And when I’d come down from that, I moved into time-out again. I pushed deep. Caleb’s shame at having failed to get me was quickly overwriting his previous mortification. Jupiter’s combination was, in essence, erasing itself. Most fixers don’t rely solely on emotion because it is so highly subjective and hard to remember. Though reluctant to do it, I had to admit I’d underestimated his genius.
And, for a Marlowe, that was almost shameful enough a thought to get me to Jupiter’s sanctum. Of course, pride at my realizing that immediately erased that path. So I forced myself on, embracing regrets and humiliations. I sought that one moment which, if I could, I would change, then wallowed in pity at my inability to do so. For a heartbeat I felt my father once again dying in my arms, then I used it to tear through into Jupiter’s private elsewhen.
I appeared in a locus of incalculable opulence. Mosaics from buildings long lost to fire, flood or flowing desert sands themselves became pieces of a larger mosaic. Close by, dark wooden walls that extended high into vaulted ceilings were hung with paintings and portraits by great masters and even better artists long unremembered. Lines of shelves like spokes on a wheel bowed beneath the weight of scrolls, codices and books. Between them, display cases held everything from articulated skeletons to silken robes and bright armor. Chests stacked at the base of the walls had burst open beneath the crushing weight of those chests piled above them, spilling gold and jewels in a conspicuous display of wealth.
I found myself speechless. I had traveled through the centuries. I had witnessed many marvels. I’d seen Emperors buried in elaborate ceremonies. I’d watched kings spend fortunes to celebrate a birthday; and dictators spend even more to celebrate themselves. Again and again I’d seen spectacles which the participants were certain exceeded anything that had gone before and would never be surpassed.
And yet all those were as nothing before this display.
It could have taken an eyeblink or a century for me to pass through to the center. In that place time was irrelevant. More important was my inability to comprehend the enormity of what I was seeing. I could not fix it because it was truly beyond my understanding.
Here and there I recognized things. Amidst the glittering splendor sat a flat, square cardboard box. Within it lay a plastic reel of brown tape, holding the missing minutes of a Nixonian White House conversation. Further on the Shroud of Turin—not the medieval copy, but the original—had been draped over the chest containing the Plantagenet crown jewels. A codex copy of the Secret Gospel of Mark nestled within the shadow of a lost Roman Legion’s golden eagle, and beyond it Excalibur had been racked with the original Bowie knife.
All of these things—missing things, things snatched out of time at critical split-seconds—created a portrait of chaotic excess. Wrenn’s fledglings had stolen them all. They’d brought them as tribute to their absentee father. With pleasure he would welcome them, then set his brood new tasks, greater tasks. He’d whisper to each that they would be his heir if they could do just one more thing.
And I was living proof they had failed. So many Wrenns. So much waste.
I found the old man at the center. Not much taller than me, we had the same build. His hair had become white, with dark locks at the temples. He wore no beard and chose to dress formally, in dark velvets with gold buttons—properly Victorian. It suited him but was, of course, only an affectation. He would have been more suited to a toga, watching Caleb fight in an arena.
“Is it done, then?”
“Almost.”
At the sound of my voice he looked up. I don’t know what I expected. Maybe I wanted the blood to drain from his face. Surely his eyes could have widened in shock. Instead, all I got was a grin, a grandfather’s grin as he watched an infant grandson toddle toward him.
“Alec Marlowe, as I live and breathe.” He straightened up from the oaken table, an aged map rolled out on it. “Sooner than I expected, but not unexpected.”
I drew my pistol and pointed it at him unwavering. “You have many sins to answer for.”
“Yes. Your father’s death. And your grandmother’s suicide. I accept responsibility for them. Thus your presence should worry me.” He shrugged. “But I know your secret. You can’t kill me. You see, I am your…”
“...grandfather, I know.”
He blinked. “You know?”
“Have done since my father died. My grandfather told me.”
“He knew? Elias knew?” Jupiter frowned. “That’s not possible. I fixed her life.”
“You did fix it. But only her life.”
