by A. R. Moxon
“Which brings us, my comrades, to my first hint to you about me. For me, time is a little different than it is for you. To explain, I’ll give you a picture.”
From beneath the table Landrude produces a large knapsack. He rummages, emerging at last with a large, well-thumbed, paperback edition of Moby-Dick. “So,” he says, “here is an apt picture of a passage through time. Each page a slice, you could say, though not a perfectly equivalent slice. In a book, we might jump forward a day in one page, or linger for another fifty pages on a single moment, then in the space of a paragraph leap like gods a century or more forward or backward. Melville doesn’t do this (thank you, Melville); he’s mainly a linear fellow, which gives him a straightforwardness useful to this example.” Landrude raises the book in one hand like a high priest with an offering, then, with one long finger of the opposite hand opens the book in dramatic flourish to the final page. He makes a show of investigating the contents. “Rum luck. Ahab is dead, and so is Queequeg. The Pequod is destroyed, and all the crew but Ishmael are sunk down to the sea floor and drowned. Sorry for ruining the book if you haven’t yet gotten to it, but it ends badly if you aren’t a white whale or an Ishmael.” With equally dexterous and casual movement, Landrude flops the pages in a mass to the beginning. “Oh, look. Ahab alive. Queequeg alive. Pequod not yet set out upon the high seas.”
He flips to the beginning. To the end. Flip. Flip. Flip. Flip. “Everybody’s alive. Dead. Alive. Dead. Alive. Dead, and Ishmael saved in a coffin.” Flip. “And now Queequeg is building the coffin.” Flip. “And now he hasn’t yet built it.”
Landrude closes the book and sets it gently onto the table. “And that,” he says, “Is what your time is for me. Your time isn’t past and present and future for me. It just is. It’s there already, fixed, waiting to move between, as easily as you flip pages of a book. Exactly that easily, if you must know. If you weren’t constrained third-dimensional proles (no offense), you could visit whenever you wanted, whenever you wanted, if you take my meaning.*3
“ ‘But hold on a second,’ you may be wishing you could say (and I’ll let you speak again soon, I promise); ‘Sure, my past is inaccessible. But my future is still open to possibility. Free will, sir. Free will.’ And you’re right, insofar as ‘free will’ goes. Choices are being made, and some of them are even being made by you. Let’s go back to space. In space, an infinity of points are crafted by proximity into everything, crafted—wittingly? unwittingly? by choice?—into something both more structurally complex yet—merely by dint of being this rather than an infinity of opposing thats—more simple. As with space, so with time. You choose paths leading to one series of possibilities and probabilities, and these choices cut you off forever from other sets of less proximal possibilities and probabilities. Thus you pass through the tunnel of your life, only experiencing one path of the many possible paths you might have known. Free will is the tool by which people create the universe, or—to be more precise—how they choose the part of the universe their perceptions inhabit, moment by moment, from a ceaseless selection of other ones. This is why we should talk about doughnuts. May I?”
Landrude reaches past Julius’s plate, which holds his lone uneaten pastry, and snatches the priest’s box of doughnut extras. With another deft flick of Landrude’s fingers the box-top nods obediently open, revealing doughnutty goodness within. “So,” Landrude says with gusto. “Here we have some choices. Father Julius, creating (or choosing) a tiny portion of the universe with doughnuts. I see you’ve gone with the baker’s dozen—bully for you! We could be sitting in a universe where this box only contained twelve, but here we have something prime. Thirteen little doughy dabs of delight, lined in three rows, glazed, sprinkled, frosted, frittered.
“Think, Julius. Think of all the different ways the doughnuts in this box could be arranged. Of other doughnut varieties, which have been, for any variety of different reasons (including but not limited to unavailability), unchosen. Consider the universe where there is no box on this table, because you decided not to continue your tradition today. Or you discontinued the tradition a week ago. Or never took it up. Think of the universe (however improbable) in which you never developed the taste for doughnuts. Let’s stop before we arrive at the world in which there was never a demand for doughnuts and thus no doughnut store ever opened its doughnut doors. I think you’ll start to injure your poor mind, in much the same way as I may have injured mine, contemplating only the variables of a single box of doughnuts, chosen by one man of many, on one day of many. Yet again, infinite points connected to infinite points. Ouch, says my brain, and yours too, I presume.
