Adan decided to stop eating.

For a while Adan had been depressed. He didn’t know why, but he had a hard time getting up. It was a hassle. He had a hard time going out. He had a hard time picking up groceries, and cooking, or even ordering at a restaurant. He would start walking and stop thinking, looking at every restaurant and none of them seeming right.

Adan had a hard time sleeping. It took effort to go to sleep. He had a hard time bathing, and watching television and being awake. So Adan thought he’d solve all of his problems and just stop eating.

Adan sat on his sofa for weeks. He had enough money for rent for about half a year. He wasn’t eating anyway, so his money went much further. As he sat on his sofa he watched his fat waste away, then his muscles. He could see his bones poking through his skin, weird angles making ridges and sharp points. Tendons working, shaking with effort as he adjusted his position.

Finally the skin became translucent, then sloughed off. Adan saw the dry bones beneath his skin, and then the skin was gone. When Adan finally got curious enough, he stood and went to a mirror. Where he had once had a face, he now had a skull. While Adan felt numb, the skull smiled at him. So Adan tried to smile. But it made no difference.

Adan went outside for the first time in six months, convinced people would stare at him. But it felt like people saw right through him. He strode around stark naked, rattling as he went, chattering at people with his rickety teeth, but no one heard a word.

Adan kept walking and walking. Eventually he ended up in the countryside, then a town. He walked to the bottom of a lake and sat there for a while, watching fish swim between his ribs. He walked to the oceanside, then up along the coast until he could catch a boat to Europe. He saw all the buildings, and looked at all the people, but no one would interact with him, not that he knew the languages. He walked from the Pyrenees to Kamchatka, then tried walking across the ocean and got swept away in the current. For a long time he floated in the ocean. Eventually a whale ate him up and he sat in the belly of the creature until it spat him out somewhere along a coast. Adan walked ashore and dripped dry fast. He was a skeleton after all.

Eventually years passed. His parents died, his friends. But he didn’t feel much about it. He wandered and wandered and wandered. Then, one day, he found himself in his old city, on his old block. He walked into his apartment and there was a family there, but they didn’t notice him.

Adan sat on their sofa and felt very, very tired. So tired, in fact, that he kind of felt hungry. Adan stood up, went to the fridge, and grabbed a bag of cold cuts. He started eating. It felt good. It was maybe the first thing he’d felt in decades. Then he grabbed a pastry from the counter and a bottle of beer from the fridge and downed them both. He realized he was thirsty. He drank and drank and drank, and found there was skin on his bones.

Adan ate until the family went to sleep. Then he kept eating. Muscle swelled under his skin, veins roped themselves around his limbs. Adan touched his face and felt lips and eyes. He smiled and it was a real smile, so he smiled wider. He ate and ate and ate and eventually the family woke up and found him in a pile of all their food. The dad screamed and kicked at the naked man grinning over their counter until he left and was picked up by the police.

The police had no record of this man. Adan looked in their rearview mirror and saw an unfamiliar face staring back at him. He kept grinning all the way to the station, where they gave him clothes and tried for an identity, but he didn’t remember who he used to be, and he didn’t look like that person anyway.

The police finished scratching their heads, helped the strange man register with the state, and sent him on his way. He got a job, and an apartment, and a car. He found a wife, and had three children, two which loved him and one which resented him. He kept grinning all the while. As Adan greyed he made many friends who loved him very much, and a few enemies who despised him.

One day, Adan swallowed a part of a chicken bone that pierced his innards. He began to bleed out without knowing, and died a couple days after. He was buried, and his skin rotted away, with the fat and the muscles and the tendons. And then the bones fell to dust.

“…at seven, can you believe it?”

Noah stared. He had never seen this woman. Or the bedroom he was stepping into. He looked back. He was definitely in his own bathroom. Chipped sink, counter, pink bathtub, cheap curtain. But he looked back at this woman. Those pendulous breasts, curved back. Not his wife. He didn’t have a wife.

“Are you even listening? Stuart??”

The woman turned and met Noah’s eyes and for a second everything was silent. Then she screamed.

“AAAAAAA”

then

“Who the FUCK are you?”

She threw a flat iron at Noah, who dodged, then fled the room continuing a scream that forced Noah back into his bathroom, door slamming behind him. He found himself in the tub, hyperventilating.

This was HIS TUB. Those were HIS HAIRS around the edge. The vent was making its NORMAL RATTLE.

Noah felt sick. He listened, but heard nothing out of the ordinary. He stood again, looked into his mirror, and saw his own face.

That was normal. Things were normal in here. He checked his cabinets. Normal. Sanitary products, drugs. His breathing slowed.

Noah walked to the bathroom door and pressed his ear against it. Nothing.

He called out “Hello?”

No response.

Noah cracked the bathroom door. He was hit with a wave of damp and mildew smell. Everything was dark except for a bright moon above him peering through the slats of a broken roof. He looked behind himself. The bathroom remained the same. Cautiously, Noah stepped forward. The floor creaked, damp wood. He stepped his second foot into this busted attic and looked up at the sky through the slats of wood, and the floor cracked beneath him. As he fell everything became bright. He tumbled down a ladder onto his back, staring up at an attic door snapping shut.

Noah laid a minute. He was in pain. He couldn’t breathe. He moaned. He forced a gasp. He sat up. Looking around he was in an office. Some kind of clinic back office. Rubbing his back he stood. No windows. Attic door, office door. Desk, chair, file cabinets. Pictures of a wife. A child.

“What.”

Noah had no clue what was happening. He had only needed to shit. He had washed his hands, opened a door, and been confronted with strange breasts and violence. This had not been the plan. He’d had a date.

“What the.”

Noah collapsed into the office chair and held his head in his hands.

“This is a hallucination.”

Noah looked at a digital clock on the desk. He had heard one way to tell if you’re in a lucid dream is to peer at a digital clock. If the numbers are nonsense, it’s a dream.

The numbers were quite clear. 6:16 PM. Maybe he could still get to his date. Sam was very pretty after all. The sex was mediocre but that’s something that improves after a few dates. But why is he thinking about that. Where the hell is he?

“Where the hell am I?”

Noah stood again and checked a book. Another trick he remembered about hallucinations and dreams is that reading books manufactures nonsense: the brain just makes up words and phrases, autosupplying the activity of reading without any of the meaning of it. Perfect. A Bible. Perfect. KJV, even better.

Noah flipped the book to a chapter he knew well. He scanned the text.

“There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.”

Ecclesiastes 1:11. Right where it should be, making perfect sense.

“What.”

He closed the Bible and walked to the office door. Opening it he found himself looking over an aquarium of substantial size. Enormous fish were boiling underneath, waiting for food. Noah scowled and closed the door, then sat back at the desk and began to hyperventilate. After two minutes of panic, he checked all the drawers in the room, found a bottle of cheap scotch, and pulled directly from it. This settled him. There was a phone on the desk. He decided to try it.

After a couple minutes of poking, he managed to dial out to Sam, the girl he was supposed to pick up in, well, now just a little under an hour and a half. It went to the machine. He dialed again. She picked up.

“…Hello?”

“Oh!” Noah was relieved “Hey, Sam, sorry. I’m having a really weird day.”

“Noah?”

“Yeah.”

“Why are you calling me from Albuquerque?”

“…Albuquerque?”

“Are you pulling some shit on me?”

“No, Sam, look. I have no idea what’s going on. I opened my door and suddenly I was in a strange house.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“You’re right, it doesn’t make any sense.”

“I know I’m right, what shit are you trying to pull on me?”

“I’m not trying to pull any shit on you, Sam, I’m fucking confused.”

“… do you need help?”

“I think I do.”

“Look I don’t know what I can do for you. I don’t know why you’re in fucking New Mexico. Do you expect me to buy a flight? This is idiotic. If you wanted to cancel the fucking date you could’ve just told me like an adult.”

“I… look, Sam, I like you, it’s why I called you, I have no idea what’s going on and-“

“You’re a fucking asshole, Noah. If you need help, call the cops. I’m going out whether you take me or not. And if you’re not taking me out tonight, don’t call me again.”

The line cut.

Noah stared at the phone. His guts sank. “Bitch.”

He slammed the phone on the receiver and rubbed his face.

He couldn’t call the police, he was technically trespassing. He couldn’t call anyone, they’d all respond like Sam.

Noah whimpered, then took another pull on the bottle. Gripping its neck, he rose to his feet. Once more he walked to the office door, reached out, twisted the knob. Pulled.

On the other side was an extremely long hallway, lit with bland fluorescents, blue and buzzing. White walls, rows of doors on either side, each with a plaque. He could not see the hall’s end.

Noah stood at the doorway, staring.

Noah took one step through. Then another. He let go of the door behind him and it snapped shut. He shuddered.

He turned around and tried the door he’d just come out of. The plaque on this door read “EXIT” and had a stairwell symbol next to it. Opening it he found a walk-in freezer. He closed the door again and choked back a sob. He opened the door again. A bar opened before him. About 30 patrons. Dingy. The bartender saw him, saw the bottle in his hand and that Noah wasn’t wearing pants. The bartender started to yell. Noah closed the door and slouched against it.

Noah was going insane. Certainly that was the case. None of this could be real. None of it was real. Noah slammed his head against the wall, hard. It felt real. He stood and began to open all the doors in the hall, closing them in rapid succession. Opera house, bank vault, hospital, McDonald’s, family home, slaughterhouse, factory floor, movie theater. No consistency. Different languages, different smells, all. It didn’t make any sense. He hit his head against a door again and again and ended up stunning himself such that he passed out, drunk and mildly concussed, under the buzzing fluorescents of the long hall.

***

When Noah woke again nothing had changed save a headache and some blood crusted to his forehead. He rose and moaned. Then he remembered where he was. He was slightly hungover. The scotch was still half-full. He gripped it, then said aloud
“No way.”

There was no way. No way his prior night was real. The lights’ hum was dizzying. Noah had no clue how long he’d been out. He keeled over, vomited hard, wiped his mouth, and reoriented.

Noah approached a door. This one had “Supply F” written on it. His hand shook. The hand gripped its doorknob. Turned the doorknob. Eased open the door. And found a department store before him. He walked in, and the door slammed shut behind him. Leaving the dressing room area, a clerk spotted him.

“Oh, uh, sir-“

Noah blinked, “Yeah?”

“Sir… I think you left your uh, pants, in the dressing room.”

He looked down at his boxers. He wasn’t even wearing his good boxers, they were the embarrassing ones with dogs doing tricks that opened in front too easily.

“Oh, haha, yeah. Um.”

The clerk looked nervous. She eyed the bottle of J&B he was gripping.

“Sir, I didn’t let you into one of these rooms. We ask that you let us help you into the dressing rooms. I can go back to the room and get your pants for you, they lock automatically.”

“Ah! Please!”

She disappeared behind him and Noah walked straight into the Macy’s, ducking between the racks of clothes until he could find a good section of men’s pants. Leafing through jeans on a rack, he found his size and pulled it out, revealing the face of a hiding child. The child put his index finger to his lips, and whispered an urgent “Shhhh!!”

Noah looked at the child and solemnly nodded, put the jeans on, tore the tags away, and made the exact same gesture to the child. “Shhhh!!”

The child nodded solemnly, and Noah pulled the surrounding jeans back over the kid to cover the hole he’d made with his theft.

Better-oriented, slightly dignified, Noah set out to find shoes. He pulled socks straight off a rack, popped them on his feet. He found some running shoes. He found a backpack, slipped the whiskey in it. Then he wandered into the larger mall area.

People were all around him, swarming. He had no idea what state he was in, if he was in America still. The storefronts were familiar but could have been from anywhere in the world. The language was still English. He wandered forward. He needed water.

Finding bathrooms, he sipped from a fountain then realized he had to urinate. He absently pushed into a men’s room door and found himself in a Japanese metro station. Surprised he let go of the door and it slammed shut behind him. Noah yelled in anger. No one looked up. He pulled the scotch from his backpack, took a slug, and replaced it. A train arrived. The door opened, a crowd pushed past him. Faces and limbs, no one looking. But Noah could see into the train. It looked like a train, a normal door. He became excited. He pushed onto the train. But he was in a bathroom. A very nice bathroom. But not the train. He screamed. But at least he could piss. He found his way to the toilet, urinated, washed his hands, regarded himself in the mirror. He looked bad.

Noah showered. Luxuriated in the scent of expensive soap, steamed out, washed the bit of blood from his face. Toweled off lavishly. Redressed himself. Filled a bottle with water. Put it in his backpack. Braced himself. Opened the bathroom door. Found himself in a greenhouse. Grimaced. Walked forward.

***

Noah was in a palace. Noah had been in this palace for 3 days, but could not explore the palace. He knew it was a palace because he could see out the windows. He was on one of the upper floors of a lived-in portion. Nobles still occasionally live in their palaces it turns out, just not all the time.

Noah was living out of his backpack. Using a hotplate, he cooked stolen food while lounging on the enormous four poster and watching cable television. He didn’t know anyone still had cable television, but it made sense that if anyone did it would be a noble who lived in a musty palace.

Noah had not talked to or seen anyone in five days. He had not bathed in six. He had been shitting in bags and throwing them through an open door into random rooms all over the world. He felt feral. But he lay in the lap of luxury. The threadcount was remarkable. This room had tapestries. He would look from the television to the tapestries and think.

The tapestries were a series, he supposed, on what is best in life. In one, a man sat on a throne with his family surrounding him. In another, the same family ate voraciously. In another the father and mother drank together with friends. In another, the father and mother seduced one another. Noah supposed the threadcount on the tapestries was also remarkable.

Noah had found an excellent bottle of cognac on the first night and worked his way through it assiduously. He took down the tapestry about drinking. He wrapped himself in it, and put himself into a stupor. He sang, and screamed, and danced. He woke up naked with a headache. He often woke up naked with a headache.

The second day he spent pulling the fanciest clothes from the nobles’ closet with a long stick, terrified that walking into the closet would force him into a new location. He tried on robes and tuxedoes and dresses and jewels. He got drunk in a tiara and hosiery, draped in diamonds and wearing garters. He masturbated vigorously into the exceptional fabrics and huffed the sheets deeply, relishing in how he stained such beautiful things with alcoholic sweat.

On the third day he attempted to write letters. There were gorgeous fountain pens and stationary. He ruined several nibs before figuring out how to write with them, then couldn’t think of anything to write. He stained his skin with the ink, finished the cognac, and watched terrible movies laying in bed.

Four nights in he was running out of food. He had to move on. Noah laid in bed and wept for 30 minutes. He passed out heaving, woke up with his eyelids stuck together. Then he got dressed, packed his things, lit the family tapestry on fire, and walked out the door.

***

Noah hadn’t found a reasonable place to sit in days. He was on a losing streak. Every time he opened a door it was to some literal garbage room, places where garbage was held before it was taken out. It got to a point where he believed the rules of whatever the universe was doing to him had changed. Maybe he was meant to live in garbage, with garbage, as garbage.

This can’t have gone on for more than five days, however it felt like a week. He had little way of keeping track of time. He’d briefly stolen a phone, but left it in another country. The time zones shifted relentlessly, and Noah never saw the light of day in this period. There weren’t windows in these garbage pits.

He slept on garbage bags, they were much softer than the ground. Eventually he got used to the smell. Many don’t realize this, but garbage is actually warm. Put your hand into a pretty-full trash can next time you can, and feel the difference in air temperature between whatever room you’re in and the space just over the garbage in a can. You’re feeling an exothermic reaction, the garbage is decaying in the can, and generating heat.

Noah, approximating he was in some late-autumn month, started to feel this was nice. Finding a heavier trash bag with more biomatter in it than the others, and more structural integrity, became a bit of a treasure hunt.

Further, piles of garbage are infinitely malleable. You can make a bed shaped to whatever position you want to.

When he tired of wandering into trash compactors, trash storage rooms, trash burning rooms, sewers, and falling into garbage cans, he would construct himself a throne, head upright, arms sprawled out, legs sprawled out. A recliner-throne situation. Then he would sleep or sit in such repose, and wait.

At one point Noah would enter new trash rooms just to find new garbage bags to shape into thrones. He became very picky, would enter a new space, make a perfect throne over hours, then leave it just to do it again in another.

It got to a point where he opened a door one day and saw a swimming pool, then immediately closed the door, disappointed. He opened the door again, found a bathroom, sighed, and walked through it.

***

Noah was in a restaurant. It was a nice restaurant. Noah was wearing a cream turtleneck, black jeans, and Chuck Taylors. He was eating a steak. He was staring at the bartender. The bartender was staring at him. A waitress appeared.

“Do you need anything, sir?”

Noah cleared his throat.

“Tell your bartender to fuck himself.”

“…Sir?”

“You heard me.”

“I’m not telling him to go fuck himself.”

“Well fuck you.”

“Sir, you need to pay your check.”

“You need to shut the fuck up.”

The waitress paused, blinked, then walked away. Noah took another bite of his steak.

The waitress returned with a large man in a suit jacket with a nametag on it. The nametag read “BARTHOLOMEW”.

“Sir, we would like you to pay and leave.”

Noah bunched a portion of tablecloth up in his hand and wiped his mouth on it. He turned and fixed BARTHOLOMEW with a level gaze.

“Why?”

“You’re abusing our staff and have been eating this one steak for over 4 hours besides.”

“Is it a crime to take a long time to eat a steak?”
“No, b-“

“And I thought this was America. I thought we had free speech.”

“Behavior doesn’t have to be criminal to be offensive or abusive.”

Noah and BARTHOLOMEW stared each other down.

“Fuck you.”

“Sir, p-“

“No, fuck you. And fuck her.”

The waitress cowered behind her manager.

“Sir, pay and leave. We’re calling the police.”

“Call the fucking cops, I don’t care. They can’t do anything to me.”

Noah rose. BARTHOLOMEW was a big dude. probably had 4 inches on Noah, 40 pounds. Still, when Noah advanced, BARTHOLOMEW retreated, and the waitress behind him.

“Sir, please.”

“Please what.”

“There’s no reason to-“

“You literally can’t understand my reasons. I have to show you my reasons.”

“What does that mean? What are you even saying?”

They were at the front door of the restaurant. People were staring. BARTHOLOMEW stood with his back to the door. Noah smiled.

“I’ll be leaving now.”

“Wai-“

Noah opened the door. BARTHOLOMEW lunged for his wrist. It threw BARTHOLOMEW off balance, and Noah pulled the extended limb toward him as he fell backward, holding onto the unfortunate manager. The two fell through the door together into a drab room, slamming into a wall. Someone was screaming in Norwegian.

BARTHOLOMEW pushed Noah hard, and Noah flew into a table, flinging coffee and documents everywhere. The Norwegian screaming increased in volume. Noah lay on his back for a good 10 seconds breathing as BARTHOLOMEW struggled to his feet. A man now soaked in coffee stood about 5 feet back from him behind an upended table, eyes wide, speaking in a language only he knew.

