by Mark Teppo
"I don’t think that’s a good idea," she said, not unkindly. She glanced down at his hand. "You’re wearing a ring."
"But she doesn’t—" He wanted to say, She doesn’t understand me like you do. But that was going too far, extending himself in a way that would only lead to embarrassment for both of them. "She doesn’t like Thai food."
His wife entered his study without knocking. On his computer screen was an ad for a ladies Rolex. Judith looked disgusted. The hand modeling the watch was beautiful, though a little too perfect for his tastes: the wrist was improbably narrow, the fingers obviously airbrushed. Fortunately, a few months ago he’d found an internet forum where people exchanged pictures of the best hand models.
"I’ve made an appointment," Judith said. "With a specialist." He told her he wasn’t interested, but she would not be refused.
They drove to a clinic only a few blocks from the hospital where Olivia worked. The doctor wasn’t a psychiatrist, as he’d feared, or a neurologist, but a family practice MD who’d written a book about alternate states of consciousness. He was bald except for a gray ponytail, as if his hair had given up on general coverage and decided to specialize. The doctor seemed inordinately excited by Franklin’s condition. "We must nudge the mind out of its cul-de-sac," he said emphatically, "And return it to its former home." He rambled on for some time before Franklin realized that his proposed solution was to amputate.
"It’s the only way," the man said. "Sudden Egotic eviction."
"Are you insane?" Franklin said. "You could kill me!"
"Your hand is up in the air again," Judith said. And then to the doctor she said, "He does that whenever he feels defensive."
"Marvelous," Dr. Ponytail said. "May I see your hand? Your finger looks inflamed."
"Get the hell away from me!" He curled into a fist and charged out of the office. He did indeed feel hot, like a lawn mower engine revved beyond its specs. Outside he uncurled and saw that he’d turned red as a thermometer, his self-finger seeming to pulse like a rubber bladder. He cried out.
"Franklin? Are you all right?" It was Olivia’s voice—Olivia! He spun his arm to reach out to her, and then the world continued to spin, and he collapsed to the sidewalk.
When he awoke, he was alone in another hospital room, and the feeling of suffocation he’d experienced on the stairs months ago had returned. He looked down, and saw that his left hand was encased in white bandages, from wrist to fingertips. His other arm was restrained by IV tubes, but he bit and chewed at the bandages until his fingers were free.
The index finger was still there. It had turned pale and shriveled, as if it had spent too long in the bathtub, but it was whole.
Something was wrong, however. The finger looked utterly unfamiliar to him. Had he really thought that he’d been in there, in that pointer? More alarmingly, the suffocating feeling had not dissipated.
At that moment, Olivia and Judith came into the room. They were holding paper cups of coffee, and it looked as if they’d been having a heart-to-heart discussion.
"It’s all right," Olivia said, "You’re safe now. You just passed out."
"Try to calm down," Judith said. And then she saw the scraps of bandages and frowned. "I suppose you’re still . . ."
"No!" he said. "That’s over! I’m—" Where was he? He was drowning, and he could feel his giant body above him, his voice thundering from far away.
"What do you need?" Olivia asked.
He closed his eyes, concentrating. This little piggy went to market, he said to himself. This little piggy stayed home. And this little piggy . . . "Here!" he said, kicking up at the sheet. "For God’s sake, get this sheet off of me!"
The women pulled up the linens, and at his pleading, removed his socks. He lifted his right foot into the air.
There he was. Third toe from the right. He was slender, with a thick, healthy nail. A single hair sprouted from his knuckle in a Superman curl. Yes, just a middle toe, but at last he felt completely at home: surrounded, supported, unstubbable.
Why Ulu Left the Bladescliff
— Amanda C. Davis
Ulu cleans her gutters before Cleaver comes by, skims the rust from the roof, sharpens the awning into a razor’s edge. Shipshape. Stem to stern. If the sun would hit it, her arch would glint like the tone tapped on a crystal glass. But there’s no sun here. Only fog. No light. Only Cleaver.
There is Spey next door only an alley-gorge apart from Sheepsfoot his neighbor, and both are shearing their gables with steel wool until only ten, only five, only a single angel could dance on the tip. Spey sings out: "The little miss is expecting company! Mark me, there’ll be a good show through that window tonight!"
