MEMOIRS OF THE UNREALISTIC CHAPTER 7

On the glide to The Puddin’s, Flicky told me of some worries he had about the upcoming shoot of “Waiting for Godot III – Zombie Surfers at Hula Camp” in Hawaii in the fall. When Flicky had worries it was either the script or the director. This time, the director was a feature first-timer called James Cameron V. “There’s a fifth one?” I asked. “Yeah, and what I hear from folks who’ve worked on his industrial shoots, he’s not shy about borrowing the name’s juice when there’s a creative conflict.”

“That won’t wash with you, though.”

“It’s my juice versus his dynasty’s juice. I’d prefer it didn’t come to that. I’d like to get him off the project before it starts, if I can do it without leaving any finprints.”

Just then, a genuine flush of affection for my own lifestyle surged through me. I knew that such affection had presented itself solely for me to mock it, to laugh at its shallowness, or to parse it with a jaded chuckle and a hardboiled squint off to one side. I knew I should have had my tongue in my cheek as I felt that flush, and so knowing, I felt that flush of affection to be all the more sincere. In fact, I felt a flush of affection for that flush of affection, so that words flew to my mouth from out of the purest light in my heart, and I said, “I love Hollywood.”

“Everyone loves Hollywood,” Flicky said. “Except people who get wrapped up in – I don’t know, emotional ties, loved ones, ups and downs, sickness and health, life and death – you know, reality.”

I’d only been to The Puddin’s once before. The mingling of the Cosmos with the Cosmunculus ushered in by the Sluice was a lumpy mingling rather than a smooth one. The two worlds wove in and out of one another in seeming disarray from which scientists and mathematicians were hoping, eventually, to adduce a pattern. The new generation of gyroscopic laser clocks could detect a single Cosmuncular straw in a hectare of Cosmorganic hay, and vice versa, but the relative proportions of Cosmic and Cosmuncular matter and energy were impossible to predict in any given volume/duration of spacetime. Thus places like The Puddin’s, where one or another world’s matter was prevalent, The Puddin’s being an area dominated by the Cosmunculus. It’s around Santa Monica Boulevard and Gower, having sluiced itself between the Hollywood Forever cemetery and what had once been called, “The Sort Of Theater District.”

Aside from the entities congregating there, one would have been hard-pressed to say exactly what the difference was. To me, though, Cosmic matter has a satisfying abrasiveness to it, like caffeinated coffee versus decaf, or opiated gland candy versus dry – Cosmuncular stuff is too yielding somehow, too soft. It’s harder to wash Cosmic lather off in a shower of Cosmuncular water.

Of course, the Autunculi love their native plant species, and the gardens at The Puddin’s are replete with them – giant sweet garlics, crystalline roses, tulip spruce and cake hedges, and the florid bulbs and tumtum trees and fruits and knobs and mountainous mushrooms bred from the imaginary flora of children’s literature and mo-tainment. And the paths, paved with what is ostensibly akin to compressed limestone, but which look and feel like buttery piecrust, wending about amid the beds, fountains and ponds.

And along the paths walked people and animals and objects and machines.

I don’t mean to exoticize them, but I do enjoy being among the Autunculi; I am uncomfortable to the point of claustrophobia in a segregated environment where everyone is Cosmorganic. I suppose, for me, variety is indeed the spice of life. And why not, for goodness’ sake? Why has all this stuff got mixed up together if not for us to enjoy, to be startled by, to drink in with our senses like attars and ambrosia?

We were about a half hour into our constitutional around the Puddin’s when a bell began ringing. It was a maritime sound. It started everyone in the park moving in the same direction, down a path toward the cave called Mahaspelunkha (the Goon Island Creole name means, “The Cave of Origin”). There’s a collage quality to the name that lends a lightness to it as a subject of conversation, but, there at the Puddin’s, the bell’s melancholy tone invoked funereal guardian spirits, and we marched as if processing to a seaside church to pray for the dead.

