The 187th-floor hallway is black. But I can see a door to a single room, facing the elevator. Cracked. So in we go. It turns out there is only one room total on this floor. A presidential suite, being renovated. Many of the partition walls are incomplete or not even begun. The rooms are separated only by a series of steel framing studs and columns. Basically, an enormous loft space. Wiring tufting out of the wall panels and in some cases hanging down from the ceiling like vines. At the perimeter, all around us, three hundred and sixty degrees of floor-to-ceiling, sheet-glass windows.
The Freehold and its capital city, at night.
Dennis finds a single clamp-on construction lamp, plugs it in, and sticks it up by the vestibule. It is not entirely dark now. We can see a little of the space, but not much. Which means we can still see out of the windows. We walk over to the glass, occasionally stepping on, or inadvertently kicking over various construction detritus. I find a chair wrapped in plastic, and drag it over to the farthest end of the suite and let myself down into it. Dennis pulls up a large industrial bucket, flips it over next to mine, and sits on that. We perch there in silence looking out.
The city is lit, its lights giving the metropolis a structure. An enormous connect-the-dots image of blocks and spires. Don’t need to connect the dots actually, as there are just so many of them. Pixels. This time: a high-resolution image.
We hear the hotel groan. It is mournful. Dennis turns to me, makes a series of mock-scary “oogie-boogie” gestures with his hands.
“See? Ghost hotel,” he says.
“If no one ever stays here, why don’t they just sell it. Or demolish it.”
“It’s the brand. Doesn’t matter if anyone comes. As long as people know it’s here.”
“But who would know? If they did get rid…if nobody ever…”
“Good point,” he admits.
“Then it would truly be a ghost hotel.”
“Faux-tel.”
“Quite.”
We have a tipple. Drink straight from the bottle, pass it back and forth. Dennis sucking his electric fag in the bottleless intervals. Feels pretty homey and comfortable. Just two men enjoying a gents’ night out. Sitting in almost silence. Oh, and we have his small bottle of pills. The ones he stole. The ones I’ve heard murmurs of, but never tried. The special ones.
“You’ve done this before, I presume?” I ask Dennis.
“Once or twice.”
“Is it safe?”
“Depends,” he replies, throwing back his head to swallow.
“Depends on what?”
“On many things, but mainly, it depends upon how willing you are to experience what you are about to experience.”
“Mystical nonsense.”
“Nothing mystical or nonsensical about it.”
He looks at me, patronizing, places a hand on my shoulder, and pats me a couple of times. Holds out the other hand palm up. Single tablet resting in it.
“Down the hatch, Mr. F. And I’ll see you on the other side.”
And if it isn’t just: The Best Feeling Ever.
I dip in and out, and so, at points I’m occasionally, vaguely, aware of Dennis, shivering beside me, eyeballs spun ceiling-ward. We are conjoined. He’s me and I’m him. Both of us no one, and both of us gone. Him, to god knows where; me, to my dreamscapes.
Cold visions. Frozen lands. A steppe, or floe or some such? No, an air-conditioned office. One dream presenting significant personal items, but frozen over and encrusted with a dirty rime. One such frozen item is an old ballpoint pen. And a notepad is another. A tablet. Several vignettes then involving the freezing of a computer monitor. The flatscreen is frozen both literally and operationally. I see through the cloudy ice a crucial notification, a red reminder of an incoming email; a text; a like; a poke; a reminder or rebuke. The incrusting ice prevents my response. Now it is my project which pops up. I can see it—its thin lines of thought—though ice-blurred, as through a cataract. I dream that I defrost the monitor with a hair-dryer, cradle and rock it like a baby animal. After the ice melts the monitor blinks. Just draws down a lazy lid, covers the screen’s glossy pupil! Once; twice…the lid opens and closes. Languidly, as in a seduction. This stops eventually. We stare at one another, my monitor and I, until I…
…wake completely, at last, with a jolt, to the chimes of the same device. I’d forgotten that I’d had it. How long had I been out? Rub my eyes. Stretch my limbs.
