Charlene pirouettes the makeup brush through the contours in her face, evening out every imbalanced hue into a uniform carmel-sandyness. She smacks on some magenta lipstick, darkens lashes homegrown and foreign, shadows eyes, conceals, and uproots some rebel eyebrow and chin hairs. It’s complex math she’s perfected into a few minutes through years of diligence.
A rap-tap at the front door summons her. She shimmies across her apartment’s creaking wood floorboards and flips open the door with a light wrist twist. Pascal stands there, smiling dorkishly behind a vibrant bouquet. “Yeeee!” Charlene squeaks and yanks the flowers, sending several petals petering to their deaths. She ushers her lover down the hallway, into the dining room wooden chair, where she scoops him aggressive heaps of duck pasta, then plops in the opposing chair, poised to relish the sight of his eyes and cheeks bulging with lingual pleasure. She rattles off questions about his day at the penitentiary (as a guard), to which he answers through mouthfuls of mallard. “Honestly though baby, those inmates are so lucky to have you there. They need to start treating you like it. They could have a guard that’s like a drill sergeant.” Pascal bobbles his head left and right a moment. “Mmm… Actually I kinda am.” “Oh really?” “Mm mm.” “Oh. Ohhhh...” Charlene wiggles her shoulders. “R’you gonna have any?” “No, I don’t need any. By the way, you know what day it is right?” Pascal rapid eye blinks. Charlene snatches a wrapped box from atop the refrigerator and slides it next to him. Pascal pauses chewing to raise an eyebrow and cock his head. He spreads his mouth apart to create a smile, unwraps the gift, revealing a lidded box, which he uncloisters to discover a globe paperweight. He holds it up to the light to see two figures cut in the glass center in the likeness of Charlene and Pascal. “Wow. Thank you darling. What is this for?” “It’s our 12 week anniversary!” “Ahhh! But we just celebrated our 10 week-” “Two weeks ago!” She scuttles next to him and caresses his upper back as they both admire the piece. Pascal rolls it around in his fingers, gazing upon their crystal ball selves from several angles. Charlene rubs his neck, as though attempting to massage some words out his throat. “Pasc?” Pascal lowers the ball in his lap. “This isn’t going to work, Charlene,” he speaks in a low registry that’s foreign to Charlene’s ears. All of Charlene’s internal organs freeze at the sound of this imposter’s voice. “Wha-?” It’s just not working. I love you a lot. But I’m not right for you. You’re an amazing person. You deserve someone just as amazing.” Charlene’s heart feels to be the sole body part that functions, and at a hyperdrive pace to make up for the rest of her deadened self. “I don’t get it. What did I do wrong?” “Nothing. You did everything perfect. Really perfect. So perfect that I don’t know, it almost feels like… I don’t know. You’re just amazing. I’m not. I’m normal. You deserve better - deserve amazing.” Pascal places the paperweight back in the box. He stands up with an ease that painfully contrasts with Charlene’s rigor mortis. She watches this alternate reality play out as her lover gathers his jacket, shoes, and wallet. Suddenly, she realizes she was wrong; her limbs are in fact airy and light. All weight – and meaning – has lifted! She flitters over to him and grabs his shoulders, which only feel like buzzing sand at the moment. “I don’t understa-” Charlene chokes on a super dry “-nd”, saved by a sharp breath thereafter. Pascal wraps her in bony arms and holds her close to his ribcage. He speaks with a soft voice that careens into sobs every few words, “I’ll come back if you love yourself. You need to be with you for a while. You need to date you. Love you. You’re too amazing. I don’t know how else to say it.” Gobsmacked, Charlene watches Pascal unravel himself from her, and whisk out her life through her front door. Whenever Charlene realizes that she’s dreaming, her trick is to run to the nearest liquid and dip her head in. She always wakes up. She dashes into the bathroom and douses her head in a frigid shower stream, signaling that she’s on the waking side of consciousness, which she’d sourly suspected. Water dots her phone as she emergency messages her best friends group text. Within an hour two childhood friends and a fiancee by association surround her balled, balling figure on the sofa, mustering awkward accolades of concern. “He said I-I need to date myself. Like he was saying I don’t love myself enough or s-something. It’s the same thing that Ryan said, and Max sort of said that too.” All three friends freeze, creating a roaring silence that Jasmine desperately attempts to fill by blurting the obvious, “Wwwwwell baby, maybe that’s something to think about.” She hides a grimace at her poor efforts. “You mean you don’t think I love myself either? Just because I need a man? I love myself enough to know I’m only happy if I’m dating someone. I just didn’t know it would become so many someones.” Charlene’s eyes glitter with tears. Rodney, the friend-by-coital-association, pipes up. “You know how sometimes when life keeps telling you something, and at some point you realize you’re the common denominator?” Charlene looks point blank at Rodney. “So I’m the lowest common denominator? That’s why my relationships always shatter? I push on them too hard?!” Charlene jumps up off the couch and saunters into the bedroom, strips her full-length mirror off the wall in one rip, marches back into the dining room, and sticks it on the chair recently abandoned by Pascal. “Fine. I’ll fucking date myself. Is this what you people want?!” Charlene locks eyes with herself in the mirror and growls. She forks a clump of cold pasta and stuffs it in her mouth. “Look,” she muffles through pasta, “I’m Lady and the Tramp! Are you guys happy yet?” She adjoins a strand of dangling pasta with her glassed self’s complimentary piece, forming a perfect mouth-to-mouth strand before she aggressively slurps it, sloshing pasta sauce across her own face and eye, resulting in a pink tint overlaying half her vision. She studies her rosied reflection. Her face scrunches. Rodney, Jasmine, and Tara clench various orifices, recognizing the warning signs of when their middle school buddy is poised to row off the waterfall of feelings. But when Charlene breaks into giggles, they glance at each other, mouths agape. “I look funny.” Jasmine and Tara exchange sideways shrugs to one another. Charlene wipes her face with the carcass of Pascal’s paper towel. She does the same for some splotches across her mirror self too, who echoes the favor in perfect stride. She leans in to her self. The identical ladies’ grins blossom into toothy smiles. “He he. I’m pretty.” The three friends side glance one another, risking only minimal neck motion, as though afraid to crack the tender miracle before them. Charlene and her mirror self gaze at each other and lightly tap their fingers against each other in graceful union. “Goodness…” The mirrored clone and she purse their lips at each other. She teeth-squeeks, “Vvvvvwah. Vvvvvvvvvwah. Vvwah-vvwah.” “Charlene, do you want to-?” “GAAH!” Charlene shrieks, spinning around. “Oh, Ha!” She giggles, touching her chest. “I forgot you guys were there a second. Um. I think I’m good. You guys can go actually.” “Are... you sure Char? I don’t know if you really want-” “I’m sure.” She flits over to them, bestowing nice but brief hugs. “Love you guys. Thanks for being there for me. Your shoes are over here.” She bids them a smile as they push themselves back into their jackets, shoes, and purses. “Love you guys,” Charlene singsongs as she pushes the door closed behind them. She swoops back over to the mirror, picks it up and spins in place, watching the overhead lighting dancing through the angles on her face. She can’t remember the last time she looked at her own eyes rather than the blotches or bags around them. She places the mirror back in the seat, which she straddles, becoming a hungry voyeur to her mirror self, who lights up her own face with pleasure as she caresses her bosom and stomach. It was as if the lack of sensation from Pascal had factory reset her sense of touch, which now felt vibrant. Her skin felt like fresh brie and her lips felt like tangerine pieces. She smashes them against the lips of her counterpart, gazing hazily at her self. “Fucking hot,” she whispers to her mute counterpart. Charlene is stunned to see her reflection grab the paperweight off the mirror table and stick it underneath her, where it disappears from view. She locks eyes with her self, mesmerized by the pleasure seeping across her face as she bobs up and down. How could anyone dump this? Enthralled, she reaches crescendo, tilts forward, and promptly shatters the glass under her hands. Shards crash down all around her hands as she finishes descending. Charlene glares at the blank rectangle of plywood, once again abandoned by a budding new relationship. She rises slowly, gasping at the mess of glass before her. From within hundreds of fragmented angles, her self stares back at her; her own glorious Picasso, softened by a haze of tears, and accompanied by the music of laughter.
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Click here to read Part 1.
Hello again, my little Dandy. I last left off when Gloria saved my experiment and soul from the spiraled towers in my own brain. I was desperate to publish the results of what we’d found, but Gloria insisted I needed to locate the source of the down ticks. She told me it would be the difference between being a Joseph Swan, or a Thomas Edison. She helped me to dream big. She also showered me with love and attention, so I readily acquiesced. It meant giving up my postdoctoral position with the University. Gloria and I bought a modest two-story walk-up in the Pullman neighborhood, farther south than Hyde Park. The neighborhood was a bit frightful, but Gloria loved the danger, and it had a noticeable black art presence that inspired her. It was also affordable, and the house had a large basement cellar in which I could build a laboratory. We married and conceived you almost right away, and as your mother became pregnant with you, I slowly built myself a laboratory designed to provide enough power to build electron beam guns. My hypothesis was that the down ticks were the presence of positrons, which I presumed to be the building blocks of the human soul or mind. If I could bind beams of electrons to the positrons, then I could capture their exact location, and engineer electric extensions of the positrons. Normally, the positrons exit the eyes of the beholder, and shoot and disperse into nothingness. But if I managed to attach beams of electrons to them, their net charge would neutralize, and become self sustaining strands of electricity, almost like hair extensions that would come directly from the subject’s neuronal impulses, and might even be controllable by his or her thoughts. Over the next several years, I worked on building these copper crowns: headdresses that conducted electricity, and were able to funnel electron beams into specific parts of the human brain. They were thin like halos, but with little spokes like crowns, and could be adjusted by the millimeter to pinpoint different nodes of the brain, hunting for the location of the human soul. With no human subjects, I started using the crowns to shoot the electricity into my own brain, trying every possible combination of electrons, angles, and intensities to get them to hook onto a receptive ray of positrons. I became buried in my work, obsessed with finding the right combinations. Before I knew it, months had passed by, and you were getting bigger and smarter. Your mother spent your early childhood with you, mostly upstairs in the attic where her art studio was. She would paint her masterpieces with you next to her, and be featured in art shows around different neighborhoods of Chicago and usually