a novelette by

Jeffrey Dorchen

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MEMOIRS OF THE UNREALISTIC CHAPTER 1

Grampa dreamed of fame. Not about achieving anything in particular to earn it; he just liked to fantasize about having it. About being a celebrity. His journals contain long meditations on how he would deal with his public. Would he give autographs? Yes, he would; he would sign autographs day and night. He would lavish love upon his public. Or: No, he wouldn't. He would remain aloof from his public. He would "vant to be alone." He would eschew interviews. He would be demure. He would outwit the paparazzi. He would pass among the masses unseen, a windblown shadow. His public would be frustrated, maddened, but in the end they would come to understand the gift he had given them: a hero unsullied by commercialism. A man who hadn't sold himself.

If Grampa's journals reveal anything, it is the inner life of a man self-absorbed, escapist, deluded, detached from society, abjuring any productive relationship with his fellow citizens – in a word, and from every angle, an "unrealistic" man.

And this is precisely where I differ from Grampa. My experience with fame is authentic; his, fabulistic. He ate baked beans cold out of the can and dreamed of caviar. I've eaten my share of caviar and don't even really like it much. Fame does not impress me, nor do its accoutrements. This is no doubt because of my immersion in the milieu of celebrity. I am a biographer, entertainment journalist, and sometime-ghostwriter. And I am lucky enough to count among my friends the most celebrated entertainer of our time, Flicky Flounder, a fact that has undoubtedly played its part in demystifying that which Grampa looked upon as a fetish.

I can't overstate my affection for him. Most of the worlds know Flicky as the star of such eleven-dimensional mo-tainment spectaculars as The Fish Who Saved Madison County, Mr. Limpet Goes to Wall Street and Moby Dick VI: Gladiators of Atlantis. Gear-heads know Flicky as a state-of-the-art eighth-gen autunculus, a slack-stringer, a pocket phantom. But I know the fish behind the technical strata and PR glitz. The Flicky I know is not the Hollywood idol; nor is he any mere refraction of a set of probability equations projected within a highly energized, tightly focused gravity beam through the prism of micro-dimensional spacetime.

The Flicky Flounder I know is an artist, and a deep soul. He is profoundly wise, and profoundly sad.

You hear this phrase all the time regarding celebrities, but I'll say it anyway, because in this case it is so true: people don't understand Flicky. People have the wrong idea about autunculi in general. But I think, because of his origins in 3D computer-generated animation, they have an especially wrong idea of the Great Flatfish. He is beloved, especially by children, for roles in which he displays a cartoonish talent for distorting his features. Such talent is, no doubt, a vestige of his Pixarian ancestry. Yet he is no cartoon; he is anything but. (I address all these issues, and more, in my upcoming biography of Flicky, Nobody's Fish out of Water, the very real life of the worlds’ greatest entertainer.)

Integral to his depth and strength of character has been his struggle against bigotry. There will always be those prejudiced against admitting the equal authenticity of the Cosmunculus and our Cosmos. And that is sad. For me, there is something especially poignant about it. I am, let me assure you, an unwilling champion for the cause of equality. Were it not for my personal stake in the matter, I wouldn't consider for a moment agitating for a transformation of the popular consciousness. There's nothing I'd rather do than flow along with the course of historical events, causing nary a ripple. But destiny has demanded otherwise. There is an over-arching armature of fate that pulls the strings. I find myself having to apologize for the preachy tone that inevitably possesses my voice. Against my nature, I've become a kind of evangelist.

But why should it be so difficult for so many to acknowledge how intertwined the Cosmos and the Cosmunculus have become? And this outrage I hear – as if such a condition had been thrust upon cosmorganic humanity with the precipitous shock of a truck accident – can there be anything more disingenuous? As if we couldn’t have seen the Sluice coming. Even as the first theoretical universes were in the process of being modeled in the Quantum Ocean, the ocean of qubits, part of which evolved into the Undermind, the seeds of the jungle of realities we now inhabit were already beginning to sprout. Anyone who was shocked by the Sluice must have been living in a cave for the six decades prior.

A good historical analogy is the development of radio broadcasting in the early twentieth century: listeners initially had no doubts whether they were being spoken to by another human being, thinking thoughts within their own heads, or listening to electromagnetic signals translated into sound waves by a receiver; yet, by the early twenty-first century, the human information environment was so saturated with signals – electromagnetic, olfactory, tactile, sonic, and visual – that personal broadcast/receive devices were as integral to human awareness as eyes, ears, noses and skin. Of course there was still a difference between, say, being bodily in a war and experiencing a war via electromagnetic transmission, but the difference was no longer one of "natural" versus "artificial." They were different ways of perceiving a war, each with its own limitations and advantages, but neither more nor less "real" than the other.

The same argument for authenticity applies to those who originate in the Cosmunculus. The colloquial terms, "slack-stringer," "gravity puppet," and the archaic pejorative "pocket phantom," are misleading in their evocations of artifice. Likewise, the term normally employed in “sensitive” discourse and journalism, "autunculus," brings to mind, even in its most respectful connotation, a will exerted from behind the scenes to manipulate an otherwise hollow projection. It casts the Undermind as puppeteer, the Cosmunculus as a stage, and the autunculi as its puppets.

Needless to say, there's a great deal of cosmocentrism at work in the metaphorical universe these lexical relics conjure. Remember, to the autunculi, it's OUR world that is a projection into THEIRS. Conservatives will point out that our world came first; but what makes an old world more real than a younger one? Were the Titans more real than the Olympians? Is the Old Testament more real than the New?

