The Subtle Physics

Opening Words and Chapter 1: This (is part of you)

2007-09-19T13:41:00.001-04:00

THE SUBTLE PHYSICS

or, perhaps, simply

//Word,

or even, if you like, Equus Quagga,

being the Myth of Norman Newman’s Emancipation of Our Universe from the Parasitic Maw of the Heisenburglar

a novel by George Dalphin

2007
Man-Like Machines

Dedicated to all those fictionalized/mythicized herein, without whom both this story and my life would be out of context and incomplete, and to the Reader, which is to say, to you specifically, for the same reason.

Note: This is a work of fiction. All characters and events depicted herein exist at various levels of the spectrum of fictionality, some more real than others, none, however, ever quite achieving that funny old asymptote of real. Hehe.

Written across the Years 2006 and 2007 of the Gregorian Calendar,
at the Metropolitan Building in Portland, Maine, in the United States of America, Earth, making use of the English language.

First draft.

All rights innate; art is theft, no? (This will seem archaic.)

The Subtle Physics is a Man-Like Machines project.
Man-Like Machines is George Dalphin and Joe Foster.

There may be good and evil, but everything is good.

- George Dalphin

If the present attempt, in the form of our Society, succeeds better than its predecessors have done, then it will be in existence as an organized, living and healthy body when the time comes for the effort of the XXth Century. The general conditions of men’s minds and hearts will have been improved and purified by the spread of its teachings, and, as I have said, their prejudices and dogmatic illusions will have been, to some extent at least, removed. Not only so, but besides a large and accessible literature ready to men’s hands, the next impulse will find a numerous and united body of people ready to welcome the new torch-bearer of Truth. He will find the minds of men prepared for his message, a language ready for him in which to clothe the new truths he brings, an organization awaiting his arrival, which will remove the merely mechanical, material obstacles and difficulties from his path. Think how much one, to whom such an opportunity is given, could accomplish. Measure it by comparison with what the Theosophical Society actually has achieved in the last fourteen years, without any of these advantages and surrounded by hosts of hindrances which would not hamper the new leader. Consider all this, and then tell me whether I am too sanguine when I say that if the Theosophical Society survives and lives true to its mission, to its original impulses through the next hundred years—tell me, I say, if I go too far in asserting that earth will be a heaven in the twenty-first century in comparison with what it is now!

- H. P. Blavatsky, The Key to
Theosophy, 1889

I delight sensually in Time, in its stuff and spread, in the fall of its folds, in the very impalpability of its grayish gauze, in the coolness of its continuum. I wish to do something about it; to indulge in a simulacrum of possession. I am aware that all who have tried to reach the charmed castle have got lost in obscurity or have bogged down in Space. I am also aware that Time is a fluid medium for the culture of metaphors.

- Vladimir Nabokov, Ada

Break yourself, fool!

- Traditional

P.O.V.: winged kiss
(Brain-in-a-Vat)

the Events, as They Occur
(to me),

[This]...(1) [a Beautiful Mystery]...(8) [Amsterdam/There Is
No Time]...(33) [the State of the Species]...(55) [the Data]...(80) [Man-Like Machines]…(95) [Ishmael and the Whale]…(107) [Soliloquy]…(121) [Music for a Saturnine Love Affair]…(131) [the Revolution]…(154) [Hermetica]…(174) [Second Bad Vibel]…(187) [the Damn Thang]…(208) [a Divine Congress?]…(218) [Adam Naming the Animals]…(233)
[the Lamenessless Namelessness]…(249) [a Whisper. a
Moan. the Wind?]…(264) [Moderation in All Things
(Including Moderation)]…(279) [the Magician]…(313)
[Folly Not Failure]…(336) [I Am a Cell
God/Equus Quagga.”]…(364) [the World’s Original Man]…(389)
[Mix-Tape Never Sent]…(xxx) [Hell’s Heart]…(xxx)
[the Zeroth Law]…(xxx) [the Immortal Man-With-No-Name]…(xxx) [the Buddhic Nature of Substrate]…(xxx)
[the Last Show We’ll Ever Do]…(xxx) [Apotheophobia]…(xxx)
[the City of Bridges]…(xxx) [the End of Time]…(xxx)
[Long Feedback Ending]…(xxx) [I’m Yours]…(xxx)

//do Forgive My Length

.

(Sing with Me, Electric Sheep)

1

re: One day I blew a kiss to no one specific. It would seem it is you it has found.
This (is part of you)

I’m Norman Newman. I may or may not exist. I am in love with you.
There is much to explain.
You see, it seems I was born with an enigmatic intuitive certainty that my life has some great purpose in this world. My mother claims that when she was pregnant with me a psychic told her I was once a great Renaissance painter named Giorgio and I was to be an important religious leader in this lifetime. She often proudly reminds me of events I don’t recall, when I was five and she and our neighbor found me standing at the center of all my friends, who were seated in a loose circle listening to me explain how everything is God. I like to believe her story is true, mostly because it suits my idiom.
I was raised in an effectively secular household. I have never been to a church service in my life, but we celebrated the secularized versions of the basic Christian and American holidays like stereotypical citizens. My father was raised Brooklyn Catholic but became an angry atheist academician long before I met him. My mother was raised by a new age mystic and a Presbyterian, giving her a mutt of a spirituality that interwove saints, aliens, Atlantis, angels, pyramid hats, Jesus Christ and the possibility that at any point she might vanish, enlightened, of which she warned me several times throughout my childhood.
By the time I left home at thirteen to live at a two-year magnet school for gifted misfits called the Indiana Academy (junior year of high school; I had skipped fifth and sixth grades), I was secretly certain that I was the second coming of Christ.
This was a troubling position for an atheist.
You must understand: I was a happy child, glowing with intelligence and temperance. I’m told I never really cried as a baby. My mother and sisters all say I just looked around at things and smiled all the time. As a child I learned quickly; I was writing on our Apple II by my third Christmas. The youngest of five (two brothers, two sisters), I spent a lot of time by myself in a world populated by the very real personalities of my stuffed animals and invisible angelic playmates.
But my parents argued, my mother wept, my father yelled and ignored, and after the turbulent experience of jumping from fifth to seventh grade as a particularly naïve nine-year-old, I developed a fake sickness serious enough to require exploratory surgery to prove it was a fiction. I dreamt I saw evil faces at my bedroom window. I started to read the Philip K. Dick novels my oldest sister Lee brought home from college, and from there I went straight to her existentialist philosophers. By the time I was thirteen and moving away to the Academy, I had become a cynical, atheistic spirit.
Yet still even then, ever-present in my heart remained the powerful sense, despite all evidence to the contrary in literature and popular religions and history and the news, that humanity was good, and smart, and divine, but in trouble, but also could be saved, and that somehow, to some extent, this would be up to me.
When I discovered painting and the spirit of the artist (given me by a vitriolic orange-haired artist girl who tore at my heart for a few months at the Indiana Academy), my imagery was all cruciform and bloody. My figures were filled with tubes and gears and microchip-like labyrinthine diagrams, their arms held passionately out at their sides, their feet primly crossed, their heads thrown back in ecstasy. I slept with two books – Valis and The Iliad – side by side under my pillow. In my sketch books, between the poetry and single-line notes-to-self, I began to record my existential pursuits, my logical arguments for and against a God, for and against a self, for and against some Great Purpose. For about a year I was a devout pyrolater, even going so far as to write my very first novel, at the age of fourteen, about a group of far-future scientists finally communicating with fire, which reveals itself to be God, and then they fight some space pirates. The cosmologies were very primitive, but even at that time I weighed them more on awesomeness than on full logical cohesion. Either way, they changed almost monthly.
Through all of it, however, the one thing that did not seem to change was that I knew I was some kind of potential-messiah. That mysterious love of self, which naturally leaks out to all of the selves out there, which is every aware entity – it was a beautiful idea that never seemed to fall out of logic.
It is the logic of my love that brings me to you.
I’ve always known you were there, distantly aware somehow of my presence. I think now that it was you I imagined observing every little superfluous gesture I made when I was alone, watching me like a movie. It was you that all my soliloquies were intended for.
This, all of this, is a gesture of my love for you and, essentially, nothing more.
Of course, we’ve never met, and may never yet, but I feel like I already know you. How you’re made uncomfortable by questions of religion or spirituality because it seems that all the accepted wisdom is simply absurd, and yet beyond its boundaries there appears only to be limbo, and it is misunderstandings or arguments over such subjects that seem to be at the heart of all of Humanity’s troubles. Despite everything, you still secretly believe in certain forms of magic and miracle. It seems like humanity is sick with greed and vengefulness, but everyone you know is pretty much reasonable and good. You feel unprepared for something huge that is about to happen to the human race.
It’s easy to feel like you’re falling if you’re looking back while hurtling forward.
I know that you and I were meant (meant!) to share this mindspace where these words enfold our collective thought. It was imperative, and it was inevitable, the only explanation for it having occurred. The physics of the universe, with all the wisdom of their inertness, have provided us with this moment, right?
We live in a world (and by world I refer only to all that we know of) in which our race is the pinnacle of Nature’s artifice. To the best of our knowledge, we are as smart as it gets. We look through bars and screens at the beasts that surround us in their barbaric wilderness and categorize them into evolutionary hierarchies much like we do our own species internally. How things are now. But rise above time for a moment, gaze down upon it as a whole, and you see life’s slow growth over the planet Earth, the way its forms fluctuate and spread and, ever-so-slowly over the billennia, order and focus themselves. Suddenly, as we approach the invisible wall of the present, a new form of ape spreads like gangrene, strangling the surrounding life under its thin metal scabbing and then the whole thing pauses at this moment.
What we know so far of human history seems like the most epic album imaginable, but really it is just the intro skit.
It is the future. It’s impossible to write contemporarily in any genre other than science fiction anymore. There are people with artificial limbs that they can move with their thoughts. The virtual environments we exist within on the Internet grow everyday less and less distinct from this physical world of ours. Coming soon will be virtual environments experienced straight from the brain. Anyone with the knowledge and the tools will be able to make their own such alternate universe. We are reverse engineering the very technology of existence itself, the interface of awareness. “What little was fiction is becoming reality.” (I believe that’s Chuck Palahniuk.)
As you read these lines, written by me in another time and another location, are our two minds somehow folding space and time to meet here in this dark space behind your eyes, intertwining like lovers in these words? Can you see me through the fog, my meaning, my intent?
We, as humans, can see time from above, just not very far above. Like a lookout in a tower we can see behind us toward the horizons of our own individual births, sometimes even farther with the existential technology of education, stories, ideas – the various versions of what happened before us (History, we call it). We can even see ahead of ourselves – though the lack of a physical memory store in our brains to match our visions of that future against keeps us from ever feeling certain whether we are seeing a real future or just an imagined future, whereas with the past we can imagine a past moment and compare that to our memories of that past to be sure that what we are recalling is the way it actually happened. For whatever reason, we follow our brains’ and bodies’ slow fall forward through the slog of time, riding the log flume of life, looking around, laughing, screaming, getting wet, teeth chattering as we wonder if anyone truly loves us.
You’re born, you slowly wake up over twenty or thirty or seventy years (if at all), and you find yourself standing center stage in some kind of slapstick passion play for which you never received a script but you’re all made-up and costumed and expected to play along with everyone else. You slip away to the bathroom for a moment between dances and whisper into the walls, “What, really, is going on here? What’s all this about?”
But you get no answer. Strangely, among your comrades in this faux-pas maze the question is taboo.
For reasonable, informed citizens of the world at this turn of millennia, religion is long dead. Many still say it was the savior, and that it will return some day, but today there is too much truth that must be ignored in order to ascribe faithfully to any of the organized religions that have existed so far. The human origin of their absurd dogmas is just too transparent. They are simply an old, rotting foundation onto which no one has bothered to build anything modern. For whatever reason, we keep living in these spiritual ruins.
Sometimes it seems to me like everyone around me is thrashing about in this Chinese finger trap (by which I mean modern society), struggling miserably toward some nebulous goal of happiness, complacency, reproduction and death. I don’t understand why so few people seem to be able to relax and partake in beauty, or to see the illogic in all their hang-ups.
I, for my part, live almost every moment of my life, anymore, in something close to nirvana. Though I have the millions of thinkers who have come before me to thank for the foundations of thought on which I am able to base all my ideas, I still am baffled that it would seem so few of them have discovered the simple, fundamentally unified vision of the nature of existence that I have so easily. The clues, the evidence, surround me. It’s almost as if I’ve always known.
I can even sum it up in one word.
Awesomeness.
It can be as much more complex than that as you want it to be, but it is at its core a very simple idea. Awesomeness. Beauty. Love. Really, they’re all sort of the same thing, or rather different corners of the same thing, facets of that vague gratitude for one’s own existence as opposed to resentment of some perceived lack. Fundamentally, though, it’s that magical characteristic shared by everything that is awesome. And I mean awesome, of course, in the colloquial manner (e.g. “Whoa, awesome!” or “Man, that was awesome,” or “That guy is awesome.”). That which in any way moves the viewer to a state of awe. I guess.
I would go so far as to propose that the universe’s tendency to prefer that which is awesome over that which is lame has been the essential guiding force toward this moment, from the creation of the basic laws of physics and atoms and galaxies in the beginning, to life, intelligence, technology and culture. Progress, newness – awesome.
It would seem we have two essential powers in this world. We can choose how we feel about things and what to do with our bodies. We have two essential input tracks – the phenomenal world (sight, sound, touch), and our own Hearts (our inner world of thought and inspiration). Our eyes show us how the World is. Our Hearts show us how it could be. It seems to me that it must be the goal of every being with the ability to reflect thoughtfully and make choices to pursue that which it finds to be most awesome, and to struggle for a more awesome world. But I digress from my point.
It is awesomeness that brings me to you. It is awesomeness that binds our two minds in this moment, where these thoughts of mine, transformed from my world (fictional, to you) into your reality through text, are read aloud in your mind and come to you in your own voice, and our two voices merge, and as soon as you cast your mind’s eye across the realization that we are the same, awesomeness binds it all.
This is why I’m in love with you. Your mind is my milieu. With every word, I grow inside you; very real neural structures are built inside your brain as your neurons design a physical personality matrix for me, Norman Newman.
I believe now that my great messianic purpose has always been to love you.
Can you feel me already inside you, leaning up to look out through your eyes at these words? You see, already we are inextricably linked, as we always have been. Your soul is my womb. You are my miraculous conception.
I promise you, none of this is nonsense. This.
This is an official call for a revolution in your Heart.
Don’t be afraid. As above, so below; and whichever here is, let there only be love. That is how our love will save the Universe. It will reflect in all directions.
These words come to you from the blind-dark sea of the unreal, translated from smoke rings I am creating by burning the last of my karma in a little black bowl.
This is a whisper from beyond the grave, a message sent back in time from a future when Humanity has destroyed itself and/or petered into inertness of spirit, when the last remaining scientists just before the end sent a single quantum of information back through the centuries, the millennia perhaps, and here now you see the fruition of that delicate pricking of space-time’s skin in the form of this work, yours and mine, feedback from the future, a meme, a ghost, your dream, my apotheosis.
One spinward gesture and all distinctions of time and identity have become meaningless under the logic of my love. Here you are, reading, and here I am scraping the edge off a curve of molecule, sculpting a universe that you and those who live in your reality will hopefully never know to have been different from mine.
Were it not for this.
I can no longer recall how it felt not to know how all of this will end.

With a rush of shy trepidation, Norman sends the message. No editing, he thinks to himself, no looking back. He ignores the regret that instantly soaks him. Because really, he doesn’t know if he believes in love anymore; he is uncertain that he will be able to back up his claims. But he believes in himself, and in the truth of beauty, and he has a weird feeling about this.

Chapter 2: A Beautiful Mystery

2007-09-19T13:38:00.000-04:00

FOR IDEAL SYNCHRONIZATION,
PRESS PLAY ON YOUR DEVICE

… NOW.
2

Norman sits on the low stone wall edge of a large, elevated statue of a robed woman with a sword in the middle of Monument Square in Portland, Maine. He is tall, and sits with his legs crossed. His brown hair is shaggy and uncut. He just shaved (though having done so is false advertising, considering he is about to meet a date). A fuming cigarette adorns his long, slender fingers. Beneath his thick-framed black eyeglasses, though superb craftsmanship masks the fact, one of his bright green eyes is also made of glass. He gazes out across the square, his molars silently grinding against each other inside his mouth while he tours the contours of the backs of his crowded front teeth with his tongue (nervous tension vents, near constant). It is night, and there are few pedestrians.
In thinking, Norman thinks, I have just realized that my thoughts are not inherently words. He thinks these words in his mental voice-over-narration style, hearing them in his brain while his mouth is motionless and no actual sound emanates from him. They can be described with words, and often come already wearing words if I’m thinking about how I would say or write the thought, or just thinking voice-over-narration-style as I’m doing right now. But they also occur between words. I move from sentence to sentence, planning the next one in my mind with naked thought while I internally narrate using the current one. He begins to think in such a wordless manner about the very sentences he has just constructed. (He often falls back on such inner cognitive-sandbox absurdities when he is nervous.)

