by Alex Shakar
It was early Thursday morning by the time everything was set up. Lying on his back, Fred reached over and brought the laptop on top of him, reached over again and switched on the amplifier. Then took hold of the space helmet, and put it on.
The dusty pipes.
The water-stained cinderblocks.
Breath clouding the faceplate.
His reflected eyes.
Straining to lift his head, making out the laptop’s screen.
Cursoring to the vacuus file.
Taking a breath.
Double-clicking …
The deep-space suction is almost immediate.
Everything inside is pressed to the surface. Until there’s no interior at all. Only the flesh, only the skin. Then not even that, from all body to no body. Nothing but the sight of those fearful, reflected eyes. And a horrible pressure. And, clutching the airlock door, fighting the suction and wind, a single, screaming thought: to pull the cable from the laptop and end this.
But who’s here to hear the thought?
Who’s here to think it?
The vacuus session was repeated several times that day, and several more in the three days following. In between, there was eating, and sleeping, and post-working-hours trips to the bathroom, and a lot of sitting on the floor, on a couple of staggered cushions, lotus-legged, staring at the wall. The sessions themselves shook up all the contents and popped the cap. The sitting allowed what remained to slowly fizz and dissipate.
From Freddom to Freedom. The thought bubbled up, and floated off.
The surface thoughts were the first layer to come free. They didn’t disperse altogether, but increasingly, in the minutes following the sessions, they became discontinuous enough to allow for a kind of sliding beneath them, and beneath them lay the first, euphoric glimpses of clarity. Looking around, the cluttered little room could be seen anew, from the moist grime along the sides of the green metal doorframe to the orange and green half-cantaloupe printed on the cardboard box. It was all a kind of fantastic, habitable artwork, so luscious that memories of those swank Zerkendorf apartments seemed sterile in comparison. Though it seemed what mattered wasn’t the environment at all, per se, so much as the depth to which it could be dwelt in, moment by moment. Concepts of failure, poverty, squalor, could be watched like gray weather until the sky cleared once more. Concepts of success, security, luxury—these, too, were pale ghosts compared to the specific, brimming spoonfuls of minestrone soup; the playful burble of pissing into a two-liter Coke bottle salvaged from the trash room; even the vivid aches and shooting pains of folded legs in meditation.
Once the euphoria passed, as it did on the second day, what came up was the missing of it, the desire to get it back. This desire alone was all it took for Freddom to start reclaiming its ground. Within minutes, there Fred was again, in that selfhood built of lack. Wanting happiness. Wanting clarity. Wanting to disappear.
Progress, he found, wasn’t made for long without a great deal of vigilance. There were so many heads to the Hydra of the self, and as long as any one of them remained, he began to sense, the rest would eventually come sprouting back. It was necessary to inspect every loop of all those tangled necks to discern which could be loosened in any given moment. It took a certain amount of will not to look away, particularly when it came to loosening the will itself.
Beneath thoughts, the subsurface of emotions became the focus on the third day in the basement. These too, with awareness, could be pried up, and underneath lay a purer kind of feeling, less subject to mood and circumstance. The feeling was one of spaciousness and forward freefall, whenever the attachment to experience itself could be let go. Giving up time and becoming time, the flow itself, as the radiant faces of Buddha and Shiva and Christ looked on from their vantage, taped to the mainframe’s hull.
By the fourth day, the focus was other people, the desire to be respected or loved, or to simply feel of use to this world. With thoughts of others inevitably came thoughts of self, bringing him back again, in all his guilt and all his envy: his guilt over having failed George, failed Sam, failed his parents, over sitting in a basement and doing nothing while people out there were starving, ecosystems dying; his envy of everyone out there playing and winning, making money, making names for themselves, getting laid, getting adulated, competing for ever bigger niches; his guilty envy of a world chugging along for better and worse without him. Seven billion ghosts, himself among them, an entire simulated metaverse in this hapless skull.