“Now you have begun to pass into the fifth dimension. When one line of possibility meets another and begins to battle out which of them is truly real. A foolish battle. Both of them are real. All that can be, is. We cling to our free will as if it was some great power, but it’s the weakest possible power. The branches that lie behind, never chosen, or never even accessible to you—they still exist, every bit as real as the branches that lie before, made real merely by their possibility for realness. Potential reality is reality. And we all sense it, don’t we?—and don’t we mourn?—the ache of the inaccessible branches, the vast expanse of possibilities unchosen and un-choosable, universes of reality unselectable and unselected?
“Apply this to things you can’t choose; to the movements of planets, of stars, of galaxies. Apply it to atoms, to particles. Everything that exists, in all its possibility, from the beginning of time to the end. And—can you imagine it?—time is a cycle. The bang leads to collapse leads to bang again. The beginning is the end. The snake eats its tail. The shape of time’s pastry, which is all space moving through all time across all possibility is…you know it already, don’t you? Everything is a doughnut. Everything that is and was and will be and could be. Welcome to the sixth dimension. The person who lives here can choose anything in the universe. Any possibility. Any thing, at any time. The person who can dance the sixth-step can be anywhere, move any when, change reality with a word, choosing it simply by saying it. As easily as you third-steppers walk through a door from one room to another, as easily as a fourth-stepper can move from page to page through time, so a sixth-stepper moves through possibility. A sixth-stepper says it, and so it is. Not because we make it from what was not, but because we see it, and go there.” Landrude leans back and stretches, taking a posture of summation. “And that’s who I am. That’s where I live. The Author. Of what? Why…” Landrude makes a minuscule grimace, then gestures all-encompassingly. “Of this. And of you, of course. So, yes, I’m God, if you like—but only as far as you’re concerned.” After a moment he says, “You can talk again, if you want.”
Julius stands in one abrupt motion. “I’m leaving. Give me my doughnuts.”
“Really? No questions? No further context required?”
“If you’re God,” Julius says, “then you’re a shit one. Whatever it is I try to worship, it’s not you. Even if It’s not real, and you are real, It’s still better than you.”
Landrude stands, reaches in his slow, deliberate way across the table, rests one hand on Julius’s shoulder. Julius regards it with distaste. “I apologize. I admit I’ve possibly struck the wrong tone—but it is important you hear me out.”
“To you, maybe.”
“Not just me.” Hushed, eyes wide. “To everybody.”
“Tough cheese.” Julius picks up his doughnuts, looks out at the pearly graywhite nothing. “I dislike this view. Put it back right, or I’ll pound you until I see something out the window that looks as good or better. We’re going.”
Something regretful, even apologetic, passes over Landrude’s face, but there is a diamond sharpness in his eyes. “Why do you think your father said he had an aquiline forehead?” he asks.
“How…” Julius shutters a tight smile as he realizes. “Right. Of course you know.”
Landrude shaking his head: �
�More, I made it. In fact, I added that detail recently.”
“Horse shit. That’s from when I was—”
“From when you were twelve. Thirty-four years ago. I added it yesterday. You need to stop thinking in terms of cause and effect. My effects create causes. Up and down time’s line.”
“I…am…leaving.” Julius growls thickly. He’s breathing hard, as if he’s a dray horse pulling an overladen cart.
“Julius sat back down,” Landrude says.
Julius sits back down. Landrude sits with him.
“Julius realized he had not eaten his doughnut yet,” Landrude says. “Hunger seized him with sudden ferocity.”
Julius eyes the doughnut on the plate. Glares at Landrude, then back to the plate.
