An echoing growl.
The world rocks for a moment, and I lose my feet as something hits the Institute and knocks the wind out of it. Sirens. I hear the sirens again, as well.
I pick myself up and cover my ears.
The wails: louder and louder.
The dreaded front has finally arrived in all its force.
Everything shakes. The piercing and melismatic soprano of high winds. Sizzles and explosions. Looking up in the tumult, I can see, between me and the dangerous sky, a red warning light, one of many on the Institute’s sensor-array—all the way right up there in the dizzying heights of the metastructure’s central vault. It’s blinking. Warning us of something? Has the dome reached its maximum load, given all of the paper piling outside, and given the beam’s particular tensile strength? Is the beam losing cohesion? What if a particular column can no longer bear the weight of all this paper anymore?
I hear the sirens. I hear the sirens.
But it couldn’t possibly…
And even sooner than I would have imagined, right away in fact, there is a wrenching groan, as of a massive, old wooden door opening, and then the beam gives way. And indeed, the northeastern buttress, of which this I-beam had been a constituent part, folds. There ensues a cascade effect. The groin-vaults buckle, one after another, the entire dome begins to sag like a soufflé before falling away entirely. After this, silicates shower down, and there is the briefest moment where it seems beautiful, the glass particles and shards look to me surprisingly like rain, glinting at the exact same angles as would a sun-shower, a shower which would have been very welcome back when all the fellows and admins alike were convecting alive within the Institute like hatchlings in an enormous incubator. The downward shivering glass, happily, does not injure me, I don’t feel it at all in fact, as I am buffered by almost twenty meters of paper baffling, though the glass hitting the paper still makes an impressive noise. A noise like an immense sizzling.
No more metastructure.
(More sirens.)
Paper raining down, billowing up.
A long, long (very long) gap.
Local Address.
Cowering. Fear.
Vandalism and riots. Mob violence. Flats and studios ransacked. Fellows attacked, beaten, humiliated. Then. Martial law. Police actions. Admins in masks corralling the fellows, putting up cordons. More red lights. (Not flares though, as the whole paper world is now thoroughly combustible.) Fellows herded into safe areas. The admins in hazmat attire, waving, pointing, yelling.
Time passes in just such a state of emergency.
More time.
Now…
Citizenship.
The world is white.
But order is restored. We are now deep down under the paper, inside hollowed-out areas of it. We become mole-people. The Institute: a warren. Rooms, large and small, mined-out. The bigger volumes, small halls, dining areas, cloisters, are constructed through stacking paper reams, on top of one another, to form restraining walls, colonnades, and other structural supports. Rebuilding the entire infrastructure underground (as it were) is quite a feat of collective effort, a great “pulling together” of admins and fellows, and during the process, many of my fellow fellows continue to live and work exactly as we once did, back before the paper “just came out of nowhere” and swamped us all. They do so with renewed purpose, almost as if to prove a point, as if still carrying out an argument with a respondent who had already packed it in and left the debate (there is also, briefly, an Institute-wide dispute concerning the derivation, nature, and meaning of the paper, and naturally, these hypotheses and opinions vary wildly according to our commitments—the Philosopher providing a philosophical account, the Ecologist providing an ecological account, the Poet a poetic account, so on; I may even provide my own—but the meaning of the paper is obviated and overwhelmed by the sheer fact of the paper, its presence becoming confirmation to us of its necessity, all of us, every one, caving in to this new normal and making necessary adjustments…no one surmising that I am the cause of it, was, all along, and as such, must soon move on and take the paper with me. But yes, in this newly built ecosystem, order is more or less maintained: fellows and admins alike dressing exclusively in paper, breathing pulpy air, and eating sketched-out meals. The paper becomes fungible, commoditized. My counterfeit is openly circulated. Companies of paper-holders are formed. Ledgers of ledgers are kept. Some fellows form mini-collectives, small, independent city-states which proceed with their own Groups and Discourses™. (Sure. Sure, why not.) The various collectives cleave to their own schedules, and their own rules. The codex of suggestions, rules-of-thumb, and other generalized wisdom known as “the Ladder” is also maintained, but over time, these various will begin to interpret the foundational document differently from one another, such that, in the end, the text seems almost like several separate and contradictory documents. These various subgroups, the various “Sects of the Ladder,” coexist for a period, though eventually, under the harsh, sharp, and bright conditions, internecine turmoil arises (as it inevitably does in such closed systems). Other fellows—and one might say wiser fellows—disappear, one at a time, alone, down into the narrow passageways and tunnels (I will be one of them), paths most no wider than the width of a man, these spelunkers deviating at various points from the marked routes, bushwhacking their own roads into the paper-mass like they are walking into an endless white cornfield, pushing the sheets away with their sliced-up hands and forearms, merging into it all, as more often than not the paths they blaze cave in behind them as they travel, and these solitary adventurers might, when deep enough into the paper, carve berths for themselves, berths just large enough to fit their prone bodies in, little dens, in which to snuggle up, sleep, eat, live, read, and die. But not me. I keep heading out.