The more he opened to the racing vacuum—the more he became it—the more powerful the program’s function. He could bring its fatal beam to bear on whole populations, and watch as their inner significances and connections to him burned away. He watched Gibbon, and Lipton, and Erskine, and Gretta melt and sizzle like heated frames of film. He purged friends, too—Jesse and Conrad, waving good morning from behind their desks, going translucent, giving way to a clear white screen. Mel, smiling above him as she pinioned his wrists, her hair falling around both their faces in a sunlit curtain, bright, brighter, gone.
It took half the night before the ensuing panic subsided and the annihilating light could be turned on those closest:
There went Vartan, in his white tuxedo, with his cavernous, questioning eyes, tapping Fred’s chest, tapping his own.
There went Holly, in her sunglasses, launching her hands over Broadway.
There went Sam, risking a smile at the thought of black Bermuda shorts.
With each frame that caught fire, the projector itself seemed to smolder a little more. So that by the time George flashed up—collegebound, lying with his hands behind his head on the steps of a church—and was incinerated, there remained only the dim screen, the empty theater. Even the watcher was gone.
Two words. Twelve 3-D silver letters, flipping and bouncing in the void of a laptop screen.
The blood pulse in these ears.
These shallow breaths.
The drip drip drip from a soaked towel onto a pantleg.
Where am I?
But the I, the am, these words had no meaning.
Floating thoughts, probing for their missing root. Severed fingers in search of a palm no longer there.
No one staring at a bare lightbulb.
No one gripping a scalp.
No one picking up the Swiss Army knife from the water heater. Pulling out the corkscrew. Snapping it back. Pulling out the bottle opener. Snapping it back.
No one thinking of a tree falling in a forest.
This was that forest.
No self, no problem, Manny had said. Yet all the problems remained. This body remained, getting hungry, having to take a dump. These thinkerless thoughts remained, bits of exploded brain pulp, twinkling in the miasma.
Too far! Gone too far! says one.
Or not far enough? says another.
But what’s left? Not a single Hydra head in sight.
These feeler-less feelings, even, lone little heart cells, pulsing for no one. The state, which was no state at all, wasn’t even scary—there was no one to be scared. But it was horrible, in a dry kind of way. To whom or to what it was horrible wasn’t quite clear. Something must have remained. Some tenacious, biting head amid the blood.
Certain naturally occurring experiments conducted themselves. An erection was lightly fondled in the fingers. The scattered heart cells twitched with a repulsive force. The fingers withdrew. The brainbits kept firing—think this, don’t think that, try this, try that, I’m me, I’m me. No one to receive the thoughts. So many looping REM statements in the dark.
No one even to wait for oblivion.
Hours later, it seemed to come, in the form of sleep paralysis—even that problem remained. A dream of no dream. Just darkness. Unopenable lids. Unmovable muscles. Dwindling air supply. A lump in the chest, acid in the nerves.
How would this body wake up now, with no one, inside or out, to wake it?
Coma, said a brainbit.
Ha, said another. Ha ha.
No one laughing.
Without being willed, the labored breathing commenced. That old technique. Huffing and puffing. Building momentum. Even this was habitual.
Eyes opening.
The pipes, two feet above.
Drip drip drip, soaking the legs of no one.
Monday morning.
Is this it? Is this nothing all there is? This bullshit?
And there it was—spotted at last. The final head, peeping up from the dark: meaning. The desire for that.
All at once, the other heads started tumoring up again, nattering in agreement. This life should mean something. All life should mean something. George’s life should have meant something. Everything should mean. Every last thing.
Here he was, clutching the Swiss Army knife, pulling out the long blade, wanting to plunge it into his neck. Sliding out the tweezers. He could gouge his eyes with them—that would give them meaning, no?
He let them drop, grabbed the laptop, shoved the helmet on. He’d play the fucking program over and over, as long as it took. He doubleclicked. The suction began.
