by Brian Short
“Thanks for your help,” said Vinny, turning back to go inside and fetch his cymbals and stands and little chair.
As he walked past me, I said, “Vinny?”
He stopped and looked at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
•
…the tear or crack, and look, it’s full of numbers, it’s full of words and numbers, the objects from my vantage receding. I could scarcely trace the words and numbers back to that image of the Golden Body, nor towards that of the other image, perhaps the same image, given a different name, the shape of which was the exact shape in negative of the hole left inside me, where it had been; that thing I had once known as my mind, but that no longer seemed to be either mine, nor a mind.
Yes, I was hollow. I was egg-shaped.
That space in me was where the yolk had been.
This was the world, insofar as there was a world, and I could see it receding: the self, the objects, the ghost, the shadows. I could only let them slip away, distorted in the ever-increasing fisheye lens that made everything so distant. You see, I did not move. I didn’t have to. Everything else just got smaller, got bent up around the edges, became less and less, while I, standing at the sidewalk, willing myself back and back farther, willing my vision into a pinpoint, a small dot that included everything, became also less and less, and finally became nothing. That was my art, as a person who wasn’t there. That was my greatest achievement yet.
Everyone was gone away now, and so was I. Returned to the sea.
EIGHT
The Ultraworld!
[1994] (Hollywood, CA)
At the orange table, midday light flooding in from all directions at once, even somehow from underneath – such were the reflective properties of most surfaces of Dirty D’s Donut Hole – the desert heat (because, despite appearances, one could never quite forget that this was originally and in essence remained a desert) at least a little dispelled by the quiet labors of Jun-suh’s ultramodern air-conditioning unit, and with his thick hands laid flat to either side of the paper plate in front of him, hands like the flappers of an otter and just as useless on land as an otter’s, OFFICER FRIENDLY stared at the irregular circle of grease on the plate where the doughnut, some moments before, had been. He would’ve made a noise had it been appropriate to make any, barking like a dog, barking like an otter, or some other slick and flippered animal. Rather, he kept his silence, and his thoughts, such as they were, for the moment, to himself.
The change had come once already. Likely it would come again, or so he figured. A wavering to the air, something fair and faint and fluttery like an itch in his eye, and then the overlapping of one space across the substance of another as two ghost objects occupied the same location, like a lap dissolve in a movie without the movie. It was there for only a moment. Long enough to dismiss it. One thing too much like the other, yet different enough to be obviously so. He’d been staring at the circle of his sugar doughnut, or what was then still left of it, and watched it turn partially into chicken fried steak with scrambled eggs and hashbrowns on a plate, a real, ceramic plate, while in his hands he gripped, on the one side, a knife, on the other, a thick and heavy fork.
This, he thought, is food, and either way, I’m eating.
This… this is… this is the real food.
And I… am eating, yes? (Doubt.)
When the meat and eggs went away again, everything was the same as it had been. Only the doubt remained.
•
The bent man with thinning, spiky hair said that his name was Davis.
“Davis,” he said, standing over OFFICER FRIENDLY’s table, too tall, bent, likely because of it, and looking knobby with his oversized cheekbones which seemed to compete directly with his tiny little eyes for prominence over the rest of his face. He held a misshapen canvas bag in his hands.
“That so?” asked OFFICER FRIENDLY, not getting up from the bench, waiting to see what this customer might come up with next.
Which was nothing. The man just stood there, staring down at him, eventually to say, “Yeah-hm.” He nodded his head once for emphasis.
“What… ah… are you doing here, ‘Davis’?”
“Nothing.”
OFFICER FRIENDLY observed him keenly.
“You’re,” Davis said after a long silence had passed, “a police man.”
The policeman observed him keenly. Then he said, “After a manner of speaking. Yes. I am.”
“A manner. Of speaking.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
The policeman squinted at him.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Is there something I can do for you?”
“Can I have a cigarette?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I have no cigarettes. You will have to ask somebody else.”
“I don’t know what a manner of speaking is.”
“‘Davis’?”
“Yes.”
“It’s just something that you say.”
•
Jun-suh, at the table, standing above the two of them, said, “Oh. You are playing a game. Isn’t that something. Who is your friend?”
“This is ‘Davis’,” said OFFICER FRIENDLY. “But I wouldn’t call him–”
“What is this game?”
“What is a manner of speaking?” asked Davis of Jun-suh, looking up at him, blinking, innocent, who looked down at the two of them, beaming like a proud father.
“This game is not a sensible thing.” The policeman seemed perturbed. “I’m a busy man, and this thing is insensible. This helps nothing.”
“In the fullness of time, OFFICER FRIENDLY.”
“In the fullness of time what?”
“You are not that busy.”
“If you move that piece… You can’t move that piece.”
“Why not?”
“What does it mean that you are a police man after a manner of speaking?”
“I’m not. It was just a thing that I said. ‘A manner of speaking’ was only a thing I said.”