Ulu blushes, but she knows Spey’s only kidding. She has just one window, and very thick curtains.
She polishes the walls all the way down. Polishes the shutters and steps and gate. Picks steel splinters from her skin. Spits on the doorknob, wipes it away. Brass. If there was light it would glow. A tiny sun.
In a cupboard in the kitchen lives a lever of red oak with a brass tip. It has roots far below on the stairs: a tangled gearworks anchor. It came with the house. She has only used it once. It winks, a glint on brass, to remind her of their first time together: falling into thick fog, losing the sun. She swats it with the rag and closes the cupboard. She doesn’t need the lever now that there’s Cleaver.
She teaches the floor about wax and the table about oil and the walls about soapy water. She teaches her hair about curls and her neck about perfume and her face about sticks of color. Everybody learns. Her lips are crisp with crimson: her star pupil.
Then there’s a turning from the tiny brass sun. Cleaver is here.
Cleaver’s looking good. Cleaver’s got his spats on. Cleaver sounds like whiskey, and his tie is loosey-noosey. Her bones shrink at the sight of him. Cleaver lurks in the doorway behind the red oak table, using it like sandbags to keep the flood of Ulu from his shoes.
"Do you want a drink?" she says.
He says, "Sure, I guess."
She puts gin in the glass and the glass in his hands and his hand on her arm. It hangs like dead meat. A sandbag. He’s slow-fingered and quick-eyed. The gin plays the girl in a magic trick: one blink, and it disappears. He hangs in the doorway like a coat and gazes out the window. Nearby, Sheepsfoot is scurrying up and down ladders. Ulu has forgotten to shut the curtains.
Ulu says, "Don’t you want to hold me?"
Ulu says, "You sure are quiet."
Ulu says, "You smell different."
"It’s Butcher," he blurts. He says it like a groan, like a geyser. "Butcher. It’s always been Butcher. I smell like Butcher because I was with Butcher, I’m in love with Butcher, and I’m never coming back to this dull house and its dull, sad, stupid woman." He gasps for breath. "Butcher," he says again, only there’s no sound when his mouth moves. He’s sagging. Then he says, clear and loud, "I’ll have another drink."
Ulu takes his hand from her arm and the glass from his hand. Cleaver wants gin. Cleaver wants Butcher. She puts the glass in the sink. She opens the window, invites the chill in.
"It’s cold," says Cleaver. Oh, is he right.
Ulu smiles at him; her star pupil in crimson expands and contracts. She cannot see clearly. Cleaver has winked out and gone dark; he is eclipsed, and she is blinded at the loss of him. She opens the cabinet beside the icebox. There’s the lever. She never thought she’d use it again. Ulu grasps the lever, pushes it forward to the place where the gears loosen, and pulls it all the way back toward her.
The house shakes, lurches, tips. Inverts. Rotates.
Cleaver falls to the floor, then wall, then ceiling; he shouts, but not words. The curtains tear off in his hands. Corners and angles and cabinets knock him side-to-side. His fingers punch through the plaster to the knuckle. Both plaster and fingers break. Ulu is the eye of this cyclone, in all ways: she is central and calm and unmoving, and she watches.
Cleaver crashes against the sink. Above him the town spires are
high and grey and Spey and Sheepsfoot are only statues on their pinnacles, gaping through her window as the house turns. The house rolls; he slips to the window. He clings like a roast drooping from its spit. He is trying to shout at Ulu. He is almost broken before he manages it.
"DULL," he screams. "DULL."
He folds, he twists, he is no larger than the window. He slides through like he was fit for it. His twitching, broken fingertips are the last parts of him Ulu sees.
The shoring is gone, the basement is the attic. The stairs won’t hold. Ulu feels the stilts of her home buckling beneath, snapping off. Like toothpicks. Like fingers.
The house loses its balance. It twists off from the neighbors—no more Spey, no more Sheepsfoot—to fall down, down, down into the fog.
Her home plunges, spinning like a windblown spider. Ulu watches the fog stream past the window and the window stream past the fog. She holds her footing: her house pivots around her, of course. She wishes the edge she polished so painfully would shine a little in the dark. Just a glint. A tone tapped on glass.