sell almost every single one. She would take you to events and charity functions. You probably have very early memories of those times; almost none of which I had a chance to see. Sometimes when I would abandon my scientific pursuits for the day I would walk up to the attic and hear her speaking to you excitedly in some muffled language, making you giggle and shriek in delight. A few years went by and my experiment was, once again, proving fruitless. Worse, I had been alone so long, shooting myself with electricity, it began altering my brain chemistry. I was losing weight and getting streaks of gray in my hair. I became paranoid and thinly strung. There were times when I would hear you and your mother in her studio where I swear I could almost hear other voices in there. I would ask her about what you two talk about alone and she said she was teaching you about art and the world, and never went into specifics. I remember one day after zapping parts in my brain for hours, I came up to the kitchen and you two were having dinner, and your mother was talking to you. “You will be the queen of all the land. Can you hear them, my darling? Can you hear them applauding for you? Thousands of them right now!” “Yeah I can hear them!” “Yes, you can, you can!” I had entered and immediately started sobbing. “What’s wrong, Angel Head?” asked your Mother, tossing back her fiery red hair and caressing my back. “I’m exhausted and I’m losing all my time with you and Kara. I’m fading, honey. I’m losing my memory. I’m losing my ability to think. I’m losing my self down there.” For the next six months, she was glued to my side. She vowed to change, to make it up to me, but she was unable to complete nearly as many art pieces during that time, and our profits suffered from the subsequent art galleries. She tried staying up late to create more, but the quality of her work suffered. She became tired like I did, so finally I told her I freed her of that obligation, with the promise that once I discovered the link to the positrons, we would become a cohesive family again. But around this time, I started paying closer attention to the vocal tones that Gloria would take with you when talking to you in her gallery. I would frequently hear her going on long-winded conversations, or excitable soliloquies that seemed almost too complex for a child. I could never fully make out most of the words, because they were so muffled from the upstairs attic, and usually when I crept closer to make them out, she would cease. I also realized you weren’t always responding to her. I started to grow paranoid, wondering what exactly she was telling you, because it just seemed odd. It almost sounded like she was in full conversation with you, without you talking back to her. She would frequently seem to pause suddenly and then start again, as if listening and responding. I figured it was part of her creative process, and you certainly seemed attached to her, so I did my best to hide my burgeoning paranoia, also aware that it was partially because of the electro shock therapy I was giving myself. Around November of 1995, Gloria was featured in an art gallery in Woodlawn. We took you on opening night. There was something very different about this show, compared to her others. Your mother’s art had always been characterized by its beautiful chaos. She would commonly depict figures melting into messy swirls, with mismatched colors, textures, and even styles. Of course, the genius was that one woman was able to master so many different styles; that’s what made her work so immediately stand out from so many others. But this show was different; all the works were neat and tidy. Every canvas had cohesion from top to bottom. There was symmetry, right angles, recognizable patterns, consistency, and color themes. Her usual crowd, a gaggle of Chicago’s supposed upper crust who’d succumb to both her works and electric personality (as did I), gazed upon the works that night with increasingly baffled faces. Gloria stood up on a little platform stage near the windowed entrance to the gallery and addressed her patrons. “Thank you all for attending my newest exhibit, titled, The Second Bang. I invite you all to join me in a new perspective on the world that will soon unfold. Leave the person behind who would pay 800 papers with white guy heads on them for a piece of square I stained with pigments that reflect the lights that you interpret as reflecting your life. In this new land, let us arbitrarily choose colors, paints, music, poetry as the new currency. I’m selling my works tonight for two well-constructed poems – rap form preferred, an aria with piano accompaniment, or a clay statue of any greek god or a Muppet. Human cash will be rejected. Finally, I’m delighted to announce that this will be my last art show ever.” A murmur danced through the room. A couple patrons glanced at me, as if I were wise to the information. “In the next couple of weeks, my husband – the one trying backing into the corner there – will announce a scientific breakthrough that will transform our lives in a way that a stained canvas could merely suggest.” More of Gloria’s patrons turned to me, with open, expectant mouths. I had flashes of zombie films. “Daddy Lion, ow,” you said to me. I had been squeezing your shoulders. “Sorry, Dandy.” After the show, we sat down on the number 3 bus. There were only so many darkened rows of houses and business front shops I could gaze at before it came up. “Why did you tell all your buyers you were done with art?” “Oh, I’m not done with art, Honey Head. I’m just done with the hollow masturbation of art exhibits.” She smiled sweetly, as though it made crystal shimmering sense. “I don’t understand how you can just declare that,” I said beneath my breath, trying to avoid you hearing, sandwiched between us and dozing as your little head bobbed to the bumping of the bus. “It’s our only source of income. Meanwhile I’m down in a basement zapping my brain with electricity, losing my ability to think straight. Why would you tell everyone that?” “I didn’t tell them anything. I was only relaying what I know to be true.” “We don’t have the room to gamble like that, Glo. We have a daughter for Christ’s sake.” “What if I were to tell you that Christ was the one who told me?” Gloria smirked, eyes aglow with electric intoxication. “Jesus Christ herself told me that you’re about to discover the positron receptor.” “This isn’t funny, honey.” “I know – it’s uproarious!” she whispered gleefully. I watched her face, praying for her to break into a laugh, but she held her sincerity, and my stomach tightened inside my body. Later that night, we put you to bed, and I pretended to work in the laboratory basement, but more trying to handle my thoughts spinning in place, thinking back to all the times I heard your mother talking to herself or you inside her studio. I’d always assumed it was a means of artistic process, or her way of bonding with you. But the comment she made on the bus was making that warm assumption unravel, and I glanced at the many electric halos I’d designed, shocked that I allowed someone to talk me into destroying my own mind. I slowly ascended the stairs to the second floor, and opened the bedroom door to find out your Mother on the floor, surrounded by varingly scented candles and knees crossed, deep in a meditation. I sat down on the edge of the bed, facing her. “Glo, can you explain to me what you meant on the bus before?” “I know you did not expect to hear it, Dearest,” she said, with eyes still closed. “I would have told you beforehand, but this is our future we’re talking about, and I couldn’t risk logic and careful planning to ruin it.” “I hear you talking to yourself.” “And?” “I don’t think it’s normal.” “If I were normal, my Angel Bread, I would not have learned how to scream in colors or cry in textures.” “But now you’re beginning to treat our financial future like some random canvas you’re working on.” “Paintbrushes, acrylics, and eisels have become tiresome, my Love’s Love. How impotent they are. I yearn to ascend to a level of art where human spirit is the paint, and happenstance is the canvas.” “Honey,” I remember clasping her hand, desperate to break through to her. “I think you have a form of psychosis. We can live with it, and get help, but you have to see it.” She opened her eyes and uncrossed her legs, getting on all fours, and crawling towards me from her meditation mat among the candles. Her gaze sharpened into me in a way they hadn’t had since the day we pseudo-met in the Regenstein Library. “I told my, my Angel Head, that if you found the connection, you would be mine forever. You think I am quitting selling art. Nay. I am burgeoning onto the greatest art project any single mankind member has or will fathom. In fact, I did not conceive of it. It has been whispered into the minds of anyone who wanted to hear it for longer than human records account. You can recognize the few who’ve heard it, by how noticeably the concept broke their mind, and entrapped them into endless soliloquies to the dead airs under bridges, train terminals, alleyways, and roads; those who speak back to the ones who whisper to all of us.” Your mother searched my eyes. “My lab coated angel, have you really never felt any of this? Are you really that Inward?” She touched my wrist. “I would have thought that inklings would have permeated by now. That boy in the library, who conceived the greatest idea in modern science; that was the boy I had faith in.” She kissed my cheek and I lay back on my pillow, feeling my stomach become impregnated with a stagnant panic. It’s one thing to be blindsided by someone you love, but another by someone you created a living being with. The feeling sat in my stomach all night like food poisoning, dragging me into frenetic dreams of you, your mother, and I running against raging winds in some kind of foreign fields made of twinkling pink rocks. BOOM CRACK. I whipped sideways out of bed, blasted by inertia from this sudden noise, crashed against the wall, clamored into the hallway and through your door, scooped you out of bed amid your wakeful sobs, and clutched you to my chest as I frantically searched for your mother. I scurried down two flights of stairs to into basement lab, holding your head close so you could not see. There was a smell of burnt flesh and hair, and then the sight of your mother’s bare feet on the floor sideways. I dashed back up to the living room and plopped you on the sofa. Your crying was easing, and I told you to stay put and wait for me. I darted back down the stairs, running to Gloria’s side. She was splayed out on the floor in the middle of my lab. Her head was turned unnaturally sideways, eyes open but unmoving, and faintly breathing. There was a burn gash across the top right of her forehead and a little into her scalp, where her hair was singed off. The remainder of her hair was standing straight on end. I shook her shoulders. “Gloria! Gloria!” Even though she was breathing, I put my lips to hers to begin CPR, but the moment our lips connected she gasped and reanimated. “Gloria!” She sat up straight, eyes intensely glazed over. Her hair continued to stand on end, like a forgotten Barbie doll. The burn on her forehead and scalp was beginning to flare up. “Honey, you’re burned. What happened?” Without breaking her unfocused gaze, she pointed across the room. On the floor a few yards away was one of the copper crowns, with blue and gold static electricity flowing around it like infinite braid loops, self sustaining and unbreaking, just like I had theorized. “You discovered it!” Gloria pushed herself up onto her knees, and tried get up on her feet, but wobbled. “Baby!” I grabbed her to help her, but she gently brushed my arm away. “Honey, you’re hurt. You’re burned.” Again, she pushed herself up to her feet, this time making it on shaky legs, and hobbled towards the stairs, her gaze still locked in a non-focus. Before she reached the