“Why would you say things?”
The board itself was indistinguishable at first glance from your typical chess or checkers board, with alternating squares either light or dark – in this case red and black – though a careful count would have revealed more than sixty-four total positions, yet still less than eighty-one, despite the divisions along any of the four sides being the same number, either eight or nine, depending on how you looked at it. Which meant…
“The square root is an irrational number. Certain key positions on the board aren’t in three dimensions, but run orthogonally to it.”
All three looked up, Jun-suh in curious detachment, Davis neither comprehending nor caring to, and OFFICER FRIENDLY in flat annoyance.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“I’m… just trying to help.”
“To help in what way?”
“The game. I know this game. It’s… I… Never mind, forget it.” The interloper moped away dejectedly in his long coat and crumpled hat, bending visibly under OFFICER FRIENDLY’s belligerence – which only promised sticky and troublesome legal entanglements to come – taking his doughnut and coffee to a table somewhere else; really, as far off as possible. He unwound from his neck a long and colorful and entirely unseasonal scarf (because in Los Angeles when could there ever be a season for such a scarf?) and sat himself down and stared hard into the table, trying to look like he was not there and failing.
As disturbing as the board itself might be, the game pieces, each picked out from the spill of small objects in Davis’s cloth bag, were even worse. These had been arranged like bright star clusters over the board’s surface with no regard to oppositional symmetry or any system of logic. They’d not even been put into definite squares, but many straddled the borders between them, though they’d been set with obvious, even meticulous care by Davis, who with one eye shut,
the other squinted, his face so close to the board he’d all but crushed his long nose against it, seemed like he might burn holes through it by the intensity of his concentration. This performance had started the onset of OFFICER FRIENDLY’s impatience in earnest.
“So now what?” The policeman said.
“Move. It’s your move. You have to move now.” Outside, in the midday sun, everything was sharp, all too sharp. The cars moving slowly up and down Santa Monica Boulevard were crystal, glimmering sharp, their edges and colors like crystal knives cutting through the air with sunlight.
“I don’t want to.” He poked at a piece. The sun reflected a piercing spike of light off one of its many facets.
“You can’t move that piece,” Davis told him.
“I don’t want to.”
“You can’t. You can’t move the House until you’ve moved the Body. That piece is the House. You have to move the Body first, but you can only move the Body every alternating second move. If you make one move, then I make two moves, see? Then… okay, then you make two moves, and that’s your alternating second move, and that’s when you can move that piece – and then I make… I make one move. But it’s only after you’ve moved that piece first, then you can move that piece.”
“So if I move this piece –”
“NO! You can’t move that one! That’s what… I just told you.”
“I didn’t want to.”
“You have to move now. It’s your move now, so you have to move.”
“What can I move?”
“Not that.”
“What about this?”
“NO! Not until this piece, the Bird” – Davis pointed at a piece that looked nothing like a bird – “has crashed into the Window and we’ve both seen it die. That’s the rule. We have to both see the bird die. Then you can move the Fulcrum.”
“That’s what this is?”
“The Fulcrum.”
“This ball-bearing thing? Silver, shiny? No, wait, not so shiny.”
“The Fulcrum.”
“That’s what this is?”
•
He’d set his wrecked hat to the side, not far from the pile made of his scarf on the table, but left his jacket on; a wide and over-large army surplus thing, green and gray, that hung on his bones like a tent, one inadequately staked and come half-undone in the wind. He may not have been an old man – in fact, he was quite young, perhaps in his mid-twenties, which was in fact about that same age as OFFICER FRIENDLY (who wore his youth quite differently than this young man) – yet he affected an agedness, or at least a beaten weariness and a certain decrepitude like that of someone more accustomed to defeat than his years should have already allowed. He’d eaten half his doughnut in dejection and drunk his coffee in sorrow. In such a state as he’d sunk into, which was no doubt a habitual one, it took some moments longer than courtesy might allow for him to notice that he was being talked at.
He looked up. “What?”
The large police officer was staring at him. So were Jun-suh and the long man at the table.
Oh shit.
“Come here.”
He did. He stood. He warily stepped up to the table, looking as though he expected someone to hit him.
“What’s your name, son?”
Son? “M-m-my name?” he stammered.
“That is what I said.”
“It…” the boy looked from side to side in a sort of panic. “It’s not… P-P-Pro –”
“I didn’t ask you what it’s not. I asked you what it is. Never mind. You look skin and bones. You look scared. You look like you’re hiding something. Whatever it is, I’m willing to ignore that for the moment… if you can make some sense of this thing which my, uh, friend here is unable to explain clearly.”