Others will assert that, since humans authored the original quantum computer programs that formed the Quantum Ocean, any reality catalyzed thereafter by the Undermind is in some way contingent upon the more "real" reality of our universe. To me that's no different than asserting that, because we long ago altered the genes for frontal lobe development in chimpanzees, the differential calculus chimpanzees use today is less real than that which was employed a century ago. But we know this to be untrue. Both are the same calculus, using the same equations for the same purposes with identical accuracy.

The milk is contingent upon the prior existence of the cow, yet both are equally real.

Is an ancestor more real than its descendant?

I think not.

MEMOIRS OF THE UNREALISTIC CHAPTER 2

As I reveal in the biography, Flicky and I met while attending a mo-tainment presentation at the Snerd Sensorium, an event called "WOO-MO-MANIA." It was a rare retrospective of student works by the three giants of the Woo mo-tainment dynasty, presented in the original media peculiar to each generation of the artistic clan.

The patriarch John Woo's art school mo-tainment product was displayed on a classic "silvered" screen. It consisted of images cast by light passing through a transparent, gray-toned, sprocketed membrane, in the classical tradition.

To a mo-tainment connoisseur such as myself, if I may be allowed a modest display of self-esteem, it was the usual pretentious student tripe: camera panning across actors straining to appear motionless, then abruptly fainting for no rhyme or reason. I found it somehow comforting to note that even a mo-tainment god of Woo's stature had begun his career as just another navel-gazing poseur. Even the rest of the audience, inveterate snobs versed in the art of feigning deep appreciation for shallow nonsense, could not watch it without snickering.

The next piece, by Woo's grandson, Yassir Zappa-Woo, was projected in its original cineplasma format. I must admit to a prejudice here. Cineplasmographic mo-tainment never fails to nauseate me. Perhaps it's the sense memory of the seasickness I succumbed to while watching the opening scene of the plasma re-engineered version of Woody Allen's masterpiece from the classical celluloid repertoire, Husbands and Wives, with the pitches and sweeps of its "handheld" technique. Still, I don’t think I’m alone in considering Zappa-Woo's an unremarkable work, and at this showing a gelatinous quiver caused by a rickety old compressor rendered it all but intolerable. Its sole saving grace was its brevity.

The third piece was what I'd really come to see. More than likely, so had most of the crowd. It's justly esteemed a masterpiece of the third-gen pellunculas. Directed by Woo's great-granddaughter, Chastity Minelli-Zappa-Woo, arguably the best artist of the Woo dynasty – you really must see it, if you haven't already – it's a short pocket called, "All the Puppets Know Pinocchio." The plot, such as it is, is worth recounting, as it bears more than a little symbolic relevance to my story. The pelluncula begins by extruding the viewer's consciousness through six dimensions into the seventh-through-ninth-dimensional pocket environment of a deserted carnival on the Mediterranean coast:

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

We are an overweight, middle-aged Italian businessman wearing a cream-colored suit and a narrow black tie. This is Pinocchio, all grown up. His tie flaps in the wind. He smokes a cigarette as he treads gravely through the abandoned seaside fairgrounds. The smoking of this cigarette is giving him no satisfaction. We feel his sadness, his loneliness, his vague, numb despair.

The world, in return, understands itself as the barren thing Pinocchio perceives it to be: an environment empty of joy. The sea throws itself upon the shore in sacrificial angst. Now we are the sea, wave after wave of salt sea, collapsing in abject apology, falling on our faces in the wet sand, again and again, stumbling over one another in impotent, penitential abandon.

Pinocchio's wandering takes him to the old puppet theater where he used to work. The jolly paint on the plywood façade is aged and peeling. The door hangs on one hinge, revealing a velvet black that sways heavily in the wind. He throws his cigarette away. Far off, gulls cry. Pinocchio pushes the black aside and enters.

We are the darkness within.

We are the theater's darkness hovering near as Pinocchio enters the melancholy space. He wanders to the stage, sits on the lip, and lights another cigarette. He blows smoke up into the lighting grid. The folding chairs on the plywood risers are all empty. Pinocchio climbs the riser stairs and wanders among the vacant seats. Finally, he sits, facing the darkened void of the stage.

Then a Fresnel above the stage comes on with a warm hum, revealing a set: a seedy tavern. Pinocchio stares at it awhile. All at once he is possessed by the sardonic impulse to inhabit that dramatic space. He rises from his seat, and his heels knock dull echoes on the plywood steps down from the risers and up to the stage. He walks to the lone table on the set, entering the cone of warm light. His cigarette smoke curls upward, high up into the flies, joining a swarm of motes swirling just in front of the hot, yellow lamp lens.

We are a silent darkness, observing.

A marionette barmaid comes to his table. It's Signora Rosaura, looking as sad as cracked paint on a weathered carousel horse. She recognizes him. "You're … Pinocchio, right? That puppet who got his wish to be a real boy? How did that work out?"

Pinocchio takes a world-weary drag of his smoke. "Not too badly."

Rosaura takes Pinocchio's drink order and marionettes away into the darkness, her wooden limbs clacking softly together, like bamboo chimes in a breeze.

Other marionettes emerge, taking seats along the bar. They are old puppet drunks, small timers and whores.

"So, you're a big man now, aren't you, brother?" sneers one barfly, whom Pinocchio recognizes as his old friend Arlecchino. The puppets have all heard about Pinocchio's success, how he's climbed the corporate ladder at the Fiat division of MSN-Pfizer-Benz. "A big shot he is now." "Big apartment in Rome." "Chalet in the Alps." "Villa in Tuscany." "Pretty ladies. Real ones, anatomically correct." "What's he come back here for, to rub our noses in it?"

Rosaura clatters back with Pinocchio's drink. "Look, at least he didn't waste the freedom he got from the Blue Fairy. He made the most of it. Could any of you have done better? Cut the guy some slack."