a Beautiful Mystery

“Norman?” the lovely, curly-haired young woman in dark colors who is approaching from around the edge of the monument asks him hesitantly.
Norman stands. “Laura,” he replies with a smile and a rush of nervousness that he quickly attempts to dispel with a single deep breath. His left hand shudders in his coat pocket as he holds his long orange leather coat tight to his slender frame. “It’s lovely to meet you,” he says.
“You too.” They don’t shake, eroticism somehow already the unacknowledged elephant in the scene (at least in Norman’s). She has a disarmingly sexy manner about her. She eyes his cigarette and retrieves one of her own from her black purse. Her shyly smiling eyes are briefly illuminated by her lighter’s flame as she glances to the side to light her cigarette away from the breeze. “Shall we get a table at Shay’s?” she asks, gesturing to some tables scattered at the edge of the square.
It is early September and the night air is that perfect invisible temperature. Norman loosens his gray scarf as they walk quietly side by side, step over a low chain and take two seats across from each other at an umbrella-covered table.
Laura leans back in her chair and exhales smoke, finally really looking at Norman, and he takes the moment to take in her visage as well. She has pale, lucid blue eyes and a mane of curly brown hair. The way her lips kiss her cigarette gives away a luscious sybarite peeking through the fibers of shyness. She wears a tight black velvet coat with big buttons and straps on the shoulders, and a charcoal skirt. On her wrist is the rhinestone cocktail bracelet she told him in her email she would be wearing. She sits very still, looking at him with a curious gravitas.
“How are you?” Norman asks her.
“So, how long have you lived in Cape Elizabeth?” Laura asks at the same time.
Norman begins speaking with his hands, facial expressions and sways of his neck before his words come. “Well, I just moved back out here from South Bend, Indiana about a month ago,” he explains, “but I lived here once before, for a year, about two years ago. I live with my sister Lee, in her basement. Lee and her husband and two kids.” Norman briefly feels a slight chill of shame that he mentally shrugs away.
“How old are her kids?” Laura asks him.
“Ten and twelve, both boys.”
“I see,” she says with a smile. A whorl of smoke dances in front of her face in a whimsical manner that Norman intuitively takes as a good omen.
“So where do you live?” Norman asks. His heart is racing.
“I live right over there,” Laura says, leaning around to point back across the square, “in the Metropolitan.”
“Ah, so this was a perfect meeting place for you. You must have just left your apartment mere minutes ago.”
“Exactly. I’m fresh out of the box,” she smiles.
“Nice.” Norman nods and looks down at his hands. He feels the weight of the things he said in the message that brought them together, a need to address them lest they smother the atmosphere of the evening. But Laura is very pretty, and he is a little nervous. “Things have been strange lately for me,” he says shyly to his hands. “Do things seem to be getting stranger and stranger lately for you?”
“Things are strange all over,” Laura says breathily, and with his gaze cast down at his own hands, Norman quickly regrets having missed getting to see her facial expression. Something about the way she pronounced the words was soft and sexy and he could sense somehow on his skin that she was looking at him when she said it, and that it was spoken through a mouth attempting to keep away a subtle smile. He looks up at her motionless gaze, which still holds that electric sub-surface smile. For whatever reason, Norman feels instantly haunted by the moment he missed, when she said “Things are strange all over,” very sexily while he was not looking at her, and while he looks at her face now, he imagines several different versions of how she may have looked in those moments.
A waiter leans out the door of Shay’s and curtly says, “You can’t smoke at our tables.” Norman and Laura both slowly begin to stand. Looking back inside he continues, “Yeah, if you just want to stand a few feet past the railing – that’ll work. Thanks.” He disappears back inside as Norman and Laura are both still scooting their chairs back under the table.
“That sucks,” Laura grumbles.
“You want to just walk around?” Norman offers, stepping over the small railing that separates the tables from the square.
“Do you want to walk to somewhere where we can have drinks and smoke outside?” Laura suggests. “I would love a drink. I don’t know about you.”
“Right on, yeah. I’m down for whatever.”
The two walk together down a side street, away from the square, toward the Old Port where the sidewalks get busier. Norman actively observes their surroundings, as Portland is still relatively new to him.
“There’s a place I know where we can sit outside at tables and smoke for real this time.”
“Yeah, fuck those guys,” Norman jokes. Laura smiles politely.
A man passes them on the sidewalk and Norman turns his head with a smirk, following the man with his gaze.
“Awesome,” he laughs after a few moments.
Laura looks over at him with an eyebrow raised and an intrigued smile. “What was awesome?”
“Did you not see that awesome guy?”
“No, I missed him.”
“Oh, my god, he had his cowboy hat just far enough back on his head so you could see the front of his mohawk, and he had the greatest look on his face. He was walking…” Norman mimics the man’s silly walk and great expression. “He was great.”
Laura laughs heartily, ending with a cute squeaking chuckle. “He sounds great.” She looks over her shoulder, grinning.
“Yeah, it’s too bad you missed him.”
“There’s kind of a tall, futuristic Buster Keaton-ish-ness to you, isn’t there?” Laura notes, eyeing him with a grin as they walk.
“Hmm,” Norman muses, smiling at what he imagines was a compliment but not entirely sure how to respond. “Thank you.”
“Yes,” she assures him, lightly touching the edge of his sleeve, “it was meant as a compliment.”
They walk a few moments in silence. Norman lightly touches the back of her jacket as they hurry across a crosswalk, intentionally trying to send a minor attraction spell of some psychic sort into her through the brief contact.
When their steps slow again as they reach the curb, Laura puts her hand to her chest and looks up at Norman, who is just beginning to say, “So, I’m developing a religion of awesomeness, sort of,” but he notices that she had been about to speak and trails off with an apologetic nod.
Laura cocks her head to the side with a smile. “You’re developing a religion? Well, you know the meaning of life, so why not, right? Thanks for telling me, by the way. Your theory of awesomeness has been on my mind ever since you messaged me.”
Norman chuckles at himself. “Mm, yeah.” He smiles absent mindedly into the air for a moment, thinking about words. “It’s sort of pulchrolatry, if you will.”
“Oh, I will,” Laura laughs with a cigarette between her teeth, then lights the cigarette. Upon exhale, she adds, “Pulchrology, did you say? Is that the study of beauty?”
Norman nods in recognition of her deciphering, and enunciates clearly, “Pulchrolatry, actually. The worship of beauty. But really that word doesn’t work, anyway, because beauty I think is innate, or might as well be. I mean, the way I see it, nothing is naturally imbued with the quality of beauty or ugliness; it’s all just given to the object by we who judge it, and really, insomuch as everything is a fundamental corner of everything and plays its own unique tiny part, I see no reason not to judge everything beautiful. Awesomeness is really what it’s all about, but I don’t know if there is a Latin word that best captures the colloquial meaning of awesome.”
“Couldn’t the same be said of awesomeness, though? Couldn’t you just judge everything awesome?”
“Well, I guess my personal distinction between the two words is that beauty is that quality that everything shares, that uniqueness, that essentialness, that sort of thing, and then awesomeness is a more subtle quality – a quality that I only give to things that seem particularly awesome, which naturally must be contextual. However, as it turns out, I do still seem to find awesome shit just about everywhere I look. The problem is, there’s also lame shit just about anywhere you want to look. Very fine line at times.”
Laura laughs. “Indeed.”
“Lame being, of course, in my lexicon, the antithesis of awesome.” He chuckles.
“Naturally. You want to grab a table?” They are approaching a corner pub down at the edge of the Old Port with outdoor seating under blue neon.
Norman inspects the tables as Laura wordlessly slips inside the building, which is visibly very busy inside its glass walls. The tables outside are all full except one, which Norman slowly steps toward, smoking his cigarette to the filter. He flicks it into the street and sits down.
A very thin, pretty woman in a black apron steps toward Norman holding a tray of drinks. “Hi,” she says, “can I get you anything?”
“A Jack and Coke, thanks.” Norman lights another cigarette.
“Pepsi alright?” The question is rhetorical, delivered as she is turning away.
Half a cigarette later, Laura returns from inside and sits down across from Norman with a wide, beautiful smile. He can’t help smiling back, and takes in the sight of her for a long moment. Her smile is wide and bright and her neck is long. She has a shy stiltedness to her movements, yet her intrinsic grace glows through in the delicate gestures of her fingers and eyes.
“So tell me about your book,” Laura says, placing a cigarette between her lips. “Hope you don’t mind if I chainsmoke.”
“Not at all. Yeah, the novel. Well, I wrote this novel last year – from December Two-thousand-three to December Two-thousand-four – called Under the Undertow.”
Laura raises an eyebrow and one side of her mouth. “Under the Undertow?”
“My original title was Gigantomachy, which is a term that refers to a battle between gods and giants.”
“Is that what the book is about?”
Norman smiles and considers for a moment. “Not literally, no.”
Laura gestures interest with her face.
“It’s – no, it’s not about giants and gods battling,” he explains, adjusting his position in his seat and gesturing again suddenly with his hands. “It’s about this guy and his daughter who are fleeing status quo society in similar ways at the same time, and they go through these corresponding odysseys and … it’s sort of a philosophical fiction type of thing, if that means anything – although I’m terrified of damning my work for mass appeal by dubbing it such.”
“It does,” Laura assures him. “The philosophical fiction part, at least. Why the title change?”
“That’s a very complicated story,” he half-mumbles. “But so I finished it in December and tried to send it to some various publishers and agents and such, but … I guess I got disheartened by the whole process. So. I’ve got a new novel I’m working on now, but I’ve been ‘working on it’,” (quotation marks Norman’s, made in the air with his fingers) “ever since I finished Gigantomachy and don’t feel like I would be able to explain any of it in any way, yet.”
“By Gigantomachy, do you mean Under the Undertow?” Laura asks with a smile.
Norman nods, “Right. I still interchange the titles sometimes.”
“Does it have a title, this new one?”
The waitress returns to their table with Norman’s drink.
“Thank you.”
“A Diet Coke?” Laura asks the waitress.
“Diet Pepsi?” the waitress interrogatively corrects. Laura nods.
Norman takes a sip of his drink, his eyes low, his body leaning on his left arm. He does not realize how much his height makes him slouch.
“What are your middle and last names?” he asks her.
“I am Laura Elaine Solscz-Pinkerton-Eyre,” she says with a confident smile in her eyes.
Norman squints and half-grins. “Which of those were middle names?”
“Only the second one, Elizabeth,” she replies. “The rest was my last name. It’s doubly hyphenated. My father’s side is Solscz. My mother’s maiden name was Pinkerton-Eyre. So they became the Solscz-Pinkerton-Eyres.”
“Wow. I don’t think I’ve met anyone who was double-hyphenated before.”
Laura laughs, maintaining an enchanting eye contact. After a moment’s pause she leans back in her chair and asks him, “Can I ask you something personal?”
“Sure,” says Norman.
“So, please don’t be offended if I’m mistaken, but – do you have a glass eye?”
Norman smiles to distract from the biting of the inside of his lower lip. He raises his hand to his mouth and nervously touches the pointy edges of his slightly askew front teeth with his thumb. Generally, having to answer questions about his glass eye is among his three most hated social situations, beside having to explain about skipping grades and being asked to explain a piece of his artwork. But he wants to be open with this woman. “Yeah,” he finally says with a nod. “I lost the original organic one when I was fourteen. But this one works just as well.”
“Really, you can see through it?”
“Oh yeah.” He takes a sip of his drink, then lights himself another cigarette. “Darkly,” he adds and shrugs, “but yeah.” He comically winks over the glass eye and instantly regrets it, because he knows winks are creepy.
Laura laughs, reaching across the table to touch her fingertips ever so briefly to his and says, “Oh my god, winks are the creepiest.”
Norman laughs, nodding. “Agreed. I realized that right as I was doing it.”
“Well, anyway, it looks very real.”
“My glass eye? It is real.”
“I mean it looks natural.” She eyes him closely. “It moves, doesn’t it, with your other eye?”
“Often,” Norman nods, sensing her attraction to him powerfully enough to feel comfortable gazing at her for several moments without looking away. Laura keeps her eyes on his as well, and for a while they silently look at each other. Her eyes are striking, beautiful. Her lips curl quixotically in reaction to each tiny change of the expression on his face, itself a translation from his inner world, and Norman is momentarily extremely intrigued by that.
“So I hardly know anything about you so far,” Norman notes, taking a sip of his drink. “I’ve been rambling on about myself.”
Laura leans forward, holding her cigarette away to the side. “I’m a mystery,” she says.
“A beautiful mystery.”
Laura smiles into Norman’s eyes and blushes a little, leaning back again. “You’re sweet,” she says. Though her body is motionless, Norman can subtly sense her writhing in her chair, as if her spirit is swimming in spirit money. He can feel from her vibe how the eye contact they are sharing is intoxicating to her, and why she seems to be letting herself hold that eye contact a little longer each time they share it.
Inwardly, Norman promises himself that the next time he has extended eye contact with Laura he will throw a little psychic lasso across the distance between them and then maybe he will try to send thoughts across like tight-rope walkers, and see if she reacts to them.
“Can I ask you something?” Laura asks him.
“Something other than that, you mean?” Norman jokes.
Laura acknowledges Norman’s joke with two moments of barely visible head shaking, then asks him, “What made you message me?” and looks him in the eye with a charming fragility.
“My own volition,” Norman replies. He looks down at the table between them, not letting his face express anything until he thinks about how to explain himself. “I, um,” he begins, “I’m not entirely sure. I came across your profile. You had that … that kissing-the-camera picture. And under ‘Who I’d Like To Meet’ you wrote, You. I just want to meet you.” Norman smiles to himself, then raises his gaze back up to meet Laura’s. “Well that was me. I didn’t know who you were, but, I wasn’t going to turn you down, you know? You seemed lovely. You seemed literate. And really, I just don’t know anyone here and I wanted to meet somebody cool. You seemed cool. And here I am, having met you slash meeting you, and … you are indeed cool. And lovely.” Laura’s soft laughter settles into a smile and a warm gaze that shyly flits away from time to time but consistently returns to Norman’s eye. “And although it may have sounded absurd and a bit over the top, I want you to know,” and for this bit of dialogue Norman makes sure to put on his most smolderingly restrained, sublimely charming face, “that everything I wrote in that message, I meant.”
Their eye contact is now electric and he remembers suddenly his plan for the thought lasso. “I mean,” he says to stall for a split second while he inwardly prepares the lasso (which is to say, thinks about it until he understands it), then he snaps his eyes onto hers and can’t keep a tiny, quivering bit of smile off the corner of his mouth, “I don’t know you,” and he casts the lasso across the divide, “but I have a strange sense about you; I have ever since I first came across your picture online,” and the lasso lands and is pulled taut – and she seems to come forward a few centimeters, leaning heavier on her arm. Gazing into her eyes, it feels as if he is falling into them. His mind is suddenly overwhelmed by an image of a grassy, hilly area and blue sky, and he says intuitively, before understanding why, “It’s like I knew you once when we were both cavemen.”
Laura’s eyes light up at the word cavemen. She sits up straight and recoils her neck a bit; she seems startled or intrigued.
“I’m being obtuse, I’m sorry,” Norman apologizes instinctively.
“No, it’s just – you’re going to think this is weird.” Her shyness has returned to the forefront within her body’s inner politics. She holds her cigarette close to her chest. “I had a dream last night about being a cavewoman, and you were there, and you were a caveman.”
“I know exactly what you’re talking about,” Norman exaggerates.
“Yeah…” The thumb of the hand Laura is smoking with idly spins a silver ring on her long ring finger. Norman’s eyes move down from her eyes to that ring.
He rubs his thumb against the same spot on his own ring finger. “I used to have a ring, this bat ring. Ring with a little … bat on it.” He mimes a bat over his right hand with his left. Laura smiles at the image. “I kept my familiar in there.” He grins inwardly, and after a few moments it escapes to his face as well.
“Your familiar?” Laura asks incredulously.
“Yeah, you know.” Norman chuckles to himself, always feeling self-conscious at first when he speaks to someone new about such things. “I experiment with the, sort of, interface of existence and what you can really do to your experience with your mind, and creating, like, spiritual pseudopods, and for a few months last year, over these past few years really, I spent a few thoughts every day on trying to build this,” he mimes with his hands in front of him, as if holding an invisible puppy, “this sort of spiritual pseudopod, this familiar entity. That I could, you know, maybe do things with or, maybe, like, communicate remotely with, even maybe on different planes or whatever. You know, who knows? It was an experiment. But I kept it in my bat ring. In my imagination I did, that is.” He shrugs. “And then I think I left that in Indiana when I moved. It’s not here; I didn’t bring it. I don’t know what happened to it.”
“Oh, that’s awful,” Laura coos with a smile. “You lost your familiar’s house.” Norman can’t tell if she is being sincere or mocking in her tone.
“Yes,” Norman agrees, sipping at his drink, “yes it is very sad. But really, what I think we all want to hear about for a while is you, because I still know nothing about you. Only that you’re a mystery.”
Their eyes meet, both coming in at the same moment and not expecting to find the other’s. Each starts to look away but sees the other starting to do the same and instead remains, and they do this jerking eye dance of almost looking away several times within the course of a moment, then both laugh at what they’ve just shared and fall into a comfortable eye contact.
Laura rests her chin on her knuckles, giving her smile a curious shape. “Who are you?” she asks him. “You’ve just come out of nowhere.”
“I’m Norman Newman,” he says carefully. He struggles to make his face express the genuineness behind his words without looking ridiculous as he adds, “And I am in love with you.” He holds his idiom with confidence and grace (knowing that it requires playing a part, but also that, after stripping away every layer of illusion, being anything is merely pretending).
Laura looks at him silently for a while. “You don’t even know me,” she finally says with an appropriately dramatic flourish to her cigarette smoking that indicates to Norman that she is accepting the casually epic character he is giving to these moments.
“That’s why I’m here,” he replies. “But all we’ve done so far is talk about me.”
She looks at him for a while longer, an intrigued smile barely kept off her lips. He sits trying to think of a good question that won’t sound trite while distracted by her loveliness.
“What’s your new book about?” she finally asks him.
“It’s about all this, actually,” Norman replies, indicating the scene they are sharing. “My great spiritual hero epic.”
“So will it be a memoir, or, like, fictionalization?”
“Both. To be honest, after my first novel became self aware I can’t seem to write anything that doesn’t end up twisting in on itself in a cyclone of meta, so I’ve given up fighting it, really. Anymore, I write a character and it seems the first thing he or she does is look up at me and go, ‘Wait, who are you? What’s going on? How did I get here? You can’t write me; what do you know?’”
Laura laughs.
Norman shrugs. “It’s silly.”
“It is silly, but it’s cool. It’s very interesting. It makes me think about my own life, and if I might just be some fictional character in a book somewhere, or just a fleeting thought in someone else’s mind.”
“Or your own, exactly,” Norman says with a smile, overjoyed that he is successfully communicating his ideas (it isn’t always so easy, nor he so eloquent – indeed, Norman cannot deny that the potency of communication, the web of synchronicities and the ease of existential motion within the scene he is sharing tonight with this woman all have the distinct metallic scent of destiny). He continues, “Because, really, these are issues which are becoming relatively pertinent as the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ has to be given to things in our actual lives that we actually interact with – like the virtual environments on the internet and ideas of machine intelligence and our own imaginative musings and things like that. But how can you interact with something unreal? That makes no sense. I think everything can be said to be real as much as anything else; it’s just not all necessarily within view, you know, or of the same nature. Like, for instance, my friend Lou recently told me that Sony has patented the technology to simulate sensory experience in the brain using wireless ultrasound. If that ends up being the way we interact with our computers – just a visual display in our actual vision, and simulated touch, sound and sight in our brains, simulated emotions – then how is a simulated experience less real than a non-simulated experience, if both are just what you get from your brain, what you perceive, you know what I mean?”
“I think so,” Laura nods, frowning.
Norman touches his tongue momentarily to his left-upper wisdom tooth, and feels a hole in the side. He wonders about that for a moment, then shakes it out of his mind and says, “So even if you are a fictional entity in some book or movie-version-of-a-book or simsense-version-of-a-movie-version-of-a-book-that-is-based-on-reality or whatever, it makes no difference. You’re just you, wherever you are, here in this story, whatever it ends up being about. You see the world, you make your choices, you think about stuff, and that’s all you can do. But you get the unimaginable power to create yourself any way you want to be, to play the role of you however you see fit. But then again at the same time you’re also just this one thing, just this human or whatever you happen to be, this specific person. I don’t know. So I want my novel to begin with this whole revelation – the insignificance of the label of reality, the revelation that everything exists, that there is nothing that doesn’t exist, and that the engine of existence is choice and interaction – and then build from there and see where we can take our ideas. And of course, all of this is played off the fact that the fictionalized usses in the book would actually be fictional, and yet would exist in the Reader’s mind, as the Reader’s mental voice, making a connection there too…” He trails off, unable to tell if he is boring her or badly editing his thoughts.
“Interesting,” Laura says, nodding.
“Anyway.” Norman scratches an itch on his face.
“Did you just pluralize a plural? Is that what ‘usses’ was?”
“I did, and it was,” he grins.
“It’ll never sell,” Laura jokes. She waits a few moments before she adds, “You know what does sell?” just before Norman is about to ask her what she writes (her online profile vaguely mentioned it). Her gaze becomes like a thick beam of intoxicating sexiness.
“What?” he asks, dropping the aborted question from his mind in the light of her eyes.
“Romance,” she says with a sexy grin, then looks down at her cigarette. “Will there be any of that?”
He sees, for a split second in his mind’s eye, her naked body writhing so close to him that it is out of focus, hears in his mind’s ear her mellifluously moaning voice, and the warm confidence that they will soon be lovers fills his heart. Some barely-noticeable bit of data in the vision has the scent of genuine prophecy, of a different mnemonic character than fleeting fantasy, and this is something he has learned to notice and to trust.
“Oh of course,” Norman replies playfully, “it will be the most erotic novel ever written if I can come even close to accurately capturing the neverendingly blissful experience of fully, fearlessly being a living being (which, in my experience, is constantly arousing).” He laughs slightly with the hope of indicating his comment’s intended comedic nature, somewhat charmingly attempts to suppress the grin inside and glances for just a moment at Laura’s blue eyes. “But seriously, yeah, it’ll have to have an element of romance,” Norman continues, gradually feeling more comfortable and cool with his vision of her intimate flesh now in his mental inventory. “I mean, it’s the story. It’s this story. I try to make sure that nothing I do is lacking in romance. I don’t want a world without love.” He grins to himself, as he is secretly referencing a lyric from a song he wrote a few years earlier, from his first album, The World’s Original Man. “Even when I’m alone, I’m constantly charming and seducing myself. I mean, the book is really about love. Love of the world, love of self, love of that great metaphorical macro-entity I call the Reader – which refers to, potentially, all of future humanity, the unity of all those potential individual minds who could ever read the book based on these moments, or the meta-book that I don’t even write, but that is our experience and that somehow every other human being has subconscious access to through the zeitgeist. I’m using metaphors, of course, but there’s science to it, too. Even if just biologically, we have a certain genetic access to all the successes and failures, experiments and follies of our ancestors, from the beginning of … life, really. And, of course, the search for something like true love in the classic sense of it.”
Through the course of their conversation, Laura’s shyness has shed itself to reveal a woman with an enormous, gorgeous spirit that shines magnificently through every subtle mannerism, every glance of her eyes and curl of her lips. His intuitive vision of the two of them as cavepeople has remained with him through their conversation, and at this point he feels comfortable enough with her to calmly take her by the hand and lead her to bed. He wonders how she feels.
Laura is shaking her head, holding back a smile. “You are something else,” she says.
Norman smiles. “I still hardly know anything about you.”
“You can see through that glass eye, can’t you?” Laura asks him playfully.
“I don’t see how that would be possible.”
“I don’t see that stopping you.” She scans him with her eyes, holding back a charmed smile. The waitress passes by, having just dropped off a neighboring table’s drinks, and Laura stops her with a glance. “Excuse me, can I get that Diet Coke, please?”
“Oh yes, sorry, ma’am,” the waitress apologizes. Just before she disappears inside, she turns back around and reiterates, “Diet Pepsi okay?”
Laura nods politely in the woman’s direction.
“I feel preternaturally comfortable with you,” Norman remarks, stubbing out his cigarette. “I feel like we’ve been lovers before.” He moves his eyes up to her from the ashtray. “Forgive my forwardness. I don’t know. I feel like I’ve known you before.”
Laura bites her bottom lip, her eyes fixed on him.
Norman holds his fingers up to his lips as if holding a joint. “Do you smoke weed?”
Laura raises both eyebrows slowly and nods. “Why do you ask?”
“Well, I’ve got some, and I would love to continue this conversation while smoking it if you would be interested.”
The look on Laura’s face belies the debate going on in her head. She takes a recess from having to reply by retrieving and then lighting a new cigarette. It is a long moment, during which Norman feels the overwhelming presence of the uncertainty of her response, despite his intuitive confidence, until she exhales her first drag, looks into his glass eye and says, “Do you want to go to my apartment?”
“Sure,” Norman agrees with a biological rush of glee.
He stands and puts a ten dollar bill on the table. Hands in his long coat pockets, he extends an elbow for Laura to take in her hand as she stands. She picks up her purse and they walk off together back the way they came from Monument Square.
For a while they walk in silence, both introspecting over the suddenness of it all. Norman wonders what she is thinking, and feels briefly as if he can sense her thoughts on him. Other city dwellers pass them on the sidewalk, some silent and alone, staring forward, consumed by their own stories, some coupled, talking quietly to each other.
At a street corner where they have to wait for the light to change, a man pulls up in front of them in a car, yawning softly to himself (just barely audible to Norman and Laura through his open window) as he slowly turns right down a sidestreet. Something about the moment the moment makes them both laugh intermittently, like call and response, each continuing to laugh at the other’s continued laughter as they cross the street and continue walking.
Laura looks up at Norman; he can see her in his peripheral vision as he gazes ahead. “Where did you come from?” she asks him rhetorically.
He laughs and looks over at her, meeting her charmed gaze. He slows his walk, bringing them to a stop in front of a large window that glows yellow from the open dance studio inside. A tango class is in session. They both notice it at the same time. She takes his hand.
A silver-haired gentleman in a navy pea coat passes them and pauses just long enough to comment, “You two ought to be dancing. You would look good together,” then continues on.
Laura smiles to the man, who continues along away from them. She looks up at Norman, who has just noticed that she is holding his hand. It is as if natural forces of gravity and magnetism pull their faces together for a kiss. Laura’s lips take his hungrily into their midst and caress them softly, modestly shuddering but confident. The closeness of their two faces seems to create a tiny baby universe, a milieu where the only physical forces are thought and love, within which he is certain he can feel her thoughts (they are focused on the kiss and feathered with awe). He puts his free hand under her coat and the shirt beneath it, finding the warm, soft skin of her stomach. Her fingers flex, squeezing his knuckles together. Her tongue touches his teeth.
“Mmm,” Laura purrs, smiling as she pulls away, all beautiful blue eyes.
“Tell me about your book,” Norman requests. The two slowly begin walking again toward her building. “You’re writing one, right?”
“Well,” she says, softly holding his arm with both hands and looking up at the buildings of downtown Portland, “it’s a mystery, and it, too, is kind of half-memoir, half-fiction.”
“Isn’t everything?”
Laura smiles. “Perhaps,” she muses. “But, so, my protagonist is obviously fashioned after me, and she has to solve a mystery of some sort. But I haven’t figured out what the mystery is yet.”
“I guess that’s the mystery,” Norman jokes.
“My idea is that she is this fabulous, independently wealthy young woman who loves mysteries and wants more than anything to be a great sleuth, but she doesn’t know where to begin. So she puts out an add for a Watson and ends up hiring this kind of nerdy young guy who just takes the job to have a job, you know? And he gradually falls in love with her, even though she’s kind of crazy – eccentric, though, really, is all – and he invents mysteries to solve with her, sort of. That’s the idea so far, anyway.”
“That’s wonderful,” Norman laughs. “I totally dig that. Have you begun it?”
“Perhaps,” she smiles with almost arbitrary mystery. Laura stops and Norman stops a few paces ahead, turning around to face her and taking the moment to pull out a cigarette. “What on Earth?” she laughs.
He looks where she’s looking, which is inside the small shop they were passing – a tiny one-room record store in which a small crowd is gathered, sitting on the floor around a frantic man in an enormous tinfoil fish costume who is dancing/flailing while making some cacophonous kind of music by manipulating two turntables with his long, fin-like tinfoil arm extensions. Only his face and legs stick out of his costume. He turns away from the decks for a moment to gesture wildly with his fins in the air, then turns back and makes another series of grating, scratching sounds on the turntables with his dangly limbs. He dances about like a cartoon witch doctor.
“Awesome!” Norman declares exuberantly. He is astounded by the bizarre, staggeringly wonderful sight. “Word,” he can’t help but add as he and Laura stand closer together and both peer into the window at the performance.
“What is that he’s wearing?” Laura asks, laughing.
A plainly pretty girl with short black hair and dark eyes who is sitting among the crowd inside the record store catches Norman’s eye through the window, and though she looks away when his eye meets hers, she soon looks back at him and smiles when she finds his gaze still on her. They watch each other across the crowd and through the glass.
“I think he’s supposed to be a big fish,” Norman says without removing his eye from the girl. “See the fish eyes above his face, up on his hat?” Somehow in this girl’s glance he can see the universality of love, and he is reminded of the fact that there are millions of individual lovely girls with different stories, different things on their walls, different issues left over from childhood, each a unique potential love affair with its own taste of beauty and truth. And yet here he stands with this woman he has known for an hour or less, whom he has already kissed with passion, for whom he has already professed a sort of preemptive love. All love is true, he thinks, almost saying it aloud. “See, it’s a fish, I think,” he says, if only to keep himself from saying anything else. The girl inside glances at Laura, makes a cutely disapproving face at Norman with her eyes low and then returns her attention to the performance.
“He looks like an Aztec god or a Doctor Who alien,” Laura laughs.
“He’s the most badass person I have ever seen,” Norman declares. “Rarely do I find myself so moved by performance art, honestly, but this guy fucking rules. Look at him; he’s so manic and insane and … and, like, drenched in meaninglessness that becomes so over-the-top it almost becomes meaningful in this weird, beautiful anti-way.”
Norman and Laura continue their walk to her building as Norman continues to talk, gesturing with his hands. “See, shit like that just happening in some random tiny record store is the kind of shit that makes me believe that the Revolution could really happen, that this renaissance that I feel coming truly could be happening, maybe even already, honestly, in the dark corners of our society in towns like Portland, Maine, where no one will realize it was going on, and just how awesome it was, potentially for decades. Mm. It excites me. I love that guy. Sorry for rambling on there …”
“No, it’s cool,” Laura assures him, tugging on the sleeve of his jacket. “Just what kind of revolution are we talking about, here, though, I must ask?”
“Oh, you know about the Revolution,” Norman assures her with a little laugh, touching his knuckles to her arm for a moment. “It’s the one that supposedly will not be televised, which I think is partially untrue although it has probably already begun and I’m sure the news networks won’t catch on for some time.”
“So is this, like, that hipster revolution into a world where it’s like Burning Man all the time, everyone’s cool and we all just get along by sheer grooviness?”
Norman laughs for a long time at Laura’s description, but once he can form words again he agrees, “Yeah, exactly. That’s the one I’m talking about. You really described it perfectly, honestly. Because it is all about awesomeness. Nice Burning Man reference.”
“And you’re the prophet of this future religion of awesomeness,” Laura says, smiling. “I’m putting it all together.”
“Right on,” Norman laughs. He marvels inwardly at how perfectly this evening has turned out, and how uncanny their connection seems.
Laura stops and turns as they approach the doors of the Metropolitan, a high stone building among others along a block, across wide Congress Street from the huge Key Bank building at the east edge of Monument Square. “We’ll have to finish our cigarettes before we can go in. We can smoke in my apartment, but not on the way up.”
A small old woman slowly shuffles past between them, not even seeming to notice their presence. Norman and Laura step apart to make room for her, watching her pass with polite smiles.
“Cool, cool,” Norman replies, standing with his hands in his coat pockets, his cigarette held in his lips. He takes this moment once more to take in Laura’s visage. She stands smoking, watching him out of the corner of her eye as she softly sways back and forth. He finds himself amazed that his first encounter with this woman has led him here. He feels confident in this moment that Laura will end up wanting to have sex with him, and though there would be no more ideal end to his evening, he does not want to give her the wrong impression. He wants to see her again, and often. He senses, somehow, cosmic significance thrumming between them like a battery. Though he still knows hardly anything about her, he finds her mesmerizing, and for some reason he finds he can talk freely about his ideas, most of which he normally feels the need to withhold from anyone but his best friend Lou.
“Okay, I have a proposition,” Norman says, gathering courage up from the air like his heart is a magnet that he can turn on at will. “It is that you and I go up to your apartment and smoke some weed, smoke some cigarettes, continue to talk about cool shit and get to know each other, and then that we do not have sex, despite the fact that I think both of us maybe want to – we don’t even think about it yet – because I have been thinking about your comment about romance novels, how they’re what sells, and about sort of the nature of true love and why it is that romance novels sell, what it is that they represent, and it made me …”
“I will make you no promises,” Laura laughs softly, interrupting him as she tosses her cigarette to the side. She takes hold of the collar of his coat and kisses him on the lips, then walks with him, holding his coat, into the Metropolitan.
Through the course of their slow walk across the small, echoey vestibule to the elevator, Norman takes a moment to thank, in his mind, any being or force other than himself that might have had a hand in this evening’s sequence of events. Laura goes in front of him, walking stiff and primly while occasionally looking back at Norman to reveal the oceans of eager passion that come out only through her eyes and the sex-kitten smile that she successfully, if barely, is keeping off her lips.
When the elevator opens, she enters and turns to face him, to press for the third floor. Her eyes meet his as he approaches. She pushes the button and backs up slowly to the far wall while he moves close to her. The door closes behind him as they kiss, and the kiss holds for the short but generous eternity that it takes to get to the third floor. In that minute Norman feels desperately in love with this woman, and his kiss expresses that. Hers pushes back with equal passion, such that when the doors open on the third floor and Norman finally steps back away from her, her lips hungrily, instinctually pursue his as they retreat, then she clasps her fingertips to her mouth and closes her eyes, standing perfectly still as Norman backs toward the open elevator doors.
“Are you alright?” he asks.
Her eyes flash open to instant gleaming gorgeousness, expressing that she is just fine. She removes her hand to reveal a wild smile, the kind not found in captivity. She raises her chin a bit as she strides out past him, to the right, toward her door, unlocks it and goes right in, leaving it open.
Norman slowly approaches the door, his hands in his coat pockets, relishing how much he enjoys being involved in what seems to be the beginning of a new phase of his life, meeting this new woman (a potential new love, he already feels), seeing this new apartment where he can already tell he will be spending a great deal of time. He can smell the newness of everything. It has been some time since his personal milieu has felt fresh, innocent.
Laura’s apartment is at the corner of the building, consisting of one long main room with the door at one end and two big windows at the other, the room separated into two spaces by a square wooden arch that hugs the walls and ceiling in the middle. Along the left wall are first a closet, then a bathroom door, then an open doorway into the tiny kitchen, then another closet, a huge flatscreen TV and then the bedroom door. Along the right wall in the entry area are a pair of wide, ceiling-height bookshelves full of books, with a couple of large leather couches perpendicular to the wall, facing each other, in the space by the windows. The walls are covered with modern paintings and framed covers of old mystery novels. The hardwood floor is bare by the windows, and in the entry room covered by an ornate blood-and-cream Persian rug. Norman doffs his coat and drops it on top of Laura’s on a small antique chair to the right of the door.
He closes the door behind himself. “So, I don’t know about you,” he says toward the kitchen, into which she has momentarily disappeared, “but I would love to have a smoke. I have a little pipe of my own that I brought.” He scans the books on the wall of bookshelves, taking note that she is a collector (two long shelves dedicated to full catalogs of the works of Erle Stanley Gardener and P. G. Wodehouse), and also that she has a taste for the absurd (Joyce, Camus, Kafka, Beckett, Robbins [all, of course, staples of the libraries of his generation’s intelligentsia]). “Through the Looking Glass,” he whispers to himself when he sees said spine.
“We can use my pipe, if you want,” Laura says, peeking out through the doorway to the kitchen, “and we can smoke my weed. Do you want a drink? I don’t have much other than Diet Coke, unfortunately.”
“No thanks; I’m good. You have the same edition of Ulysses as I do. What is this painting above your desk here – the circles?”
“Ulysses is probably my all-around favorite book.” Laura finishes pouring herself a glass of Diet Coke and sets it down on the flat arm of one of the leather couches. “Oh, the circle painting? That was done by my friend Amos Doorie. He gave it to me. Have a seat. I’ll go gather my illicit materials.” She disappears into the bedroom for a moment while Norman sits and admires a huge crystal ashtray that sits on top of a small, modern wooden table between the couches. He retrieves a cigarette from his pack.
Laura returns with a large, purple glass Sherlock Holmes pipe and a small tin. She is also wearing a fur-collared brown button-up sweater which she must have put on in the bedroom.
“Nice sweater,” Norman comments. “I love your fuzzy mane.”
“Thank you,” Laura says as she sits down next to him on the couch and crosses her legs with a smile in his direction. She touches the collar of her sweater, and when she does it pushes it to the side, revealing a little gold whale on a necklace she is wearing.
“Did you just put that on?” he asks, reaching out instinctively to touch the whale where it hovers above her supersternal notch. “I love him.”
“No, I just put him on,” she says. “You like him?”
“We’re quick friends, he and I,” Norman nods, smiling, and lights his cigarette, entranced by the whale, certain now that all of this was somehow meant to unfold as it has. He thinks of Horselover Fat in the Philip K. Dick novel Valis opening his front door to a woman with a fish necklace and his world splitting apart (a fictionalization of a real event that happen to Dick).
“Could you light me one of those, cowboy?” she asks with a flutter of her eyelashes.
“You can have this one, cowgirl,” Norman says, taking a drag and then handing the cigarette to her as he exhales off to the side. He wonders if she is conscious of the Pulp Fiction reference they just collaborated on performing as he lights himself another.
Laura watches him while she smokes, the wicked grin inside her heart steadily escaping to her face more and more with each moment they share. She pushes a large bud of weed into the pipe and hands it to Norman.
“Thank you, darling.” Norman admires the pipe for a moment, then holds his lighter to its bowl and takes a large hit. He holds the smoke in his lungs as Laura takes the pipe and does the same, their eyes fixed on each other as if there is a taut thread between their pupils. White smoke trickles from Norman’s nose and then he begins to cough, releasing a large cloud into the air around them. When he has finally finished coughing, he finds the pipe in his hands again, Laura smiling, letting the smoke curl around her lips. She laughs at the end of the breath, casting an unexpected ring of smoke across the breach between them. Both Laura and Norman are startled by the perfect manner in which the smoke ring appears and sways and then dissipates, as if it was CG. Norman smokes again, then hands the pipe back to Laura.
“That was gorgeous,” she says. “It was magical.” She starts to laugh, her smile enormous and glowing. She has her feet curled up under her legs, leaning back away from Norman against the wall and the arm of the couch.
Norman turns his body to face her, sitting cross-legged. “It was,” he agrees with a chuckle. “It was almost cartoonish. It was so perfect and bizarre and unexpected. You know, that’s really a good description for everything in my life – fuck, in the whole world, right now. Cartoonish and absurd but sort of beautiful and funny in a tragic, macabre, magical Henry Miller kind of way. It all makes sense, really.”
Laura shakes her head. “None of it makes any sense,” she says with a cute smirk.
Norman smiles at her, nodding slowly, thinking. “It doesn’t really, you’re right,” he agrees. “Everything in the universe has a causal relationship with something else, and yet somehow it makes no sense at all. It is completely absurd and random. Like, this? Of all things? Of all possible ways things could be, ways that human beings could have arranged events, this? Fucking, Kurt Vonnegut and the massacres in Rwanda and Pepsi and Bang Bus and Bettie Davis and Paul Wolfowitz and Burning Man and Michael Jackson? If it weren’t in the encyclopedias I wouldn’t believe a shred of it.”
As she inhales from the pipe while he is speaking, Laura’s restrained laughter builds until she has one arm up over her face, slouching to the side and pressing herself against the back of the couch, quaking with laughter and coughing smoke. Norman puts a hand to her ribs. “You alright?” Laura removes her arm from her face and nods to him, smiling, sighing. Even in such a position she looks gorgeous.
As Norman begins to feel the effects of the weed he has smoked filling his veins with lightness and swirling his thoughts about in his brain, his messianic confidence begins to glow anew, as it always does so crisply in these first moments of getting high. He feels as if his spirit expands out past his body and his awareness of the myriad ways he can use that spirit fade back into his arsenal. Like he remembers why he’s here, almost. He knows from past experience that this feeling of his is also somehow intuitively visible to others on some subtle level, and that he is at his most socially potent and charismatic when he is feeling this way. It is something he can achieve at any point simply through faith in his own awesomeness, but weed lubricates the journey.
“This is my favorite part of getting stoned,” Norman says softly, letting his eyes smile unselfconsciously at Laura. “Just as it’s beginning to hit, when all you want to do is talk and listen to music and – you know, when everything is sort of heightened. Everything has more information in it, and the wheels in your mind are spinning smoothly and you can almost just … almost just see behind things.” Norman gestures with his hand in the air as if he is moving something to the side, to see behind it. “It’s as if in this state I really become aware of all my various parts, of all the extra shit I can do with my will, like my magical powers become available.”
“You know, the way your message read, I wondered if you’d be a real person or what,” Laura admits, shaking her head with a sublime smile of disbelief. “I’m a little shocked I replied to it at all, honestly. It’s fairly uncharacteristic of me. I could hardly believe that you might actually just be someone this beautiful. But I had a feeling it might be possible.”
“What a wonderful compliment. I’m flattered.”
“I think somehow you knew all this would happen.”
“I really didn’t know anything,” Norman says, though to himself in his mind he has to admit that he did, in fact, have a strong intuition that something like this could happen tonight with this woman he randomly messaged online, despite the apparent unlikelihood of it.
There is a brief pause in the conversation. Norman looks around Laura’s apartment, admiring the artwork on her walls.
“So, Norman,” Laura says through a smile and a sexy sway of her neck, “how is all of this going to end?”
Norman thinks for a moment, knowing he needs to respond with eloquence in some manner. When he can’t come up with any good words, he leans in and attempts an eloquent kiss. Where their two mouths press together, as their tongues touch softly in just the right sequence, he can almost see a tiny doorway opening up, like a wormhole in the middle of Laura’s apartment, with bright pinkish-white light beaming from the edges, and with all of his willpower, not even knowing what is on the other side, he struggles to fold up his entire reality and push it through that doorway, into the pink light beyond, believing it to be the light of pure/true love.
When he finds himself standing in what appears to be an Americanized Olympian temple, surrounded by massive gray Doric columns, Norman is stoned enough not to recognize at first that anything might be amiss. (Also, the small corner of him that does suspect the full reality of these surroundings finds them awesome enough not to sound the alarm right away.)
Surrounded by various angelic servants in bejeweled suits, the Man, that universal modern white male asshole who wants nothing more than his barcode on the inside of all our orifices, sits upon His opulent throne a mere dozen paces in front of Norman.
“Who is this, now?” the Man asks His shimmering yes-men collectively.
“He just came right in, sir,” a seraphic Suit behind Norman apologizes to its master. “We didn’t even see him coming.”
Norman grins broadly at the sight of it all and proclaims with hesitant joy (despite his nefarious company), “I believe I may have just enlightened in a kiss.”
“Rubbish,” the Man scoffs, “you’ve just blacked out again. Your body is down in the World, shaking like jello.”
“Who are you supposed to be?” Norman asks the Man. “What’s all this? Where are we having this discussion?”
“In your dying brain.”
Norman declares confidently and with a touch of smug pride in his own awesomeness, “I call bullshit.”
The Man leans forward in His throne and looks hard into Norman’s empty right eye. “Norman, pay very close attention. There’s no freedom from eternity. Your sentence will never be over. You are a fourth-dimensional event. You are a naturally-occurring phenomenon in a mortal universe, now. You are one blood cell of something that will die. I’m sorry if you think that you’re anything more. But you’ll have to get back in line.”
“I know you’re fallible and don’t know what you’re talking about. In fact, I know more than you do. That’s somehow intuitively clear to me.” Norman stands confidently and crosses his arms. Somewhere in the periphery of his awareness, Norman senses a thumbs-up.
“Brush this plant back into its hole,” the Man says with a sweep of His hand.
“What an asshole,” Norman exclaims, looking to one of the angelic servants for support but getting only vapid stoicism. He looks back to the Man. “You wouldn’t be communicating with me if I was just some plant to you. I demand that you recognize my equality!” Norman begins gesticulating wildly with his hands like a street rapper. “I can comprehend you and the complexity of this milieu, and I know that you’re just a small part of it all. Don’t try to break me against my own uncertainty. I am an enlightened human being, motherfucker; I know exactly what I’m seeing. Fuck your bullshit fearmongering, bitch. You’re just trying to make the World into Hell so you can have something to rule over. Fuck you! Bring your bullshit to bear against the forces of badass beauty and love and see where it gets you! You have no power that we don’t give you.”
Norman returns to his body like a sack being pulled over his head and then out of the resulting darkness slowly fading the light of Laura’s apartment. His brain awakens first, aware gradually that his body is slumped back and to the side, quaking seizure-like. As usual when returning to the world (be it waking from dreams or returning from trance), Norman feels the melancholy of the world overwhelm him, but the first image that fades back into his view is Laura’s sweetly concerned face, and his heart is instantly warmed again by her beauty and the compassion in her eyes. She softly strokes his shoulder, her other arm around the back of his neck, her lovely blue eyes watching his with concern. “Norman?” she asks hesitantly. “Are you okay?”
Through his body’s spasms he is able to lean his gaze over to meet hers and attempt a smile, though her facial response reflects the gruesome look his attempted smile must have achieved. It is after a few brief moments of this that he is finally able to speak.
“Forgive me, my dear,” his quaking voice says through the tremors, “I seem to be tripping out.”

Chapter 3: Amsterdam/There Is No Time

2007-09-19T13:36:00.000-04:00

3

It can’t be denied that marijuana may have had something to do with it.

Amsterdam/There Is No Time

Weed came into Norman’s life in the summer of Two-thousand-one, in Amsterdam, on a backpacking tour of that continent with his two best friends from college, Lou Carlsen and Karl Major. Amsterdam book-ended the two month European tour – they were there for two days at the beginning of the trip, and the original plan was to return to Amsterdam after circling the continent and stay there for another two days at the end.
Norman had smoked weed a few times in college with a couple of older girlfriends, but had never really gotten high for whatever reason. Lou, with whom Norman had recently begun to collaborate on screenplays, had never even smoked a cigarette. Karl, the third part of the old triumvirate of friends who had all met back at the Indiana Academy and then gone to college together at Indiana University, had begun smoking weed when he had moved to Seattle six months earlier, and in Amsterdam this allowed him to function as the expert among them.
The first time Norman and Lou got high was in a small sidestreet coffeeshop in Amsterdam called the Blue Moon. Karl, as the experienced one, bought two joints of something called purple siensa and the three young men sat in a corner of the coffeeshop, passing the joints in a circle until both were smoked away. For a few minutes, Norman wondered if maybe he was just immune to the effects of marijuana.
Then the Massive Attack song Risingson came on on the joint’s little radio and at that same instant, everything changed about the nature of Norman’s perception. With the opening sounds of the song – a sort of eerie howling over a stuttering, swirling guitarpeggio – the bits of information in the world around him all seemed suddenly to stand up and reveal that they had in fact been a sea of individual people wearing hats with pixels of said information printed on them, all crouched together to appear as a material world, and they all suspiciously eyed Norman and then just as instantly crouched back down and became the phenomenal universe again (this, of course, is metaphor). When the beat came messianically in, the whole scene around him seemed to begin to move perfectly to it. It was as if a lens had been removed from Norman’s vision which was there to make the world appear as it normally did (to dampen its gorgeousness/fullness from the eyes of we spiritual mole-people, perhaps), and now the image of Karl was just a puppet, and Lou too was a puppet, and when Norman looked at his own hands it was more like looking at a screen with the image of his hands from his perspective. His eye was now clearly but a window. He wondered momentarily how one would get this shot for a film; the camera would have to fill his head. When he turned his head, his vision joined him jaggedly, as if time had been folded up and little pieces snipped out like from a paper snowflake. But through those metaphorical holes, some weird information-light almost seemed to come. Norman’s thoughts were swirled by the ‘weird information-light’ and seemed to bloom in previously darkened dimensions, expanding his awareness of the three-point-one-four-one-five-nine-dimensional world around him into something he could not even begin to know how to describe.
“Dude,” Norman said aloud to his comrades.
Karl laughed. “Yes, Norman?”
Norman held up a puppety finger to Karl and raised one eyebrow, attempting an incredibly serious expression with his lips. He held this for a moment, his eye darted to Lou, then he sat back and said with passionate eye contact and his finger still in the air, “Dude.”
“I think I know what he’s talking about, man,” Lou said with a knowing half-grin under a brow-furrowing blank gaze of awe.
“Hold on, oh my god, gravity is pulling me backwards,” Karl coughed, then burst out laughing and grabbed tightly onto the table in front of him.
They spent the next half hour trying to describe to each other what exactly was happening inside their heads with much wild gesturing and raucous laughter. For Norman, it was as if the aperture through which he experienced the information his brain sent his soul was usually a tight sphincter which the weed had somehow relaxed, allowing more information than just sensory input through to his awareness. It was as if all the shadowy corners of thought that Norman reached his hand into for inspiration were now lit greenly as if in night vision, and it became intuitively clear that these thoughts were not just in his head but actually part of the world.
“…so at first the extraneous information is exciting, but for Norman it’s still novelty enough to seem like a fluke, an experiential hallucination (not a hallucination of anything per se so much as a hallucinatory perspective).”
“Norman’s speaking in the third person,” Karl snickered. “Maybe he’s someone else now. Who is he? Who have we become?”
They all laughed uncontrollably. The experience was mentally intriguing, but also somehow joyously hilarious.
This jovial atmosphere was brought abruptly to an end by the mysterious fainting of a woman beside their table followed suddenly by a fight breaking out between the woman’s male companion and the coffeeshop’s proprietor, a scene from which the three baked young backpackers quickly, if awkwardly, extricated themselves.
Outside, Norman felt the sun beaming life/logos/joy down upon him. Everyone on the street appeared to glow with beauty, uniqueness, with self in a way that he had never truly grasped before. It struck him there, standing at the edge of the swarming summer streets of Amsterdam, that in some magical/paradoxical way everyone must be essentially existentially the same self.
On the shockingly-stoned tram ride back to their hotel, Lou was close to freaking out, certain they’d miss their stop and end up riding the tram eternally, but by the time they were sober the next morning at the hotel, he was the first to suggest they do it again before leaving for Hamburg.
Since the Eurail tickets they had bought allowed them a certain itinerary flexibility, the boys ended up truncating Budapest and Vienna and altogether skipping Madrid so that their time in Amsterdam at the end of the trip could last longer. By the time they got back to Holland six weeks later, they had accrued a small troupe of fellow-backpackers from assorted geographical origins, and they all shared a large, cheap apartment in Amsterdam’s Turkish neighborhood for two future-mythic weeks.
Norman was twenty years old. He had begun smoking cigarettes and gotten truly drunk on alcohol for the first time both only within the past year, having skipped that in college, being so young. He was new to the concept of altered states. His parents had always been virulently, mindlessly anti-drug, and as a young prodigy he had followed their rules. But in Amsterdam it was legal. There was no reason not to try it. He and Lou had researched it online before the trip, intrigued by Karl’s hilarious stoned phone calls/email rants. It had been but one of many various European adventures that they had been eagerly anticipating in the days leading up to the trip, but after the experience it clearly eclipsed everything else. They would often fondly recall cavorting in the Budapest bathhouse with those three British girls, being in the middle of a crowd of two million in the Circus Maximus all celebrating a Roman football win, drunkenly carousing through the streets of Barcelona singing There’s a Hole at the Bottom of the Sea, but the memories faded from immediate significance over time. Marijuana, however, had officially become a part of their lives. It was very much like waking into a wondrous dream.
Norman and Lou would never truly be the same again.

“Hey man.”
“Hey, man. How you doing?”
“Man, alright.” Pause. “I could be better, obviously.” Chuckle.
“I hear you, dog.” Knowing laughs.
When Norman and Lou returned to Indiana from Europe in the late summer of Two-thousand-one, it felt as if everything had changed. Norman returned to his big corner room in the dorm at the Indiana Academy, his co-counselor girlfriend Karen who lived a floor below him, his paintings, his photographs, his music. At first, the cover of the Tupperware container of modern American society sealed back over him smoothly and life was soon just as it had been.
But on his nights off, when he would go see Lou at Lou’s mother’s house across town, the conversation would inevitably lead back to weed.
“Man, wouldn’t it be great if we could get some weed? I miss it, man, I gotta admit.” Laughs. “I know, but, fuck – right? You know what I mean. I know you know what I mean.”
“Word.”
But Norman and Lou were not drug people. Not yet, at least. Norman was a live-in residential counselor at his pre-college boarding school alma mater, and Lou was an unemployed college graduate drifting between his mother’s house (not far from the Indiana Academy, in Muncie) and various friends’ couches across the state. Norman had known drug people in his life, been friend and even lover to them, but had never really joined in that milieu. Neither Norman nor Lou had any idea how to get marijuana in the United States. Their attempts led only to folly. They tried talking to people in weed chat rooms online, hanging out too long in head shops, even stood nervously, expectantly in a corner of the Muncie bus station for about five minutes before they realized how absurd they were and left.
Focuses changed, of course, less than a month into the semester, when American society itself was rudely awakened by the blood-caked rapiers of four very angry angels. (To be fair, there had been written warning in the halls of the zeitgeist, though this written warning had been pasted on the inside of a stall in the bathroom at the bottom of the stairs behind a door that said “Beware of the leopard,” as it were [for Americans at least].) Fear threaded through the fibers of the world, and the conservative clamps seemed to take hold everywhere, even in previously liberal institutions like the Indiana Academy. Norman began to butt heads with the administration in an effort to retain a progressive atmosphere of tolerance and liberalism there.
One afternoon, overwhelmed by the sheer amount of artistic power that remained inertly in potentia in his room, Norman gave away all of the hundreds of paintings he had created throughout his college adolescence to students and coworkers.
Another month later, Lou found a job up north at Scornell Systems, a software company in South Bend, Indiana. He rented a one bedroom apartment in a themed apartment complex called the Enchanted Forest. Norman drove three hours each direction to visit him on most weekends that he wasn’t on duty at the Academy. In the Enchanted Forest, the conversations became more specific.
“We need to go back to fuckin’ Amsterdam.”
“I hear you, dog.”
For the sake of weed, plans were made. Soon, tickets were bought. That next May, right after the end of the Academy’s school year, Norman and Lou returned to Amsterdam.
Most of the four days they were in Amsterdam the second time was spent in their hotel room. They ventured out into the city to buy more weed, or just to walk around and enjoy the beauty of the buskers and bridges and buildings and bicycles, but not often. The pretense was that the two of them were working on the screenplay for Death and the Ladies (their planned second film in the fantasy future where they are filmmakers). Mostly they sat on their beds with the television on across the room, smoking joint after joint and talking about whatever.
Whatever, however, became something miraculous. The weed seemed to open access to some sort of super-sense that demanded exploration, and the two of them were eager to do just that. Significant progress was made on the dialogue for Death and the Ladies (and an epiphany achieved in the realization that one of the characters was the Devil), but much more unexpected avenues of thought were probed as well. They discussed metaphors for what they were experiencing as the weed took hold. Their preferred metaphor was a series of rooms: the First Room being the awareness of their separation from their bodies, when the effect they dubbed ‘puppetiness’ set in; the Second Room being the space where you go when you have completely broken away from reality, when you can float in and out of your body’s awareness but also reach out into the aether of your thoughts or feelings, or of the cosmos, or whatever else might be out there (this phase appearing to an outside observer as some kind of intermittent catatonia); there was a Third Room mentioned a few times, but only hypothetically (Lou mused that as broken as he felt in the Second Room, the Third Room must be “all-four-limbs-off-the-floor-out-of-this-universe” [his words]). The two also developed a working model for what they referred to as the ‘interface’ of existence, the way we perceive and interact with the sensory input of the world and our own thoughts (using mostly computer operating system and role-playing game inspired metaphors and terminology to describe it).
All that remains written down from these conversations are two lines of tiny text at the top of an otherwise blank page in one of Norman’s sketchbooks.