She wonders where she will land.
She dares to dream. She will fall until she finds a new city, busy and happy, where roofs rise like shards of diamond from downtown to suburbs, each block a shivering bouquet, each house shark’s-fin sharp. Ulu imagines a mouth of steel teeth spat up from lips of fog. No—this time she will fall far enough that there is no fog, but grass. Somewhere that brass glows like it should, where steel gleams bright.
Somewhere with no Cleaver. Only light.
Somewhere there’s sun.
Follow Me Through Anarchy
— Jetse de Vries
—in the room—
"Consciousness is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. There are degrees of phenomenality."
—Thomas Metzinger,
from Being No-One, pg. 559.
Blinded by the zest, deafened by the colors, nauseated by the harmony and overwhelmed by the aroma, Alex Sanders enters the conference room. Temporarily, the world seems different and time feels topsy-turvy. Repeating his prime directive like a mantra, Alex shakes off the synesthetic shift: must talk, must communicate. Otherwise the insanity may break the surface tension, unleashing overpowering complexity, and she will retreat in his shell. Why do I always get the most complicated attacks, she wonders, not something simple like cognitive dissonance or a multiple personality disorder?
The pre-meeting briefing probably triggered the sensorial overload: too much, too fast, too soon. Not a short summary but a tornado of theories, one more warped than the other, as they kept talking through the twenty-minute video presentation—"you can multitask, right?"—that launched a barrage of images, diagrams, soundbites, 3D-graphs, weird music, and dog knows what more. Patterns flickering so fast he can’t remember them, soundscapes so wicked she’s not sure if he’s whacked-out.
Add pressure: this is important, so important that—Alex’s mind blanks out, and she’s on the verge of a blackout. Why can’t he remember? Or maybe she just can’t retain the info quick enough: only the emphasis on how immensely vital it all was.
Also, a monetary reward both frightening and exhilarating. His virtual bank assistant verified the deposit as real, but with a strict no cure, no pay string attached. Twenty minutes of madness, then off the deep end. Or say no and miss out on . . . the amount still seemed surreal.
Still, the money—while highly significant—isn’t the prime motivator: the challenge is. Telling Alex that the challenge is too great is like telling Scrooge McDuck that a person can have too much money: inconceivable. They mentioned that so many had failed already, that the semantic divide proved too big . . . No!
She’s Alex the great communicator: bridging cultural gaps is second nature to him. Negotiating truces, preventing conflicts, melting tragic misunderstanding under the spotlight of education and explanation. No rift too large to overcome: certainly she should know, if he could only remember. But her trauma is buried under fuzzy layers, the beast from beyond restrained, not overcome, like a silent volcano simmering in the night.
So Alex, sexless Alex, so androgynous that she/he even had the memory of his/her previous life removed after the elimination of all sex characteristics, walks in. Schizophrenic Alex, who hops from her to his, and from he to she like a neutrino oscillating from tau to electron to muon: instantaneous and without apparent cause. Drowning any sexual preference in a sea of ambiguity. Neutered Alex, who will be neutral at all costs, unbiased in any case (with extraterrestrial aliens, if necessary). Communicative Alex, who made it his life goal to help people, to increase understanding (but her mind is still abuzz with uncomprehended concepts). Shifty Alex, who can shift arguments like no one, who can find himself in every viewpoint, who can place herself in any position (but he’s still trying to figure out if there is position in the quicksand of her overburdened mind).
Now, Alex, shift this.
The room is huge, if only to encompass the enormous elliptic conference table. Only two chairs, facing each other over the middle of the longer sides. Someone sits in one chair: a person of Asian heritage who makes a gesture towards the opposite seat. Alex sits down, struggling to keep her inner turmoil from going external. The table’s too big, so instead of shaking hands Alex waves.
"Good morning, I’m Alex Sanders."
The Asian gives a short nod and says: "Good morning. You can call me Tanaka. Let’s talk about reality."
—in the village—
Alex walks the streets of a small coastal town. She needs to fish. He needs a fishing rod. Then worry about the sea.