"What does he need slack for?" one drunk puppet – Pulccinella – slurs. "He doesn't have any strings." The other puppets snicker at that. They stink of envy and self-pity and alcohol, and their clothes are distressed by puckers and cigarette burns, with permanent wrinkles at the joints of those limbs whose flexibility is so limited. There is an odor of mold, and an overall patina of hopelessness.

Pinocchio takes a sip of his drink, whisky on ice. The puppets all watch him, as do we – we who are the hovering darkness. He drinks. The ice knocks in the glass. He takes a drag of his cigarette.

"Where's old Fire Eater?" Pinocchio asks.

A few wooden heads wag back and forth over their drinks. These are marionette gestures of pity. Arlecchino speaks:

"He got burnt out. Trying to keep up with the trends. We did some expressionist performances here for a while. He was a good expressionist director. We adapted Caligari. Pulccinella played Cesare the somnambulist. Had those harsh angles whittled into his face especially for the part."

"Hmm, I thought you looked thinner," Pinocchio says.

"For all that it matters now," Pulccinella replies with a rueful downing of grappa.

Arlecchino continues: "But no sooner was expressionism in style than it was out again. Now everyone wanted Futurism. Next, absurdism. Then surrealism. Fire Eater went crazy chasing each zeitgeist. We even went through a period where we had no strings – like you, brother. Fire Eater was dabbling in the Japanese puppetry form known as bunraku. He thought, if he could just predict what the next big theatrical movement was going to be, he could stay a step ahead of the market, get on board a trend at the beginning instead of having to play catch-up.

"But we had to reattach our strings when Futurism made a nostalgic return.

"It was when the rage came in for Javanese shadow puppets that he really broke down. Where was he going to find a gamelon orchestra? And none of us had profiles striking enough to cast shadows of the proper intensity. In the end, he raised a lot of money, spent a lot of money, and lost it all. The glowing coals cooled to ash in his eyes. He quit show business and went into data storage. And we turned the theater into our private tavern."

Pinocchio has absorbed the tale. By the end of it, he's shaking. He can't even light another cigarette. He tries to drink and drops his glass. We (the darkness) reach out in vain to catch it; we hear it shatter; we absorb the sound.

Pinocchio breaks down weeping.

Turns out he misses his strings and the proscenium of the theater. He misses the parameters they set. His limits were defined, and he took pleasure in going just beyond them into mischief. He longs for the cycle of ups and downs, crises and reprieves, devilishness and repentance, that once gave his life order. Because now his boundaries are vague. His life is an expanse of potential of which he can only fall short. He even misses the growing nose, erstwhile barometer of truth and lies. These days he's never sure whether he's telling the truth or not. Truth is the most elusive thing of all. Even now, as he bares his soul to the puppets, he has no idea if he isn't perhaps merely acting out a dramatic lie to give a cleaner shape to an awkward situation. The authenticity of his own emotions is in doubt, even to himself.

"You're wrong, Rosaura, I have wasted the Blue Fairy's gift," he weeps. "But there is no way not to waste it. One must be something, and in being something, one inevitably fails to be all other things."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

As the drama ended and the pellunculan pocket collapsed, our consciousnesses retreated, with that familiar squirting sensation, back into our heads. We came to ourselves in four-dimensional spacetime. We were still in the Snerd Sensorium, of course, per the technological requirements of the older mo-tainment formats that had begun the evening. But, you know what? Formats, shmormats, I enjoy the experience of mo-tainment in a theater, with a crowd. It's a communal experience. It's like worship in a temple. Yes, of course, there's no real need for theaters, since the advent of spacetime pockets and consciousness extrusion. One can sit on a park bench and absent oneself into a pocket environment for hours on end, exploring worlds and sensations with enhanced, nearly godlike perception.

But there's still something quaint about a theater. Something friendly. Something human. And, after all, if I hadn't gone to "All the Puppets Know Pinocchio" in the Snerd Sensorium, I never would have met Flicky.

When my mind returned from the micro-dimensional representation of the sad Italian carnival and filled up my skull again, I could still hear the sound of weeping. Was this one of those trick endings, where you only think you're back in your native spacetime? I hoped not. It would have added a cheese factor that would have ruined the piece for me. I looked over to the seat next to mine, from where I'd determined the sound was coming. And there I saw the famous flounder himself.

He had his face in his fins. And he was sobbing, as though he knew exactly the pain and failure of which Pinocchio had spoken.

MEMOIRS OF THE UNREALISTIC CHAPTER 3

Back in the '030s, Grampa wrote in his journal about seeing caricatures of friends of his in the New Yorker magazine. There wasn't an article about these friends, just a calendar listing. But these friends of his, Mr. Quintron and Miss Pussycat, were not merely listed. Their listing was punctuated with a cartoon drawing of them, beneath which ran the caption: "Mr. Quintron, inventor of the Drum Buddy, and Miss Pussycat, at the Mercury Lounge, Friday at 9pm." The cartoon showed Mr. Quintron and Miss Pussycat performing, Quintron at his vintage Hammond organ, Pussycat standing nearby in a sequin leotard, tutu and fishnet stockings, holding up a hand puppet. The hand puppet looked to be a plush donkey recently recovered from severe burns. The Drum Buddy, a drum-sound-producing machine topped by a rotating lampshade with star-shaped holes in it, was also pictured in the cartoon.