steps I grabbed her elbow to help her up, but she pulled it away. “Honey, we need to get you checked out.” As she slowly ascended, I heard your pitter patter and you appeared at the top of the stairs. “Mama? Mama!” You reached for her, but she ignored you, and once reaching the top of the stairs, walked past you. You pined for her to hold you, grabbing at her legs as she walked through the house, whining for her attention. I swooped you up and tried to comfort you in my arms as Gloria ascended the stairwells to her studio, but you screamed and struggled for her so vehemently I released you and you scampered up the steps and managed to make it inside before she shut the door. As silently as I could, I snuck upstairs and put my ear to the attic door, hoping to hear something, but only silence. For the first time in my marriage, I was scared for your safety. I sunk to the floor outside the door, still reeling from the shock of tonight’s events. The electric crown had been created exactly as I’d hypothesized, but Gloria had been the one to activate it, and I had never expected that to occur. Firstly, it had shocked her unconscious – did that mean the crown could not be worn? Furthermore, I knew that when the electron beams combined with the positrons in the mind, that some of it would be likely removed from the brain. I was willing to sacrifice my own mind for the success of this project, in the name of science and providing a plentiful life for you and your mother. I had been the one blasting my own gray matter in that lab for years, unsure what the effects would be when it finally activated. The fact that the crown had instead activated on your Mother’s head was as upsetting as it was exciting. After an hour or so, I grew weary. I walked down to the basement, gazed upon the copper halo, aglow in static elec- and positricity, swinging back and forth around the crown, mirroring its own negative and positive charges in symmetrical waves. I placed the crown in my insulated supply case and wandered back upstairs, lost in a reverberation between gleeful and doubtful thoughts, much like the crown itself. As I neared the bedrooms, I heard bemoaning from the beyond attic door above. “...It was nothing like you said. You were dead wrong. Everything drained of color. Everyone drained of passions… I saw all of it. I was at a nexus point. The arc laid out for me to see… Oh.” And then once again, dead silence. Still on the outside in so many ways, I gave up, and went to bed, where my exhausted mind begged my shell shocked body to succumb to sleep. I must have dozed off in some capacity because I was suddenly aware of sunlight and the smell of eggs, bacon, and coffee. I sat up in bed, and had to instruct my body to do all of the things it naturally does: swing my legs off the bed, get dressed, brush my teeth, and go downstairs. I trembled in fear as I entered through the living room and into the kitchen, where your mother in her nightgown was frying food at the stovetop. Her hair had mostly gone back down closer to her shoulders, but not fully. The burn on her head was pustulating. You were sitting at the table, playing with your Brio trains. “Hi Daddy Lion!” you said upon seeing me. “Hi Dandy Lion. Hi Dear.” Gloria floated through the kitchen and planted a kiss on my cheek, that popped with a static shock. “Good morning Angel Head!” she said with a smile and neck twitch. “You’re just in time for eggs and French toast! Sit!” I moved gingerly towards my seat, as though sudden movements could shatter the atmosphere, and sat down to a farm animal-themed place setting I hadn’t seen since Thanksgiving, empty plate, empty mug, silverware, and neatly folded napkin. “Coffee?” she asked me, coming over with a pot of coffee, pouring it into the empty mug. “Thank you, my love,” I said slowly. Gloria served you a heap of eggs, bacon, and French toast. Your eyes lit up watching the food pile up higher than your head. “Eat up sweetie!” You wasted no time beginning to nosh on the pile of food. You started by using a fork, then quickly gave up and used your hands instead. “And for you my darling.” Gloria filled my plate with a huge helping of each. “Thank you, Glo.” She replied with a smile that stretched just a bit too wide in either direction. She served herself on her plate, put the pan on the stove, and sat down at her seat. “Shall we pray?” I cocked my head in confusion. “Hm?” She held her hands out, and I grabbed one. You followed suit, reaching over the table to grab her other. “Dear gods. We pray for you. All the people walking on Earth, commanding you to help them. We pray for you for once. Allow us to help you. Allow us to tend your wounds. Allow us to erect you into the gods that you promised to become. Thank you for incurring the pain of the world. We are sorry we abandoned you. Amen.” She unclasped hands and began eating. “Everything good, honey?” I said nearly underneath my breath. “Of course. Everything good for you Honey Head?” she responded cheerfully. “If you say so…” “Why would I say otherwise?” “I don’t know,” I said, trying to speak without moving my lips. “Maybe because last night you were almost electrocuted to death, and spent the night arguing with invisible people in your studio?” I gasped at myself, unaware that I was going to say that. She smiled at me. “More coffee dear?” she got up and ran to the coffee pot. I looked down; my mug was still full because I had not taken a sip. She bustled back over to the table and poured coffee into the mug, which quickly overflowed all over the table, sopping the place setting mat. Coffee began spilling over the edges of the table, onto the floor and my legs. You started pointing and laughing in glee. She winked and fluttered back into the kitchen. “I’ll make some more.” She hurriedly scooped more coffee and water into the coffee maker. “Do you want more French toast, darling?” “Yes!” you exclaimed, despite not getting through a fraction of your plate. Gloria enthusiastically flipped on the stovetop burner, throwing in a few pieces of sliced bread, butter, and cracked a few eggs on the edge of the pan, some of which made it in. Then she opened the refrigerator and scooped armfuls of ingredients, jars, and bottles and carried them to the counter, with several falling and shattering on the floor. She unscrewed indiscriminately, throwing all into the pan – milk, peanut butter, cottage cheese, pickles, cheese, cola. I stood up gingerly, treading the heavy air to the kitchen. She hummed while stirring the ingredients, several of which poured over the edge and caused the burner to start smoking. I looked at her bare feet, standing in broken glass, and stained with strawberry jam, tabasco sauce, blood, or all. “Glo. You’re bleeding.” “Nonsense!” “Glo. Please stop.” “Our baby wants French toast!” She glanced at me like I was being absurd. She tasted the mixture with one finger. Smoke was now steadily rising from the burner. “A few more minutes.” “My Love, I need you to please stop.” I softly grabbed her elbow and she turned towards me, slipping on the floor, slamming against the stove. I tried pulling her towards me but she slipped backward, the pan falling on her head. I grabbed the pan with my bare hand, throwing it an opposing direction, yelping in searing pain, and grabbed Gloria by her elbow to lift her off the floor. “MAMA!” you cried, running towards us. I let go of your mother, who hit the floor again, to body block you from getting close. “KARA! GO!” I bellowed. You obeyed and I turned back to your mother, who was steadying herself upward. I reached for her and again, she resisted my touch. “Oh dear. We made a mess. I’ll take care of it.” “No, we’re going to the hospital.” I turned off the stovetop burner while eyeing her brand new sweltering blister across the other side of her head. “Mama!” you cried again. I swiveled around and scooped you up so that you wouldn’t come close. Gloria, now covered in a mess of condiments, blood, and burns, made a move to come touch you in my arms and I held you away from her. “Don’t,” I hissed. You cried and begged for her in my arms, and your mother gazed at both of us, oozing in liquids. “Honey,” she said to you, “your Father doesn’t want me seeing you anymore.” “No!” you cried out. “And I think he’s right.” She promptly exited the kitchen. I tried soothing you, but you were wild with angst and tears. In a few minutes she reappeared, still messy, barefoot, and bleeding, but holding a suitcase. “Thank you for being my family. I’ll miss you both.” “MAMA!” you shrieked from within my arms. “Not anymore, Sweetness. I am not your Mother anymore.” You screamed with every stitch of your lungs. She smiled at you, her new burn beginning to puss. “Baby, don’t leave!” I begged her. “I don’t want you to leave! You can’t leave! Stay here!” “That’s wonderful, dear,” she said, nodding. Then she swiftly turned and walked out the back door, leaving you writhing in my arms, and me dumbfounded and aghast. Please forgive me, my darling Dandy. These memories are nerve wrenchingly painful to write to paper. I wanted to finish the tale, but this is all my body can bear at the moment. I’ll write you one final letter after this, and I promise I will reach the conclusion. I hope this finds you. My will to live depends on it. Love, Lion Krishna banged an asteroid gavel on the hard surface of space.
“Created Creators, the every Ones, convene!” The spiritual remnants of the hopes of human life popped into the Milky Way space that cloistered its pearl, Earth, with neatly hollowed ridges aligning its open shell, where everyone’s every One gathered and sat themselves on uninhabited planets and moons. Krishna gazed upon her comrades. “As the gods of our gods, who created us in their images to have created them in ours, we find ourselves in an awkward position.” “I have to agree,” piped up Mohammad, swirling his hand forward dramatically. “These Earth creatures who imagined us into existence are kinda….” he struggles for the right word. “...Bad,” said Buddha. “Yeah, bad,” agreed Mohammad among a murmur of consent. “Bro, it is bad.” said Moses. “It’s like for every loving act they do, like charity, or self sacrifice, or shredding a gnarly electric violin riff; there’s at least ten other acts of pure grade douchery.” “Even the best of them are half crappy,” said Karma, twirling her supernova-dyed hair. “It feels, like, toxic? Like hard to be around? Especially since they expect me to go around and come around constantly, literally. They’re just like – bllllll” she holds her arms out and shakes them as though grossed out. “They’re just a lot.” Buddha stared long and hard at his niece. “I really wish you would move back home, dear one.” “And the things they’re doing in my name,” continued Mohammad. “It’s like, first you create me as your Creator, okay fine. That’s fine. It requires me to distort the great arc of the Fourth’s time-space to make it work, but fine, I’m happy to do it. But then after they create me, and connect me to their hearts, then they regularly torture each other in my name. Whoa! What do you do with that? That’s more gaslighting than the planet Jupiter here. Is that why they created me? Why did they make me? Why am I alive? Why are my billions of gods abandoning me?” “Actually,” said Science, a male god, with a dry drawl. He was suffering from a crippling osteoporosis so bad that his entire body was completely inverted, and his voice was muffled into his rear end. “They didn’t abandon you, because technically their origins are chimpanzee.” “Yes, so actually,” continued Reason, his female counterpart who was also suffering from the same deformity. “Their behaviors are realistically remnants of their ingrained animalistic tendencies of territory guarding and aggression.” “Yeah, so actually and factually,” continued Science, “entree into consciousness and reason is still so new that it’s mired by millions of years of animal instincts caked into their genetics.” “Yeah, so