Travel Route.
Now, in the heat of the morning, I plow my way to the perimeter. By the time I reach the edge of everything, the old dome is good and broke—crenelated, shards of the metastructure sticking up into the sky like pickets. For some time now, while we were persisting on with our lives inside of it, the Institute has become just another ruin, another of the desert’s follies. But this is no longer my problem. The storm has passed on. Cloudy skies are clear again. The world around the ruin is healing. Closure: the order of the day. So I clamber up what is now a ridge of paper, slippery with pages and sand, and now find an aperture between two ragged shards of dome-glass, which I slip between, heading always outward, and now I am upon the sands of the desert.
The sand radiates warmth—even through my shoes. I struggle to find purchase upon this new and uncertain surface, though I am happy that I am Irl again. I realize that it is the very first time I’ve walked in the desert, can you believe it, having previously only looked at it—looked at it from peripheries, from my observation bench, from towers, from classrooms, parking lots, sides of roads, vehicles, my wall screen, from afar that is—having abrogated my every tie to the thing itself. I am now just so thrilled to be participating in the desert as opposed to merely witnessing it. Participating: crest and trough; crest, trough, so on.
Out I go, still. The desert world becoming more visible as the sun, sweating with endeavor, chin-ups above the horizon. I take a step, and then another. I am snaking out into the dunes, trudging forward, as the blue and lemon glow of morning dawns. As I leave the shadow of the demolished dome, from out over the plain, I hear a few muffled detonations behind me—fainter and fainter, receding thunder. There has been further catastrophe back there. Further collapses. But I don’t turn around to look, the turning back is for later (and not for me). Alterberg, O, Alterberg!
The ties are cut.
“This is where my dream has brought us?” I think, knowing full well.
And I make a kind of
gesture to myself, before continuing on, stumbling forward into the brighteni
ng wind. One more boom, and I know that the Institute has fallen finally; sunk with all hands.
Don’t look back.
There is no time for mourning the Institute, its occupants, or the bubble which housed us. That’s behind. My thoughts are for the now.
I squint at the sun, a single lens flare: an anemone in the frame. The sun is high and impassive—or passive; or passive-aggressive, actually. The sun is being an a**hole. Whew, it’s hot.
The trip will take some time, obviously. Days and nights. There will be adventures, sights-to-behold (ruined castles, tombs, Great Walls, Lighthouses, Eiffel Towers, wavering trails of wayward robot jockeys…). There will be terrible predicaments, jubilant escapes, so on.
The trip through the desert to be indicated by question marks, which, themselves, indicate other things entirely, like confusion, excitement, but also exhaustion, thirst, itchiness, gratitude, nausea, anguish, glimmers of false hope, recognition, discharges, both solid and liquid, prayer, fist-shaking, delusional merriment, etc.