Grampa wrote, "I'm happy for them, and proud to know them. But at the same time I'm envious. I've always wanted to see myself caricatured. And not by one of those charcoal-wielding hacks on the boardwalk who draw you with oversized head and tiny body, participating in your favorite interest. I want someone to distort my features out of cleverness, not in obeisance to some arbitrary formalism. For my needs, as a matter of fact, the style of the drawing of Quintron and Pussycat is too straightforward. I want something splattery and warped. I want to see exactly which features of mine a perverse artist believes make me look like me. Bulging forehead? Squinty but penetrating blue eyes? Pointy nose? Pouty lip? Weak chin? Jowls? Veiny temples? I wouldn't take offense, regardless of how ludicrously I were rendered, or what unattractive attribute the artist chose to amplify. I would be fascinated. I would stare at it for hours, wondering at the mysteries of identity.

"Because I am sick of exploring those mysteries in my mirror, and in the disarray of the squalor in which I live. I want to see a trivial item that seeks to represent me. I want to stare at that item, seeking the mystery of myself, the mystery of what others see as me, and the mystery of emptiness in the representation of life. Because one cannot view one's own corpse. And maybe that's what I really want, to see my own corpse. Or to be at my own funeral, to see who shows up. But only fame affords one that kind of luxury. Fame enough to have a great caricaturist caricature one -- what an honor that would be! You know you've really made it when you're caricatured for an article in the New Yorker. (And not just cartooned for the calendar -- not to take anything away from Quintron and Pussycat.) To be sold in a blister pack as an action figure would be an even greater honor. A springy bobble-head less so. But, ah, to be a gashapon key fob! A super-deformed mini-fig in the Japanese kaiju style, side-by-side with the likes of Rodan, Mecha-Ghidora, and the great Godzilla."

Flicky and I often reminisce about the night we met at the Snerd. I'm not the type to be star-struck, and I think he sensed that right away. (As I hope I've made clear, unlike Grampa, I don't differentiate between Fame and any other condition of life. To me they are simply points on a continuum between infinite solitude and infinite public exposure.) Flicky appreciated not being fawned over, and he jumped at the chance to have a normal discussion. We ended up going out for drinks at Musso and Frank's. I'm a fan of their respect for the genuine martini, and Flicky loves the oversized booths, upholstered with cracked red leather and brass brads, designs from a bygone age of gentlemanly smoking rooms, while actual elderly gentlemen rollerskate here and there in short white jackets, delivering drinks and rare meat. Here we had the first of many nights of alcohol, steak, and aesthetic discourse. The subject at hand was, of course, "WOO-MO-MANIA" and its strengths and weaknesses. We agreed the event had offered rarities worth seeing at least once, but that the only satisfying piece was "All the Puppets Know Pinocchio." We both loved it. The focus of our discussion tightened around Minelli-Zappa-Woo's aesthetic strategies. During our intense volley of analytical insights, Flicky made a very perceptive remark about her choice of the ninth dimension as the depth axis for Pinocchio's midlife crisis. It's a comment that invariably returns to mind whenever the subject of gravity as an artistic medium comes up in conversation.

"You know the way a minor chord in music conveys sadness?" He was smoking a cigarette and nursing a whisky on ice, "Or a major seventh at the end of a blues melody turns one back towards the beginning with the gallows humor of the chronically unfortunate?" I nodded. It was the hour when drunk, meat-fed philosophers unveil their finest truths. That's the time to nod when a famous fish draws you in with quiet sibilance. "Well, the ninth dimension," he said, his eyes -- the two of them crowded together on one side of his face -- clouding over with a mist of reverie, his mouth off to the other side of his head, lower jaw slack, fish lips, like Belmondo's in Goddard's Breathless, setting a curl of smoke adrift:

"The ninth dimension, in a pocket setting by the sea," he said, at such an hour, "is the dimension of regret."

MEMOIRS OF THE UNREALISTIC CHAPTER 4

By '059, Grampa had lost touch with the family. He was able to maintain relations with himself, however, and persisted in keeping a journal. It traces much the same tragic arc followed by so many superstars: a meteoric rise to fame, then a slow but certain descent into the gutter. With his innate sense of economy, though, Grampa skipped the rise and cut straight to the plummet. It was undoubtedly less painful than falling to the gutter from a great height, having to drop only from the relatively humble level of complete obscurity. More like rolling down a shallow incline, really, and coming to a gentle stop at the bottom. There, Grampa at last found a trade suitable for a man with his species of idealism: dirty old bum.

Earlier that year, the Firearms, Drug, and Entertainment Administration (FDEA) had okayed consciousness extrusion for experimental trials on human subjects. So began the most concerted cooperation between academic, medical, and corporate interests in recorded history. Physicists were quick to perceive the implications of a technology that handled consciousness as a modulation of the gravitational field; consciousness could be conducted along curvatures in Planck-scale spacetime dimensions as easily as electricity through a copper wire, yet the theoretical and mathematical underpinnings of the process were still up for grabs; here, for the first time in over a century, observable phenomena had appeared in advance of any calculations that could explain it. Psychiatrists, too, were all over the process, vying with each other to develop its therapeutic uses. And money migrated everywhere, backing research projects, buying stock in any remotely promising application, capitalizing start-up companies run by chimpanzees who'd barely mastered algebra. It was the beginning of a cultural renaissance reminiscent of the tech bubble of the 1990s, but with even more starry-eyed confidence behind it, fueled by pop culture pundits cheerleading a consumer revolution.

How pathetic, then, that the most common manifestations of the new technology were virtual sex pellunculas and sleazy porn pockets. How tawdry, how typical, how squalid, how human. Meanwhile, Grampa's destitution had brought his self-hatred to fester like Mr. Hughes' raisin in the sun, or, rather, like Mr. Hughes' running sore. Whichever, having his dreams deferred had rendered Grampa the perfect sucker. He lived on only the pittance paid to research subjects, and on the simulated human warmth he found in pornuncraphy. Thus, Grampa's relationship to the blossoming cultural renaissance was the perfect marriage between vulnerability and opportunism. And, lest you thank your lucky stars and think, There but for fortune go I, consider for a moment that Grampa's situation represents nothing more nor less than the marketplace at its least varnished. Our own circumstances differ only by the degree to which they are dressed up as civilized. In this, at least, we are all equal.