theoretically,” drawled Reason, “Their contradictions are their inner struggles between these two states; the heaven of consciousness, and the hell of animalhood.” But due to the pair’s deformity, the other deities could only hear muffled mumblings. “Ummm,” Krishna looked back and forth at the other Ones. “Did anyone else understand that?” Mohammad shook his head. “They’ve grown so far up their own asses, I can’t hear anything.” “They’re dying off soon anyway,” Krishna whispered quietly. “Actually-” started Reason, before being cut off. “I know they created me to be fake, but I need to be real a moment.” Santa Claus piped up. “Their contradictions slay me. First, they create me to sort out the nice and naughty, as though they’re not all both, but fine, I’ll get the damn job done. Then they declare I give coal to the naughty ones, when the majority of them are on the naughty list for using fossil fuels. It’s like punishing an arsonist with matches, I’ve had it up to my fat tits with these people.” “I really hate to judge,” said Jesus. “Oh please, Jeez. Mirror, mirror, who’s the judgiest of all.” Mohammad rolls his eyes so hard they create tiny black holes that accidentally swallow up a few nearby moons. “Fine, exposed,” Jesus admits. “Well, I’m doing this thing where I don’t judge, but to be completely objective, why would we keep ourselves beholden to what amounts to a mound of bidepal flesh ants?” “Oooooooohhhhh!!” said Buddha. “Go girl, go!” “I’m not trying to be holier than thou, I’m just actually asking.” “Oh please, you’re holier than the boughs of a thousand thous,” jabbed Mohammad. “Girl, don’t,” said Jesus. “Oh is that a commandment?” said Mohammad with a sly grin. “Why don’t you put it in stone, bish?” “Oooooooohhhh!” hollered Buddha. “Thanks, Mo mo. No mo from Mo Mo. Okay? That’s a no no, Mo Mo.” “Someone’s such a sassy lassy. I thought you were Miss turn-the-other-cheek.” “Yes but I decided I didn’t want to steal your only talent.” “OHHHHH!!!!” cried Buddha, jumping up and down in joy on some poor turquoise moon that fractured under his weight. “She win, she win!” Mohammad playfully kicked Jesus on his rear and Jesus slapped him back, and the boys broke into a slapping fit, grabbing each other by the hair, howling and laughing. “Girls,” said Krishna, the male deity covered in jewelry and a headdress of peacock feathers, “Focus. Every minute we waste is hundreds of years for our Creator Creatures.” “What are we going to do?!” piped up Santa Claus. “In my personal opinion,” started Moses. “This is an ancient problem, and requires an ancient solution.” “Are you talking about our Dads?” asked Mohammad. “Yes.” “Where are they?” asked Krishna. “They were getting a bit old and loud, so we put then in a nice nursing home.” “Oh my billions of gods, you put them in Limbo?” Jesus defended himself, “It’s clean there. They like it.” “Can you go get them?” Moses, Mohammad, and Jesus left to get their two Fathers, and pulled them out of their sterile, white environments and wheeled them to the cosmic forum where the thousands of Ones awaited. “Dad,” said Jesus. “We need your help.” Yahweh, almost more white beard than discernible idol at this point, shouted through his overgrown tufts of hair. “Blast the sinners. Burn the sodomites!” His shouting riled up Allah, who was equally as bushy. “Cast the disbeliever into hell. Punish the faithless!” “Sacrifice their firstborns. Murder the uncircumcised!” “Thanks for that, Dad and Uncle,” said Mohammad. “Do you have a solution for the problem with the Earthdwellers?” “FLOOD THEM.” “100 YEARS OF DARKNESS.” The rest of the Created Creators glanced at each other. “Maybe,” mumbled Krishna, rubbing his chin, “that is the most merciful thing we can do.” Karma rebutted, “I don’t know if we should put that energy out there. We’ll be extinguishing the beautiful parts of them too.” “Yea, bros. Think of the electric violins,” says Moses. “But,” said Buddha, “Didn’t they create us to enact judgment upon them? Didn’t they create us for this very circumstance? No matter how much beauty they have if it means even just one more child is imprisoned and mangled, isn’t none of that beauty worth it?” “You’re so smart, Buddha,” says Jesus. “Yeah, let’s kill them.” “But how?” “Flood?” “Volcano eruptions?” “Earthquake?” “Meteor?” “No, the gods of the lizards tried that, and then we ended up with these.” “You’re all so medieval,” says Krishna. “All we need to do is extinguish the sun. Then they all go out in a freezing numbness of black. The essence of peace.” “I don’t feel right about this,” says Karma. “This feels toxic.” “We need to pray.” “To whom?” “Our gods. Duh. We pray to them. Listen to them. Ask them what they want.” The consensus was agreed upon: pray. The human created Gods kneed themselves on the ridges of space, perfect pews, glittering with suns and moons, and bent forward into their human creators and listened to them. The buzzings of millions of their gods overcame them. They felt god; the Human Spirit, triumphant, dirty, and strong. “They want to live,” gasped Jesus. “Their desperate need to live and thrive – that is the source of them. That is their god,” said an astonished Karma. “We can’t let them die,” remarked Buddha. Krishna looked around at the other deities, astounded in love for their billions of Creator Creatures and swiftly extinguished the sun with two fingers. The heated Earth pearl froze over instantly, and the thousands of Ones welcomed their creators with open arms. The newly departed souls poured into the bellies of their created Creators, reuniting with all the familiar souls they knew on the pearl. “Come, come, do not fret,” said Krishna to all the new souls who flocked back into his womb. “We’ll find a new flesh into which you may commune. We’ll do it all over again. We’ll get it right eventually. And then someday, we will finally be birthed into life through you.” My Dear, my Dandy, please forgive me. I lived two lives; one with you, and one without you. Nothing else that happened to me, not even my imprisonment, altered me as much as your absence. Please, understand what happened. I’ll start from the beginning. See, 23 years ago... I sat in the University of Chicago Regenstein Library, staring at my brand new tape recorder; tiny, sleek, and a light 12 plus pound silver brick. Oh, the 1990s technology. I imagined in the 2000s, they’d be the size of one’s palm. The entire cassette tape was spooled on the left-side; completely blank and poised for me. Almost erotic, virginal, ready to take in my Postdoc research proposal; my entire reason for staying at the University. I opened my mouth to explain how I would submit a proposal based on my successful dissertation, furthering to monitor the effects of ionizing radiation on intra-nuclear pairings of homologous heterochromatin. I had only scratched the surface of radiation-induced colocalization in primary human fibroblasts! So juicy. Yet, it wouldn’t come out. I eyed, mouth gaped, the spooled tape, unable to fertilize it with my idea. I guess now that my PhD was earned, my imagination was being tickled by the confines of acceptable scientific study finally lifting off me. I felt like after this decades-long delve into factuals and analytics, I’d finally circled back to the beginning and my boyhood longings for the vast world of science were awakening. I could research anything. See, when I was a kid growing up in Miami (Missouri (although coincidentally about as Catholic as actual Miami (more really)), my family’s religion wouldn’t permeate me. I tried my hardest to let in the reverence for Christ that my parents, older siblings, and priests exuded in the pews of their church temple, but it never came for me. Instead, the vastness in my math and science textbooks confounded me. I was awestruck at the universe’s complexity. It confused me just as much as the other students, but it didn’t seem to titillate them the way it did me. Then in 4th grade, I had a teacher who explained that even if you learned every single chapter in every single textbook, it would only make up a pin drop of discoverable science. When she said that, I shrunk down to a miniscule biological organism in a species that knew nothing. I left my body and the cold metal desk I sat in, and felt like I was floating in a vast sea of Unknown, infinitely more ancient than all of us combined. That Unknown was all-knowing and all-consuming. The Design was also the Designer. For the first time in my life, I had found the churchy feelings my family prayed, swayed, and bowed in every prayer. In church, my prayers became reflections of the latest, most confusing math and science I’d learned earlier that week. Pythagoras, Faradays, and Newton became some of my saints, and their laws became my prayers. When I finally understood a concept, I became excited, then depressed, because the magic died for me, and so I had to delve further into my textbooks, and eventually other books, like an addict searching for that original high. My parents were humored by my obsession with science, but always reminded me that science was a largely phantom invented by God to trick us, aided by Satan. I know they said that to deter me, but taking them at their face value, it made me ravenously curious to find out why the God of our natural world was also such a conniving jerk. My answers were finally satiated in adolescence when I realized that my parents were the connivers. They were never openly hostile towards my scientific passions, but their inability to relate made me feel alone, and once I hit my teenage years, I saw them for what they were: well-adapted organisms that had adopted optimal survival traits conformed to their particular human ecosystem, and not much beyond that. It’s no wonder that the collective warm and fuzzy security those organisms gain in their tribal system naturally transform into communal worship of the source of their biological success: a sun god; or in their case, a son-god. The sun is the source of all sight and life on Earth, so it’s no wonder that my parent organisms told me The Son of their god is what lets them see truth and live. But being alone didn’t translate well into my teen years, when loneliness gains that extra unbearable edge. I began to really resent my parents for being baseline organisms and for a couple years made it my mission to disenchant their dearest held notions of love, god, and family. “Your Aunt Jonie loves you dearly.” “Mom, the fact that Aunt Jonie’s brain releases dopamine when she thinks about the tribe of people who’ll help her survive in times of war or famine, is not particularly extraordinary.” They grew so annoyed with me that their disinterest in my scientific passion became openly hostile. The difference is that I was a teenager and they should have been able to handle my angst better, but they were decidedly unequipped. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the anger replaced my profound passion for science. Science became a form of rebellion, and I completely lost the feeling I felt in that 4th grade classroom when I was enchanted with the great Benevolent Unknown. I no longer believed in a god. I was delighted to freak my parents out by getting accepted to a Liberal Arts school in Michigan. My mother was terrified they would literally teaching me how to be a liberal. Turns out she was kind of right. Besides the general atmosphere of the campus, I was also surrounded by scientific minds who, like me, had decided that God was nonexistent, and that religious people were too stupid to understand the complexities of the actual universe. I was also introduced to a whole other form of socialization on campus that I’d never known in Missouri. Drinking, drugs, laughter, and dancing were a norm in my dorm. I tried my best to learn how to do it, but all the years of being withdrawn; I’d already formed into my adulthood too much. My social skills were abhorrent and I quickly gave up trying. I did date a couple of great young women in my Biology program, but neither worked out. The sad truth was that that the women who really caught my eye were the boisterous, social ones at the parties were I’d wilter under social anxiety. A female who knew how to chatter, who could make a group of people laugh at the drop of a one-liner thrilled me to my bone marrow. But I was a man of science and knew that the male butterfly with dull-patterned wings was in a lower courtship league, and wouldn’t dare waste the time of the social butterflies with bright, loud wings that flittered far above him. Eventually I studied at the University of Chicago, forehead deep in studies of microbiology for graduate school, which is what lead me to this moment here, sitting among stacks of faded book spines in the dusty Regenstein Library, with vaulted ceilings, almost like the St. Peters church my family was undoubtedly in right now, clutching a blank tape recorder, ready to decide the next chapter in my scientific life. Ionizing radiation heterochromatin just seemed too small to avenge that lonely 4th grade boy who once believe in a god of science. Out of a distant window, students hobbled through the snowfall. This semester was winding down, so the library was at only half capacity, if that, as many students had already headed back to their home nests. There were a few stragglers, heads nearly literally in their books, consuming their ways through fuel scraps of snacks and caffeine. I myself nursed on a paper cup of Cappuccino as I gazed up into the lattice work of the library ceiling, letting that 4th grade imagination wash over me, whispering boyhood fantasies I once had, and hadn’t had a moment to breathe passion into me since my academic pursuits began; dinosaurs, tornadoes, robots, volcano eruptions, exploding stars – and then I wasn’t. In the splittest of a second, my eyes darted into the pupils of a woman with wild red hair staring at me across the library near the reference section. Her eyes beamed with excitement. A crazy thought jolted through my neurons: How did that just happen? And how does that ever happen? What exactly was that magical phenomenon we all experience daily, yet accept as rudimentary; when our eyes involuntarily dart into someone else’s that were staring at us, and so in reverse? It was completely unexplainable. If the eyes only receive, then what are emitting that’s detectable? Something is detectable. As this realization swirled around my brain, making me piloerect from the base of my spine, the woman kept her gaze. I imagined she could see what I was imagining, and indeed it seemed like she could. She blinked and her mouth formed a wide smile that matched her radiant eyes. I squeezed the record and play buttons on the tape recorder, and the cogs kicked into motion. I mumbled into the device: “I am going to find what people call the human soul. It’s neither just our brains, nor a ghost that lives in our bones. It is a scientific phenomenon that can be located. “The eye beams – those rays that we can sense so accurately, we involuntarily find with the speed and automation of a blink. Catching people watching you. That is my Postdoc experiment. If the windows are the eyes to the soul, there is a scientific mechanism there to be discovered, and that is what I will pursue.” Our gaze still completely unbroken, the woman stood up and gathered the books at her desk.“What is it likely to be? What do we know has an invisible and detectable ray or beam? Radioactivity. Maybe that’s all the human soul is: radioactivity. Maybe all of our personalities and lives are just controlled subatomic decay, like little walking, talking nuclear power plants, spending 70 to 100 years of slow meltdown. That would explain our presence on this Earth, consuming the planet to slow rubble, decimating animal and vegetation populations. We’re all the agents of confined radioactive decay; maybe that’s what our life force is, and that radiation can be emitted and detected from eyesight. That explains why a single glance can hurt or harm someone, like beams of ultraviolet radiation.” The woman moved around her table and started to approach me. As she walked closer and I yammered into my tape recorder, I became sure she was eyelocked with someone directly behind me. I glanced behind me a moment – no one there. “This eye-catching phenomenon we all take for granted; is beyond known science, yet as involuntary as breathing. It’s the feeling of being watched, of knowing what someone is thinking with a single look. It could even explain things like psychic powers, or evil eye curses. I just have to locate the frequency, and that frequency must live within observable scientific-” I pressed stop on the tape recorder, as the woman had now stopped in front of me, her eyes still twinkling with meaning. She wore a purple cardigan, slightly stained with various colored paints, and wore a simple brown satchel bag. She clutched books in her hand about electricity and magnetism. “You just figured it out, didn’t you?” she hissed. I blinked. “They were really with you! What did you just understand – Wait, no! Don’t tell me.” I closed my mouth, eagerly obeying this radiant lady. In between her wavy red hair was a fairly weathered, lightly wrinkled face, with freckles that reminded me of the patterns of stars. Her green eyes, transfixed gaze, hair, everything was electric. She was one of those females that made me weak to my spine. She was in command of the very air around her. “I know what it’s like when you finally get the right seed. It’s a gift. You need to nurture it. Tell you what, let’s meet at this exact time again, tomorrow. Will you meet me here?” I nodded. “Okay great. Right here, 2:42pm exactly. Let’s stand in the same exact spot. Don’t, I mean don’t, fall off the track. Agreed?” She blinked. It felt like a kiss. Then she scurried away. Mere minutes later I scaled the stairs to my third floor apartment, and made sure my roommate was gone before I lay down on my bed and rewound the tape. I pressed Play, gazing at my popcorn ceiling, yellowed by the glow of the light in the ceiling fan, bursting with excitement to relive those couple of minutes over and over and over. What luck I had immortalized it in some form! “I am going to find what people call the human soul. It’s neither just our brains, nor a ghost that lives in our bones. It is a scientific phenomenon that can be located. The eye beams – those rays that we can sense so accurately, we involuntarily find with the speed and automation of a blink. Catching people watching you. That is my Postdoc experiment. If the windows are the eyes to the s-” I pressed stop on the tape recorder. I could almost sense the popcorn paint crashing down on me. Was that what I sounded like? Oh my god, that was the worst voice I’d ever heard coming from any human being’s mouth, except maybe Mrs. Colderchant, my teacher from grade school who was known for chain smoking and screeching. Though my stomach seemed to drop through the bed, I pressed play on the recorder again. “-oul, there is a scientific mechanism there to be discovered, and that is what I will pursue. What is it likely to be? What do we know has an invisible and detectable ray or beam? Radioactivity. Maybe that’s all the human soul is: radioactivity. Maybe all of our personalities and lives are just controlled subatomic decay, like little walking, talking nuclear power plants, spending 70 to 100 years of slow meltdown. That would explain-” I pressed stop again. My voice was actually getting worse as it went on. I sounded like I was attempting to milk the consonants of my words using my tongue, as though lustful for proverbial complexity. It made me cringe to my core. That could not really be me. “-our presence on this Earth, consuming the planet to slow rubble, decimating animal and vegetation populations. We’re all the agents of confined radioactive decay; maybe that’s what our life force is, and that radiation can be emitted and detected from eyesight.” “Oh my god,” I said out loud. “You need to relearn to speak. You need to relearn to speak. You need to re. Learn. To. Speak.” I tried out different intonations and inflections. I grabbed the tape recorder and rewound back to the beginning. As I spoke, I emphasized my Os and tried to go easy on my Ts and Ls so I didn’t sound like I was trying to perform fellatio on my sentences. “My hypothesis is that the human soul is radioactivity, and can be detected through the eyes. That didn’t sound natural, did it? Okay, apologies, let me try again. My idea is that – Okay, sorry, one more time. My scientific… Oh I don’t know. Okay, I can do this. Why am I talking to myself now? Stop talking to yourself you idiot! You’re going mental.” I rewound and pressed play. “My hypothesis is that the human soul is radioactivity, and can be detected through the eyes.” “Wow, now it’s worse.” “That didn’t sound natural, did it?” “You sounded deaf.” “Okay, apologies, let me try again.” “Oh, God.” “My idea is that – Okay, sorry, one more time.” “Wow you are pathetic.” “My scientific…” “What is wrong with you?!” “Oh I don’t know.” “Please do it better.” “Okay, I can do this. Why am I talking to myself right now?” “Because you can’t speak to other human beings.” “Stop talking to yourself you absolute idiot!” “Fuck off.” “You’re going mental.” I pressed stop on the tape recorder. “Jerk.” I immediately pressed record again. “Just talk like a human being. Everyone does it. You never learned this skill because you’re a social retard. So just accept that about yourself. Today you met a beautiful, just beautiful woman, and she wants to see you again tomorrow, so you need to be able to speak out loud and not revolt her. Can you PLEASE do that?!” Shaking, I pressed stop on the tape recorder, and rewound it a bit. “Just talk like a human being. Everyone does it. You never learned this skill because you’re a social retard.” “And now you’re talking to yourself through a tape recorder.” “So just accept that about yourself, you social retard.” I blinked. I didn’t remember saying that phrase twice. “Today you met a beautiful, just beautiful woman, and she wants to see you again tomorrow. So you need to be able to speak out loud and not revolt her, like every single other woman you’ve barely had a shot with before. Can you PLEASE do that, you nerd?!” I jumped up and gasped. The tape recorder fell to the ground and the AA batteries ejected and rolled into the underbelly of my bed. “Yo. Marshall. You okay in there?” my roommate yelled, knocking on the door. “Yes!” I was shaking all over. I was certain I hadn’t said those last two words in the recording. I gulped some water from a half-drunk cup on my wooden dresser and looked at my reflection in the slightly warped mirror. My eyes were wide and face gaunt. I looked either disheveled or slightly shaggy, as my African hair was beginning poof out. I took lungful breaths, trying to let the epinephrine run out of my bloodstream. I sat down at my desk in the corner, and began writing my hypothesis from memory with a good old notebook and pen. “You can’t talk back,” I told the paper and pen. I began scribing a preliminary procedure, in which two subjects would sit facing each other. An EMF detector would be procured to look for electromagnetic frequencies and a Geiger Muller for radioactivity. I would have to devise some way to engender emotional sentiments between the sitting subjects as I monitored. I also made a note to research who in the past has tried to study this eye phenomenon. By the time I wrote all this out, it was already time for bed, and as I went to turn out the lights, I stepped on the tape recorder on the ground. I picked it up, giggled to myself about the manic episode from before. I pawed for the batteries under the bed, and slipped them back in the device. I grabbed a pair of headphones from the desk drawer and stuck the auxilliary cord in the recorder. I lay back in bed and pressed record. “Tomorrow you’re going to meet a