Find the device.
All the pings I’ve missed.
I whisper it back to sleep.
Good night, device. Good-bye, ping.
Good night, Dennis; good night, e-ve-ry-thing.
* * *
—
Now, later, I hug my knees to my chest and just rock for a little while.
That dream (the cold one, Icymi). What does it portend?
Nothing? I am seeing patterns in everything. My vatic nerve, my interpretational gland, is enflamed, engorged, hypersensitive. Dreams. I don’t do dreams. There are no signs here—no omens. The cold is no metaphor, nor is the heat. The Freehold doesn’t map. A metastructure is not a signifier. Nothing indexed; nothing allegorical. One doesn’t (or shouldn’t) do dreams…it’s facile. Obviously.
I notice that Dennis isn’t next to me anymore. I haul myself up. Painfully. Where the…
“Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum,” Mr. Royal calls out, emerging from a hallway, uniform gone from the waist up.
“Dennis.”
“Welcome back to the land of the living.”
“How long,” I ask, as it seems the sun is rising. Must have been out all night.
“Eight hours? Nine?”
“The fuck.”
“Yeah. Didn’t want to wake you.”
“Dennis, the Institute, my meetings—”
“Looks like you just played hooky, doesn’t it.”
(Miss Fairfax must be spitting.)
Dennis Royal sits now on the floor of the hotel room; his missing shirt has turned up as an ad hoc do-rag around his head. His face is looking a tad paralytic; stunned in that post-brain-fuck kind of way. I can only imagine what mine looks like.
He helps himself to the last of the alcohol in the bottle. Giving it a couple of final taps into his baby bird’s upward-facing mouth.
“We’ll need to make a beverage run.”
My head is suffering compression, as if it were a bathysphere at extreme depth, and catching my reflection, I see that the window-glass of my eyes is beginning to spider under the strain.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I reply, “at least not…ugh. For a bit.”
“Not to worry, Frobisher ole pal, I will venture out. Try some lower floors. See if we can’t find something we need. Some minibar-jacking is in order, I believe.”
“Dennis.”
“Yes?”
“The visions I had last night—”
“You get those. That’s the whole point, though, isn’t it. The weird shit. You should expect some more of it. Cramps. Shakes. A few other side effects. Btw.” (He says: “bee-tee-dubs.”)
One hand pats my shoulder again, and he sticks his palm out in exact duplication of thirty hours ago. The same.
“Go again?”
*
How much later I do not know, still periodically surging with cortical excitement, I get up and circumnavigate the suite, a new suite, several floors up. The highest floor in the Spar. We wandered upward at some point. This room, the twin of the last. I find another PVC bucket, one that neither of us has vomited into, and drag it over to the window, place it right up against the glass, where I stand upon it. As of this moment, I am the highest person in the Freehold. Maybe on the entire planet. Probably. Up there, on my bucket. My masterful perspective. My regal perspective. The world is (The end of the phrase c
omes to me: “on a table.” I’m not sure what kind of table, but this is what it feels like. “The world on a table.”).
I relish it. I take some deep breaths. Reach up and touch the ceiling. Muse.
I imagine spending the remainder of my tenure at the Institute right here, as a kind of Stylite. An ascetic on the 210th floor of a hotel tower in the desert. Dennis will bring me food and drink—Dennis, my new Tea Boy—but I don’t exchange another word with anyone else and I won’t set foot on terra firma ever again. I am revered as a saint. The Hermit of the Spar. Plumbing the depths of all of life’s enigmas aided by remoteness and sheer immobility. Pilgrims will come. They will sit at the foot of my bucket—attend my act of extreme sanctimony. “How does one step off of a one-hundred-foot pole?” As the koan has it. (One bloody well doesn’t. I suppose is the point.)