It’s an ancient town, but many old façades are being revamped. ATMs, mobile phone shops, and cranky internet cafés invade the old array of grocery stores, butchers, bakeries and fisheries, and the countless bars, brasseries, bistros, cafés, and cafeterias. Cars traverse the cobbled streets: SUVs and hybrids, delivery trucks and coupés. In the narrow alleys, scooters and mountain bikes—and often pedestrians—perform a delicate dance around the four-wheeled vehicles.
All the streets are one-way. The town, initially quite charming, increasingly appears to be an incessant maze. Where’s the angling shop? Why is each and every street single-directional? Who made everyone obey that rule? What stops him from turning around and going against the grain? Is she going insane?
No matter how he walks, there seems no way out. All the shops she encounters sell the weirdest of things, but not a fishing rod. There is a neverending supply of pubs and restaurants, there’s always a hotel or apartment with vacancies, and the ATMs keep dishing out dough.
Sometimes the street seems familiar, sometimes the tree-lined plaza seems absolutely new. This big cathedral: hadn’t she seen it before? This red-bricked theatre: wasn’t it yellow before? This little park: wasn’t it mostly cedars instead of palms?
Sometimes the sea comes lingeringly close: a glimpse of blue, a salty smell, a crashing surf. But always it’s at the wrong side of a one-way street, behind a barrier, over the wall. And even then, why go to the sea without a fishing rod? Or without bait? Even if she’s waiting for me, I’m not ready for the sea.
But still she carries on. The streets are strange and charming, and while one keeps running into the other, nothing seems to change. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose indeed. Even the weather hardly varies: a balmy late summer day, maybe early autumn. In some trees the leaves are changing color, but in others they remain evergreen. The odd, mild spot of rain seems enough to sustain them.
It’s maddening: if there are only one-way streets, how do people that live here get back to their houses? Or do they just get into other people’s houses, while their last home is taking up by again different people? You’d be truly in trouble if you ran into a blind alley. But—as far as he can see—there are no cul-de-sacs.
Nobody finds this consistent one-way-street town plan—or is it a rule?—strange. It might even work if the street plan was exact, rectangular grid, but the roads, alleys, and byways seem to
intersect in about everything but perpendicular angles. Like your average town center from medieval times, the only city planning was that there was no planning.
Why is she accepting this? He feels encroached by silhouettes in disguise, shadows of her ill-remembered past coming back to haunt. But no: he’s come a long way, she will not retreat again. Must speak, must interact, he thinks as she taps a passerby on the shoulder. "Allo? Hola?" What was it they’re speaking here? Not quite Spanish, not quite Russian, and not quite English, either. Ah: Esperanto. "Saluton." But even as Alex can talk with these people, they don’t quite seem to communicate: they speak on different levels where question & answer have no cause & effect, almost mimicking an absurd comedy.
Even more frustrating is trying to explain the concept of a two-way street to this mad town’s people: it’s like explaining electricity to Stone Age hunter-gatherers. A simple demonstration should suffice: look, you simply walk the other way. But the moment Alex actually tries it, it won’t go. It’s as if an invisible force holds him back, ties her down. The harder she tries, the stronger the resistance becomes: unbreakable, like a glass prison, an extremely deep conditioning.
In the end, it’s pointless. Alex continues his one-way trip to nowhere, in search of a fishing rod. And all the restaurants serve fish . . .
—in the forest—
Alex, deliciously young Alex hides in the tree. Her tree of life, his secret hideaway, where she giddily lies low while the others search for him. From the cavity in the trunk, high up, he can watch the world go by. She has brought a bottle of lemonade and a bag of cookies, chocolate chippies.
He loves the hide-and-seek, delicately naïve Alex, even if she does want to be found, eventually. But they will have to work hard for it, the pursuers. Alex can see them come from the distance, and will be very quiet. The world will pass by.
She hears them from afar: the galloping horses, the barking dogs, the trashing of the undergrowth, the crashing through the foliage. Fox on the run. The hunting party—men in red suits riding black steeds—is approaching. They halt right next to the towering tree. The bloodhounds sniff the air, trot around the big trunk, pushing their muzzles on the bark.