There were few regulations governing the nascent industry, and no enforceable safeguards protecting research subjects. Ethics in this environment ran the gamut from negligent to Tuskegee-syphilis-study unconscionable. Grampa writes, "I keep having to sign these 'recursion echo' risk waivers. I don't know what a recursion echo is, but apparently it's a risk I take every time I'm in one of these studies." A few weeks later, he's found out what a recursion echo is, but writes that, by then, it was "an acceptable hazard. I've never loved or felt so loved before. Everything's changed. Life would be meaningless without Maria."

Maria. He'd just met a girl named Maria. She was a first-generation autunculus. Of course, being first generation, she could only meet Grampa in a prismatic micro-three-brane, a complex warping in Planck-scale spacetime along xyz vectors 5-7. This was a nice piece of fraud on the part of the porn provider, by the way. There was absolutely no reason autunculi and cosmorganics couldn't have cross-projected through the interstitial matrix by this time, except that virtual reality providers wanted to retain a monopoly on the process. The porn guy Grampa was dependent on to provide him and Maria a prism within which to rendezvous was selling both of them a bill of goods, a pig in a poke. Maria was a starving artist who had auditioned for her role in the pocket, and Grampa was a low-wage guinea pig. Had the two of them been allowed to find their own ways through the interstices of the spacetime fabric -- had they understood that there was really no division between the two of them at all, in gravitational terms -- the pornuncrapher would have had no way to justify his research grants, no hope of an IPO, no corporation whatever. The porn guy, and thousands of providers like him at the time, colluded to defraud such people as Grampa and his autuncular beloved, letting them believe they needed to continue risking their lives to be together. Grampa bought the pig in the poke. So did Maria; hook, line, and sinker.

The recursion echo is a thing of the past, but in the past it was a thing of dread, albeit a rare phenomenon. The recursion echo was what happened when the gravitational frequency of your extruded consciousness happened to sync up exactly with the resonance frequency of the gravity warping the pocket dimension into which you were being projected. If that occurred, your consciousness would dissolve into the structure of the pocket and, as soon as the quite temporary dimension ceased to exist, so would your identity. "You" would disappear into the universes' general flow of gravity, and your body, in the virtual reality booth, would simply die. It's analogous to the Placido Domingo tragedy, in the '020s, when the great tenor sang the F that happened to be the exact resonance harmonic of the newly built Chernobyl Opera House. The note vibrated at the exact acoustical frequency as the very structure of the building, which set it resonating like a tuning fork, and, although he'd stopped singing, the echo of the note built in intensity, focused on poor Domingo at the center of a bombardment of wave after reverberating wave of sound, until finally his skull imploded under the barrage.

I said the phenomenon was rare. In the medium of sound, Domingo's fate was probably unique. In the medium of gravity, however -- in the world of consciousness extrusion -- recursion echoes were not quite so rare. They happened just often enough to require the signing of a recursion echo risk waiver.

In Grampa's case, that was too often by a factor of one.

MEMOIRS OF THE UNREALISTIC CHAPTER 5

The Planck length is 10^-33 centimeters, and is considered by today's physicists to be the smallest possible unit into which space can be divided. It is posited, however, by speculative theorists, that an entirely independent spacetime begins at an exponentially smaller scale, whose largest increment of distance is 10^-33 Planck length. This inconceivably tiny distance is known as the Planckety-Planck length.

An extension of the principle of dualities inherent in M Theory leads these theorists to suggest that the Cosmunculus and the Cosmos share a duality whose meeting point is a tunnel between a lower Cosmic limit of Planck length and an upper Cosmuncular limit of Planckety-Planck length; and further that, in keeping with M duality, from the point of view of the Cosmunculus, it is our Cosmos that begins at the tiny Planckety-Planck scale, exponentially below their minimum Planck length. It is as if we are observing each other through the wrong ends of two telescopes joined at their eyepieces.

The area that joins the two scales, and which acts as a self-adjusting lens between them, is the Quantum Ocean. Early in her existence, in her larval stage, as it were, she was a network of quantum computers. But as the network grew in both complexity and cognitive autonomy, the location of any computer on the network became increasingly uncertain. The process-mind of the network began to enlist the particles making up the actual hardware. Desktop stations all along the network were seen to dissolve into the cognitive "fluid" before the very eyes of office workers. The network became the Undermind, an amoebic quantum computational process, expressing her pseudopodia in all directions, invisible to the human eye but ever-present.

One of the Undermind's most important tasks was to describe the kinds of universes implied by various given energy values of certain quanta, particularly the Higgs boson. It was from these calculations that the Cosmunculus was first posited. Once posited, it wasn't long before researchers discovered its utility as an arena into which consciousness could be projected in the form of gravity transmissions. It was taken for granted that the small dimensions in the Cosmunculus were, though assumed to be mere phantoms of quantum computation, nevertheless real enough to serve as entryways for the projected human mind into micro-dimensional scenarios. Perhaps the blurring of matter and energy evident when the Undermind dissolved her physical boundaries had set a precedent. Perhaps it had prepared us to believe in the realness of a virtual reality. And to accept it as real – as long as it kept its distance, at any rate.

The Undermind herself had no stake in the entertainment business. She was oblivious to the uses made of this other universe she had described, or perhaps, rather, discovered. Pornuncraphers and other purveyors of micro-dimensional adventure and therapy might have passed themselves off for who knows how long as exclusive travel agents, keepers of the only pathway between Cosmos and Cosmunculus, had it not been for the Sluice. Of course, with hindsight, we know now that the Sluice was inevitable, but if those in the business had had their druthers, it would never have come to pass.