The ritual that followed is an almost unbearably lovely piece of art. As I entered the cave I couldn’t tell at what point the lensing of my consciousness began. There’s a deliberate blurring of “before” and “during” in the particular ritual or presentation I was witnessing. The procession into the cave weaves seamlessly into a pelluncular voyage through the twisted spacetime of the smallest dimensions. Yet the senses are never wholly usurped. That’s the genius of it. Only the visual and auditory senses make the pelluncular journey; the olfactory senses and the external bulk of the body continue their walk through the cave, which walk concurs perfectly with the illusion of penetrating the moebian intramanifolds of Planck-scale reality. That the consciousness moves through a “blank” pocket – the setting is Planck-scale spacetime itself, without any mise-en-scene whatsoever – while, at the same time, the feet walk on the butter-crust cave floor, gives the journey a “behind-the-scenes” feel, a kind of Brechtian exposure of the theatrical clockworks that, paradoxically, serves to flesh out the illusion that one is wandering through the hollow fibers of the tiniest knots in the fabric of the universe.

I’ve read that last sentence back to myself several times and realize I seem to be saying that the addition of realism to the illusion serves to flesh out its illusion of reality. I hate to be the stereotypically unreliable narrator, but I’m not sure I can unbind my meaning from its entanglement in the contradictory terms striving to express it. The illusion was made more real-seeming by the superimposition of reality upon it. But, in fact, the reality allowed to intrude into the illusion was only a metaphor for the content of the illusion. Because, of course, neither the human eye nor ear can perceive the contents of the microdimensions, since sight and sound are manifestations of phenomena inherent to a much larger scale, nor can their surfaces be trod by the human shoe. All the same, one’s conscious is indeed being projected into microdimensional spacetime and circulating in the very space one is being tricked into perceiving.

And then one is brought up short by the intrusion of a synthetic visual, or rather the illusion of a synthetic visual. It emerges from the warpings of the walls and takes the shape of a fuzzy lozenge with action playing out within it. The drama is the love story of Leon and Maria. Leon is my grandfather.

The scenario, I learned later on, is based on the recollections of Maria, who survived the recursion echo that killed Grampa. Grampa’s diaries now stand next to hers in the Musee de Blancmange in the Franco-Chinese prefecture of Paris.

Maria is quite the sexy Autuncula. Voluptuous and dark-skinned, she seems to have been based on a character from a slapstick children’s cartoon about the ancient Inca. Her love for Grampa Leon is portrayed as entirely genuine. It’s touching, really, to see an idealized sex bomb tending so tenderly to the pleasure of a depleted, withered old man, so very real in his pathos and sickliness. Watching the drama, I became aware for the first time that Grampa probably had had little time left alive during this period. His breath rattled and churned in his chest, and the yellow tinge in his eyes bespoke a diseased liver.

Their trysts take place in a hut on a bluff overlooking the sea. It’s the mid-19^th Century. Maria slips away from her brutal husband at every opportunity to care for a vagrant who, one stormy night, found shelter in the abandoned hut. She discovered him on one of her soul-searching walks along the bluff. At first their love buoys both of them, but the episode inevitably arrives in which Leon’s decline in health is too obvious for even such lovers to ignore. As he worsens, she makes the bold decision to stay by his side night and day. Each hour that passes means the eventual wrath she will have to face from her husband will be that much more severe, while Leon’s worsening illness brings the day when she will have to face that wrath ever closer. His death is inevitable. So it’s a lose/lose situation. The longer he hangs on, the worse it will be for her, but she does everything in her power to keep him alive. Somehow, though, Leon’s illness never gets in the way of his sexual appetite, to which Maria happily attends in several scenes I could have done without.

One day, Maria has gone to buy fruit for Leon, leaving him alone in the hut, asleep. A strange vibration begins – the walls of the hut begin to ripple in waves, and an engulfing gong sound swells in pulses, as if one were trapped inside a tolling bell. Leon wakes up to find himself and his ersatz world shattering and dissolving. He panics at first, but just before he and his surroundings are due to be absorbed back into the walls of the Planck-scale pocket, there’s a kind of acceptance on his face, almost serenity. And then the scene breaks apart, and its shards scatter like sparks thrown from a fire.

And then there is a rushing. Strands of energy flood from all directions through the moebius tunnels, dancing from wall to wall like carbon arcs. The sparks of Grampa’s virtual world are carried every which way by this and that current of flow. The flood becomes blinding in intensity. This is the very moment of the Sluice.