When Jupiter’s plan to unite the Wrenns and Marlowes through marriage fell through, he chose to avenge himself through my father’s mother. Josephine had been an intensely religious woman who attended Catholic Mass on a regular basis. The vehemence of her belief had provided a fix on her which Jupiter used to find her in spite of all the precautions my grandfather had taken to keep her safe.
On their honeymoon, which they’d enjoyed in a 1970s motel at Niagara Falls, Jupiter had stolen her from her marriage bed for a split second while my grandfather was off brushing his teeth. Jupiter whisked her away to a Roman villa during the time of the Great Fire. He made himself up to be an Incubus and told her it was Hell. He raped her repeatedly and returned her to the motel, laying with her for just a second or two, relishing the thrill of deceiving my grandfather.
Josephine bore Elias a son, Thomas. Try as she might, however, she could not shake the shame she felt. Being raped by a demon consumed her soul. Confession, prayer, counseling, even visiting saints and being exorcised brought her no relief. In her great despair, she tried to kill my father, since he was Satan’s child.
When she failed, she killed herself.
I thumbed the pistol’s hammer back. “You missed the fact that the owner of that motel had hidden video cameras in the rooms. He had cartons of tapes in a storage locker which he rented under an assumed name. When he died, the contents were sold at auction. The tapes of your visit entered the paranormal underground as proof that demons exist.”
Jupiter laughed and clapped his hands. “Bravo. So both your father and grandfather knew. Elias never came after me since to kill me could conceivably kill his son. And Thomas never killed me because then he would die. The paradox would cause us both to be resurrected. We’d replay that tawdry scenario out over and over in a recursive hell.”
I nodded. “Most likely.”
“I assure you, Alec, we are in a when before your father was conceived.”
“I have no doubt.”
“Then you see how it is.” Jupiter opened his arms wide. “Embrace your true heritage. You are the union of the Wrenns and Marlowes. You are my dream come true. Everything here can be yours. Anything you want can be yours.”
“What I want is you, dead.”
He fixed me with a reproving stare. “Don’t be petulant, my boy. You can kill me. You’ll likely even enjoy it the first dozen times. But, ultimately, you’ll find it boring. A complete waste of your obvious talent.”
“Might look that way, but not true.” I smiled, my finger tightening on the trigger. “You see, my father knew he was your son. He had himself fixed, and my mother liked to sleep around.”
Introduction to “The Totem of Curtained Minds”
“The Totem of Curtained Minds” marks Ken Hinckley’s third short fiction sale, but don’t let that fool you. He has produced around 80 scientific papers and more than 150 patents in his career as a research scientist. He’s best known for his work on sensors, pen computing, and dual-screen devices. He has also started musing about time.
He has what he calls a zany system for writing stories. “I pick words, settings, characters. I stir them in a pot. I type in a title. And then I go.”
In this instance, “my cauldron spat out Prisoner. It spat out Totem Pole and Mind. Curtains and Silk. Weave those together in the twisted geometry of what passes for my brain, and the story that follows is what you get. It’s simple, and plain as da
y. Only it isn’t. You’ll see.”
The Totem of Curtained Minds
Ken Hinckley
“Lights out!” the guard screamed, the pimply-faced new guy on Cell Block D, trying just a little too hard to assert his newfound superiority. Maximum security, one man to a cell. I guess he thought he had to seize every bit of control he could lay his grubby little fingers on.
He was one of those types, curtained off to the world, one of those men who like to dwell in a special little prison of their own devising.
“And that means you, 9-9-6-8-6-2-9,” he said, lowering his voice a register but still spitting out the digits like gunfire. “And make it snappy.”
I shook my head and tried not to laugh. Figured he’d last a week, if that, before this place drove him straight to crazy.
But just in case he was there already, I did what the man said. Clicked off the articulated reading light clipped to my e-reader, and plunged myself into darkness.
The sounds of men coughing and bunks creaking echoed through the hard, unyielding walls of the cellblock as we all settled into the night. The whole joint stank of mildew stewing in cracked concrete, of man-sweat and fear, all the smells they couldn’t scrub out no matter how many times they made us mop up the floors. The taste of watered-down Pine-Sol never left my tongue.