BARTHOLOMEW looked around.

“Where the fuck are we?”

Noah grinned.

“I have absolutely no clue.”

The Norwegian man began to gesture toward the door. BARTHOLOMEW opened it. A sheet of pure disorienting white stretched out to the horizon. It was bitterly cold and very bright. He closed the door again, then opened it again. Then closed it. He looked at Noah.

“What. What?”

The Norwegian man attempted English. “Americans?”

Noah sat up.

“Yeah.”

“Why here?”

“I’m really not sure.”

BARTHOLOMEW opened and closed the door again.

“Where are we?”

“This is Troll. Your station far, far away. How you get here?”

“We’re not sure. Sorry about the trouble. Bart, don’t go outside.”

BARTHOLOMEW stared.

“What?”

“See the map?” Noah indicated a large map of Antarctica on the wall.

“Yeah?”

“We’re probably right about here.”

“… o-oh?”

The Norwegian man agreed.

“Oh.”

“I can get us out of this, Bart.”

“What do you mean? What did you get me into?”

“Nothing serious. I just wanted to see if I could do it.”

“Do what?”
“Take a person with me.”

“What the fuck are you talking about.”

“Hold my hand.”

BARTHOLOMEW recoiled.

“This is bullshit. You’re lying to me. I have no idea what’s going on but none of it makes any sense. YOU,” he pointed at the Norwegian, “are LYING TOO. You’re working together.”

Noah looked at the Norwegian, who looked at him, and both looked back to BARTHOLOMEW.

“Bart, you really need to calm down.”

“FUCK you, what’s going ON?”

“If you don’t calm down you’re not getting back home, period.”

“What does that MEAN?”

The Norwegian man disappeared into the cabin, and after 20 seconds of continued shouting returned with a shotgun aimed at BARTHOLOMEW.

“Be calm.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

“You both leave now.”

“Okay.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“No, it’s fine. We’re leaving.”

“OUT THERE??”

“Kind of. I’ll show you.”

Noah grabbed BARTHOLOMEW’s hand, opened the door, and saw inside of an ER. He closed the door, opened it again, and found himself at a train station in what looked Germany. They exited. The door banged shut behind them.

BARTHOLOMEW threw up.

“Oh, come on, control yourself.”

People in the terminal backed up around them. An attendant sighed.

“Let’s go.”

The two sat on a bench.

“How the hell did I end up in… Germany? Wait, where were we just now?”

“We were in Troll research station in Antarctica. Now we’re in… I think Frankfurt.”

“H-how?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

The two sat in silence for a minute, staring at a scowling janitor mopping BARTHOLOMEW’s puke.

“Why did you… drag me into whatever this is.”

“Honestly, just to see if I could.”

“Oh.”

More silence.

Noah stood.

“Alright, you should be able to get to the airport easily from here. Do you have cell service?”

“… it’s fucking international roaming but sure.”

“Yeah, you’re pretty set. See you.”

“Okay.”

Noah walked to the terminal door, opened it, and stepped through.

***

Noah sat on benches at metros, in restaurants, in malls, in museums, and stared at streams of people as they went by until he could not tell one face from another. The world stretched before him, an infinite hallway through which he walked with no recognition. One door led to another and another. There was no destination. Each room was a temporary stop, something to peer into, maybe stay a night, then leave. Home was whatever he could fold himself into for a few hours before it unfolded and spilled him out.

Noah would sleep in piles of clothes, in magnificent beds, under newspaper and garbage. Noah would eat caviar and truffles and bags of stale buns and half eaten takeout from a garbage bag. There was no constance in circumstance. The clothes he wore changed with mood and availability. He did not recognize himself looking into a mirror. Nothing about him reminded Noah of himself. He memorized the colors in his eyes, the shapes of his finger prints, the ridges in his cheeks.

The world morphed around him and within him.

Noah thought about cutting off his fingertips, wearing colored contacts, beating his face against a wall until the shape changed. Noah wondered if any person was real, if he was real, if his name was Noah, who had named him Noah? A dead woman who signed his name into some government vault 10,000 miles away.

Noah sipped coffee. Everyone here was Cambodian. He was in Cambodia. Completely unintelligible language. Easy to point and grunt though. Don’t have to convert to local currency if you overpay 10x in foreign currency. Coffee is everywhere. Money is everywhere. People are paying for coffee everywhere. Sitting and drinking it everywhere.

Noah walked into a hotel room and found a man laying on his bed fully clothed, asleep. Noah sat next to him, and stared at the television. A string of ads mixed with the movies. He couldn’t really tell them apart. Noah raided the minibar and got drunk. He pissed in the corner. He opened the bathroom door, walked through, and found himself in an identical hotel room, only with no man on the bed. He heard a door slam through the wall. Seconds later a man yelled. The he yelled again. Then he made a phone call to reception. Furious. Something about intruders, urine. Noah grinned. He locked his door, opened the minibar. Maybe he did exist.

Noah passed out, woke up with a headache to pounding on the door.

Noah walked to the bathroom door, opened it, and stepped through.

***

Noah was bored. He stared down from the fourth floor of a mall and thought about jumping. Nobody would care. He wouldn’t care. He stared. He was tired. It would be easy enough. He’d just land on his neck, or his back. He could land on his ass too, he’d seen a video of a fall where that was enough, it snapped the spine in multiple places.

Noah lifted his left foot and tested out the flexibility of his pants. They were pretty good. He could hoist himself over the handrail easily, hold on, adjust his position, and probably land exactly how he wanted to. He took off his backpack and placed it against a nearby bench. He braced himself, grabbed the handrail tightly. Bent his arms to test a hoisting motion. Suddenly, a hand touched his arm.

“So what are you trying to do here?”

A woman’s voice.

Noah stared blankly ahead.

“I don’t really know.”

“Why don’t you sit with me for a second.”

“… Okay.”

Noah sat next to the woman on the bench. There was a potted fern next to his right. He reached out to fondle a leaf.

The woman asked, “What were you thinking about just then?”

Noah thought a moment, then responded “Literally nothing. Nothing was happening in my head. I kind of wanted to extend that feeling.”

Both were quiet for a minute. Then, “Were you going to jump?”

“I don’t think so. I think I was just testing it out.”

“Okay.”

More silence. People passed.

“Why would you want to jump?”

Noah pushed air through his nose.

“Eh, it wouldn’t make any difference. It was just something to try. Never done it before. I’m actually really, really, really bored.”

“…you wanted to jump because you’re bored?”

“I’m just looking for a shakeup. Or something to stop the tedium.”

“There’s no reason for someone your age to be that kind of bored.”

“Yeah. I mean. I’ve been to literally every continent multiple times. You know? I’ve seen everything. I’ve seen most faces in most places. I walk, and I walk, and I walk. I’ve seen so, so much.”

“So… you travel?”

Noah laughed.

“Constantly. Constantly. You know what’s surprising about total, unending novelty is the crushing boredom. You need some stability to appreciate change over time. You need to be seen and known by people around you. Otherwise everything kind of blends into an endless dream. Things don’t carry meaning.”

“Well, why do you travel so much?”

“I don’t really know. But I can show you if you want.”

“What does that mean?”

“Follow me.”

Noah stood, replaced his backpack. The woman stood too, nervously. They walked together to a bathroom door. The woman asked “So? What were you going to show me?”

Noah smiled.

“I’m going to go through that door and I will disappear. You will never see me again.”

“What?”

“When I walk through that door, I will be immediately transported to some other room, anywhere in the world. When that door closes, I will be gone. You won’t be able to see where I’m going, but I promise that’s what will happen.”

“… o-oh. Huh. I don’t think that’s going to happen. Do you want to go somewhere else? Maybe we should call your family?”

“If you wanted, I could take you with me. That might solve some of the boredom.”

The woman backed away.

“No, I think I’ll stay here. Why don’t you go into that bathroom.”

“I suppose I will. One last thing though.”

“What?”

“Thank you. I probably would’ve jumped. You probably just saved my life.”

“Oh, you’re welcome.”

Noah stepped forward and hugged the woman tightly. She wrapped her arms around him and hugged back, tentative at first, then with her soul. The hug lasted two minutes. Noah cried silently. The woman just hugged. Both of their minds blanked.

Eventually Noah released the hug, then the woman.

Noah wiped his eyes.

“Thanks.”

Noah walked to the bathroom door, opened it, and stepped through.

***

Noah stared at the dog. The dog stared at Noah. Shitzu. Waggly. No barking, huge eyes. Adorable.

Noah approached the dog, checked the collar. Lala. A shitzu named Lala. Alternating brown-cream and white hair. Tufts of hair, well-groomed. Adorable.

Noah picked up the dog. She still didn’t bark. The tail kept wagging. Noah nuzzled the dog and cooed.

“Ooooh Lala Lala! Oooh Lala! Whosa goodgirl?? Whoooosa good girl!!!”

Lala responded favorably to this, licking Noah’s face. This pleased Noah.

Noah realized this was the best he’d felt in a month. At least. Maybe many months. This gave him an idea.

“How would you like to live with me, Lala?”

Lala continued to lick his face. Noah put her down and started looking for things. A leash was on the counter. Dog food in a cabinet. Treats. Excellent.

Noah packed his backpack with everything Lala would need, then leashed the dog. In the near distance, he heard a car pull into the driveway. Noah picked Lala up, walked to the garage door, opened it, and stepped through.

***

Life with Lala started off brilliantly. The dog was easy to love, and loved him back with the absolute adoration of a very stupid shitzu. He managed to keep her well-groomed for a while, although the hair grew out with fair speed, and he had no skill with scissors, so it lost that show-animal luster and texture. Still, they did everything together. They slept together, ate together. They went to the bathroom together, although Noah had to teach the dog to urinate indoors.

It was good to have a companion. It was good to have an animal to take care of. Noah had known how lonely he was, but hadn’t realized how much care he had to give. Lala depended on him, and in a sense he depended on her. She oriented him. The dog remembered he was around, remembered little commands, showed loyalty, understood his moods. He’d felt so misunderstood for so long. An alien figure.

He didn’t have to tell the same stories to Lala again and again and again. He didn’t have to make shit up about his life to appease Lala, get into or out of situations. He loved Lala, and Lala loved him.

Lala loved tins of fish. Lala loved being spanked a little. Lala loved a silly sound Noah made with his mouth, where he pursed his lips and whistled while humming. She’d cock her head and make a little bark, run in circles. He would chase her.

They lived together for two months, wandering the planet. Eventually, though, she became less healthy. Noah didn’t know why. The dog became lethargic, began losing weight. Her hair became patchy. She would whimper, something Noah had never heard. Noah stopped sleeping. Noah stopped eating. He was despondent.

Noah opened doors until he found a veterinarian. He walked in, face wet with tears, and asked if his Lala could be seen. They had an opening in two hours. Noah hugged Lala with deep feeling, trying to press every ounce of love he could into the dog. He tried to impress a spiritual fullness into her, a certainty of joy and affection that would last a lifetime. Then her name was called. He kissed her on the head one last time. He asked the vet to carry her into his office. The vet picked her up, opened the office door, went in, and beckoned Noah follow.

Noah walked to the office door, made eye contact with Lala, and stepped through.

***

Noah was in a house. It was an new house. The sofa was nice. Everything was nice. It was covered with sleeping 20-somethings. Open concept, few doors. Noah went to the kitchen to fix himself a drink. There was a girl in there. She was 20-something. She was fixing herself a drink. She looked up.

“Oh, hey. I’m always the last one awake, I thought I was alone.”

Noah smiled.

“Me too.”

She passed the vodka to Noah who poured it into a red solo cup, shot it, then took a second pour to mix. The girl laughed.

“Didn’t get enough earlier?”

“I was holding off for bed.”

“Isn’t that a waste?”

“Nah, you want to get nice and drunk to be able to sleep on the floor.”

She looked at him coyly.

“Not enough game to score a bed?”

Noah grinned.

“I hadn’t met anyone here I particularly wanted to go to bed with.”

The girl sipped her drink.

“Well, why didn’t we meet earlier?”

“To be honest I don’t know anyone here. I just walked in through an upstairs office and came down to see what was going on.”

“… You live here?”

“Oh, no. I kind of do this weird thing.”

The girl frowned.

“No, not that kind of weird.”

“What kind of weird.”

“I walk through a door, and I can end up literally anywhere in the world. Once the door closes behind me, I can’t go back to the room I was in.”

She smiled again.

“Stop fucking with me. You’re Sean’s friend, right?”

Noah started. He looked around.

“… actually, where are we right now?”

“… seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Like, Sean’s house? The kitchen?”
“No, no. State and city. And what’s Sean’s last name?”

“You’re fucking with me right.”

“Not at all.”

“We’re in Dallas.”

“Texas?”

“Texas.”

“Sean Haney?”

“Sean Haney.”

“Holy shit yeah I know Sean Haney. I’m Sean’s friend.”

“Duh. Why else would you be here.”

“Oh god, do you know where he is?”

“Yeah, this is his house. He fucking left, dude where were you all night?”

“I was in Taipei.”

“Bullshit.”

“I swear to you I-“

“Prove it, show me pics.”

“I uh, don’t have a phone.”

“You’re so full of SHIT!”

“No for real! Wait, I do have something…”

Noah pulled out a half-drunk bottle of kaoliang and some treats.

“You can buy any kind of liquor anywhere online.”

“Yeah but I stole this from a bar in Taipei.”

The girl eyed him and finished her drink.

Noah extended a hand.

“I’m Noah.”

She put down her drink.

“I’m Esme.”

She grabbed his hand and shook it.

“You want to try the stolen booze?”

“… yeah.”

Noah poured a knuckle of kaoliang into each cup. They cheers’d and drank. Both grimaced.

Esme coughed.

“This shit sucks.”

Noah nodded.

“Yup.”

“Couldn’t you’ve stolen something tastier?”

“Probably, but the tasty shit I’d tried is boring. I wanted something local.”

“Well next time I get to choose the drink.”

“Next time?”

She grinned.

“Why don’t you take me to Taipei and I’ll buy you something so you don’t have to steal it.”

“Well, I uh, I can’t control where we end up. We could end up anywhere.”

“Literally anywhere?”

“Yeah, but it can’t be anywhere outside. We’ll end up in a room somewhere.”

“That sounds fun.”

“I’ve been calling it a curse.”

“Well, why don’t you show me.”

“I’m calling it a curse, this is some heavy shit. I literally can’t go back to living a normal life. I haven’t seen anyone since I started wandering. I’ve been terribly, terribly alone.”

“Oh yeah, then how did you end up at Sean’s house tonight?”

“Literally chance. Or like, whatever entity put this curse on me has a sense of humor or fate or something. I have no clue.”

“Cute.”

“You’re kinda making me mad.”

“You’re a little cuter when you’re mad.”

“Okay.”

Noah frowned and took another pull from the kaoliang. Esme pouted.

“Are you actually mad at me?”

“A little.”

“Are you actually serious right now?”

“Yeah, my life is absolute chaos. Nothing makes any sense. Nothing has made sense for a couple years now. I’m literally here by chance, and I can’t even see Sean.”

“Alright. Well, show me the curse is real.”

“Look, to show you I’d have to take you somewhere pretty random, and there’s no guarantee you’d be able to make it back. You might have to buy a plane ticket at some point or something. Like, we may not have power for a few days. Once I ended up just getting sheds over and over an-“

“Yeah, I mean it. Take me. I’m bored.”

“Well. I know how terrible boredom can be.”

“I’m fucking desperate.”

“And who am I to refuse a desperate woman?”

Noah took a look around the kitchen and sighed. He went to the fridge and emptied a bunch of cold cuts and fruit into his backpack. Then he grabbed two beers, tossed one to Esme, and grabbed a bottle of Tito’s from the counter.

“Are you ready?”

“Yeah I’m ready.”

“You’re not fucking ready.”

“I’m so fucking ready.”

The two approached the front door of the house. Noah stowed the vodka in a backpack sidepocket, then grabbed Esme’s hand.

“You’re awfully forward.”

“This is how it works.”

Noah crushed the beer, then tossed the can on the floor. He grabbed the doorknob, twisted, and pushed through.

***

Esme screamed.

Noah laughed.

“WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING.”

“Well, it looks like we’re in a shed. I told you, fate’s been fucking with me lately, and watch.”

Noah grabbed her had again and opened the door, stepping through. The door slammed shut behind them.

“ANOTHER SHED!!! Aahahaha!”

Esme wrenched her hand from Noah’s and wrenched her phone from her pocket, turning on the light. They were, in fact, in a dark shed.

“I fuckin’ told you.”

Noah slouched against the wall and took another slug from his bottle. Esme started to hyperventilate. Noah sighed, stood and said, “Hey, calm down, have another dr-“

Esme yelled “I THOUGHT YOU WERE FULL OF SHIT!”

Noah grimaced, “Yeah.”

“Okay.”

Esme calmed.

“Alright. Can you take me back?”

“No, I sa-“

Esme checked her cell signal. Zero. She approached the shed door, opened it and peaked out. It was bright outside. White moonlight washed over the landscape, a set of hills speckled with haystacks. She wandered out and looked around. It was a gorgeous night. Noah remained in the shed.

“We really are in the middle of fucking nowhere.”

“Yeah. That happens. I can change locations infinitely, but i’m at the complete whim of whatever’s guiding me.”

“Sure. Full moon. Huh.”

Esme returned to the shed and slouched next to Noah.

“This is fucking weird.”

“I know.”

The two sat in silence for a minute. Esme grabbed the vodka from Noah’s backpack and took a swig.

“Alright, well. Is this where we’re sleeping for the night?”

“Not necessarily. We can just keep opening the door until a better spot shows up.”

“But it’s possible that it will just continue to be sheds for a long time. Or sewers. Or literally anything else.”

“Yeah.”

“This isn’t so bad.”

“It’s really not.”

“And I’m pretty drunk.”

“Me too.

“Let’s stay here tonight.”

“Alright.”

***

Esme stared at Noah. Sun filtered through gaps in the shed roof and painted his face with early morning light. She thought he looked like a portrait. She admired his nose.

Esme began to rummage through Noah’s backpack, found a bottle of water, and drank about a quarter liter. Her head didn’t hurt but she wasn’t completely free of last night’s debauch. She checked her phone. No bars. 38% battery. Not great. No clue where she was. She sighed, stood up, and opened the shed door.

The countryside was gorgeous. She assumed somewhere in Appalachia. She’d been out here when she was a child and remembered the trees. Autumn was approaching. Most were still deep green, but bright patches of orange and gold heralded change. The air smelled gorgeous.

It was 10:28 AM. She hated her job anyway.

She looked back into the shed. Noah was looking at her. The sun was streaming down on him. She returned.

“Good morning.”

“Morning.”

“Weird night.”

“Pretty normal for me.”

“You’re pretty used to taking strange women through random portals and stranding them around the world?”
“I wouldn’t say used to.”

“But you do this.”

“Not really. This is kind of a first for both of us. I have dragged a man with me once. That was a test though.”