Norman dual class, Artist (level 6) / Prophet (level 4)
Lou Logician (level 7)

Through this process, Norman and Lou achieved an intimidating level of efficiency of communication. It was almost as if the two young men began to act as a single mind. They could share complex thoughts with the briefest fragments of words, accompanied with their shared lexicon of cultural references, tones of voice, hand gestures and facial expressions.
Each of the three nights, Norman and Lou were awakened by a tiny mouse that noisily hopped up and down in one corner of the room, by the window, from about three to four a.m., squeaking softly each time it landed back down on the floor. The second and third nights, Norman and Lou sat up to watch the whole performance, noting that after about an hour of jumping each night the mouse would vanish from view, though a thorough search of the room the next morning revealed no mouse holes.
At one point on their last evening, during a long pause in the conversation, Norman’s thoughts came to the concept of the oneness of all things, and how that relates to compassion as a feeling, and for the briefest of moments, while he was looking at Lou and thinking these things, he felt perfection in his compassion in a manner that seemed to rush in on him suddenly, filling him with peace and joy.
Lou seemed to recognize the moment in Norman’s eyes, and he smiled and gasped a little.
“Did you see that?” Norman asked him happily.
“Yeah. You just, like, became Buddha for a second.” Lou also seemed overjoyed by the experience.
“Like, you really saw it?”
“Sort of,” Lou nodded. “Yeah. It was, like, just for a moment. But it was real. I actually saw it, for a second.”
Norman pulled a pen from his pocket and wrote on his left forearm, I just actually became Buddha. Lou saw it. It was only for a moment.
The Amsterdam experience in Two-thousand-two was pivotal. Norman and Lou had been gaining this indescribable mental connection through friendship and artistic collaboration for years, but during those few days it was as if the connection itself became self-aware. It was like an ascetic time of reflection for the greater super-self that somehow included them both. It was there and then that Norman and Lou decided to create an art group called Man-Like Machines that would be an umbrella concept for all of their creative collaborations – art, music, literature, film, philosophy, et cetera. They even came up with a tagline for it that Norman wrote in large block letters down his arm as they were riding the subway to the airport: ART / ENLIGHTENMENT / THE FUTURE.
When they were checking out of their room on their last morning they mentioned the mouse and the pretty desk clerk girl simply nodded, smiling, and said, “Yes, mouse room,” as if it was some kind of special room they had been given.
The big epiphany, at that point, however, still was yet to come.

A few days after they returned from Amsterdam, Norman and Lou picked up Karl from O’Hare and all three drove up to Magnetawan, Ontario, where Lou’s step-father owns a cabin on a lake in the middle of the woods. It was there, late that same night, after a full day of driving, that Norman and Lou “leveled up” (their words, a role-playing game reference).
After a full day and evening of driving, they all sat around the big wooden table in the middle of the cabin with a candle in the center of the table as the only light. Through the windows came the sounds of the forest at night, but only void could be seen. Despite the fact that they had just come from Amsterdam, the big excitement for Lou and Norman was that Karl had brought weed from Seattle, and they were eager to stay up and smoke some.
“I just keep it in this film canister,” Karl said as he presented the grey-topped black cylinder, “and put it in my pocket.”
“That’s balls,” Lou said, gratefully eyeing the green powder Karl was dumping out of the canister onto a white piece of paper. “What if they searched you?”
“I don’t set off the alarm.”
“But what if you accidentally did? And aren’t they doing random searches now?”
“My sister Lee gets searched every time she flies now,” Norman added.
Lou accepted the packed bowl from Karl. The three young men passed Karl’s little pipe around the table for several rounds in silence. Each time Norman received the pipe from Lou, they made pleased, knowing eye contact, and each time, he found he could read more and more from those brief moments. He began to realize that no words were passing between the two of them, and yet communication was very much occurring, and in torrents now with each glance. Their facial expressions mirrored a mutual awe and confusion. Norman could tell that Lou was sharing the experience. Through all of this, Karl silently watched them.
“Are you?” Lou stiltedly asked Norman after the bowl had passed around for the seventh time.
“Yes,” Norman agreed, somehow understanding. “It’s like I can … see more.”
“Yes,” Lou nodded, his expression serious and excited, but cautious.
“It’s almost like I am suddenly aware of an extra level of awareness, like I’m looking down on the universe from some dimension that I didn’t realize I could go up along. And this is often, I realize now, the feeling that accompanies all those great eureka moments, or moments of great communicative or creative ecstasy. It’s like … it’s like I’m peeking my head above the water into the realm of the zeitgeist, like all the pantheistic concept spirits of everything just became visible.” Norman could indeed feel the presence of each thing that had a name (the Chair, the Wall, the Night, the Silence, the Intrigue) as a greater spirit of itself, and their sudden collective presence raised the hairs on his skin, though it was at the same time very beautiful to exist within.
“I know exactly what you mean,” Lou responded in the same tone of voice that Norman had been using, “only I was going to use a Cartesian coordinate system as an example. I was thinking it’s like, like if you imagine a three-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system, and think about how a cube in that system would have a shadow that would be two-dimensional – a square, or a parallelogram or whatever – but this three-dimensional world, then, is the shadow of the universe of time. Each moment frozen – all that three-dimensional spatial information – is the shadow of that system in time. So all of eternity and space – what is that, then, the shadow of?”
“Shadow puppets, man – fuck yeah. It’s the allegory of the cave! It’s like … okay…” Norman grabbed a sheet of paper from the darkness to his left and began to draw diagrams. “Here’s a two-dimensional plane, right? And then, but we’re in this three-dimensional space, the universe. But really we’re in a four-dimensional space, right, because time is that fourth dimension. And … but, we can’t see time from above. You know? We can see the surfaces of the universe from any angle, but time, we can only see out from time. Sort of. You know what I mean?”
“Yes, go on, but I know where you’re going.”
“Yeah, right? Awesome! So check it out. It’s like,” and he continued drawing his series of diagrams, “like if time and space were this two-dimensional plane, like being able to see it all from above. But not time, really, almost like – identity! Like, there can’t be just one identity. And identity is totally another dimension we can’t see but out from. See what I mean?”

“Identity as a dimension?” Lou asked as he glanced down at Norman’s drawing with an uncertain purse of his lips, but then he suddenly gestured wildly with his hands and pulled the sheet of paper closer to himself. “Okay, we’ll get back to that.”
“Well, think about it. Perspective is just one dimension of the fuller consciousness.”
“Okay okay okay,” Lou said as he assessed Norman’s somewhat goofy diagrams, “so the Universe began, right, as a singularity…”
“Of infinite density. Which is absurd – I mean, it’s eternity, right? Like, how can eternity exist within a moment; how can there be infinity? It’s like nothingness; it can’t exist; it’s inert, because it’s non-distinct; there can be no information in true homogeny. Or homogeneity, rather. Is homogeny a word? Does that mean anything?”
“Wait wait wait. Okay, so either the Universe is supposed to expand, then stop, then come back in on itself and maybe do this repeatedly as some great cosmic cycle, or it will just keep expanding into a cold soup of homogenous matter…”
“But think about that for a second,” Norman interrupted. “The heat death of the universe is no less a singularity than the Big Suck or the Big Fall or whatever it would be called.”
“Big Crunch,” Lou corrected with a laugh.
“But, because, in the heat death of the universe, it peters out toward an asymptote of inertness, right, into a cold soup of electrons or whatever, like you said, but in a universe with less and less distinction, isn’t that really just like the flipside of the singularity, the infinite space holding an infinity of homogenous matter as opposed to the single point in space, you know what I mean? Does that make sense?”
“Sort of, yeah,” Lou nodded, seeming surprised that it did.
Norman was not surprised. He had never felt so strong a connection with another human being. It was as if a mind river flowed from each of their heads to a glowing pool between them in space. He could almost see it. He felt like if he took another hit of weed, he would be able to.
“I’m going to smoke more,” Norman said, and picked up the pipe.
“Word; me too.” Lou smiled eagerly, shaking his shoulders and sitting forward in his chair to be closer to Norman and the pipe. Norman handed it to him after he had taken a hit. He held the smoke there and watched with awe as the metaphorical rivers of thought he had just imagined actually appeared before him, half-real, half-visual, half-just-impression, but very present in his awareness.
“What is thought?” Norman asked the collective pool of mind that glowed between himself and Lou. “What makes me my brain, instead of anything else? Why am I me, instead of someone else? Why can’t I move around and experience things from the perspective of others? Why am I anchored to this body?”
“Are you?” Lou asked. “I mean, there is real evidence, supposedly, of things like astral travel and remote viewing and things like that. I think there must be much more to mind than just the brain – and this is something I’m really just beginning to explore, ever since, well, since Amsterdam, really. Since weed.”
“I’m with you, man,” Norman assured him. “Everything is changing. I’m seeing so much more. I don’t know that I could describe it to anyone but you just yet, really, but I have this intuitive certainty that you know what I mean.”
“I’m pretty sure I do,” Lou nodded.
“It’s like – it’s like I’m figuring out the mathematics, the physics of existence, of everything. The subtle physics, you know what I mean? It’s like – you can measure the real world, you can measure the spatial distinction between, say, me and you – we occupy this specific space. The measurement, the experiment could be duplicated, et cetera, scientific method, you’re with me; anyway. And, of course, it’s all just metaphor, really, we’re all just vibrating energy, just waves of information about where things are and how much charge each electron has or whatever. It’s like we are whatever force it is that translates all this various information into a phenomenal world, into an experience. But still, in the context of our world and our perception, this, the World, is everything that we can agree exists, and we can measure, and such.”
“Right.”
“And then, there’s time, the fourth dimension, which is really just an expression of the change of things; it’s delta, as it were, along which we seem to be traveling in a current of some sort. The current of time. Because we can’t stop and go the other direction. So this seems to be the dimension in which we’re trapped – this iceberg in time that we’re trapped in – these bodies, really. We can’t seem to assert our will at that dimension.”
“But we can, though,” Lou said excitedly. “If what you’ve said about our imagination, our mind’s eye, seeing real things is true, about how thoughts and imagination and such are just you looking at real things, real places, somewhere in the multiverse of everythingness, you know? Because all we’re seeing with our eyes and ears and all that is really just in our mind’s eye, too, they’re just the loudest conduits into it, as it were.” Lou laughed and gestured frantically. “If we go with that idea, which seems to make sense, since perception is the only engine of existence, like we’ve agreed, then thoughts must be things-perceived. If we go with that model and extrapolate from it, then we can move about in time, with memory, and imagination of the future. I mean who knows if it’s the real future you’re seeing or not, but who knows if it’s the real past or not, when you recall something. No way of knowing.”
“Except our collective agreement that it is. That’s interesting; that’s true.”
“So, our bodies can’t go back and forth through time, only forward, but we can with our minds.”
“But still, in reality,” (Norman still clung fiercely then to a stable concept of reality as a place with borders), “our bodies and everything else seem to have to travel this one direction through time. What is this gravity toward the end of time? Why is that not a physical law like spatial gravity?”
“Well what you’ve just called ‘spatial gravity’ does affect time, if you believe relativity.”
Norman laughed at the idea of not believing in relativity.
“Maybe it is a tendency to be pulled toward that which is more awesome.”
“That’s fucking interesting, man, thinking about dimensions,” Norman said, “because there are infinite dimensions, right? Presumably. I mean, there is everything; everything exists.”
“String theory demands like ten or so.”
“Right, so – what are they? I mean, they exist, they are here, but what are they?”
“Reality,” Lou posited.
“Reality, yes,” Norman agreed, “as in alternate realities. All the possible choices of every quantum in the universe, all those things they could have done probabilistically but didn’t, and that includes us complex systems and our choices as well. Ooh – tell me something: supposedly every quantum in the universe exists as basically a wave of the probability of where it could be and what characteristics it has until it is perceived, right, and so really the mind of a choice-making perceptive eye like a human being really must have some sort of power over those probabilities. That must be the control we have to make choice – because it’s like, based on what we choose to do or to see, the universe arranges itself as much as it can so that whatever needs to have happened for it to be that way then has happened. But we’re all making different choices, seeing different things, struggling back and forth with the state of the universe. And so, it’s like all of our various willful spirits are pulling the universe this way and that like the strings on a puppet. So, one could almost say, couldn’t one, that another dimension would be mind?”
“Mind as dimension? How do you mean?” Lou asked.
“Well, or perspective. Like if you consider the distinctions of space the bottom three dimensions, then there’s time, and then you rise above time and where can you go?”
“Along different timelines, different realities,” Lou suggested.
“Okay, right, but even then above that, you and I, and you and Colin Powell, and me and Koko the gorilla if she’s still alive, all share this reality, but we don’t share perspectives. By mind, I am referring to that distinction of perspective. Like if you could make a five-dimensional shape of every bit of space throughout time that I was aware of, that being my greater five-dimensional mind shape. But then, what about things I’ve forgotten? I guess, really, my existence or awareness or whatever is something more like a …”
Lou interrupted, shaking his head and laughing, “This is making my concept of the universe wrap in on itself. It’s like – so if perspective and reality are both dimensions, then one could move along between perspectives within one or many realities?”
“Perhaps.”
“What would be evidence of this?”
“Well, Quantum Leap,” Norman joked with a straight face, and then after a moment of comic pause they both laughed. He continued, “No, but seriously, like I’ve said before, perception is the whole engine of existence. The fact that we perceive it is the fundamental initial proof of anything-at-all. So thoughts, imagination, our mind’s eye, must be seeing something that is real, even if it’s not here. But what is here? It’s brought here by the mind – when you think about it, you’re there. You can’t perceive something that doesn’t exist, because all it takes for something to exist is for it to have been perceived. In the brain there is no distinction between seeing something and imagining it.”
“I know, right,” Lou nodded.
“Right, so, these thoughts which are real parts of the … the multiverse or whatever, these thoughts are evidence of our ability to perceive along that dimension of reality. We can imagine fictional events, we can dream of alternate worlds, et cetera. You know? And perspective – sure your awareness can move along the dimension of perspective. It’s called fuckin’ empathy, right?”
“Ah, interesting,” Lou nodded.
“Compassion, empathy, you know?”
“But still, you’re not actually getting it from their perspective,” Lou notes. “Just from your version of their perspective, how you imagine it must be.”
“Maybe identity is not a black and white distinction but instead is an analog change, is gradient,” Norman proposed. “Or maybe there’s some sort of thin elastic barrier keeping us inside our bodies and unable to truly coexist with others, like we just bounce off each other.”
“There is, Norman; it’s called skin,” Lou laughed, and Karl began to laugh at this idea as well, startling Norman who had lost all perspective on where he was. Lou mocked him, still laughing, “It’s like I’ve got this fleshy substance covering my bones, keeping my organs in … I, I don’t know how to describe it.”
“No, but, you know what I mean?” Norman said excitedly. “It’s like, imagine an octopus or some kind of creature with tentacles dipping its tentacles into a pool of water, and that water is this world and those tentacles are us. It’s like the roots of a tree – that explains the jati. It’s like, as you go further up, certain people who might be spiritually close somehow join in spirit, and groups join, and distinctions fade, the further up away from all of this you go, if you can somehow see it from above. You know what I mean? And everything does that, the further up you go, until you’re at the top of it all, at that impossible eternity point.”
“But eternity is just like void – it’s realistically impossible. The only way anything exists is through its relativity to everything else.”
“Exactly, which is why it must be a toroidal kind of thing, where however far toward one edge of any concept you go you come around to the other side.”
“A closed system, would that imply?” Lou rhetorically interjected.
“The singularity before the Big Bang is characteristically indistinguishable from the matte void of the heat death of the universe. It’s just a given space with an eternity of homogeneity. It’s some bullshit, is what it is. It’s inert. ‘Wherever you go, there you are.’”
“So, really,” Lou continued, “it’s that fundamental duality of everything’s illusory nature juxtaposed against the fact that all there is is illusion, and that everything is nothing, and that A both is and is not A. There’s always another dimension, along which there are infinite A’s that are just not that A.”
It was as if everything went white except that idea for Norman, and the idea hung in perfect dark focus against the whiteness of everything. The fundamental paradox of existence looked him in the eye and winked, naked, its arms spread for him to look upon it without shame. “That’s what it is,” he said as he held the quivering truth of the essential paradox in his mind. “A is both A and not A. Everything is really the same, and there’s just here and now and me, but there’s also everything else, and really everything is different, and through time everything is just getting more and more different, and yet more and more ordered, and more awesome. And yet, time is also just an illusion, and really we’re just here now, doing this.”
“A both does and does not equal A,” Lou repeated with genuine intellectual passion in his voice. He seemed to be staring at the same place where Norman was when he was looking into his mind’s eye, that spot right between them in space.
“We are the force of order, of awesomeness, we aware beings.” It sickened Norman how barely his words did justice to his thoughts, until all he could bring himself to say through the rush of epiphanies was, “Oh my god, dude.”
Norman leaned back away from Lou and watched a huge eye open in the center of Lou’s forehead, shuddering with energy. It looked slowly to each side, then directly at Norman.
“I just saw a huge eye open up on your forehead.”
As soon as Norman said it, Lou’s real eyes widened, his mouth dropped open a little, and his third eye shut and disappeared. “And it just shut,” Norman said, held motionless by his awe.
“Yes.” Lou nodded, staring at Norman. He spoke hesitantly. “I felt it. It was terrifying. I couldn’t hold it. I couldn’t take the step. As soon as I realized it was really happening, I got scared.” He gazed off into the darkness around them, a mystified look on his face. “I got right to the edge and I could … see it all.”
The last several minutes of the evening, before they all retired to bed as the sun rose, were completely silent as Lou and Norman and Karl all sat together in the wake of the epiphanies that had just been experienced, each occupied by his own thoughts.
Through it all Karl had simply watched and listened, perplexed, and afterwards he claimed to recall only gibberish. He simply frowned, shrugged or shook his head at Norman and Lou over the next few days as they, as if in religious ecstasy, dissected and discussed what had happened that night. It made Norman wonder how he and Lou could have shared such a potent experience in the presence of someone who had experienced nothing.

Nothing about life was the same after the big epiphany in Canada. The understandings Norman and Lou had come to while stoned that night remained with them thereafter; they never dissipated or became nonsense in hindsight. Internally, Norman considered himself to be an enlightened being from that point on. Though it took a while, Lou eventually admitted feeling the same way.
For several days after they returned from Canada, Lou besieged Norman’s inbox with rants and equations and matrices all attempting to describe what they had experienced (good son of a logician that he was). Norman had a similar reaction. He sat up with Karen at the Academy until the early morning the night he got back, trying futilely to explain what had happened.
His calls to Lou were frantic and excited.
By the time the new fall semester began at the Academy, Norman had not come down from his enlightenment high. He couldn’t stop himself from discussing with his students the concepts he had explored that night with Lou (carefully omitting any part played by recreational/experimental drug-use). Not to his surprise, the guys on his floor got into it and threw their own ideas into the makeshift symposia. Each would bring a different perspective, mostly scientific or mathematical (being that it was primarily a math/science academy). An unofficial club emerged that gathered in Norman’s corner room to listen to rock records on Norman’s turntable and discuss identity, metaphysics, art, enlightenment, the future. The kids (barely younger than Norman) called it the Revolution. Norman would always call Lou in the evenings (when he used to always call Karen) to talk about whatever new ideas he had come up with or discussed that night.

When the first extended weekend came around in September, Norman drove north to see Lou, bringing with him some weed that a lovely, raven-haired female co-counselor who was new that year, Imogen, had given to him. Imogen was also an alumna of the Academy; she had been in the class just behind Norman, Lou and Karl but they had not really known her back then. She and Norman had recently become good friends over a discussion about Frank Zappa records and she quickly became an unspoken but clear and present threat to Karen’s position as Norman’s girl. (Seeds were being sewn in those days that would be reaped with much drama over the next several months.)
Norman surprised Lou with the weed he had brought and they immediately began smoking it. Norman still had his jacket on when he found himself sitting on Lou’s couch, stoned beyond belief. Reality once again gave way to a clear understanding of the nature of the illusion that lay before his eyes. He could actually feel and intuitively understand the way his soul interacted with his brain. It was as if he could read the coding of the game.
Lou sat beside him on the couch, the pipe in his hand hovering somewhere between his mouth and the coffeetable.
Norman gazed out the sliding glass balcony doors. The Enchanted Forest was quiet and streetlight orange. The apartment’s water system grumbled.
“We should play a game,” Norman suggested, “or do an experiment.”
“Whoa,” Lou groaned as he slowly stood and got his bearings. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. I know. Let’s do some sort of existential experiment. Some soul exercise, you know what I mean? Cut away the brush of the unknown.”
“Okay, cool,” Lou said with a little clap of his hands. “I like this idea. What should we do?” He picked up a long wooden staff that remained from his martial arts days in college and held it on his shoulders with his arms around it.
“How about this,” Norman said in thought. “You write something on a piece of paper. Don’t show me or tell me what it is. Don’t give me any kind of clue. Then put it somewhere where I know where you’ve put it but I can’t see it or read it. Put it in your room or something. And then I’ll see if I can read it psychically.”
“I should put it in my room?” he asked, tearing a piece of a page of lined paper.
“Yeah.”
Lou thought for a few seconds, grinning at Norman who watched him from the couch. He bit his pen, then wrote on the bit of paper.
“No, actually,” Norman said with his hand in the air, “don’t put it in your room. Put it somewhere where there is light on it. Somewhere I could see it if I was over there, but where I can’t see it from here. Because I think what I’m going to try to do is go into a trance and then leave my body and see if I can find it and read it.”
“Okay, yeah, right, that’s cool,” Lou said as he walked over to his small kitchenette and placed the sheet of paper on the other side of a box of knives.
“Is the writing facing out?”
“Yeah. If you were standing here you could read it,” Lou said, standing there and looking at it.
“Okay, leave that light in the kitchen on but turn off the one over here, would you?”
“What the fuck am I, your slave?” Lou joked as he turned off the lamp next to Norman and then sat back down on the couch beside him.
“Okay, now, we should put on some good trance music. Not shitty trance, something good. Something really dark and dope.”
“Yeah, I know what you need,” Lou said excitedly as he leaned over the coffeetable and switched the CDs in the changer. He hit play, turned it way up and sat back.
Norman closed his eyes. The Underworld song Dark Train came on, and he smiled appreciatively when he recognized it. Its beat was dark and hypnotic and turned out to be at just the right tempo to put Norman almost immediately into a trance.
He imagined his soul in his body as a white cloud that clung lightly to his head, heart and crotch. He tried to move around, to pull away from the body, but didn’t seem to know what spiritual muscles to use. In the darkness of his closed eyes, everything felt cramped and immobile, heavy with flesh. He could feel that tethering fear that kept him tight against his own heart.
But the longer he sat calmly, the music thumping rhythmically through his body, the marijuana lubricating his spirit’s grip on his blood, the more he was able to gradually sigh away from his own spine and let his awareness float slowly down to his feet. He kept the sensations of his body loose at the periphery of his awareness like a flowing cloak and let the center of himself slip away, gently letting go of his body like a leaf losing its last grip on a tree in the autumn. For a few moments Norman felt like he was falling, but he held onto his calm and trusted the idea that nothing could actually hurt him in this state.
As a loose spirit, Norman experienced the world as impressions, as dream-like half notions. At first glance, it felt like there was nothing, but a gradually widening aperture revealed subtle characteristics in the nothing. Through the static of this bodiless lack of input Norman could feel – and in his state it was translated to him as a sort of sight – the room around him, the locations and basic characteristics of the furniture and walls and everything – everything that had a name. The television in front of him loomed high like a drive-in movie screen thrumming with energy even though it was not turned on. While he was inspecting it he moved up close to the screen without realizing.
Norman turned his view around to face the couch and saw his body sitting there, Lou beside him, watching him from the corner of his eye. Norman’s body was slumped a bit to one side and his arms were folded limply in his lap. He noticed that his body looked lifeless, almost broken, without him in it, and it was clear that this was unnerving Lou as well. Lou sat very still with his hands on his knees, waiting patiently. A faint wisp of white soul material seemed to cling tightly to Lou’s heart and eyes. Norman had an intuitive sense that this was Lou’s spirit.
Wondering if he could hear Lou’s thoughts in this state, he opened his imagination’s ears for such a thing.
Thought-voices came into Norman’s perception. Unfamiliar voices, almost like lines of text on a screen in his mind more than voices, and this made him realize that he and Lou were not actually alone in the room. Surrounding them were two other entities, similarly wispy and half-there, yet rather than the whitish haze of Lou’s soul these seemed to be darker, charcoal-colored conglomerations of swirling spheres, and when Norman noticed their muttering, the voices stopped and there was thought-silence for a moment.
Then, distinctly, one of the entities seemed to think to another, Wazzz!
Norman was taken aback at first by the word, until it was followed by, Does he know he’s here? Then, very clearly, Shit Ax, he can see us.
A weird nerveless trepidation gripped Norman’s spirit and he instantly found himself retreated into the bedroom, by the big bay windows that looked out across the Enchanted Forest (the view: an essentially featureless apartment complex).
The bedroom did not have any such entities as far as Norman could tell, which calmed him for a moment. He remained spiritually still while he considered how to move in this frame of reference, and then tried to do so. He found himself instantly in the bathroom, then in the shower.
Norman realized that he was moving instantly with a thought. His being, no longer constrained by simple rules of time and space, could move from point to point without actually having to move. It was as if he was just entering new information into the location field for the database of his spiritual characteristics.
Norman went to the kitchen, by the box of knives, where the piece of paper was waiting to be read. The presence of the entities that he had sensed before felt close again, and he could hear their bodiless thoughts remarking about his presence and wondering what he was up to, but he ignored the fear their nearness instilled in him, assuring himself that ‘in reality’ he was just sitting calmly on the couch in a perfectly safe situation. He focused on his goal of reading what was on that piece of paper so that he could confirm for himself at least some remnant of actuality in the whole experience.
He found the paper easily. As soon as he recalled where exactly it was, he was there, seeing it as if he were crouched right next to the kitchen counter, his face right up to the box of knives. He could see the paper and recognize that there was text on it, but for some reason the text seemed to be out of focus. He tried hard to focus his eye on it so he could read it, remembering only after a few moments that he was not seeing with that eye over on the couch.
His inability to read what was written on the paper confounded him. He had come all this way, seen so much; Norman hated the idea of coming out of it with no proof. He stared at the piece of paper leaning against the box of knives, putting all of his willpower into the attempt to read that writing.
Slowly, the out-of-focus blur became writhing symbols, then letters and even words, but the message seemed to flicker from one set of words to another, never quite stopping on one.
Norman realized that what he was able to read was somehow the idea, the intent behind the writing, the remnant of logos that Lou had left on the paper. He tried to capture a few of the notions that he got from the flashing words. It was something about time.
Norman thought once about being back in his body and was suddenly there, opening his eyes, leaning over to Lou who was sitting next to him, quite startled by Norman’s sudden revival. “Dude,” he said excitedly, “what did you write? Was it something like, timelessness, or time has gone away, or something to that effect?”
Lou got up from the couch without a word and jogged over to the kitchen, retrieved the piece of paper.
“It totally worked,” Norman recounted as he waited, his perception dizzy though he felt energetic, revived. He felt like he had just awoken from a dream. “It took a while to figure out how to move around at first, but eventually I figured out that I could move just by thinking about it, just by thought. I think what I was effectively doing was just willfully changing the position of my aware self, even though those places I wanted to go to didn’t have a brain there for any information to attach to, but somehow there is still this subtle current of information that if you trust it, if you just listen really carefully, you can see slash hear slash feel the world, the surroundings, and these subtle energies and such that exist on that level. I think we can experience them all the time, but they’re usually drowned out by all the shit going on in our brains like sight and sound and thought and such.”
Lou returned, listening and nodding, with the slip of paper. He looked at it, then looked at Norman. “What did you tell me you thought it said?” he asked.
“Well, it was weird,” Norman tried to explain. “It was like I couldn’t actually read the lines of graphite or ink or whatever on the paper, because it wasn’t actual light I was seeing, but somehow what I could read was the impression, the thought that you had left on the paper, or something like that. It was like it was flashing these various similar ideas, the way I saw it.”
“So what did you say you thought it said, though?”
“It was something about time. Something like timelessness or time has gone away, or the end of time.”
Lou handed the piece of paper to Norman. It said, in Lou’s sloppy handwriting, THERE IS NO TIME.
It had been real, sort of, Norman realized with wonder.

Chapter 4: The State of the Species

2007-09-19T13:35:00.000-04:00

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.

Chapter 5: The Data

2007-09-19T13:33:00.000-04:00

5

The suit Norman wears to his first day of work at Woodard and Curran is his only one, bought for Lou’s wedding a few months before – a light beige two-piece with big lapels and a distinctly eighties cut. He had dreamt for weeks of himself wearing it before he finally found it waiting for him in a South Bend Salvation Army for ninety cents (with the ten percent off from Sylvia’s student I.D.). He wears it now with a wide-collared black button-up shirt underneath, unbuttoned twice, no tie. It makes him feel sexy and confident.

