Louis nodded. “A bit like my mother. But I couldn’t blame her; in fact I always felt sorry for her. My father used to beat the goddamn daylights out of her. She had a horrible life. I guess the only thing I never really understood was why she never left him.”
“Maybe she feared it would be worse for her children as a single mother,” The Master said. “Or maybe she didn’t know any better. Maybe she was comfortable with what she had.”
Louis wasn’t buying it. “How could anyone be comfortable living a life of hell?”
The Master opened her mouth to say something, then let it slide and said instead, “Have you heard of the Comfort Paradox?”
“Can’t say that I have,” he said.
Not too far up ahead, the stop-motion images of himself and The Master approached an intersection and stopped before disappearing into the darkness. To his right, a Burger Boss had just blinked into existence. There was no line of eager patrons waiting to get inside. In fact, the whole place was empty, just like every other shop or store they had passed, like they were passing through a ghost town. It’s just like a necropolis, he remembered thinking the first time he had laid eyes on the sprawl of LeMont International Enterprises. A goddamn city of the dead.
“There’s an interesting fact that explains what I mean,” The Master said. “When a frog is dropped into boiling water, it jumps out. The heat is too much for it to bear. But when a frog is put into cool water that is brought to the boil, it remains there until it dies. Isn’t that fascinating?”
More like goddamn ludicrous. “And you’re saying that that’s what happened to my mother? She was a frog in hot water?”
“I’m saying that often what we perceive as a level of comfort is actually something that is preventing us from living life to the fullest or to the best of our ability. Something that dulls our awareness and limits our ability to make informed decisions.”
“But she was being beaten and battered. Of course she couldn’t make informed or rational decisions.”
The Master simply reiterated her point. “The Comfort Paradox. The frog stays in the boiling water even though it’s dying.”
They were now at the intersection. Directly across at the very limits of the Sphere of Illumination, blurring into the darkness, Louis could see the shimmering façade of a 24-hour mini-market. On it graffiti had been sprayed, something that made him baulk: WHEN THE TOWER DOES FALL, HE WILL COME. An unwelcome tingle coursed down his back to the tip of his tail, and he was once again left with the sense that he was being swept along by an uncontrollable force. Then suddenly, while he continued to stare at the graffiti, something strange happened to the stop-motion images. Now there were two weasels in a blue-gray suit. One of them continued with The Master across the intersection, disappearing into the darkness beyond the mini-market. The other backtracked (fleeing in panic, if he was goddamn honest) into The Plenitude from which they had just emerged.
The Master noticed it too. She abruptly stopped, holding her paw across his chest like a mother protecting her child from an oncoming bus. “What were you just thinking?”
Louis shrugged. “Nothing in particular. Why?”
The Master glanced behind, then ahead across the intersection. He didn’t much like the expression that furrowed her brow. “You’ve reached a crossroad. Literally. You’ve got some serious choices to make, and quickly.”
“What… what are you saying?”
“The future now holds two identical possibilities for you. To turn around and go back to what you were doing before we met, or to break from the past and continue ahead.”
Louis stared across the intersection. He had often wondered about the major decisions he had made in his life and the subsequent consequences that followed. Dating and marrying Dianne Trump. Quitting his job and starting the company. It was easy enough to look back and follow the path that had unfolded throughout the course of his life, but what about the path of unmade decisions? Or more to the point, the path that led from making the opposite decision, if he had said no instead of yes. What would his life have been like if he had never married Lady Di (or divorced her?), or decided to stick with his dead-end job? Would he still have had children? Would he still be alive?