“Julius found he was helpless to resist the pangs,” Landrude says, and now his words seem to echo through something infinitesimally more real than space. “They were like live rats chewing in his belly. His stubborn pride insisted he not eat, but finally the compulsion within him became too great, and he gave in.”
With furious deliberation, Julius begins chewing air. He is gripping the table. He’s not weeping, but he is visibly fighting tears.
“Julius hated the stranger,” Landrude says. “He hated him for his control, his advantage, the carelessness with which he carried his ability to manipulate Julius’s actions and even his thoughts. But Julius hated the stranger most of all because, even though the stranger had taken away all reason for him to believe in the God he sought without cease, and whom he worshipped without belief, still the stranger would not or could not take away from him the hunger for belief in that God. Julius realized the stranger had built within him an inescapable hunger, untouchable by reason, for knowledge of the divine.”
“Oh, you bastard,” Julius creaks, reaching for a doughnut. He is weeping openly. “You dirty bastard.” He chews on his fritter, hatred and horror playing on his face. Gordy can see the priest’s near hand clutching the table, the small tendons of the wrist standing out against the skin.
“But at least you got to pick which doughnut,” Landrude murmurs. “But back to business. I am a writer and an artist, yes? My work is an extended graphic novel called Cat’s Crib, and it is—or at least it was—considered one of the apotheoses of the form. Inspiring in scope. Startling in tonal range. Dazzling for its technical proficiency. Admirable for its longevity. And yet, even so, most of polite society will insist on distilling my contributions to creative endeavor to the diminutive phrase ‘He makes comics.’ Don’t sympathize, I’m quite used to it.”
“I wasn’t going to sympathize.”
Landrude’s stare blisters with mordancy. “Yes. I know. And nobody, it seems, ever will. Oh well.”
He claps once, loudly. “So! Now we see where I fit. I made this world, which we can call Cat’s Crib. I am the guy who can choose from all available versions of Cat’s Crib. Not that other versions don’t still exist. There’s still a version out there, for example, as real as this one, and identical in all other ways to it, in which our good Father here is still, out of spite and stubbornness, suffering intense hunger while resisting his natural biological urge to eat. I simply have chosen, on the behalf of literally everybody, not to occupy it. You’re welcome, everybody. That’s what I am, and I don’t doubt that (however you may feel about it), what I am matters. Now, my friends, now we need to talk about what you are, and why that matters. Which leads me to the following question: Does it ever strike you as the least bit odd, that you and everybody you know are all anthropomorphic cartoon cats?”
“Never mind,” Landrude says. “It was a stupid question. After all, I don’t find my own state of being strange. But I did hope stating it that baldly would ease my problems. No good. Even after spelling it out, they still aren’t sure.”
“They?”
“I’ll explain everything eventually, I promise. We won’t leave until I do.”
“Thank God for that,” Julius says, his voice hollow as a toilet-paper tube, dry as a hobo’s elbow.
Landrude returns to his recitation: “In the beginning, was Cat’s Crib. And Landrude said, ‘Let the narrative be set in ‘Loony Island,’ and there the Island was, and the Island was funky, and a little bit dangerous, but in a goofy, heightened sort of way, and the readers saw that it was very good. And then Landrude said, ‘Let there be Donk, and Boyd, and Bailey, and let them be our heroes, and so they were, and the readers saw that it was very good. Cat’s Crib was a hit, feted in the comics journals and even (ever so occasionally) in mainstream media sources, not enough perhaps to be optioned for film, but nevertheless to the increasing satisfaction of both Landrude’s ego and his bank account.
