Fiction

I have my little place just as I like it, and I stick to a schedule.

06:30- Rise. Stretch. Write down dreams in a grey notepad next to the bed. Chase away the spectres. It’s still dark.

06:45- Meditation on the mat between the bed and the closet. Eyes closed, palms up, awareness focused. Wrangling monkey mind.

07:30- Wash. The hot, hot water soaks the cold out.

Dress. Second-hand, new ones every couple years.

07:45- Breakfast. By now, my little sun has begun to warm the kitchen with light. The contraption they set up here mimics the exact shade and quality of the light outside the pitch black panels that shell the house. I don’t know the technical word for them. Before she put me here, I didn’t know anything existed that could keep me blind. But as I said, the little sun doesn’t feel too different from what I remember. Though I suppose small changes have a way of going unnoticed over time and editing the past

Oatmeal. Eggs. Maybe a strawberrry or two, if they’ve brought some. After all this time, I’m still not tired of the fare. The eggs are real and fresh with bright yellow yolks you can only get from a tiny farm with just a few well-loved hens.

08:20: I wash the dishes in lukewarm water, and I think of nothing else but washing the dishes. First the glass, then spoon, plate, bowl, spatula, and pan. I make it last, the soap and sponge, the foam.

And then the waiting.

Sometimes I still think of all of them, or of her, and him.

There aren’t many of my sort left here. Not that I knew of, at least. There was the girl in Nepal whose hair sometimes grew in as cold, hard frost, but she was easily ignored. There was the old Jordanian man who, termite-like, survived on wood alone. He was nearly a hundred forty and was sure to die at any moment. There was a 5-year-old girl in Alabama being constantly, heavily sedated, for during her kindergarten class she had, or so the aide had said, caused her teacher’s eyes to explode in his skull.

Those who were left behind were all alone; the others had all gone already.

Me, I never cared to meet any of them. Not even as a young boy, when my eyes first started to change. There are no words for the way my mind warped to take in what my eyes were showing me – there are never enough words for it. A blood cell in my puppy’s foot; the contents on a botanist’s plate, down to peppercorns, through the window of Star Station. How does one 7-year-old explain that to another 7-year-old? How does a kid tell his father he can see the cholesterol choking his arteries through the infinitesimal windows of the stitch on his shirt and the pores on his skin? I didn’t even know what an artery was.

Vision first, then language, and fast.

She came when I was fourteen. Taller than me, visiting her mother, the mathematician, who had been snatched up by the Lab in Pasadena as soon as the labor embargo had lifted.

There was a skate park nearby where all the kids would congregate during the summer. The boys would pretend to know how to ride the quarter pipes, and the girls would pretend to care about their game of frisbee. The point was to pay the least attention to the other group, while still getting one among them to talk to you.

They called her Olive Oyl, cause she was at least 6 inches taller than the biggest boy, and skinny as a rail. They called me Squat cause I was at least 6 inches shorter than the next-shortest boy. She cared the least about frisbee, and I’d stand around with my skateboard, never once stepping on it with my full weight. I thought she seemed older, like a big sister. I could see every layer in every shaft of her tawny-brown hair, and I could tell which of the zits on her forehead she’d picked to scabs from 50 feet away. Still, I had no idea that she wanted to talk to me.

We wouldn’t have the conversation until many years later, lounging around her college dorm room during her last semester.

She was looking hard into the mirror, pulling at her face.

I told her: “It’s only skin.”

“Yes,” she said, “but it’s my skin.”

“For now.”
She looked at me hard and knew this was it. I was finally going to talk about the thing, the thing I had been getting at for a week by now, chip by chip.

She asked me what I meant, and it all came out at once.

“Right now it’s your skin, this totally crucial thing to your survival. But when I look at it, I see the tiny little fibres that make it up, and behind that I see the proteins, and behind that the acids, and behind that the cells, and the parts of the cells, and the molecules and atoms that make those up. And in this way, looking at you is absolutely no different from looking at a cat, a couch, the tip of a pencil. And even now I see great swathes of these cells flying off you all the time, so that there’s this haze surrounding you like a halo, like the Virgin Mary with a golden aura.”

She looked at me. “But it isn’t just me. It’s everyone. Right? You too.”

“Yes, it’s everyone. I know most people see each other as these static things, these dense, hard entities made of compact materials that, unless some violence occurs, change too slowly to notice except in photographs. I see that nothing is fixed. Your cells are flying away from you, and they decay into smaller parts, and where they land, they make something else. It’s like you’re throwing off seeds constantly, and the entire world is fertile earth where those seeds can transform.”

She took a hard look in the mirror, unphased, then strode across the room and sat hard on the bed. “How can you rely on anything, then?”

“I don’t know. Beneath the flurry of change, there’s this little core that is roughly reliable. But… no, but that’s wrong. Nothing is reliable. Not the soul of a person or the shape of one. But… isn’t that all right? I know that I exist– I think. So if someone is roughly made of this or of that, or if they act one way or another, well, that’s their business. I don’t need them to stay the same. I am anyway.

“It sounds lonely.”

“Does it? I think it’s lonelier to expect the entire world to be a way it isn’t. I don’t expect it to do anything except change.”

“What if it does? What if, suddenly, everything freezes?”

“Then we’ve all been obliterated by a supernova, or something.”

It took about another week before I’d gotten at it from every angle. She hugged me with all her billion fragments every time I made the long journey to one truth or another.

But I never got around to the truth about him. I still haven’t told anyone about that.

***

I can almost see it. I guess you’d call it deja vu. It’s these other versions of us, of the lives we have. But it’s every version except this one. We can’t even comprehend how big it is. Every alternative movement of every atom would have made is a reality being borne out somewhere.

Say you lost your husband in a car crash. There are a million realities being borne out now where he’s still alive, and you’re still together. And then there are a million realities where you died first, and where he was never born at all, and one in which you killed him, and one in which you married his brother, and one in which you married his sister, and one in which you had three pancakes instead of four that morning in late November, and one in which you grew old together and managed never to hate each other even once, and you died hand in hand.

I get glimpses every now and again, this impression like looking at 10,000 slides of the same, but slightly different image, pressed one on top of the other. I get this one little glance at it, and I can almost make out the shape, but the longer I look, the blurrier it gets. More and more slides are adding on top of it all the time, and before too long it’s all just a big impossible blur.

Can you imagine the power of such a thing? Can you imagine someone thinking they can pick and choose among those realities? It’d take a god to sort through them all and pick the right one to colonize. Cause that’s what it’d be– laying claim to something that isn’t yours, now or ever. Who you are and this life you have– you think you have a thing to do with it? It’s the chaos, it’s the atoms. We’re just their artwork. Mona Lisa doesn’t get to jump into Starry Night. It’s not where she was painted.

That’s what he wants. He wants to separate the slides, to find a way to flip through them like posters in a rack, pick the one he likes best, and go inside. But the rules are there, and they’re firmer than you’d think. They’re firmer than he thinks, and it cannot be allowed.

The question is: Is this progress? Is this capitalism at its finest? Survival of the fittest? Survival of the reality that prevents this from happening?

21:00- Undress. Wash up. Socks and underpants in the hamper. Pants, undershirt, and sweater folded neatly and tucked into the drawer. I read a chapter of a book. I close my eyes until morning.