He looked first to Jun-suh, the most welcoming of the three, who smiled, beaming like the sun, a beaming, golden Buddha, accepting everything; then to the long man who, bent forward, twisted his body and rolled his eyes up toward him, blinking, lips puckered like a fish, the expression on his face easily as blank as a fish’s; and last to the officer who’d addressed him, maybe somewhat less belligerent now, and actually wanting his advice. He straightened a little then, even puffed out his bony chest. “Right. Of course. As I was saying, some of the squares aren’t visible because they’re not in the world – not in this world, not so we can see them. They aren’t imaginary, not in the strict sense, but they are irrational by definition. In the event of a piece being moved into this other, orthogonal space, the effect of play over here is resultant to that other side – one of those other sides – over there, while on the occasion of a piece that originates on that side being moved over here, the reverse is the case. That much should be obvious…”
The look of annoyance crossing the policeman’s face made him reconsider his approach.
“…O-or not. What I’m saying is there may be other players involved that we can’t see, and other moves being made. It’s hard to tell, really. You’ll notice how the pieces sometimes seem to… to change position… by themselves, when you’re not looking… or, or come from out of nowhere, or disappear. That’s why the, uh, the board is flat. It’s a representation in two dimensions, mathematically, in the x and y coordinates, of something that is really three-dimensional – which is space, okay? – which is where the movement really happens. And the z axis, which you can’t in this case see, where the rules are – in this case the law – is actually a four-dimensional representation of something not, as you’d maybe expect, in five dimensions, but that is actually seven – yeah, seven dimensions – which… which… we can’t even imagine what that looks like, right? And it makes you wonder what happened to six? Where is six? I know… I know… Dimensions all curling in within themselves, tucked into space, there in a notional sense but not really conceivable… And fractures in time, falling – a whole universe that moves slower, you could say, while another one goes faster, like bubbles… like so many bubbles… uh… in foam? Like waves. In the sea. So the way you have to move these pieces, and the order that you move them in, is not the way you see them being moved, or that you – get this – see that you yourself are moved… by invisible hands! Yes! Or, no, no… even to think that you’re the one that’s moving. You’re not moving, see, you’re being moved. This whole concept of willfulness, or even of being an individual – Jesus, God! – or that sometimes, how the interface between these spaces, it moves, it moves right along with you, even if you’re… you think you’re standing still. And it still keeps moving, right there with you, no matter what –”
“I don’t want to play,” said the policeman to his long-bodied opponent, who twisted himself up uncomfortably at the other side of the table. “I give up. You win.”
And he… he hadn’t been aware that he’d been spitting, not exactly, not all over them. Or that his eyes had bulged out quite so large or so wide. And in the moment that he realized exactly what he’d been saying, because he’d let go of himself and spoken more or less in a trance…
“I don’t think that you have a choice in this, OFFICER FRIENDLY. No, I daresay, that is not your decision now to make.” A heavy silence followed afterward… But nobody in the room could quite say where this particular voice had come from, or whose it was, other than it had not come from any of them.
“I should just arrest you,” said the policeman. “For something. I don’t know what. Don’t let me see you in here again.”
And just like that the young man had lost all his puff and was as hunched as ever, worse in fact, bent cumulatively by gravities perhaps more subtle, and definitely more personal, than the Earth’s own. What had he even been saying? He’d never seen this game before; he didn’t know what he’d been talking about. Hell, he’d just started talking, letting it all come out, like it wasn’t even him. And now, sensing his failure all too acutely, he succumbed and let this very specific form of gravity pull him out onto the street, where, gravid and aching, his skin and bones all wrong, his face, he k
new, also wrong, he forgot about his unfinished coffee and his half-eaten pastry that he’d left behind on the table, knowing only that he was lost, that his soul was lost, or it was in any case no longer his own (if it ever had been), out where the midday sun glared reprovingly down at him and would sooner or later no doubt kill him. Because it was always the midday sun, wasn’t it? The very worst of it. The damn thing would never move. It would never move. It was always three o’clock, goddamn it. And because this was where, his own feet seemed to tell him (there again with the gravity), he should take his body: out into the street, where he might shut his eyes against it, that he should stop in the center and wait for it, and it would for certain come.
•
“Move. Make your move. You make your move now.”
“Yeah, okay. How’s that?” OFFICER FRIENDLY pushed one piece one square in one direction.
“…Oh. Oh. Oh…? Oh, okay, yeah, that’s – that’s not bad.”
The piece he’d moved, unaware of its name or function, was the Eye, also often called the Captured Eye, which both looks and is watched, which both captures and is captured.
NINE
The World
[2005]
Patches of dried, dead grass amongst the green and still-living; a bench made of wood – the bench was positioned at a sharp diagonal within the camera’s little LCD screen, made flat, made two-dimensional, its parallels impossibly slanted towards a convergence in some implied vanishing point not so very far back. With the device held in front of me I squatted down to a child’s height; any deviation from the obvious, such as the vantage of a body of average size, of an eye where an eye should be, seemed an improvement. If the subject was nothing to speak of, perhaps the composition might make something out of it, I’d figured. I’d not thought in these terms for years, of aesthetic necessities and their elements, of how to put the pieces together to make a whole thing. I’d once been good at it.