“But then, it happened. Without warning, everything changed.” Landrude pantomimes an explosion with his fingers. “By which I mean to say…everything. One fine morning, I woke up, came down to work, and the page on my easel was different. I don’t mean a line here or there different, or a panel changed—totally different. The drawings literally weren’t the pictures I remembered drawing. The pictures weren’t telling the story I’d written.*4 Worse, what was happening in those pages wouldn’t make any sense in the context of the story that had come before. But even this wasn’t the worst of it. I found the worst of it that evening, returning to a back-issue to reference a plot point. This is when I saw it clearly: Everything had changed. Do you understand? Even the stuff I had already published. The new pages did fit the story; but the story itself had become unrecognizable to me. Sure, most of the main characters were still there, and many of the story elements, and some of the same plotlines, but jumbled—the entire thing was different. It wasn’t the book I remember writing. Worst of all: I was the only person who remembered it the way it had been. Nobody had ever read the story I remembered writing. They had read and enjoyed this other story, parallel to my story, but it was all wrong. The details, wrong. The themes, shifted. The back story, altered. Years of work gone, replaced with something else…or, worse—and I had to consider this—what if this was the way it had always been, and I was crazy? I had only my memory of the way it used to read—the way it was supposed to read. Nothing else in the world had changed, only this. It wasn’t impossible to imagine I was…” Landrude’s voice weakens, trails off. He stares for a while, drifting. When he looks up, his eyes are moist with recollection. “So, you see, I can appreciate your position,” he says to Julius. “I understand why you hate me for what I am. For what I just did to you, have been doing to you, will do to you. I’ve experienced it, too.”
“But I know this much: Along with the changes came new characters. Two new characters, to be specific. Morris is one. A character who had begun only as an afterthought, who was never going to be more than a minor recurring villain, a temporary number-two bad guy, who I was going to bump off in the next issue. Now, he’s the main antagonist. “And you—” here he jabs a finger at Gordy—“You were the other one. You’d become the new hero of Cat’s Crib. The main character. And I’d never even seen you before. You had your ticket, and your powers, and you were helping Donk, Boyd, and Bailey defeat Morris and his Brotherhood of Solipsist Assassins.”
“Who is Boyd?” asks Julius.
Landrude, on the verge of some explanation, shakes his head. “Never mind. You, Gordy—you and Morris—brought all this in your wake, or else it brought you. But there’s no doubt you were the primary new elements. I trace all the changes back to you.”
“I couldn’t have done any of that,” Gordy splutters, even as, within the deeper bulwarks of his consciousness, he feels some precariously balanced boulders begin to shift. “I’ve only been here a few months. I never fought with—”
“You have to change your thinking about time,” Landrude twirls a doughnut on his finger, then flips it to the table, and, returning the finger to the hole, begins, without taking his eyes from Gordy, to spin it slowly. “You’re only looking at what you
’re doing now, and what you’ve done in the past now. But from my perspective, your current situation is only one of many I’ve seen. What you are and have been now can be wildly different from what you used to have been in the pasts, or what you used to ‘are’ in the presents, or what you used to ‘going-to-be’ in the futures. And it’s not like I haven’t created your future for you. You’ve done many things you never did, and have already done many things you haven’t done yet. Remember, I’ve seen the most recent finished page; it takes place at a moment chronologically beyond this moment we’re experiencing now. I’m just trying to put my story back right. I remember. I visit. I alter. I nudge to try to get it back on track. Every time I visit, it changes again, every time I return, I find a new story pressed between covers, new original art in my archives, with me the only one to notice the difference. With me to read it all over again to learn once again what my story has become. To hunt for clues as to how to restore it back to what I remember. And to wonder—What if things have changed that even I don’t remember anymore?”
Gordy finds he has nothing to say.
“I think it’s time to talk about the next set of dimensions.” Landrude becomes deliberate again. “These are the dimensions of the Everythings. If the sixth dimension is the sum of all possibility across all existing space and all existing time, then the sixth dimension is, simply, the Everything of everything. All that is and all that ever could be. So, how, you ask—or you do if I say you do—how do you go beyond Everything? Eh? How do you pull that trick off? In fact, it’s the simplest thing. Imagine a realm where some—or all—of the most foundational rules governing the universe are…different. Where those originating points, infinite before even approaching the first dimension, began assembling themselves according to some scheme other than proximity. Where space isn’t even space, where time isn’t even time. Where time is made of magnetism. Where magnetism is made of lettuce.