Flicker

There are many worlds to walk in, many existences to live by.  Don't be so quick to assume that there is only one reality.

The candle molds were actually supposed to be used for popsicles.  We had cut the tips in order to thread the wicks through.  The tray had six molds, one for each of us, little blue obelisks pointing up from the counter.

     To be honest, I wasn’t sure what I was doing there.  I was barely sure why I had come at all, all I knew was that it was some sort of cult ritual, and I would rather be anywhere than at home, starting my chem paper.  Dylan had called around six to ask if I would come, saying that it was something his girl and her friends had found.  Girls, chem paper, there was just no competition.  So there we were; me, Dylan, and Jack sitting in a basement belonging to El, or Eleanor, a sophomore who I had never seen before but wouldn’t have missed for the world.  She was tall, thin but not overly so, with black hair and a pale, elegant face with just enough gothic to be sexy.  Black clothes emphasized her figure, which was beautiful bordering on perfection.  There were two other girls; Rose, Dylan’s girlfriend, and Skye, both of whom were also wearing black.  Rose was a short, pixie-figured girl with brown hair and a fiery spirit.  I had known her for a while; Dylan and I had been friends since high school.  Skye was new, not unattractive, but relatively plain compared to the other two.  Slightly wider, blonde, nice form, classic sorority girl.  Jack and Dylan were also wearing black, I noticed.  I was wearing blue jeans and an orange sweatshirt.  Guess I had missed the memo.

     Skye was the one who had found the book.  It was a little thing we had read through maybe half an hour ago, describing a ritual whose importance was far outclassed by the importance of El’s fantastic curves.  I mean, don’t think I was just sitting there drooling, I was actually listening, but the little book was written in some Shakespearean English that was impossible to understand without concentrating fully on it.  It involved candles – I got that part – but past there it was so much distracting babble.

     By the time we got around to making the candles, we should have been either bored, or drunk.  We were neither.  There was a pale, oppressing silence over the room that seemed to urge you to speak and yet threaten anyone who dared try.  I was standing by the range, watching a cube of black wax melt in a small pot.  El was leaning against the counter, cutting lengths of white twine for wicks, but even watching her didn’t quite take off the edge the room had acquired.  Jack was next to me, watching the wax and stirring every so often with a wooden spatula.  It seemed like a bad idea; how does one clean wax off of wood, exactly?  But I didn’t say anything.  Dylan and Rose were sitting on a dirty couch, bent into opposing ninety-degree angles and not touching.  Rose was pacing the back of the room, in front of the staircase.

     Somewhere outside, there came the sound of screeching tires, and we all jumped.  The sound seemed to reverberate between my ears, bouncing back and forth until it died down.  Suddenly, I wanted to leave.  I could call a cab, if Dylan wouldn’t give me a ride back.  But I didn’t want to stay here; I had the strange and utter sensation that we weren’t alone in the room, that we were sharing it with spirits and demons and things I didn’t want to see.

     Then El was next to me, turning off the burner on the wax and wrapping one thin, warm arm around my waist.  “You excited?” she whispered.  “I am.  I can feel it in the air, this is going to be good.”

     Oh, I could feel it.  I wasn’t as sure about the ‘good’ part, but I could certainly feel it.  Still, I let myself be led over to the small, hexagonal wooden table in the corner, below the stairs.  I sat down on a stool, and El got up and walked to the stool opposite me.  Skye sat on my left, holding the lengths of string and a stack of small china bowls with a pattern of red and blue spirals painted on the outside.  I might as well stick around for a while, I thought.  See what happens.  I can bail later, if things get too weird. 

     If I only knew.

     She took a bowl and passed them to me, I passed them to Rose, who was on my right.   They went around the circle, ending with Jack.  Then Skye cleared her throat and began to speak, and the tension snapped like an old guitar string, replaced by a surreal innocence.

     “All right, guys.  So here we are, time to start, I guess?  Um.”

     El nodded at her reassuringly.

     “So, how this works is, in modern English, I think; we are going to separate ourselves from location, and reality.  The purpose is to deny space and time, evolve, I guess you could say.  To escape the bindings of the physical world.  The ritual was created by the cult of Scarbo six hundred years ago, and has been passed down ever since then. 