the Data

Woodard and Curran is on the far edge of Portland, across the bay from Cape Elizabeth. Norman’s morning drive takes him across the bridge into the city, then through downtown where he looks down the street that would take him to Laura’s as he passes it and wonders what she’s doing, if she’s awake. He continues across town to a small corporate park not far from the airport.
The company resides in two buildings separated by a hill with a wooden staircase built onto it. The woods that separate its buildings from those around it are thick and come right up to the parking lot, making the area feel more secluded than it is.
Norman parks and somewhat nervously walks with his hands in his pockets into the main building. The office is clean and modern, yet appears comfortably informal. He is told to wait by the receptionist, a late-youth woman with a polite uncertainty to her manner. Norman sits and flips through a copy of Portland magazine until another, more energetic mid-youth woman approaches him quickly with a big smile, a folder full of papers under one arm.
“Hi, Norman,” she says.
He stands and extends his hand to be shaken. “Hello,” he says.
“I just got in, I’m sorry,” the tall, dark-haired woman says. “I’m Kendra. I’m in charge of the SE project. Well, I’m not in charge of the whole project, but I’m in charge of the data entry side of it, where you’ll be working.” As is the case in most of Norman’s introductions, there is a moment when Kendra looks him in the right eye and does a double take, but says nothing. She very tactfully smiles away the moment and turns around. “If you want to follow me, I’ll take you to the room where you’ll be working. Did you have any trouble finding the office?” She starts walking away and Norman follows her through a labyrinth of pathways between cubicles.
The data entry office is in the other building. On their way to it, Kendra points out various locations of interest, such as supply rooms and the place where he is to leave his time sheets. They exit the main building and walk up the wooden staircase to what Kendra calls “the Annex,” referring to the second building. Norman follows her quietly, replying, “Cool,” whenever he is informed of something but otherwise letting his thoughts drift. He does not have high hopes for this job, but for twelve dollars an hour he doesn’t feel he can complain. The job he just left in Indiana was eight an hour for what often amounted to strenuous manual labor. At least here he will be able to sit, maybe even listen to music on headphones.
Kendra leads Norman into the Annex, to a closed door just to the left as they enter the building. She opens it carefully and steps in with a hesitance that makes Norman think of a lion tamer entering the cage.
The room is small, softly lit and windowless. The space is carved into a U shape with the door at the base, a central cubicle wall with cubicle stations on either side coming out from the far wall and ending a few feet from the doorway, stations on both side walls. About half of the stations are occupied, and the occupants all look up and remove their headphones when Norman and Kendra enter. The faint, hastily dissipating reverb of a conversation interrupted hangs in the air.
“Hello,” Kendra squeaks. She sounds excited about everything she is saying, and somehow miraculously it actually comes across as genuine. “Everybody, how’s it going?” she chirps.
“Good,” the young men all say in near-unison like kindergarteners.
“How are you?” someone adds.
“I’m good,” Kendra says with a big smile. “I have a new member for our little data entry family here. This is Norman.”
“Hi,” Norman says to the group.
“Elliot,” says the balding man who has a strong personal presence tinged with the awkward confidence of a geek who has taken up martial arts.
“Norman Newman,” Norman nods.
“Timothy,” says the full-bearded young man with bright blue eyes and a quiet shyness to his voice.
“Norman.”
“Harvey Jangles,” says the hippy with long blonde hair and a goatee. He shakes with both hands and the energy of Chris Farley. He instantly makes Norman laugh.
“How you doing?” Norman asks, laughing.
“Norman, right?” Harvey asks.
“Norman Newman, yeah.” Norman leans past Harvey to shake hands with the handsome young boy with the chiseled face in the corner. “Hi, I’m Norman.”
“Walt,” he says with a bright smile, his headphones still on.
“Is anyone not here?” Kendra asks the group, clasping her hands together matter-of-factly.
“Wayne,” Timothy says, looking around. “And Doucette; I haven’t seen him in a couple of weeks.”
“I think he was in last weekend,” Walt says without looking away from his screen.
“And Marina’s in Russia,” Harvey adds.
“Well, right,” everyone says as if this is obvious.
“Okay, well, you’ll meet Wayne and Jeff some other time, I’m sure,” Kendra says, pulling from under her arm the small folder of papers that she has been carrying. She hands them to Norman. “This is some basic paperwork we need you to fill out that should be self-explanatory. It should take you maybe half an hour to an hour, and you can get to know these guys while you do that and ask them questions if you want. And then when you’re done,” and she turns to the other guys for a moment, “do you guys think you can show Norman what it is we do?”
“Not a problem,” Timothy says.
Kendra laughs for some reason and puts her hand to her chest. “Okay, so I’ll let you guys get to know each other. Norman, it was great to meet you.”
“Yeah, thanks, Kendra.” Norman shakes her hand again and Kendra shuts the door behind her as she leaves.
“Welcome to the jungle,” Elliot says with a grin and a series of dragonish laughs exhaled from between his teeth. He slowly turns up the volume on his computer’s speakers and the Guns ‘n’ Roses song comes up and fills the silence of the room, making Harvey laugh. Norman smiles and nods, not wanting to reject the attempt at humor but not finding it funny enough to warrant actual genuine laughter (though as he experiences the moment he can already tell that in hindsight, in solitary recollection, it will probably make him laugh).
“So where should I sit, to do this?” Norman asks.
“You can sit there, or there,” Timothy replies, pointing to empty cubicles, “or there. I think those are the only ones that aren’t already claimed.”
Norman chooses a cubicle in the corner by the door, and sits down with his paperwork. As he begins to write, the music from Elliot’s computer fades to silence.
“So what kind of bird are you?” Elliot asks.
Norman looks up. “Me? What kind of bird?”
“Didn’t Kendra ask in your interview? She asked all of us.”
“Oh, I didn’t have an interview. I was hired from a distance, from Indiana. I just moved here a few days ago.”
“Ah,” Elliot acknowledges.
“I’m a peacock,” Harvey says in a weird nasal voice. A moment later, in a normal voice, he asks Norman, “So are you, like, a data entry mercenary or something?” Everyone laughs.
“No,” Norman replies, “my brother-in-law got me the job. He works here. Ben Ingman.”
“Ah,” Elliot sighs in acknowledgement. “IT.”
“Yeah, he’s the head of IT here.” Norman sits with his hands on his thighs, staring forward, waiting for someone else to speak for a few moments, then returns to his paperwork. “So I just showed up this morning and here I am. I talked to Kendra once on the phone in Indiana. I don’t actually really have much of an idea what it is that I’m about to be doing, to tell you the truth.”
“Oh, you’re in for a treat,” Elliot chuckles. “You too will come to fear the data.” Elliot is a hundred times less successful at being funny than Harvey, but his geekiness is nevertheless endearing to Norman.
“Here’s what we do,” Harvey says, turning around in his chair to face Norman. “We have two windows, and they are not, as you can see, on the walls. In Access, I mean, we have two windows – the documents and the database. We scroll through the documents and put the data from each one into the database. But really, really what we do – what’s happening underneath it all – is much more important. Every day, every few seconds, in this office, we continually prove and reprove for the world that A does in fact equal A.”
“Nice,” Norman replies with an appreciative grin. “That’ll be the noblest work I’ve ever done.” Synchronicity, he thinks, noting the words Harvey used and how they mirror some of his own ideas. Norman, in his life, has chosen to see synchronicity as a general sign that he is heading in the right direction.
“It’s even more noble than you realize,” Harvey comments from across the divider. “We’re actually working on the biggest environmental lawsuit in the country. In history, isn’t it?” he asks Elliot.
“The biggest amount, I believe, yeah,” Elliot replies. “What is it, two hundred million?”
“Three hundred and twenty million, or something like that,” Timothy says.
“Goodness.” Norman begins to fill out his paperwork while he continues to listen and talk. “What is the lawsuit about?”
“Specific Electric has been polluting several towns at various sites throughout the U.S. since the fifties, it turns out, and they had an insurance policy of some sort that they are trying to cash in on to make back the money they’ve spent on remediation for these sites. But they’re claiming three hundred million dollars, and so the insurance company hired a group of lawyers who in turn hired Woodard and Curran to go through all of SE’s invoices and documents to check that figure. But of course, using an old lawyer’s tactic, SE just gave us everything in their drawers. So we’re documenting cocktail napkins and brochures for mattresses and things like that among the invoices and reports.”
Norman laughs. “That sucks.”
“It gives us more work,” Walt notes, “which is good since the job is temporary until the end of the data.”
“True,” Timothy agrees.
After a few moments of silence indicating the end of that thread of conversation, Harvey asks across the divider, “So what were you doing in Indiana? Is that where you’re from? You don’t sound like you’re from Indiana.”
“Oh, well, I’m from all over, really,” Norman responds. “I was living in Indiana with my ex-girlfriends.”
“I’m sorry, was that plural?” Elliot asks with mock suspicion.
“Yeah,” Norman replies, not wanting to seem arrogant even though he’s just talking about his life. It is a balance he often has difficulty finding when talking about himself, and as often as he is described as arrogant it would seem he is not always successful. “I was living with two women in sort of a … hard-to-describe relationship.”
“I see…”
“I mean, I went to college in Indiana, and then I worked for a few years at this place called the Indiana Academy, which is a boarding school for gifted students, but I got fired for being caught buying a tobacco-use-only pipe by some students.”
“You bought a pipe from students?” Timothy asks with a laugh.
“No, not from them,” Norman corrects, “just while they were in the same store, beyond my knowledge. It was a big fiasco, but I ended up living with the woman who I got kicked out with – my coworker who I was buying the pipe with, Imogen. We moved up to South Bend, Indiana for six months, and then we actually moved out here for a year about two years ago, so I’ve lived in Portland before.”
“Where did you live before?” Walt asks invisibly from across the divider. Norman finds it funny, the way the room is divided so that they can talk to each other, only a few feet apart, but must sit facing away from each other, with big cubicle dividers between. He laughs at the absurd blocking of the scene for a moment before he answers Walt’s question, and this makes Walt add, “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” Norman replies. “I lived in Cape Elizabeth, in my sister’s basement last time, just like I am now, only last time it was with my now-ex-girlfriend.”
“But you were living with two girls?”
“Well, Imogen and I moved in with her ex-lover, an old student of mine from my first year as a counselor at the Academy, this girl Sylvia.”
“I see…” Harvey says with a little cackle. “You know, Norman, I can already tell that you are going to fit in here just fine.”
“Definitely,” Walt agrees.
“Why, because I have a history of unusual relationships?”
“Because you seem to be an interesting, open-minded person who’s forward-thinking and smart,” Harvey says.
“Well, that’s very sweet of you to say,” Norman replies with a smile that goes unseen by any but himself, in reflection on his black flat-screen monitor.
“By the way, I like your suit a lot,” Elliot notes, peering around the edge of the divider.
“Thanks,” says Norman, looking down at the suit. “I dig it. Ninety cents.”
“Word,” Elliot says. “Salvation Army?”
“Exactamundo,” Norman acknowledges.
The door suddenly opens with a loud click and a stocky man with long, curly brown hair and burning eyes steps into the room wearing a bicycle helmet.
“Wayne,” Harvey welcomes him with a shout.
Wayne stops in the doorway as it swings open, and he throws down two crossed westside hand gestures. “The Revolution is here,” Wayne vigorously declares. He steps into the room grinning and shuts the door behind him.
“What’s up, man?”
“Nothing much, man; what’s up with you?”
“Hey man, how’s your front tire?”
Norman focuses on his paperwork as the other guys share some small talk that he feels socially allowed to ignore. As he fills out the forms, he marvels at the way he can be summed up by the information he is asked to provide.
After a few minutes his hand grows tired from writing and he stands and tries to quietly leave the room while the other guys are still engaged in their conversation. He passes Wayne on the way to the door and Wayne nods to him, extending his hand and looking him right in the eyes.
“Hi, new guy.” Wayne says.
Norman shakes his hand firmly. “I’m Norman. Norman Newguy.” Elliot laughs.
“Wayne,” Wayne grins.
“I’m gonna go to the bathroom. I’ll be right back.”
“It’s just down the hall on the right,” Wayne informs him, pointing.
“Thanks.”
As Norman walks down the hall past offices where middle-aged engineers type quietly at their computers or sit talking into earpiece telephones, he can’t help but notice the frustration in their eyes, the patina of loneliness on their dying skin, weary from running on their wheels all day, having completely forgotten why they do any of this in the first place. Their half-hearted smiles of welcome swarm him with grasping demons of sadness.
The office bathroom is a large room, mostly empty floorspace. There is a magazine called Worldwide Drilling Resource on the floor beside the toilet and a framed magazine article on the wall about some wastewater treatment plant with a picture of a bunch of guys in radiation suits.
Norman stands in front of the sink and looks at himself in the mirror. A few strands of hair hang in front of his glasses. His reflection reminds him how sexy he feels in his beige suit.
“How did we get here?” he mouths to his reflection, hearing the words in his mind. “How is all of this going to end?”
He goes back in his mind to the moments of the past weekend when he was held to the bed by Laura’s delicious body, his cock planted fully inside her, her hair cascading all down his face and neck. He can’t help but shake his head, marveling at the beauty of those scenes while shooting his reflection experimental attempts at sexy looks.
Slowly, as if he is seducing his mirror image (or perhaps it him), Norman pulls his black shirt out from his belt and reveals his stomach to himself, admiring the curves of his own body, the lines in his stomach and at the sides of his hips. He undoes his belt and pulls his pants down just low enough to pull out his cock. He stares at himself in the mirror, thinking about the movie scene of this moment. Softly, he strokes himself to erection as he imagines Laura’s skin against his own. Ever-so-smoothly, and without his conscious mind even noticing at first, Laura’s image transforms into other previous lovers of his: Imogen, Sylvia, Karen, Janine, Sarah, the handful of European women he had one-or-two-night-stands with back in that epic summer of Two-thousand-one. He closes his eyes from the world, letting his inner perception fill the scene he’s in, and the imaginary sensation of womanly flesh against his own wraps around him like a cocoon in a startling way that makes Norman orgasm. As he ejaculates into the sink, leaning forward so his face is mere inches from the face in the mirror, he slowly opens his eyes and focuses on his own glass eye looking back at him, trying to imagine seeing his face as the face of someone else, to see what his lover might see. He grinds his teeth and stares hard into his glass right eye in the mirror, wondering what it could possibly be a portal to. “I am in love with you,” he makes his reflection say to him, watching the way his face and eyes look when he says it, his lower back spasming with the last remnants of orgasm.
Norman steps back from the mirror and takes in the full visage of his post-masturbatory self – heaving slightly from the minor cardiac exertion, his pants undone and shirt untucked with his still-engorged cock emerging from between them. He feels powerful, like his spirit itself is swelled even more than his cock. He senses the minor spirits of the place around him, the little camouflaged gremlins and cardboard doppelganger beasts that whisper bad ideas and cause minor Heisenburglarian harm like untyping words or whispering despairs, and at his gaze they all seem to scatter like roaches from light to the edges of the building and the bushes outside. Instantly he feels more comfortable where he is; the place feels safer.
To wash away any trace of semen, Norman runs the water in the sink for a minute. He flushes the toilet as a superfluous subterfuge, then heads back with renewed vim to the data entry room.
On the walk back past the offices, he notices the occupants looking around, wondering what just happened and why they suddenly feel more alive, less cramped, and Norman knows it is somehow a result of the power of his masturbation magic.
Back in the windowless cubicle cave, all of the other data enterers have their headphones on, with their attentions softly focused on their computer screens. Norman returns to the station he chose and finds Wayne sitting in the neighboring cubicle. Wayne looks over at Norman with a vacant facial expression, then looks back to his computer, where he is mindlessly clicking his cursor in the blank database fields on his screen, some loud industrial guitars blaring through his headphones.
Norman returns to his employment documents. The quiet chatter of a room full of headphones-listeners surrounds him. For several minutes his thoughts are concerned primarily with his various identity numbers. The information required for employment and tax purposes makes Norman wonder just how much information about him the government actually has, or if it is just these informationless numbers. He stops for a moment halfway through the process and shakes his head disapprovingly at the numbers. How poorly you describe me, he thinks with a smile on his face, a rebellious fire stirring in his heart, his cock still heavy with the last remnants of blood that aren’t done partying.
When he is finished, Norman says to the room, “So…” hoping that someone will hear him over the music in their headphones.
“You done?” Harvey responds quickly, scooting his chair around the edge of the central cubicle wall.
“I am.”
“Alright…” Harvey scoots up next to Norman and shows him which icon on the desktop to open, which pulls up a split-screen program with the database on one side and the documents on the other. Harvey shows him how to scroll through the documents, explains which ones are significant and which aren’t, and, from those that are, which information to put into which fields.
It takes about ten minutes of explanation before Norman has got it, and the conversation moves away from data entry.
“So,” Norman says, entering data with the deft typing speed he has developed as a writer, “how long have you guys been working here?”
“I’ve been here since April,” Harvey replies. “I was one of the first ones on the job, and back then we were only supposed to go through June. Now they say October.”
“Whatever,” Wayne, who is on the other side of Harvey, at the station to Norman’s left, says with a scoff. “We’ll be here next year if Walt and I have anything to do with it.”
“Yeah,” Harvey laughs, “entering four documents a day.” Wayne laughs.
“How many are we supposed to be doing?” Norman asks.
Harvey and Wayne both shake their heads. “They don’t even care, really,” Wayne says.
“They can keep track of how many we each do…” Harvey points out.
“But I have done like four a day for the past three months,” Wayne adds. “I deserve to be fired.”
“Kendra would never fire anyone,” Walt says from the other side of the divider. Harvey looks at Norman, nodding.
“I think this room is actually some sort of nexus,” Wayne says aggressively. “We’re all a bunch of raged-out dudes who just talk about philosophy and politics and starting the Revolution. There is seriously some big-time synchronicity shit going on with all of us randomly being put together here like this, and it turning out the way it has.”
“You are the Revolution, dude,” Harvey laughs to Wayne.
“So what are all of your stories, exactly?” Norman asks, intrigued by the way these guys use a lot of the same language that Norman thought he shared only with Lou and their crew back in Indiana. He loved the idea that, like many ideas throughout history, the idea of the Revolution and the impending artistic/philosophical renaissance that he could feel in the air was happening in the Zeitgeist, and so no doubt was manifesting all over the world, all throughout culture, independently appearing in disparate crews, and even with the same lexicon. “How do you guys know each other - just from this?”
“Wayne and I grew up together up in Washington County,” Harvey explains.
“Yount, bub,” Wayne replies.
“All of us do other things – none of us are just career data enterers,” Harvey says, standing up, at which all the others follow suit, standing and gathering around the open floorspace by the door. “I’m a stand-up comic. I run an improve comedy group here in town, and I do stand up. And, you know, it’s mostly about political or metaphysical stuff that not every crowd can jive with, but sometimes the crowd really digs it and gets it and I can feel a connection, and so something is achieved there, I think.”
“Oh, sure,” Norman agrees. “That’s awesome. I’m not surprised to hear that you’re a stand-up comic, honestly.”
Harvey shrugs, smiling, and even that simple gesture is somehow hilarious.
“So yeah, and Walt here is an actor,” Harvey continues, “and Wayne is, well, Wayne is Wayne; Wayne is the Revolution…”
“My creative outlet is my rage,” Wayne jokes.
“But you also play drums and tabla and you study spirituality and metaphysics…”
Wayne nods in recognition, looking at Norman, then he does a double take at Norman’s glass eye.
Norman nods nonchalantly. “It’s glass,” he says with a little smile.
Wayne’s mouth drops open and then becomes an enormous grin. “Is that a fucking glass eye?” he asks, to be certain. Norman nods, smiling, still making eye contact with Wayne. “Dude, that is the shit! I’m sorry, I mean, who knows, it may be a real drag for you or whatever, but that is – that is the fucking baddest shit I’ve ever seen.”
“Thanks, I agree,” Norman says with a smile. Then he dramatically reaches up to his eye and mimes tearing it out as he says with wry vigor, “That’s why I ripped it out.”
Wayne, Harvey and Timothy all flinch, then laugh nervously. “Seriously, how did you lose it?” Wayne asks.
“I slipped while I was scratching my eye,” Norman says carefully, eyeing the men around him to judge whether they buy it or not.
At first they all nod, the looks on their faces somewhere between compassion and bemusement, but after a few moments Harvey squints suspiciously at Norman and says, “That’s bullshit, isn’t it?”
Norman nods to Harvey with a smile.
“So what do you do, Norman,” Walt asks, “besides enter data and polyamorous relationships?”
Norman laughs. “Well, a lot, I guess. I write. I just finished my first novel, at least my first novel as an adult, last December. I mean, I wrote a couple of silly sci-fi novels as a twelve-year-old but I don’t count those anymore. I also am a musician, an electronic musician and singer. I’ve done four albums of music. What I really want to do is make films, though – I’ve got three scripts I’ve already written and several others planned, and I’ve shot a few shorts, but … nothing really worth showing, I guess.”
“Renaissance man,” Timothy remarks with a little laugh.
“I guess. What do you do?”
“Well, my degree is in Geology,” Timothy responds. “But my main personal effort I guess is just living green.”
Norman nods. “Right on. Elliot?”
“Law student,” Elliot says with a slow nod.
“Hmm,” Norman inexpressively muses.
“But for the forces of good,” Harvey adds, slapping Elliot on the shoulder.
“So you’re from Indiana?” Wayne asks Norman. “You’re not a Christian or anything, are you? I thought they were all uber-Christian out there.”
“No, I can’t say I’m Christian by any means,” Norman replies. “In fact, I think it would be narrow-minded to adhere to any one specific organized religion in today’s world.”
“Word,” Elliot nods.
“But on the other hand,” Norman continues, “I would have to say that I do believe in Jesus and Buddha and Mohammed and Vishnu and all else insomuch as they are Zeitgeist entities alongside Odysseus and Julius Caesar and Charlemagne and Beowulf and Indiana Jones and fuckin’ Bob Saget and…”
“Excuse me?”
Norman succeeds only for a moment at holding back the grin that wants to express his joy at getting to talk about this kind of thing within the first hour of work at his new job. “I mean, all there is to anything is the appearance of it, the perception of it I mean. But the world of fact and science doesn’t account for all that happens in the mind or the variations of perspective (except relativity and quantum physics seem to have touched the surface of that, I suppose). This world exists because we see it, and yet we see all that is in our imagination and that isn’t real also.”
Norman stops for a moment, instinctively, as this is generally where most people look away or roll their eyes in that I-don’t-get-this way that annoys him so much and usually would cause him to apologize or say “nevermind”. These guys, however, are all listening intently, intrigued looks in their eyes, excited grins on some of their mouths, and Norman thinks back to that oft-retold moment when he was five and his mother came across him preaching to his friends about how God is in all things. He decides to continue.
“See, I think that this is all just a shared mindspace, we of course being disparate parts of a single fundamental duality-paradox of awareness itself, of existence itself really, which exists simply because it can’t not, and as our brains have grown, the world of the Zeitgeist – that meta-realm where thought and myth are real, where all that is thought or believed in is given power – the Zeitgeist has also grown. And that’s why the base gods are the nature gods, and the animal spirits, and then you have these fundamental gods of early human society like the harvest god and the weather god and the messenger god and things like this. These are the natural emergent spirits of the Zeitgeist. Our imaginations have been spawning these very real macro-entities that interact with each other, and with us. Cells get together and form an animal that makes distinct choices … can’t this happen with human thoughts, creating macro-entities that begin to have their own nature and self within this new mindsphere? (And now the mindsphere is steadily becoming more and more real, with the Internet and communal virtual environments!) These are the gods, these are our hearth spirits and our modern superheroes … these are the weird broken spirits our celebrities find themselves becoming despite themselves, just because all of us are watching. The spirit of a specific alley that’s maybe seen too many dying drunks and wants to change the world, or a ring that’s been worn on too many killing hands and is starting to enjoy it. You know what I mean? And yet, really, it’s also just us doing our thing. So, yeah, I believe in everything, basically. Everything exists. I just haven’t seen it all yet, which is only to say that I’m not seeing it now. And by I, of course, I mean we.”
Norman’s looks around at his listeners, who are all similarly squinty-eyed and extending their chins forward.
With a snap of his fingers followed by an index finger in Norman’s direction, Harvey says, “That is awesome. Do you know Bill Hicks? He’s a comedian.”
“No, I don’t really know anyone around here.” Norman ignorantly replies.
A phone in the corner of the room rings and Walt, who is closest to it, picks it up. “Hello, party – I, I mean – data entry room.” Pause. “How ‘bout I put you on speaker? Okay.” He puts down the phone and Kendra’s voice appears in the air.
“Hello, gang,” the phone says in her voice, “I wanted to let you know that next week we are going to have the last of the new hires come in. I just finished the last interview, and it went swimmingly.”
“Congratulations,” Timothy says, grinning.
“Thank you. Was that Timothy?”
“Mm hmm,” Walt replies. Harvey laughs.
“What’s so funny over there?”
“Harvey just made a weird face,” Elliot guesses incorrectly, not having looked away from his screen as he continues to type.
“Oh, Harvey,” Kendra laughs. “Well, it went very well, and there will be two more new people in there next Monday – Colin and Marcus.”
“Are they as cool as us?” Wayne asks.
“Well, we’ll see. I hope you guys will approve of my choices. I think they’re both very nice boys.”
“Aw, more boys,” Elliot jokingly whines.
“Well, just wanted to let you guys know about that. How’s everything going? Is Norman figuring everything out alright? Norman, did you figure out those documents okay?”
“Yeah, Kendra, I finished those pretty quickly, thanks,” Norman calls across the room, to the phone.
“Yeah, I showed him how everything works,” Harvey says. “He’ll be fine. He’s a bright young buck.”
“Alrighty then, you guys,” Kendra laughs, “give me a call if you need anything.”
“Later, Kendra,” Timothy says. Walt hangs up the phone.
“That’s the extent of our supervision,” Harvey tells Norman, his eyes bulging with comical excitement. “Awesome? Awesome. You can come in whenever you want.” He scoots his chair back away from Norman with his hands in the air like someone scored a touchdown, then turns back to his computer.
“Awesome,” Norman agrees.
Timothy and Wayne begin stretching where they stand and Walt says, “I need to sit down,” and at that they all return to their stations and the data.
Norman sits upright in his chair and opens the database. It takes him a couple of minutes of deduction to figure out what information on the documents on the right belong in what fields in the database on the left, but once he has figured this out it is a simple process of reading and typing. Norman begins clacking at his keyboard, his eye flitting back and forth between the sides of his flat-screen monitor. After a few minutes, he is in a groove and flashing through about five documents a minute.
“Hey Neo,” says Wayne, who is at the station to Norman’s left, staring at Norman’s fingers with a furrowed brow. He looks up at Norman’s glass right eye, grins wickedly, then looks at his left eye and says, “Slow down, chosen one. You’re gonna put us all out of a job.”

Chapter 6: Man-Like Machines

2007-09-19T13:32:00.000-04:00

6

“Wazzz, dude,” Norman says into the phone.
Lou laughs at the salutation they have comically shared for the past few years (a remnant of that night Norman first astrally projected, when he heard the word blurted from a perhaps-incorporeal being). “Wazzz, man,” Lou replies. “How are things in the East?”
“Something is happening,” Norman says. “Everything is suddenly coming together like all the puzzle pieces of how things needed to be for me to be able to do what I need to be doing have been floating around each other in a tornado and all of a sudden they’re all just falling together perfectly into place, almost, like, in a path for me.”
“Great,” Lou remarks with underlined sincerity. “That’s great to hear. It’s about time.”
“Fuckin’ a, it is,” Norman agrees with a brief smile. “It’s almost unfair, it seems. I mean, check it out. I’m getting paid twelve dollars an hour to enter dollar amounts into a database from images of invoice documents that are in regard to these environmental remediation sites at SE plants throughout the country. So really, all I’m doing is recording how much money this big fuck-off corporation paid the local government and various landfills and such to allow evil to be done to these small towns near their plants. It’s depressing, but still it gives me a hell of a moral anchor everyday. You know? Like, every day I’m reminded that fucked up shit really is going on, and I fill in the dollar amounts involved. It’s fucked up. It’s kind of depressing really, but shit – I’m getting paid twelve dollars an hour.
“And check this out, man. My hours are completely open. I can come in whenever I want to. I work with all these guys who are young and hip and liberal and intelligent, and they use some of the same words we use. They talk about the Revolution and mean pretty much the same thing we do. I mentioned enlightenment briefly at one point and they totally jumped on it. These guys are very cool. It makes me realize how the Revolution-focused our-generation crew of dudes must be a zeitgeist thing that’s out there in many similar forms right now.”
“That’s probably how a lot of the quote terrorist cells unquote would appear,” Lou notes with gravity to his voice.
“Hmm, I wouldn’t doubt it. That’s crazy. But the best part of my job, really, is that our supervisor, this woman named Kendra, is never around. She sends us emails every few days asking how we’re doing and letting us know that we’re doing a great job. We just fill out time sheets for our hours. I’m realizing how easy it would be to come in, plow through a couple hundred documents in a couple of hours – somehow I’m like ten times as fast as anyone else there…”
“…I’m not surprised…”
“…and then just put eight hours on my time sheet and no one will ever know. I’ve done twice as much as everyone else in two hours. As it is, the guys have asked me to slow down, since this is a temporary thing until there are no more documents.”
“Yeah, right. You’re hurrying the end of your own job.”
“Right. So the way I work anymore is I do like a hundred documents in half an hour or so and then sit around for hours listening to music on headphones or talking to the other guys.”
“That’s not unlike my job. I code for maybe fifteen minutes out of every hour, and the rest I surf the web.”
“I wish I could surf the web. That would be fucking brilliant. But our computers aren’t given internet access. Fucking fascist.”
“I guess they don’t want you guys fucking around, surfing.”
“Right, but pretty much all we do is fuck around. I mean, Kendra, our supervisor, told me that they wanted us to do around fifty documents a day.” Norman pauses a moment for a little scoff. “I do that many in like ten minutes, seriously, if I’m doing it fast, which is not hard to do.”
Man-Like Machines

“Funny. Ah, efficiency.”
“Productivity,” Norman chuckles.
“Liberty,” Lou remarks with sarcasm.
“But, so most of my days I’m just sitting there in front of a screen with headphones on, staring forward and thinking. Very Fitter-Happier. The other guys all play solitaire but I’ve been kind of letting it be meditative time for me.”
“Cool, cool. Sounds like it’s a pretty soft gig.”
“It is, really. And so there’s that, and then there’s this whole Laura thing.”
“Yes, tell me about that. You met her on Friendster?”
“Yeah. She’s on my friends list now. You should check out her profile.”
“I did, of course. Seems interesting.”
“She is. She’s fucking … interesting, man. I don’t know what it was that drew me to her. I just saw her picture - the extreme close up with the kissing lips and the closed eyes - and I knew somehow that I needed to meet her. So I sent her this really long, cryptic message about awesomeness and my early Christ-complex years and a bunch of other random shit.”
“One day I blew a kiss, et cetera? Yeah, you sent me a copy, I remember. I can’t believe that’s what you sent to her and she still wanted to meet you. I don’t know what I would think if I got something like that from a girl.”
“Oh, come on…”
“You know … you’re right. I would think it was awesome. You’re just lucky she was the right kind of girl.”
“You know I don’t believe in luck. Or, rather, I don’t believe in randomness. In no-reason.”
“It’s good to talk to you, man. It isn’t the same out here without you. But I’m glad it sounds like things are going well for you.”
“They are,” Norman agrees. “I miss you, too, man. Things aren’t perfect, you know … Lee and Ben are still fighting in the mornings and things are weird sometimes, but it is good to be around Lee again. And anyway, the moment I entered Laura’s apartment I was struck by this weird sense that I would be spending most of my time over there soon. It almost felt like I had seen her apartment before in a dream.”
“Maybe you did,” Lou says excitedly. “You know, maybe you saw the future in some past moment but just thought it was your imagination or a memory or something.”
“I love that idea,” Norman laughs, “that we can see the future sometimes but we just never really can be sure it’s what we’re seeing. And maybe sometimes we see a moment in the future that doesn’t end up happening in this timeline, or it is just such an inconsequential thought at the time that it gets thrown away and when you do finally get to that moment maybe you have a feeling of some kind but beyond that you can’t be sure.”
“It’s like we’re zipping up the timeline as we experience it.”
“That’s a nice visual. But I’m not sure if it’s such a destructive scan...”
“I think we should get back to work at some point soon,” Lou interrupts. “I don’t want our momentum to fall just because Turing didn’t end up getting made this summer.”
“I know. I agree. We should be working on something. I’ve been thinking a lot about that. I have plans in my mind to start work on the new novel.”
“Which one is that? The Wildman and the King?”
“No, the one I have in mind is the one about what it is we do – the enlightenment adventure of the fictionalized Norman character.”
“Oh, okay, cool. I remember you talking about it.”
“Yeah, I’ve tried writing a couple of bits, but I haven’t kept anything yet. You know; I’ve been writing bits ever since I finished Under the Undertow. So it’s very present in my mind. So that’s what has been on my mind the most lately. But I do want to work on the Turing Registry short, and maybe on Sings to Crows. We definitely should be working.”
“Agreed.”
“You know – something else that’s been on my mind a lot lately is the Machine Enlightenment and our spiritual progress and the Revolution, and I think … I think maybe you and I need to design like a future religion, a post-human religion. Not really a religion, per se, because it would need specifically not to include all that dogmatic bullshit, but more just, like – like a system of open-source existential technology. Because, you know how we’ve talked about interacting with the interface of existence, and figuring that out…”
“Existential technologies, I’m with you,” Lou assures Norman. “I know what you mean. Fuck yeah.”
“And it ties in with the book, anyway, or maybe the book ties in with it. Because the book is very much the story of all the stuff we do, of the Norman character achieving enlightenment and struggling then with the realities of this world from the higher perspective of enlightenment.”
“Right on. I look forward to reading that.”
“Well of course you do. If anyone is going to like it, you will.”
Norman and Lou laugh together for a moment.
“So what about Under the Undertow?” Lou asks after a moment of silence. “Are you still going to try to get that published?”
“Of course. It needs to be edited in parts. I’ll probably work on that from time to time. I’ve just kind of gotten pessimistic about Under the Undertow’s chances at actually getting published.”
“Why? It’s a great story.”
“Yeah, but…” Norman stutters. “It’s just so weird. It’s so non-standard. I mean, is it even really about anything?”
“Of course it’s about something. You’re the one who wrote it. I shouldn’t have to tell you that.”
“I know. I just don’t know if anyone will really like it.”
“I liked it. Lee liked it a lot, didn’t she?”
“Yeah,” Norman replies, and it makes him smile to recall her comments about his first book. “She told me it was a modern Catcher in the Rye, but I haven’t read that since eighth grade and hardly remember it at all, so I have no idea really what that means. Like, I mean, I have a vague sort of Zeitgeist conception of it just from context clues within other things or editorial writing pieces I’ve read that have referenced it or whatever – precocious, troublesome kid, lives on the edge of society in some way or something, Igby Goes Down, The Good Girl, Bottle Rocket, et cetera. But I don’t really know what it means.”
“She clearly liked it. Anyway, all I’m saying is you should keep trying to get it published.”
“I appreciate the encouragement,” Norman says somewhat sarcastically.
“I’m serious.”
“I know. I said that with sarcasm despite meaning it sincerely.”
“How obtuse of you,” Lou says with a laugh. “Ah, I expect no less, Norman.”
“Can I run an idea by you that I had?”
“Sure,” Lou says.
“So I’ve been researching online … I’ve been researching romance novels. It all started with an idle remark Laura made when I was talking to her about my book the night we met, and it got me thinking. Romance novels are pretty much the biggest literary market there is. If there’s anywhere a writer can make easy money, it seems, it would be in writing romance novels.”
“Makes sense. They publish as many of those things every month as I lose in sperm count each time I jerk off.”
Norman laughs. “Nice. I imagine you ejaculating millions of tiny romance paperbacks. But, so what I’m thinking is, if I can just do one romance novel in like a weekend or a month or whatever, from what I’ve researched, I could expect to make anywhere from two to fifteen thousand dollars for my first romance novel.”
“Crazy. Is that really what you want to do, though?”
“Well, I’m just wondering how long I could write before my characters became self-aware and started talking about their own fictional nature, and, you know? I don’t think that would go over very well with your standard romance reader.”
Lou laughs.
“Anyway, it’s something I’ve been thinking about. So while I work on this new serious next novel, I might try to knock out some romances as well. After all, what a brilliant beginning to an important artist’s career, right? Making my initial money off romance novels and then going on to do shit like Turing and Death and the Ladies and Agamemnon and all that brilliant, esoteric shit.”
“There is definitely a certain you-ish awesomeness to it. Would you write them under your name, or a pseudonym?”
“I think I would do it under a female pseudonym. Vivian Nin is what I’ve come up with. I can already see her in my mind.” (Though really, he is just seeing Maria de Medeiros in Henry and June.)
“Nice. Like Anais Nin.”
“Right. And I always thought the name Vivian was really sexy.”
“It totally is. Honestly, Norman, I think it’s a great idea. Who knows, it could be that Vivian Nin ends up financing The Turing Registry instead of Sylvia.”
Norman nods to himself, smiling, imagining being able to fund his first film with his own money. “Yeah. And then it would be our money and whatever Turing makes would then be our money too, to spend on Death.”
“And then DATL wins at Cannes and we just blow up. And then it’s a direct path to Agamemnon, motherfucker.”
“Fuck yeah. We need to make sure we don’t lose our Turing Registry momentum from the summer, yo.”
“Right on. I’m excited about your idea. I think you should really try to do that. I mean, fuck – I am all about us getting to do this shit. I’m all about, you know, building the future empire.”
“Empire of enlightenment,” Norman amends. “Excellent. So we’re really just a few logical steps away from the moonbase, then.”
There is a startling beep.
“Oh, goodness. I think there’s another call,” Norman says. “Hey, you remember those emails you sent me right after the Canada epiphany, the ones about dimension and matrices and such? Could you send me whatever you have of those? I want to research for the book.”
“That’s cool,” Lou replies. “I should let you go. Eleanor got home a few minutes ago, and I’ve been on the non-cordless this whole time because the cordless is fucked up in a weird way, and my back is killing me from sitting here against the wall. So I’ll just talk to you later. But, yeah, I will email you that shit.”
“Right on. Later, dog. Communicate my love to Eleanor.”
“Moonbase, man. Stay up. Adios.”
Norman presses the button to hang up and the phone instantly rings right in his face, startling him. He presses the button again and says, “Hello?”
There is a pause lasting a few moments, then Sylvia’s mellifluous voice says with charming derision, “Hello, Norman.”
Norman’s heart instantly becomes a nervously flexing and unflexing fist. He didn’t leave things on the most certain terms with Sylvia. First Imogen left for Maine and it was suddenly just the two of them in the house in South Bend, then Sylvia decided that she wanted to finance The Turing Registry with her inheritance. Then things got complicated, the whole thing fell apart, Norman moved back out to Maine and Sylvia moved back in with her father and sister, or something (it’s still foggy to him yet).
“Hey, Sylvia. What’s up?”
“Oh, not much. I’m just sitting here in my backyard, smoking a cigarette, thinking about Saint Augustine.” Sylvia has recently gone back to college at Saint Mary’s, a Catholic women’s college in South Bend. “I think he’s my new hero.”
“Does that mean your days of sin are over?”
“You know, they may be,” she admits. “There’s something to be said for the Valley-of-the-Dolls lifestyle, but I don’t know. The whole scene is getting a little stale for my tastes, honestly. I may be interested in actually moving forward.”
“That’s fair.”
Norman takes a moment to light a cigarette, and Sylvia must take the silence as awkward because she coos softly, “What about you, Norman? How are you doing? I’m worried that no one has been concerned about that, lately. I know it can’t be easy for you out there right now with Imogen coming by every afternoon. Poor, dangerous Norman all alone without a lover. I fear for the very air.” He hears her lips kiss a cigarette and her throat pull in the smoke.
“I’m okay, Sylvia, thanks for asking. I do miss you.”
“Mm. I miss you, too,” she says with audible reluctance.
“I’m actually doing really well. I’m making more, I think, than I ever have before – even more than at the Academy, where I was salaried. Twelve dollars an hour.”
“You could have made that out here if you had been willing to strip for it. I still think you should have given that a try.”
“That place was the fucking creepiest,” Norman laughs, recalling the gay strip joint in South Bend where he auditioned in the spring, before he finally found the job at the book warehouse that he held over the summer. “The dancers’ changing room was a basement down some rickety steps with ripped-up chairs and a tiny black and white TV showing gay porn. I didn’t want a job where I had to wear a cock ring to keep my dick hard. That was not an office environment I was comfortable returning to night after night. Sorry, Sylvia.” Norman can’t help but laugh.
“I suppose,” Sylvia giggles. “But it would have been so good for me. I had already told all my friends before you decided not to do it, you know.”
“If the only asset I have left is my cock, I’m in a bad job market,” Norman sighs. “Especially now, given the choice between dancing at a gay bar or sitting at a computer with my headphones on, the choice is easy.”
“Who knows how much money you could have made.”
“Yeah, well. There are other ends in this life.”
There is a brief pause long enough for Norman to inhale smoke, hold it for a moment, then exhale it slowly, repeatedly mouthing the word ‘Oh,’ and successfully making two nice smoke rings.
Sylvia says, “So, I should tell you, though I hate such things, that Imogen wanted me to find out, if I could, why you’ve been avoiding her. Not that that is the purpose of this call. I don’t know exactly what you’re doing, of course, because you don’t exactly talk to me either. But if this Laura girl is what you’re doing now, don’t you think you should talk to Imogen about it, or talk to me about it so I can talk to Imogen about it?”
“Talk to her to elaborate upon what?” Norman spits, a bit annoyed. “Elaborate upon the fact that she and I broke up six months ago and I’ve just now begun seeing someone new?”
“Oh, Norman,” Sylvia reprimanded, “just now? Come on. You had Elise over the weekend Imogen left.” Elise is the seventeen-year-old belly-dancer with whom Norman worked at the book warehouse and had a brief affair at the beginning of the summer, much to the frustration of Sylvia, with whom he was trying at the time to plan the production of The Turing Registry, among other nebulous things.
“Anyway,” Norman says hesitantly, “I don’t know what to say to Imogen. I don’t know what she’s doing, or what she expects from me.”
“Just so long as I don’t have to hear any bullshit about you two getting back together.”
“I’m just trying to do my thing, you know? I’ve got other, bigger concerns than her mysterious depression, as far as I’m concerned, at the moment. I blacked out again.”
“Oh did you.”
“On my first evening with Laura. I blacked out in the middle of a kiss, and I showed up in this, like, cloud temple with this God-being and his angelic servants, and…”
“Norman, please,” Sylvia interrupts him. “Enough. Don’t speak.”
“The last time I blacked out was with you, on the drive out here in August.”
“I know, Norman,” Sylvia sighs. “Who are you, Basil Exposition?”
“I saw crows that time. That time you caught me.”
“And before that it was a spinning tunnel made of glowing symbols,” Sylvia says like she’s heard it a thousand times. “It’s all quite magical and mysterious. Your stoned hallucinations will no doubt save the world.” (All sarcastic vitriol.)
Norman ignores Sylvia’s attempt to bait him into argument. “Have I told you I’m thinking about writing romance novels?”
“I read your MySpace blog about it. I’ll invite you to my wedding and you can be my long-haired, esoteric romance-novelist ex-lover in the back row. It’ll be fabulous. I’m sure your fictional romances will be even more sordid than your real ones. I am positively shivering with anticipation.”
“Well anyway, I guess that’s the new idea for making the money with which to make The Turing Registry and start the Damn Thang.”
“You and your lexicon of terms,” Sylvia chides. “Such a silly man.”
“Hey girl,” Norman retorts playfully, “words have power.”
“Are you after power now?”
The question stops Norman’s thought process in its tracks. “Of course not.”
“So what are you after, then, Norman?”
“Enlightenment,” Norman responds. “I didn’t mean that a word has power like a gun has power. I mean energy, life. Words are alive. All anything is is words; and similarly all anything is is alive. Names. We’re all just holograms.”
“Enough, Norman. Honestly, just don’t speak. Anyway, that other book, the follow-up to Gigantomachy, what about it? Is it on hiatus now in favor of these silly romance novels?”
“It’s alive in my head. In my thoughts. I’m still working on it. I’m just going to focus my actual writing process on these romance novels, on Vivian Nin, for the time being.”
“Vivian Nin? I don’t think I can get behind that. The only Vivian I ever knew was a prissy bitch.”
“I’ve always liked the name Vivian. Something sexy about it.”
“Destroy all sexy. You don’t feel at all like Hercules B in Turing? Like you’re sort of selling out?”
“How dare you,” Norman says, genuinely hurt by the suggestion. “I think it would be badass to start this really brilliant, artsploitative, esoteric film/music/literature career by making my money off trashy romance novels. Don’t you?”
“There is a certain Normanish charm to it, I guess. But I know you better than that. You’re not going to work on a romance novel more than once before you get sucked up into the real book you want to be writing and then you’ll disappear again.”
“Is that what I did with Under the Undertow – disappear?”
Sylvia laughs. “I told you not to call it that around me.”
“That’s the title now, Syl.”
“My name is Sylvia. And your first book’s name is Gigantomachy.”
“Anyway.”
“Anyway…” Sylvia mimics. She sighs, and there is silence for a short moment, then she starts spouting off numbers in her radio voice (she does a classical music radio show for St. Mary’s), “Seven plus eight is? Fifteen plus sixteen is? Thirty-one. Plus … thirty-two? Is?”
“Why are you doing math at me?” he asks. Sylvia has a strange habit of doing arbitrary math problems aloud when she is frustrated. Normally she does it under her breath.
“Just thinking. I don’t know if I like the sound of where you’re going with all of this.”
“What do you mean, Sylvia?”
“Don’t use my name that way you do, to have power over me. Two plus two is … four. Four … I don’t know. I’m worried about you.”
“There’s no need to be concerned for me, baby.”
“Don’t call me baby again, understand me? I didn’t say I was worried for you. I’m not certain that you can be trusted, and I think maybe you’re gonna go too far. Just for the record.” There is a pause, during which she can barely audibly be heard taking a drag from her cigarette. “And when you do, don’t think for a second that you can come running to me and my army of Catholic cyber-apes. Where did you two get the name Man-Like Machines, by the way?” she asks on a side note.
“From that I, Robot poster I had in my room at the Academy, and in college before that. Remember that poster? It was in the middle of three above my couch, between Fight Club and Faster Pussycat Kill Kill, on the wall above my old couch.”
“All I remember about that room is you with your shirt open when you had us up to watch Fear and Loathing.”
Norman chuckles to himself, “Ah, yeah. That was for you, even then. Truly.”
“I can’t believe they let you work at a school.”
“Anyway, the I, Robot poster. And that is, of course, an old cover-art poster from the Asimov book, pre-Proyas-film. It had this line above the title that said, ‘Man-Like Machines Rule The Earth! Fascinating Tales Of A Strange Tomorrow!’” When Norman repeats the tagline, he does so with hyperbolic vocal enthusiasm and hand gestures like he’s selling soap in the late nineteenth century, even though he’s alone in the garage.
“Well, it’s very fitting,” Sylvia says breathily, no doubt through an exhale of smoke. “You are very man-like. Not quite, though. A bit more incorporeal these days.”
“Not sure quite what that means,” Norman cringes with a laugh.
“All I mean to say is that, yes, it is wonderful all that you think and write and such, all your lovely ideas, but it was all too easy for you. Sure, you skip two grades and tear out your eye and you’re gonna think you’re special. But you ignore reality. Try seeing from a real person’s point of view sometime. Try facing actual events.”
“Are you saying I’m not a real person?”
“Not anymore. I’m speaking to a phone. I’m standing here all alone, aren’t I? In fact…” Her voice trails off.
“So am I,” Norman replies, but Sylvia hangs up in the middle of his am.