That was me, Gareth Warren Abrahamson, Prisoner number 9968629, serving a life sentence in Cell Block D of the Colorado State Penitentiary Annex, located in unincorporated Larimer County, Colorado, just outside the city limits of Fort Collins.
The reason for my incarceration doesn’t much matter, I suppose, though it’s not all that hard to venture a guess and smack it dead-on.
I’d been sentenced, and sentenced to life.
And even that turned pretty quick into life plus 20 years, but I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Twenty years! Makes me laugh, makes me feel old. Might as well be 9,968,629 years tacked onto that life sentence. The math works out just the same.
Only it doesn’t.
I’m not really sure why they needed this system of numbers, this incessant need to strip away our names and our identities and whatever else it is that makes us human, just so they can squeeze us into a cell somewhere. Whether it was one of concrete blocks or a little fifty-percent gray rectangle in some computer spreadsheet somewhere didn’t really seem to matter all that much.
They had us and they had us good, we prisoners of life, we men of curtained minds, and that was exactly the way they liked it.
***
Turned out I was wrong about that guard, the new guy, Pimple Face. He was still on the job, and he watched me like a hawk.
I refused to learn his name.
It certainly made things more difficult, but there’s ways to pull off most anything if your motivation is sufficient.
Turned out it was an old man who saved me. A man wise to the ways of the world, its untapped potential.
I have to admit that when I first came to Cell Block D I didn’t pay any attention to Ol’ Man Clark Soderstrom, not really, not the way you would to the last cigarette in a used-up pack of Winstons, the empty promise of the lingering tobacco smell on the air.
Or, say, the final resounding crash of that cold, riveted plate-steel door slamming shut the first time you’ve landed your ass in solitary. That’s a sound you can never forget.
I deserved it, oh yeah, I’m not saying I didn’t. Those twenty extra years weren’t tacked on for nothing.
But nights like those set a fella to thinking. And seeing. And feeling. I mean really feeling, the way I can feel a moth trapped in the hole with me dizzying the air with its wings.
Enough time down there, enough long long nights talking to yourself in the dark, enough days inhaling the stink of piss that didn’t make it all the way into the can, and you start to see things you didn’t before. You start to pay attention to those little clues fate scatters at the soles of your scuffed-up black leather oxfords, the prison-issue shoes engulfing your worn-out feet.
Clues. They’re everywhere, if you’ll only just open your eyes and look.
Like those books in the prison library, the ones with more squiggly little math symbols than words, the ones even the astrophysicists don’t know what the hell to make of. It’s a correctional facility, after all, a place to make more of men who’ve come up lacking. Self-improvement. Education. Science and math. Advanced principles of physics, the Road to Reality they call it.
A promise like that just makes me laugh.
We’ve books on everything here, electronic and otherwise, and I got plenty of time to read ’em all. Just because I done wrong doesn’t mean I was born full up of stupid. I got a good head on my shoulders.
Let me put the problem to you like this.
You emit a photon, gamma (γ), screaming like hell towards the future at the speed of light, c, at the same time a prisoner, P, weaves a strand of silk, S, that catches a ray of sunlight just so.
How long does it take him to get there?
Most people don’t follow this part, so listen and listen close.
The problem with time is that it doesn’t exist, not really, the same way Soderstrom didn’t really exist for me before I started paying attention, the same way that pack of cigarettes I thought I had is gone because all of ’em went up in veils of blue-coiled smoke. It’s a surface phenomenon, an illusion, a reality that emerges from nothing.
Time does not exist.
You see, it’s in the light. It’s all about the light.
And space.
And time.
Which, as I said, does not exist. Einstein dreamed it, riding a beam of light. He looked out, and what did he see?
Nothing. Time stops. It dilates to zero. It’s every man’s boyhood dream, to bridge the vast distances to the stars.
No time passes at all, for you and you only, when you’re moving at the speed of light. It’s the rest of us suckers that age faster than a chain-smoking con locked up in maximum security, in a featureless gray cell twenty-three hours a day.