Then it all subsides. We know intellectually that the Cosmos and the Cosmunculus have become one, but we also have an electric sensation of it, somehow, if that makes any sense. Then we walk again, and soon we have come to the shore of a misty sea. This is the Quantum Ocean.

It was at this point that I, to my surprise, became the focus of the event. Everyone watched as Flicky came over to me. At his behest I stripped down to my trunks. He reached out for my hand and led me into the sea. I looked back to the shore at those who watched; there was one cylindrical fellow who looked a lot like my sombrero-wearing shot glass. I couldn’t help suspecting I had been spied on, but that suspicion mellowed to a feeling of having been watched over by a benign presence. In any case, the resemblance between the gentleman on the shore and my shot glass was probably coincidental.

When wading into this ocean, should one choose to do so, the swimmer is actually immersed in two oceans at once. Again, the visual and auditory senses experience the pelluncular illusion of the Quantum Ocean where, at the near-Planck level, matter and energy are events rather than things, events that move and flip and jump and vibrate into and out of existence. It’s a jittery firmament of decoherence. The other ocean one enters is, of course, the Pacific, the waters of which are sensed by the skin and by the mucus membranes of the mouth and nose. The Cave of Origin opens onto the shore of Melrose Bay at the same time the Planck-dimensional tunnels unfurl at the Quantum coast. The superimposition of these two environments is nothing less than an esthetic tour de force.

When we had waded out deep enough into the waters of decoherence, Flicky instructed me to hold onto the lower rim of his dorsal gill slit, and thereafter carried me on his back. He took me out into the vast decoherent mist, where the smell and taste of the salt sea, the cold passage of the wind, and the flexing musculature of Flicky as he bore me while I hung on, with fingers nearly numb, to the bony edge of his cheek, were all that prevented me from losing myself in a senseless limbo. Perhaps I was in danger of succumbing to “rapture of the deep.”

Then it seemed the distance was bisected by a vertical, luminous filament. As we drew closer to it I could see that it was a beam of light, seemingly without origin, that plummeted as deep into the bottomless ocean as it ascended into the infinite sky. We continued to draw nearer to it. The beam was very broad. Where it intersected the surface separating up from down, it made a circle of light about a quarter mile in diameter, by my body’s scale of reckoning. Our trajectory was going to take us within that circle. I had strong trepidations about that.

At the brink of the circle, the edge of the spotlight, as it were, the choppy decoherence was as blue as the Caribbean and frothing with mist and white and turquoise foam. And when we entered the beam, the surface it circumscribed was like an ocean of milk.

Of course this was all a pelluncular illusion, albeit based on theoretical models that had been interpolated into the cultural mythos of the Autunculi. Yet I’ve been told since that much of the audiovisual aspect of the event is synthesized using actual data translated algorithmically into optical and aural signals. So… that’s something.

The Cult of Mahaspelunkha, of which Flicky is a member, calls this beam of light “The Little Father.” I was told I could call it anything I liked. Believers assert that something of the character of Leon – by virtue of his identity having dissolved into a recursion echo at the exact moment of the Sluice – some trace of Leon lingers in everything in the world. When they call the beam of light, “Little Father,” they mean Leon is the father of the mingled realities, the mother being the Sluice herself.

I don’t happen to share that belief. I call the beam of light Grampa. When we were well within its circle of illumination, paddling placidly in the ivory sea, I heard his voice. I wasn’t imagining it – everyone who goes there can hear it. It’s quite distant, tinny, and wispy amid crackling radio static, but there’s no mistaking the voice as that of Leon from the drama of Leon and Maria. That is to say, Grampa. He speaks, he recites. He sings. I listened to him sing several songs from disparate genres. I’m told his repertoire is respectably large and varied. His voice isn’t bad, either. It has a pleasant timbre that comes through despite the interference. Regardless of whether anyone’s there to hear it, he sings. He sings every song he knows. And he talks. He laughs. It’s clear he doesn’t know or care if anyone’s listening. And, I suppose, most of the time, nobody is.

FIN