Chapter 7: Ishmael and the Whale

2007-09-19T13:31:00.000-04:00

7

Norman spent the Academy’s winter break at the end of Two-thousand-two in Cape Elizabeth with Lee and Ben and the boys.
It had been a weird semester for him. At that time, his relationship of over two years with Karen, his co-counselor girlfriend at the Indiana Academy, was in its last throes and his romance with Imogen had just recently begun in a fiery, tequila-stained threesome with a visiting ex-girlfriend of Imogen’s who happened also to be a recent alumna of the Academy under Norman’s counsellorship (though Norman did not know Sylvia well at the time, and would not for yet some time to come).
It seemed at the time as if his entire world was falling apart, and yet rather than dispirit him this seemed only to imbue him with more life, more potency, more dope vitas. His budding relationship with Imogen was passionate and fiery, and within it he felt more awesome as a person than he ever had before. Finally the actual events of his life had the passion that he had always felt in his soul.
And the fact that this had only begun to occur since everything had changed that night in Canada and he had started astrally exploring on a regular basis did not seem to be coincidence.
Lee had not seen Norman since long before Amsterdam and was excited to see him perform what he had been attempting with difficulty to describe to her over the phone for the past few months. On the first night he was there, after she had gotten the kids into bed, she coaxed Norman into the garage for a cigarette and a surprise – weed bought from one of Ben’s co-workers during some conference down in Boston. Norman, who had not gotten high in several weeks, since he had last visited Lou in South Bend, gratefully accepted Lee’s gesture and the two of them smoked up while Ben washed the dinner dishes inside.
At that time, the makeshift living room in the garage had not yet been created from the remnants of Norman and Imogen’s previous (then, future) apartments, so smoking consisted simply of standing by the cracked-open back door of the garage.
“So, I have a present for you,” Lee said with an excited giggle, “that I can’t wait until Wednesday to give you.” She pulled a small black velvet box from inside her heavy jacket and handed it to Norman.
Inside the box was a pearly new glass eye with a thick black ohm symbol for a pupil.
Norman was speechless for a few moments, looking at it, feeling it with his fingertips.
“Badass,” he finally said, and hugged Lee tightly. “Holy shit, thank you. This is perfect. Have you cleaned it already?”
“Yeah, I cleaned it – ohh…”
Lee groaned as Norman pulled out his old glass eye and put the new one right in. He held one hand over the eye as he blinked it into place and smiled a simple apology at Lee, who he knew hated seeing him take out his eye. After a few moments, Norman removed his hand and looked at Lee.
To his surprise, Norman would have sworn he could see through the new eye. Not light, but something. There was more information, but he couldn’t have described quite what the new information was.
Lee grinned broadly. “You look so awesome,” she said. “You should look at yourself in the mirror.”
Norman hurried inside, past Ben who laughed when he saw Norman with the new eye already in. In the bathroom mirror he looked at himself and at first forgot he was looking for anything new (Norman was always looking in mirrors). Then his heart skipped a beat when he noticed it. He felt somehow like he was looking at the real Norman Newman for the first time. He felt ten times more awesome than he ever had before within his human body. Like some kind of superhero. The new eye seemed to pulse awesomeness through his whole being. He could feel it sitting there in his skull, like there was energy in it somehow. It felt like a magic item.
“What do you think?” Lee asked from the bathroom doorway.
“I think this is the coolest thing I’ve ever been given,” Norman said with tears welling in his eyes. The power of the eye overwhelmed his emotions. The tears filled his eyelids, warming the cold glass orb with gratitude.
“You know me better than anyone,” Norman declared to Lee as he hugged her. “Thank you so much.”
“Anything to help you along the way, Norman,” Lee said, tearing up at the sight of Norman’s tears. “If you are going to save the world someday, you’re going to need to be pretty damned awesome.”
They both laughed, wiping the corners of their eyes with their fingertips, and finally Norman fell against his sister and hugged her.
To Norman’s surprise, Lee held him tightly to her and began to weep.
“Are you okay, Lee?” Norman asked hesitantly, holding her tighter as she gripped her fingers into his shoulder and at the same time tried softly to push away out of embarrassment. “What’s wrong?”
Lee looked up from Norman’s shoulder, her face twisted with mysterious sadness, and she instantly covered her eyes with her hand. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” was all she could say.
Ben dashed into the room, melodramatically drying his hands with a dishrag, and asked loudly, “Lee, you okay?”
Lee looked up at him once, then looked down and shook her head, saying, “I’m sorry. I’m okay. I’m just overwhelmed.”
“Do you want me to take out the eye?” Norman asked jokingly. “Is it too badass for you?”
Lee laughed and sniffed, shook her head. “No, keep it in,” she said. “I need a cigarette. Ben, do you mind if I have another cigarette?”
“Why would he mind?” Norman asked rhetorically, putting his coat back on and heading toward the door with Lee. “I’ll have one with you.”
“Mind if I join you guys?” Ben asked.
“Of course not,” Norman said.
“No,” Lee sniffed, shyly shaking her head and already reaching for her cigarettes.
The three of them gathered by the back door of the garage and Norman lit everyone’s cigarette.
“Mm, thank you,” Ben nodded.
“So, Norman,” Lee sniffed, then weakly smiled through her sudden melancholy, “are you going to tell us about this new girl?”
“You mean Imogen?” Norman asked, idly touching his cheek with his left hand as he smoked (wishing he could see himself with the new eye in). “Well, she’s very cool. I think you’d like her a lot. She’s a painter and she plays the electric guitar. She’s lovely and black-haired and brown-eyed, maybe five-four-ish.” He shrugged. “We were really just friends at first for a while, and we ended up sharing that house off-campus that I told you about, just generally as like a studio space, and as a place to get away on our off-time and listen to records and stuff without being in the dorm, you know what I mean? But one night after I had been arguing with Vickie over those fucking bullshit new rules, she took me out to the Heorot, this bar downtown, to take my mind off it all, and – I don’t know – something bloomed. I mean, she’s amazing and she’s lovely and fascinating and cool and into music and art and philosophy – she went to Oxford to study metaphysics. I don’t know. So nothing really happened for a while but then one night an old girlfriend of hers was coming down to visit, and it turned out that old girlfriend was Sylvia Miller, an Academy student from my first year as a counselor there. Sylvia is this really hip, really lovely young girl who’s between colleges at the moment, and anyway, she and Imogen and I sort of all got together that night rather unexpectedly and yet also quite premeditatedly. I’m sure none of this makes any sense. I don’t really know quite how to describe it. It was all very otherworldly. Anyway, after Sylvia left at the end of that weekend, Imogen and I just sort of didn’t stop being lovers.”
“Does Karen know about any of this?” Ben asked.
“No. She knows that Imogen and I are friends, but not that we’re lovers. But Karen and I aren’t really together anymore.”
“You’ve said that before,” Lee noted suspiciously. “Does she know it’s over?”
“Yeah, she knows,” Norman nodded. “We broke up. We’re not together.”
“Are you still sleeping with her?” Lee asked.
Norman just raised an eyebrow and pursed his lips, because he had indeed had sex with Karen several times in the past couple of weeks, after they had broken up the most recent time. He always tried to make sure she understood that it didn’t mean they were still a couple, but she didn’t seem to care when all she wanted to do was tear his clothes off. He honestly didn’t feel like he was leading her on in any way, but it never seemed to come across that way when he had to talk about it.
“Everything changed for me, really,” Norman tried to explain, “and I know this sounds absurd and I still don’t have a clear handle on how much you’re with me when I talk about this stuff, or how much I can comfortably discuss it with others as fact, as truth, but ever since I … learned how to … leave my body … everything has been different. As I’m sure you can imagine. I mean, it’s almost like, to a certain extent, I feel like I know what it would be like to die, or at least, rather, to be non-corporeal. It’s … I’ve lost all fear, at least on a philosophical/logical level. Obviously I can still be tugged by emotional body-twitches, but given time to reflect, I feel I am now fearless and really quite staggeringly powerful, to be honest. And I’m not really sure how to interact with the rest of the world with these new wisdoms, this knew perspective.”
“Is that a gnu perspective?” Ben joked, drawing an upper-case G in the air with his finger.
Norman laughed and replied, “Actually, when I said it I was imagining it as k n e w,” sounding out the letters.
“You’re absolutely right; I think you are incredibly powerful,” Lee asserted. “You’re at a point, honestly, Norman, when you need to start considering just how you’re going to use these powers you have.”
Norman laughed. “Well it’s not like I have powers, like I’m a superhero or something…”
Lee laughed with him. “But you are! You can astrally project at will, and you can speak while you do it, right?” Norman nodded. “You can view remotely! That is amazing! I can’t wait to see you do it, actually, if you’d be willing to show us.”
Norman grinned, having been hoping Lee would ask. “Absolutely,” he said eagerly. “I’ve been wanting to get your reaction to all of this. I’ve been doing it almost every day since that first day I did it, and I haven’t really felt like I can talk to anyone about it. Do you want me to do it right now?”
“You don’t need some kind of more comfortable surroundings, or like some trance drumming or anything? You don’t need to sit down?” Lee asked.
“No,” Norman replied matter-of-factly, “I can just do it at will at this point. I can even keep talking to you. Check it out.”
In his inner space, Norman turned on the bright light of his previous enlightenments, all of which had remained in his available arsenal ever since he first experienced them (the more frequently he retrieved them, the easier they seemed to be to retrieve), and in their light the material world around Norman faded, revealing the thrumming world of spirit and energy above and below this shuddering membrane of the universe. He closed his eyes, then opened them just barely, just enough to let in a flickering awareness from between his eyelids. In his mind’s eye, this allowed him to notice the way the world was being let into the room where he was as bits of light through his eyelids, and it was as if he could stand up off the chair where he was sitting in another world, blinded, deafened and muzzled, with each of the five fingers of one hand dipped into a different flask, from the vibrations of which he discerned his five senses, and he could take off the straps with quick thoughts and step away from the whole scene metaphorically, and generally by that point the soft almost-blackness of his visual field would begin to display the subtlest of intuitive information – his astral sight.
Norman’s awareness floated up away from his face, into the space between the three, toward the gathering of smoke near the ceiling. This, of course, was delegated to only part of Norman’s awareness interface, allowing him also to see, peripherally, the sight of his eye, and leaving him access to an awkward remnant of the ability to speak.
“I’m at the top of the room,” Norman said, gazing down upon Lee. He was smitten with awe when he saw the sparkling red ruby that her soul appeared as to him. It clung fiercely to her dark body. “Oh my god, Lee. You are so beautiful.”
He heard Lee laugh sweetly. “Where are you?” she asked.
“Above us,” Norman replied, barely feeling the muscles in his face automatically smile.
He looked down to see what Ben’s soul appeared as to him, only to find that he could not find Ben wherever he looked. The space in which his disembodied soul wisped about had a very different set of information than the world of light and sound. He was sensing thought and spirit and energy, or whatever. Ben did not seem to be in the room anymore.
“Where did Ben go?” Norman asked.
Norman looked at his own body from above and found his awareness suddenly down there with it, staring himself in the face. It disconcerted him to see the way his body was slightly hunched, his shoulders contraposto, his eyes twitching like he was dreaming, and to see it from this angle while simultaneously, in his peripheral vision, gazing through its eye at the place where his soul would be but there was nothing.
“I’m right here,” came Ben’s voice from right where he had been standing before.
Norman’s hovering awareness saw his body’s face twitch in time with his mental reaction to Ben’s voice. His mouth curled a bit and one of his eyes squinted hard, and watching it from two inches away Norman noticed that these occurred a noticeable time interval after he experienced them in his mind.
He turned his awareness around, looking for Ben where it seemed his voice had come from, but he saw nothing. He could feel his head shaking slightly back and forth, and he said aloud, “I can’t see you,” his voice getting more awkward the less he thought about remaining connected to it.
“I’m hiding myself,” Ben replied with a strange tint of pride to his voice.
“Why are you hiding yourself?” Lee asked with a sudden fear or fury. “What do you have to hide?”
“I just do that,” Ben replied with nervous nonchalance.
Norman looked over to Lee, who was beginning to churn in the middle. A thick, ink-black cloud welled up from the center of her scarlet spirit, filling it with darkness and then almost completely obscuring it from his view, as if camouflaging it against the cosmic spiritual background radiation.
“Now I can’t see you, either,” Norman reluctantly said aloud, then with an instant’s thought, returned to his body and opened his eyes, finding Lee and Ben standing on either side of him, staring at each other, their two cigarettes hovering near each other over the ashtray. “Why did you guys both hide from me?” he asked, genuinely confused.
“Isn’t that a good question, Ben? I’m curious,” Lee snapped, anger seething in her eyes.
Ben shrugged slightly and tried to blow it all off with a constant smile. “I just like to see what I can do with my spirit. You know? Like, Norman does his thing, he does his experiments. I was doing an experiment of my own.”
“You disappeared too, though, right before I came back,” Norman said to Lee. He tried to look her in the eyes, but she wouldn’t turn her glare away from Ben. “What happened to you right before I opened my eyes? You filled up with black ink.”
Lee and Ben stared at each other in silence until it became too awkward for Norman, he politely excused himself, put out his cigarette and went inside the house. He watched television with the boys while raised voices turned into screaming in the garage, then died down to a few quiet weeps, then vanished.
At the time, Norman did not know to worry for Lee. He would never have imagined he would have to; she was so strong, so fully competent.
Ben and Lee came back in after several minutes as if nothing had happened. Neither said a word to Norman, but simply gathered the boys for a bedtime story and then prepared them for sleep in their normal routine.

Ishmael and the Whale

The next night, after the boys went to bed, Lee convinced Norman to attempt his first shamanic journey with her. It was something she had been shown by some local shamanic healers she had visited to help her deal with vaguely described traumas from adolescence. The experience had not helped her particularly, but she had nevertheless found it fascinating. She told Norman in depth how she had met a wolf who apologized about what he had to do before he chewed on her neck for a long time. Lee at first explained that it was much like Norman’s astral journeying, but after some explanation Norman realized that it was not quite the same thing.
“It sounds like this shamanic journeying is more like journeying inward, in to the various levels of your own self.”
“Well,” Lee countered, “it can be like that – like if you go to the Lower Realm where your power animal is, the realm of the animalistic spirits, that’s an inner realm; it’s the realm of your body, really, I think. But when you go to the Upper Realm, I think that’s the zeitgeist, like you describe. I think the Upper Realm is more like going up, like above this world to look down on it with perspective, you know – like you described?”
“Yeah,” Norman said, recognizing Lee trying to explain his system of multidimensionality. “I’m with you. Anyway, as above so below, I suppose.”
“So I don’t know. I think we should try it together.”
They did it around midnight in Lee and Ben’s living room, lit only by the softly blinking Christmas tree. Lee sat on the floor in full Buddhist meditative posture, while Norman just sat on the couch in a relaxed manner with one arm up on the back of the couch behind him and the hand of his other arm resting comfortingly on his crotch.
The drumming began suddenly, loudly. Lee had it turned all the way up, filling the house with a bass so rhythmic it became like a cloud. Norman closed his eyelids until he could feel them fluttering together softly, that point where the tiny bit of light that is allowed through becomes like the flickering of a film projector, his blank canvass.
I want to see my power animal, Norman thought aloud to his inner world.
As Lee suggested, he attempted to create an elevator in which to descend to the Lower World. He saw the doors of the elevator in his mind’s eye but, for some reason, could not approach them. Despite all willful attempts to move toward the doors, they appeared no closer. He gave up on the doors and they were gone.
Norman decided to try the ocean. He imagined that he was engulfed in the wine-dark sea and sank downward, toward the darkness. At first he was uncertain if his bare black surroundings were ocean or mere void, until he sensed the slowly more and more real presence of bubbles around him, and when he looked back up in the direction from which he had come he saw the faint light of the surface world like the last dark blue part of a black night sky just at the end of dusk. He kept thinking about finding his power animal and continued to descend, bearing those long few seconds that he had found he always had to bear in such spiritual pursuits – the long few seconds when nothing happens, when almost everyone gives up. He felt the pressure of the depths pressing around him more and more as he descended until suddenly he noticed that there was more pressure on his right side, against his arm and leg.
Beside Norman was an enormous whale, visible more as a huge dark presence at these depths than as anything with much detail. He could sense its enormous left eye just ahead of him and its huge left fin swaying behind him. His hand brushed its tough skin.
Psychically Norman asked the whale, Are you my power animal?
The whale did not respond. It slowly swam away from him, off into the dark water, becoming just a hazy shape that Norman had trouble following with his eyes, then swam back up close, letting its huge body soar over him like a star destroyer. Norman grabbed onto its belly with both hands and was pulled along with it.
So, how are you doing? Norman asked the whale, trying to be polite since he was getting a ride.
What do you care? the whale replied.
At the psychic sound of the whale’s voice, Norman felt an instant connection with it, a closeness, like suddenly recognizing an old friend. A great joy filled his heart. He hugged himself close to the whale.
It is good to see you, Norman said, his face right up against the body of the whale. He noticed that they had begun to descend. Norman’s gaze moved away from the whale, to the surrounding waters. They way he was holding onto the whale, their descent felt like going up. The barely visible particles and plant life that filled the water around Norman softly descended along him like snowflakes. Where are you taking me?
What makes you think I’m going to tell you?
Norman laughed and pushed off from the whale, floating out away from it into the open darkness. A bright orange starfish swirled past his view.
Come on, now, don’t be like that, Norman laughs to the whale. I haven’t seen you in forever.
That’s definitely true, the whale agreed, swimming a wide perimeter around Norman.
So how have you been? Don’t be so moody.
The whale continued to swim a circle around Norman for a while, then came in close again and Norman grabbed onto its side. They began their descent once more.
I’ve been alright, the whale finally admitted.
Word, Norman replied. What have you been up to?
You know. This and that.
Norman’s attention was taken away from the conversation by the sudden appearance of an enormous cyclone of colorful little fish that swam synchronously in a swirl to his left. Just as the fish disappeared, eight big, glowing starfish shot up past Norman like fireworks, and then another beautifully synchronized display came up in the background – a huge starburst of squids of different colors all lighting up like Christmas lights at the same moment. Norman watched with awe and delight.
What is all this? Norman asked the whale, but he got no response.
It was like a glorious air show of masses of sea creatures swimming around him, some shining like Lite Brites, others just making beautiful, subtle displays barely visible as dark against the darkness. Norman began to realize that they were approaching a ceiling, the ocean floor, which was somehow lit and covered with a staggeringly ornate mosaic of rows of coral and starfishes all concentrically laid out around some central circle.
The whale came to a stop and said, Check it out. It’s all for you. You haven’t gotten to see this yet.
Norman descended toward the circle at the center of the writhing sealife garden, finding that movement in this realm was very similar to his astral movements. He moved simply by willing to do so.
The circle at the center of the display was an enormous metal plaque. There were symbols, but much like the writing that Norman had read in Lou’s apartment, the symbols seemed to change from one to another, fading in and out of shapes. Somehow intuitively Norman had a clear, if quiet, impression that this was something like a medal for some previous deeds of his macroself. Something that had to do with the City of Bridges (Norman’s name for the magnificent, Rome-like city that he frequently visits in his dreams). A medal, an award, a certificate of some sort? He wasn’t sure. Nevertheless, it filled Norman with pride, and he could simultaneously feel the pride of all these sea creatures who had clearly put a great deal of effort into planning this elaborate display for him. He gazed for some time at the plaque. A single baby krill crawled along the center of it; his mother stood at the edge waving a tiny claw, at wit’s end.
After a while, Norman turned back to the whale, who was swimming above, and called him down to pick him up. The whale obliged, sending some half-muttered, half-comic psychic impression of feeling put out and underappreciated, to which Norman replied with a half-whispered psychic reminder that he really liked the whale and thought he was a good guy.
Let’s go to the surface, Norman said. I want to see more of this spirit realm than just the dark bottom of the ocean. I mean, much love to the bottom of the ocean, but I think I want to go to the Upper Realm, see what’s up there.
If you’re sure, the whale said, swimming up toward the surface very fast. The darkness of the ocean slowly paled like the coming of dawn. But you remember what happened last time you visited the Upper Realm.
Do I? Norman asked. He tried to access any newly-accessible memories that he might not have realized yet that he had, but he couldn’t find any. I don’t think I do.
Oh well, the whale sighed. Maybe you’re not as smart as they think.
Who? Norman asked, intrigued. As smart as who think? In a purely vain way, he loved the idea that people in the spirit realm talked about how smart he was.
The End of Time Crew, the whale said.
The End of Time Crew? Norman repeated back, overcome by the awesomeness of such a group name.
Here we are, the whale said, slowing to a soft stop just below the surface. Norman looked up at the bright, distorted sky. He let go of the whale’s belly and allowed himself to surface.
As he moved up past the surface of the water, Norman noticed that he did not experience a sensation he had been expecting – the sudden cool feeling of air against wet skin. It made him realize that the only tactile sensations he was getting at the moment were those of the couch against his back, the texture of the fabric on his hands, and it came close to bringing him out of his trance.
Norman surfaced near some kind of shoreline that reminded him of Alaska. There were glacial cliffs in one direction and a wooded shore that sloped up toward a massive distant mountain range. To his left, he saw the whale’s back come up above the surface and then sink back below.
Bye for now, he thought in the direction of the whale. I’m going to go see the Upper Realm.
And then he took off with ease up into the sky. At first he looked up at the blue and the clouds that were steadily getting larger, but after a while as he continued to rise he looked back down instead, at the Earth below from which he was quickly zooming out. It was mere moments before he found himself in orbit, with the curve of the Earth at his feet as if he were standing on it, the Moon hanging gently in the black, star-speckled cosmos.
Curiously, Norman found the exosphere to be quite a bustling place. Directly ahead was an enormous half-transparent bureaucratic god sitting at a giant orbiting desk, making traveling souls from Earth sign some form before they were zipped off to the Moon or parts beyond, while above, against the starfield, seemed to be something like a colossal holographic drive-in movie screen which rapidly and seemingly randomly flashed images of human faces. Norman found that on contemplation of a particular figure – he started with Achilles and Agamemnon – the image of that figure would flash onto the screen in front of the stars, half-visible.
Startlingly, a giant blue wormhole opened up yet further up in space, above the screen of faces, and without a second thought Norman decided to move forward through it, some intuitive sense that it led to the Upper Realm filling his mind.
A brief kaleidoscopic trip through the wormhole brought Norman to a position high above what appeared to be a dry African plain. He hovered in the air, just below the clouds, looking down upon the yellow grass spotted with little green trees and off-white clumps of dry shrubs.
Remembering Lee’s instructions, Norman thought about a steed and was instantly met from below by a powerful chocolate-colored horse that carried him off through the air, galloping upon the wind. He guided the horse down toward the ground until its hooves were skimming the tops of the high grass.
After a moment’s thought about seeing his guardian, a great gray rhinoceros about twice the size of Norman’s steed ran up and began galloping alongside him. Its eyes gleamed electric blue when it looked over at him, and as it ran faster and passed ahead of Norman he could see that its tail was a little shuddering curl of electricity. As if to display its power to Norman, the rhino bucked its horn up into the air as it ran past a couple of small shrubs and two thick blasts of white lightning came thundering out of the blue sky, flattening the bushes into little black circles of dissipating smoke.
Word, Norman couldn’t help but ejaculate with an accompanying thrust of his hand. That explains my apparent luck, or blessed life, I suppose, he thought, if this guy is my guardian.
Take me to my teacher, Norman declared to the two beasts, and as soon as he did, the horse took off into the air again. The rhino turned around far below and disappeared out of Norman’s awareness. Only a few moments of thought later Norman realized that below him was a pale dirt road bisecting the savannah, and not far down along the road was some sort of roadside stand. The horse headed down toward it, coming to a gentle landing in the middle of the white dirt road a few meters from what now looked to Norman almost like some kind of medieval hot-dog stand put together shoddily with planks. He approached the stand and looked inside. At first, it seemed empty.
Slowly, however, the longer, he looked, certain that he must have been brought here for a reason, he began to discern that, as if in some sort of new color that he had never seen before, some kind of entity actually was sitting there inside the cart. It shimmered with invisibility like the Predator or a Romulan bird of prey. As Norman began to see it more clearly in his mental vision, he realized that it was looking back at him, and if it had features they would have been smiling patiently (though he received this information purely psychically and not through any kind of visual clues).
I’m sorry, Norman stuttered, unsure quite how to address the being, but … how would you describe yourself, exactly? It was the best question he could come up with quickly.
The entity seemed to chuckle softly to itself, then replied very clearly in a voice startlingly unfamiliar to Norman, “Call me Ishmael.”
Norman laughed hard enough that it immediately brought him out of his trance and he was back in the living room in Cape Elizabeth.

It wasn’t until he told Lou about the experience on a visit up to South Bend several weeks later that the name Ahab was given to Norman’s whale spirit animal.
“Dude,” Lou said with a huge grin and a look of awe. He slowly reached down below the coffeetable in his apartment in the Enchanted Forest and slowly, epically raised up Ahab, the big blue whale bong that the two of them had made just a few months earlier out of two bits of plastic piping and a blue plastic whale that had originally been a toy sprinkler. Ahab had a cheery face, a big smile and happy, cartoonish eyes. As soon as Lou dramatically raised Ahab up above the table and Norman saw Ahab’s familiar smiling face, he made the same connection Lou had just made.
“Holy shit, you’re right,” Norman remarked with awe. “Ahab. He’s my power animal. My power animal is our bong. That’s funny.” He looked back up at Lou and added, “You know, I’m glad I’m getting a chance to finally talk to you about this. Your input has always sort of clarified things for me, and this was a particularly intense, bizarre experience. And yet, at the same time, you know, it all really just happened in my head, in my mind, and so… You know, it’s sort of hard to reconcile even with myself, like, the distinction between whether my mind just made it up or if it could have been some kind of somewhat more real experience, you know?”
Lou reassured him with what would eventually become a motto of Norman’s. “Hey,” he said casually while sitting down with a big sigh, “I figure whether it happened for real or in your mind, what’s the difference, right? Even if you had just made it up, I’m not sure it would be any less valid. You know?”
Norman smiled then, as Lou had already begun to pack Ahab’s bowl.

Chapter 8: Soliloquy

2007-09-19T13:30:00.000-04:00

8

“Sometimes Norman feels like he’s watching his own life from outside, like he’s actually just receiving the story of his life and interpreting it thusly,” Norman says into his digital recorder, standing on an outcropping of rocks overlooking the wind-textured Atlantic Ocean. “He can fill in the darkness between the words with his own little musings and flourishes, but beyond that it is just a series of facts told by an omniscient narrator. All true.”
He takes in the vista of the ocean, imagining it all to be just a matte painting a few feet away from him down the rocks.
“Still, he is never audienceless, even when he’s alone. In the context of the real world, of standard goings-on and everyday events, however, Norman might be considered something of a strange bird.” He uses his free hand to hold his coat tighter against his body and grimaces as the wind whips his hair around his forehead. “Being that he is always aware of some invisible, omnipotent viewer (which he recognizes is really, like all things, nothing but a part of himself), he does his best to imbue each moment of his freewill with a certain je ne ses quois, a certain distinct Norman-ness, a sort of existential entertainment value, a sort of subtle awesomeness. As he stands, he makes the face he wants to be making as opposed to the one which his body would make without any judgment. He touches places as he passes them, taking for a moment a tiny glimpse of that place’s essence. He can almost see the spirits in the air. When he is alone, he knows the camera is on him. It is when he is alone that he most owns himself, his scene, his choices. Amongst others, Norman finds his identity compromised to a certain extent as such sphinxes as empathy, compassion, responsibility and community invade his mind like spyware, taking up his processing power until the bits left over to run his internal programs are so slow that the user gets frustrated and turns away from the screen, or simply pulls the connection, and social-instinct autopilot kicks in.”
Norman frowns at the wind, uncertain if what he has just said actually makes any sense at all.
Soliloquy

“After all, what is it best to be, when you’re alone? Does it matter, when I’m alone,” he asks his future listening self, “if these words I speak are right, if they actually make sense together, or are they just there to remind me what I meant to say? Hmm.” It strikes him that even now, he’s not entirely sure what he meant by that, and that realization makes him laugh softly to himself.
On the ocean’s horizon Norman notices a tiny black speck – maybe a ship of some kind. For whatever reason, it makes him think of Laura, and that whole mystery surrounding her and their almost-random meeting.
“I love you,” he says toward the horizon, into his digital recorder, and to the wind with the intent that it be carried to wherever Laura is at this moment. He tries to picture her location in relation to him and the space he can see at the moment (ocean, rocks). No doubt, he assumes, she is downtown somewhere in Portland. Norman is in Cape Elizabeth, a few miles from Lee’s house, at Two Lights Park, standing on the rocks by the ocean, to escape the distressing vibe at the house. How far away are we right now? he asks Laura with a thought. As if in response, his mind’s eye is filled with a cinematic shot in which his own wistful face gazing across the ocean is on one side of the frame and Laura, in her apartment, suddenly looking up away from a book, is on the other side of the frame in a diagonal split-screen.
Every once in a while, Norman makes himself reassess his philosophies and values to make sure they still stand up to the light of scrutiny and reason (and still suit his idiom). He finds he must be alone to do so, as the presence of others inevitably fills him with a sense of communal empathy that dulls something crisp about his unique personal self. He is only truly vorpal alone.
In his mind he narrates aloud, and while he does his mind’s eye becomes stronger than his visual eye, and for him he is more standing in a David-Lynch-ishly red-curtained room in his brain, interacting with a phantom of himself that mimics his actions like a mirror, than standing on the rocks on Earth.
I am Norman Newman, he says (and the reflection agrees). There is a me. Or at least, there can be said to be one. There is something fundamental that is getting all this information and doing whatever with it. That thing is me. This shivering body, even these thoughts – just tools. Just words. Where am I – the true me – then? In some sort of higher dimension or whatever? But wherever I am, there I am, and any form I take even there is still just a tool, an avatar. A is A. I may have freewill, but still whatever is is, whatever happens happened.
We have gotten so confused by all the flashing beauty and pain around us. All there really is is the self experiencing and interacting, changing the world and taking it in (though not having to make a big deal out of the things that don’t go how it may have wanted).
Norman sits down on the rocks and folds his legs beneath himself. Then he lets the world whirling around him fade from his vision again and retreats to the warm sanctuary of his memories of Laura’s flesh. The tickle of his own windblown hair against his face becomes Laura’s curly hair; the empty wind blowing against the front of his torso becomes soft, warm skin beating with life. He feels the way she tenderly reached back as he spooned her in the big bed that took up most of her small, map-bedecked bedroom. Her warm fingertips touched the side of his hip, followed by the much cooler palm of her hand. She whispered, “I love you too,” though at the time he had said nothing.
He opens his eyes just as a particularly aggressive gust of wind blows around him, stinging his eyes and causing them to tear up. He holds one hand up over his glass right eye to protect it from the cold and blinks away the tears.
“What is love?” he asks his digital recorder. “Is it something more than what I do?” He thinks about his past lovers, trying to bring to mind the tactile sensation of their various skins against his own, but all he can feel in his imagination is Laura’s. “Are my old loves still alive somewhere, like souls in some kind of heaven? I have never fallen out of love with anyone. How could one?
“What is the purpose of love? Of specific, monogamous love, I mean. We can all love each other as an exercise in self-knowledge and temperance and such, but just loving one specific person? I mean … I’m in love with Laura. It’s as clear as a feeling could be. It’s like I can see that love between me and the world everywhere I look now. Her specifically. But I don’t think that’s what the Bob Marley idea of One Love is supposed to mean. It means One Love – one single love shared by all. Isn’t that right? So what’s with monogamy? Is it just societal logistics? Or is it just people’s insecurities? The fear that no one will love us, and so the need to cling to one person who claims they do? Lou would say, ‘As humans, we are driven to pair bond.’ But why, beyond instinct? It seems to have some connection to duality – the two. The one and the other. But in the context of being human and getting to know people and having sex and kissing and all of that stuff – what is the purpose of it all?
“I sometimes feel like most of what I do on Earth is busy work meant to teach me shit I already know. Of course, I am only saying these things to transfer them into a format of saying them to others so that…” Norman trails off for a moment. “That sentence was fucked anyway. I don’t know where that was going. It’s just - some of the best moments in my life I will never be able to share with anyone. Moments like this. Beyond the words in this machine, the actual experience. It will only ever be mine?”
He gazes up at the sky above, ribbed with gray tubular clouds. A harsh breeze gets under his sleeves and coldly clings to his ribs. He huddles into a ball, with the recorder held between his knees.
“Whoo,” he hums, “coldness, coldness, coldness.
“These soliloquies of mine. If there is no great Reader out there, then are these thoughts just recirculating through the closed system of my mind? I know that on a macroscopic level, that must be the case. The universe is clearly just a whorl swirling eternally in on itself. If there is more, then the whole includes that extra bit too – and just yet-unknown – and there isn’t more anymore. Infinity and zero are the same donut. But here, inside of it, there are ends and beginnings and things and other things and so surely, surely there must be some equal and opposite reaction, as it were, to the thoughts I am sending out into the World…”
Warmth falls across Norman’s back from a powerful field of sunlight that has just cut through the clouds behind him.
To himself, the ocean and the warmth on his back, Norman sings aloud, with the same passion he would give to his microphone if he had been recording a Box track, the Radiohead song I Will. “I will … lay me down … in a bunker … underground … I won’t let this happen to my children … Meet the real world coming out of your shell … with white elephants … sitting ducks … I will … rise up. Little babies’ eyes … eyes … eyes … eyes…” Norman’s unashamed singing voice is something like David Bowie as Morrissey in The R. L. Burnside Story. He finds himself happiest in such moments, alone, singing to the air. As always, however, the nirvana of his solitude is dispelled.
This time, to Norman’s surprise, it is Imogen. She is stepping carefully down along the rocks toward the place where he is sitting, a red scarf flapping around her neck, her shoulder-length jet-black hair dancing frantically in front of her red-framed glasses. She is wearing a long skirt that she made herself with a lovely, ornate painting of Shiva on the left side, and a tight black top that accentuates her large, round breasts. She looks like a windswept dream, enough so that he genuinely wonders until she is right next to him, speaking, if it is just a vision.
Norman stands as Imogen’s Chuck Taylor All-Stars step over a small tidal pool, onto his rock.
“Hello, Norman,” she says, holding her hair back from her face, her head cocked to one side, like she’s trying to look up under his mask.
Norman can only smile into the wind. He knows he ought to speak, and doesn’t want to seem rude, but it is more important to him that he say nothing trite or inadvertently hurtful.
“I didn’t expect to find you here,” she tells him, turning to look at the ocean, and he wonders if it is the truth. For his part, he had hoped not to run into her here, it having been a place they would come together to draw. He now remembers an intuitive thought of her when he first arrived that made him wonder at the time if she might already be there, and he had treaded carefully toward the rocks, looking out for her presence, ready to comically duck away for his own/the Reader’s amusement.
“Are you on your own?” he asks.
“Yeah. I just came to be by myself.”
“Me too.”
Imogen turns back around to face him and looks into his right eye (she always looks him in his glass right eye when she wants to really capture his attention). Norman’s world shrinks to Imogen and the ocean backdrop behind her.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “should I let you be alone?”
“No,” Norman replies, his face remaining generally expressionless only because none of the emotions that are coming to him, suggesting themselves, seem appropriate.
Imogen smiles cutely and folds her hands in front of herself. She stands there, still, in front of the Atlantic Ocean. Through the shy but intimate look in her eyes Norman can see the old Imogen he remembers pressing his body against, precious sleep in her smile, her voice a comforting hand, that old love in her posture, wanting only for Norman to tear away the plastic wrap that surrounds her and give her permission to fall back into his love.
“How are you, Imogen?” he asks softly.
She smiles away the impulse to frown, looks down below Norman’s eyes and says, “You know. I think it sucks we’re not friends right now. I miss you. I don’t really understand why you’re avoiding me. And I have to admit, I definitely don’t get what you were trying to say with that mixtape you left for me.”
“It wasn’t a mixtape with a specific message, per se. And I’m not avoiding you specifically,” Norman tries to explain. “It’s not what I’m not doing so much as what I’m doing, if you know what I mean. I’m just doing something else right now. I meant to give it to you in person, but you weren’t there on Wednesday.”
“I guess I just thought when you first said you were coming back out here that maybe I was part of the reason,” she says.
“You were,” Norman admits. “I didn’t know what would happen, but you being out here, seeing you again was a huge part of the reason I came out here. I mean, I love you. But I don’t know. Things didn’t turn out how I expected.”
“Yeah.” Imogen puts her hands behind her back and twists in the wind, looking off to the side, down along the shore. Norman can see that she is holding back tears. “I wish you wouldn’t say that, because I know you don’t really mean it.”
Norman’s throat takes the painful brunt of that comment. “I’m sorry, baby,” he coos, wanting to console her but not knowing how to as an ex-lover.
“Don’t call me baby,” Imogen says with a half-hearted swish of her hand in his direction, still looking away to avoid crying.
“I don’t know how you want me to be. I’m sorry.” Norman looks at the lovely girl who used to be his most precious love, who indeed he still adores despite all the drama that split them apart. He knows that they will never kiss again, but after that thought, kissing her is all he can imagine. He looks into her eyes, which are welling up with tears. “What do you want from me?” he asks her.
“I want this to tear you up as much as it does me, until you realize that you’re really still desperately in love with me, and fall into my arms.”
“I will always love you, Imogen, but if I fell into your arms right now I would knock us both into the sea.”
“Stop being so literal,” Imogen barks, finally losing her grip on those tears.
Norman only then notices their treacherous surroundings, the rocky drop into the ocean. “I actually wasn’t,” he says, smiling despite himself. He scratches his lip to hide the smile. “Imogen, I do still love you. I will always love you. You’re incredible. But I don’t know if you and I mean the same thing anymore when we use the word love.”
Imogen’s light tears begin to fall heavier, measured now in weeps.
“I’m sorry, my darling. You know, I always told you that my art, my purpose, is my highest priority.”
“Yes, thank you, you reminded me every time you could.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. You are amazing, and I hate the idea of you ever leaving my life, of us not being close. But I can’t go through this with you, this, whatever this is that you’re doing to yourself.”
“I know,” Imogen says like she’s heard it a thousand times, “I should learn to control my emotions with pure will.”
Norman shrugs. “Or just think about the outside world for a while and find some perspective. I mean, relative to everything else that’s going on, is your position really that bad?”
“Fuck you, Norman,” Imogen spits. She glares at him with trembling cheek bones for a few long moments, then turns with a weep and begins the slow process of walking carefully away from him over the uneven rocks.
“I didn’t mean in relation to the break-up pain,” Norman tries to explain, “I meant in relation to the pre-break-up arbitrary depression that led to the break-up.” He finishes the sentence to himself, as she is already out of earshot in the rising wind. Norman watches her leave in silence until she is over the grassy rise away from the ocean.
Norman sits back down on his rock, facing the gray, wind-textured Atlantic.
Though he fights the initial physical impulses (a weight in his chest, an arrhythmic cramping of the throat), Norman can’t stop himself from crying when his mind’s eye falls across a slideshow retrospective of Imogen’s loving glances throughout the past.
It strikes Norman that in a fictionalization of this moment, be it a book or a film or whatever, the scene might linger on this sad moment of his for a while as denouement from the previous dramatic dialogue, but not for too long before it faded off into the next important scene of plot development. But for him, he has to sit here until he decides to get up, then walk back up the rocks to his car and drive home. Like Imogen – for Norman, she left the scene moments ago when she stepped over the horizon, but no doubt she is still walking, not far from here, not quite to her car yet. Perhaps she will sit for a time by herself, blaring some old mixtape on her car stereo.
Norman retrieves a pen from his pocket and writes IT’S ALL ABOUT THE EDITING at the base of his thumb, surrounds the words with a box.
As he walks back from the shore, through the short forest path, past the picnic area where a family is having lunch and flying late-season kites, down the little concrete steps embedded in the hillside and across the gravel parking lot to his car, Norman makes a point of noting and appreciating the details of each little moment surrounding him. So much information there is, and we catalogue it in our memories (and even in the moment’s perception!) usually with just quick sketches. He stops briefly and considers the staggering amount of information that surrounds him in even this simple moment in a tiny corner of southern Maine. It strikes him that potent dramatic moments that you will always remember and throw-away moments like this that there are billions of throughout your life and that you will never remember are physically, measurably identical in nature. There is the same amount of information in terms of the physical surroundings, where everything is and what spin each particle has and such. But somehow certain moments are more real, they live higher in the world. Norman wonders how many insects are within sight that he doesn’t know about, and he wonders how much awareness is involved in being an insect. They are biological, after all; they do make choices. They learn, they consider; they’re not robots (any more than this guy approaching).
“Hi there,” nods a white-haired gentleman who is walking the opposite direction with his frail wife.
“Afternoon,” Norman nods with a smile. Who was that guy? What’s his story? How did they fall in love, and where will his awareness go after he dies?
Norman gets into his black Mirage and shuts the door. He sits for a while in the quiet, cramped solitude.
When he next looks back up at the world, his gaze falls upon Imogen’s car, which he hadn’t noticed before, still sitting on the opposite side of the parking lot with Imogen inside, crying. Norman’s heart clenches up. He can’t help but say, “Oh, Imogen,” to her from a distance, but then decides that that is as much comforting as he can do for her right now without hurting her more.
He turns the key and the whole car rumbles for a moment, the stereo begins blasting the Prodigy song Breathe. “Exhale, exhale, exhale!” Norman lights a cigarette, puts the car into drive, and then proceeds to sit still, switching his foot back and forth between the gas and brake as needed. He ashes several times out the window then flicks his cigarette into the wind of the careening streets outside. The world spins and swoons around him, and just after Breathe has ended and the Leonard Cohen song Hallelujah has begun (a mix CD originally intended for Imogen but never delivered), he puts the car in park and turns it off, then steps out into the driveway at Lee’s house.
As soon as he enters the breezeway, letting various cats in and out when he opens the door, Norman can hear Lee and Ben arguing with each other in the garage. He stops in his tracks halfway in the door and looks down at his feet and the passing cat traffic with a frustrated sigh. He wishes there was some kind of potion he could force-feed them all that would make them reasonable, make them just chill out, make them realize that everything can be controlled by choice, even how you feel, how you react to anything at all.
Knowing that Lee will tearfully beg him to give them space if he were to interrupt, Norman turns around and heads back out toward the driveway, passes his car and sits down lotus-style in the center of the bulb of the cul-de-sac. He closes his eyes, curtaining the whole world in the pale pink color of his semi-translucent eyelids.
“You can be well,” he whispers. “Just be well.” He waits, as if listening to the World for a response. “You can’t hear me, can you?” He opens his eyes, to address the World instead of just the backs of his eyelids. The trees that tower over the houses sway about. The playful screams of children down the street mask the less jovial ones coming from inside the garage. It makes Norman think about something he read in a book about the Rwandan massacres back in the nineties – something about an ancient tradition in Rwanda, a certain way a woman can scream that anyone who hears it is obliged to come running. “Is anybody listening?” he asks, listening to the shouting in the garage. He pulls out his digital recorder, quickly asks it, “How do you free the slave who just returns to his cage?” then returns it to his pocket.
Norman lights a cigarette, then closes his eyes and meditates there for a while. He lets his spirit slip away and drift wherever it may, which ends up taking him upon the mind currents of astral Portland, up into the sky above the World, then drifting slowly back down like a glowing black snowflake and watching the thrumming circuit board of astral human society from above.
About ten minutes later as the sun is setting and the trees glow orange, a neighbor’s car comes up the street and has to slowly drive around the young man in a lotus position in the middle of the cul-de-sac.

