Same Same

by Peter Mendelsund

  That is: paper.

  A line of it, a conveyer belt of it, now heading out, along the same direction as she is—flying sunward, leaving the city via the air, following an invisible, forceful, and innate logic. It’s about twenty stories up—the papers casting a long, snaking shadow, an adumbrating dotted line upon these very blistering sidewalks she is standing upon, though she should be (not sprinting, but at least) speed-walking, so that she can clock in earlier than is strictly speaking necessary, as she needs to run the numbers a third time and rehearse the presentation and recommendations again before having to actually present and rec them—these recs referring to her firm’s go-ahead to that consortium overseeing the construction of a spanking new hotel; a hotel in a perfect, exactly-to-scale reconstruction of a famous Bourbon château—one with room upon room of trompe l’oeil, each fantastical, ornate, pastel, Fabergé chamber diverting the visitor’s gaze toward its unique series of windows; each window framing a different baroque idyll of bubblegum-clouded skies and nymph-and-swain-thronged parks; windows which, upon closer inspection, open upon nothing, and in fact do not even open at all as they are skillfully painted upon the chalky walls—this luxury hotel theoretically drawing the super big coin—mega-money—not only expected income from tourist occupancy but from the adjacent two-hundred-room conference center, which will assist in recouping their loan funding in a matter of a single fiscal year (or so the numbers suggest, and so she shall claim as the projectors whine, and styluses are twirled and triangular sandwiches calcify into waxwork simulations), but here on the grueling concrete she is honestly surprised to find that she no longer cares much, and furthermore, and more surprising still, she no longer needs her fashionably over-large sunglasses (for the first time in years, for as long as she has been stationed in the Freehold, that is) and so duly takes them off, sticking them on her blouse like she is paper-clipping her various strata together, her clothes, skin, organs, thoughts…while others too around her are also taking off their sunglasses; and she sees that everyone is frozen, a line of people like this, all looking up, as in an eclipse (staring counterindicated), but still—the paper leaving the city is a thing to see—everyone in awe of the migration.

  The thing itself, the thing moving away that is: ordinary. Only paper: base matter. The movement is the thing. The direction is the thing; the vector. Time asserting itself over objects, nothing stable. So there’s raw emotion here, though she can’t see anyone else’s face in full, visored as they all are beneath the shade of each of their salutes, everyone paying a military honor to the sky; people speaking in mutter-tongue, vibrating with communality. The only times you see events like these are catastrophes. Perhaps this is one too? The great paper diaspora? It is news of a sort. The parade going by up above, sheet by sheet by sheet. The view each citizen is afforded of the paper train, each a slightly different sight line on the event—no different really from how the news of the world comes down for us out of the meatspace, refracted through our portals, each screen also viewed from a unique angle, in a different locale—bar, bathroom, on a bedspread, lap, palm—though here everyone knows that they are participating together in some way which is more real than these other scenarios; secure in the knowledge that each angle on the paper-event will come together like the miracle of binocular vision in order to present a single, coherent whole, a mass revelation; though the truth is that even our cherished Irl, our real here-and-now, is fractured, and individual. Spoked. Watched on that private feed reserved for all of us in our lonesomeness: MeChat. iTube. Moi-stagram.

  She watches the paper trail leave, waiting for it to tail off, which it doesn’t. Out, out the paper goes and she imagines that the exodus is definitely heading toward some better place, for sure, better than here—where life isn’t tabulated into calendar invites and spreadsheets, the columns and rows of which have long since ceased to stand in for anything except for other designified columns and rows; where life lacks the constant dread of the next incoming ping, the stultifying heat-death of office corridors, chaffing of synthetic pantsuits (the fucking rope-burn of her butt-floss), buzzing of network servers and a catalog of performative facial expressions—devoid of sincerity but laden with social significance. It has to be that heralded “better place.” And it isn’t that she, or anyone else here today, feels a sense of loss exactly, but it is more like a generalized ache, born of seeing (just about anything) up in the sky, anything which moves away en masse, which migrates, which is to say that it is a sadness born of distance, born of a reversal of the work of gravity, born of loss. She, alongside the other onlookers frozen in the city, actually relishes this sadness, relishes the distance, relishes the cool and intermittent reprieve of the stuttering shade.

  Will everyone disperse when the papers are gone, she wonders? When the last straggling sheet vanishes? Will she and the other rubberneckers just go back to it all? Will they all remember the feeling of the Universal Family convened here? The family praying together; staying together? Does nothing make a dent? Divert the stream? When it ends, will people look around shyly, feeling a bit stupid, everyone feeling as though they had just tripped over an unexpectedly jutting curb, or belched inappropriately? Will there be that inevitable embarrassing aftermath of the big, communal merging? Will she draw, later, in the margins of her poorly stapled, redundant meeting minutes, a row of rectangles, trailing toward a vanishing point, having excused herself mentally from the deck’s time-keeping—sloganed slides, the sands of a commodified hourglass—excused herself for this fleeting reminiscence of the unusual occasion of the great paper relocation?

  Doubt it.