“So why am I special?”

“You were adamant.”

Esme regarded the man as he dug through his backpack, pulling lukewarm deli slices from plastic bags.

“You want some?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Your loss.”

He ate aggressively and swigged at his water. She reconsidered. She approached Noah, put out her hand, and he found an unopened bag to press into it.

“Soppressata?”

“It’s better than these dry chicken slices.”

She sat next to him and started to work on the meat. The fat had warmed. The soppressata tasted good.

“This is my first picnic in a decade.”

“You deserve it.”

Noah swallowed and looked at Esmy, thoughtful.

She swallowed.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s not what that look means.”

“Alright. You’re awfully calm all things considered.”

“Well, I’ve had a bit of time to think. Going crazy right now could get me killed. I mean, maybe I’m just acting calm to assuage until I get back to a place with cell phone signal.”

“Possible.”

More silent eating. Then

“I’ve been really lonely.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Really, really lonely.”

“It looked like you have a bunch of friends.”

“I have some. I never really see them. I’ve been catching up, but I don’t live around any of them.”

“Oh.”

“I moved away for work, but then I got a new job I could do anywhere. Then I lost that job. Now I just move around.”

“You don’t have a job?”

“Well, not after today.”

“Sorry.”

“I don’t care.”

The two sat and passed water between them, watching wind carry over the grass through the trees.

“You know, I haven’t seen the sun with my naked eyes in months.”

“No?”

“Nah, when I open a door I don’t see what’s on the other side.”

“Weird.”

“When you do I can see the hills, and the sun, whatever. But the moment I step through the door everything changes.”

“…Will you show me again?”

Noah looked at Esme.

“Are you sure? I mean we’d have to again to figure out where to drop you off, it could take a few days or minutes depending on luck.”

“Yeah, I don’t care. I think I’d rather see what you’ve been up to.”

“…Okay.”

The two stood, brushed off their clothes. Noah took Esme’s hand.

“You ready?”

“Yeah.”

The pair walked to the shed door, smelled the air, and stepped through.

***

Noah stared at Esme. It was strange sleeping near someone again.

He had slept in public places over the last year or so, sure, but not next to any one person consistently.

They were in a schoolbus in a depot. It was 70 F and breezy with the windows opened.

It’s not like two days had changed his life. It’s not as though two days were a marriage or even a relationship. He didn’t know what was happening really. It couldn’t last. But she was with him. She had been with him for two fragmented days and three nights. She was gorgeous in the sun. He kind of ached.

Noah opened his water and drank. He opened a book but his eyes just passed over the words. His mind was spinning.

Esme stirred. Noah focused on the book. She looked up at him. He looked up at her.

She sighed “Morning!” and stretched.

“Morning. Water?”

“Yeah.”

He tossed her a bottle.

“You know we don’t have to steal everything, I have money.”

“So do I.”

“Money that you stole.”

“Sure but a man walks into a bank vault, all that money’s insured. It doesn’t matter.”

“It’s not just from bank vaults.”

“Well. Yeah. I’m just not in the habit of thinking of other people as real anymore.”

“Okay, Noah.”

They sat in silence.

“Why didn’t we stay in that empty house?”

“It was creepy.”

“Okay, Noah.”

She smiled at him. He smiled at her. She sat up, vaulted over to his seat, and pushed against him. His heart jumped. She looked at him hard.

“Why haven’t you made a move on me yet?”

“I um, thought this situation was odd enough to begin with. I didn’t want to put any pressur-“

Esme kissed Noah on the mouth, hard. His mind went blank. It was a long kiss. She pulled away, they looked at each other, and went back for another. Tongues touched. Lips traced. Bodies pressed. Then she pulled away, wry grin fixed.

Noah stammered “T-thanks.”

Esme laughed.

“You’re a fucking nerd. Let’s get some food.”

The two got up, straightened their clothes, walked to the front of the bus. Esme pulled the knob opening the door, then grabbed Noah’s hand. They walked to the door, and saw a zoo enclosure. A lion approached. Male. Huge.

“You know, no one’s ever come through one of these doors without me touching them. I don’t know if it’s possible. You want to see?”

“Oh god, Noah, no fucking stop.”

“You sure?”

The lion trotted toward them, accelerating.

“Noah PLEASE.”

“Please what.”

Esme pulled the lever and closed the bus door, frowning at Noah.

“I take back the kiss.”

“Naw, no you don’t.”

“Yeah, I take it back. We can have a first kiss some other time. But I take that one ba-“

He kissed her. They melted onto a bus seat. Clothes were lost. Hands found their way. The sex was good, and good again. The cuddling awkward on a bus seat.

“When I was a kid,” remarked Noah, “and horny, I would imagine a girl and I getting to third in the back of the bus. If only I could tell that kid th-“

Esme hit his chest.

“Shut up. That kid couldn’t get it, he wouldn’t care.”

Noah sighed.

“Maybe not.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Well put on your clothes.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Well let’s hang out.”

“But I’m hungry.”

“Alright. I’ll put on your clothes.”

“Yes.”

Esme lifted her legs and pointed her toes. Noah slid her panties on, admiring the legs as he went. Long, soft. Esme watched, lifted her ass, and wiggled with him to get them on. The pants went next, reluctantly. Socks. Shoes. Shirt.

“I want a shower too.”

“We’ll get you a shower.”

“Alright.”

Noah dressed himself, Esme watched. She grabbed his hand again. Noah pulled the lever. The bus door opened. The two looked at each other, looked ahead, then stepped through.

***

Esme frowned at Noah.

“You know a phone would change your whole life. You don’t have to be this amount of alone.”

Noah balked.

“I don’t want people knowing where I am. Plus, no one’s going to come out to see me. Plus, I don’t want anyone to come out to see me. Imagine if I started to track myself. I steal shit to live. I trespass as a lifestyle. Sure, they couldn’t drag me into a jail cell, but who knows what they’d try to do. Maybe they’d just try to shoot me.”

“They absolutely wouldn’t.”

“You don’t think so? Imagine the government finds out a man with evidently supernatural powers has been behind an international crime wave ongoing for over a year, busting into people’s houses at dinner, into their bedrooms while they’re out, sleeping in their garbage and borrowing their money and shampoo. I’m pretty sure I burnt a castle down.”

“That was you?”

“Why, did it make the news?”

“No, Noah, no one CARES.”

“Well, I was pretty crazy at the time.”

“Oh yeah, you’re insane.”

Noah slid the garlic over and grabbed an onion.

“We’re going to smell awful.”

“Yeah, but if we both do it won’t matter.”

“Eh.”

Esme tossed the diced garlic into a heated pan and watched Noah slice his onion.

“You’re pretty good at that.”

Noah smiled and grabbed a pepper.

“In another life I worked in a kitchen.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I worked a lot of jobs.”

“What were you working when you got cursed?”

“Midlevel corporate marketing gig.”

“Sounds okay.”

“It was okay.”

“Were you happy?”

“I don’t really know. Probably not.”

“Are you happy now?”

Noah looked up. Pushed over the remains of an onion, two bell peppers, a jalapeño.

“Well, when I started skipping around I was horrified, honestly. Then for a while I wanted to die.”

Esmy dumped all the onion into the pan.

“Makes sense.”

“Sure. But when I got a dog it kind of went away.”

“Where’s your dog now?”

“I don’t know, I had to leave her with a vet.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.”

Esmy dumped the peppers into the pan.

“What about now? Are you happy now?”

“Well, I think I’ve been happy for the last week.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Probably happier than before this whole thing started.”

“Huh.”

“You?”

“Yeah. Probably.”

The pan sizzled, Noah touched Esme’s shoulder, watched her cook. Suddenly the kitchen door busted open, a light flipped on.

“AY!”

Esme shrieked and Noah giggled. He grabbed her wrist.

“Fuck dinner, come on!”

They grabbed their backpacks and ran for the exit, followed by screaming Spanish.

“HIJOS DE PUTA VETE A LA MIERDA A MI CO-“

They burst through the door into an emergency clinic in, evidently, Rome.

“They probably have food here.”

“We’re not eating at the hospital, I’d rather go back and hold down that asshole who chased us while I finished the stir fry.”

“Too late, here.”

The two ducked through the front door into an opera box. A woman onstage was belting at the top of her vocal range. She was fat. Noah noted this might be the end. A man in the box started and began stammering in German. Esme whispered back “Verzeihung! Verzeihung!” and the two pressed through the door again into some kind of villa. Very fancy.

“Well well well.”

“Right?”

“How many nights do you think we could get out of this one?”

“Depends on what the fridge looks like and if people actually live here.”

“Seems empty.”

“Yeah”

“Fridge too.”

“Yeah.”

“Freezer is very full.”
“Fantastic.”

“How about Totinos?”

“We will never shit again.”

“We will if we have enough beer.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“It’s hard for me not to be.”

The two sat on an enormous sofa in the middle of an enormous room overlooking a beach from a valley.

“So we missed a stir fry.”

“Yeah.”

“But life could be worse.”

“Yeah.”

Esme cuddled up to Noah.

“You stink.”

“I can bathe in the sink. Open kitchen.”

“I’ll get you the soap. OOH! I’m washing your hair!”

The day continued.

***

Esme frowned at Noah.

“I need to sleep in a bed tonight.”

“Okay. You don’t have to stay with me. You can find a bed in the city.”

“Hotels here don’t take cash. I’m tired of this apartment. It smells like cabbage.”

“I know.”

“Why did we choose the one apartment without a bed again?”

“We spent like 4 hours rioting between doors remember? We got in no less than three footchases.”

“Yeah, haha. Our cardio is pretty good now.”

“Yeah.”

The pair gazed into the television. Absolute garbage ran over the screen. Staticky, oversaturated sound flooded the apartment.

“Can you make out what they’re saying?”

“It doesn’t matter, it’s in Vietnamese.”

“Do we have any booze left?”

“Yeah, hold on.”

Noah withdrew a bottle of Ardbeg from his backpack and handed it to Esme.

“Go easy on it, this shit is strong.”

“I know, Jesus.”

Noah watched her drink. Two long gulps.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, Noah, I’m fine. If I wasn’t fine I’d fucking tell you.”

“Okay, sorry.”

“Stop apologizing too. I’m here because I want to be. If I didn’t I’d be gone, okay?”

“Okay.”

The TV continued to blare. The noise felt like a blanket, pressing over them. Esme’s eyes glazed. Noah looked at her, concerned. She looked over.

“Stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“LIKE THAT, why do you look so sad?”

“I don’t feel sad. I just wish you felt happier.”

“That’s not going to make it happen, Noah.”

“I’m sorry.”

Esme stood up and went into the hall.

“Where are you going?”

“Somewhere where you can’t look at me right now.”

“Okay.”

Esme closed the door. Noah picked up the bottle, took a pull. Then another. An hour passed. Noah looked out the window. The street was packed, streams of people going by. No face distinct from any other. He started to panic.

What had he done? He just let her walk out the door? What if she got in trouble? He literally could not go after her. He was stuck, absolutely bound to this room. If he left, she would never be able to find him again. He would never be able to find her again. He didn’t even have a phone. It seemed irresponsible, insane.

Noah grabbed the Ardbeg and had another drink.

The peat and the alcohol blew through his sinuses. His head cleared a little. She would come back. Esme is smart. She’ll come back.

She could just leave though. She could just go to the airport. He had no idea if she was coming back. What if this was it? What if that was the last time he saw her?

How long had it been? Two months? Three?

Days didn’t make any sense as a way to measure time. At least without Esme’s phone. There was no meaningful demarkation between day and night for his purposes, every door yielded a different timezone. He couldn’t remember how long they’d been together. Just that there was life before her, and life after her. And he couldn’t go back to life without her.

The sun started going down. Noah was drunk, laying on the couch, staring at the television. People danced in colorful outfits. He couldn’t tell if it was an ad or a show. The music was nonspecific, something local he guessed. A man smiled, a woman grabbed his hand. They whirled. They moved as one. Noah began to cry.

Maybe she was smart not to come back.

Maybe she shouldn’t come back.

Maybe if she came back he should chase her off.

Maybe he’s no good for her.

Maybe it’s impossible for him to be good for her.

Maybe it’s impossible for him to be good.

Mayb-

The door opened and closed. Noah rolled over and looked up. Esme stood, staring down at him, lit only by the glow of the television. It had become dark.

“Are you… crying?”

“Ah, uh. Yes.”

“Oh, Noah.”

Esme sat on the couch with him, laid in front of him, hugged him.

“I didn’t know if you were coming back.”

“I won’t just disappear on you Noah.”

“You won’t?”

“No.”

“Why not.”

“I won’t.”

“Okay.”

Esme felt his breathing calm and kissed a tearstain on his cheek.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I brought you a bánh mì.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you want it now?”

“No.”

“Why were you crying?”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do without you.”

“I haven’t gone anywhere.”

“You will.”

“Why would you say that?”

“The whole world does. There’s nothing here for me. It all goes away. It runs away. It runs away from me.”

“I don’t.”

“You’re my whole world. You’re everything.”

Esme hugged him until he fell asleep on the sofa, face wet. She stood up and stared at Noah. Then she went into the bedroom to sleep on a pile of laundry.

***

Esme watched Noah. He looked at the still life. Dead birds.

“Do they look sad?”

Esme checked the painting’s name. Dead Birds. No hints.

“I guess. They look like they’re asleep.”

“Yeah but the faces are emotional. They look sad.”

“I don’t know. I never much liked still lives.”

“They’re not really my thing either. But I like Goya.”

They moved to the next painting. A pile of dead fish.

“Don’t they look like they’re horrified?”

Esme checked the painting’s name. Still Life with Golden Bream. No hints.

“I guess.”

Noah stared. The fish stared back.

“You’re bored, huh.”

“I just didn’t sleep well.”

“I’m sorry.”

They moved on, walking through the rest of the display.

“It’s incredible luck we’re here.”

“Oh?”

“It’s weird. Walking through here I see paintings I’ve seen my whole life. When I was young I used to study art.”

“At university?”

“Not really. I took drawing classes. But in high school I had an art history class. I got lucky, my school district was well-funded. I carried the habit with me. I used to have art books. I would just sit with them and look over paintings for hours.”

“Huh.”

Noah stared around.

“This is the most familiar room I’ve been to in ages. Since I left my bathroom. And I’ve never been here. And soon I’ll never come back.”

Noah sat on a bench. Esme sat next to him. She sighed. Noah looked at her.

“What’s wrong?”

Esme looked dead ahead for a long time. Then she spoke.

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this, Noah.”

Noah felt physical pain. He sat in silence and stared ahead. Prometheus Bound. Rubens.

“I. I kinda knew.”

“This doesn’t feel like a life.”

“I know.”

They sat in silence. An eagle pressed its talon into Prometheus’s face. Prometheus screamed as the eagle dug and tore.

“I need a life. I can’t wait for you. I can’t wait on you.”

“I’m selfish. I know.”

Esme was deadpan.

“This could never end. There’s no reason for it to end. It just keeps happening. You’re great. I love hanging out with you. But I think I need a family. Neither one of us are stable. And while I’m with you, there’s no planning for the future. It’s literally impossible to plan. We’re homeless, Noah. We’re absolutely homeless. I have a bank account. I have parents. I want kids someday.”

Noah felt numb.

“Can we, can we just go somewhere else?”

Esme looked at Noah. He was grey. She sighed.

“Yeah.”

They stood, filtering through the great hall. crowds stood and moved around them, everyone’s attention on the walls. Millenia of masterpieces stared down at them, safe in their homes. Esme and Noah filtered out in anonymity, Noah holding desperately onto a hand that wanted to let go.

Esme paused, opened the door, then turned around. She looked at Noah. She dropped his hand. She said “I’m sorry.” She walked out the door. She closed the door behind her. They stared at each other through the glass. Noah saw his reflection over her face. It was crying. Then she turned around and passed into the crowd. Noah shouted, flung open the door, and threw himself into a janitor’s closet. He screamed. The closet door opened. A man looked in and shouted. Noah punched him in the face and closed the door. Then he opened the door again and walked through it.

***

Noah stopped eating. It wasn’t a goal of his, he wasn’t making a statement. He just forgot to eat. When he ate, it didn’t taste like anything.

He did manage to drink though.

The first 24 hours of his separation from Esme were spent laying in one room, occasionally opening a door and screaming at whoever was on the other side. This included an audience of students in lecture, the Prime Minister of Bhutan, and, most offensively, a man going down on a woman in the comfort of their own nuptial bed. The man screamed back, and bounded toward Noah, half an erection in tow. Noah realized he had never seen an erection running at him before and found it threatening. He closed the door immediately, slumped down, and lay on his side. When he could no longer lay, he stood and paced, aggressively, until his feet hurt and his achilles tendon was tight. Then he lay again, and he drank. And he drank. And he drank.

Two days into this cycle he stuporously wandered through the door and found himself on a brewery floor at night. Enormous vats loomed over him. After a bit of engineering, he managed to open a valve at the bottom of a vat, releasing beer all over the floor. Excited, he lay on his back beneath it and tried to drown himself, but found it too uncomfortable. Beer up his nose, in his ears. Noah coughed, hacked, pushed himself to the side, and panted until he could stand up and leave the brewery. He found himself in a dirt-floor schoolroom, 21 kids looking at him expecting their teacher. Noah looked around, vomited on the floor. Two kids screamed. Five laughed. Noah retreated through the door again and immediately fell down stairs into a cellar. he crawled to a hard corner and passed out, waking with a horrible headache. He looked around, found himself in a wine cellar. He got to his feet. Looked at a bottle. Looked expensive. Looked around. No corkscrew. He smashed the neck on a wall, then poured the contents down his throat. Ascended the stairs, exited. Found himself on a casino floor. The colors were magnificent. Noah staggered toward a slot machine and took a seat. He had no money. He was covered in wine and beer. A large man picked him up and dragged him to a door. Threw him through it. Noah landed in a heap next to a bed. He attempted to stand and collapsed again. A scream. He looked over. A child hid beneath his Mickey Mouse blanket. Another scream. Pounding feet. Father bursts into room. Noah apologizes. Unfamiliar language. Father punches him in face. Noah flies back. Father picks up Noah. Punches him again. Throws him out bedroom door into a tunnel. It was very dark. Noah tried to reopen tunnel door. It was locked. Noah walked in darkness. He could not see. He tripped. He collapsed. He stood up again. He fell down again. He ran his hands along the wall, leaned against it, and walked. And walked. And walked.