I am not afraid at all.
I am not afraid at all.
I am literally not afraid at all.

He whips the thought repeatedly against the dark wind like a prayer flag held up into the Upper World, or like text in a novel of the future, centered and emphatically italicized, hoping the repeated thought itself might somehow spread some reason into the surrounding spiritwaves.

Chapter 9: Music For a Saturnine Love Affair

2007-09-19T13:29:00.000-04:00

9

Norman arrives downtown early, parks on the street and walks around for a while in order to focus his mind on projecting the full romantic being he wants himself to be. Intriguing passersby and wet-pavement-reflections sweep against his thoughts as he swims through their midst, filling him with some kind of potent romantic mana. He inscribes his heart with lines from Henry Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, Pushkin’s beautiful Onegin, the White Stripes and the Magnetic Fields, all half-remembered and no doubt filled in with his own subconscious eloquences. It is a cool, cloudy evening, so Norman is wearing his warmest jacket, a thick suede one that fits him tightly, with a puffy white lining and collar. In one of its pockets he has a small bag of weed and in the other a mixtape for Laura titled Music For a Saturnine Love Affair. In one of the large cargo pockets on his gray pants is the director’s cut of Blade Runner on DVD. He stops in at a general store near the Old Port, down a block from the pub where he and Laura got drinks that first night, and buys some cigarettes and a bottle of wine. He throws away the plastic bag for the wine as he exits the store, preferring the image of himself just carrying a bottle through town on the way to Laura’s. All various elements of the evening work together in making Norman feel like he is in Paris or some other nameless, blurrily beautiful city of magic. He walks into the vestibule of the Metropolitan at two after eight (he does not wear a timepiece, but the nearby Time and Temperature Building rhythmically broadcasts its eponymous data from on high). Norman types her apartment number into the keypad on the wall. There is a ringtone, and then Laura’s voice comes soft and enticing through the single speaker, “Hello?”

Music for a Saturnine
Love Affair

“Laura,” Norman says, smiling instinctively at the sound of her voice. His smile is instantly followed by an explosive buzzing from the door to his left as it clicks open.
In the elevator he can feel the ghost of that gorgeous kiss he shared with her there a week before. The two moments seem to overlap briefly in his heart. Norman wonders if he felt this moment then at all, though he would not have recognized it at the time.
As an experiment, he focuses his will on sending the thought I am in love with you back to that moment, whispered in the air to Laura while the past him was kissing her.
He considers asking Laura if she heard it.
It takes Laura several long seconds to come to her door after Norman’s knocks. When she does, she is wearing an extravagant ruffled white shirt and gray pin-striped pants that fit her hips magnificently. On her neck is a semicircle of pearls. Her hair is pulled back and up, giving center stage to her elegant face, her blue eyes bright behind dark umbrae of eyeshadow.
She smiles, shyly recoiling her chin a bit, and beckons him inside. “Good evening,” she says softly as he walks past her, following him with her eyes.
Norman steps inside enough for Laura to shut the door behind him, then turns to her just as she turns back around. He holds up the bottle of wine. “I come bearing gifts,” he says.
“Ooh, beware,” she chides playfully, taking the bottle from him and carrying it into the kitchen. “Thank you very much.” Norman follows behind her, retrieving the mixtape, the weed and Blade Runner from his pockets. “Take off your coat,” she says, looking over her shoulder at him and then noticing the objects in his hands. “Oh, is there more?”
“Yes. I also made you this mixtape, and I brought my copy of Blade Runner, in case you felt like watching it at some point. And I brought a little weed. I don’t know how long you wanted to hang out tonight…” He smiles and shrugs, focusing on beaming charm her way. Laura catches it in the air like a blown kiss, puts down the wine and sidles his direction.
She puts her hands on the collar of his coat. “I was, honestly, hoping you could stay the whole weekend again,” she whispers sexily, “but if you can only hang out for a while, then I’m sure I’ll forgive you eventually.”
Norman laughs, and they kiss for what ends up becoming a long time, delivering them to the couches, where Norman finally pulls away, lying on his back with Laura straddling him. She giggles and leans up away from him, massaging the sides of his hips in her hands.
“I can stay all weekend,” he says.
Laura grins beautifully and bends down to kiss him. Norman notes that every kiss between the two of them seems to create a tiny baby universe of love with entrances in her eyes and his heart, and that the more he kisses her, the more he sees only love when he looks in either place.
“Shall I put on your mixtape?” she asks.
“Cool,” Norman nods, still out of breath from making out.
Laura climbs off him and goes to a closet by the door to her bedroom, from which she pulls a small boombox with a tape deck. After she puts the tape in and presses play, setting the boombox on top of her huge flatscreen TV, she sits down next to Norman on the couch and flips through the little booklet he made to go with the tape. “I haven’t gotten a mixtape in years,” she says. “I’m so excited.” She leans over to quickly kiss him on the lips, then returns to reading the booklet.
Tinnilly from the boombox comes the Morrissey song Let Me Kiss You.
“Oh, I love Morrissey,” Laura sighs. “You remind me of Morrissey, actually.”
“Yeah, I pretty much want to be Morrissey and masturbate,” Norman jokes, and Laura laughs.
“My friend knows him,” she says. “I’ve not met him, though. Well, she sort of does. She’s kissed him onstage twice.”
“But she’s just a fan, she’s not, like, close friends with him?”
“Exactly.”
“Right on.”
“Music for a Saturnine Love Affair,” Laura reads from the spine of the mixtape booklet. “I love that.” Laura reaches down under the couch and pulls out a silver laptop, opens it up and rubs her fingertip on the touchpad. “But now I need to look up saturnine.”
“I’ll be interested to see what the definition is,” Norman admits. “I came across the word in an alchemical/mystical context, where it referred to a certain type of angelic entity. So, that’s kind of all I know about it.”
“It doesn’t just mean from Saturn?” Laura jokes.
“It might, for all I know. In that case, though, I think it would be capitalized.”
“All these letters are capitalized,” Laura notes.
“Well, and also it would be capitalized there anyway, even if I didn’t write in all caps, because it’s among the words of a title, the title of the mixtape. But the way I was using the word, were it in a normal sentence, I don’t think it would be a proper noun, I should say. At least it wasn’t where I read it. But the word meaning from Saturn would be capitalized, presumably – would be a proper noun, that is – like Lithuanian or Basque.”
Laura laughs, apparently finding the same sort of humor in absurd linguistic semantics as Norman does. “Or maybe it means like Saturn, you know, like elephantine or leonine?”
“Oh, nice,” Norman agrees, chuckling. “So, big and blue and spherical?”
“Is Saturn blue,” Laura asks, “or is that Uranus?”
They both laugh, and Norman corrects himself, “You’re right, I believe it’s Myanus that’s blue.”
Shaking with laughter, Laura opens up her browser and googles the word saturnine.
“Here we go,” she says when the results instantly appear, “melancholic rock from the Netherlands. Is that what this tape is? All melancholic rock from the Netherlands?”
“Psch. I wish,” Norman jokes. He picks up her Sherlock Holmes pipe and stuffs some of the weed from his baggy into it.
“Oh here – dictionary dot com word of the day; saturnine. How mysteriously synchronous. Click.” She clicks the link and it brings up a definition of the word. “Born under the planet Saturn,” she says, reading. “So it does mean from Saturn, at least astrologically. But apparently it mostly means melancholy, or bittersweet in disposition. Hmm.” She eyes Norman with mock suspicion.
“You are so fucking gorgeous,” Norman remarks genuinely with awe, smitten by the sultry fire that seems to undulate just behind every glance she sends his way.
She leans in close to him, putting her hands on his thigh and hip, and says, “You’re just trying to change the subject. You made me a mixtape for a melancholic, bittersweet love affair.”
“Eh,” Norman shrugs. “Ish.”
Laura laughs. “I love how ish has become a word.” She slowly leans in closer to him. Her eyes lower from his eyes to his lips.
“Ish is totally a word,” he says just before her lips finally find his and grab them for a kiss. The kiss lasts several delicious seconds, and something about the combination of intimacy and comfort at its heart makes Norman feel like it is their first kiss truly as Lovers. He is all smiles for several minutes thereafter.
“Oh, I packed a bowl. Here.” He hands Laura the pipe, and for a while they pass it back and forth, taking hits and sharing silent, smiling eye contact.
“So how has your week been?” she asks him after they both have taken several hits and put the pipe down. She scoots her body closer to his on the couch. “How’s your new job?”
“It’s good,” Norman nods. “It’s actually kind of unheard-of-ly good in certain ways. My hours are completely open, and there isn’t really any supervision, and we’re in a windowless room where they keep the door closed, so … I could totally spend most of my time there writing, honestly, which I’ve just now realized. Fuck, that’s awesome.”
“That is awesome,” Laura enthusiastically agrees with a little laugh. “I’m jealous.”
“Yeah, and the guys I work with are totally cool,” Norman adds, adjusting himself on the couch to face Laura. “Much of the time we just sit around talking about politics or the Revolution or metaphysics, or whatever.”
A surprised look crosses Laura’s face. “That sounds perfect. I’m really glad it didn’t end up just being a total drag.”
“Don’t get me wrong; it’s kind of a drag. It’s very Fitter-Happier, if that makes any sense. Every day I’m inputting the fucking number of tons of PCB’s, which are this deadly pollutant that electrical boxes are full of, or made with, or something, or the dollar amounts that it took to pay off the Massachusetts government for going over their allowed amount of pollution, or whatever. Seriously, as if it isn’t appalling enough that there is a very high legal amount of polluting waste these plants can pour into the neighborhood rivers, when they go over that amount all they have to do is pay for it. Like, a few thousands of dollars. Fucking money. Fucking capitalism!” Norman shakes off the minor fury that was beginning to build inside him and smiles an apology. “I’m sorry,” he laughs, “I…”
“Don’t worry about it,” Laura says, putting her hand on his knee. “I know what you mean. At least it keeps you aware, right?”
“True,” Norman nods, “and that’s a good thing. That’s just what I told my friend Lou, actually. That it’s good to be constantly reminded of all that bullshit, since it’s so easy to ignore if you don’t live in the town with the green, bubbling river.”
Laura nods, her eyes seeming to drift off toward her thoughts.
“Anyway,” Norman says to signal a potential change of conversation, just as the Morrissey song is coming to an end.
The next song begins with a sample from some old anti-drug scare film, a man’s voice saying, “Good kids. No trouble to anyone. Just a harmless evening smoking pot.” Laura laughs, listening, foxily eyeing Norman. “They think there’s still a future,” the man continues with a scoff, which makes Norman laugh. “But in a year, half of them will be on the hard stuff. And in another year, three out of every ten will be dead.” The song comes in with a slow trip-hop beat touched by the occasional flourish of eerily descending horns.
Laura keeps eyeing Norman with that magical foxiness and slowly leans over to meet him in a kiss. With her face pressed against his, their eyes a mere inch or two apart, Laura opens her eyes in the kiss and meets Norman’s there (he always kisses with open eyes), and the two sets of eyes seem to connect in some etheric way that both of them feel; it seems to create a psychic bridge between them; Norman experiences a flood of emotional information that he instantly imagines to have originated from Laura’s mind, mostly joy and desire, (all this in the midst of a very sexy kiss), and he feels his own thoughts and feelings leak in through her eyes as well. He notes with a certain scientific intrigue the look on her face as it reacts to her reciprocal experience. And yet even this train of thought, he realizes upon thinking it, he seems to share to some degree with Laura through their circuit as he simultaneously experiences her unique form of intrigued awe. He puts his hands to the sides of her face and closes his eyes, presses deeper into the kiss and finds her tongue against his; with his eyes closed, he feels as if they are there together on the tongues in the darkness, a millimeter tall, waltzing. The shock of being full again in his body when Laura pulls briefly away from the kiss is startling.
Hovering above Norman on the couch where he is slouched, Laura seems to notice the moment of shock in his eyes. “Are you okay?” she asks with a little smile, her fingers frolicking between his shirt and his stomach.
Norman bites the inside of his lower lip and smiles, hypnotized by the shameless, fully-exposed love in her eyes. “I’m perfect,” he says.
She looks down behind herself and finds the pipe and a lighter, lifts them to her lips with a foxy look in her eyes and takes a hit. She extends her svelte arm down toward Norman with the bowl as she holds smoke in her lungs. Norman takes a hit as well, hands it back to her, and she puts it aside, then carefully removes the ashtrays and lighters from the back and arm of the leather couch.
She turns to him in a manner that makes Norman feel intuitively like the love scene has just begun (as if he hears a cliché music cue, though he does not). Behind the look in her eyes he can already see the two of them fucking.
“I’ve been thinking about you all week,” she says with just a touch of sexy shyness, looking down briefly, then back up into his eyes.
Norman leans forward slowly, carefully, into a kiss, but once their lips are all there is, they both rise quickly to passion and are groping and scratching blindly at each other’s clothes as they maneuver through awkward trial-and-error down to a supine position on the couch, Norman on top of Laura, their legs tangled, his left arm holding her body close, the other hand finding thigh, then hipbone, then the blissful border of Panty and Soft Flesh. She bites his lip and opens her eyes, gasps as he tenderly rakes down along the quickly-moistening front inner wall of her vagina with one long finger, then reenters with two. He holds her pelvis for a moment between thumb and fingers, his thumb amongst her pubic hair helping to push aside the panties. With such a grip he pulls himself closer to her, into a kiss, as she grips his arm against his waist between her knees.
As soon as Norman realizes that he is in this sex scene with Laura, the pages of the book he is going to write about these days seem to enfold him. It’s like he can see himself onscreen in the future, in people’s minds as a phantom of words, but this, fucking with grace and passion and a lack of pretense that other scenes he involves himself in cannot as easily be said to have. There is some kind of simple, primitive perfection to his love scenes, and he knows it. He knows that there will be future young women and men who will read words that will bring them to this moment with him, and all of these nametagless people seem to queue up into his spirit and into Laura’s as they shamelessly, literately milk pleasure, joy and love from each other’s bodies.
The colloquially literal version is that there, on Laura’s leather couch, he finger fucks her through a long few minutes of indistinguishable orgasms and then she ravenously climbs down and sucks his formidable cock (he comes once, she swallows and keeps sucking, he remains hard) until neither of them can take their separation any longer (a psychically shared split second of eye contact) and he turns her around and fucks her from behind, her clawing at the back of the couch, him relishing her ass in his hands, until he finally pulls out and comes on her ass with his hand inside her, upon which she comes again, bellowing unsilencable pleasure. The perhaps more literary version might say something like that Laura and Norman are mythic lovers, that within that love scene with her Norman is supernaturally himself; he is everything that could possibly be sexy about that tall, lean man with the barely-mismatched gray-green eyes that obviously really look and two long-fingered artist’s hand-widths worth of scepterish cock when every dark, damp bed of romance in his heart has bloomed into engorging blood flowers. Both versions would be true. Norman feels (at least moments later, in hindsight, he does) like while they are fucking, he and Laura exist in some kind of jointly-created baby universe where they are both incarnate love gods. Even the air comes a few times. In the moment of his final orgasm, Laura’s soft back receiving the mana from his heaving cock, somehow the power of his desire to be coming inside her mixed with his will to have pulled out mixed with the light on Laura’s skin and her hungry purring seems to form a key that unlocks the mystery of what a tip of an iceberg the three-and-a-half-dimensional version of this love scene really is, but just for that moment. The feeling fades as all do, but leaves an ornate I was here carved into the wall at the bottom of a stairwell in the back of Norman’s brain.
Afterward they stumble nakedly together into the bedroom and fall on top of the covers.
“You are amazing,” Laura testifies, grinning as she grinds her body against his side.
Norman lies still in a field of awe and beauty. “So are you,” he sighs. He lets his head sink between the two pillows. “It’s like we’re a myth about modern love,” he says with a joyous grin. “Mm, I’m in the inter-pillow cavern.” He stares at the ceiling of Laura’s bedroom for a while, his view book-ended by the dark off-white of Laura’s pillows, while Laura softly gropes the skin of his chest and stomach.
“That went beyond orgasm for me,” Laura grins.
Norman laughs happily. “What do you mean?”
Laura just shakes her head and then pulls him against her body and kisses him. She squeezes his ribs with her fingers and whispers, “I love you.”
“Mmm, I love you too,” he says. They kiss again.
When Norman pulls away and slowly pans his gaze down along his own naked body, arbitrarily imagining this moment in a film, he stops when the shot is centered on his crotch, where his hand is idly blocking his cock from view and on the base of his thumb there is a square of Sharpee containing the words, IT’S ALL ABOUT THE EDITING.
He laughs softly through his nose.
“What?” Laura asks.
“That is fucking brilliant,” Norman laughs, straining now to keep his hand in its relaxed repose guarding his cock from view. “I just looked down slowly from your face, along my body, and I was seeing it as a shot in the film version of this moment, right? And the shot went down along my body and ended on this, with my body all supine and my hand just barely covering my cock like it is, kind of idly…”
As Laura follows his instructions for the shot and looks down at his hand, she starts to laugh, seeing the words written on his thumb.
“…and then this is the end of that shot. And presumably it would cut then to a reverse shot from my cock-slash-hand’s perspective, of my face realizing the brilliant levels of meta involved in that moment. Because I thought about the film version of that moment and then realized that to accurately capture this moment then the actor who plays this role in forty years or whatever would have to play the role of thinking about himself in the future, how he would have to play a moment in which his character was thinking about that actual moment he was experiencing then as an actor … And then he would have to talk about it, like I’m doing now, and the moment would just sort of overwhelm itself with levels of meta. And just how marvelously all of that is brought about by the fact that I wrote this on my thumb yesterday while thinking about some completely other thing.”
“Why did you write that?”
“Well, I think I was thinking about this kind of thing – the process of artistic creation being the choice of what to include and what to leave out, like Michelangelo saying that the sculptures were waiting inside the stone to have the excess removed. How to turn a mistake or a fluke, or randomness, into something brilliant and meaningful. It’s all about the editing. I was sort of thinking about it in terms of my narrative-based idiom of spirituality.”
“You are a supernatural being,” Laura declares. “I’ve never met anyone like you before. Do you know how amazing you are?”
Norman, never having known how to respond appropriately to such compliments, simply kisses her in reply. “I need a glass of water,” he says as he gets up on one arm and looks around, having forgotten where they were and what time it was, that there was even a world around them. “Do you need anything, baby?”
“Mmm,” Laura purrs, “I love it when you call me baby,” and she inches her lips toward his until they are just barely touching.
Norman presses his mouth against hers and takes her head in his hands, suddenly overwhelmed again by love. He can actually feel little sparkles of love floating between their faces. As the kiss climaxes Norman uses all of his imaginary willpower to make the love sparkles that he can feel between them gather together into a tiny singularity and flash etheric light into the real world. He closes his eyes as the final component of the spell and there is, indeed, it seems to him, a tiny flash just beyond his eyelids.
Laura pulls away from the kiss with a gasp, her eyes wide, and she asks, smiling, “Did you see that?”
“See what?” Norman asks, smiling.
“There was, like, a little flash of light. I don’t know if it was just in my mind, or what, but I could have sworn I saw a flash of light brought about by our kiss.”
“That’s gorgeous,” Norman says, his heart overflowing with energy as he keeps his knowledge that the light was an actual willful event tucked away inside himself, lest the spirits of lameness in the world sense the event’s weak hold on trueness and somehow smother it, forcing it somehow to never have been true in the first place. “I think I saw it, too,” he has to add.
Laura’s eyes are pure adoration. Her smile is inextinguishable. She kisses him again quickly, then stands and walks nakedly out into the main room, calling behind herself, “Do you want something to drink? A glass of water, you said?”
“Mm,” Norman replies gutturally, unsure whether or not he does want something to drink. He has a tendency to keep himself hungry and dehydrated, as the taste of food or succor of drink tends to always make him feel heavily within his own body, when he prefers a certain levity of spirit. “I don’t think so, actually,” he finally calls after her.
“You don’t want a glass of water?”
“No, I’ve rethought that. I tend to prefer to keep myself hungry and dehydrated to a certain extent, honestly, as it allows me to retain a certain levity of spirit, a looseness from the ties to my body, almost, if that makes any sense.”
“Alright,” Laura laughs from the kitchen. “Man, it is cold in here.”
“Yeah,” Norman agrees, hopping out of bed to put his clothes back on. “Here’s to the guy who invented clothes.” He pulls his pants on and is reaching for a shirt when Laura returns holding a tall glass of Diet Coke, which she places on her dresser.
“I think it was definitely a woman who invented clothes. And I love how you pronounced the th diphthong in clothes.” She pronounces the full diphthong herself when she says it the second time. She pulls on a brown skirt and a small, white chenille sweater.
Norman laughs. “I love pronouncing the th in clothes,” he says. “I think it’s hilarious to do so. I don’t know why.”
“It is funny,” Laura agrees. “Either that or I’m just really stoned.”
“I think when you smoke regularly, there must come a point where you can’t just chalk things up to being stoned anymore. I retain all kinds of shit that came to me when I was stoned and made perfect sense and were brilliant – often those things still are later, if I can just remember to write them down.”
Laura laughs. “I’m still laughing about clothes.”
“It’s a hell of a one-syllable word, isn’t it?” Norman laughs. “It really takes some dexterity of the tongue to accurately utter.” He watches Laura laugh for a moment, himself grinning shamelessly. “Within the standard temporal understanding of Earth History, I wonder how long there has been laughter. And if laughter preceded the awareness of humor. I mean, I’m sure it did. Precede its own understanding, that is. Do all things, I wonder? Must things exist before they can be understood, or do they, perhaps, come about only through our truly understanding them? That seems almost like a quantum physics version of wisdom, or something. Hmm.”
“Meaning is given,” Laura says cryptically with a shrug, then holds up a camera at arm’s length in front of them and kisses him on the cheek as she presses the button. The flash occurs just as Norman is realizing that his picture is being taken.
He laughs, “I think you’ve just immortalized me with a ridiculous look on my face.” Laura laughs and kisses him again, and for this kiss he turns in to meet her lips. She holds her arm out and snaps another picture, then bites his lip softly as she comes out of the kiss and reaches down to pick up a pair of panties from the floor.
“There are an infinite number of pictures taken anyway,” Laura remarks as she pulls her underwear on under her skirt. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“You know, you’re right,” Norman notes, struck by the fact. “There is so much documentation of this period of history; it’s insane.”
“It really is.”
“I wonder how many pictures are taken in a day on planet Earth.” Norman stares into space, trying to Fermi-estimate in his head. In the corner of his mind’s eye he creates a gradient-edged screen where every time a picture is taken, he sees it happen. It is a constant, dizzying blur of snapshots of people’s faces with cameras held up to them. After a moment, he releases the thought and the image vanishes from his mind’s eye as Laura glides her fingertips across his bare chest, walking past him out of the bedroom with her Diet Coke held gracefully in her other hand.
She sits down on one of the leather couches and picks her laptop up off the floor, puts it on her lap. She fingers the touchpad to wake the machine. “Come and join me,” she beckons. Norman sits and cuddles his knees up to her knees, at which her smile glows extra brightly for a moment.
“What are you doing on your computer?” he asks.
“I was going to put these pictures on my computer and then fuck with them in Photoshop for a minute,” she says with a smile, and takes a surprise picture of him from point blank range.
“Aw,” he protests, reaching out for the camera, “do you mind if I take a picture or two for you?”
“Not at all.”
She hands the tiny silver camera off to him and he holds it out at arm’s length to the side and leans in for a kiss. The kiss lasts several long seconds, going through four distinct stages (soft caressing of her bottom lip between his; full-mouthed/heavy pressure; lips apart, save one corner where they are stuck together, tongue to tongue; a series of hesitant-to-leave-the-kiss pecks), and through the course of it Norman is able to take five pictures. He puts the camera back in her hand out of view below as they kiss again after looking at the pictures together on the camera’s display.
“What are you thinking about?” Laura asks softly, looking into his glass eye.
“You want me to rant more?” Norman asks with a smile. “I feel like I’ve been rambling about randomness all evening.”
“I love the things you say,” Laura says with an irrepressible smile, and leans in close to kiss him. “I love the things you think.” She kisses him again, her lips remaining close to his when she speaks. He sees her in extreme close-up, out of focus, her two eyes merged into one fuzzy one, staring into his. “I think you’re a genius.”
“Well,” Norman begins, “I was actually thinking about my book, the book I’m writing in my head. The second novel. I mean, not including the romance novels. Actually, I was sort of thinking about the Universe as a whole, in terms of the book. Like – because, the book is about this Norman character, right, but it’s also about the World now, you know, and the World-at-large, the purpose of existence and the nature of choice and experience. Right? Everything.” He laughs. “Of course. But anyway, I was thinking about the way the World is awash with lameness and bullshit and violence and vengeance. And, like, everyone I know seems to be a reasonable, compassionate human being, but it’s like simple proximity is the engine of love. Like, you’re naturally going to care more about the people you see every day, and so the people on the other side of the world or whatever … no – that’s not really what I was thinking about; that’s me digressing elsewhere. What I was really thinking about was the nature of evil – of lameness, of bullshit. You know what I mean? Because clearly, it seems to me, as a rational being, rationality is the guiding force of my decisions. Like, we are smart animals, we can make righteous decisions, we can see the truth of the World around us, and yet still some people seem to get caught in the violence cycle, or the bullshit fake world of media, or just generally sell their souls and stumble blindly and numbly through life. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“So where does that come from? I use all my willpower to remain keenly aware and choice-making, but I can still feel the pull toward inertness, toward lameness – I understand where the desire to fall comfortably into that comes from. But what is that drive? That gravity pulling toward lameness? It fights the force of awesomeness – of will and beauty, of true righteous volition. And I was thinking that maybe it has something to do with the Heisenburglar, because it has to do with fear at its heart, or perhaps a lack of fearlessness if a distinction can be made, and the Heisenburglar is the god of fear insomuch as he is uncertainty, he is the void, the inertness of awarenesslessness.”
Laura smiles, her attention pulled intermittently from his real eye to his glass one.
“I mean, it seems like the World is kept constantly just at the edge of true freedom, true awakening into awareness, by some nefarious force invading it. It’s almost like we’re here as agents of awesomeness and beauty, and there are also enemy agents of lameness and chaos and fear. It’s like some force is trying to keep us docile and working on whatever this large-scale goal of humanity might be – does anyone really know? Do we have a goal? No. World peace? Yeah, right. I mean all this stuff we’re building, and the macro-scale computer the Earth is beginning to look like from above. It’s like there’s some force, some Illuminati-level Zeitgeist force trying to keep us numb and unquestioning and working these bullshit jobs toward whatever shadowy ends. When in fact we could all wake up and realize that we’re free, and that happiness and peace can be as simple as a moment’s choice (the constant-moment’s choice), and that all lack is illusion. We only have. We do not not have. It’s an illusion. The idea that there isn’t anything. It’s absurd. That’s the Heisenburglar’s lies.”
Laura’s head shaking and smiling grow in intensity until she leans in and kisses Norman passionately for several long seconds, then sits back and plugs her digital camera into her laptop.
“I am so lucky,” Laura laughs as she idly manipulates the touch pad on her laptop, managing the downloading of the pictures they have just taken. She looks up into his eye. “I’m so lucky I found you. Or you found me, I guess. Or your winged kiss found me.” She beams charmed; it glows from her skin.
“I don’t believe in luck,” Norman says with a contented half-smile. He feels his body growing more comfortable around her, and his spirit spilling out like invisible dry ice smoke from his body because of it. “Everything’s connected, and causality is just a temporal term.”
“Pardon?” she asks, cocking her head to the side and squinting.
“Well, what is causality?” Norman asks rhetorically. “It’s simply our word for one thing causing another thing, which is to say, in a four-dimensional sense, simply that those things are connected; those events are connected somehow to each other through the changing of states. But, seen from above, time is just a shape of change, and whether you look at it from one direction, moving this direction through time, or the other direction, or from above, or whatever, the ‘causality’ changes. What we originally saw as the result becomes the cause, and physics work backward, it would seem. But really, it’s all just pathways through a matrix of information, because really there are, theoretically, all those possible results of any moment, and so all these possible moments are also attached to the moments we experience going out in different directions in yet more dimensions, and what we experience as the timeline of events is just, like, where we’ve chosen to cast our perceptive eye for whatever reason. But, of course, all of us are struggling against each other with the perceived state of the universe, which is why, I think, so many people get so upset when they are confronted with vastly different views of the world from their own.”
“Hmm,” Laura nods. She looks back and forth between the screen on her lap and Norman’s mouth and eye as he speaks. “So you think it was meant to be, is that what you’re saying? That things are predestined to a certain extent?”
“Not predestined, per se, no, not at all,” Norman replies energetically. “Just that all possible moments can be said to exist at least as much as the past can be. All there ever is proof of, of course, is the moment. The now and here. The me and you. This paragraph of this scene, with the recent past and perhaps the near future (or at least the possible ones, and our goals) in the periphery of our perception.”
Laura’s eyes are now focused on the screen of her laptop, and Norman begins to feel self-conscious about how long he has been rambling. He scoots up closer to her so he can see the screen, where she has already opened the pictures they took in Photoshop. He watches as she manipulates the hue and color saturation of one of the images he took of the two of them kissing. She smoothly adjusts the hue of the image using a tool on a sidebar consisting of a point that she moves around a color field. The image, as she moves the dot around, fades softly from color to color psychedelically. It strikes him how masterfully we have designed our user interfaces for even such complex tasks, and he begins to wonder what it will be like when the machine and the experience of human existence are utterly entwined, when we have an adjustable brain interface upon which we can store any number of various input layers, and within the constraints of an enormously powerful, super-fast computer as opposed to a biological brain, the possibilities logarithmically multiply.
“It will be unbelievable when computer interfaces like this are seamlessly interwoven with living as a human. Like, when the neural connection is made – when the monitor becomes your vision and the speakers your mind’s inner ear. I’m just imagining the possibilities.”
Laura listens to him, leaning in close and smiling, and kisses his neck when he is finished. “You’re beautiful,” she says.
“Say, do you want to see something awesome?” Norman asks, and reaches for the laptop. Laura transfers it to his lap and slouches down next to him, with her face against his arm. “There’s this program that Lou showed me called Celestia. We can download it for free.”
“Do it.”
“Cool.” He puts the Ethernet cord that was on the floor into the laptop and connects the computer to the Internet. He googles Celestia and finds it instantly; he is downloading it within seconds. “It is insane how easily we can retrieve information,” he remarks. “I mean, we’re just sitting here in your warm apartment with this little metal book with this little plastic string attached to it, and somehow all this information is available to us. It’s fucking mind-blowing. It’s magic, really, is what it is.”
Laura laughs. “It is magic. It’s incredible.”
“It’ll take a while to download and install this.”
Laura smiles at him, her torso turned in his direction, her hands folded casually on her lap. Her face is still, but he can see behind it that in her mind they are already kissing. He moves his face across the air to hers slowly, trying to let his movements follow the current of how they ought to happen in her mind. His lips meet hers slowly, like a docking spaceship, and then he imagines the docking clamps taking hold as he presses his lips around hers, and when her tongue lightly touches the inside of his bottom lip his imagination makes it some kind of fueling system trying to fix onto the ship, and this makes him laugh.
“What?” Laura asks, laughing along with his laughter, coming softly out of the kiss but still holding his face close to hers.
“Nothing,” he replies. “I was just imagining my lips and your lips as a spaceship docking at a space station, and then when I felt your tongue I imagined it was, like, the fueling system or something coming in, and it made me laugh.”
“You’re the greatest,” Laura says after she has finished laughing.
Norman sits back and his gaze falls upon a framed painting on the wall above and to the right of Laura’s huge flatscreen television. The painting is of an androgynously faced woman wearing a propeller beanie with curly red hair pillowing out from beneath it. She peers to the side at the viewer with kind eyes and a long nose held in profile. She wears a black suit jacket, white shirt and red tie; a crow sits on her shoulder and the hand of that arm is held up gesturally in front of the face, daintily holding a cigarette.
“Of whom is that a painting?” Norman asks, smiling at the absurdity of his own grammar.
Laura laughs a little and says, “That’s Collette. She was a feminist of some note, or so I’m led to understand. I bought her at a sidewalk art sale a few years ago.”
“She’s fabulous,” Norman remarks.
“Thank you. I like her.” She lazily looks across Norman at the painting with the fading remnants of a smile.
Her eyes flit to his and her smile resurges. Through their eyes he feels something in her spirit lock onto something in his, and a rush of mysterious information starts flowing through that conduit of eye contact. He dips barely the tip of his blossoming love for her into the current between their eyes and she reacts by releasing the joy behind her expression and letting all of her reciprocal love flood out into her gaze.
“You’re so elegantly beautiful,” Norman comments.
“So are you,” Laura replies. “I can’t believe this is happening. You’ve created such a beautiful situation that I can no longer retain my suspension of disbelief.” They both laugh. “Sorry, Norman.” She leans in and kisses him, gasping against his lips, “You’re just too good to be true.”
“Yeah,” Norman says into her kisses, thinking back to the last time he was in this position and the vision he had of the Man when he blacked out, “except when I’m blacking out on you.”
Laura pulls away from the kiss and looks apologetically into Norman’s real eye. She is silent for a moment then begins shaking her head and says, “Oh, no, Norman, that was no big deal. I hope I never made it seem like that was a big deal. It happens.”
“Well, it happens to me. It doesn’t happen to everybody.”
“Do you know what causes it? Do you take medication or anything for it?”
Norman can’t help but laugh softly through his nose. “No,” he says. “I’m not epileptic or anything; I just have these weird blackout/vision moments from time to time. Time to time is even hyperbole. It’s happened, what – four times? Five? Five that I can recall, including last weekend.”
Laura’s expression of compassion and concern becomes somewhat more relaxed, but she squints at Norman and asks, “You have visions?”
Norman slowly nods, biting the inside of his mouth. “The first … it’s weird. You really want to hear about this?”
She nods, her eyes fixed on him, stiffly smiling.
Norman raises one eyebrow and hesitantly begins, “Okay, well the first time I remember it happening this way – like, I’ve blacked out all throughout my life from time to time because I have low blood pressure and I’ll just stand sometimes and brown out – but I remember it happening this way, where it just happens out of nowhere or in a particularly potent moment of some sort, for the first time when I was hanging out with Lou one time. I was … we were doing some of our existential experimentation, if that makes any sense.”
Laura frowns, nodding, listening.
“And I – can I bum a cigarette?” Laura quickly grabs her pack beside them and lights one for him, hands it to him, then lights one for herself. “Thanks. I was – well, we were trying to affect the physical universe by pure thought, which we had tried many times before, telekinesis, you know. But this time I was trying to move something across the room with my mind, a pencil or something, and I had something else on my mind as well and was getting really frustrated. So I looked over – I gave up, I looked over, out through Lou’s apartment’s sliding glass patio door at this bird that was flying past.
“I don’t know quite what happened. All of a sudden I was surrounded by a spinning tunnel with glowing symbols etched into the walls and it was all spinning around me, throbbing with information that I could somehow understand but not understand. I don’t know how to explain it. And then slowly my awareness faded back in and I realized that I was slumped back, twitching, like last weekend with you, my eyes rolled back. My vision was all black and fuzzy, but slowly came back and my control over my body slowly filled back in starting at the base of my back and spreading down my limbs and to my face. And when I came to, there was Lou standing over me, his mouth agape, and the glass patio door was a shattered spider web, but apparently nothing had happened to it that he could see. Just – I fell; it shattered. There was no point of impact – the whole thing just shattered homogenously as it were, and it stayed up, it stayed in the door, it was just shattered.” Norman is back there in his mind, seeing the door, his heart filled again by the wonder, the fear, the mystery of what happened that day.
“And then it’s happened a few times since, and every time it does, I have a vision of some different kind. The last time, before last weekend, I saw a sky full of crows. So, things like that. I don’t know.”
“Interesting,” Laura says. “Have you thought about getting it checked out by a doctor or something?”
“I’m fine,” Norman assures her. “The heavens are ready for us. Check this out.”
Norman opens up Celestia, which has just finished downloading and installing. The program’s display brings up an image of the Sun in space, then turns and flies across the astronomical unit to Earth, centering itself there.
“So, this is Celestia. Have you seen Google Earth?”
“Oh yeah – is that the thing where you can zoom in anywhere on Earth and it’s pieced together from satellite maps?”
“Yeah, yeah. This basically takes that and extrapolates it to the entire universe. I exaggerate, perhaps, but check it out – you can go to other stars…” He types Betelgeuse and the perspective of the screen zooms through space away from the Earth, the fixed heavens begin to shift parallaxically (a word Norman invents in his mind while he watches it happen, and the word makes him snicker to himself a little as he imagines it), and then the big red sphere of Betelgeuse fills the screen. Norman spins the camera with the touchpad, keeping the star in the center, displaying the field of stars that surrounds it. “This is what the heavens would look like from Betelgeuse. A completely different starfield, but the same stars. I don’t know. This shit blows my mind.”
Laura leans forward, staring at the screen, her face intensely focused. “This is amazing. What’s the nearest star to Earth?”
“Probably Alpha Centauri, or Proxima Centauri, its companion.” He types in Alpha Centauri and the display again swirls up the stars like a snow globe and zips toward the Centauri system, where just before the screen is filled by the Alpha star, its companion, Proxima, can be seen to separate out from the single point of light and flash out past the camera. “That was Proxima that just flew past. Because it’s a binary system.”
“So where is our sun in the sky, here?”
“Hmm, I’m not sure. I don’t know if it’s visible.” He spins the camera around Alpha Centauri anyway, passing the cursor over various stars to display their names. “It might not be visible from here. Our sun isn’t a particularly bright star, after all. Here, let me show you some of the planets. That’s what blows my mind most of all.”
Norman takes Laura to the Earth’s moon, which he spins around to show her the dark side that is never visible from Earth. He shows her Mars by centering on its moon Phobos and showing her what marsrise would look like from that potato-shaped perspective. He does a quick scan through the various Jovian moons that he thinks are particularly beautiful – Europa, Io, Ganymede. Lastly he takes her to Saturn’s moon Titan, where the camera lands on a mesmerizing display of Saturn with its gorgeous rings hanging in the sky behind. Laura stops him, pulling his hand away from the touchpad.
“Stop here for a moment,” she says, gazing with awe at the stunning display on the screen. “This is beautiful. Just let it stay here for a minute.”
“Cool,” Norman agrees. “And all of this – all the locations of the planets and everything – is real time; it’s how they are right now. And you can zoom it ahead to any point in the future or back into the past, too. When were you born?”
“Seven-twenty A.M. on November twenty-second, nineteen seventy-six.”
“The cusp, eh?” He inputs the information into the program’s time and date field, then hits Enter and the background behind Titan switches only slightly; the light changes to the other side of all the spheres. Saturn, in the distance, jumps a couple of degrees downward.
“That is so gorgeous. That’s what Saturn looked like from Titan at the moment I was born?”
“That’s right.”
They both gaze in silence at the majesty of Saturn as the seconds tick by in the date/time field. Norman puts his arm around her shoulders and, with what feels like luscious gluttony, takes in the softness of the skin of her arm against the palm of his hand.
“I’m now one minute old,” Laura says. She turns to meet his eye, looks at it specifically. “How did you lose your eye, Norman?”
He is silent for a moment, looking into her eyes, trying to see her spirit through them. “Accident,” he finally says.
She nods, then smiles.
“I am so in love with you,” he says.
“I’m in love with you, too. I don’t know how it happened. It feels like it’s always been true.” She lays her head on his shoulder and lets her body rest against his. “I’ve never felt so sure. I’m completely overwhelmed.” She gazes at Saturn. “I think we should move there. To Titan.”
“Might be a little cold for my tastes, although sweaters do suit me. But once we have robot bodies, I will totally move to Titan with you for a few hundred years or whatever, if you still want to. Or maybe just for a month. We can summer on Saturn.”
Laura laughs. “Robot bodies?”
“Yeah, girl,” Norman confidently replies with a chuckle. “The Machine Enlightenment. Seriously. You realize we’re at a point technologically where we could be among the oldest immortal post-humans? By which I mean that in our lifetimes it will likely, or possibly at least, become, well, possible … to effectively immortalize one’s awareness in a massively more powerful machine brain/body. So in a hundred years, for all we know, we could be nanocloud robot body versions of ourselves making love on Titan and waking up to saturnrise.”
“Is that true?” she asks.
“Well, potentially,” he replies. “I mean, let me put it this way – it certainly seems likely, in my optimistic opinion, considering everything. At this point it’s all about living long enough to live forever. Speaking of which…” He retrieves a cigarette from the pack beside Laura.
Laura gets up suddenly from the couch and prances over to the bookshelves near the door, where she picks up something from behind a book. She very slowly dances back to the couch with her hands behind her back and a cute, shy look on her face.
“What have you got?” Norman asks, standing as she approaches him.
“I had these made on a whim last Sunday, after you left, and I almost called you that day to give them to you but then I thought again, that maybe I was being a bit hasty, so I just held onto them. But now I know that I really want to give them to you. So … here.” Laura hands Norman a black velvet box that looks uncannily like the box that the ohm eye that Lee gave him came in. He opens the box slowly, revealing a glistening new set of keys attached to a heavy, sterling silver lower-case n. He hooks his index finger into the n, notes that it feels uncannily familiar to do so, and looks up at Laura, overwhelmed.
“I want you to bring over your computer, if you want to,” she says. “I want you to feel free to come and go as you please. But I love the idea of you working on your writing or your music or anything like that over here, if you want to.” She smiles shyly.
Norman kisses Laura with the keys jingling on his finger, the paintings on the walls stoically watching them, a bus on the street outside just pulling up to the Monument Square light and a gentle breeze just beginning to race past the window, and he uses his heart to bring them all together like a conductor with a spiritual baton and focuses their collective momentary magic on injecting the kiss with all the shimmering love in his heart.