     “The six of us – the thing needs six people – will transcend our mortal forms, set our spirits alight.  That’s the purpose of the candles.  The hexagon of alternating sexes forms a microcosm of human society, the candles the lifespans of our mortal forms.  I have to stress that, for all of you here, we are bonded.  There is no turning back now.”

     The phrase sent shivers up my spine, but I didn’t put too much stock in it.  I could bail.  Anytime, I could quit, if I wanted to.  El got up and walked to the counter behind me, taking something out of a drawer.  I watched her, starstruck.

     She was beautiful.  Mesmerizing.  The soft, organic curves of her hips, back, and breasts seemed absolutely perfect, beauty in its purest form.  The thing she held was a knife, small and cold.  It wasn’t a sexual desire, as much as a powerful hunger, a need to be with her, to watch her, to take her form into my eyes, my mind, my body.  She was left-handed, I noticed.  Her head tilted slightly to the side as she looked at me, the faintest trace of a smile upon her lips.  There was no turning back; how could I leave her now?  How could I ever, ever have enough?

     Snap out of it, I thought, frightened and confused.  All of the sudden, she was just a girl, a pleasant person holding a not-so-pleasant item.  I stood up, knocking the table a little with my hip. 

     “No,” I said.  This was madness.  This couldn’t be happening.  It wasn’t the knife that scared me; it was just the whole attitude of the place, the feel.  It was tense, excited and yet scared in a bad way, it made me feel sick.  Vertigo struck me; I grabbed hold of the edge of the table. 

     “There’s no turning back,” Dylan said.  “For any of us.  You can’t leave, not now.  Nor do you want to.”
     “Well, you’re wrong about that,” I muttered, walking towards the door.  None of the others stood up.  I stepped onto the first stair, looking up at the basement door.  Blinding light streamed out from the edges of the door; I noticed for the first time that it was completely dark in the basement.

     Dark, but I could still see.

     Arms wrapped around me.  Such sweet arms.  “Don’t worry,” she whispered.  “Don’t be afraid.”  A pair of soft lips touched my neck.  “This is fate.”  I turned around, confused, disoriented, breathing heavily.  The light from behind the door had burned itself into my retinas; everywhere I looked was obscured by the glowing rectangle.  Hands turned me around, and then touched my face.  The kiss was ecstasy, lighting a fire that burned against her cool touch.  I didn’t even feel the knife as it slipped down and into my palm.

     We sat down in our place, me and El opposite each other.  I held my bleeding hand over the small china bowl in a daze.  I felt somewhere between waking and sleeping, in that grey area where thoughts take on a life of their own, the conscious and subconscious merge.  I could feel my heart beat, my eyes dilate.  The subtle flexing of my diaphragm sent air through my lungs.  I could feel it all, and yet didn’t acknowledge that I did; my mind was elsewhere.

     The world began to leach the color from my eyes; everything faded to black and grey.  The blood trembled in its’ cup, reality trembled in time.  Lines became curves, non-Euclidian shapes drawn on spheres and viewed at the wrong angle.  Entropy became a dark shape, the shadow of a shadow crowding in from all directions.

     This is location, I thought.  The thought swam through my head like some dark fish.  This is location; this is reality in all of its flaws, in all the unbelievable, uncontrollable chaos that we never see.  This is true reality.

     It was bizarre, disorienting.  It was a world I think that we, as humans, shut out, hide from.  It was a world from which the order and normality, all this time nothing more than a thin veneer of perception, had been stripped.  We passed around the wicks, white against the black of the table, the black of our blood.  Then the wicks, too, were black, stained with what might have been red, in daylight.  Daylight, what a joke.  There was no daylight here.  We poured the candles, threading the wicks through the molds and holding them as the wax was poured in.  We never got them confused; each one of us got the candle made with our own blood.  I don’t know how.  The wax took an eternity to cool; I watched the rise and fall of galaxies, reflected in a mote of dust.  The physical had become transparent, like stained-glass.  Microbes grew in my intestines, multiplying, consuming. 

     We lit the candles, the flame from the lighter, a blinding yellow; the flame from the candles, black.  The flames sucked light from the room, their progress only visible by the slow melting of the wax and the curling of the wick, which fizzed as the blood boiled away. 