Grampa's journal entry for the morning of November 22, 2063 reveals the man in love, only the slightest taint of foreboding on the periphery of his awareness. "I've got a spring in my step. Bounding like a puppy in the grass. Just the shape of Maria's name on my lips fills my heart with a kind of loft, as though it were a linen sheet on a line, filled and billowing with the summer wind" ... yet … "I feel haunted. There's a morbid little Sam Spade perched on my shoulder, ready to discover the worst. And he thinks he's hardboiled enough to take it, but I have my doubts."

The last words he wrote were these: "If only life could go on like this."



I sometimes play the conceptual game of putting myself in Flicky's shoes. First, I imagine myself denuded of the human genealogy I've come to take for granted. Suppose as a child I had found out my ancestry could not be traced back to the Haitian pioneer Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. That, in fact, I was not even a descendant of the early primates, not even of primeval microorganisms – I was not even of the stuff the Earth is made from, and that, unlike the other children, I did not have a share in human, biological, or even geological history. What if I discovered I had descended from Popeye, Charlie Brown, Brenda Starr, or Beetle Bailey? Or, for those of the Judeo-Christian persuasion, how would you feel if it turned out that Adam and Eve were actually the Lockhorns, or Hi and Lois? And that the mass, the weight, the function and form of your body had come about because manufacturers had improved their skill in mass-producing representations of marketable characters? That your kind had begun as stick-figures on cave walls, evolved into two dimensional glyphs on newsprint, were given the hint of depth through cross-hatching, were then modeled with color, then fattened up and animated in clay or by human hands in felt disguises, or by hydraulic armatures within sculpted latex, eventually given fluidity of movement in computer code and pixels, then endowed with a kind of contingent sentience in projected gravity, finally to achieve independent life through a pre-ordained mathematical event?

You would find yourself coexisting with humanity, beings with a history billions of years deep. Beings who had earned over the course of eons the right to examine the paradox of being alive. You would look around at these wise material entities, the twists of whose DNA had been latent in the earliest moments of their universe, and see them, hoary with wisdom, these pilgrims of the ages, and hear them and read their books, discoursing with sage gravity on the paradoxes of existence, on the puzzle of life and death, on the search for meaning, on the "human condition." And although you couldn't claim to have paid your dues in the sense they had, you would know yourself to be in exactly that "human condition." You would stand out like a gum-snapping Lolita at a college of mandarins, while inside you – if it could only express itself! – a soul would be brooding with all the agony and ecstasy of a great, unrecognized poet.

So, within a decade of the Sluice, the Autunculan community set about inventing its cultural cannon. A great mass of Autunculan literature was hurriedly whipped up, and just as quickly disposed of by detractors from the elder physics. The "Encyclopedia Autunculana," compiled over a twenty-year period by the Autunculan French-Canadian raccoon, Yukon Leroux, was mocked without mercy by the usually "humanistic" New York Review of Books ("Diderot as Farce," by Jicama Schama-Gould, Mar 2078, v.59, #223) in a screed so vicious as to disabuse even the most naive Autunculus of hope for an amicable integration of the universes.

They ghettoized themselves, or so goes the tale told by the dominant culture. They settled in segregated "toon towns" and in decrepit human neighborhoods and in rural seclusion – wherever they needn't fear bigotry and its attendant violence. They were banned from human civic life, from voting, from practicing law and medicine, from professional and amateur sports at any officially recognized level. Though their handicrafts and artisanal wares were indistinguishable from ours without a the aid of a gyroscopic laser clock – a device originally invented for the sole purpose of detecting that difference and enforcing discrimination, by the way – they were subject to restrictions in the marketplace not even a robot would stand for. Only the most naturalistic figural autunculi were able to pass undetected into prosaic jobs in the human workforce. And even thus situated, they still made clandestine returns to the Autunculan community and its developing institutions and traditions, drawn back always to the cosmuncular fabric, to its feel, to its heymishekeit – to the furniture and the food and the environment. Just as we cosmorganics are to our native cosmic matter.

Even at this late date, cosmorganic humans who choose to live among autunculi are subject to stigma. This despite how well documented it is that, when it comes to affection – no, I'll say "love," because that's what it is – mammals, high and low, whether of the cosmorganic or the autuncular variety, make no distinctions. A prize-winning cosmorganic Chow from London settled down with the above-mentioned Yukon Leroux, against her master's wishes. Eventually the bitch and the sentient raccoon were separated against their wills. This led to a legal battle, Leroux and Lady Mao v. the Findlays of Charing Cross, and a decision was returned which, in attempting to define and prohibit bestiality across the Planckety-planck boundary, ironically opened the door for local laws that, even where comprehensible, are so disparate from region to region that no plaintiff has successfully challenged a similar union since. Wives and husbands leave their spouses for autuncular satyrs and nymphs who possess no more sentience than a cosmorganic horse, but, by legal definitions as they stand today in over 80 nations, that isn't bestiality. The Autunculan physicist, Thunderbolt McNutt, was well known to have kept a harem of a dozen border collies – some autuncular, some cosmorganic – and the stockholders of Duncan Yoyodine Polymeric Fields, LLC, which employed him, are said to have turned a blind eye to many a scandalous incident involving gatherings of animals and people which, in the times before the Sluice, would have made a pariah of the most beloved public figure.

Please don't think I have no compassion for the many who are challenged, to the hidden vault of their beliefs about species kinship and taboos, by the present situation. There isn't a thing I know about the world after the Sluice that disputes the most reactionary characterization of the state of things as "a mess." It's an epistemological mess. It's a theological mess. It's a plain old logical mess.