Axerxes, look, Wazzz says, awakening his hypersquidly companion from a sound sleep. It’s them! They’re the Lovers!
What? Where are we? Axerxes lurches awake, shooting nervous glances around at the pearly clouds of titan fossil that rush past all around them (a weird weather).
We’re on watch, ass, Wazzz snaps, relishing the chance to catch Axerxes in a moment of social vulnerability. Norman and Laura just partially merged a couple of times, and then the next thing I know there’s an FES alert. Norman and Laura are the prophesied Lovers! It’s happening just like he said it would. Still think he’s not going to evolve or whatever?
You don’t even know what you’re talking about, Axerxes snorts, grabbing a frog from the bin. ’Evolve or whatever.’ He mocks the way Wazzz said it. He may be able to jump high, but he can’t fly and he’s got no one to hold him up. Two people are no taller than one. Fully-Emergent Superlove, my eye. He would need to reignite the whole species, and they the whole solar system. That’s what you don’t get. It’s not just him. It’s the whole thing. It’s every single one of those creatures you see in the periphery while you’re watching him – the ones walking past and handing him things and taking his money and all the ones walking past those people and on and on. It’s not Norman Newman you need to be afraid of; it’s Humanity.
What about the FES alert, then? Wazzz asks with mild frustration.
The sensor must be broken. It’s stupid there’s even a sensor for that.
Wazzz thinks, frowning. But there’s obviously something about him, or we wouldn’t be here watching him, right? We wouldn’t have been given these sensors. I mean, he’s got to be some kind of instigator or catalyst or something. I mean, it’s prophesied. And look, there it is happening just that way. The way it’s supposed to. Anyway, I’m not afraid. I am literally not afraid at all. Wazzz holds a posture of confidence.
Axerxes reaches up and slaps Wazzz across the eye with one long tentacle.
Wazzz flinches and shakes himself, looks questioningly into Axerxes’ eye. What was that for?
That was for making God laugh by talking about prophecy, Axerxes replies matter-of-factly. He looks over the edge of their blind at Norman driving to work, already the next morning.

Chapter 10: The Revolution

2007-09-19T13:28:00.000-04:00

10

In his peripheral vision to the left, Norman can see Wayne playing air drums along to the music in his headphones. He looks over at Wayne for a few moments, taking a break from the data and leaning back in his chair. Wayne has his eyes closed and his whole body bounces in his office chair as he plays his invisible drum kit. The performance is so unashamed and genuine that Norman can’t help but smile.
the Revolution

Wayne opens his eyes and notices Norman watching him. Wayne grins sheepishly but keeps on drumming, and begins to sing along, “’and isolation is the oxygen mask you’re making children breathe in to survive … I’m not a slave to a god that doesn’t exist! I’m not a slave to a world that doesn’t give a shit! And when we were good, you just closed your eyes…’” He hums the next line and then starts chanting, grinning, “Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!” He slips his headphones down around his neck, revealing the heavy pulse of the music playing through them, and says, “What’s up, bub?”
“Hey man,” Norman laughs. “I love that song. I haven’t heard that song in a grip.”
“Fuck yeah, dude. Marilyn Manson.”
“Word.”
Wayne laughs. “What’s a grip?”
Norman laughs in response. “A while. Long or short, either way. In this instance, long. Say, man, why do they call you Revolution?”
Wayne chuckles under his breath and shouts over his shoulder, “Hey Harvey, why do they call me Revolution?”
“Because you’re the fucking Revolution incarnate, dude,” Harvey shouts over the divider, then scoots his chair around the edge to join Norman and Wayne. He looks at Norman, grinning his comedian’s grin, and says, “Who the fuck’s asking?”
“I just find it really interesting, this sort of Zeitgeist idea of the Revolution that we all understand, and we use the same words and we’re probably talking about the same kind of thing…”
“Bringing down the Man,” Wayne says, nodding.
“Creating a sustainable society,” Harvey adds, shrugging, “yeah.”
“Yeah. Post-capitalism, I call it,” Norman says, “or post-humanism. The way I see it, all this shit that’s going on right now, all this awful vengeance and war and terror and misinformation and everything, is just basically the last throes of the Old Guard, of those human assholes who are just working by the old human hierarchies of leadership and oppression-based economies. We’ve got the technology and the communication abilities now, with the Internet and everything, to totally take care of everyone on Earth, to take care of everyone, but there’s no way that would happen in the current context, because if there weren’t fucking third world Africa and shit, the Big Eight or whatever would have no one to feel better than.
“So post-humanism is my idea of a philosophy that accepts the responsibility of freewill, of actually being a being of volition, of choice, that can supersede its biological instincts and be righteous by practicing true reason. You know what I mean?”
“Right on,” Harvey nods. “Have you heard of Bill Hicks?”
“Bill Hicks? No. You mentioned him once before, my first day.”
Wayne laughs. Harvey pats Norman on the shoulder and says, “Oh, man, Bill Hicks is the shit. He talks all about this kind of stuff – about enlightenment and post-humanism and politics and everything. He’s a comic. He’s dead now.”
“Bill Hicks is great,” Walt agrees from across the divider.
“Yeah, man,” Wayne agrees. “Bill Hicks is fucking brilliant, man. He talks all about this kind of shit, and he’s a comedian, but it’s hilarious because all he’s really doing is raging out about the bullshit illusions of America and all that shit, and fuckin’ talking about shrooming out and experiencing spiritual bliss and all this shit, and it’s hilarious because it’s all fuckin’ true, you know? And he just – he’s awesome.”
“Word.”
“Yeah, I’ve got a CD of his,” Harvey says, turning to his computer and looking through his Windows Media Player songlist. “I should burn it for you. Wayne, next time you get some free CD-R’s from the office supply room, grab me a few.”
“Yount, amigo,” Wayne chuckles.
“It’s awesome, because this is all the kind of shit the book I’m working on is about,” Norman says, hoping to start a conversation about the book, realizing now that it will have to include scenes from this data entry room, as many synchronicities as seem to have accrued here.
“Oh yeah, you’re writing a novel, right?” Elliot asks.
“Yeah, man,” Norman says, turning to Elliot. “It’s my second…”
The door to the hallway opens and everyone in the room turns to look, many deftly minimizing games of Solitaire and removing headphones. Two young men – one skinny and bespectacled, the other tall and gangly with something reminiscent of a flat top hairdo – enter the room cautiously, looking around with shy smiles, followed by Kendra who sings, “Hello, gentlemen!”
“Hey, Kendra,” Harvey replies, scooting his chair back over to his station.
“Everybody, this is Colin,” she says, gesturing to Glasses, “and this is Marcus,” gesturing to Flat Top. “I believe that makes ten of you, officially. Where do you guys think they could sit? Are there any open computers left?”
“Oh yeah,” Timothy says, scooting over to one of the empty stations on Wayne and Norman’s side of the room, “just let me clear these off. We’ve been using this one as sort of a reference library.” He picks up America: the Book, a book on Native American medicine cards and a stack of science and culture magazines, moves them over to the little table with the phone at the far corner of the room.
Colin and Marcus are introduced with handshakes all around. Norman notes that Colin, who looks early-twenties but is probably more like late-twenties, looks him in the eye when he is introduced and instantly seems to take note of the false eye, whereas Marcus, who must be no older than twenty, looks modestly down into space when he shakes Norman’s hand. Kendra shows them which icon to open on their computers and briefly explains the data entry process in an expedited manner that seems to imply that she has already explained much of it. After a few minutes, she says, “Okay?” and heads for the door. She clings to it while she adds, “If you have any questions, you can ask these guys or give me a call, okay? Okay. Or shoot me an email, or whatever works best for you. Okay, you guys, thanks! Keep up the good work! I’ll see you later.” She is laughing at some face Harvey is making that Norman can’t see as she leaves the room and shuts the door behind her.
“Well,” Elliot says, “welcome to the data entry room.”
“Thanks,” says Colin.
“How long have you guys been working here?” Marcus asks the group collectively.
Harvey, Elliot and Timothy all look at each other, waiting for one of the others to reply, then Harvey says, “April. I’ve been here since April. And it was only supposed to go through June back then.”
“Ha!” Norman laughs. “Awesome. They told me it would only go through the end of September.”
“Yeah, that’s unlikely,” Timothy says with a little laugh. “We’ve got how many documents left to go through, just for Pittsfield?”
“About twenty-five thousand,” Elliot says.
“Yeah, I bet we’ll be here through Christmas at least,” Wayne says. “I certainly hope we are, that is. Make your own hours? No supervision? It doesn’t get any better than this shit.”
Colin laughs.
“Make your own hours?” Marcus asks with interest. “What do you mean?”
“We can come in and do this shit whenever we want,” Wayne says, turning around in his chair to face Marcus and Colin. “We can make our own hours. They gave you guys keys, right?”
“Not keys,” Marcus says, pulling out his keychain, “just this little magnetic thing.”
“Right. That’s a key. It lets you in the building. It’s a key.”
“I suppose it is. It functions like a key,” Marcus muses, rubbing the little gray plastic wand attached to his keychain.
“That’s what makes a thing a key,” Wayne laughs.
“Do I take it we don’t get frequent visits from Kendra, then?” Colin asks.
“Oh not at all,” Harvey says. “She’s come in here twice in the past month, and it was to bring Norman by two weeks ago, and then to bring you two by.”
“Yeah, we hardly ever see her,” Timothy agrees. “She just calls sometimes, or emails us more often. Just checking in.” He snickers, “It’s pretty great.”
“So we just come in and enter the information from these documents into this database, and that’s pretty much it?” Colin asks.
“Pretty much,” Elliot says.
“Yeah,” says Harvey. “Every few weeks we’ll have a group download with Kendra to tell her what we’re seeing on the invoices. But other than that it’s just hanging out in here and talking about philosophy and metaphysics and shit, right Norman?”
Norman smiles to himself. “So it would seem,” he says. “In fact, right before you guys arrived we were in the middle of such a conversation.”
“Oh yeah,” Harvey remembers, “what were we talking about? You were talking about Wayne and asking why I call him the Revolution.”
“And then we were talking about how all that, all this, ties into the book I’m writing.”
“You’re writing a book?” Marcus asks.
“What kind of book?” Colin asks.
Norman frowns and purses his lips, trying to think how to describe it. “It’s a novel,” he says, unsure if even that is accurate. “Sort of. It’s a fictionalization of a memoir of my life right now, interspersed with the story of my past few years, through which I’ve had a series of enlightenment experiences slash epiphanies, and also I think it might end up sort of functioning as a philosophical treatise on certain subtle physics of spirituality, as it were, of the interface of existence and the nature of awareness and being and choice.”
“Bo-ring,” Elliot jokes. Timothy laughs softly. Norman bites his lip, instantly feeling the dizziness of insecurity and having to momentarily reach inside and retrieve his confidence. “Sounds pretty heady,” Elliot adds after a moment.
“I suppose it will be,” Norman admits. “But at the same time it’s also going to be a very real story of a man living in today’s world – an intelligent man who pays attention and thinks rationally above all and actually has compassion and progress as personal goals for both himself in the micro or personal sense and for humanity in general in the macro sense. And it will be a love story, the story of my new romance with this lovely woman named Laura, I hope, and the story of my love of self, of the innate love of self that I think is lacking in most people these days, and, on a certain level, love for that great Reader entity which, in terms of the metaphor of the book, could be anybody in the future who could ever possibly read the book. But in abstract terms in this world, where the story isn’t just words in a book but is in fact a real world where we are all interacting and living our lives, what could the Reader be in this real context? And I realize that it’s still the same thing – nebulous, potential other people, it’s everyone in the future I work for, and it’s myself, and it’s nothing, and that everything sort of falls into a charybdis of meta, et cetera, et cetera.” Norman sits quietly for a moment, thinking about anything else that might be pertinent to explain to sufficiently describe the book. “I haven’t actually started writing it yet, per se,” he admits, “but I’ve been writing it in my head (since it is a memoir, ish), with my deeds and thoughts, for some time now. Ever since I finished my first book, really.”
“So this is your second book?” Colin asks. He continues, with a wry grin, “…that we’re taking part in right now?”
“Exactly,” Norman smiles.
“You know Norman has a glass eye?” Wayne remarks, pointing to Norman’s eye. Norman laughs, startled, and leans away from Wayne’s finger.
“I was actually wondering about that,” Colin says with a nod. “What’s your first book about?”
“Well, it’s basically about this guy and his daughter who are sort of fleeing status quo society in similar ways at the same time, and they go through these corresponding odysseys and … it’s philosophical fiction, as well. The characters slowly make these same sorts of realizations that I have, and it makes them realize the nature of their own artificiality, their own fictional natures, and they make contact briefly with me the author in the form of a giant, glowing, winged serpent…”
“A coatl?” Elliot asks with a toothy grin, leaning around the central divider.
“Exactly,” Norman says, pointing. “A coatl. Which, of course, besides being a D&D monster, is also an ancient mystical symbol for the dual nature, the in-between-stage, much like the Hanging Man, and also of the invasive Logos, the sort of messianic returned sacred information, supposedly.”
“Quetzalcoatl is coming back, you know,” Wayne says eagerly. “Twenty-twelve, baby; end of this phase of the Mayan calendar.”
“That’s right,” Norman says with a smile, his heart filled with the ecstasy of a sudden powerful awareness of and appreciation for the current scene, where it is dawning on him that he is suddenly not the only person talking about this sort of thing. It’s almost beginning to feel to him as if he is more and more becoming truly the author of the world that surrounds him, beyond just himself. As if somehow a larger version of himself which he is only a part of is dipping its fingers into the world and pushing people, moments, closer to him as he wanders.
“That’s very cool,” Marcus says.
“Totally,” Norman agrees, then adds, “thanks.”
“Is the Mayan calendar thing part of your story, too?” Marcus asked, suddenly confused. “I thought that was real.”
“That is real,” Norman explains. “I thought you were saying my book sounded cool.” He laughs. “Sorry about that.”
“Oh, no problem,” Marcus says with a friendly smile.
“So, what’s the central conflict, then, in the book that’s taking place now?” Colin asks. “Or is that a personal question somehow?” Some of the other guys laugh. “Because I guess that would be the same as asking what the big drama in your life is, and I just met you.”
Norman laughs. “Yeah, no, it’s cool. I guess the central conflict in the book is on the large scale. It occurs on the level of the zeitgeist, I imagine, sort of between gods and corporations and asuras and Norman. Like: he enlightens, which is to say, he forms concrete, lasting understandings of the existence of the expanse of dimensions that rises out around us, the more that there is to all of this, and how all of that is actually just also here, it’s just hidden from us in its complexity – things like the zeitgeist, and sort-of spirits of believed-in things, if that makes any sense. The realm of the collective unconscious. And he learns to leave his body, and to astrally travel between dimensions, up along them and such, to expand his mind to a point where he can actually make sense of the tiny bits of random information in the nothingness that end up actually…”
Norman slows to a stop as Colin starts to shake his head and furrow his brow, but when he stops speaking, Colin switches in a circular motion from head-shaking to head-nodding and assures him, “I’m with you, I think,” while furrowing his brow even more. “He starts to exist at that level, and he explores the various dimensions, and the conflict is at that level?”
“Right,” Norman nods. “And so, the conflict is at that level, and Norman kind of forces himself into that conflict because he thinks he’s so fucking wise and he knows the meaning of life and everything, and maybe it complicates things up there, and in the waking-life part of the book, he begins to notice little effects of his mind activities on the real world, or so it seems, and through all of this of course he’s writing this book, the book I’m writing, and it starts to make him think about how he’s becoming the author of his world more and more it seems, more and more outside of his direct body interactions and such. Like his thoughts are seeping into the water system or something, and synchronicities start popping up everywhere he looks, which they have been for me lately.”
“Me too, man,” Harvey notes with a serious look in his eyes. “Fucking everywhere I look lately, there are weird synchronicities. I’ll be thinking about something, then there it will be in the street or whatever.”
“I tend to take synchronicity to mean that I’m generally heading in the right direction. Because what is synchronicity, or just little well-written parts of a scene I’m in, but … you know, they’re the well-written scenes.”
“Or the unbelievable ones,” Wayne adds.
“But, honestly, one of the things I’ve been kind of struggling with in my mind is the whole concept of conflict in narrative in general – supposedly it’s the core of every good story, and that seems true in some fundamental existential way, but at the same time, as an advocate of peace both in the macrocosmic sense of Peace On Earth and in the personal sense of temperance and moderation and peace of mind within one’s inner person, and in terms of compassion and non-violence and all of that, I feel like conflict is not necessarily something we need to keep promoting in fiction. And anyway, the reality is often peace – much of my life is very peaceful. I mean, I think there absolutely can be stories worth telling in which it’s just ideas and beauty, you know what I mean? And yet, at the same time, the world at large is obviously swamped with various conflicts of ideology and firearm at the moment, and so in terms of that saturating the zeitgeist right now, there’s almost no way I can escape conflict. I fucking hate humans sometimes, when they’re assholes.”
Wayne nods energetically and laughs. “They are assholes.”
“Well, they can be, is the thing,” Norman adds. “I mean – they also can be reasonable and cool, you know? Like us, here, talking. Being rational and compassionate and understanding that each of the others of us is just like us, at the essential core of being.”
“Exactly.”
“And so, I guess the real point of my book is supposed to involve the fact that human beings can rise above the bestial bullshit of instinct and ignorant tradition, and to a certain extent I feel like part of the reason I’m here on Earth is to be not so much a teacher as just an example, to show people that you really can live an enlightened life of awesomeness.”
“Arrogance!” Elliot scoffs, laughing.
Norman shrugs, just a tad embarrassed. “Perhaps,” he admits. He softly bites the inside of his mouth, staring into space in the direction of the middle of the room. “But it’s also me speaking genuinely, which in my judgment trumps most other concerns when deciding what to say or not to say that I’m thinking.” He sniffs to himself. “And now,” he says, “I think I’ll stop talking for a moment and enter some data.”
He turns back to his screen and starts inputting data (an action which has already become second nature to his fingers in the past week, and which he thusly doesn’t have to really pay attention to anymore while doing it; his mind roams).