  Merely a flutter, later, in the space behind her eyes, a brief spasm, then, gone.

  33

  (THE FULLNESS OF HARMONY)

  Two o’clock in the world of tomorrow, and it is whole new terrain out here: landscape of pink rock, blue trunks, a bending river, and gently dipping purple fronds. The sky is egg-yolk yellow, and the air is alive with the barely visible fuzz of small insect life. Blue-gray mountains smudge the horizon. I’m looking around and there is more of the same in all directions. Such a relief to be away from the Institute, among all of this dense flora. This valley; the foothills of a rain forest perhaps. No sign of habitation. Unsullied. One gets the sense that the entire planet may be uninhabited.

  We are far from the meatspace—in the surround, being walking through 鼎福 the Architect’s new project. We enter in God mode, and just look around. It’s pretty amazing actually. Very little lag or latency. I’m impressed. Total verisimilitude. The coding and processing power required must be awesome. It is a real wow, obviously, though I must admit that I am just beginning to grow a bit weary of such spectacular moments, out here at the Institute. (We’ve been privy to so many.) The world, our world, Irl, is not, contrary to what you might hear, devoid of miracles. Spectacular revelation is still possible out there, but rather we’ve all witnessed enough of these revelations not to care anymore. “Miracle blindness,” I suppose you could call it. And here we go again. Dennis Royal must feel the same way—there he is over yonder, affecting total ennui, his appropriately jaded and slouchy avatar slumping up against a polygonal tree, lighting a CGI cigarette and taking a sumptuous and Frankenberry-scented rip. (Smell?)

  “That’s the stuff,” he says, still expressionless.

  So great, I think again, to be away from the Institute, and its humid cloying fugs and growing general despondency. (And these are the only admin-less trips I’m officially sanctioned to take.) So, I’m doing a lot of this virtual sightseeing now; lots of video; plenty of games, XD, VR, so on. Anyway, I am interested in the Architect’s project, of course, but the real reason I’ve come is to quote-unquote get away, away from Irl and, and, more importantly find a place to talk to Dennis off-site.

  The Architect gently pushes aside some spidery vines with the back side of his hand, and through doing so, shows us, me and Dennis, the rule
s; the physics, etc., etc. I do the same, experimenting with the degree of agency I am granted. A fair amount. We are learning. Some things are possible, others are not, so forth.

  We walk, we crouch, we swing our arms. We hit some pose-balls, and duly enact their directives. We follow a river path. A few other presences, bots, prowl the valley, ignoring us. Some of them parade in place, or labor, walking up against a large rock or tree, industrious, dumb, stuck. When one of the more mobile avatars crosses our path, we walk right through it.

  “Of course, there are all kinds of glitches and blank spots—places where the kinks still need to be worked out, or where you simply reach the end of the rendering,” 鼎福 the Architect says. He shows me one such location, down a ways, behind a thick copse, in a clearing. It is a square of gray nothing. There it is, the nihility. It is—so strictly speaking, it is more a presence than an absence, and it stands out from what is around it, but it is inert, flat, dead. And very satisfying. The Architect taps me on my shoulder to tell me that we are moving on.

  Most of the area here is pretty fully conceived though, and, the Architect tells me, what I see today should give me a decent sense of the program’s capabilities.

  “Do you like it?” prods the Architect.

  “It’s amazing.”

  “Of course, it won’t look like this for very long.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “As soon as the product is released, consumers will enter the space, begin occupying it; and they will construct buildings of various kinds. Soon, there will be houses, fortresses, towers, temples, shops, windmills, banks, malls, hospitals, theaters, pleasure domes, bunkers, tree houses, legislatures, hovels, lighthouses, restaurants, apartment blocks, cottages, hobbit holes, stilt dwellings, yurts, tent villages, high-rises, barracks, dormitories, longhouses, pubs, projection rooms, odea, gymnasia—”

  I can immediately grasp the appeal of having a place like this to oneself. So quiet. If only one could be totally alone and anonymous in such an untrammeled land.

  “The problem is: everyone builds,” the Architect explains. “Nobody just walks around and looks. It is as if none of it is real unless it is interacted with. Like I said, everyone needs to get their hands dirty. Every world I’ve ever designed rapidly became overrun with stuff. I build spaces you see, Mr. Frobisher, and a space is merely a potentiality toward a state of fullness; toward being occupied. Even worse, the stuff we build ‘in here’ ends up colonizing the world ‘out there.’ ”

  “Irl?” I say.

  “In subtle ways. But, yes, it escapes. Creeps out. People experiment in here, and that work then becomes a model for work out there, which in turn—”

  The simulacrum is just stunning, and quite tangible. I feel like coating myself in it. Grabbing handfuls of it, leaves, sky, water, and clouds, and rubbing it on myself. Would I feel it if I did? Would the world feel like a warm coat? A second skin? We are surrounded by fronds, all reaching up and swaying about us like hands at a revival meeting.

  I imagine building a little house Rn, far away inside the virgin forest. Just a single dwelling. I’d stop at one.

  Dennis sidles up from behind me.

  “So,” he leads off, “caught, eh?”