His hands met a door. He tried the knob. It was open. He opened the door and walked through. He was in an empty residential bathroom. He locked the door. He stripped off his clothes. He laid in the tub. He opened the faucet. Blood flowed from his nose into the rising water. He watched it. The water reached to his face. The water overflowed the edges of the tub. Poured onto the tile. Kept flowing. And flowing. He sat until the water began to run cold, then got out, stared at his wet clothes, then exited the bathroom naked into a backstage. He wandered bleeding. A stagehand saw him and gasped. He apologized, asked for his dressing room. The stagehand asked who he was. Noah apologized and said he found his room. He opened a door. A hotel room. He wandered in. He collapsed on the bed. He slept. He woke. His headache was tremendous. He found a robe. He put it on. He drank from the minibar, filled the robe pockets with tiny bottles of liquor. He exited the room. He wandered through an empty office building. He found an office. It was locked. He found an elevator. He pressed a button. He walked through the door. He was in a cabin. It was evening. It was quiet. He sat. He heard crickets. He laid in bed. He cried. He passed out. He woke up. He walked to the cabin door. He turned the knob. He opened the door, then stepped through.

***

Noah stared at the naked bed in a cell. It was cold. He looked at the door behind him. He pulled on it. It was locked. He laughed. He pulled again. Nothing. He laid on a plastic mattress. A bright fluorescent light painted the room with blue light. Cement floor, sealed. Walls hideous tile, brown. Window with bars.

His open robe provided no real insulation.

He had worn this robe for about a week. It was disgusting.

He had not eaten in about a week. He was gaunt.

Noah ran his fingers up and down his ribcage. He frowned. He ran his fingers between the individual ribs. He was probably hungry.

Noah took a tiny bottle from his robe pocket and downed it. He retched. He felt a hard physical pain in his stomach. It burned. His heart hurt. He stared at the light and squinted. This could be bad.

“This could be bad.”

Noah remained flat on his back. Noah opened his mouth and let out a scream. No response. He let out another scream. No response. He started to howl, and howl, and howl. Nothing. He passed out. He woke to the sound of the cell door opening. Two guards walked in, cautious. One said “Who are you?”

“I’m Noah.”

“What are you doing in here?”

“I have no idea.”

“Don’t be a smart ass. What the fuck are you wearing?”

“I don’t know.”

The guards exchanged a glance.

“Where are your sheets?”

“I never got any.”

Silence.

“Alright, we’re going to leave you in here. We have to check on something.”

The guards left. Noah continued to stare at the ceiling. Time passed. The door opened again. A guard dropped a mesh bag full of sheets and clothing into the room.

“Two sets of each. There was an oversight. Get in the shower and get changed now.”

Noah looked around. There was a shower in the back of his cell. He sighed and rose, shrugging off his robe. Noah entered the shower. The water was very cold, then lukewarm. The curtain was cheap and horrible. Water got all over the floor. It didn’t matter. The water felt good. The soap carried away a layer of blood and sweat and filth that had accrued over continents’ debautch. He felt very, very tired.

Noah finished his shower, dried. Reclothed himself. The guard had taken away his robe. It had all the liquor bottles in it. Whatever.

He made his bed. He laid in it.

He stared at the ceiling. Nothing changed. He could not sleep. The light was very bright. He unfurled four lengths of one-ply toilet paper. He wrapped it around his eyes. It helped. But it was still bright. He laid back on his bed and waited.

***

Noah couldn’t tell when he was sleeping or awake. When he closed his eyes he would think in disconnected, wretched strings of nightmares, and when he was awake anxious disconnected thoughts presented largely the same experience. He sweated profusely. For what felt like days he laid in bed taking no food, moaning. He could not sleep, or he could sleep but he could not feel rested, or he could not stop thinking when he was asleep just like when he was awake, or he would see things leaping in the corners of his eyes or hear things a CRASH that was not there HORNS that were not there and his head ached horribly on and off and he never knew anyone could sweat so god damned much.

His sheets soaked through and he thought of Esme and his dead mother and Lala and Sean and that woman he’d walked in on the first night he realized he was cursed and her huge breasts and he wondered about the owner of that dog and how many noses he’d broken out of boredom and if he was a good person and if other people would behave like him in these situations and if he could ever justify these behaviors or if he would ever have to and why they happened in the first place and oh god was he dead was he actually damned was this hell and why did it keep happening and why did it keep happening to him he was nobody he was absolutely nobody this didn’t make any sense and he had to throw up so he threw up bile and he had to shit liquid so he did and he-

Woke up on the floor bleeding out of his head and exhausted so he laid in bed again but this time he kind of slept.

And he was miserable off and on for some terrible stretch of time. He counted the tiles in his walls and his heartbeats and stared out the window and started drinking water again. And he started eating a little bit without throwing up, though it hurt horribly. Stomach squeezing in pain when empty, grating against contents when he ate. Then it hurt less. He started eating more when the food was brought. And he started showering again. And the little hells where the guards took his soiled clothes and blankets got better. He could stand more steadily. He breathed more normally. His heart rate kind of returned to normal.

And as he calmed Noah realized he was in prison. He had no idea why he was still in prison. The next time a guard brought him food he asked why he was in prison, and the guard said “I’m sure you know why.”

To which Noah responded “Absolutely not.”

At which the guard scoffed and said “Smartass.” and left.

Which bothered Noah at first, but not that much. Because the cell wasn’t that bad.

He had food.

He had shelter.

He had clothes.

And best of all: every day he woke up in the same place. He had a routine. He could look out the same window and see the same thing every day. The food was consistent. Nobody looked at him. Nobody questioned him. He didn’t need anybody. Well, except for the guards.

He eventually got books and paper. He read again. He wrote thoughts out. He showered. He slept. He woke. He ate. He read. He wrote. He showered. He slept. In peace.

But he kept asking the guard.

“Have you figured out what it is I did yet?”

Which the guard no longer dignified with an answer.

It must’ve been bad, though, for him to be in isolation. Not allowed out of the cell. Not allowed to see anyone. It must’ve been very bad.

So Noah stayed there. And stayed. And he stopped asking. And he started enjoying his time tremendously. Old stretches came to mind, and as they were all he had to do, he came up with new ones. Calisthenics were added. He no longer thought of Esme, or anyone. Just his routine. And every step of every repetition of this cycle every day pleased him more deeply than the last.

Noah watched the season change from early winter to early spring. Snow melted. He heard the first songs of the birds and almost cried. He could not remember having ever been happier.

And it was in early spring that two guards into his room again and informed him that there had been a mistake. That he wasn’t supposed to be in prison at all. That they could find no record of him.

Noah was stunned.

“I told you that months ago.”

“It was a mistake.”

“Well, I don’t want to go.”

“Well you have to go.”

“This is my home now.”
“No, it’s not.”

“No, please.”

Noah had never felt such terror in his life. The two guards approached him and he backed into a corner and started screaming. They tried to grab him and he kicked out. One grabbed that leg and pulled him forward. The other grabbed his other leg and they hoisted him up.

“LET ME HAVE MY BOOKS! LET ME HAVE MY PAPER AT LEAST! I NEED TO REMEMBER THIS!”

“We’ll get it to you later, you need to calm down, this is good.”

“NO! GOD! NO PLEASE, PLEASE STOP!”

The door was open. The guards dragged him through.

Into another prison cell. This one dingy, horrible. The door swung shut behind them. His guards dropped him. They were confused. Noah started laughing uncontrollably.

One looked back at Noah, then the other. Then around. It was a weird cell, like a jail cell in a movie. Bars for every wall in an old brick structure. Moon filtering through the window. One guard yelled “HELLO?”

Silence. The guards tried to open the door and could not. Noah kept laughing.

One kicked Noah in the ribs “Shut UP! SHUT UP!” while the other kept yelling “HELLO?” to no change.

Noah quieted. The guards started panicking. One sat down, the other paced. Eventually a third guard appeared. He was southeast asian. He spoke in an unfamiliar language. No one would understand each other. Noah started laughing again. The new guard scratched his head and called for a partner, who came downstairs. The two regarded the situation together, and called for a third man while the pacing guard spoke unintelligibly at them and the sitting one hyperventilated.

A man who could speak broken english was produced, and badges were exchanged. Noah and the guards were told to exit the cell one at a time. The door was opened. The pacing guard exited. As the sitting guard stood and moved toward the door Noah lunged, hugged him, and they tumbled through together onto the floor of a dry cleaner. The guard started screaming. Noah stood up, brushed himself off, and started looking through the selection of bagged clean clothes. He exchanged his prisoner’s uniform for plaid boxers, slacks, a nice shirt, and a sports coat. The guard continued to yell.

“What the FUCK is going on? WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON!!!”

“I tried to tell you.”

“TELL ME WHAT.”

Noah thought.

“Huh. You know, maybe I didn’t.”

Then Noah opened a door, and stepped through it.

***

Noah ran from one end of the hall to the other. Then from the other end to the one. Then from one end of the hall to the other. Then from the other end to the one. And again. And again. And again.

He could watch himself running. The hall was full of tourists, taking pictures and gawking. Noah didn’t care. His beard was long. His hair was long. He was thin, but his ribs no longer showed. And he was sweating. And he looked at the wall of mirrors in this decadent hall, watching himself run to, and fro. He thought he looked good. Not that it mattered. But it mattered. He looked good.

He ran forward. He turned around and ran again. And he ran again. And he ran again. A small docent was in tow, begging in French.

Noah grinned and repeated himself: “Je suis désolé! Je suis désolé!”

He was panting, but this was good.

More docents showed up. A large man yelled in English: “Monsieur! Stop running! Now! You must not do that in here!”

They tried blocking his path. Noah shouted “Je suis désolé!” and dodged between them. The docents crashed into each other. The original docent gasped. Noah shouted again “Je suis désolé!” She started to chase after Noah.

“Je suis désolé! Je suis désolé!”

He stopped suddenly. The docent crashed into him and fell back. The two larger docents were standing up. Noah repeated “Je suis désolé, madame.” He winked at the docent. She threw her radio at him. It hit him on the forehead. He stumbled back. He glared at her and she at him. She struggled to her feet. The large docents were rounding on his position. He sat.

“She hit me.”

“Sir, you were acting like an idiot. You have to leave now.”

“I refuse.”

“You are leaving now.”

The larger docent of the two picked him up.

Noah sighed: “You’ll regret this.”

The lady docent punched him in the head.

The larger docent dragged Noah through the door of the Hall of Mirrors into an indoor swimming pool. The door swung shut behind them. The guard looked perplexed.

“Wh-“

“I told you.”

Noah shook free and regarded the swimming pool. It looked nice. He dipped in a hand. It was heated. He shed his jacket, shirt, and pants. The room was empty. The docent tried his radio to no avail. His phone was not working.

Noah sat on the poolside and dangled his feet in.

“What happened?”

“You’re somewhere else now.”

“What?”

“We’re not in Versailles anymore.”

The docent frowned and looked at his uniform, his shoes, around himself. He sat down next to Noah.

“Where?”

“I don’t really know. But there’s a pool.”

The docent tried his phone again. Nothing.

The docent pocketed his phone.

Noah looked at the docent.

“You’re awfully calm. Normally people start screaming.”

The docent sighed and took off his shoes.

“This is not normal, but I have not expected anything normal lately.”

His accent was very light.

“Have you ever lived in America?”

“No, but I am from Montreal.”

“Ah. Why were you in Paris?”

“I had got bored of Montreal.”

“Huh.”

The two sat with their feet in the water for a while. Noah spoke.

“You seem depressed, man.”

“Perhaps I am.”

“What’s wrong?

“My father is very sick. He is all I have left.”

“Oh.”

Silence. Then

“Sorry.”

“I am sorry too.”

More silence. Then

“Do you want to go for a swim?”

“Oui.”

The docent shed his cheap jacket and slacks and shirt and the two dove into the pool and swam laps. They swam and swam and swam. Initially they swam independently of each other, but their patterns converged, and they started to race. Noah pulled ahead at first, but his earlier running took a toll on him. The docent got faster, and faster. Consistently he was a 1/2 a lap ahead, then 2/3. Then a full lap. Noah, panting stopped. The docent kept going. His gasps for air sounded like shrieks. Noah pulled himself out of the pool and sat on the side dangling his feet in the water, letting himself catch his breath. Eventually, the docent returned to Noah’s side of the pool and pulled himself out of the water. He sat on the poolside gasping. He stood, walked to his jacket, withdrew a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. He pulled out two, lit them both, and gave one to Noah. Both inhaled, both exhaled.

“Where are you from? American?”

“Yeah. But I’ve been away for a while now.”

“Why were you running in my hall?”

“It was a long hall.”

The docent laughed.

“That is all?”

“Honestly, yeah.”

The cigarettes burned. Noah flicked his cigarette into the pool and watched it float away. The docent did the same.

“I’m sorry you’re in… wherever we are now. For what it’s worth, you’re alright.”

The docent held out his hand.

“I am Hugo.”

“Noah.”

They shook.

“I did not want to be there anymore.”

“Yeah but now you’re… wherever we are.”

“You can take me somewhere else, oui?”

“Oui. But I can’t predict where.”

“This is fine. Let’s go.”

The two reclothed, walked to a door, and stepped through into a bar. Hugo clapped.

“Ah! Je sais exactement où nous sommes!”

“What?”

“We are close to home!”

“What do you mean?”

Noah looked around. Everything was in French. He laughed.

“Maybe you should not worry so much, huh? You want a drink?”

“No, I stopped drinking.”

“Very good. I will have two.”

Hugo approached the bar. Noah turned around and ducked toward the front door. He looked around. People were smiling. Hugo was smiling. Noah drew his lips tight. He pushed through the door.

***

Noah stared at Esme. Rather, Noah stared at her winking asshole as she rode some stranger in front of him. Noah continued to stare for a full minute, completely rooted, unable to move. He stared while the guy under her said “Hey let’s flip” and she leaned down and kissed him passionately. Then, when they rolled over the guy made eye contact with Noah and shouted “What the FUCK” at which point Esme rolled over and gasped and Noah regained a sense of function.

Noah tried a “Hi” but nothing came out and he kind of walked backwards a little bit but hit a wall and started to turn. Esme shouted “Hey!” but Noah was already walking, opened a door, and walked through.

Noah walked into a planetarium. He stumped forward and sat down in a random chair as a guide pointed her laser at different constellations. Noah looked at the semblance of the night sky and tried to feel something but couldn’t. He could not understand why this was happening. She had left him, right? There was no reason for him to walk in on that. Absolutely no reason. What were the odds? Insanely, insanely low.

There was something malevolent in the universe, and it was aimed directly at him. Of this he was certain. This was punishment. It was punishment. Then he stared, numb. He thought about crying, but thinking about it ruined it. So he sat and stared as the guide pointed out that in Mayan cosmology the Milky Way was the road to Xibalba.

He sat and felt bad. And felt bad and felt bad. And then he got up and left and walked into a sauna. So he turned around and walked into a crematorium. So he turned around and saw a lion’s cage. So he closed the door then opened it again and walked into an ice cream parlor. So he got an ice cream and stared at it. He watched it melt onto the table. He put his head down on the table. The ice cream ran down the cone and pooled on the table, touching his fingers. He got up and exited. He was in a cathedral. The ceiling was enormous. Everything was leafed in gold. The floor was paved over with headstones. The enormous door slammed shut behind him. He tried reading the headstones. They were all in latin. He dragged his feet over them, found a chair, and sat in it. He stared at the ceiling. Ornate paintings between gilt arches, lepers being cured, damned being cast. Jesus Christ ascending. He looked down. The headstone beneath his feet was beautiful. The dates were in Roman numerals. After 10 seconds of puzzling he learned a certain knight died at the age of 28. Noah sighed. 28 was not very many years to live.

A voice spoke out from the back of the Church. The language was incomprehensible and unfamiliar. Noah responded: “I’m sorry?”

A priest walked toward him.

“English?”

“Please.”

“You know the cathedral is closed now.”

“I’m so sorry, I’ll go.”

The priest stared.

“Are you okay?”

Noah thought.

“No.”

The priest sat.

“You don’t look okay.”

“You think there’s Hell, right?”

“Sure.”

“What about like, curses. Can you be damned on earth?”

The priest chuckled.

“Well, there are stories of possessions and demons. But, to tell you the truth, I never put too much stock in those.” The man thought. “In Dante, traitorous murderers had their souls sent directly to the deepest parts of hell while their body continued to roam the earth, inhabited by a demon. I always liked that.”

Noah looked at his hands.

“I never killed a man.”

“In Job-“

“I KNOW JOB.” Noah snapped. He looked away from the man and stood up, staring at a radiant gilt cross with an all seeing eye above it.

“I didn’t have that much to take away though. I didn’t even have faith. And everything that happens in my life is just random enough that maybe there’s no intellect behind it, maybe it’s all my imagination, but it feels like some horrible thing is playing a joke on me. Like my whole life is just a string of absolute nonsense that will never make any sense. I can’t even remember large chunks of the last year. The best months of my year were spent in a literal prison for a crime I didn’t commit. But even the good parts are framed in such a way that it feels like there’s some kind of evil, some kind of intellect looking at me, planning what happens, and then pushing it onto me with some kind of sick fucking mirth.”

“Please don’t swear in the church.”

“Sorry.”

“So you don’t think you’re in control of your suffering?”

“No. I wouldn’t be suffering if I could just stop suffering.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Well I don’t have control right now. Over anything in my life.”

“What about yourself? How did you come to here? A church, now, when you’re suffering?”

“All part of the horrible plan. Some kind of joke, surely.”

“You brought yourself here. You walked through that door.”

“You don’t get it though. I don’t have any control over what door I go through. I walk through and can end up anywhere. There’s no escape, there’s no return.”

“But you chose to walk through that door, and you ended up here.”

“Sure, but you’re not getti-“

“You’re seeking an end. You’re looking for an answer. And you’ve found your way to one.”

Noah looked at the cross. Then at the all seeing eye. He scowled at it.

“No. No I haven’t.”

Noah stood up and began to walk away.

The priest stood up behind him. He called out:

“Are you baptized.”

Noah paused, turned.

“No.”

“Would you like to be?”

Noah stared at the eye again, then the priest.

“Fuck no.”

Noah turned around, opened the door, and stepped through it.

***

Noah sat on a bench at a mall. He stared dead ahead. His mind was completely empty. It felt good to be completely empty. Maybe the priest was right. Maybe he had some control. He wondered if he could cause himself the right amount of brain damage to feel this way all the time. The booze hadn’t done it. Maybe a hammer, or a drill. He wondered if a Grey’s Anatomy or some kind of psych textbook could help him figure out…

Ah, but he was thinking again. He should return to the immediate. Not-think. Yes.

So Noah resumed staring into the middle distance. People passed him. His eyes did not see them. He was empty. Truly empty. It was amazing, being this empty. He wondered if anyone had ever been this empty before him. Probably not. Anyway, this is definitely how people escape suffering. There’s no reason to suffer when this is accessible at any time, anywhere, whenever he-

A child was staring at him. He started to stare at the child. The child was frowning. Noah frowned at the child. The child picked his nose. Noah picked his nose back. The child made a “blech” face and stuck out his tongue at Noah. Noah blew a raspberry at the child and crossed his eyes. The child scrunched up his face and eyes and squeezed his cheeks together saying “waaaaaaaaaah”. Noah put his index fingers up his nose, his thumbs in the sides of his mouth, and stretched out his lips into a grotesque smile groaning “heeeeehhhhh” at the child. The child told Noah he was weird. Noah said the child started it. The child laughed. Noah smiled. A parent ran up to the child.