     Dylan’s candle was the first to burn down.  I watched as he grew translucent, transparent, and then invisible, and something rushed by me, like a bird in the night.  I didn’t flinch.  His shadow still danced in the non-light of the other candles, multiplied fivefold.  Rose went next, then Jack.  My own candle had burned maybe half of the way down.  I felt the slow passage of time, movement along some unsuspected axis.  Skye faded away, her shadow a mere double now.  What would she look like, I wondered, when all the flames have died?  Eleanor disappeared.  I didn’t say goodbye.  Why would I?  I waited.

     And waited.  The shadows watched me, the last mortal remains of the other five, held back only by me.  I waited.

     The candle flickered, sputtering at the bottom of its inexorable downward journey.  Then a sound like a train whistle, or maybe a woman screaming.  The candle began to build itself back up in a reversing process, a black obelisk growing from a black flame.  The air turned white, and for a moment it was just that, the black candle, the black flame, the white world, I looked around and saw something a little like a sphere, a sphere that pulsed along some cracked, unknown reality, something that I could not perceive, but only imagine; the growing dark, the crack, spewing light, the pulsing, maddening beat, like a heartbeat that resonated across planets as a sound wave resonates across molecules.

     The flame flickered, flared, and vanished.

Time

has the most amazing way of slipping by.  Grains of sand on an infinite beach, constantly washing away moment by moment.  The moments themselves are so small, they don't exist, you know?  They're just moments, single, tiny things.  But they're all we have.
     Some people say that someday, time will start to rewind, snapping back like a rubber band, or a ball thrown into the air, until the universe recollapses in on itself and we'll have what Douglas Adams called a gnab gib.  Then time will start moving forward again, big bang, gravity, fusion, heat, life.
     Life will then ponder the existence of time.
     Over and over and over again.
     This is all from an outside perspective, of course.  From our perspective, time has already snapped back an infinite number of times, sure as it has once.  Yes, we are accepting this theory as true for the moment.  This doesn't seem like such a problem, except when you consider the question of free will, that eternal goal of humanity.  In my opinion, free will is bullshit.  It's a fancy way of saying we don't know what's going to happen next.  It's an excuse for being unable to change the past.  See, the timeline already exists, your life is laid out before you, determined by a near-infinite number of factors jumbled together in the most complex equation in the universe.  Indeed, it's the only equation in the universe.  Abstractly, that equation is the universe.  The outcome?  It determines what you'll have for breakfast tomorrow.
     To us, Benjamin Franklin has no free will.  He can't decide, all of the sudden, to become and actor's apprentice instead of a printer's apprentice.  It can't happen, because we already know what he did.  Likewise, we will have no freewill to those in the future, because they will know what we did.  We don't, though, and that makes all the difference; the discovery, the journey of life that only sounds corny because no one stops to think about what it means.
     This is true whether or not the time-rolls-back-and-forth theory is accurate.
     But enough about the future, let's move on to the past.  A fixed world, a dead world, a world that, for whatever reason, humans want to preserve at all costs.  The funny thing is, how do we know it exists?  How do we know it's anything but a story our subconscious came up with on the fly to explain your present situation?
     We don't.  But, whereas we refer to the future as free, we refer to the past as set.  Oh, sure, you can interpret history any way you like, but no one disputes solid fact.  At least, no one reasonable.  That's because once you start disputing it, suddenly there is no truth anymore, only perception.  There are very few people who can live on perception alone.  I know I'm not one of them.  Some people dispute, and then turn to an alternate 'truth' because they can't live without at least something.  How do you know that the world isn't 9000 years old, that it wasn't created in seven days by a being we then went and killed?  How do you know it wasn't sneezed from the nose of the Great Green Arkleseizure, or congealed from a drop of oil from the spear of an inbred demigod hero?  We don't.  And yet, we don't have 'free will' to believe the past.  We have facts.  We have a nice little reasonable worldview that we hide in because we don't want to know what might be out there.  It's the human condition, hiding in a cave, watching shadows because shadows have no power to hurt.  We separate past from future because its the only way that makes sense to live.  And the crazy part is, we're the only species that does it.  Sure, you can train dogs, you might say that that indicates that they have some sense of past, but it's not true.  It's just a matter of chemical bonds in their brain; they could care less if they were trained, or had been born knowing to roll over when the big thing spins its fingers.
     You ever see a pet on antidepressants?  A bird taking therapy, or a lizard reading philosophy?  No, of course not.  They're too busy surviving.  They're totally and fully occupied with the present.  We humans, though, we broadened our vision; we chose to look past the present and now, the present is mainly empty; we live most of our lives in either the past or the future, focusing on what we believe to have happened and what we believe might happen.  The result is that we can build machines, harness fire and electricity, play with life itself.  The cost?  Possibly the sanity of every single human being on the face of the planet.
     Cheer up, though; it's not so bad.  And if it gets you down, just remember that this is all we have.  It may seem pointless, but when the point itself doesn't exist, when there is nothing more out there, nothing more than the next moment, the next word, the next line, the next day, the next class, the next shift, the next job, the next child, the next generation, the next flare of life on this wonderful planet, well.  When that's all there is, what you do with it makes all the difference in the universe.