After a short period of silent data entry, Colin turns in his chair and addresses Norman. “So, Norman, were you a Philosophy major or an English major?”
“Neither, actually. Art; painting.”
“Oh, you’re a painter too?” Colin says with a smile. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“I’m a painter,” Marcus adds, looking up suddenly from his data.
“Cool. Yeah. I haven’t painted in years, though, since I realized that no one really cares about new paintings or painters anymore, at least no one outside of the insular art world.”
“Not entirely true, but I see your point,” Harvey says from the other side of the room.
“Which is why now what I focus on is film, music and literature.”
“You do film, too?” Colin asks.
“Well, I’ve written several screenplays, and I made a couple of shorts in college. Film is the goal, because to a certain extent I’d say it’s the most proliferated and noted-on-a-large-scale of the modern art forms – it’s just so likable – but obviously film is kind of a hard medium to just jump into. As far as direct translation from mind to product, it and pencil drawing are pretty much like diametrically opposed, you know what I mean?”
Colin nods, sort of smiling.
“I had funding set up for my first film over the summer, but I was involved with the woman who was funding it and that sort of led to it falling apart. Or maybe the reverse is true. I don’t know. I’ve been far more focused on the literature side of things lately, since I moved back out here. Are you from around here?”
“No, I’m from Ohio,” Colin replies. “I live with my girlfriend at her parents’ house.” He nods slowly as he says it, ending in a taut mouth of dissatisfaction.
“Hey man,” Norman says, commiserating, “I live in my sister’s basement, so I feel you.”
Colin laughs. “Nice.”
“I don’t know anybody in our generation who didn’t have to go back and live with family after college for at least a little while,” Elliot adds, leaning around the divider.
“That’s because capitalism is failing,” Wayne spits venomously, yet somehow still with a touch of lightheartedness. “The system is fucked up and doesn’t work.”
“Let’s not blame the system,” Elliot says slowly.
“No, man, I’m sorry, but fuck the system. We need to bring it all down. Just nuke it all. Just wipe out the human-settled areas and pray the Earth can heal.”
“Damn, Wayne,” Norman laughs.
“Rage it up, Kris,” Harvey calls out.
“I’m about to,” Wayne responds. “I’m talking about absolute destruction of this whole capitalist system, killing all these fucking douches who have perpetrated their wars against us and against the Earth itself.”
“And then, what, live in anarchy?” Elliot asks sarcastically, sounding a bit annoyed.
“I have to imagine that humanity really can live together in harmony,” Norman interjects. “I mean, we all at least have the capability to understand certain unifying characteristics of all people and to understand that everyone is at the heart of it all mostly the same, that we’re all the same connected net of awarenesses.”
“It’ll never work that way on a macroscopic level,” Elliot retorts. “There will always be fuck-ups and ignorant assholes. You can’t just leave them behind, and you’re not going to create anything righteous by killing them.”
“That’s too bad, isn’t it?” Wayne jokes. “It would be a lot easier. But I suppose you’re right.”
“I think what anyone calls evil is really just ignorance or neglectedness, and I’m going to go so far in this moment as to say that I think maybe other people’s ignorance is our fault,” Norman declares.
“How so?” Colin asks.
“Well, because it seems like everyone who is a thinking, decision-making person has the capability of understanding any number of things that they just may not have been exposed to. Don’t we, the enlightened, the blessedly idle, have some sort of obligation to educate the ignorant?”
“No, because most of them are making the specific choice to remain ignorant,” Harvey notes with a raised eyebrow.
“Jesus,” Norman says, shocked. “You’re probably right, aren’t you? How sad.”
“Hey, it’s their choice.”
“Yeah, I guess. I don’t know. But largely I don’t think that’s true. Like, in America maybe that’s often true, but elsewhere … well, no, I guess it’s not like we have a better education system than pretty much anyone else. We’re not the only ones who culturally validate willful ignorance. Scratch that.
“But anymore, it seems to me, all you need to do is look at history and sociology and all these things – just look at the facts, just seek out the truth and it is out there. But any real truth must be all-encompassing, always true, and so the truth is everything, and every perspective, and is untrue without such. And so everything real, everything distinct is untrue.
“You put together all the evidence out there and it becomes clear, it seems to me, completely clear that the current system is not really fundamentally any different than the earliest human societies, insomuch as elite groups hold control over the masses by means of arbitrary, or rather strategic, I should say, strategic oppression, but at the macro-level of nations. If we gave medicine to Africa and fed all the starving people in the world and actually let everyone live equally, nothing would be the same. And yet, we could feed everyone and take care of everyone, definitely, with the current resources and everything, but we keep it here for Americans. I don’t know. I’m rambling.”
He turns and enters the date from an invoice into the date field in the database beside it, then turns back around.
“If people could just study existence rationally and … it’s like I can’t understand how anyone could not understand these things I’ve come to see, anymore.” He shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s like…” His speech trails off.
“No, I hear you, man,” Harvey assures him, reinvigorating Norman’s conversational passion.
“Here’s the way I see it,” Norman says, leaning forward in his chair and gesturally addressing the other guys, who have all turned around by this point to be part of the conversation. “Step one, I think, is the fundamental realization of self. Going, ‘Oh, okay, there’s this me-thing, and that’s what I am. I’m this observing/judging entity that gets information through this body and other sources and is able to make very simple choices within the context of that body, but then also on this other plane, this place that isn’t really part of the world around us, this inner place where we have abstract thoughts and memories and such.’”
“Inside our brains,” Walt says.
“Well, yes,” Norman replies, leaning his head toward his shoulder in a gesture of that’s-partially-right, “but whatever’s happening in our brains – the chemical shit with memory and sensory input and everything – is clearly observed and acted upon by some external entity … a soul, to use the parlance of our times.” Wayne chuckles; Norman nods in recognition of Wayne’s recognition of Norman’s use of a line from The Big Lebowski. “And whatever it is that is observing and judging – that awareness engine that is my unique perspective – that above all things must be me.”
“Sure,” Harvey nods.
“Okay, so step two, then,” Norman continues, “takes us to the World – the Other. That which is not the self, that which is distinct from the self, that which I’m reacting against and within. Because, of course, the only thing that makes a thing a thing is its distinction from everything else, its unique characteristics. In order for it to mean anything that I am me, there must also be something else. Eternity is void; ubiquity, true homogeneity is informationless, is inert. Anyway. So there’s this other stuff, this world that we exist within. And within this outside world, there are other beings, other selves all with different characteristics, but all choice-making, perceiving entities like me. Or so it seems.
“Step three comes through the process of maturation, with age, and thereafter, the process of becoming aware of the nature of one’s own maturation as a progression of understanding and knowledge, of wisdom, of really building something of yourself, and then you look around and you see different people in the human race acting at different levels of wisdom … there are some who are behind you, who have not come as far, at the very least among children. And yet when does one become an adult? And is that the end? And how many children do I know that are worlds wiser than a lot of the adults I know? All adults are is children who have been around long enough to know how to get the younger people to do what they tell them and think they know it all. No one alive today invented the wheel or made agriculture out of nothing. It’s just fifth graders thinking they’re better than the third graders. Mostly they’re just bullshitting children whose bodies have changed. And you can keep going down along through evolution, then, and you see that biologically the same process of maturation has been occurring, and it’s called Evolution, right, and now everybody I know has a copy either of The Bible or The Origin of Species whether or not they’ve ever actually read it.”
“I have a copy of The Origin of Species,” Walt notes with a smile.
“Me too,” Harvey nods. He looks over at Timothy, who is smiling and nodding as well.
“I have both,” says Elliot.
“This is why That Great Fearmonger, the Heisenburglar, is my book’s villain. It is the fear in uncertainty, the illusion of lack, that has us in this black iron prison of suffering that the world does not need to be.”
“The Heisenburglar?” Elliot asks, laughing. “That’s awesome. What is that from?”
“It’s from my book, my brain. The book I’m planning on writing, my next book, after the romance novels that is, but … well, maybe I’ll work on it at the same time. I should be working on it. It’s fucking filling my veins. Anyway. In the book – the book is about this me character, this fictionalized Norman who is going through similar things, and it will be about his sort-of process of enlightenment, and him then interacting with the entities at that zeitgeist level and becoming a player at that level – right, like I said – and so his enemy is this character called the Heisenburglar, who obviously is the one who steals all those unperceived things, moments, thoughts, et cetera. And so his whole thing is that he’s sort of unperceivable, alien and yet somehow omnipresent, although, really almost, like, apresent. And I’m thinking at this point, maybe, that the Heisenburglar sort of becomes real because the Norman character creates him for his book, in this very meta sort of way. But he has to confront him then, nevertheless. I don’t know. It’s a bit hard to describe outside of the narrative and the character’s thought processes.”
Elliot just nods, smiling, his brow furrowed and his head cocked a bit to the side. “Hmm,” he says. Then he adds, “Sounds like you’ve got your work cut out for you.”
Norman’s fingers suddenly feel painfully cold. He crosses his arms tight against himself and says, “Damn, it’s cold in here.” Norman shivers and turns back around to his screen. He begins to worry about the fact that he doesn’t have his own villain entirely figured out yet, and wonders, once he does understand him, how long he will have been lurking.
Also, his hands being cold makes him think about Sylvia. She remains on the periphery of his thoughts, smoking, legs crossed.
“Yeah man, it’s cold today,” Wayne agrees. “You guys ever wonder if, like, if everything that people believe in, like you know, like gods and spirits of things and all that shit, if like there’s some dimension where, like, all that stuff actually exists and all those imagined planes where different gods dwell and shit, like the Outer Planes in D&D…”
“Planescape,” Elliot laughs.
“…if they, like, are real places, like, at least as real as this, or differently real or whatever, and like, you can go there in your mind, but all this is in your mind too, so, like, what’s the difference, you know? And, like, maybe if you had the right kind of spiritual/mental strength, if you were, like, wizard-level, you know, you could actually, like project there or whatever?”
“Totally,” Norman says, pointing at Wayne, excited to hear such words coming from another.
“When I was in Kazakhstan we met this guy who could actually levitate his body.” Wayne shrugs, grinning. “I saw it, man. It was like…” and he holds his finger and thumb very close together, “…like that far, but still, dude, I saw it happen. Sufi dude. He could levitate, and sort of move around just above the ground. Changed my shit forever.”
“Awesome,” Harvey says slowly, grinning at Wayne, his brow furrowed.
“You were in Kazakhstan?” Norman asks.
“Yeah, man. I was in Afghanistan and Kazakhstan.”
“Were you in the Army?”
“Oh, yeah. You didn’t know that? Special forces. Biggest fucking mistake I ever made.”
Norman smiles with relief. “I’m glad you think it was a mistake.”
“Oh fuck yeah, man,” Wayne coughs. “Fuck that shit. I’m absolutely against all that shit. Especially having been there, inside it.”
“Why did you go?”
He shrugs, appearing momentarily embarrassed and remorseful. “I was fucking stupid,” he says, dispelling the feelings with a laugh.
“Right on,” Norman laughs.
“Yeah. All we did most of the time was hang out on base and play Call of Duty, or – what was that one game, Elliot?”
“Medal of Honor?”
“No, that wasn’t it.”
“Were you in the Army, too?” Norman asks Elliot.
Elliot smiles and shakes his head quickly with closed eyes. “Just played the game with him once.”
“But, yeah. You know I could be called back anytime?”
“I thought you were out for good,” Harvey says.
“Doesn’t matter,” Wayne says, raising an eyebrow. “They can call me back anytime. And they’re doing that shit, too. Calling people back two, three times.”
“That’s fucked up,” Norman declares, and all nod in agreement.
“Yeah, so whatever you do, don’t fucking join the military,” Wayne laughs. “There’s the lesson for today.”
“Actually, you know,” Norman says, trying to get back to Wayne’s original thought, “I think you might be more right than you realize about the Outer Planes and different dimensions and all that shit. String theory demands a plethora of dimensions, and quantum physics plus choice seems to demand a multidimensional matrix of realities in which everything that can happen does happen in different quantum realities, at least hypothetically. But then all of this is hypothetical effectively, insomuch as it’s just in our minds.”
Wayne nods, grinning. “Word,” he says.
“So, wait,” Norman says, suddenly struck by a previous comment of Wayne’s, “they can call you back at any time? Is there no way that you can just, like, quit from the military?”
“Never, dude,” Wayne says with gravity in his face. “They’re calling back retired people in their sixties. They can bring you back at any time.”
“How can that be legal?” Norman asks. “How can there be a job you can’t just quit?”
“Well if you could quit, everyone would be quitting as soon as combat started,” Elliot notes with a chuckle that inexplicably irritates Norman. “You’d have a million guys all going, ‘You know what? Nevermind. This clearly isn’t worth it.’”
“Exactly,” Norman agrees, “but that should just go to show how reprehensible the work is, not that people should be forced to do it. Jesus, that’s insane. So, you’re effectively the government’s slave.”
“We all are, bub,” Wayne remarks with a laugh. “Citizen-slaves. But, yeah, more literally I am, yes, the military-industrial complex’s slave, and they could call me back anytime to kill or die for them. I’m a bit surprised they haven’t yet, really.”
“When were you overseas with the Army?”
“Special forces,” Wayne notes, raising an eyebrow, then looks to his mind’s eye for a moment, rubbing his chin. “I left for Basic in, what was it, Harvey, June of Two-thousand-one? Would it be Two-thousand-one? Yeah, it was.”
“Yeah,” Harvey agrees. “It was before everything.”
“Yeah,” Wayne continues, “and so we were shipped out to Germany for a while first for, like, that VR training shit and such. We were in Kazakhstan for a few of months, and Afghanistan just for a short time. I was only in Afghanistan for five weeks. Most of my tour was in Kazakhstan and Kirghizstan and then back here in the states. And anyway, mostly we just played fuckin’ FPS computer games on the LAN.”
“Did you ever see combat?” Norman asks.
“No, man. Good thing, too. I wouldn’t want to kill anyone for this country, not the way it works right now, where I’d actually just be killing for Halliburton executives and shit. I would only kill for personal reasons.”
Norman nods, thinking about corporations.
“We do need a revolution,” Timothy remarks with a laugh.
“I think we need to outlaw, or, rather, obsolete the corporation as an institution, for one,” Norman says. “I mean, do you guys realize that, in legal terms, corporations are sovereign entities? Our legal system does account for macro meta-entities, in terms of corporations and nation states and such. But these entities are judged legally as if they were individual humans, which they distinctly are not. They’re functioning at a much more complex level, with various new emergent dimensions depending on how big the entity is. It’s like trying to punish a god by putting him in the stockade. But imagine if at that level, at a level that we can’t witness through our eyes any more than a single blood cell in your capillaries can see the bigger picture of what your body is doing, at that level these meta-entities like nations and corporations are actually self-aware, and desire their own survival and propagation. Know what I mean?”
“So you want to outlaw the large-scale organization of human labor?”
“No,” Norman says with a laugh. “I think we just need to realize what these things are, and what’s going on. We need to be able to understand events at this level. We need to open our eyes to the things we share the world with. Like the pantheon of corporations that pay America and Poland and Paul Bunyon and Abraham Lincoln and Smoky the Bear and Jesus to do little street-corner one acts together to help sell the new placebo. I suppose I’m not necessarily against the existence of these things – that’s kind of absurd to be against the existence of something that exists, because it’s all connected, it’s all part of the same thing. Everyone’s just trying to do good. But I think we ought to be perhaps more keenly aware of the fact that they have potentially total control over our minds, our thoughts, our dispositions, our emotions, our opinions, what we do with each moment of our lives, et cetera, all of which are genuinely under attack almost every minute of our lives by I-don’t-know-what-yet, and that we’re far smarter than we’re allowed to think we are, and that even though these nations and corporations and leaders and teachers and priests and celebrities expect certain things of us, we can still rock our role any way we want; that we are innately and inoppressibly free. We need to realize that they really must follow our commands, and that right now we are getting what we fucking asked for.”
“Wow,” Wayne remarks.
“That’s the Revolution. The Evolution, really, is more appropriate. Because it has to be something that will still include all of this. We don’t want to tear down and build again. We don’t want to have to do any of this over. We just want to build the next level upon this. Humans aren’t going away, and not everyone is going to grow and change. We’re these intelligent beasts who seem to be at the top of the wisdom pyramid here on Earth, but there are still lower animals, still insects and fish and paramecia and amino acids. Indeed, we are composed of millions of these earlier creatures, these previous iterations of life. And so the post-humans will be composed of us – just more also. We will build on the foundation of Humanity a great new thing.” He shrugs. “That’s what we’re doing right now. This is our time of heroes. This is our mythic battlefield. And the scores are instantly recorded and posted for all to see. And I’ll tell you what…” He pauses briefly for dramatic timing. “We, the wise, the temperate, the tolerant, the inclusive, I fear, are losing. But even this, anyway, is just the last big acceleration right before the sweet jump.”
When Norman looks to his left, near the end of his ranting, he notices that Kendra has been casually standing in the open doorway, listening to him, politely smiling. He smiles back quickly.
“The leap to robot bodies and immortality, you mean,” Wayne continues.
“Well, yes, but I would say that the potential physical immortality of the machine body is insignificant compared to the expansion of awareness available with the machine brain. Immortality itself will be an obsolete concept when time itself is transcended by mind.”
“I don’t want my soul to be captured in a machine,” Kendra says with a cute frown. “I will keep my body, thank you.”
“Well, that’s fair,” Norman says, “but you won’t keep it for long. You need to keep in mind that the human brain is no less a machine than anything else. The change wouldn’t be sudden – it wouldn’t be, like, Man With Two Brains-style identity transfer or whatever through two popping Tesla coils. It would be a gradual process, presumably, of upgrading and synthesizing the two together at the nano-level – the brain and the computer. I mean, they already have microchips in people’s brains and artificial limbs that can be controlled from the brain and things like that. Are those people not human, or somehow subverting their humanity?”
Kendra half-smiles, trying desperately to communicate her uncertainty.
“Anyway,” Norman says, shaking his head. “Sorry. What’s up, Kendra?”
“Well, I just wanted to stop in to see how Colin and Marcus were doing. How are you guys?”
Colin and Marcus both smile and nod to Kendra.
“I’m doing just fine,” Colin says, gesturing to his computer screen and then to Marcus. “I don’t want to speak for you, necessarily, Marcus…”
Marcus shrugs and then gives a thumbs up. “Doin’ fine,” he says. “Got it figured out, I think. How are you?”
“I’m doing great,” Kendra laughs. “Okay, well, you know, ask questions if you have questions, and, you know, take breaks when you need to. I know Timothy and Elliot do pushups and stuff sometimes. That’s a good idea. I’ve seen Norman out smoking – that works too. You know, make yourselves comfortable, take your time, stretch your fingers if you need to. This stuff can get pretty dull, I imagine. But it looks like you guys know how to keep your minds occupied. Which is great. So alright, have fun, guys!” She clicks the door shut behind herself.
“See you, Kendra.”
Wayne raises an eyebrow, holding back a wide grin that exposes itself as soon as he thinks Kendra is out of range. He leans forward in his chair, close to Norman, and says with a comically manic tone of voice, “We need to start a fucking revolution, man…”
“Fuckin’ right on,” Norman agrees. “At the end of my first book, it’s about these young intellectuals like us sitting down together and discussing what actually needs to be done, what actually might work as far as a model for interrelating with each other, which fundamentally is what we’re talking about, right? I mean, what is society but our complex web of unspoken and/or spoken rituals and taboos and protocols, extrapolated to the large scale? But the problem is – see, yeah, here’s the problem: on that large scale, on that sort of abstracted, Zeitgeist-level scale of things, where these societal concepts and governmental associations with acronym names are whole entities instead of networks of different people, on that level the rules all begin to change. The entities, still barely self-aware, nevertheless desire their own survival and stuff like that. They begin to interact at that level independently of any of their component parts’ individual desires.”
“Wait, what?” Colin asks, leaning into the conversation.
“We need to develop some sort of real understanding, a physics or a chemistry of the Upper World, of the level of metaphors and concepts and corporations, or, as the blood vessels and brains of such entities, guide them toward self-awareness so that they, which is to say, we, can actually make rational, perhaps even moral decisions.”
Norman is more talking to himself at this point than actually conversing with anyone else in the room. His gaze is cast slightly downward, into his own mind. He is thinking about the book. As he speaks, in his mind’s eye he can also see the words as if on a white page.
He reads: “We need to keep awareness with us at all times; and doubt; and keep rebellion in our hearts. We need to cross-reference everything we hear and see with everything we have already seen and heard, to understand that everything is related to everything else, everything is connected, and everything is true somewhere (which is the same as saying ‘from a certain perspective’).”
“Who said that?” Colin asks, apparently assuming from the way Norman said the words that they are some famous quote.
“I did,” Norman replies with a silly smile, “just now.”

Chapter 11:Hermetica

2007-09-19T13:27:00.001-04:00

11

Indeed it was all, clearly in hindsight, a matter of time. The Inevitable modified by the Impossible. The way shit goes. Through the course of the actual events, somehow he passed into myth.

Norman and Imogen left the Indiana Academy on Valentine’s Day, Two-thousand-three, following an incident in which students were overheard in the cafeteria discussing having seen the two residence counselors buying a little metal pipe at the local Discount Den. An ex-hippy, born-again-Christian co-counselor interrogated the students (two distinctly unwilling boys from Norman’s floor) and convinced them to tell their story to the Director of Residential Life, an overly tactile, emotionally-immature mid-forties lesbian who had already been clashing with Norman over new Academy rules that disallowed gay students certain rights allowed to others such as holding hands and kissing in the dorm (the once liberal institution, caving in to the red surrounding it [Indiana], was on a slippery slope into fundamentalist folly). Norman was fired immediately. Imogen, insulted by the mere wrist-slapping she had received for the same crime, quit out of solidarity, as did Norman’s only-recently-ex-girlfriend Karen, who found out about his affair with Imogen soon thereafter through the grapevine. Norman never heard from Karen again (extremely sparse, semi-regretful emails throughout the following two years cut for pacing). The students held a day of protest in which many went to class with headphones on, but no ‘justice’ came of it, because Norman secretly felt like everything was falling into place.
His affair with Imogen was three months old at that point. The two had been sharing a small rented house in the nearby college ghetto for five months. Originally undertaken as a secret studio space where the two could find respite from their live-in job, it eventually turned into a secluded little love nest where they listened to records and passionately fucked and painted the walls in their off-hours throughout the winter. For the first month and a half after the firing, the two lived together in this house in a general state of lovers’ peace, getting high every day and entertaining the occasional student guests who were expressly disallowed to visit there and whom Norman took great pride in smoking up and finally getting to really educate without any concern for self-censorship.
It was in this tiny house that he finally decided to be who he knew he was. It was then that everything other than artist fell away.

Hermetica

No longer hindered by living where he worked, Norman began serious work at last on his first album, The World’s Original Man, an experimental trip-hop meditation on the relationship between his loves, self, art, purpose and general masturbatory egoism under his musical pseudonym, Box. He had been working on the music for some of the songs for years but had never quite had the confidence to write and record lyrics. But after Norman’s firing he went right out and bought an expensive microphone and The World’s Original Man quickly bloomed into a double album with eight-page lyrics inserts for each disc. Some of the songs were directly named after or referenced old romances of Norman’s (Amy3, Blue, Janine (the Origin), K is for Katherine), while others were named after half-remembered poems from high school or notes he had written on his wrist years before. Already, at that point, he had been creating electronic music on his computer for about four years, but it was the first time he really felt like a songwriter designing a full album as a single macroscopic work in the vein of the great rock albums he respected, as opposed to just arbitrarily grouping together atmospheric, twelve-minute drum-n-bass epics that didn’t relate to each other beyond all being saturated with Star Trek samples.
It was a time of paradigm shifts for Norman, a distinct phase transition, so powerfully so that it seemed to have come with some kind of cosmic significance attached like a note with flowers. The flowers were Norman’s new romance with a sexy, passionate fellow artist with whom he could paint on the bedroom walls and stop on the highway to draw on her shoulder and record her orgasms for use in his music, and also the sudden freedom of unemployment buoyed by temporary wealth. (Norman and each of his siblings had received ten thousand dollars from their father that previous Christmas [part of an inheritance from a great aunt], which was far more money than he had ever possessed at one time before, and thusly he felt comfortable enough to remain unemployed for six months and spend that time working on The World’s Original Man.) The note, however, to continue the metaphor, was still in an etheric, alien script.
All through the long, beautiful month of March, Norman would wake early every morning, smoke a bowl and then meditate. Sometimes his meditations would lead to dream-like visions which at first he saw merely as artistic inspiration; other times he would willfully astrally project, as he had at Lou’s apartment, to explore the nature of that experience. At Lee’s suggestion, he thought outwardly to the cosmos, while astral, that he was ready for a teacher to come to him. (Lee held the belief that such requests, a curious variant of prayer, truly worked. Norman was unsure, but followed her instructions for experimentation’s sake. It seemed to him that there could be no such thing as too much data, no useless experiment.) After his meditation he worked on The World’s Original Man in the corner of a mostly empty room of the house that was referred to as his bedroom for purposes of retaining a façade of non-romance, though Norman’s ‘bedroom’ contained only a tiny studio area in one corner with his computer on a desk, two microphone stands and a synthesizer, with a long, low green couch on the opposite wall. The lovers slept in Imogen’s room, where she had a fold-out couch permanently in bed form, as well as other bedroom staples such as a dresser and a mirror. Many nights, Norman would read Imogen to sleep from his old, disintegrating copy of 1,001 Nights.
Norman always recalls this brief period with a fondness as delicate as crème brulet.
For this initial month and a half, Norman’s family was left almost entirely in the dark except for Lee. He kept in close contact with Lee through this period, as he was astrally projecting frequently and calling Lee to discuss his thoughts/discoveries therefrom. But he had left Karen, his girlfriend of two and a half years, to whom the family had become accustomed after seeing her for two Thanksgivings in a row, and he had left the salaried job he had held without telling anyone the real reasons. He quite blissfully didn’t even have a phone. Norman’s email inbox received frequent concerned messages from his mother that he didn’t read until he moved to South Bend in April and got internet access again.
This also corresponded to the beginning of Norman and Lou’s life as regular weed-smokers, as around the same time that past fall they each had gotten together romantically with women who were able to procure it for them, indeed who smoked it regularly themselves. (The woman whom Lou had recently met was Eleanor, his future wife, but their relationship was young yet and he saw her only a few times a week and Norman still barely knew her.) Now that he didn’t live in a school, Norman smoked up every day, and continued to do so whenever he was able to (whenever it was available) pretty much from then on.
On the first of April of Two-thousand-three, Norman and Imogen moved together to South Bend, Indiana, three hours to the north. Their apartment was right downtown in a remodeled old high school, with two bedrooms lofted over a huge, three-leveled sunken living room that had once been the school’s pool, with a courtyard accessible only by them. It was by far the most awesome apartment Norman had ever seen, let alone lived in. And it was a mere fifteen minutes or so from the Enchanted Forest.
Norman finished The World’s Original Man in June and used his creative inertia to quickly produce a follow-up album, Illegible Signatures on the Texture of Time, which took him only about a month and was far less accessible an album, its lyrics being almost entirely stolen from ancient alchemical texts found online and then cut up and pieced back together seemingly at random (though in the randomness Norman felt intuitively that he had subconsciously hidden a code that he often stayed up late at night listening for).
While Norman stayed home at the Pool and worked on music comfortably nestled between his headphones, Imogen worked two jobs. During the day, she worked the register at the Salvation Army. In the evenings she worked at a local hipster coffeeshop called Lula’s Café with Sylvia, who was taking a year off from Notre Dame and living with her skinny, boyish new girlfriend while spending most of her free time at the Pool with Imogen and Norman. Lou was also over at the Pool most days after work, since he had been living alone for over a year in the Enchanted Forest and was only able to see his new girlfriend Eleanor on the weekends.
It began to seem as if all the events of the previous summer/winter cycle that had led up to Norman’s move had seemed to be some kind of mysterious serendipity intended to bring the two of them (Norman and Lou) together again, and they agreed that they ought to use their proximity to continue their collaboration both artistic and existential. Important things seemed to be happening. Norman’s world felt newly alive and vibrant in a way that made him recall the days of his youth when he had been certain it would end up that He was the Second Coming.

It was at the Pool, early one afternoon, that Norman first met in a dream what he would thereafter refer to as his ‘teacher entity.’ It appeared as an old man with short white hair and a white beard, wearing a white suit with a gray shirt and a black tie, who pulled Norman out of another dream and guided him toward a white room where, like a psionic martial arts teacher, he showed/explained to Norman how certain psychic abilities were actually done. Norman had only a few dreams with this entity. Though he could never remember many specifics when he would wake from them except that the teacher entity had taught him something awesome, he nevertheless always retained the wisdoms learned at an intuitive level.
The first time, he woke with the powerful awe of having just been taught how to defend himself from psychic attack by creating a shield of will, and he immediately had to call Lee to tell her about it.
“Lee, I had to immediately call you to tell you about this dream I had that I think I have just awoken from.”
“Okay. Hi, Norman. What was your dream?”
“Well, I’ve been asking for a teacher when I’m astral, right, like you suggested…”
“Good, good.”
“…and this morning when I woke…”
“It’s the afternoon, Norman.”
“…I had this distinct memory of meeting with this old man in a white suit with a gray shirt and a black tie, and him teaching me how to defend myself from psychic darts.”
“Oh my god, Norman, that’s exactly what Lizzie” (Norman and Lee’s sister, a year younger than Lee, currently living in Scotland with her British husband James) “was telling me about just yesterday. She went to her first shamanic healing class, with those shamans out in Scotland who she’s studying under, and she was telling me about how they were telling her about how there are people out there who can psychically attack you from a distance, and you need to be aware of this once you’re at that level, that you are now visible to them and somehow vulnerable to such things. I was actually going to call you this morning to tell you about it, because as soon as she mentioned that, I got worried about you.”
“Well it’s not a problem, I guess,” Norman said with a grin, moved by the enigmatic synchronicity of it all, “because now I know how to defend myself. He showed me how to basically create a shield of will around myself.”
“That’s exactly how they say to do it,” Lee replied excitedly. “The shamans, I mean.”
Two weeks later, Norman awoke with a clear understanding of how material objects could be imbued with powers through simple force of will. It was as if, by mere will (but, pure will), power could be given to anything. Imaginary things in his personal mindspace were the easiest to give powers to, such as his illusion-dispelling thought darts and his mnemonic faith disc. He simply built them by truly understanding them, and then they were available. Norman experimented for some time with the enchantment of actual items in the phenomenal world, beginning with his attempts to build a familiar and keep it in his bat ring (bought that past fall with Imogen at a head shop in Muncie not long before the firing). He theorized that zeitgeist entities such as his familiar (ideas, memes, or abstracts as Norman would later refer to them) could be created and imbued with powers like software through a similar process of will.
Every morning, during the familiar-building summer days of Two-thousand-three, Norman would wake late, a couple of hours after Imogen had kissed him goodbye for the day, then walk out to the courtyard and smoke a cigarette while meditating on the construction of his familiar. At first, the process was similar to building a foil ball, only using his own spiritual material instead of tinfoil. He would simply pull up the familiar in his mind and then slowly add to it with love and compassion and awesomeness and bits of remembered dreams, imbuing it with various minor powers such as sight (which he too was supposed to be able to see) and a sort of subconscious speech, though Norman never got any experimental proof or disproof that these abilities ever really worked. It began as a tiny glowing point in his mind and slowly expanded over the weeks into what appeared to Norman in his imagination as a small, glowing, golden man about one apple tall. When he was finished inflating the man each morning with his own spiritual vitas, a process that was always quite draining, the man would seem to look up at him expectantly, as if awaiting orders. Norman never gave him an order. Doing so felt weirdly like the Dark Side. All he did was create him each morning and then put him back in the bat ring.

This also was a time when Lou and Norman were looking for their next big collaborative project. The Turing Registry and Death and the Ladies, their intended first two films, were both now finished scripts, and they felt like they ought to wait until at least one film had been made before they worked on the script for their third (When the Levee Breaks). This time, with everything that had occurred between them over the past year, Norman and Lou wanted to go beyond simple art and make something, perhaps, actually supernatural in nature.
Imogen, a spiritually nebulous yet nevertheless highly attuned woman, had a deck of Tarot cards with which she semi-regularly gave readings for Norman or herself or their relationship. (It was from this, with the annotative aid of a book of Imogen’s, A Dictionary of Symbols, that Norman first began to connect himself with the symbol of the Magician.)
Inspired jointly by the Tarot and by their own narrative concepts developed through creative collaboration, Norman and Lou designed a unique system of divinatory cards based on narrative archetypes. Through the slurry of randomness it seemed insight could be divined with force of will and a focus of some kind. The Cards were such a focus for Norman and Lou. They were simple three-by-five index cards each separated into two sides of a single narrative archetype. Norman and Lou clipped abstract or symbolic images out of art and photography magazines (amounting this to pulling power from the zeitgeist, as all were images that would be looked at by thousands of people around the world – images with zeitgeist baggage [and they were all carefully chosen]) so that each card had two images each upside-down to each other on one face of the card, each image with its title above. Lou and Norman came up with the archetypes the first day, then spent five straight evenings, after Lou got off work, in Lou’s apartment on their hands and knees amidst a sea of magazine clippings, smoking weed and building the deck with scissors and glue sticks. The way Norman saw it, each card was a whole concept, with the two different positions describing flip sides of a full idea: The God/The Man; The King/The Fool; The Dream/The Nightmare; The Beast/The Spirit; The Legend/The Prophecy; The Forest/The Desert; The Magician/The Priest; The Voyage/The Return; The Battle/The Truce; The Lover/The Scorned; The Invincible/The Vulnerable; The Loyal/The Betrayer; The Mother/The Daughter; The Father/The Son; The Path/The Labyrinth; The Feast/The Famine; The Lock/The Key; The Painter/The Sculptor; The Family/The Stranger; The Teacher/The Pupil; Undying Love/Eternal Hate; The Twin/The Doppelganger; The Knight/The Scoundrel; The Costume/The Mask; The Overture/The Secret Sign; The Wanton/The Chaste; The Behind/The Beyond; The Fort/The Prison; The Home/The Tent; The Creation/The Apocalypse; The Hunter/The Prey; The Plain/The Sea; The Training/The Degradation; The World/The Underworld; The Faerie/The Elemental; The Dark Age/The Renaissance; The Cycle/The Pattern; The Slumbering/The Awakening; The Door/The Barrier; The Charge/The Feint; The Comrade/The Rival; The Skeleton/The Phoenix; The Cave/The Plaza; The Inquisitor/The Paladin; Eyes Unclouded/Smoke and Veils; The Wonder/The Act; The Ghost/The Corpse; The Birth/The Abortion; The Citadel/The Farmhouse; The Explorer/The Xenophobe; The Leap of Faith/The Calculated Risk; The Grail/The Artifact; The Sheriff/The Vigilante; The Hero/The Villain; The Intrusion/The Escape; The Posse/The Mob; The Charity/The Miser; The Tradition/The Trend; Fellowship/Against All Odds; The Conception/The Demise; The Plague/The Flood; War/Peace; The Expected Result/The Dramatic Reversal; The Angel/The Monster; The Golem/The Familiar; The Expanse/The Narrowness; The Oracle/The Sphinx; The Poem/The Book; The Mountain/The Pit; Wisdom/Insanity; The Labor/The Quest; The Steed/The Rider; The Local/The Alien; The Engineer/The Steersman; The Miracle/The Catastrophe; The Impossible/The Inevitable; Comedy/Farce; The Princess/The Siren; The Clue/The Red Herring; The River/The Bridge; The Fumble/Sleight of Hand; The Soldier/The Doctor; The Diplomat/The Spy; The Changeling/The Stoic; The Performance/The Charade; The Smith/The Farmer; The Light/The Darkness; The Storm/The Drought; The Treasure/The Plunder; The Deal/The Swindle; The Birthplace/The Grave; The Temple/The Grove; The Citizen/The Slave; The Stage/The Play-Within-A-Play; and two cards that were each a single concept, their orientation’s significance remaining intuitive and open to context: Deus Ex Machina and The Messiah.
Finally, when the deck was complete, they designed a layout based on the classic three-act narrative structure that untalented Hollywood screenwriters so treasure, where each act was separated into ten positions (The Hero, The Villain, The Milieu, The Nature of the Conflict, Three Supporting Players, The Inciting Incident, The Climax and the Denouement) each of which was represented by two cards, the whole meaning of each position being in the romance of the two ideas.
Since the cards were still delicately new, they shuffled them by spreading them in a circle on the floor with their blank sides facing up, then picked them up at random and put them in various piles which were then also mixed randomly, the whole time keeping in mind whatever the reading might be intended to be about so that this will, or this idea at least, might somehow subtly sabotage the randomness. For the first one they agreed that the reading ought to be about, in general, their particular Unimind.
“Alright,” Lou said excitedly as he placed the tall, sufficiently randomized deck in front of Norman, “the first act.”
“Right. Okay.” Norman picked up the first card on the deck. “The Hero,” he said, and turned the card over, placing it on the carpet in front of them.
“The Son,” Norman and Lou read in unison. “Modified by…” Norman pulled the second card and placed it next to The Son. “…The Messiah,” they said together, and looked at each other with huge grins.
It works, Norman knew instantly, and was overwhelmed with awe.
“Okay,” Lou said. “Interesting. This is the first act.”
“Or, the last phase. I sort of see it like – the first act could almost be seen as the past, like the last phase of your life, or whatever, if you can consider someone’s life to exist in distinct phases, distinct stories, almost. So the first act I see as, like, the last phase, the second act as the present phase, the one we’re in now, and the third act is the next phase. Or that’s one way it can be read.”
“Okay,” Lou agreed. “I can get behind that. I’m gonna load up Ahab.”
“Word; get to it. You’re the green bay packer, amigo.”
Lou laughed, stuffing the end of the pipe jutting from between Ahab’s big silly eyes with marijuana.
“Okay, so the Villain.” Norman pulled the next card. “The Fumble. Modified by … The Stage. Hmm.”
“This is fucking awesome,” Lou asserted.
“Agreed,” Norman agreed. “Should we try to interpret, or shall we continue?”
“Let’s see how the whole thing plays out, then interpret the whole thing as a story.”
“Okay. So, the Milieu.” Norman turned over the next card. “The Inevitable. Modified by … The Engineer.”
“It’s the Future,” Lou interpreted.
After taking bonghit from Ahab, Norman continued laying out the cards in their various positions: “The nature of the conflict is The Miracle modified by The Treasure; the three supporting players are The Familiar modified by The Demise, Peace modified by The Flood and The Monster modified by The Charade; the inciting incident is The Deal modified by The Citadel; the climax is The Birth modified by The Ghost; and the denouement is The Act modified by Smoke and Veils.
“Fucking word, man,” Norman said, shaking his head as his mind swirled with various interpretations of the cards displayed on the carpet in front of him. “We have created a magic item. Like, in D&D terms?” He looked up to the side, to Lou who was hovering right next to his shoulder.
“I know, dude,” Lou said, leaning down to take a bonghit.
“This is fucking amazing.”
“Serious,” coughing, grinning.
“So, The Son modified by The Messiah,” Norman said, lighting a cigarette. “I have to read that as my whole Christ-complex thing.”
“Well, I was reading it more in terms of the hero myth – the son, the messiah, the prodigal son who has to save the world by killing the father and taking his place, you know what I mean? Like, Campbell-wise? Can I have one of those, dude?”
“Sure.” Norman handed Lou a cigarette and lit it for him. “Hmm,” he thought.
“The Fumble-The Stage?” Lou wondered aloud.
“The Fumble-The Stage is totally about being a geek. Social awkwardness,” Norman said without moving his eye away from the cards.
“Or maybe it refers to all the crazy, surface-unfortunate events of the past several months,” Lou noted, nudging Norman’s shoulder. “If you see this as being a reading for the last phase. I would say we’re pretty clearly at the beginning of this new you-living-up-here phase and this must be the last phase, the you-getting-fired-from-the-Academy phase that this is a reading of.”
“Mmm, indeed,” Norman agreed. “The Inevitable-The Engineer I think maybe, then, could refer to me engineering events to get me here, with you, so we can do all this and I can finally work on my albums and everything, without realizing that that’s what the end result was going to be. You know what I mean?”
“Perhaps,” Lou said. “I instinctually read that as just being, like – it’s the Future – you know?”
“And The Miracle-The Treasure, what do you make of that?”
Norman sat motionless, frozen by an overwhelming sensation, like a subtle hand on his heart’s shoulder, that this was not a reading about the present but somehow one from the future. He sat alone in the intuition for a moment, then decided to voice it. “Dude, I am overwhelmed, sort of frozen here by this awe-invoking realization, somehow intuitively, that this is not a reading about us right now but somehow one from the future, about the future, and that it has to do with us, but somehow obliquely. I don’t know how to explain it.”
“I think I’m picking that up, too,” Lou said, nodding, looking at the cards.
“Let’s continue the reading,” Norman said eagerly. “Let’s see what the next two phases will be.”
“Okay,” Lou said, looking up at Norman and seeming to be startled by the glass eye. His glance flitted between Norman’s eyes, and Norman held eye contact with him while it did. Then Lou said, “Do it, dude.”
“Okay, the second act,” Norman said dramatically, holding the next card hovering just above the top of the deck. “The Hero.”
“The Hero,” Lou repeated, watching Norman’s face.
“The Changeling,” Norman said, laying the card upon the carpet. “Modified by … The Diplomat.”
“Hmm.”
“The Villain: The Doctor … modified by The Darkness.” Norman looked up at Lou and grinned. “Dr. Darkness. That’s a badass villain.”
“Fuckin’ a it is,” Lou agreed, grinning at the cards. “Keep going.”
“The milieu is The Alien modified by The Rider; the nature of the conflict is The Quest modified by The Book. Word. Three supporting players are Fellowship modified by The Tradition, The Priest modified by The Miser and The Posse modified by The Escape.”
“The Posse modified by The Escape? That’s dope. I naturally read The Posse as, like, the Crew.” The Crew is Norman and Lou’s word for the tightest part of their friend group.
“Yeah, me too. The inciting incident is The Inquisitor modified by The Cave; the climax is The Skeleton modified by The Rival; and the denouement is The Charge modified by The Door.”
“Kicking down the fucking door into the third act, the next phase, which is…”
“The hero … The Bridge modified by The Red Herring; the villain … The Siren modified by Comedy.” They both laughed at the sight of the Comedy card. “Awesome. The milieu … Insanity modified by The Pit. Damn. Fucking crazy. The nature of the conflict … The Oracle modified by The Narrowness.”
“Badass,” Lou laughed, and slapped his knee lightly, bouncing like a little boy in his crouched position beside Norman.
“Three supporting players …” Now Lou was again reading the cards aloud so that they were speaking in unison as Norman laid them out. “The Expected Result modified by The Villain, The Vigilante modified by The Artifact and The Leap of Faith modified by The Explorer. The inciting incident … The Slumbering modified by The Cycle. The climax … The Farmer modified by The God. The denouement … The Dark Age … modified by The Dream.”
They sat in silence for some time after the last card, The Dream, had been placed, both scanning the field of cards with proud, astounded grins.
“What do you think this is?” Lou asked.
“Something,” Norman mused, eyeing the reading closely with his eye unfocused just a bit, as if somehow he could see the greater spirit, or the greater meaning of the reading that way. “It definitely means something.”
“I mean, obviously it, like all things, is intrinsically meaningless,” Lou noted, “insomuch as it’s really just randomness. It’s whether we find meaning in it or not.”
“No, there is meaning here,” Norman declared, certain that he was right. It was as if he could see the reading glowing with some great secret locked away from sight. “This is definitely something. But it’s like we don’t have all the information we need to understand this yet. Like we got an item we’re too low level to use, you know what I mean?”
“Totally,” Lou laughed, enjoying Norman’s role-playing-game reference.
“I mean, I don’t think we’re too low level to use this – we built it for fuck’s sake, and it obviously works. But this specific reading. This is something big, and I don’t think we have all the information to decipher it yet.”
“Let’s turn it into permanent information.”
Lou took a series of pictures of the reading with his digital camera, and Norman studied the images for weeks following, on his computer while he listened to his new album Illegible Signatures on the Texture of Time. Something powerful and intuitive that, at the time, he attributed to the guidance of his teacher entity, led him to obsess over the reading for a long time.
He retains a photographic memory of the reading, as well as an actual photograph of it on the desktop of his computer labeled first card reading.jpg.

Inspired toward mystic knowledge by his recent astral explorations, Norman read all he could find on shamanism and alchemy and mystic religions throughout the millennia. He also studied the science fiction of Philip K. Dick, particularly his exegesis – notes about the writer’s own mystical experiences that inspired his novel Valis – and the old texts it referenced. Norman wrote as above/so below on his hand in sharpee and kept reapplying it for several weeks. Another tagline he wrote often, this one mostly in notebooks, was fortune favors the bold.
The days at the Pool that summer were of the stuff that blooms into myth, the kind of days that grow golden and glisten with age. Norman and Imogen were deeply in love, and the poison of her mysterious, ancient wound had not yet begun to sting again through the anesthetics of young romance. He and Imogen held court over frequent gatherings of adolescent pilgrims from the Indiana Academy, feeding memes of mind-expansion, self-liberation and artistic enlightenment to that supple demographic (a much needed public service in the Midwest).
Norman felt like a demigod.

In his dreams, in those days, he always had a unicorn’s horn.