I have not disappeared from sight yet though; far from it. I travel across the desert, past the esoteric, sunken monuments, over the bay (yes over the bay), and by the time I reach the outskirts of the city, the trip has taken my humanity along with my clothes, my shoes, several layers of skin, bodily moisture, and much of what is left of my reason. Do not shed a tear on my behalf, though, I’m still going. My feet carry me on still. Out of the flatlands. One step and another. Into the heart of town, past the outskirts, the Spar, in and around the Electronics Roundabout, past the perfume district, past the casinos, past the mosques and the barbican of business towers, toward downtown, and deeper. Into the tangle of smaller streets. Into the heart of the city’s ghettos—in and in, retracing the journey into the obscure center of the metropolis. Then: the alleyway, the end of the alleyway, the door. I stare at the front of the shop for an elastic moment, a caesura of indefinite, or perhaps mutating length, and, low-slung and bowlegged under the fatigue, I take the last few steps and reach for the knob, give it a stiff, quick pull, and walk in under the familiar yellow fluorescents.
Exit/Entry Visas.
The first thing I see in the Same Same shop is the proprietor. He is amused. No, smirking. He seems proud. Unusually so. Why so arrogant, I want to ask? But before I can say a word, he turns, ducks back through the counter, opens the door to that back room of his, and disappears through it.
Time passes.
(More time.)
Sounds from back there.
Rustling. Conversation?
I wait, and when the door finally opens again, it isn’t him who emerges from it.
No, it’s something else entirely. A visual disruption pattern, some weird species of cancerous pixel-generation, in which, it appears that a man is standing, right in front of me, a man who looks for all the world like…
“Hello, Percy,” I say.
“Hello,” say I, in the exact same (tone of) voice.
There I am, I think, and I’ve changed.
I am older. Grayer, obviously. The work of gravity on the face of a man is the saddest yet most inevitable thing—the sagging; not that it is that noticeable, though it’s noticeable enough to me. Sorry to think that, in moments like this, vanity still rears its (Ugly? Beautiful? Self-recriminating?) head.
God, Percy, you could have at least shaved.
Show some pride, man.
And boy oh boy, you’ve really let yourself go around the middle. Would a little exercise have killed you? (I recall, now, the trip up the Landau-Schmidt, and the desultory stabs at the gym. Stick-to-itiveness has never been my forte though, has it. But in my defense, who has the time? The time for the project, and one’s vanity? Time, time, time. The project takes up one’s allowance of time and of vanity, I’m afraid. All of it.)
Eyes are pretty bloodshot, though the good news is that they are also slightly more animated than they used to be. A little less dull, flat, a little less dark. But still sad and wet. The hair? The hairline? Bloody hell if that isn’t the worst part of all of it. It will be gone soon, and that. Dying off like a poorly sprinkled parkland. I’ll soon have a metastructural dome of my own, Lolz.
Okay. Never mind. Good riddance.
Less maintenance I suppose, less work.
Other than this, other than my reduced appearance, there is little else to recount. He (Percy, I) is (am) standing behind the desk, in front of the curtain which hides the back room. He’s me (or us), he is me in every detail (but you know, denatured). He is me in a way which is so powerfully insistent that it threatens the assimilation of us both. I feel a gravitational pull from our congruities. He must feel the same, for he levers open a gate in the counter, and steps through to the other side, folds the counter back down again, turns, and walks closer.
The unmitigated likeness threatens to pull us and the entire world into a collapsing singularity. It is nauseating. He stands there, eyes open and unblinking, as if they were painted on the placard of his face. (God this is exhausting.) He doesn’t speak, and doesn’t acknowledge my having spoken in any way. It isn’t clear to me whether this dumbness is due to incomprehension or intransigence. Perhaps he is simply unable to respond, as our bodies, our features, our very organs of comprehension and communication are beginning to merge toward an indistinguishable point.
“Shouldn’t it end now?” I suggest to him (me), mildly.
And a pilot light goes on inside him (me). He (I) nod(s).
Rooting in his (my—okay enuf of this, let’s go with “he” and “his”) pocket, he finds something and pulls it out. A single piece of paper. He smooths it, and puts it on the countertop. Hands a pen to me.
He taps on the paper with a finger.
“What’s this?” I ask. “Will this…Ah, I see. Okay. I’m supposed to…
Signature of Holder.