     This started out as a sort of lament, an epitaph for something I did in my past that I can't change.  I suppose the fact that you can't change the past is obvious, but to me it wasn't.  From there, this came out, the idea that the past and the future aren't so different.  This combined with two other theories of mine, that free will is bullshit and that maybe my memories are just a subconscious explanation for where I am right now, and you get this thing.  The funny part is, it made me feel much better about myself, knowing that there's a story beyond what I may or may not have done, and that there's no use dwelling on the past.  The intention was to do the same for you, though, knowing me, this will just end up sounding extremely depressing and drive the larger part of the Albuquerque area into a homicidal nihilist rage.
     New short story soon.  Candles, chicks, and cult rituals.

Tunnel Vision

I reallized with fresh horror that new doors of perception were opening up inside.  New?  Not so.  Old doors of perception.  The perception of a child who has not yet learned to protect itself be developing the tunnel vision that keeps out ninety percent of the universe.  Children see everything their eyes happen upon, hear everything in their ear's range.  But if life is the rise of consciousness, then it is also the reduction of input.
     -Stephen King,  The Mist

There are powers out there that we do not understand, powers so complex and inexplicably vast that we have no choice but to shut them out.  The shutting out isn't an instinct, though; we as human beings are far too smart for that.  No, we have to learn to shut these things out.
     I've read a theory explaining children's fascination with dinosaurs, saying that as a rule, children love that which is A) big and scary and B) unable to hurt them.  My personal opinion is that the author of said theory doesn't quite remember childhood.  Because dinosaurs can hurt you, because when the doorknob turns you know it's the velociraptor, and you don't dare to draw the curtain up, even on the second floor, out of fear of staring into the eyes of a brontosaurus or pterodactyl.  The reason these things don't send you screaming is because with childhood monsters come childhood magic, the talismanic blanket or teddy bear, the ancient seal of your mother's kiss or hug.
     As we grow up, the magic goes away.  It's a sad, sobering process, but perhaps a necessary one; by necessity, the world of childhood fantasy is ill-suited to prepare you for the real world.  So the magic goes away, and gets replaced by fact, by theories and rules and laws.  And sure, maybe you keep teddy on a high shelf and when the shadows start to get long, you feel safer tucked in, but for the most part those are nostalgic acts, throwbacks.  For the most part, the magic is gone.
     But here's the thing: the monsters aren't gone.  Oh, sure, maybe they've gotten a little more mature, a little older, maybe the bogeyman becomes the looming threat of global climate change, the dinosaurs become the slow decay of forces hanging around out there in space, forces that twist mass and gravity in strange cycles we can't see and are powerless against, but the monsters are still there, all the same.  So what do we do?  We shut them out.  Life is the reduction of input.  We cast our gaze to the heavens, and saw too much.  It's the curse of humanity, that we see more than we can live with.  Because who can survive, who has the will to do so, in the face of demons?  And yet.
     We never stop looking.  And when we see, when the stars align and for just one second the veil of human misconception is thrown back, we scream, we cry and back away, and we try to forget what we saw because how could we?  We didn't know what was out there.  We didn't know that, while we're so invulnerable to the monsters of our children, our monsters never lose their power.  And in the end, just as every child will grow up and learn that their parents aren't so invincible after all, every adult must learn, someday, that the monsters are never gone.  We just choose to ignore them.
     And some things don't like to be ignored.