Time is nothing but the unassailable logic of cause and effect, the eternal truth that things, once done, cannot be undone. An eggshell, shattered and spilling its viscera of yolk, that cannot be put back together. Men, broken and jumbled inside, that one fatal defect lying like an invisible curtain on their mind, who cannot be rebuilt. Who cannot be rehabilitated.
Except when they can.
Got that? Good. I figured as much.
Maybe not.
Let me run at this again, pose another toy problem.
Q: If a prisoner, P, travels at the speed of light to an unknown future, f, how long does it take him to get there?
At the speed of light, time crawls to a halt. It’s a divide by zero, a mathematical impossibility.
Only, we know that can’t be true. Light, the brilliant beams of the sun, pull it off each and every day. They’ve escaped. They’re free of time.
So here you have it, your answer. To wit:
A: It takes no time at all. Not even an instant. Time does not pass for a beam of light; time has no meaning at all. It dilates down to nothing, less than nothing. It simply doesn’t exist, an axiom utterly without foundation.
Time. It’s just one of the many curtains draped over the minds of men, the cloth stale with sun-bleached dust, the fibers disintegrating with age.
***
It was around the time of these deep musings that I first discovered Ol’ Man Soderstrom was raising the Hyalophora cecropia moths in his cell on the sly. The giant Cecropia silk moth, North America’s largest native moth. Their wings smelled like musty velvet when they first unfurled them, as Soderstrom let them dry there in the squat, narrow windowsill of his seven-by-ten cell.
I don’t know how the hell he did it, but he even managed to keep it a secret from Pimple-Face, which was quite an accomplishment, even if the guy didn’t pay nearly as much attention to Soderstrom as he did to me. Most of those moths never made it, but the ones that did
were six goddamned inches across. Six inches! Soderstrom delighted in setting them free on the yard, after they pupated, when he thought nobody was looking.
He was a blue-veined ghost with a shock of silver hair, and yet nobody ever caught on ‘cept me. Shuffled right under their radar. He was practically invisible.
Being stooped and frail with skin like wet vellum has its advantages.
And then it doesn’t.
Soderstrom was just a weak old man, but he took it upon himself to shuffle around the perimeter of the yard each and every day for the one hour he was allotted to feel the warmth of the sun on his shoulders, the one hour a day when he could actually feel alive.
He’d confided to me that he had Parkinson’s disease, slowly spiraling his life to a halt, but he wasn’t going to shuffle off without a hell of a struggle, one hell of a fight.
He was absolutely right.
Somehow, Snyder Shankley, a good-ol’ boy hailing from somewhere in the Tri-Cities area of Eastern Washington, had gotten it into his mind to grift Soderstrom for his three packs a week of Winstons.
They didn’t call him Shank for nothing.
Soderstrom didn’t touch the things, of course, but they were the currency of the prison black-market, worth far more than their weight in gold.
Worth far more than an old man’s life.
Soderstrom bartered the cigs for the moth eggs, had ’em sent to his wife from some mail-order place. She’d slip a few into her letters here and there, and she wrote to him every day. Every single day, and twice on Sundays. She doted on him even after twenty years of never setting her eyes on his face. She’d had a stroke long ago, and hung on all those years, living with their daughter in Maine.
I don’t know what he fed them, but he’d concocted something they would feed on, and some of them even survived. Not many. But a doting wife can slip a lot of moth eggs into her letters in a year.
When it finally happened, Soderstrom never saw Shiv coming.
It was only when the moths emerged alive that he was happy, but when they failed to thrive, as they often did, he soaked the cocoons in alternating baths of scalding hot and ice-cold tap water so he could harvest the silk. He wound it in spools of thread round little black pebbles I collected for him from the yard, small enough to where I could jam them into the gaps in the tread of my oxfords and walk them right back into the cell-block. He collected a few on his own, as well, but he liked me to help, he had taken me under his wing. I think it was his way of welcoming me into his little conspiracy.
Time Streams - Fiction River Smashwords Edition Page 17