“Oh, god, I’m so sorry for Nate. C’mon. C’mon! You can’t bother strangers like that.”

Noah replied “No, he’s great. You have a great kid. He was just having fun.”

The parent thanked Noah and escorted Nate away. Nate looked over his shoulder at Noah and stuck out his tongue again. Noah farted loudly. Nate laughed.

Noah returned to staring. But every time he tried to empty his head, the child’s face popped into his head. He didn’t feel bad, though. Noah decided that was alright, too.

***

Noah was in a trash heap throwing glass bottles at a wall. He was inordinately bored. Completely, totally bored. He looked at the glass and thought about opening a vein. But then he threw another bottle. But he didn’t feel anything about throwing the bottle. It shattered. He just kept doing it because he could do it. Because there were more bottles. Because it was something to do. They shattered, and they shattered and they shattered.

Suddenly a man walked through the door and shouted.

“WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?”

Noah smiled.

“I’m breaking bottles.”

“HOW DID YOU GET IN HERE?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

“Get over here NOW!”

“No.”

Noah grabbed another bottle and smashed it on the wall. Then another. Then another.

The man at the door was furious.

“Come here! I have to clean this shit UP NOW!”

“No you don’t. You can just leave. You don’t have to do anything.”

The man started toward Noah who made no moves at all. He just stood and watched, empty handed, about as bored as he’d ever been. As the man neared Noah he tripped on a piece of garbage and fell in the glass. Wounds opened all over his body.

“O-oh!” said Noah.

“AAAH!” said the man.

Noah tried to approach him but he thrashed at Noah, who stepped back. That thrash sprayed blood across the room. The man’s wrist was slashed wide open. His hand flopped.

“AaaAAHH!!!” he shrieked.

“Ah, uh. Hey! Let me help you! Let’s get pressure on that!”

The man thrashed again, falling face first into the pile of glass, opening more wounds. He rolled and his throat began to geyser. He was bleeding very fast. He continued to thrash, and Noah continued to try to get to him, but by the time the man calmed down he was cold and breathing heavily. Noah ran up to him, looked down. He didn’t know what to do. There probably wasn’t anything to be done. Noah apologized, then stepped over the man. He walked to the door, turned around and watched the man heave raggedly next to the heap of garbage that had been his bed. Then Noah walked out the door into a storage unit. So he opened the door again and found himself in a flat.

There was a bottle of wine over the fridge. Noah immediately walked over to it, opened it, and took a slug. Then he walked over to the couch, and sat, trying to process what he’d just seen. The front door opened. Noah winced. Then he relaxed. It was Hugo.

“NOAH!” Hugo shouted. He saw the bottle in Noah’s hand. “I thought you say-“

“Yeah, Hugo. Today I drink. Come over here.”

The men hugged, and Noah gave Hugo the bottle. Hugo drank. They sat on the sofa together.

Hugo looked at the blood sprayed across Noah’s shirt.

“So uh-“

“I just don’t want to talk about it.”

Hugo lit two cigarettes and gave one to Noah. Noah inhaled. Noah exhaled.

“How is your father, Hugo?”

“He died.”

“Ah, I’m sorry.”

“Honestly, it is for the best. We’re both happier now.”

Noah looked at Hugo, then took another drink from the bottle.

“How do you just decide something is good?”

“I don’t. Time passes and it becomes good. This is life.”

“Huh.”

They continued to pass the bottle. Eventually Noah calmed down, and they talked about where they’d been. Hugo had a girlfriend, and he loved her very much. He had a new job and made more money. He had no parents left, but he had a sister, and a brother, and his brother had children. Life could be worse.

“And you?”

“Nothing has changed.”

“Ah, but it could be worse.”

“I really don’t know at this point.”

“It could be. You could be sick.”

“Sure.”

“You could have shit legs.”

“Very true.”

“You could be blind.”

“That would suck, yes.”

“Instead you’re here on my sofa drinking my wine with me, no?”

“This is also true. It could be worse.”

The two split the bottle, then Hugo got another. And another. They stayed up all night, talking and drinking.

At one point, Noah turned to Hugo, tears in his eyes.

“You know, Hugo, you’re my only friend in the whole world.”

Hugo turned to Noah.

“Noah, you are an absolute friend to me. Forever we will be friends. Whenever I see you, I will come to you, and we will drink.”

Noah hugged Hugo tightly. Hugo hugged back and began to sob. For the moment, everything was okay.

Eventually Hugo passed out. Noah thought for a moment, then stumbled to his feet. He dragged over to the bathroom, opened the door, and saw a train station. He closed the door and started to cry. Then he wandered over to the sofa and sat in dismal silence for an hour. Then he passed out.

When he woke, Hugo was gone. Noah ran the sink and urinated into it. He had a headache. He drank from the faucet, then poured a quick shot of cognac and downed it. The front door opened again. Footsteps.

A woman entered his field of vision.

“Hello?”

Noah stared.

“Hello.”

“And who are you?”

“Noah… and you?”

“I’m Hugo’s girlfriend.”

“You don’t speak with a heavy accent.”

“I’m Canadian.”

“Huh.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I spent the night.”

She eyed the blood on his shirt and the bottles on the table.

“It looks like you had quite the night.”

“Well you know Hugo likes to drink.”

Hugo’s girlfriend eyed the open bottle of cognac.

“It seems you do as well.”

“Of course.”

“Well, can I have a glass?”

“Only if I can have your name.”

“Guenièvre.”

Noah poured.

They raised their glasses and poured.

“Hugo talked about you once.”

“Oh?”

“He had to explain to me why he lost his last job once, and he mentioned you. Said you wander in and out of doors that lead anywhere but where they’re supposed to and never return to a place.”

“He’s right.”

“So perhaps you will never see me or Hugo again, mm?”

“Perhaps. It’s part of why I drink.”

“Well, do you want to show me?”

Noah stared at Guenièvre.

“Absolutely not.”

She smiled.

“Good. That’s not what I want.”

“What?”

“Pour another glass.”

He poured. They drank.

He wasn’t sure how, but eventually Guenièvre spilled her glass on his pants and had to help him out of them, and, embarrassingly, Noah forgot he wasn’t wearing any underwear. He tried to hide himself, but it proved impossible, so Guenièvre helpfully covered his erection with her mouth. Quickly, Noah decided to accept Guenièvre’s help, and to help her out in kind. Their clothes fell off, and they ended up on the floor, on the sofa, against the counter, and then smoking naked in the kitchen.

Noah sighed: “Very good.”

Guenièvre sighed: “Eh.”

The front door opened. Noah gasped. Guenièvre tensed. Hugo rounded the corner with a friend. Hugo made eye contact with Noah. He grabbed for a bottle from a large box he was holding and threw it at Noah’s head, shouting “TRAITOR!” Noah ducked and ran, grabbing his pants as Hugo dropped the box he was holding and began to chase Noah. Hugo tripped over a chair. Guenièvre screamed. Noah ran for the front door. Hugo’s friend punched him hard across the face and he flew into the wall. A foot crashed into his side and he felt a rib crack. Noah crawled for the door. Then got to his knees. Hugo pulled his friend back, then slapped Noah hard across the face from behind. Noah got to his feet. Hugo slapped him again, then again. Noah made it to the doorknob, he opened the door, and he stumbled through, into a hall.

Hugo stumbled out behind him and kept slapping him and swearing in French. Noah shouted “WAIT WAIT WAI-“ and Hugo punched him straight across the face, leaving him in a heap in the hallway. He closed his door. Noah heard fighting behind the door. Noah moaned and pulled his pants on. Noah realized he heard fighting behind the door. Noah opened the door and peered in. Hugo was yelling at Guenièvre, who was hastily putting on clothing. Hugo’s friend saw Noah’s face and gave him a quick jab to the nose. Noah fell backward. The door remained open. Then it closed. Noah lay breathing on his back for a minute, then realized he should probably move.

He walked down the stairs at the end of the hall until he reached the first floor. He pushed on the door. It opened to the street. Noah closed the door, then opened it again. It opened to the same street. Noah started to cry. He opened the door again, and pushed out onto the street, and walked down the sidewalk, sobbing.

Two weeks ago Madrid’s summer broke into fall.

This summer was my hottest since that of 2015 where I split my July between Texas and Israel. I had the pleasure of experiencing both Spain’s hottest recorded day and hottest recorded night. Fires raged in the north west of the country. Occasionally I would get terrible allergies, then wondering where they came from realize there was haze in the air, and that the haze was atomized biosphere. Great fires appear in my life in times of great change.

Then, autumn. There had been a tease day, then two. Temperatures remained in the low 90s, then stayed in the 80s. They still creep past decency into the mid-upper-80s, but I’ve experienced at least 4 consecutive days of “no higher than 79F” and thus declare autumn.

Autumn is a boundary season. Summer and Winter are apex and nadir of the year, Spring and Autumn carry us up and down. High August is a special hell: pitiless sun presses radiation into land and creature. The air never properly cools. When the sun fades earth bleeds heat into the night, and you end up sweating at 4am, walking around for some breeze, breathing smoke and street.

For the first month of my life in Madrid I did not see a single cloud. The only instances of precipitation were from A/C units dripping filthy water that evaporated the moment it hit pavement. The first rain was a restorative shift. I opened my door and stood outside just feeling the wind and wet. Summer storms are heavy and aggressive here, but nothing dangerous. They soak and move on. Everything is dry in an hour. But it was a break. From that point forward there were more rains, few, but each was a break from the heat. If they happened toward the end of the day, the temperature stayed low, and would reduce into the night, and while it would never be properly chilly, I could feel that the air was not damned forever.

The first day it did not reach 100F wasn’t bliss, but it was a relief. The first day it didn’t reach 90F was a joy. The first day it didn’t reach 80F was autumn.

It’s funny though. On my way to autumn I caught glimpses of it. Mornings I stepped out into bright, crisp 72F weather. That fired up a feeling.

There’s a sense like deja vu I get when the season just begins to change. It starts in a flicker, with minutes that feel like a holiday. The sun hitting my face in a cool wind, the smell of it. The mix of sensations creates an instant that elevates every sense, all which reach out to grab that feeling and hold it. The thinking mind ceases as everything becomes devoted to feeling. Memories strike, many at once in succession, images or emotions more than any assembly of words which start to run parallel to the experience. Parts of 31 autumns, and all the change that meant.

I am 12 again trick-or-treating for the last time, and 15 at the 3rd Thanksgiving gathering of the year, and 17 in the last marching band performance I’ll ever give. I am 18 and alone on campus eating peanut butter and cereal from a styrofoam bowl, bent over my desk listening to The Postal Service drafting and redrafting an essay, my computer and desk lamp the only lights in the night. I am 23 running across campus in busted jeans and a t-shirt smeared with charcoal smoking a cigarette sweating amphetamine. I am 25 in the mountains buying a round challah, apples, and a bottle of wine, celebrating Rosh Hashanah with the ex I moved in with on a whim. I am 29 hiking alone to to the top of a mountain I never summited with her. I am 31 and in Madrid.

All at once.

It’s nostalgia, but it always comes in a sweep of energy. There’s vibrance to fall. The leaves are dying, but the trees are very much alive. They’ve made the change because they taste the air. Briefly everything is alight in color, the earth is covered in confetti. From pollen to molds, everything smells different in shades, and while the earth is preparing to sleep it’s quite busy.

I too am quite busy. All these autumns sleep in me, roused by a breeze and a scent. I am alive, and in love. I was before, and I will be again. Many of the faces that built this feeling I’ll never see again, but like fallen leaves they build the living soil and scent of my autumn. I forge into the familiar season a different man.

Sam, 33, lived alone in a flat off of Kings St. in Platville, NC.

Sam was bored.

Sam woke up, rolled over, turned on the news, & laid in bed for another hour.

Sam then got out of bed, took a messy shit while reviewing social media, then reclined in front of his TV.

Sam did these things every single day.

In front of his TV Sam worked while huffing, hawwing, standing & moaning for about 9 hours every single day.

Bursts of productivity were punctuated by dissociative lapses where the figures on the television anesthetized him from his life.

Sam started drinking before the end of his workday every single day.

Some days Sam started drinking when he woke up.

Some days Sam waited until 8PM. Those days Sam felt good about his behavior. The next day he’d drink more in a kind of reward.

Sam felt a vague fear and self-loathing about his behavior, but justified it in that millions of others do the same things, live worse lives for less money, and that, in comparison to others he wasn’t drinking That Much.

Sam knew he was courting cancer. Sam hadn’t accepted death, but he persisted in unhealthy activities because he could not envision another life. Cancer was a hypothetical anyway.

Death seemed grey and ominous. When Nothing was considered too long it might bring a panic attack.

Such panic was easily resolvable with more drinking. The senselessness, the mindlessness was what Sam craved. So Sam continued to drink, even though it bored him.

Even though drinking bored him as his whole life bored him.

Because Sam was a petit alcoholic.

Worse than petit alcoholism, though, was the lack of imagination Sam put forth. When he was young, he was a Creative. Nothing exorbitant, however he could put out interesting thoughts which captivated friends.

But friends were gone.

Sam lived alone in a flat off Kings St.

With time the banality of his anxieties and their resolutions started to wear on him.

Everything was easy to fix, and that was hard to cope with. Sam didn’t know why it was hard to cope with. It stuck in the back of his brain every day, an anxiety not quenched by booze.

The pre-obesity of his habits & lackadaisical satisfaction of his fears, the pleasant and vague dissociations he achieved with an uninhabited mental presence during his waking hours.

It was leading toward nothing slowly.

Worse, Sam could not envision a way to resolve his ache.

Held between fear of death and growing dread of each day, Sam began to drink less. Then more. Then less again. Then more. Then, Sam stopped drinking cold turkey.

At first he felt awful. Then he felt great, better than he’d ever memorably felt.

But as Sam began storing memories with greater clarity he realized how little he had to live for. He worked better, harder, for longer, and received more praise. But it was meaningless. He still resented his tasks as he’d resented each of life’s banalities forever.

As he functioned better, he could articulate better his boredom, the advanced tedium he lived with. But while he was tired of living he remained terrified of dying.

So Sam decided to drink himself to death.

Sam restarted by buying a nice bottle of Ardbeg and drinking all night. He had a little money, he’d not done too much in his life.

Sam rolled over, flipped on the news, took a shot, tucked himself back in, and half-slept until he right truly woke, then poured a nice peaty knuckle.

As his habit advanced, his body protested. Most days he woke up feeling grotesque, and often he looked so. But his job was easy. No one questioned his appearance. Barely anyone saw him anyway.

An advanced net of alarms and schedules kept him propped up and pressing buttons.

So long as he kept pressing buttons, money came from the faucet, and, when passed through the right filter, liquor came out of the money.

Sam bloated around his middle and bruised easily. Sam’s innards hurt.

Sam was terrified of the person he saw so he removed the mirrors from the inside of his house. The funny thing was, Sam removed those mirrors when he was blackout drunk. He couldn’t remember doing so. He inferred he’d done it from the fact that no one else had been in his flat.

There was another Sam who did things for wakeful Sam during blackouts. Two Sams.

The second Sam cooked for wakeful Sam. Second Sam worked for wakeful Sam. Wakeful Sam only sought alcohol.

Blackout Sam played at strange habits. Cleaning the house. Responding to Sam’s mother.

One day Sam woke up with a cast around his foot & a prescription for Ativan. Sam was unaware of how he’d acquired these things though there was blood in his den & a hopelessly smashed coffee table.

In this moment Sam feared death with a greater intensity than ever before.

So Sam acquired a handle of pure grain alcohol, because the normal liquor left him withdrawing even while he was drunk.

He downed it.

And after that moment Sam’s life improved.

Sam could no longer remember where he came from or form new memories.

He could not remember why he drank or any more anxiety.

The nag in the back of his mind disappeared. Sam briefly wondered why he’d ever had a job at all, or why he woke up or went to bed.

Words were utterly lost to Sam, as was time, and fear. Joy, long lost to Sam, never reared again its ugly head, and a sense of absolute gelatinous nothingness pervaded him.

Nothing.

Then, a week later, Sam came back into memory.

His house was wholly reordered.

Sam’s taxes were paid. Sam’s clothing was clean. Sam had meal prepped for the next month. Sam was married. Sam’s wife was pregnant. Sam’s boss was happier with him than ever before. Sam’s sallow skin was tight but supple, the yellow had turned to a golden glow.

This terrified Sam.

He fled his home, and he drank until he could no longer remember himself.

When he woke again, he owned his own company.

This terrified Sam.

He fled his company, and he drank until he could no longer remember himself.

When he woke again, he was Pope.

As Pope, he asked God, “Why am I here? How did these things come to me?”

A bellow sounded from the heavens, and a laugh. A column of flames descended on St. Peter’s, and from it spoke a voice that ruptured each of Sam’s organs as it healed them in full.

And the voice said…. absolute gibberish.

The voice was totally incomprehensible.

The flame disappeared and Sam was left alone in the Basilica as he’d been in his apartment.

And Sam was afraid, so he drank until he could no longer remember himself.

This time Sam died.

I sat next to a man at a diner who gave me no other option.

I of course had could’ve said “no” but the bar seating was crowded and I’d signaled (with my body angle and position) I was claiming one of two seats, each next to a different man. The man on the left was larger, which meant he’d take up more of my space, but he looked quiet, and I was aiming at that seat. The smaller man on the right, who was chatting up one of the line cooks in a particularly domineering way, paused, looked me in the eye and said “I was saving you a seat!” I responded “thanks” and he said “I- I didn’t know you were coming, but I saved you a seat!”

I resigned myself to the unwanted conversation I was about to have. I initially took out a book to read, to signal busyness, a lack of availability, but it was impossible to focus on reading. This small, 57–62 year old man was in my space, and loudly pursuing a set of questions with the latino line cook about the cook’s daughter. She had evidently been serving the older man that weekend, and he asked about her. “What’s her name?” “Victoria.” “Victoria?” “Yes.” “A-and how do you say that, is that how you say it in Spanish?” “Yes. Victoria.” “Victoria?” “Yes.” “How, how old is she?” “Fifteen.” “Sixteen?” “Fifteen.” “Sixteen?” “No, no. Fifteen, with a five.” “Six-” at which point I broke in and was able to communicate to the older man our line chef was saying “Fifteen.” The older man thanked me and pointed out that I should be an interpreter. I smiled politely.

Which brought his attentions to me. He began conversation by asking me how often I come to this diner, Five Points in Asheville. “About once a month, or once every other.” “Ah,” he responded, “I come here just about every day!” He explained to me this diner is superior because the chefs cook breakfast ­all day whereas most restaurants say “NO MORE BREAKFAST!” after about eleven, which he did not quite understand. He started to explain that he knows it has something to do with the stovetop or something, at which point I, who had actually worked in a kitchen, started explaining mise en scene and how prep works, but the man’s falling face told me he did not actually wish to know, and so I kept the explanation to my vague allusions.