Worse than any time before, like he was being pulled to pieces. He wanted meaning. He didn’t want to not want it.
Meaning what?
What meaning?
Meaning what to whom?
Rage. Whose?
An ownerless fist, rising and pounding. The supercomputer resounding, a muffled gong.
Now the other fist pounding. Now the legs, both at once, feet still in the sleeping bag. Fists and heels slamming and rocking the machine.
A metallic groan, and a snap, and a spraying sound, from somewhere below.
A jerk of the power cords. The amplifier box slipping off its cushion, falling toward the floor. Reaching out, lunging and catching it. But then the laptop slipping from the lap. Catching that too, leaning half over the edge, fighting for balance, amplifier in one outstretched hand, laptop in the other, its screensaver bouncing and flipping this name that names nothing:
And below, out from beneath the supercomputer, the floor fan, the cantaloupe box, the mini-fridge, out across the week-old minestrone soup encrustations—a spreading slick of water.
The top-heavy helmet slipping from this upside-down head, yanking the cords as it falls. Then the desk fan, down from above, clipping the back of this skull on its way, crashing to the water-sheened floor, bringing down with it the surge protector from the pipe along the wall.
A buzzing sound. Smoke.
Uh-oh, says a brainbit.
The next second, everything is electric. Metal box glued to the one hand, laptop to the other, mainframe juiced to the hull. Body writhing and juddering. And falling, feet twisting in the wet sleeping bag, useless hands still welded to the shattering amplifier and laptop, useless head smacking the electric floor for a second round of spasms. Through the smoke and steam, the surge protector. A hand wrenching free from its contortions, yanking the plug from the wall.
The room goes quiet.
Smoke rises from all of it. It rises from this body, this Fredless Fred, curls out from the cuffs of its white polyester pants. It gouts from the behemothic blue hull in great, spiraling, fractal puffs that seem to pass right through the ceiling.
Too much smoke to breathe. The sodden pair of checkered shoes are grabbed from the corner, the tux jacket snatched from the door handle. A backward fall from the room into the basement hallway.
Fredless Fred’s arms are a bright, mottled red. The hands and feet burn the hottest. On its palms, massive, cloudy blisters billow, one shaped like a flower, the other like a shell. Two fingers of its right hand don’t move as the checkered shoes are put on. The ribs on the left side stab like broken glass as the jacket is donned over a half-wet undershirt. There’s a numb softness to the skull just above the hairline, vaguely repellant to the fingertips. And, as if knocked loose, the perspective itself seems to have just slightly shifted, a view no longer quite from inside the head, but from somewhere just above and behind.
For the moment, the body is still capable of motion. And so it moves, albeit with a limp—an abused ankle sending up shooting pains—as it climbs the stairs.
In the lobby, a man with freshly trimmed, carefully mussed hair and sunglasses, recognizable from coinciding lunch runs to the deli over the years, is just now heading in to work. The guts clench. But the guy just nods as he passes, barely cognizant, noticing nothing amiss. And here it goes, this vacuumed bobblehead, mirroring the greeting. Indeed, the figure faintly reflected in the glass door looks more or less normal. The face, though unshaven, is unremarkable, the stark stare of those eyes tempered by even blinks.
The front door swings. Morning in Tribeca: a thousand suns in the windows, sidewalks washed with light. Usually, Greenwich Street is sparsely populated in the mornings, but not today—people are everywhere. They stroll, almost dawdle. The pace is that of a Sunday, or even a holiday, though there’s some business attire in the mix as well.
The checkered shoes seem to know their heading. Already, they’ve swiveled, pointed themselves south. As they follow the crowd, the tightness in the stomach begins to ease. More and more, the various jabs and throbs of pain are distant events. There’s neither anyone to be hurt nor anyone to be pleased by the pleasurable ache in the eyes of long-unseen sunlight.
A woman struggles to maneuver two bags and a stroller out a front door. And here’s a seared, white-sleeved arm and a pulsing palm extending to hold it open. A half-block later, here goes the mouth, incredibly, rattling off directions to a young couple with backpacks. The couple thanks no one at all, and moves on.