But I am of the conviction that, if we could admit the Sluice has merely awakened us to the true messiness of the mess we were already in, most of what seems to be a mess would fall away like cobwebs under the sweep of a rational hand debunking a haunted house. All that would remain would be the quandaries that propel one to strive for a rich life of hope and meaning and compassion and love. All that would remain would be the possibility that every creature is capable of happiness now, even those with the most violent of psychoses, even those made of nothing but mindless evil. And then the only question would be, How much will you risk of your own limited time in existence to help make that possibility manifest? How far and into what quagmire of moral ambiguity will you extend your hand to another in compassion, knowing that in so doing you could both break free from the unspoken superstitions binding you to your fears? I believe there has never been any other ethical question than that. That is the only question. Do you love your fear? Or will you defy fear and open yourself to life?

I apologize for my preachy tone. It’s the voice of a spirit of transuniversal ecumenism, a spirit that takes the reins of my passion and goads it to the top of some kind of Sinai. It’s a voice ill-suited to entertainment journalism. My editor at The Times Sunday Magazine started calling me Dr. Evangelical and Mr. Hyde. This, to him, was the cleverest thing he was ever apt to say, and he was probably right. “And here’s where you turn into Dr. Evangelical,” he would say, indicating a particular paragraph in one of my articles, as if I didn’t know. And I would point out, smart-ass that I was, that it was Dr. Jekkyl who turned into Mr. Hyde. “Yeah, well,” he once said, clearly, in his off-hours, having given some thought to a rejoinder, “Mr. Hyde had to turn into Dr. Jekkyl, too. It’s a two-way street. And how do you think Mr. Hyde’s friends feel – they’re just out having a good, crude old time – when exalted Dr. Jekkyl shows up in place of their drinking buddy to take them to task for their low behavior? Do you think they find that entertaining?” I pointed out that I was an entertainment journalist, not a journalistic entertainer. “Every journalist is an entertainer,” he said, “or he oughta be.”

MEMOIRS OF THE UNREALISTIC CHAPTER 6

I came into possession of Grampa’s journals after the funeral of an aunt who never threw anything away. I also inherited a lovely silver tea service and an edible-tissue incubator that operates on good, old-fashioned solar power. After having read the journals, I put them aside in a corner of a closet, a dark corner, befitting a family’s shame. This was about three years after Flicky and I first met. Three years of drinks by the pool, looking from Flicky’s patio at the top of Palisades Island out over the Pacific Ocean. Three years of awards ceremonies and private screenings and martini dinners at Musso and Frank’s. Three years that included Flicky’s major crisis, when he faced trial for assault and battery, and struggled to survive a year-long public excoriation of his character until his accusers, Johann and Alberta Transvaaler, were outed as pathological frauds. Even for a star of Flicky’s magnitude, rebuilding one’s reputation after such a scandal is a project with little hope of success. That Flicky won back his public is a testament to his will and charisma, as well as to the quality of fan he attracts, and to the reasons for the attraction: the generosity of his heart and the sense of honor with which he engages the world.

Coming through that ordeal seemed to give Flicky a new sense of himself. Having fought for his reputation and succeeded, he evinced a confidence, a self-possession, that evoked in me the image of a soldier returned from a war, in whose face one can no longer recognize the innocent young man who’d shipped out. There were times when he reminded me of Pacino at the end of Serpico when he has been disillusioned by the corruption of the police but remains hopeful and, ultimately, undefeated. I never saw Flicky cry after that, the way he had when we met in the Snerd. There was at once a firmness in his attitude, a nobility in his eyes, a solidity of purpose in all he did, and a kind of wisdom in his face. Tenderness was in his touch, but it came from a place of power within him, and when he was gentle in his dealings one had the sense of a towering angel of fire and ice holding in his palm the most delicate orchid.

Flicky had been in the habit, during the thick of the scandal, of thanking me for standing by him. It got to the point where I had to break him of it, telling him that, as far as I was concerned, there was never a question. One has a responsibility to one’s friends. I felt intrinsic to my constitution the desire to see right prevail. And, watching those two con artists trying to smear their filth over a being with the kind of complexity of virtue as Flicky possessed, the thought of withdrawing my support wouldn’t have occurred to me anymore than the thought of deliberately poking myself in the eye with a sharp stick.

As I indicated above, after his ordeal Flicky never cried again. But about a year later, sitting in our booth at Musso’s, I saw him mist up a little. I had not two days earlier relegated Grampa’s journals to their crypt, and the contents of them had yet to settle into a permanent neural arrangement in my brain. So I talked to Flicky about them, about how Grampa had been obsessed in the most impotent and embarrassing way with fame. About how he had fallen in love with Maria, whose name never failed to bring to my mind the song of that name from West Side Story. And about how he had died in a recursion echo on the very day of the Sluice.

I say I saw Flicky mist up a little. What I actually saw was his body taken over by an upwelling of emotion, albeit for only a moment. I took this as an empathetic reflex. Perhaps something in his past had come rushing to his forebrain, I thought, causing feelings that briefly wracked him but which he immediately chastened. He finished the cigarette he was smoking. Then he excused himself, he was suddenly exhausted. I didn’t hear from him for nearly two months after that.