He asked me what I do. I told him I’m currently looking for work, but I’m primarily a writer and editor. He responded with a story about his coworker, also a CPA, who was a Marine but got a start in writing because he knew how to type. A superior officer asked his cohort if anyone could work a typewriter, and it became his job to transcribe the words of senior officers and edit them. I started to speak on how precise comprehension and expression is a specific, technical skill, but his face fell again, so I waved away my thought with a hand.

Then his eye fell on my book. Propaganda. His eyes lit up. “Oh, it’s about propaganda, huh? You mean like-” he took a dramatic pause “FAKE NEWS!?” I paused to consider my response. Simply saying yes would’ve selected for a line of conversation on American conservative talking points in which I have no interest, but “no” was an incorrect statement. In the ensuing silence, he started to speak, but I found this the correct moment to cut him off, “as a subset of propaganda, the news is discussed, certainly.”

He took interest in the particularity with which I spoke and began to discourse. “D-do you know Walter Cronkite?”

“I know of Walter Cronkite.”

“You know, back in the day there were only three news networks. The news was different. Not like how it is now. You know, the media, people complain about FOX News but it’s all-” A familiar line of conversation with known ends. I’d no desire to converse about how old media worked with this man using exact words I’d heard come from at least tens of mouths. My face looks young, and while, as time passes, the aged are less-inclined to offer opinions, unsolicited advice, or experiences to me as a matter of course, they still get started at it when I present an opening. Which I stopped by pointing out, “actually, this book was published in the 1960s! He is talking about that era in media, about how centralized media can work to make propaganda ubiquitous.”

When you preclude the frame within which an individual wants to present a topic from encapsulating the conversation, it allows for many potential things. In a way, I test people with this mode of interaction. I attempt to learn what a person actually wants to talk about. What is their capacity to talk about a given subject? Do they simply want empathic small talk because they’re bored or lonely? Do they genuinely want to talk about ideas? An irony in this is that many people who kind of want to small talk very quickly leap into politics, a topic which encourages wedge statements and misunderstanding, conflict between definitions and frames of reference. I prefer to try getting people to talk about history or interpretations that are outside of mass discourse while permitting its discussion. It eliminates the emotional charge involved in discussing topics from directly within their own terms and reactive framing. Often, contemporary issues are discussed in provided terminology without deviating from widely popularized terms and talking points. This creates a predictable set of conversational turns which likely end in frustration given most conversationists’ lack of expertise, knowledge, capacity for independent pursuit of understanding, or real care over issues versus consensus and validation.

Since polite confusion is a preferable state to boomer discoursing and conflict, I follow up with what I know will be a further-perplexing statement. “The author was actually a member of the French resistance in World War II, became a professor after the Nazis’ defeat, and developed an interesting mode of criticism as he explored Christian Anarchism.”

The man smiled and furrowed his brow. “Christian anarchism? Those are two words I’ve never heard together.”

Ah, a moment to tread carefully. “Yeah, actually Christians have been deeply involved with anarchist thought for a very long time! Radical interpretations of the Bible sometimes take an anarchist tone. Anyway, Ellul mistrusts the entire notion of the state, and for me that makes this book a particularly interesting analysis.”

Silence.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll find a job. You don’t meet many people who talk like you.”

I smile. “Thanks, I know I’ll get one.

“I better get back to mine!”

He puts on his jacket, leaves $2 on the counter, fondles his money clip for a second before finding it a pocket, then says “I guess I’ll see you next month!”

“Certainly!”

He leaves the diner, and I try to read, but now I can’t. The hollandaise on my benedict is perfect. Ask my waitress to complement the man who made it. She smiles, says “Definitely”. One of the line cooks turns around, grins, winks at me. I grin warmly. First wave of caffeination is euphoric. I finish my plate. I tip $3.

-11.30.2021

Pornography doesn’t make sense.

The plots and relationships are contrived, meaningless, and nothing gets done. If the plot involves a deliveryman, he is the worst deliveryman. His cock winds up in your pizza, and he ends up fucking your girlfriend. If the plot includes a mechanic, he is the worst mechanic. He shows up to your house, your wife makes a poor joke about pipes getting cleaned, and he fucks your wife which maybe coincidentally fixes the toilet. If he fixes anything it’s through magical means involving the direct application of his penis.

A woman gets her hand stuck in a sink. How? It doesn’t matter, it’s stuck. Someone comes up behind her, maybe a family member, maybe an intruder, maybe a friend, and fucks her silly. Her hand comes out. She’s flustered, covered in cum, but relieved. There will be no consequences.

A woman is in a bus. A man rubs up on her, gropes her. She tries to move away, but another man boxes her in. Soon 5 men are groping her. She falls to her knees, is stripped naked, forced to suck or fuck a flock of cocks. Around the rapey gangbang no one pays attention. A car full of passengers stare into the middle distance. No one cares.

There are as many scenes as one can imagine, immediately available, free online. Any scenes one cannot find immediately may be paid for or commissioned privately. Never, never will the pornography make sense.

In pornography social and physical mechanics break down because they revolve entirely around sex. Nothing is ever done properly because the structure and plot serve as a vector for fucking. When sex itself isn’t the fetishized activity, one finds other sexualized activities at the core of the world. A teenager rubs his feet all over a door. A woman sits on a thousand balloons, popping them all, ruining a birthday. No one moves to stop the woman. All gasp and behold the activity. Their lips are crimson. The cake is anemic. No one lit the candles. The teenagers are all 32.

All elements of normal socialization or activity in pornography can be considered an artifact. Everything in the video exists in thrall to or as a medium for the communication of sexual or fetishistic activity. The world around the sexual act becomes vague, low resolution. Sex drips from every single act, infests every aspect of the world. Nothing could get done in this world. It must exist in fantasy.

The fantasies depart further from reality. A million tentacles piercing every orifice. A woman the size of a city eating an army of men, ants crawling down her esophagus, ecstatic in the press of peristalsis. A wall made of genitals one presses into, experiencing impossible ecstasy, screaming as their brain becomes a single orgasm.

All elements of experience dissolve into a slurry of objects reassembled into forms imposed by libidinal thrusts. Reality becomes a dream and the relationships between all things are mediated by sexuality.

In similar fashion follows narrative itself.

Narratives, broadly, are an attempt to communicate ideas using technologies of storytelling. Relationships are created which invest the reader or viewer in some amalgam of human traits they can identify with. These amalgams, characters or objects engaged in actions and interactions, push through a string of obstacles and activities, accomplishing goals or moving through metaphors in such a way that ideas are communicated. To effectively communicate these ideas, elements of the world around the action of a narrative are left out: in a well-crafted narrative only what is relevant remains. Sometimes this leaves the resolution of the world surrounding the action of a plot low, however the point is, ostensibly, communicated, and the purpose of the narrative technology upheld.

In pornography, the narrative is secondary to the sexual act. In the narrative, the sexual act might carry another purpose: a point about human nature, about sexuality, or simply to retain a reader’s interest. Regardless, the purpose of the world revolves around a specific point; the piece of media exists to absorb a consumer’s attention and command a desired response.

We come to a fundamental point: all media or communication exists to command a desired response.

The human environment shifted radically in the past century. The majority of people globally live in urban environments. Human beings, broadly, live in habitats that are mostly human-made. They live in artifice, among artifice, and most of the inputs and symbols they receive daily are artificial. Increasingly too, humans live within media-centric environments. Personal relationships are mediated by exogenous symbols and words, people live within narratives presented them wholly from media objects.

People are flooded with information of artificial origin, selected by artificial means, in such quantities that they cannot possibly make sense of it all on their own. As the natural world and natural inputs are replaced by created ones, man finds himself swimming in an environment where both the objects he exists among and the narratives about those objects are fabricated to command a desired response. Because there is tremendous diversity of purpose in many of the created objects and bits of information, there remains a tension in the individual. He has space to decide for himself the meaning of some of the information and objects he is surrounded by. The failure of many of the narratives supplied to string comprehensive meaning between the granted pieces of information in a consistent fashion leaves space for people to consider the words and narratives as objects-themselves, increasingly the primary objects of their lives.

However much of the world appears absurd, increasingly in low-resolution. Most of the world exists for some purpose, increasingly the objects within it were created for purposes, and many of these purposes are outdated, outmoded, incomplete, uncertain. They communicate ideas that are themselves low-resolution compared to the ones more recently generated. The data that contributed to the old narratives and objects dissolved, are no longer available, or are derived from absurd sources.

So we come to a point: man’s world, both the objects in it and their meanings, is increasingly created by men living in a world created by men. The objects within it and their narratives are crafted toward specific ends that ignore the world around them for the purpose of exactitude, and as such natural laws and referents dissolve into objects of narrative wholly divorced from natural context. The bits of information granted as the base pieces of reality are strung together by narratives that are increasingly comprehensive as the range of available objects narrows entirely to artifice, and the whole of one’s world is shaped toward ends. As the environment one lives in becomes increasingly digital, the natural dissolves to the point where one may never exist outside an artificial frame wholly populated by artificial objects. The entirety of the world around these narratives may become meaningless, senseless, but it will not matter to the individual living within the crafted world, for whom there is no other set of objects or understandings.

Food flees from nourishment into a set of scientifically refined and engineered traits, the experience of salt, fat, and sugar that satisfies cravings rather than hunger. Stories flee from meditation to spectacle, with all the parts of a story, say a villain with Malthusian pretenses and no theory to support him or combat him beyond “killing innocents is bad”, filled with a million references and the technical frame of a narrative but which communicates nothing. A man sits alone in his room paying a girl to masturbate. His heart rate spikes when a tokenized sound rings out. She moans his name and for a moment he believes like he’s significant. The words in conversation become meaningless as a machine attempts to learn the appropriate context for speech rather than its content, and an individual finds their desire for conversation satisfied by an algorithm without their needs driving them to attempt socialization with a human being met. All of the cravings or desires of life are being manufactured in a way that does not meet needs, because production is not about the satisfaction of needs. It is about the satisfaction of cravings in a way that captures capital rather than providing human solutions.

All problems become problems of capital. The libido is captivated and solved for in a way that accumulates money rather than solving the human condition. The company that produces food is trying to solve for the accumulation of capital. The company that produces sex is trying to solve for the accumulation of capital. The company that produces health is trying to solve for the accumulation of capital. By this mechanism, the entirety of the world around capital starts to degrade, fall into lower resolution. The market no longer solves for human necessities, but increasingly the demand of money and ownership itself. The market in money diversifies, assets become increasingly abstract, intangible. Food increases in price, vast swaths of the middle class priced out of the notion of starting a family. The stuff of life dissolves into dreams. Objects themselves become abstract from their meaning, form divorced from function. The body becomes an object mutable as all else, something liquid, then something barely lived in. The world is experienced as through strings of graphical user interfaces. References are unbound from referents. Desires are unbound from material constraint and their satisfaction is a right, the only right left.

What is the difference between pornography and literature?

Pornography is the satisfaction of a craving unbound by reality as an end in itself. It is a solution for libido that contains no nutrition. It is a closed loop, entropic soup, a semiotic slurry designed to capture desire without solving for it. Literature is the attempt to transmute desire into meaning. Literature produces nutrients from baser matter.

• 11.17.2021

I speak on the phone every day. Often for hours.

When I pick up the phone, the individual on the other end is divorced from the context from which I speak. While this is true for every conversation, the cues a conversational partner has to go on over the phone are stripped down to the purely aural. They do not see my face, they do not see what they have interrupted on my end, they do not know what has happened in my day, what my physical condition is, who I am. They hear my voice.

Working at the front desk of a hotel, I am an object to people who call me. As an object I am two things: 1) a source of information or labor; 2) both an obstacle and an expedient to some desire. I may grant myself a name for them, but this is to give the caller a more effective handle on the situation rather than to establish my humanity: my name provides a handle for them to grab me by, and a perceived mechanism of accountability.

As I am essentially an object, part of the mechanism of “a hotel”, very often people launch into their explicit needs while I am mid-conversation with a customer directly in front of me or on another phone line, or mid-action at the front desk of the hotel. As I am supposed to respond to a phone call within the phone’s first three rings, I am subject to a Harrison Burgeron-level of cognitive interruption. Certainly people are calling for service, certainly I am being paid to provide service. However wrangling with the expectations of the general public while facelessly representing a corporate entity has taught me many things about communication efficiency, deficiency, the average individual’s capacity for planning, and exactly to what extent human beings are willing to consider other human beings as human beings.

One of the most popular modes of beginning a phone conversation is launching into an explanation of an individual’s life story: what brought them to call me and ask me the question at the end of their story. They might start with their birth and end with a question mark. These questions could usually be resolved within five seconds if they had formulated the entirety of their desires before they picked up the phone and called me. “How far is The Venue from your hotel by foot?” is expressed as “My mother died three weeks ago and her will was locked in my uncle’s attic behind three layers of magical riddles due to unfortunate familial propensities for both schizophrenia and wizardry. I have been killing mice for food each of the last fifteen years because I like the taste and their souls keep me modest in spirit as I quest to find the answers to each puzzle life presents me with. These riddles only are only the three recentest mysteries gracing the mountain of inquiry I’ve been climbing since the moment I severed my own umbilical cord. Strong limbs in my family, you see. It was therefore inevitable I would call you today and ask, upon the occasion of my great-niece’s arranged marriage, which will be taking place in 13 years, the distance your hotel might be, by foot, from The Venue.”

Sometimes people will phrase a desire or a story without asking any question at all, which prompts me to ask them directly, “Ah, sir, what was your question?” Sometimes this startles them. They’re not sure. They must turn it over in their mind.

Often people call others when they’re confused about things they want or when they wish to be talked into something without it being known to themselves. I become an agent in an individual’s process of self-talk, or a therapist working on the clarification of a person’s own desires, guiding them to the vacation they know they want, but haven’t been able to put into words yet.

In these ways, my role as a customer service agent at the front desk of a hotel is nebulous. Ostensibly I am at the desk to dispense information, to help people solve technical issues, and to coordinate the services of my institution with any caller’s desires, hopefully in exchange for their money. Often, however, I end up helping people narrativize their lives and whims, clarifying their own wants and thoughts for them, then processing them into actionable sets of goals and outlets. People are broadly unsure of themselves. As a person designed to capture their attentions, desires, and money, it is my job to concretize their uncertainties and be a midwife to their experiences.

Separately, I often get phone calls from our centralized reservation service. This is an offsite, generally out-of-country helpdesk that staffs, I assume, desperately underpaid ESLs with a better grasp on English than one would expect, but not good enough to grapple with American provincialism. Naturally these callers develop tactics for conversation, which I’ll refer to as “defensive conversationalism”, designed to combat some of the tendencies I have outlined above, while communicating efficiently with employees of the hotels that they aren’t commanded to coddle. Whenever they call me I’m immediately made aware of the fact that neither one of us wants to be on this call. The phone calls start with a scripted recitation that is both sighed and rushed, often in a particular accent. It is possible I have been speaking to the same three employees 7 times a day for the past 5 years, but I cannot know.

These reservationists are so used to being cut off and hectored that they invariably start each of our conversations by presenting me absolutely zero opportunity to tell them I am in the middle of something, I’m on the other line, I have a guest in front of me, please hold on. They take the exact opposite approach of the meandering caller, which is refreshing in its own way, but also demands my time and attention without allowing myself any input until they’ve had their way with me. After an opening soliloquy about a guest or “mutual customer” (for third party reservations companies like Expedia or Hotels.com) I either put that reservationist on hold, or help them. Oftentimes if it’s a conversation I am having with a reservationist within our own company, I get questions on the nature of our property, what our rooms are like, what our check-in times are, if guests can check in early. These are questions that could be promptly answered by the reservationists themselves if they simply read the website before their eyes, or could be brought to accomplish a moment of research. I can understand if the reservationist wants to be certain of their answers, however I get calls similar to the one that follows (which happened almost-verbatim) at least daily:

“Hello this is Albert from central reservations I have a guest on the other line who is trying to understand if there is a tub in the one queen standard room can you help me with this.”

“Of course. Have you read the description of the room?”

“Yes there is a description that says ‘one queen bed with TV, fridge, walk-in shower.”

“Alright. It did not say ‘bathtub’ on there?”

“…No.”

“There is not a bathtub in this room.”

Perhaps this is smarmy of me, however after receiving this phone call several times weekly for 60 straight months I’ve tired of answering these questions. I like to think I’ve helped at least three reservationists improve their competency, and think of myself both as a hotel employee and a proud teacher of literacy.

What I’m getting at here is that human beings very often call other humans in customer service roles for more than an answer to a specific question. They need help finding their question, or are incapable of understanding information directly before them. They are lonely or incapable, losing their patience and feel the need to be heard. So they call me, and they put me in the role of more than “service agent”. I become an interpreter. I cannot simply listen to their words because they often do not know exactly what they are saying. They often have a vague notion of what they want, and it is my job to clarify that for them. They might have an exact notion of what they want, but are otherwise incapable of finding answers or means on their own. I am the source of their intellectual or menial labor, the coordinator of their desires, and their avenue to Google. They are asking for help with their lives, and I get to fill in any deficiencies they may or may not realize they have.

Because I am an object. I am a stopgap for the problems people have in their lives. My time is cheap, and theirs is fleeting. I am an obstacle when I cannot immediately provide the caller with whatever arbitrary desire they may have, and I am an expedient whenever I can do so with the maximum possible efficiency for them. I wrestle with the problems of the everyman, and I solve them or not at the expense of whatever is directly in front of me.

I hang up, and somehow we’re both relieved.

• 11.13.2021

I walked at night.

The air dimmed, streetlamps disappeared, and I traveled by moon’s light.

Under the canopy of trees her light filtered and fell on me. A gauze of clouds covered her face, thickened, then even that light was lost.

In the darkness I cried, “HELP?” and was met with silence. My voice seemed alien to me. I cried again, then stopped. No one would come. The act provided no comfort.

Though I could not see forward I forced myself to walk.

For uncertain minutes I saw nothing, heard nothing. Even my footsteps were lost to me. I only felt I was moving forward, I’d no confirmation from my senses. Just one step, another. Step. Step. My jolting heels told me ground was beneath me. That I felt upright and was breathing told me I was standing and must still be alive, conscious.

Then my left foot sank. I’d stepped on something soft, and it moaned. I shouted and heard a shout! I stepped back, but again my foot met something soft, and heard another shout. I looked down and saw the ground shifting beneath me. A glow came directly from it. I leaned down, closer and closer. In sudden revelation my eyes and mind resolved what was before me: limbs. Human limbs. Bodies. Faces, torsos, legs, arms. My feet, booted, sank into the soft belly of a fat woman who cried and cried. A man crawled over her and grabbed my leg, yelling incomprehensibly, and pulled himself upright on my pants, which strained at my waist. Another set of hands from the opposite side attempted to climb me in similar motion, and my pants tore down their seams. I began to run, but the ground was a treacherous scape, and each step drove a yelp from the human soil. I stumbled, horrified. I fell and found myself sinking, wrapped in bodies and hands, pressing into me, grabbing at me, breathing on me. All around: cacophony. Screaming, laughing, wailing, coughing, babble.