Now that was a question and a half, wasn’t it? Had every decision he made from the time of his birth led to his premature demise, or was it his destiny to have had a fatal heart attack at his desk? Something unavoidable? Something he had no goddamn control over? If not his tenth-story office on Broadway, would it have been someplace else? In the bathtub of some nursing home? Or would he have died peacefully asleep in his bed? He now glanced over his tail at the images of the weasel sprinting away from the intersection and vanishing into the darkness. What he reckoned he was getting at, something that was only now dawning on him, was this: was his destiny written in stone? Did it actually make a goddamn difference what decisions he made throughout his life if he was always going to end up collapsing face first onto his desk as a middle-aged man and then wake up in the After Life as a weasel? Was he goddamn responsible for his own demise?
Responsibility. The word seemed to echo through his entire sense of being, and not in a good way. It felt so heavy, so oppressive. If someone could actually suffocate by just thinking of a word, he reckoned he had found it. “Let’s get a move on,” he said. “Before I have any more second thoughts.”
Amazingly, as soon as he stepped forward, the stop-motion images fleeing in the opposite direction vanished into thin air, leaving only those of himself and The Master heading toward the piazza. Furthermore, as though a second streetlight had been triggered, it seemed he could now see further down the boulevard than he had previously been able. The horizon was still only a hundred or so feet away, at a guess, but something had happened for him to now see beyond the mini-market to the store next door, Big Screen Classics. “What’s happening?” he asked, stepping onto the opposite sidewalk.
“Your Sphere of Illumination is expanding.”
“My sphere? I thought it was your sphere?”
“Our sphere. We’re doing this together.”
Well fancy that and bugger me. With each step he took, the Sphere of Illumination seemed to grow exponentially. Like dawn slowly breaking across the city, the darkness was receding little by little, revealing more and more of the surroundings – the buildings, the boulevard, even the sky-vault was beginning to appear. He could now clearly see beyond the video store and read the sign next to it, CHEAP WAYS TO FEEL GOOD. He felt like an apprentice wizard learning a new trick he didn’t know how to control: he was doing something, but exactly what he couldn’t say. The Master then brought his attention to the other side of the boulevard. Whereas before he hadn’t been able to see further than halfway across the street, he could now make out the stores fronting the opposite sidewalk. “The city’s materializing out of nothing,” he said.
“The Plenitude isn’t nothing,” The Master said, “though it may initially seem that way. It all depends through which eyes you see it, as a nothingness or as a fullness. As an abyss, or as an Immensity from which everything in the universe is made real, or realized.”
Just her way of saying you either see the dough in the donut or the hole, Louis reckoned. He could now see beyond the next intersection. The speed with which the buildings and street were materializing was extraordinary, and he reckoned within the next twenty paces, about the distance to the next Burger Boss, he might see all the way down the boulevard to The Tower. As it was, over his shoulder, he could already see the pockmarked face of the cliff looming over the images of himself and The Master, like a giant wave about to crash onto a couple of unsuspecting beachgoers.
“Let me understand this correctly,” he said. “I’m not actually seeing The Plenitude retreating from me. That’s just an illusion based on my limited knowledge?”
“Precisely. The Plenitude is actually revealing Itself within your Sphere of Illumination. You’re now seeing more and more of it, not less.” They now
approached the next Burger Boss, vacant and empty as all the others Louis had seen. “At any one point in time, you can only see a small fraction of everything that exists, the part of the Infinite and Eternal Immensity you are able to experience within the limitations of your mind and body. Your mind establishes the point in space and time where you believe yourself to exist, and your body – your spirit-body in the After Life – establishes the manner with which to get yourself to the next point in space and time. The Plenitude waits for you to take the first step, then it provides the direction of your travel. That’s why it’s important you know where you’re going before you do anything else. It’s your intent that establishes your path.”
“The stronger my intent, the brighter my Sphere of Illumination? Is that right?”
“Take a look ahead. What do you think?”
Louis glanced at the stop-motion images stretching almost beyond the limits of his vision. His earlier prediction was almost spot on. Although he couldn’t quite yet make out The Tower at the end of the boulevard, he reckoned it would only be a matter of a few more paces before it materialized out of the dark horizon. “So it’s not just my mind that determines the size of my Sphere of Illumination, but my spirit-body as well?”