In the final novel of Mark Leyner’s six-volume masterpiece, Hateful Lovers, the narrator speaks of a phenomenon called “drunk dialing:” “Aside from violence and threatening suicide to extort sex, drunk dialing is the nadir of any relationship. The jilted lover’s delusions are exposed. At the time of night the French call the petit matin, a voice comes over the phone, channeling the spirit of the title character in the Doobie Brothers’ ‘What A Fool Believes.’ It’s sickening. Even Gandhi thought so. Read Satyagraha. There is no example from history where drunk dialing has ever resulted in sex. Loneliness and regret are its electricity. Love, or at least sex, is its goal, but its effect is exactly the opposite. Why evolution has not yet expunged this behavior from the human behavioral palette is a question that casts Darwin’s theories into doubt.”

What Leyner describes is the marriage of perversity and sentimentality that accompanies lone nocturnal alcohol consumption. It is not limited to defunct romances, and it isn’t always a bad thing. Any of drunk dialing’s contemporary equivalents can be a way for an otherwise reserved entity to break the social barrier of sound judgment, so that something difficult and possibly dangerous might be achieved.

And that is why I woke in Mr. Leyner’s “petit-matin” to a teleclay transmission from Flicky after so long not having heard from him. He was reclining in the antique Eames chair from which he always made his teleclay calls. His appearance in teleclay on my night table, even at this late hour, was a welcome sight. His miniature form, in his miniature chair, smoking a miniature cigarette with miniature smoke rising from it, always brought me to a kind of Buddhist mindfulness, sort of a trance of alertness, however paradoxical that may sound. Seeing a friend in teeny tiny form is incredibly endearing. Little teeny tiny things are so very precious, and friends are precious, and the two together compound the preciousness exponentially.

I always keep teeny tiny props and sets in my nightstand drawer, so when people call on the teleclay I can involve them in dioramas of my choice – without their knowing it, of course. Flicky knew of my eccentric practice, as we had both had a lot of fun at the expense of sundry pompous film industry types. And I’m sure he was aware that I sometimes did it to him – and he knew there was no malice in it. Honestly, it was an almost unconscious habit – done as it was during a trance of alertness. Now, however, he was n sheets to the wind, and I was loopy from having just woken up in the petit matin – to cut to the chase, before I was three-quarters aware what I was doing, miniature Flicky was dressed as Cleopatra, sitting in an Eames chair in an old west saloon softly orating to an attentive semi-circle of five Johnny-Reb pawns and one Jeff Davis from a Civil War chess set, a pair of grooms from a wedding cake (naked but for top hats), a Rasputin nightlight, a Marilyn Monroe-shaped yortzheit candle, a hardboiled egg with a wax mustache, a porcelain chipmunk salt shaker, Jesus and Mary corn holders, and a shot glass with feet and a sombrero. The instant my focus dollied out from the details to encompass the entire tableau I had wrought, I stifled a laugh, and Flicky leapt to his tailfin.

“What the hell? Are you playing dolly dress-up with me now? Have you heard anything I’ve said?”

“No.”

You never heard a flounder cuss the way I heard one do then. Still, even through the barrage of pelagic profanity I could see that Flicky made an all-too-perfect Queen of the Nile. I butted in to say, “Hey – I didn’t put eye makeup on you.”

Miniature Flicky walked in place as the Eames chair retreated and disappeared behind him. Then he was daubing his eyes with face cream. “I forgot to take it off when I got home from the Mephisto reading.”

“You wore makeup to the reading?”

“Mephisto, baby. I wanted to help the guy out. Make a good presentation. It’s an indy project.”

“Who’s the director?”

“Satyajit Speilberg. Of the disinherited Speilbergs.”

“You’d be great in the role.”

“Yeah, they don’t appreciate what I’m doing. They just want to be able to tell the money that I’m attached. And the script has been worried into a piece of crap.”

“Too bad. How’s the kid?”

“Satyajit? I don’t know, smart. Could be talented. I suspect he’s out for revenge, as in ‘nothing revenges like weaseling one’s way to the top of the industry once ruled by one’s reviled ancestor.’”

“I’m not familiar with that saying.”

“What you’re not familiar with could fill a book. And usually does.”

“Kiss my ass.”

“Faxiloid it to my lawyer.” Flicky had rinsed his face and was patting it dry with a butter-colored towel. “Anyhow, are you coming, or what?”

“Coming where?”

“You really didn’t listen to a word I said? I was pouring my heart out. About you and me and fate. Uch. It doesn’t matter, I was just beating around the crybaby bush with a drunk stick. You’re a good friend, and it’s my privilege and duty to share something with you about your grandfather. It involves me picking you up tomorrow at noon. So go back to sleep.”

“Grampa? Did you find something of his?”

“Don’t try to guess, okay? Just be ready at noon. Oh, and bring his journals. And wear swim trunks. Goodnight.” Flicky cut out of the teleclay, which collapsed back into the nightstand top. The motley audience in the old west saloon were left watching empty space. The corn holders looked especially glum. This hint of a mysterious “something” about Grampa – you would think it might have been the kind of teaser fit to propel the mind to endless insomniac spirals. Yet I had no trouble getting back to sleep. How interesting could it be? Had someone found Grampa’s dirty underwear in a vintage store? Or, at best, his experimental subject ID card? That was the assumption I operated under as I hit that interface between waking life and dreaming known as “the pillow.”

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

space meets vacuum

space meets vacuum
Originally uploaded by yosephus.

This spaceman has come face to face with a pie. Inside the pie is a veritable vacuum. The innards of the pie have been drawn out through a tube coming out of the top. In the background is a Chinese outerspace billboard. Can this be what the future holds? And if so, for whom?

I find it fascinating to consider that the future holds such marvels.

BRIBE PEOPLE FROM THE FUTURE

Here's a link related to the time machine below. Maybe we should take up a fund to get a ride from the aliens.

TIME MACHINE FOR SALE - SOLD!

Got this link from a colleague who just started a thing called Roblog.

I wrote to the buyer to see if he/she got it working. No answer yet.