radiant, captivating woman. Might be the most beautiful you’ve ever seen. She’s maybe 10 years older? So if you’re lucky you’ll get your cradle robbed a bit.” I played it back. My voice was more bearable. I slowed my cadence, and the gravel in my tired voice hid my throaty, nasally nerdness. The little joke at the end actually made me chuckle too. I pressed record. “You’re going to tell her about your new scientific quest. You’ll tell her that you’re going to grasp the Earthen hand of science around the human ghost. You’ll find the eye rays, and become world renowned, and then she’ll marry you. And you’ll have a gang of beautiful brilliant children, and you’ll teach them the right way to talk. And no matter what they believe, you’ll find a way to nurture it. Unless they want to maim and harm people or whatever.” I rewound the tape and listened back. It almost sounded like I had a personality! I spoke these wistful dreams into the electronic tape recorder for maybe an hour or more after that, staying up way past my bedtime. After a long while of testing my new self, I rewound to the beginning and listened to the entire thing, finally satisfied with my voice, and fell asleep. I dreamed about myself telling myself how to talk to myself in my own brain, which was made of two thick wheels of polyester film. In the morning, I woke up to the taste of Chinese produced plastic; I had been sleeping mouth open on the tape recorder corner. The headphones were askew and partially hanging from my neck, and as I hoisted myself back into gravity’s ways, I disconnected them, threw them on my desk, pressed Record on the tape recorder. “It is May 26th, 1996, and research begins.” I hustled right back to the library, being careful to use my new gravelly voice whenever interacting with someone, such as the Reference Desk gal, who helped me find studies on what turned out to be called the Psychic Starring Effect. I got a lot of practice in with her, as it took us a long time to find that term. Very long. We started in Occular, then Eye, then Pupil, then Scop-, where she, on a whim, noticed Scopaesthesia and next to it a disambiguation saying See also: Psychic Starring Effect. By that point it was already 11:45am, and I hustled through the unpublished notes on the Psychic Starring Effect, seeing that many folks had in fact studied it. Most of the experiments done seemed to have people predict if someone was staring at them from behind, or an angle they couldn’t be directly seen; several strangely through closed circuit televisions. (To this day I don’t understand how that one made sense.) And so finally I was able to sketch out a first draft of my experiment, Problem: There is an anecdotal, yet human wide phenomenon, defined by the eye’s super rectus involuntarily and rapidly pinpointing the subject’s direct vision into the pupils of an unnoticed human watcher. This purports that there is some sort of outward mechanism within human eyes that may or may not be unrelated to the intake of light (sight) or reflection thereof, which is likely too dim to be discernible. Hypothesis: There is an emission from the retina, octive nerve, or possibly even brain that transmits itself electromagnetically or radioactively from the sender (“the seer”), that can be sensed in the optical neural function of the receiver (“the seen”). This electromagnetic or radioactive frequency must be detectable by an electromagnetic field (EMF) meter or Geiger Muller. Procedure: Experiment will be conducted in three phases: 1. Record participants’ number of eyesight catches to 2-3 planted operatives during experiment registration. Will be conducted in public location such as the UofC Student Annex. Data will only be recorded for participants who complete and consent to all steps of the experiment subject registration. The number of times each experimenters catches a glance from the participants will be recorded, for a set length of time (1-2 minutes most likely). Participants will be subsequently notified of their participation, and data will only be collected for those who consent. 2. Participants will be placed opposite each other in varying distances: 2 meters, 5 meters, 10 meters, and 20 meters apart and read a series of subjectively emotional statements to each other. Cross laterally, a Geiger Muller and EMF readers will monitor the atmosphere between their eye sights. After writing this out, I continued scribbling notes, becoming lost in logistical analysis, until that woman’s springy red hair and this time yellow smock popped into my view again. The first thing I did was glance panic stricken at the clock. “Oh, are you not ready because I came so much earlier?” I don’t know about anyone else, but the person I’m panicked about seeing recognizing my panic and then calling the panic out really makes me more panicked, so as a purely homo sapien survival mechanism I nodded submissively. “Alright then. We can wait 19 more minutes until 2:42pm. I’ll be over there.” And with that she gave me an eyebrow jump, then sauntered over to the table by the Reference section I first saw her yesterday. Again, out of pure survival, I turned back to my notebooks where just seconds before I’d been scribbling madly, and now recognized that my motor skills and general analytical abilities were shot like bad brakes. The most I could comprehend from what I’d just written were the words one at a time but stringing them together into a sentence proved futile. My eyes jumped from one isolated word to the next, like little islands of refuge from having to look up and see her again. With zero recourse left, I grabbed the only thing that I knew could save my epinephrine prison – the tape recorder, and with trembling fingers mashed the play and record buttons. “Sh-sh-she – uh - she’s here and ev-vvv-verything I’m saying to you must have the air of c-casual experimentation notes. It must look foo-fluid, despite the fact that the only thing you can think of is if she’s watching you right now or not. And because you’re such a wussy willow you now find yourself in the polar opposite position of your entire experimentation – you are now consciously imagining the eye gaze of a woman you are purposefully not looking at, which probably doesn’t exist in this moment anyway. Wow. You might want to just kill yourself actually.” I rolled the little side volume wheel to very low, and then replayed what I’d just said. “-ause you’re such a wussy willow you now find yourself in the polar opposite position of your entire experimentation – you are now consciously imagining the eye gaze of a woman you are purposefully not looking at” Oh no. The intense nerd voice was back. I lost the gravel, I was going to lose her too, I knew it. She could not be witness to my real terrible voice and, well, self. I stuffed my notebook in my messenger bag and apologetically stood halfway up, fully ashamed that I was actually running. I was avoiding glancing towards her seat as I swiftly walked past the front desk towards the doors. I wrenched open the huge wooden door, and there she stood smirking. “Beat you to it. Now spill it.” Her magnetic green eyes bore into my own. She smirked devilishly, deliciously as she walked towards me. My feet instinctively moved backward as she began to steer me back into the library, completely backwards, with her gaze alone. She nodded approvingly as she careened me through various stacks of books into a nook in the wall under a large stained glass window, across from the animal psychology section. “What did you determine?” I went to open my mouth “W-” “Hold on. Before you answer,” she said, “You’re not one of those people who believe in jinxing it if you say it, right? Because you know that’s totally real; only in the fact that if you believe it’s real, then it’ll happen. There’s a whole spiritual black market with that one.” I went to shake my head and say, “N-” “Okay, good, because when I saw you yesterday I thought you weren’t that kind of person, but of course now we have to realize that since I verbalized you to not self realize the jinx, I inadvertently made it invertedly real, because now you might be worrying about not worrying a jinx into creation which essentially is an evolution of the jinx, which, again, is why the spiritual black market for that one is so robust. Let me come back another blip soon, so we can start fresh. Oh wait. I just tainted that one too didn’t I? Okay, tell you what, next time I come back you won’t say anything then either, and I won’t mention the jinx, and then I’ll come back in a whole new blip after that, and then that’s when you’ll tell me everything. I’m so excited to hear!” She blinked a kind of kiss, and left. I tell you my Beloved, I truly don’t think I would have ever put a single muster into that experiment without her promise of a promise. My faculty mentor, a gaunt and kind older man named Jack Yao, squarely rejected my proposal. Charged with encouragement from the mysterious woman, I pleaded my case in his office. “Marshall,” he began. “Your experiment is not exactly academic. Furthermore, we only appoint postdoctoral scholars based on a professional need. Your experiment proposal doesn’t enhance your abilities for employment – what government sector, industry, or nonprofit would grant you work based on this?” “Jack, if I find it – those eye rays – that would be monumental.” “Would it? I’m not sure that would really prove anything.” “Are you insane? It could be the human soul itself.” “Says who?” “What do you think it could be?” “I’m not sure.” “I’m sure this is something, Jack.” “I’ve never seen you with this much passion. Not in all the years I’ve been your faculty mentor.” “Right, so hire me.” “No.” “What?” “But, I can probably get this approved on a project proposal basis, but on one major condition.” “Yes?” “You must include a third section of your experiment to collective survey data.” I groaned. “This isn’t a survey research project.” “It must be, because if you fail to collect any data in the first two subsets of your procedure, it’ll look bad for me and the University won’t like you. They won’t be likely to help you out a second time. This way you at least will be able to collect some form of data, even qualitative, and present a report.” “Fine.” “By the way, are you sick?” “No.” “Why do you sound so different? Are you okay?” “I – it’s my new – voice.” “Oh. Alright.” A mere week later, my experiment began. I was granted funds for about 20 participants ($50 a piece) and 2 research assistants, a couple of Physics students in need of wracking up some practicum hours. As planned, we started in the Student Annex, where we held a open registrations at a table outside the cafeteria and across from a study lounge, where I planted each of the Sociology students (about 30 yards equidistant, 80 degrees to the left and right behind me, which I estimated was just out of direct eyesight for most people facing me at the registration table). Each had a pad and paper, and instructions to stare at each registrant for exactly 2 minutes during their registration. I had prepared a particularly superfluous introductory explanation that lasted a solid 2 minutes, plus they had a few University legal documents to sign. It turns out most of the registrants did meet the eyes of at least one of them, but when the data came in, I didn’t find it particularly compelling, especially against a lack of control. How would I be able to create a control with the observer not watching for the one thing they are supposed to be watching for? Once the 20 registrants were established, we set up the experiment. We worked in one of the oldest labs in the farthest corners of the Cummings Life Sciences building. It was a glorified abandoned classroom, with a few dusty tables, and antiquated sets of beakers, and maybe a Bunsen burner or two. The walls were a faded yellow, and there was a chalkboard with unerasable etches, and with two shards of chalk. It really made you wonder what you were getting for your $19,000+ tuition. In the middle of the room, we set up two chairs facing each other, and with masking tape, marked 2 meters, 10 meters, and 20 meters apart on the floor. Cross laterally, in the dead middle of the marked space, I positioned a table-top EMF reader and Geiger Muller that my funding allowed me to rent from an affiliated laboratory. My lab assistants were a young kid from India and a young woman from British Columbia, both math whizzes, and either stiff, skeptical, or both. I could feel their disappointment being assigned to my experiment from the beginning, but it definitely grew worse as the experiment continued to yield zero results. We spent the next several days sitting two people opposite each other, starting at 2 meters apart, and instruct them read awkwardly intimate statements on index cards while making eye contact, then monitored the meters, waiting for them to ping. “I love your personality.” “Your mother is my favorite person.” “I hope my children grow up to be just like you.” “You remind me of my best friend.” “I would like to marry you.” And they went on from there. After 10 statements from each side, we move them to 10 meters apart, and then 20 meters. We repeated the procedure while placing the EMF and Geiger Mullers in different positions; facing the subjects’ faces, cross laterally, near, far, up against their skin. Nothing was pinging on either meter, and I grew panicked starting on day one. We also collected the survey data at the best of Jack Yao. We asked each one to rate the feelings their own emotions, thoughts, and mental images for each question asked to them, and then to rate how they perceived those same metrics coming from their partner for each question. We repeated this for each couple, so 10 times total. It only took three days, and the experiment was over. The two Physics students left with the same blank, expectant faces with which they started. I was back to being by myself in my apartment, with tons of qualitative data, and nothing to show for it. I grabbed my tape recorder and fell back on my bed. “How did I get this so wrong? What made me think I could waltz into the pages of scientific history, on a Dixie cup University budget?” “How did I get this so wrong?” “Your arrogance.” “What made me think I could waltz into the pages of scientific history, on a Dixie Cup University budget?” I pressed record. “Probably because you got blindsided by an attractive woman you never even talked to, and your pheromones took over your basal ganglia like a coup d'état. And now you’re obligated to turn in a written report of a complete dud experiment, and hand it back into your faculty mentor for the past 9 years. Worthless.” Rewind. “-cause you got blindsided by an attractive woman you never had a shot in hell with anyway, and your pheromones took over your basal ganglia like a coup d'état. And now you’re obligated to turn in a written report of complete dud experiment, and hand it back into your faculty mentor for the past 9 years. You’re worthless.” I pressed stop. Did I really just say that? I pressed record and play. “Stop twisting my words. I’m not worthless. I had a lapse in judgment. I’ll get through this.” Rewind. “-wisting my words. I’m not worthless. I had a lapse in judgment. I’ll get through this.” Record. “You’re saying that because you know that you really won’t. The academic world is cliquier than a country club. When you screw up, everyone knows it by the end of the day, and it defines you. Even when you succeed afterwards, it’s still coupled with your previous failure.” Stop. Rewind. “You screwed up, and everyone already knows it by the end of today, and it now defines you. Even if you succeed afterwards, which you won’t, it’ll still always be coupled with this previous failure.” Record. “Shut the hell up. Who is saying that?” Stop. Rewind. “Shut the hell up. Who is saying that? You are.” I threw the tape recorder in the trash bin, my hands shaking, and tried to fall asleep, but my new gravelly recorder voice was trapped in my head all night, mocking me, and I finally fell asleep when the horizon over lake Michigan was a faint pink with daylight. When I awoke I knew the only thing to do was to hobble over to Jack and admit that the entire experiment was a failure, and try to find some way to make meaning out of the chaos to justify it to the University. I walked outside. There was no snow now, but the February wind was vicious. I walked through the few bravely bundled University folks outside toward the entrance to Cummings, where a vision of windy red hair blocked my way. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you! Did you do your experiment?” I froze. The lady smiled at me with excited eyes. They were truly like two beautiful laser guns, stunning me in my shoes right there. “Oh no, what happened?” “W-” “Oh my gosh. You’ve got to be kidding. What do you think the problem was?” I searched in my head for the answer, unsure of how to explain it. “W-” “I bet I know what your problem is,” she sputtered. “You’re looking for something right?” I nodded. “That’s the problem. You’re looking for it.” “S-” “No, no,” she said. “You’re looking for something, you’re not looking for not something.” My heart sank. Damn. No wonder she was so electric. She was either mentally ill or addicted to opiates. “Hey!” she said, jabbing me in the chest. “I am not a druggie. Not today anyway. No, listen to me. Listen. Absence among presence is something.” “Huh?” She winked and scurried away. My heart was under my shoes as I wrenched open the door to the Cummings building. Not only had I failed my first independent experiment as a doctored scientist, but the woman who inspired me to do it was clinically nuts. I took the stairwell up to the third floor and walked along the hallways full of office and classroom doors. Jack’s office was just around the next corner, and I found myself in a moment of paralysis, with a tight chest. What if I just didn’t show up? What if I just left the University and never talked to him again? I could move back home and tell my family that I failed at being an atheist too, that maybe they were right the whole time. That might be easier than having to admit what a mistake he’d made in trusting me. If I was just gone. The only problem is that he would notice my absence pretty quickly. My head turned. “Absence among presence is something.” I grabbed the tape recorder out of my messenger bag and pressed play and record, whispering into it so folks walking past me wouldn’t hear. “Absence among presence is something. You need to look for the absence of electromagnetism, the absence of radiation. You need to look for disturbances in a field.” I stuck the recorder back in my bag and rushed around the corner and yanked Jack’s office door open. He was clearly looking at something he wasn’t supposed to on his AOL computer, for he jumped in his seat, and coughed on a peanut he was eating. “Spencer, my experiment failed and I need another $1000.” “$300.” “Okay! And 8 radio transmitters.” “Uh, alright.” I didn’t know who that woman was, but her electricity filled my mind yet again. I didn’t even feel the cold as I scampered back to my apartment to plan out Phase 2 of this experiment. Five days later, my lab assistants were begrudgingly helping me wheel each of the 8 rented radio transmitters through the Cummings freight elevator. Inside our lab room, we arranged them into a perfect octagon around two empty chairs, so that when on, they would collectively emit an equivalent amount of radio waves, creating a symmetrical field. I bribed two of the previous participants to return with the incentive of an extra $50 each. Of course, when you do that, you don’t tend to get the greatest of human specimens, but at least they showed up. We set all the radio towers to the lowest possible frequency, 3 Hz. For hours, I instructed the participants to read the previously used sentences to each other, over and over, in the middle of the radio antennas. We watched for any subtle changes to the EMF reader pointed into the radio wave field. When we didn’t see any, we would adjust the radio up a tick, and then repeat. We barely got through a single 27th of the non-dangerous radio frequencies. The two participants were asking when they could leave, and I kept telling them in a few more minutes. Finally one of them, a freckled philosophy student, burst out at me. “STOP SAYING JUST A FEW MORE MINUTES IF IT’S NOT GONNA BE. What the heck is wrong with you dude?! You’re obsessive and weird. Let me teach you how to communicate with other human beings because obviously you don’t have much practice - you don’t lie to your participants.” My lab assistant nudged my arm – the EMF reader had nudged. A tiny little bump down. The absence of something. “Turn the frequency up to 40,” I urgently whispered to both of them. As they did so, I argued back to the philosophy student. “If you don’t stay here as long as the experiment takes, you won’t get your fifty dollars.” He reacted like I’d just smacked in his reproductive organs. “AFTER ALL THIS TIME, YOU’RE GOING TO NOT PAY US?!” There it was again. The EMF reader dropped down a hair-tick for a fraction of a second. “2 more hertz!” The assistants nodded. “This is profusely unethical, and I am absolutely going to report this to your department chair.” “What did you say?” “The ethics of this situation are preposterous and I’m going to report this to your department chair.” My heart skipped a beat, as the EMF reader down ticked yet again, slightly larger this time. The assistants came back around either side of me, and watched it. “Keep going,” I said to him. “Tell me what a piece of crap I am.” “Okay, uh, well you said it, not me. I don’t normally debase people down into blanket statements just because they display momentary lacks of ethical framework choices. We all do it, but if your identify is a piece of crap, then yeah, you must be.” The assistants verbally marveled as EMF ticked downward a couple more times. There it was. The human soul. And it wasn’t a radio frequency. It was a momentary disruption of one, which means I didn’t have a way to explain it. We let the subjects leave, and I had each of my assistants try it out one by one. We found that 48-66 hertz was the frequency where the tick would happen the most dramatically. It didn’t happen every time; only whenever the person in the radio field was genuinely emotional. Being frenetic or loud didn’t work. It only seemed to accompany moments of true frustration, sorrow, or joy; such as when one assistant growled in frustration that we couldn’t find his down tick. As soon as he did that, it appeared. I immediately invested in an external graph recorder; a machine similar to a polygraph test machine that I could plug into the ERF so that it would record every single down tick we could find. Then my assistants and I got to work over several days paying previous participants to return to the study. I began digging into my own quickly depleting savings to fund them. We had about 12 people return, and 4 of them displayed more than 3 strong, noticeable down ticks. 