“Totally. I think Cheney specifically was definitely in on it. I just know it. The Wolfowitz Doctrine or whatever it’s called specifically states their intentions to do all these things they’ve done – the Neo-cons planned to invade Iraq way before all of this. They knew that their agenda couldn’t be pushed forward without what they called ‘a Pearl Harbor-level event.’ So that’s what they delivered.”
“That’s fucked up. I’ll tell you, Lee,” Norman remarks with a laugh, “just from saying those words, your name has been put on like ten more government lists.”
“Can I tell you about something else I was thinking? I’m sorry to interrupt you, if you’re busy or whatever.”
“Not at all. What else were you thinking?”
“Well I was thinking about this whole Da Vinci Code thing, and how big it is in the Zeitgeist right now. There must be some reason for that. It’s huge.”
“Yeah, that is interesting. I’ve thought about that, too – that there must be something to the fact that that book is so popular.”
“Right? Because it’s no different than any other trash-literature, but it’s got this weird pseudo-conspiracy-religion-ish plot that … was anyone interested in that stuff before? Now, that book is all about how the Holy Grail is actually a symbol for Mary Magdalene, who Jesus married and moved to Europe with. Kind of like in Last Temptation. Anyway, what it made me realize is – what if Mary Magdalene,” and she pauses for dramatic timing, “was an Arab. And Jesus was a Jew.” She waits for Norman to put together the implications.
“Ah,” Norman sighs, intrigued by the idea. “Interesting. Somehow metaphorically that would make a lot of sense, at least for these times.”
“I mean literally. The church wants everyone to think that Mary Magdalene was a whore, but the Dead Sea Scrolls describe her as a woman of high social stature. She was really his number one disciple, but she was a woman, so they wanted nothing to do with that. They want a patriarchal monopoly on spirituality. The symbol of the cup, of the Holy Grail, was the symbol for the woman. And the blood, the life-giving water was actually just the truth.”
“The logos,” Norman says, knowing Lee will love that he has referenced Philip K. Dick, who Lee basically worships as a true prophet of some kind in a minor pantheon that also includes Edgar Cayce and Norman.
“Hagia Sophia,” Lee nods.
“Haven’t you seen The Last Crusade?” Norman jokes. “The grail is a little dirty cup protected by divine, rubegoldbergian traps.”
Muffled by the floor, Norman hears Ben yell, “Dinner’s ready, boys! Go wash your hands!”
“Anyway. You want chicken in your stir fry, right?”
Norman stutters, “As opposed to what, beef or crab or…?”
“No, silly,” Lee laughs, “as opposed to no chicken.”
“Oh, right, then, chicken, yeah, thanks.”



Meanwhile, slightly above our dimensional perspective, two mild-mannered, six-dimensional watcher-entities named Axerxes and Wazzz (who can only be described metaphorically in our terms as one-eyed, many-tentacled, quivering masses of purplish tumorflesh) sit atop a website like frogs on a lily pad and watch flashes of Norman and Lee in the thin, shimmering plane below that our world is to them.
Axerxes, check it out, says Wazzz with a nod, he’s about to blink again. I think he’s maybe gonna actually come up here, evolve or whatever. (Their perspective on time allows for a fuller vision of what amounts here to mere mistakable foreshadowing.)
He’s that guy living in his sister’s basement listening to Brian Eno records, Axerxes retorts with cynicism. He’s not going anywhere. There is no more movement up or down anyway, and no human is going to break that law. (Their perspective of time is also non-linear, of course, and non-deterministic.)
You don’t think he could? Wazzz glances back down at Norman, who is scratching his crotch as he ascends the basement stairs.
It doesn’t work that way, Axerxes tries to explain. A human can’t just evolve, personally. It’s a process of change over many generations of individuals, in his world. Norman Newman is a single bloom of personality. Not a full organism like you or I.
Wazzz looks up from the World long enough to stare at his companion torpidly as if he is stupid, mocking Axerxes’ words.
It’s philosophy, Axerxes says with a divine snort. You wouldn’t understand.
Wazzz looks back down at Norman sitting down to eat with his sister’s family. Without looking up, Wazzz says slowly and carefully, Well if there’s no chance of his kundalinic occulting turning into him evolving or whatever, then why are we here watching him?
Because he saw us; because you’re an asshole; because you had to see what was glowing. Not every light down there is beauty, you know. There’s burning fire down there, too. And now look what you’ve got us stuck doing. Anyway, he’s got a better chance of sinking into the second-world than of ever seeing us again. Axerxes pulls a frog soul from the hypercrystal container between the two of them, slips it under one of his tentacles to absorb it.
Wazzz looks up from the World, meeting Axerxes’ eye. They share silent eye contact for a moment.
What? Axerxes spits.
We’re watchers, Wazzz protests, defending his actions. We’re supposed to inspect anomalies. It’s not my fault we’re doing this. If anyone’s, his. He looks back down at Norman, who is sitting by himself in the garage, having an after dinner cigarette. Anyway, who says Earth waking up would be such a bad thing? Maybe they’ll be cool.
They’re all douche bags, and dead, Axerxes asserts with certainty. Like I said: it’s philosophy. You wouldn’t understand.