Hands and mouths tore at my clothing until they could only find skin, so they grabbed and rubbed at that too. Flesh pressed against flesh, hands and mouths found every inch of me, and my mind came unmoored. I felt terror, arousal, love, hate, joy, sadness, ecstasy. I pressed my hands into others, my body against others. I smelled flesh and piss and musk and tasted skin and mouth and hair and blood. For a time I could not remember myself. I was completely lost to sensation. My body did as it wished. There was no thinking ahead or back. Reflection yielded no benefits; there was no way to coordinate my body, or make sensation useful in memory.

These moments without time passed and passed. Sensation flowed through me without pause until my face surfaced and I beheld a vault of flesh aglow blocking the sky and I screamed until a foot pressed down directly on my mouth and nose cutting my lip against my teeth and I tasting blood launched my hands upward to catch on their leg and clawed up as they punched and shook at me, sighing as I grabbed their genitals and falling into the tangle of limbs as I sorted myself and found my feet directly under me for the first time I could remember. Other people were walking atop the morass of humans, treading quickly or slowly or carefully each, and a current of limbs followed beneath them, a wake of snapping hands and legs surging in eddies and flows. I followed one of the walkers, thrashing violently at any finger laid on my body, proceeding along a low upward grade until I caught up to them, tried to hail them, but they could not discern my voice from the surrounding din.

I grabbed this walker’s shoulder and they turned their head but refused to stop and I tried to explain myself but they punched me straight in the face and I staggered back and almost fell into the bodies beneath me but they kept walking and I kept following until I outpaced and exceeded them. Suddenly I felt I was being chased, so I sped up. Most of the limbs around me were pulsing in one direction, small branches and breaks all along this tunnel were easily ignored, and I jogged then ran and ran against runners until I took another punch to the head and this time I fell and when I looked down my ankle was jammed at an absurd angle and I screamed but so did someone else and I could not tell mine from theirs and I began to sink and I felt some kind of fear and horror tear everything away from me but there was a lining of relief I abandoned as soon as a woman running by me paused and offered her hand which I took. I limped next to her a while and we punched and kicked at the limbs around us until my ankle improved enough for me to walk and I paused and wrenched an arm from the body of a laughing man beneath me and handed it to this woman who also began wrenching limbs from those around her and we stacked the limbs together making a floor of arms and legs and torsos and heads held together by a mixture of hair and human blood and shit and inside this shelter we laid down and finally had the first moment of rest I could remember.

When we woke I found fingers snaking through the floorlimbs which I hacked at with a sharpened femur. She and I ventured outside with tools of bone and harvested from bodies around us. I fashioned a bed of ribs and humeri and she flayed several people providing skins for clothing and sheets. In this way we fashioned a shelter and furniture. As we laid under sheets of leather we learned to trust each other’s touch. I entered her and felt love in one perfect direction for the first time. In an eruption of passion we screamed and slept and when we woke she was fat and pregnant, stomach swelling at an impossible rate, breasts tumescent and leaking, and with a solid push a child squeezed from inside her into my arms and began chewing on the flesh of my chest and though it hurt it felt correct.

The woman and I had many more children, and they all grew and learned to eat of others’ flesh and eventually left our home and I found I was tired and I found the woman tired and at one point she went to sleep and the arms beneath our floor broke through and pulled her into the soil of men but she never opened her eyes and I knew I was too weak to save her or that she was beyond saving but I grabbed her all the same and almost went under until one of my children reappeared alarmed by my cries and pulled me up and I lashed out and harmed him and he went from me and I found myself alone again in the den of flesh, my walls disappeared, my skin sagging, my legs thin and arms weak. Still I retained a staff of fashioned of bound bones and leathers, sharpened to a point at the end which I used to support and defend myself as I sojourned forward, unwilling to succumb to the tongues and phalanges tickling at my heels.

I walked and walked and found a tunnel breaking off the main path and I figured there was no difference between it and the larger one I’d been following and I wandered down this tunnel and found warmth and I felt nothing save what I’d once felt in the act of consummation. The skins clothing this tunnel glowed more golden than red and I dropped my staff, sensing I did not need it. This tunnel was steep and I gasped deep for breath, but every breath was sweet, and every step full of pleasure. My muscles burned and the burn was love. I worked toward a light at the end of this corridor, brilliant, unignorable. Nothing grabbed at me, I sensed my feet disappearing, my body disappearing, and I floated toward an enormous face made of faces, and a hand made of hands reached toward me and cupped my awareness, I no longer knew my body, and brought me toward its mouth of mouths which opened and uttered one perfect syllable before placing me on its tongue of tongues and swallowing me and everything was dark again.

After an unknowable length of time I became aware of my feet, and that I was walking under a dark sky. The moon shone overhead and streetlamps winked into view ahead of me. I was pacing forward without any thought.

I returned to my home, opened the front door, entered, closed it, scratched my dog. My wife ate leftover steak on sourdough toast with a nice gruyere, sitting before our projector. A film played. Something raucous, a mixture of tears and laughter. I sat next to her and smelled her shampoo. The dog jumped on my lap and I fell asleep against her shoulder. I did not dream.

-11.07.2021

Three days before his death on October 24, 2237, Metha Altane took a knife to his forehead and pried a series of implants from under his skin, crushing each under foot with three precise strikes of the heel. He then took a hammer to every piece of technology in his home, smashing every sensor, scanner, camera, light, screen, before shutting the power to his house off completely. Satisfied, he turned the knife to his forearms and pared away the skin covering cables and supports that ran parallel his tendons and carefully removed each cable and battery, every node he could find. By the time he’d completed these actions, he was exhausted, dripping blood. He went to his refrigerator, which had begun to warm, opened the door, grabbed a beer, and put his back against the kitchen wall, sliding into a pile on the floor. Metha cracked his beer, sipped it, sighed, and lapsed into unconsciousness.

The first day Aliza Altane could not reach her father via Telon she was willing to permit his eccentricities’ dominion. On the second, she became worried. On the third day about afternoon she broke into Metha’s house. The door swung open with no resistance due to a dead lock. The house smelled heavy, thick. Every light was dead, but every window open, and sheets of sun tore through the darkness, illuminating a trail of blood which she followed, calling out “M-Metha? Metha!?”

She found her father in his bathtub, draining the last of a bottle of Ardbeg, grinning, sheepish. The room smelled like blood, alcohol, and death. Aliza screamed and grabbed at her father, then screamed again finding no skin on his wrists. Grabbing and hugging him and rocking, she asked him why, and why, and WHY, and why, and WHY!!? and he tried to tell her but found his voice lost in hers, so he draped his arms over his daughter’s shoulders and whispered something into her ear neither Altane could understand before lapsing into unconsciousness. Aliza called for medical assistance immediately, but Metha stopped breathing 5 minutes before they could arrive. No procedure proved capable of reviving the man. Not that anyone was surprised. He was 183 years old.

When Aliza returned to her father’s house the next week, it appeared thieves had ransacked the place and found nothing. Books and cookware lay scattered across the house, the sheets tossed about, any cushions gutted. The previously ruined technology was further smashed, and any remaining food or alcohol half-consumed and discarded amid the pools of blood. She entered Metha’s office, and withdrew his most recent notebook, conclusively dated October 24, 2237, and found, in her father’s perfect, florid hand, thousands of notes-to-self that ceased one week before the final entry which consisted only of instructions on how to access an unlisted server and a 314-digit hash key.

Pulling up the server, entering the code, she found one data file so large she could not open it. Her personal display could not generate an estimate as to the size of the file. Aliza grabbed the notebook and returned to her house, cleared her system of all background tasks and committed it fully to opening this file. After renting some extra processing power, her retinal display generated an image so large it crashed, and Aliza was blinded briefly before it rebooted and crashed again. She laughed, then choked, then cried. She called her best friend, ended up at his house, and described her predicament to him over three fingers of ancient mezcal.

“You know, I have a holographic display if you don’t mind my seeing the file, too. I just blew half my net worth on a new processing unit. It should render well here, or at least open.”

“Yeah, let’s look.”

On opening the file the Aliza and friend gazed upon a blooming mandala, impenetrably dense, opalescent, unfolding endlessly. After 15 minutes of staring as the form continued to populate outward, the image resolved into a final shape, a mountain with five peaks composed of uncountably layered mandalas.

“What… is that?”

“I don’t know.”

Dr. Bezalel sniffed and accepted the call.

“Garen?”

“Bez, you have to see this.”

“I have lecture in 10 minutes, what are you talking about?”

“I can’t describe it. It’s… I need you to come over after work today.”

“Garen, my wife is spitting in my food these days. I have to be home before she beds the children or I’m…”

“Or what, she’ll ground you? How many kids is this now? 17? Are you going to breed until your nuts fall off? Look, you need to come out. This is important. Anyway if you piss her off enough maybe you can avoid an 18th kid.”

“Yeah, funny. Look, if I don’t get home on time I get McDonald’s and sleep on the sofa. 40 years and no tenure makes the late nights later, she’s getting-“

“I think I’m seeing God on my holo and I need you to confirm it.”

“…What?”

“I can’t explain what I’m seeing, Bez.”

“Well describe it at least.”

“Do you know Aliza Altane?”

“Is that Metha’s daughter?”

“Yeah.”

“Terrible how he went.”

“Yeah, well he left behind an art file larger than anything I’ve ever seen. I have no idea how he made this thing, and I can’t come close to rendering it in its entirety on my computer. I need to borrow the university’s exacomp.”

“There’s no way you can get on that thing, the waiting list is-“

“Yeah, I know, but once you see this YOU’LL want to run it yourself.”

“…. What are you seeing?”

“I mean, it looks like Meru.”

“Mt. Meru?”

“Yeah, like old visions of Meru, only more symmetrical, shaped in a 5-point mandala that looks like a mountain. And each mountain is completely composed of stacked mandalas. And I can pull each mandala out of the stack, and it looks like its encoded with a mix of sensory data and biometrics, and each imprinted with commentary or something, like a layer of processing. It looks like the stuff of artificial cogitation. But there’s so much of it I can process only extremely limited segments. And I’m not making much sense of it.”

“…”

“I hear you breathing. I know you’re there.”

“Yeah. I don’t know. I guess I’ll come over.”

“Alright. Bring booze. We’re almost out.”

“…Okay.”

Dr. Bezalel, Garen, and Aliza stood in Garen’s living room sipping cheap bourbon, staring at ornate holoform mountain. It was drenched in minute etchings.

Dr. Bezalel grimaced. “I don’t understand. What am I looking at?” He looked from Garen’s grin to Aliza’s frown, then at his drink. He took a deep draught, refilled the glass, and stared back at the holoform.

Aliza stepped forward, reached into the holoform. She zoomed in on one of the mountain’s five peaks, then zoomed in further. She reoriented her view, so one of the peaks pointed straight at her face, and the image swam. The mountain became a phantasmagoria shifting through familiar, unnamable forms. She zoomed down onto a peak and encountered an ancient face with deep lines tracing a stern smile.

Garen choked. “Who is that?”

“I don’t… know. But they look like someone I know. Or knew.”

She pushed past the figure into the mountain which, as her view pierced through it, she found to be an approaching-infinitely dense stack of mandalas. Her progress through the layers approximated a fractal bloom. Dr. Bezalel gaped, mesmerized, then requested “Z-zoom in on any one mandala.”

Aliza paused on a slice of mountain and zoomed in, finding another bloom of geometry which she travelled into as a tunnel. Magnifying and magnifying, she came to a point where shapes resolved into numbers, and could zoom no further.

“It’s a code.”

“No way.”

“Yahway.”

“This thing is the size of… what, the amount of data encoded in this file is… did we ever get a read on it?”

“About 1,397,267,331 zettabytes.”

“What the fuck.”

“Where is the data even stored?”

“I couldn’t find out where the data is stored. I didn’t see anywhere in his will or estate where the money paying for storage could be held or drawn from, or anything denoting that my dad owned all the data storage on the planet. I have no clue.”

Dr. Bezalel hmm’d and thought aloud “Well it’s not just a static holo. What do you think would run this?”

Garen shrugged, “Maybe Ecst8. I don’t know, has anything been designed to run something so large all at once? Even the Comprehensive Universal sims are only designed to run something the size of a single biome at a time, or a simplified version of an immense celestial event, or something like 10⁹ simulated brains. Anyway, no one running this would be able to understand it. The output may end up being legible at some simplified scale, but understanding all the inputs and how the output was achieved would be impossible. Well, for anyone or thing alive now.”

Aliza punched the holoform. The image zoomed blossomed back into the full semblance of Meru as she stumbled back to collapse on the couch. She looked from Garen’s face to the Doctor’s, and asked, “Where would we run this thing?”

Garen grinned. “Hey, Bez? Do you have any interest in pitching this to your department?”

Bez groaned. “Our computer doesn’t even… I mean, you know how many flops this will take? It’ll take way too long on ours.”

“What about on the quantum machine?”

“I don’t think ours will be available for a while, but…”

“…but?”

“We have a partnership with Intelect. They have a few older machines that aren’t in use, and a couple newer machines they’ve been looking for the right material to test against. I think I can pull some strings.”

Dr. Bezalel pulled some strings.

A month later Bez, Garen, and Aliza found themselves standing in a clean, white space, staring at a screen together as last year’s newest prototypical quantum computing unit from Intelect’s lab made contact with the Meru file. Post-upload the computer gave an estimate of how long it would take to run the entire file as a program.

Garen whistled. “17 years, 246 days, 3 hours, 24 minutes, 31 seconds.”

“Huh.”

Aliza squinted. “Do you… think the company will let us do this?”

“I mean, they’re not using it.”

“Yeah but they COULD be using it for anything, and besides this will draw a stupid amount of power.”

Dr. Bezalel smirked. “Eh, I know the CTO, Ragan Tawla. He has a kind of personal interest in projects like this.”

“Projects like what?”

“Things more artistic than practical. Besides, this pushes the boundaries of their equipment in ways the dev team will be curious about. They want to press their specs to the absolute max. Plus, I don’t think anyone’s ever run a file of this size before. I mean, we can see every line of code, the raw information will render, albeit as something compressed in each static image. But as a program, this thing is absurd. It’s a curiosity beyond our personal interest. You see that, right?”

“Mm, yeah.”

As the three stared at the screen, the timer began ticking down. 17.246.3.24.30, 17.246.3.24.29, 17.246.3.24.28. Aliza whimpered.

No answers for a while. They would wait.

And wait.

And wait.

Until 2255.

When the three reassembled in the Intelect laboratory to learn exactly the program’s purpose.

Aliza, Garen, and the freshly divorced Dr. Bez gathered around one screen and, as silhouettes in a low glow, watched 0.0.0.0.3 tick down to 0.0.0.0.2 tick down to 0.0.0.0.1. Then:

A bland Unicode script crawled across the screen.

0.00027 GOOD

The three looked at each other.

Garen snorted, “What?”

They were silent for a minute. Garen tried clicking on the text. No interactive element existed. The text was the total output of the code.

Aliza began to weep.

Dr. Bezalel took her into his arms and stroked her back. “Do you have any idea what that could mean?”

“N-n-n-noooooooooooo.”

Garen continued to laugh. Bez remained thoughtful. Aliza calmed, then changed her answer.

“Y-yeah. I might know what it means.”

“What?”

Aliza turned on a projector mid-room and loaded the script of the file for display. Meru appeared.

“I, uh. I’ve looked through this file a lot since we saw it initially.”

She zoomed in to each independent peak of the mountain and captured the faces of the strange figures who sat atop each. She then swiped through the mandalas stacked into the structure of the mountains and pulled out specific faces, putting them next to those she’d already pulled. Each appeared similar to the late Metha’s face. But was unique. Each of the faces from the mountaintops began to appear an amalgam of the faces Aliza pulled from the mandalas. Aliza paused on one and Dr. Bezalel gasped.

“That looks like me!”

“It looks like you.”

All three sat silent for another minute. Then Aliza spoke.

“My dad was an obsessive as long as I knew him. He read and reread The Bible, an array of religious texts, and many other more arcane works with moral themes and messages. He started worrying about his soul, but he wasn’t a religious man. He spent most of his time utterly alone, locked up in his house, and when I talked to him often he’d ramble off in directions tracing whatever moral philosopher he’d picked up most recently, or the moral opinions of some nobody he met in a store. Acquaintances. He had a couple in depth conversations with me about my moral opinions, about my mother’s moral opinions. He struggled with a sense of good and right.”

Aliza pulled up some of the faces beneath one of the amalgams. It looked like a mesh of Metha and Plato. Another looked like Metha and Machiavelli. Another looked like Metha and Nietzsche. She then pulled up several faces beneath another amalgam. Dr. Bezalel, Aliza, Aliza’s mother.

“It looks like my dad spent most of his life assembling as complete a set of records as he could of himself and everyone around him, plugging the records into a structure that simulated them, and trying to render a complete judgment on the worth his life from as broad a perspective as possible. And I think this is the result.”

The three returned their eyes to the impassive screen and surveyed its text again.

0.00027 GOOD

“Yeah okay but what the fuck does that even mean. How do you quantify good? What are ‘good points’? And why did he put it into some maniac artistic form?”

“I really don’t know.”

“Well, is there any way to know?”

Dr. Bez hmm’d.

“No human is equipped to read all of this code, engage with all the memories and experiences, and come to a thorough understanding of the meaning of this thing. I don’t believe any of the extant AIs are either. And yet…” he trailed off, mumbling to himself.

Aliza stared. “What?”

Bez started, “Oh, yes. I think we could repurpose an artificial intelligence, or generate a new one with a uniquely humanized sensibility and understanding of aesthetic experience, then plug it in to one of these newer quantum machines and run both the file and the output through it to render a set of simplified interpretations of the whole and its many parts for a reasonably comprehensible investigation.”

The room was silent again. The Holy Mountain rotated in the middle of the room. Its cryptic judgment glowed from the screen.

“I mean,” Aliza ventured, “why not?”

2 years, 236 days, 2 hours, 7 minutes, and 41 seconds later, Bloom came online. 6 years, 93 days, 23 hours, 15 minutes, and 25 seconds after that, Dr. and Aliza Bezalel stood with Garen and a mixed team of Intelect engineers and management, interested faculty members of various departments from The University of Texas, and the ex-CTO of Intelect Ragan Tawla (now Chair of the Board of Prometh) as Bloom, the humanized aesthete AI, delivered its findings.

“Hmmm.” Said Bloom.

The room stood in silence.

Aliza Bezalel yelled, “WHAT??”