Ahead, a group of very blond people disembarks from a charter bus, handing off cameras and poring over maps. A security guard emerges from a deli with a paper cup of coffee in one hand and a Post in the other:
TRIBUTE
And a picture of George and Laura Bush, dusk-lit, laying a wreath.
The crowd thickens closer to the site. Cops are everywhere, standing around, sitting in squad cars. A man with a deeply etched face stands before a display of framed photographs of message walls and smoking ruins. Another vendor hawks T-shirts with images of firemen and policemen depicted as comic book superheroes, muscles bulging under spandex-like uniforms and windswept capes.
At the barricades, people are crowding to get a view through the fence behind a row of cops, who take turns ordering the rubberneckers to keep moving. Around the corner of Broadway, the crowd expands into the plaza.
A digital camera is placed into the hands of no one. And a picture is snapped of a bowl-haircutted Asian boy in an MIT shirt, with a sly smile and a possessive arm around a buxom, bucktoothed blond girl. They stand in front a photograph of a smashed fire truck mounted on the iron fence.
Others are photographing other photographs on the fence, of smokeblackened faces, of a fallen fuselage. Nearby, a young woman clutches the fence and cries, her face red and twisted with agony. A second woman comforts her. A third photographs the first and second.
Still others fit their lenses between the chinks and photograph what lies beyond, and others personalize the fence with private meanings—photocopied photographs of loved ones, Scotch-taped poems in children’s handwriting, balloons with pictures of more superheroes—Superman, The Incredible Hulk, The Thing.
Others hold up signs. One burly, mustachioed man brandishes a yellow placard bearing the words: BUSH DID IT. Another hollers that it was an inside job. Men in crisp, black INVESTIGATE 9/11 T-shirts shout that it was a conspiracy. Another two men hold between them a banner reading: WHEN THE LEFT CALLS FOR PEACE, WHAT THEY MEAN IS SURRENDER. Another placard calls for the end of the Iraq War. Another for impeachment.
Passersby get sucked into the arguments, listening and then participating. Small crowds cluster around the disputes, perpetuating interest, everyone eager to be a part of it. A black man in a bizarre military-dress uniform studded with gold-cross emblems adds his own explications—with the aid of a megaphone—to the noise in the air
on the rim of the pit: “It’s not about whether you’re black, white, brown, red, or yellow,” he shouts. “It’s not about whether you’re Christian, Muslim, or Hindu. It’s about coming together and expressing your feelings.” With that, he hands off the megaphone to his listeners: A long-haired, balding man who shouts that religion is the problem. An old woman who cries and says something incomprehensible.
Every few yards stands a man holding up a Bible. One holds his shut in the air, reciting a verse from memory, not quite loud enough to be heard. Another mutely holds his open to a certain page, as if the mere presence of that microscopic text were doing all the work necessary. For all the crowd clustered around the others, no one pays these men the slightest heed.
Meanwhile, a string quartet plays something classical and somber, and off in another gap in the crowd, a butoh dancer turns slowly, a long, white swath of muslin trailing from her hand. Across the street, in each of the second-story plate-glass windows of the Millenium Hilton, dressedup couples lunch from starched white tablecloths, pausing every so often to stare out over the crowd below and the gaping hole beyond.
The crowd is mostly young bodies exuding sexual excitement and the pleasure of being around other bodies doing the same. Teenagers who were just children five years earlier hold hands, caress each other’s backs. Children who weren’t yet born five years ago sit perched on their fathers’ shoulders. A dozen clean-scrubbed youths in Southern Baptist University sweatshirts take turns standing on a broad marble promontory abutting the steps to an office building across the street, snapping pictures of the iconic cross-shaped crossbeam and a giant American flag. At the top of the steps, in a loose circle, stands a smaller group, eyes closed, palms in the air.