“Sign…”
Scribble, scribble.
“And initial…”
Scribble, scribble.
“Oops, date, also…”
Scribble.
“There,” I say. “That should be it.”
He pulls a pair of reading glasses out of his pocket (since when did I need…) and looks over the paperwork.
Tick tock, tick tock.
“Does everything seem in order?”
He palms his thin, errant hair back along his sweaty head. (I do the same.)
Tick tock.
“All good, Percy? Jesus Chri—”
And then, with a sudden movement his body jerks into motion. He grabs the pen out of my hand before I know what is happening, and now he does what second men do; what they have always done, ever since the very first of the second men. With the pen held like a dagger, he swings it back in a wide arc above his head:
and my face falls,
and the pen falls,
and the stain grows, that moist spot seeping outward,
then the curtain falls,
and that’s just about that.
53
THE FINAL FUNDAMENT
Fundament 32. Not a rule, but a toast. A salute. To the chewed-up. To great, and variously nasty cuds. Here’s to junk heaps; crap made of other crap. To shit. Junk, cut with other junk. Our admixed stuff. Interwoven; layered, mashed to a paste. Here’s to the pulverized and indistinguishable contents of our eating mouths; to the acid baths of our stomachs, to the hot stews we vomit, or otherwise expel. The miscellanies, jumbles, alloys, and dyspeptic brews which are the circulating units of production in each and every cycle of consumption and manufacture, from our Frankenstein-monster-like genomic birthrights, to the planetesimals of the solar nebula from which earths are forged. Cheers to the process of consumption and manufacture itself: mastication, assimilation, ingestion, absorption, consolidation, evacuation, so on. Raise a gla
ss (that is) to the digestive, in its various material forms and in all of its magnificent phases (and in the case of the paper: the amalgamation of natural ingredients, the great “chipping together” of woods, the manufacture of pulps through molecular disintegration, reorganization, and reintegration, the separation of wastes, the supplementation of additives…). A moment to acknowledge the peristaltic nature of creativity. To recognize, most of all, the seat of invention, the cloacal; the most trafficked sites of egress, internal to external, private to public. The creative voice? The mouth has little to do with anything; vocal cords even less so. Here’s to the true birthing canals. The sewers, not the spires. As if anything in the endeavor of creation were easy, or cute. As if the products of creation were anything but impure and despoiled; violently puréed. Nothing springs forth as if newly struck—God’s own first coin, golden and bright. Births: disgusting, Imho. Wet, sticky, malodorous, dangerous, Tmi. So Prost to the absolutely repulsive process of creation. Santé, and salud to birth, retch, mucus, and pus, the foul miracle of discharge, and I’m nearly there, so pipe down, show some manners, a little patience, there’s a plan here: I’m aiming for thirty-two of these Fundaments, thirty-two exactly, like those fucking variations (you know the ones) which pretty much could’ve gone on indefinitely given the fecundity of the ground (and what piece of music, ultimately, is not a set of variations I ask you), but one has to end a composition somewhere, doesn’t one, so it might as well be with a quodlibet; a chaos of public domain ditties (Cheers, to the quodlibet), because after that, after that: the theme, the same old theme comes around again, identical, but never really identical, another example of the very same, outrageous ourobouros I’ve just been praising, the triumphal human centipede of human invention. So there’s a final toast for you: to endings. To endings! (And let’s get on with it already, shall we? Save some paper; now, as good a time as any?) Everything needs an end, Imho, and guess what, voila, it has already arrived. Yes. You made it. Here’s to you. Here’s to us. We made it. The final Fundament. The Fundament of Fundaments. It’s over now. At last. Phew. No more nonsense. No more project. No more words. All that’s left is for me to hitch up the uniform at the belt, pull it down at the crotch, brush the evidence off myself, square my shoulders, step carefully over my own body, and, before I can change my mind, slip out the front door of the shop. And that’s precisely what I intend to do. My prospects out there may be poor, but who knows? Who knows. Not me. That’s for sure. Though time will surely tell. Tbd.
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