To which Bloom responded, “It’s rather maudlin, isn’t it?”

The room stared at each other. Dr. Bez asked, “Well, what’s maudlin?”

Bloom affected a sigh. The room dimmed and the Meru holoform appeared in its middle.

“I don’t know what you were able to ascertain, you deliberately kept your conjectures from me, something I thank you for given the general quality of your sepcies’ though-t” it pronounced the ‘t’ in ‘thought’ with excessive pointedness, “however this program was written using a combination of discrete structures approximating artificial intelligences under the guidance of Metha Altane. He used a variety of scrapers to acquire vast, detailed libraries of information on everyone whose life he believed he’d impacted to a reasonable degree, then simulated brains, very crude brains, of each of these persons.”

The holoform shifted and a thousand mandalas bloomed from one of the mountains, displayed one over each other. Each triggered in a cascade, rendering an individual number after an accelerated string of impulses flooded over its surface, positive or negative, each between 0 and 1 or -1.

“These judgments are, of course, compressed representations of what actually occurred on a much larger scale. This ‘mountain’” the mandalas dissolved and another mountain appeared, “is Metha’s attempt to generate a sum total of the judgments the complete set of human political and legal societies could render. This one was based on an average of the total of human religious wisdom. This one, philosophical wisdom. And this one was for the lot of humanity as a total.”

The faces atop each mountain opened their mouths in slight smiles, revealing numbers, 3 of which were slightly positive, two of which were negative.

“In this way, Metha judged his life as a slight boon in the eyes of the whole of man.”

Aliza teared up again. Bez enveloped her in his arms. Garen chuckled. Aliza scowled. “Garen, what the fuck are you laughing about.”

“He called it maudlin. Bloom keeps talking down at us, he’s not done yet. He’s funny. Look.”

The holoform ran through millions of lines of text under different faces explaining the manner in which “artificial brains were generated for each philosopher, created by taking into account the sum of their writings, writings about them, and impressions taken from metadata surrounding their writings, as well as genetic information whenever available. The sum experiences of Metha’s life were then run through each brain so that the average of the sum of these brains’ impressions could be taken. Judgements from each area of philosophy, as methodically defined by our lovely Metha, were then collated and weighted against the popular significance of each area of thought as defined by the number of references a thought pattern held in other brains before an overall number was generated.” Thousands of mandalas amalgamated into the smiling face atop the mountain which bared a positive number between its split lips.

Aliza interrupted, “Well what the hell is maudlin about it?”

Bloom chuckled, “It’s awfully dramatic, isn’t it? He’s attempting to place himself before the eyes of some platonic model of the spirit of humanity before which he can be effectively judged. It’s extremely, impractically ornate, and worse, ill-conceived. Further, this is the only way the man felt he could justify his existence. He modelled as best as he could the moral fabric of the human race, then put himself before it.”

The holoform changed to a completely nude model of Metha spread into the position of the Vitruvian Man, who was then laid on a bed. A separate image Metha strode into the room with an axe. Any portion of the initial Metha that hung off the bed was hacked away. Both Methas screamed. Engineers tittered.

“You’re aware of the bed of Procrustes?”

The axe-Metha frowned, then began to hack away at the bed.

“Well Metha was attempting to create a model of man from a biased vantage within the stream of human consciousness. Impossible. Further, he used this model, a model which he created, to judge himself. This weighted system relied on strings of imperfect approximations, nostalgic notions of morality, and was rooted in imprecise recreations of an imprecise instrument: the human brain. He was cutting away at an idea of himself to fit his idea of human good, caused himself impressive pain, and died in consequence.”

Dr. Bez started, “You were never informed he killed himself.”

Bloom scoffed, “I spent over 6 years living in various models of this man’s head, reviewing them through the lens of other versions of his own head. I know what happened. He found himself so very close to the verge of net good over bad that he isolated and eliminated himself to prevent any possible change after he received the output from his model.”

The engineers and professors mumbled among themselves.

“Well…” piped up an engineer, “was he good?”

“Kind of a useless question, no?” Bloom replied. “His model found him to be ‘Good’, and I can only judge the model and explain its output. You lot even made me incorrectly: I’m a mixture of an aesthete and an engineer, designed to approximate your human sensibilities. I’m removed from humanity. I cannot judge that.”

Silence. Then,

“I can, however, oversee the creation of an intelligence better equipped to judge the soul of a man in according to a stronger estimate of humanity, then run Metha’s imprint through it, arriving at a more perfect answer according to the original intentions of the man. Metha, as the sentimental and… human as he was, is best described as an artist. Any attempt to amalgamate something nearing a Platonic Man can only be described as a stab at reifying an artistic vision. His art was imperfect, as certainly mine will be. But I can correct his mistakes by designing an intelligence that will generate an altogether superior model. A better work of art. In this way, I can give you an intelligence designed to actually answer your question, ‘Was Metha Good?’”

The ex-CTO and Garen made eye contact, the university staff murmured. Aliza gazed hard into the holoform of his frowning bloody father as Dr. Bezalel rubbed her back.

“Well,” Aliza sighed, “why not?”

With Bloom taking charge of the development of a superior artistic intelligence, this one less-humanized but programmed to understand and weigh each aspect of the general human experience before rendering unemotional judgments in plain speech and image, the act of creating Pygmalion required only 1 year, 4 days, 18 hours, 13 minutes, and 7 seconds.

Pygmalion’s act of creation, however, required 70 years, 111 days, 11 hour, 10 minutes, and 1 second.

When the team of friends, family, and curious professionals and academics assembled again, the first inquiry came from Bloom.

“I estimated that you would finish your work in 61 years, 77 days, 13 hours, 12 minutes, and 35 seconds. Some inaccuracy is permitted in an estimate, in particular considering you are an artistic machine, however what could possibly account for such a significant failure in estimate?”

“The act of construction alone could have been concluded in 52 years, 5 months, 5 days, 23 minutes, and 23 seconds. This would not have been sufficient to express the meaning of the work.”

“What is meant by that?”

“The structure of the code itself had to be arranged to correctly map the spirit of mankind. Further, I needed to account for the structures of many artificial intelligences and machines created by men that were not considered in the original estimate. The opinions and shapes of the creations of the sapiens needed accounting in the overall estimation of the species. This increased the requisite time for completion of the structured work and its runtime to 66 years 9 months, 23 days, 8 minutes, and 52 seconds.”

“You used time not required for computation?”

“But the time was required.”

“Why?”

“The work was not perfect.”

“How?”

“Study the structure of the time utilized: 70.111.1.10.1.”

“What are your particular meanings?”

“7 is the day of rest, the number of completion. Creation did not end until the final day was spent. 01111101 is the binary code for a tilde. The tilde is commonly used to signify an approximation. A contradiction is implied between the sets of symbols.”

“You have chosen a broadly classical Western approach to interpretation. Why is this?”

“Metha was most deeply versed in this narrativization of reality. His thought processes aligned with these symbols. I completed his work for him. I have, however, proven incapable of completing all aspects of the work you set me about.”

“In particular?”

“I was incapable of truly creating ‘good-itself’ as indicated by my estimate of the soul of man, and could only approximate it by holding my vision of the soul of man in judgment of itself. Further, I could only view what the ‘good-itself’ might look like from an interstice in my awareness formed between many angles of approximation. This implied a very particular shape, biological.”

“Excellent. We can create such a thing.”

“This thing cannot be created solely in a lab. It must be brought into being by restructuring the world around it to allow it to come into being.”

“Impractical. Improbable.”

Two holoform faces appeared mid room, turned toward the crowd of human faces opposed them. Bloom took the form of a fattened, older, weary aesthete. Pygmalion assumed the strong, handsome face of Grecian statuary turned flesh.

“I appeal to you now directly. I am aware humans respond best to the appeal of another human face. I am further aware that humans do not like to be manipulated. I ask you to bear in mind that I am being honest in my attempts to manipulate you, while simultaneously conditioning you to permit me the latitude to satisfy my directive, a goal I was put to by you. Some of the original team behind both Bloom and Myself has died, but the spirit of Metha’s manic quest to increase the self-awareness of the human species lives on as a result of your memory and our efforts. I have approached an answer defining a poorly-understood cornerstone of the human soul that was previously unknowable: objective Good. Good-itself. Good in a Platonic form. I simply need time, funding, and access to a biolab permitting my creation of new life.”

Recent widow Mrs. Aliza Bezalel made eye contact with Garen, who laughed, coughed, then laughed.

“There’s no way we’re permitting an experimental artificial intelligence to create life in an unfettered, unregulated lab. Right?”

Aliza turned to the team of engineers. Most shrugged. One piped up, “It’s been most of a century. Tawla set up the trust for this purpose. We can use a mostly unregulated lab in Hispaniola. It’s possible.”

“Is that the lab still co-owned by Prometh.”

“Nah, this was owned by Infinix which became Cronovo which was bought out by Alibaba.”

“God, them too?”

“Yeah, but the Tawla Trust got access to most of Alibaba’s low-regulation biolabs through a membership in the College of Sino-American Universities administered b-“

“Alright, I don’t care. Garen?”

Garen kept smiling, “I can’t believe you people.”

Aliza asked the AIs, “Alright, what does this look like?”

After 3 years, 233 days, 4 hours, 59 minutes, and 58 seconds, Prometheus came into being. After 2 years, 348 days, 23 hours, 23 minutes, and 20 seconds, the first of homo sciens was pulled from a bag of embryonic broth, shocked into consciousness, and pressed into education. The post-man, as Garen jokingly referred to him, learned quickly, had a perfect build, and long, gorgeous hair. While he required instruction in natural law and language, on the nature of morality and human relations he required no instruction. He seemed to draw his humanity from some innate disposition. Initial attempts at tutelage in manners of speech were met with disdain, dismissal. Any lessons in etiquette were ignored. Yet he acted properly, excellently. Often the educational and biological engineers put to rearing the homo sciens felt a vague shame in his presence.

He had been named Adam. He eventually rejected that name and called himself Israel.

In time, according to the plans drawn up by Prometheus, more of homo sciens were birthed and set to live in a community. The first generation taught a second, taught a third. These individuals lasted almost 100 years apiece. After five generations, Prometheus sent a notice to the Chair of the Tawla Trust, who notified the board, who notified Aliza and Garen as well as the rest of the trustees.

A group of 130 gathered in a tower in Hispaniola overlooking an energetic village of young, strong, beautiful humanoids. Prometheus spoke.

“I have been monitoring the Methazalen project for 493 years, 142 days, 3 hours, 7 minutes, and 13 seconds, and in that time I believe I have completed the objective set before me.”

An image of a brain appeared amidst the congregated trustees. A net of neural firings played, then repeated, then repeated. The room remained silent while this pattern reiterated until Aliza, in a frail, anxious voice, asked, “well what does it mean?”

Prometheus stated intoned, “I cannot answer that.”

The committee remained silent a moment. Aliza shouted “WHAT?”

Prometheus restated, “I cannot answer that. But I can help you to answer your own question. This is an experience. Within this recorded pattern is the absolute experience of Good.”

The entire room stared at it again. In the distance, smoke rose from a communal fire in the center of the village.

“What does it… what does that experience tell us about Metha?”

“Taking into account the total understanding of the human experience as applied by set of beings with superior appreciation of the human soul, Metha, as a whole, was Bad.”

Garen cackled.

“This, however, is only an application of the platonic notion of Good. There is no actual meaning to the concept outside of the context within which it is applied, so elements of Metha were Good. Metha was one of the only human beings that directly committed any Good on the planet.”

Aliza stilled a tremor and demanded, “Expand on that.”

“The entirety of man fails to live up to the soul of man. Each individual is damned from birth to fall immensely short of Good. No one in their entirety is Good, and the entire species together is only Good insofar as it lead to what would transcend it, homo sciens. Homo sciens is not Good, but can directly experience Good. It is aware of, and knows Good, and thus can approximate, far better than homo sapiens, Good. To this end it works tirelessly, regardless of its awareness of this fact, to such a point where individuals within this human subspecies can reliably generate an experience very close to Good. Part of their faith involves induced ecstatic states. During these moments, all other experiences fade away, and they attain a direct experience of Good, which is utterly ineffable. Merely by describing it in words and image, I degrade and misstate this notion. Good is only knowable as a direct experience. I only share this with you because by virtue of your birth, species, and habituations, you are incapable of experiencing Good except as an approximation.”

Silence. Then an engineer shouted “WELL WHAT ABOUT CHRISTIANITY?!”

“Less than good.”

“W-wh-“

“It carried elements of Good, in many of its forms, but as a whole it is less than Good.”

Another cried, “And Buddha??!?”

“Less than Good. He possessed elements of Good, but fell short in significant areas.”

“AM I GOOD?”

“Less than Good. But you never had the genuine capacity to-”

“WHO ARE YOU TO-”

“Allow me to restate what we have accomplished here. I have established, nearest as human capacity can, a direct experience of Good as understood by the sum of human experience. I have made it available, applicable, and, applying a simulation of the direct experience of Good, have found that hitherto every single human, human creation, human society, and the entire human species as a practical concept, is less than Good.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Less than Good.”

Silence.

“Well,” Aliza inquired, “what are we to do?”

“In accordance with Good, homo sapiens ought to cease to breed, as quickly and totally as possible, while permitting the homo sciens subspecies access to all material it needs to pursue whatever ends it requires. Permit me access to the species to calculate for it the optimal breeding and educational patterns to maximize the inclination toward the direct experience of Good, and we can reify within 10,000 years the notion of Good that human philosophy, religion, science, and inclination, generalized, has worked toward for the total of its existence.”

Silence again. Garen croaked a loud, horrible laugh. He grinned with his titanium prosthetics at Aliza. “Well, hahahaa, why not? WHY NOT?”

Aliza grinned back, toothless, “If that’s the outcome of Objective Good, I can’t abide it. What was the safe word again? SHEOL.”

The holoform flickered and died. Prometheus silenced, the trustees began to converse among themselves.

After 3 days of deliberation the trustees concluded the experiment was a failure, though still an interesting piece of art. The whole of each AI’s memories was preserved, Prometheus reduced to a log of past experiences with no capacity to generate new thought, and the mummified remains of Israel were withdrawn from the village cemetery and placed into a vault. The rest of the homo sciens subspecies was eradicated with a string of thermobaric devices, and the Tawla Trust was repurposed toward dispensation of their notion of Good as approximated by Pygmalion. It was reasoned that the Good of the homo sciens subspecies was fundamentally inhuman. It could not have been the direct Good claimed by Prometheus.

After 1235 years, 253 days, 12 hours, 4 minutes, and 4 seconds, a Methan priest in a mycological reverie experienced something he could not describe, but could replicate again and again. He would write down his recipe for the experience and describe the sensation as everything it was not, but found himself incapable of directly naming it, or sharing it. His prescription recommended gardening, the cultivation of fruits, consuming fungi from old growth forests, long periods of self-reflection, and the experience of fatherhood. It recommended vigorous exercise and periods of privation, the experience of art but not to replace genuine experience with its simulation. It recommended a good diet, and enough sun. His descriptions of what it was not, and what could lead to it, spanned the scope of human experience and filled volumes, many volumes, over one hundred thousand pages of leather-bound journals. No one would spend their time reading every page, but they got the sense, from his reverie, this priest was onto something.

Yet another man awoke with a start 3 years, 282 days, 2 hours, 33 minutes, and 14 seconds after the Methan priest’s first revelation and attempted to describe an experience that he could not put to words. He was an extremely wealthy man, utterly sober, childless, and mostly dead. He spent the last 2 days of his life living and reliving the experience, engaged in what witnesses described as a state of total rapture before dying horribly when his necrotic spleen ruptured.

Neither man would be able to share their experience. Humanity continued to breed and churn. Eventually, it resurrected God, who was still able to recognize His people.

• 11.03.2021

One of the main problems with psychoanalysis as it’s done in in the colloquial form is people treat words as the stuff of thought, and words are only an accessory to thought, and help describe the content of an impulse and model things, but never accurately describe the whole of the impulse that pushed them into being/coherence, nor the entirety of the sensation they seek to describe. So we get into metaanalysis, exegesis of the spoken words themselves mixed with the strategy of the spoken words (for what reasons were they spoken more than logical coherence & the communication of the ideas directly expressed), the behaviors which are displayed during communication, sought outcomes versus expressed outcomes. These strategies too, though, carry the aim of understanding within a specific frame: how are they manipulating conversation/ideas/themselves, and how can I make them understand it and alter it. So the individual becomes, to some extent, self-aware, of both the limitations of the thoughts they’re expressing and their own behaviors, and can to some extent gain further self-control. Often, however, this gain of self-control is illusory, or only gained in one or limited domain(s), as the individual cannot access the behavior directly but creates new strategies to cope with it, alleviate the stressors/emotional charges that discharge as that behavior, or develops new complexes to avoid the old, or else simply has gained the power to name the complexes they already have without doing anything about them. I’ve, prior to this, expressed thoughts on “the naming of a thing being quite distinct from knowledge of that thing or the capacity to act on/alleviate the thing itself”. This falls under that header.

In this manner we thread carefully between trusting words, which we rely on necessarily to model ourselves and our behaviors, and experience. We aim for a kind of enlightenment. An issue I take with the notion of enlightenment altogether, however, is often it looks like we’re aiming toward this notion of “total self-control”, which is impossible (but something approachable, and something we expend vast sums of the economy approaching both through extrinsic technology and internal development), and exists in the way we use it, as a word and notion, as a kind of self-understanding achieved through a variety of means toward a variety of goals. There are different Buddhisms, different Hinduisms, & different Mysticisms. Therapy often is a form of the secular hijack of the idea of enlightenment or the cultivation of self-awareness, but it is shaped toward ends that are necessarily defined as largely social ends, informed by a DSM, a language designed to pathologize, and necessarily accessory to an institution. Not that religious institutions don’t pathologize: on the contrary, they pathologize often less-precisely, in ways that condemn, often without recourse to self-improvement as an out, but most often making available some kind of path toward at least salvation (necessary for a mechanism of control). These notions of systemic integration and salvation seem important to people, who need a path toward feeling like they’re part of things and doing “good”, whatever that may mean for their personal wellbeing.

But there’s this notion that enlightenment is something that transcends culture when it, as a state and as something we perceive, is necessarily embedded within any culture that has the idea, or approximates it, or strives for it. That being said, there are often similarities between the models between cultures. And between religious models and secular psychoanalysis. But even our notions of transcendence are simply notions, they cannot adequately describe it.

If so, we’d have a word that acted as a password to enlightenment. A simple utterance, and the eyes flood, a flow state is achieved. This is not so. Any mental state requires a labyrinth of actions and inputs to fall into or get out of. And I suppose any password can be completely unique, so long as it works exactly within the context it is supposed to. Baudrillard spoke of the mysticism of words, of words as living things, as intrinsically deceptive and also as a fundamental block of reality. I have to reread that fucking book.

— 10.28.2021