“Now you’re getting it. The Plenitude can only be experienced within a framework. You might not be able to do much about the size of your body, but you can certainly keep it healthy and in good working order. The mind, however, is different. It exists on a different level not bound by the restraints in physical size. That’s where choices and free will come in to play. Do you want to experience The Plenitude with a small mind, or a big mind?”
“So Dolly Parton was right? Bigger is best.”
“Bigger just means more. It’s up to you to determine whether that’s best or not.”
Louis had never considered that his mind could grow. Sure, babies grew into toddlers, toddlers grew into children, children grew into adults, and their minds developed accordingly. But once someone reached twenty-one or thereabouts, that was it, wasn’t it? Their body had stopped growing. So too their mind. Everyone knew that. In fact, he could almost argue that it got a hell of a lot worse from then on. Once someone reached the beginning of their third decade, once the alcohol and drugs and stress started kicking in, the brain cells began to die at a rapid rate. Before long you couldn’t remember the names of your grandchildren or where you put your damned glasses. And from then on in, it’s just a short slide to Alzheimer’s and adult diapers, Louis my boy.
They continued on without saying much, passing block after block of mini-markets, video stores, retail outlets and Happythecaries, and he eventually discovered which boulevard they were on, Boulevard 13, his lucky number. The tunnel-riddled cliff face grew smaller and smaller behind them, like a wall sinking into the ground, until he looked over his tail for one last time and saw that it had disappeared altogether, just the buildings and cutout images stretching into the past. Up ahead, The Tower grew from a speck on the horizon to the size of a three-story building, prying the sky-vault away from the ground like a giant jack, inch by inch, until before long it was looming high above them. Strangely, the power of its logo was virtually non-existent, as if Zipping had completely nullified its mind-hold. The dark horizon, he saw, had also disappeared.
Two blocks from the hotel, he suddenly stopped and said, “I’ve been thinking. The Immensity. I’m part of it, aren’t I?”
“You are part of The Plenitude, and The Plenitude is part of you,” The Master said, smiling. “There’s no escaping it.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Address to Shareholders
THE lobby of the LeMont Hotel was empty as a supermarket on Good Friday when Louis and The Master passed through to the conference center. They entered via one of the rear exits. Looking down the aisle, Louis was surprised to see the auditorium as vacant as the lobby. He had expected to see every seat occupied with suit and ties absorbing the latest figures and forecasts of LeMont International Enterprises. Instead, the microphone on the podium stood alone and Louis was left wondering whether he and The Master had missed the AGM all together. The realist inside him was kind of wishing it were true.
“I’ve saved you a lot of time and boredom by Zipping you straight to your speech,” The Master said, popping Louis’ bubble of hope. “The AGM can sometimes drag on for months. I didn’t think you’d want to sit around listening to every speaker.”
Heading down the aisle and taking position on the empty podium, Louis’ stop-motion images parted with those of The Master, who sometime in the not too distant future was going to take a seat at the end of row B, presumably next to Santosa’s wheelchair. As a backdrop to the podium, a large banner occupied the entire wall: L.I.E Annual General Meeting. Complete with the alpha-omega logo and caption, Your Friend For Eternity. “Where the hell is everybody? Are you sure they haven’t already gone.”
“You can’t see them yet. We haven’t un-Zipped and re-entered their timeframe.”
A whopping dose of stage fright then suddenly seized him with icy claws. It started right in the middle of his gut, frosty and malignant, then quickly spread to his upper and lower body, as though he was being deep frozen from the inside out. He felt completely rigid, a goddamn ice statue. “I… I don’t know what to say to them.”
The instant the words plopped out, his stop-motion images split into two, as they had done along the boulevard on the way here. One set of images continued to deliver the speech behind the microphone, while the other set that had just blinked into existence sprinted for the nearest exit and disappeared from the auditorium.