  “Mmn.”

  “I suppose we really fucked up.”

  “It’s not so bad though.”

  “Maybe not for you, but this is strike three for poor old Dennis.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’ll go back. I’ve been expelled. Un-Laddered.”

  “Your project?”

  “As I said when we met, few of us will grab that brass ring.”

  “I will.”

  “You seem to mean it, bless you. And good for you.”

  Mr. Royal taps his simulated cigarette once more, forgetting it is incapable of producing ash. He takes a step back. “Frobisher,” he says, affectionately, “you really are a shit-for-brains.” Holds out a hand which is so light in my VR glove, and I realize suddenly that I would prefer to just keep holding on to it, even in its insubstantiality. I feel a sudden and unbidden affection toward him, but Dennis is walking away now.

  鼎福 the Architect leads us down a new trail now which leads toward an enormous, insurmountable horizon, and you can just tell that we are almost at the end of the landscape. There is another matte gray square, about ten feet tall, in the middle of it. The Architect beckons us into the portal, but this time I insist that he go first, and reluctantly, he does so, and then Dennis follows, and Mr. Royal’s disembodied foot disappears, and that is the last of him. So long, Dennis.

  I hesitate.

  I’m alone. Alone again.

  I take a moment here, to appreciate the pure potential of all of this. I look around, 360 degrees, breathing in the untrammeled space and its spacious nothing-air before noticing a small wodge of paper, speared, high up on the spiky edge of a palm made of polygons.

  Even here.

  I step into the gray portal and quickly flash through several biomes, like cards in a rapidly shuffled deck.

  (GROUP)

  “See the news this morning?” the new admin asks us, cheerfully.

  I saw the dust cloud on the feeds about an hour ago. A sepia filter, drawn down over a photo of the world. Scorching temperatures. Harmful particulates. Work sites abandoned. Ports closed. Airplanes grounded. Day becoming night. Emergency crews everywhere.

  “Glad I don’t live out there,” she laughs, treating the whole misfortune as merely another opening gambit. “Now let’s get started, shall we?”

  * * *

  —

  Once again with the room, the bong-water coffee dregs, the chalky scones, the beautiful chairs, the window. Earnest clasping of hands, half-hearted hugs, general emotional paralysis.

  This time we’ve got the Conceptual Artist, the Theologian, the Photographer, and the Woman-Whose-Face-and-Hands-Are-Covered-in-Yarn…

  * * *

  —

  The Conceptual Artist goes first. He tells us that he began his new project, as he begins all of his projects, with a picture. A picture he has made. (He shows it to us.)

  After the picture was finished, looking over it, he felt as though he was headed in entirely the right direction. (This was several days ago.) He hung the picture up on his studio wall, then wrote on an index card the words: “Art Move, Number One,” and tacked that card up underneath the picture like a caption.

  Following this, he grabbed a chair, sat backward upon it, resting his folded arms on its seat back, and stared at the work.

  The picture was, he decided then, no good.

  It was too sincere; it explained too much! Too much of himself was shown. The work was too revealing—but, you know, in a bad way, which is to say revealing, but not revelatory. (“Don’t you agree?” he asks, as he holds up the offending article.)

  It occurred to him, to the Conceptual Artist, then, that perhaps the index card, the label itself, was the key. He must begin with the label! The label was everything. The answer to the project would lie with naming.

  Later that same day, he duly attempted to generate energy from out of the labels.

  He labeled everything in his studio, not limited to, but including: the four walls of his studio; its eight corners; all of its windows; all of the joists and beams; his desks, workbenches, chairs, lamps, whiteboards, bulletin boards, computational gear, outlets, air-conditioning units, floorboards, cups, saucers, utensils, office supplies, duplicators, art materials, food, hampers, garbage cans, candles, printers, room screens, blankets and pillows…etc., etc. He had even tied a string to a joist in the middle of his studio and hung a card from it inscribed “Air/Aether.” (The string is labeled as well: “String.”) The Conceptual Artist’s very own Tea Boy submitted to being labeled. The Conceptual Artist was, of course, himself, label
ed (“Conceptual Artist”), as was every item of clothing he wore. Everything was named in what felt like a feat of ostension not seen since Adam labeled the garden.

  And at the end of the day, as burnt light began to creep around his studio windows, he sat back again on his chair (“Chair; sunlit”) and examined his labors with, even he had to admit, some degree of satisfaction.

  Until he noticed that the labels were, themselves, unlabeled.

  Rats.

  * * *

  —

  (We thank him for sharing.)

  * * *

  —

  The Photographer has adopted the use of an enormous camera obscura, which he has successfully rigged up for employment. Here’s how it works: “The pyramidal rays from an object receive a decussation, and so strikes a second base upon the retina or hinder coat, the proper organ of vision; wherein the pictures from objects are represented, answerable to the paper, or wall in the dark chamber; after the decussation of the rays at the hole of the hornycoat, and their refraction upon the crystalline humor, answering the foramen of the window, and the convex or burning-glass, which refracts the rays that enter it.” So, using this comparator technology, he has attempted a self-portrait.