My mind casts itself around the space, surveying the vast desert and the city below me, alert to all its details, familiarizing myself with its every nook and cranny, its minutiae, each topographic point of interest like a small rise or valley or clump of buildings below me, preening in the immaculate reflections of their neighbor’s surfaces; and behind, the floor of the world, spread out like a series of mismatched carpet samples. From my summit, I look at the distant horizon. I create a mental catalog of all the landmarks, interesting structures, color variations, blemishes or stains upon the land, scratches on the glass itself, and other quirks both accidental/superficial and structural/architectural. I perform an intricate taxonomic, morphological, and geographic mapping of space, overlaying the scene with a cartographic grid. Labeling it all in my mind with type and pictograms, in Helvetica bold, with red lined routes, black circles, crosses, and asterisks. I do this until I am lulled into a torpor, dozing. I lean my head up against the glass. And then my cheek. The glass is cool.
Time passes.
*
A philosophical meditation on Time, its elastic, subjective, and ineffable nature—especially notable when under the influence of certain unprescribed narcotics—to be indicated by dashes
I lean forward, and squeakily write a few words in my breath’s condensation on the glass with a finger, and then step off of my high watch. First, tentatively with one foot, then, more securely, with the other. I feel my weight beneath me, which feels superb, and, with nothing better to do now, I walk back over to Mr. Royal, still prone. Give him a poke with my still-stockinged toe. I hope he’s alive. Turn around to look out the window one last time and see the city, through gray, blurred, unreadable words, dripping slowly down the large glass pane.
Somewhere, on the other side of these words, deep in the urban sprawl, is my Same Same store. I imagine the proprietor bent to his work, and, remembering him, feel for the wad of bills in my pocket.
I doubted he would do it, but he did.
I doubted it could work, but it did.
Just as I imagined it. Holy hell.
I’m in the money now. Loaded, in fact. And the money looks exactly right.
When the blocky package arrived at my flat, I thought I would find only play-money inside, some kind of flimsy scrip. That I would rub on the paper, and it would become transparent. But it hasn’t. It’s real. Bang on. Right down to the smell of the inks and the texture of the stock. He did it again.
Now, everything under the dome is paid for already. So I haven’t any real opportunity or need to pass this counterfeit, other than at the shop itself, which, ironically, could be considered a true test of the Same Same’s efficacy. I will try this experiment out soon—to see whether the S.S. man will accept his own handiwork as proper payment for further work.
And if so: well then.
*
Sun is going down over the bay to my left. The building is still moaning. Dennis and I are passing his vape back and forth. Sucking on this glorified thumb drive. I don’t smoke anymore, but here we are.
He is sitting in full-lotus back on the floor. I’m trying the posture too, and my crossed legs have cramped up severely. Can’t tell which leg is which, here. Which I presume is partially the point. I’m just counting breaths, as I’ve been taught. In, out. In, out. I listen to the air humming in the air ducts, at first to the soothing constancy of that block of low-level noise, which becomes, over time, not just louder but less constant, patterns emerging, swells and hiccups, overtones dancing around the higher registers. A fighter jet comes streaking smoothly along the sky leaving no mark behind it. Tiny little oil tankers sit immobile out in the bay. A few microscopic vehicles drift along the white superhighways. The clouds take their time. Merge, come apart. Flares bounce around off buildings and lagoons. Every minute the city below changes color, slightly.
I am nothing but an atmospheric density. A field of meaning.
Boredom, and then an outlandish contentment roll through me.
Sleep.
*
Ping!
They are looking for us.
Time to go back.
Ping!
Okay already.
Ping!
Ping!Ping!
Wtf. What the actual fu—
“All good?” Dennis asks, sluggish, levered up onto an elbow.
“Not really.”
“What’s—”
“Device,” I say, turning the offending technology this way and that. “Malfunctioning.”
“You really should get that looked at.”
“No kidding.”
Ping!Ping!Ping!
“There it goes again.”
“Calm down, Percy.”
Ping!Ping!Ping!Ping!Ping!Ping!Ping!Ping!Ping!Ping!Ping!Ping!Ping!Ping!
*
And so here we are and I am now hitting my device with a hammer which I found in a toolkit in a janitor’s closet by the front door. Hit it, hit, hit. Hit it. Hit. It.