The Master grabbed his paw. “Look at me!”
Louis only had eyes for the fleeing images. As he stared, they seemed to take on an increasingly firmer, more focused appearance. Those at the microphone began to flicker and fade. As he stared, Lady Di popped up again in the back of his mind, surprising him like someone he thought was still overseas on holiday. You know what’s happening here, don’t you Louis? Your internal aerial is tuning into the reality you hope will happen. You have to ask yourself some serious questions, dear. Is this what you really want?
“Look at me!” The Master said again, this time more forcefully.
Even knowing the images exiting the auditorium had him in a mind-hold didn’t make one goddamn bit of difference. He just couldn’t take his eyes off them, and he knew – he just damn well knew – that he wasn’t able to go through with the Freedom Fighter’s plans. Suddenly, he caught a waft of horseshit. Then somewhere distant, as though The Master was now shouting at him from the podium, he heard her telling him to look at her again. Angry at the loss of buttered popcorn, he sniffed the air again. He was about to turn and complain when he felt a horrendous sting down the side of his face, all the way from his temple to his jaw. Even his ear began to ring. Louis turned to The Master, rubbing his cheek, and said, “Why’d you do that? I thought you couldn’t…”
The Master lowered her paw. “We’re un-Zipping. I had no choice. You’d gone faithless again on me. I thought we’d lost you for good this time.”
Louis sniffed the air again and grimaced. He now thought he could hear other voices, whispers coming from the front of the auditorium, though as yet he still couldn’t see anyone apart from The Master. Even the stop-motion images had vanished. “You should have let me go,” he said.
“We need you. When The Tower does fall, He will come.”
He reckoned if he heard that goddamn prophecy one more time he was going to strangle someone. Someone small and in a long blue dress. “You’re sure they’ll believe me?”
“This is your forum. This is what they’ll remember when the sky-vault collapses.”
“What about The Boss?”
“He’ll keep his distance. He won’t dare show his face, not even in the midst of tragedy. Especially not; he’ll be lynched. His citizens will be looking for someone to blame as well as to save them from the mess they’ll find themselves in.”
From out of nowhere, the walls of the auditorium began to shake. Louis held onto an adjacent seat to steady himself, hoping like hell The Tower wasn’t going to collapse right at this moment. He wanted to be a good couple of miles away when it finally happened, somewhere nice and goddamn safe. Like Conduit Number 1.
“You’d better hurry,” The Master said. The rumbling began to die down and Louis felt confident enough to let go of the seat. “The audience is expecting to see you at the front, not up here. It might look a bit suspicious what you’ve been up to.”
The whispers were getting louder, so they hurried down toward the podium. At row B, The Master took the aisle seat and wished him luck. “What do I tell them?” Louis asked. “I haven’t prepared anything.”
“Just speak from experience. It’s what they want to hear.”
Louis adjusted his tie and straightened his jacket, thinking of the hundreds of social and professional talks he had given over the course of his life. To his frustration, he couldn’t remember the details of a single damn one, not even a title. You’re just going to have to make it up as you go along, Louis my boy. There’s nothing else you can do.
“One word of advice, though,” The Master said. “Speak in the language they understand. There’s no point speaking French to the Chinese.”
Louis nodded and climbed up the short steps to the podium, getting behind the microphone just in the nick of time. Like someone switching on the lights to a surprise party, the shareholders suddenly blinked into existence. Jackals, rats, ferrets and weasels crammed the auditorium, waiting for him to say something. Santosa was there in his wheelchair, in the aisle at row B next to The Master (Tiffany Tidbits, he reminded himself, she’s not The Master in this crowd), but to his surprise Flash Freddy and Smiggins were nowhere to be seen. The whispering he had heard were the shareholders getting restless. He must have un-Zipped at a point in time where he had been saying nothing at the microphone for quite a while. Not the best goddamn introduction he could think of.
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