Over and over, again, and again and again.
The proprietary structure is incredibly durable and my hand begins to ache before even a dent is made.
Eventually, a dent is made—a tiny little pockmark. Not enough, so more bludgeoning. My blisters begin to scream and the head of the hammer begins to loosen off of its wooden stem and I am out of breath again.
“Percy, what the fuck. You are going to regret this later.”
“Shut (Hit) up (Hit) Dennis (Hit).”
Finally, the device succumbs to this brutality and winks out.
Piiiioiioinoinnnkblurp.
(Hit. One last, for good measure.)
Dead as a polished stone. I stand over it, red-faced, sweaty, deshabilled, murderous.
There is a period of panting. Watching. Satisfied that the device is gone-zo, I lie down on the spot, and curl up.
*
“Percy.”
“Go away.”
“Percy, I think we need to hit the road.”
“I’m asleep.”
“Get up.”
I rub my eyes, look around. Daytime. Though I don’t know which day.
I roll over, onto something sharp. Gah! A piece of plastic or glass. Little shards are all around me.
“What’s all this crap?” I ask. A disgusting smell from my mouth leaks into my nose.
“That’s your device, genius. Get ready. We’re leaving.”
*
We bustle through the Spar’s lobby and push through the revolving doors. Dennis, shirtless, barely keeping up, bleating complaints steadily from behind me, the lobby attendant barking in a foreign tongue after us. The car was there, autonomously, pulling up for us at the roundabout. Shit, forgot about the sun again, which even as it sets is blinding; shades on. Hurl ourselves into the seats and slam the doors.
We ease out of the lot with a slowness which seems designed to frustrate. I kick the seat back in front of me in helpless frustration. I whi
sper the vehicle up faster and faster, though there are of course controls and tolerances in place for safety reasons and there is only so much recklessness it will allow. Still: fairly fast. Now it takes a wide corner and Dennis leans into me.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t touch me, please.”
“What’s your deal with that thing, Percy?”
“It’s broken.”
“Or you are,” he stage whispers.
“Not now, Dennis.”
“Don’t blame me. If you hate the sound of it so much, just let the goddam thing die already.”
“I need it.”
“Ah, dependency. An abusive dependency. Well, that much I can understand. And so where is this godforsaken mechanic of yours?”
“Almost there.”
The device sits in the hollow of my lap, lies there in a helpless state. Choked out. Throttled like a small animal. I’ve hit the power node on it, and it seems to be trying, gamely, to come back to life. It moans, and gutters, and whines with ragged breath. This frightens me somehow more than its total demise.
*
Honestly, worst case, the device is completely fragged, what would it matter? What would I miss out on there, exactly?
My contacts? Who would I contact Rn? There’s no more contact to be had.
What would I “like”? Who would I “like”? Whose face and time would I face/time: family, friends? Nah.
(Dennis looking out his window. Dunes easing by.)
But my personal history is in there. Compressed, somewhere in its mysterious solidity. Records. My memory; in its memory. Its memory; my memory. Places I’ve been. Things I’ve done. Little things I’ve jotted down for myself, reminders, prods, thoughts for future projects. Threads. The photos. Those things the device and I have seen. My precious picture of Miss Fairfax. Secrets. The device is the only record of the me whom only I know. My private self. Can I give that up?
Dennis says, absently, to the car window: “You know, Percy, something’s not right with you. You’ve got problems, sir.”
I am not a monster. These lives—device-lives—are to be lives lived with impunity, in private. No-price, no-cost lives; no-guilt lives. This is where we all do such things, in the whisper-world. And we leave them there, in a smog of willful amnesia. The device is exactly the repository of that which needs to be kept locked away or forgotten—this privacy is the very meaning of the device. Who would recognize the distinction between thought and action without such a space? If such a locale didn’t exist? Otherwise these thoughts would be let loose on the world—free to roam the meatspace. We would need a whole new ethics. Everything would change.
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