6 of them displayed 1-2 down ticks, less prominently than the first 4. And the remaining 2 did not display any down ticks at all. The assistants and I joked that those 2 must be the soulless of the bunch. But I was up against another scientific snag; there was no measurable correlation for when the tick occurred, and that made it very difficult to define or label. The only shred was that genuine emotion would lead to a down tick, however, this kind of observation was painfully subjective, and once again, impossible to create a control to balance against it. I was nearly pulling my hair out trying to transform that into data; it seemed impossible. Desperate to find some other scientific correlation, I invested the rest of my savings plus credit into EEG and ECG monitors to measure heart and brain electrical activity and how it correlated with the down tick. No significant correlations were found there either. We tried blood pressure, pupil dilation, and skin conductance, but found zero correlations to explain this mysterious down tick. It became my sole life obsession figuring out how to pinpoint or correlate the tick. It became an anxiety that I could only get out through the tape recorder. “You’re so close,” I said into the tape recorder. “It’s measurable. Now relate it to science. It’s not heart activity, brain activity, skin, eye, or blood. The only shred is that it happens when the participants are truly excited, happy, anxious, angry, or sad. True emotions.” My chest was getting tight, for the words were coming out I never wanted to birth. “You found the human soul, and it’s unrelated to anything in our scientific realm. That means that you’ve essentially proven…” I pressed Stop. My head was swirling. I stepped out for a walk. The weather was getting more forgiving, as the very first breaths of Spring were seeping into the atmosphere. As every year, I couldn’t allow myself to enjoy the first signs of relief, as they could just as quickly be wrenched away over a single night, and then back to cold plus heartache. I sauntered along the Midway Plaisance Park, trying to enjoy the presence of the more optimistic of my species enjoying the first the glimmers of warmth, when someone tapped me on my shoulder. I turned around, and there she was, the red-headed lady! She grabbed me by my arm and pulled me under a tree. “Something happened, didn’t it?” I waited to speak, hoping she would once again jump in. “Say something!” she ordered. I’d been imagining this moment for the past three months since I first met her. I’d been practicing my tape recorder self with everyone around me, in preparation for this. “I discovered the human soul.” She looked at my mouth and her face fell. “Uh huh.” “I found what I think is the human soul,” I repeated. “Okay. That’s it?” “Why are you hiding in there?” “Uh. What?” “You know what I mean.” “Sorry but I don’t.” “I didn’t know you were so empty. You’re very empty. I’m sorry. Maybe the electrics led me astray. They’ve done it before. I’m sorry I wasted your time.” And with that she got up and left. That night was a heavy tape recorder night. “I knew you’d lose her,” you moaned into the recorder. “You can’t change who you really are. You already formed into a dull person during your most formative years. Maybe you could have changed then, but now your neurons are set and can’t change. Maybe you could resort to electoshock therapy. Maybe that can make you masculine. But even then, it wouldn’t change your experiment results, which essentially disprove science. You found something that emits from people’s eyes via emotion. It’s the soul. And not only is it not in the range of physics, it doesn’t connect with anything scientifically measurable. So you spent your life away from your religious family, pursuing academia, in order to found a groundbreaking experiment that they were right the entire time. The soul is real, and it’s some kind of nonscience spirit. And you found it. It’s all thanks to you. You’ve actually managed to somehow upend your own discipline. You’ve proven that things are no longer provable.” In order to get my mind off it, I decided to head to my lab and find my mind. I walked in, thoroughly deflated, switched on the radio emitters and the EMF reader, and sat myself in the middle of the radio field. For the first time in a while, I cried. I mourned the loss of the red-haired woman first, then the death of my 4th grade optimism, then the shame that came with having to admit that my Miami family was right my entire life. When I had thoroughly cried my last sob and felt a little relieved, I picked myself up and walked over to the result of the EMF graph. No ticks. I double checked the machine was working correctly. Yes. It was pointed at me, and it was detecting the 50 hertz of radio waves, smack dab in the middle of the optimal field range. I went to sit back down in the middle of the radio field and cried again. I thought about everything from the start, from my childhood to my dashed dreams in the science world, to the beautiful woman calling me “empty,” and then consulted the EMF graph again: no ticks. “Oh.” Finally at a strange peace in my heart, I reached into my bag and pulled out the tape recorder again, then crossed back into the radio wave field. “Hi. It’s me. Hope you’ve been well. Um, you’re soulless. Ha!” a weird relief pooled out through my bones. “You’re soulless! You don’t register on the EMF meter, like everyone else does. Some people, like you, have no soul. Ha. Isn’t that a relief?” I hit stop and listened back. “Hope you’ve been well. Um, you’re soulless. Ha!. You’re soulless! You don’t register on the EMF meter, like everyone else does. Some people, like you, have no soul. Ha. Isn’t that a relief? I could feel a very blank deadness in the center of my chest as I continued to record. “It all makes sense now. That’s why she called you ‘empty.’ That’s why you’re different than everyone else. That’s why you can’t develop social skills. That’s why you’re attracted to girls like the red-haired lady; they’re full of what you lack, and you want to latch on like a parasite. You’re a walking parasite. That’s why you undertook this experiment – so you could rob the soulful people of the planet of their belief system. You take pleasure in taking. You aren’t a you; you’re as alive as a virus is. You exist, but you don’t live. That’s why you spiral deep into your thoughts, because you have nothing else. You’re actually not human. You’re a different species, and you’ve found the intraspecific variation – no soul. Ha!” I sighed. It was all okay. I was never meant to be happy. Happiness belonged to actual human beings. Analytics, like a computer, was meant to be my existence. I seemed to float back to my apartment, lost not in thought, but something else. I lay in bed. I became excited to pass away, as now I confirmed there would be nothing left beyond my existence, and so maybe I could plot to make it happen earlier. Technically, something not alive doesn’t die anyway. But first, I needed to submit my research paper to the University. Then I could self terminate! I worked on it all night, again, until slivers of pink and orange crept into the sky, as I clacked on my typewriter on the very last paragraphs of the Conclusion section: The phenomenon surrounding human eyesight is one that will require further experimentation, but as noted extensively above, it is unlinked to brain wave patterns, heart rate, blood pressure, or dermal perspiration. Additionally, if the scientific community ends up deeming this as the most feasible evidence of a “human soul” it is worth nothing that certain specimens appear to lack it, including the experiment operator, who completely lacked the EMF downward spike, and is thereby confirmed a different sort of human, perhaps a non-human. I soon crashed on my bed, staring up at the popcorn ceiling again, clutching the tape recorder. “You’re empty. Maybe the red-haired girl can fill you up with soul before you self terminate. Maybe you can feel some mimicked version of happiness, that you managed to contribute this experiment to the good of humanity; for it will be able to tell the difference between parasites and real humans. Perhaps all the warmongers, thieves, and serial killers share this trait with you. You are like them. Perhaps this is what truly defines sociopathic brains. And once they can be identified they can all be eliminated, along with you. Maybe you are the virus that evolution selected to fortify the entirety of the human species, with its beneficial invasion. Maybe you can cease to exist with a replica of happiness.” The next day, I headed back to the laboratory to clear it out. I needed to roll each of the radio towers back to the shipping dock, so they could be sent back to the equipment lab I rented them from. When I walked in, the red-haired woman was there, observing the equipment I had left in the room. She smiled when I walked in. I didn’t smile back, because I no longer felt the need to try and display human traits. “How did it go? Actually you know what? Please don’t talk. I didn’t like it last time.” “Okay.” “What?” “Okay.” “Say more.” “Okay then.” “There you are.” She smiled gently. “I need to return this equipment.” “What did you find out?” she asked. “I think we both know the answer to that. My emptiness.” “What emptiness?” “The emptiness you commented a couple days ago. When you said I was empty.” “What does that mean then?” “I’ve proven the human soul.” She gasped. “You did?!” “Yeah. I told you that last time.” “You did?!” “Yeah. Anyway, I don’t have one.” “One what?” “One human soul. I don’t have one. I have none.” She gazed into my eyes as I said that. “Oh. I see. You have no soul.” “Yes.” She walked up to me. The pure intent behind her eyes, once again, propelled me backwards and plopped me into the open seat in the middle of the radio field. “How do you turn these things on? Ah here we go.” She flipped each one on, one by one. Then she grabbed the EMF. “Is this the instrument that-” “Yes.” She turned it on too. “It says 50, is that right?” I nodded. She came over to me and placed the EEG scalp over my head. “Did I put that on right?” I adjusted it a few inches. Then she narrowed her gaze into mine. “What is the greatest absence?” “God.” “Greater.” “Space?” “What is the greatest absence in the greatest absence of space?” I could feel the EEG machine next to me surge. “Are you talking about Dark Matter? Dark Energy? That’s a burgeoning field. Nothing is known about it, except-” She leaned into my ear from behind and whispered, “-except that it exists.” Static electric shocked my earlobes and sent shivers down my spine. “The absence that exists. Not only is it mathematically impossible for molecules to exist without a polar opposite that we cannot detect, but the universe is expanding.” I became piloerect. “You’re saying that you think I detected Dark Energy?” She shrugged. “Maybe. Who knows. But whatever that is, it’s there, because we can see when it’s not. There is unseen energy all around us, and the dead live there. They can hurt us, or help us. That day in the library, they were helping you. You were swirled up in the highest atmospheres of it. The electrics. But when you back sink into your own head, they hurt you. They hurt you so bad that your entire self becomes wrapped around your silly little brain in there. And it can’t get out. And when it can’t get out, none of your little instruments can find it. You’re not soulless, dear one. You’ve trapped yourself in your own mind.” “Are you sure?” “I’m never sure of a single thing that I say. I only say what I know. And I know that there are many, many souls lost much worse than you are. Lost in their own minds, in their own bodies, and when the pass over, they enter that Dark Energy, and flood the Universe, instead of moving on to bigger, better planes of existence. That’s the reason our Universe is expanding: the Damage.” “How do you know?” “Ask yourself that. Haven’t you heard them whispering behind the corners of your ears when you’re afraid? Haven’t you been surprised to find just a couple more words or sentences in places where they didn’t belong? Where you don’t know how they got there?” “Yes. Yes I have.” “That’s the Damage. Someone has to correct it, and that someone is going to be us.” She walked over and grabbed the EMF machine and carried it over to me. “No!” I said. “It won’t work in the radio field!” She did so anyway, bigger than we had previously found. I was looking at my own soul. My vision blurred with hot tears. The EMF machine began to haywire. Blue static came from the machine and danced up the woman’s arms and around her neck and head. She bent down and kissed me, and the light tickle of static danced between our heads. She pulled away and I could see literal electricity beaming from her eyes into mine. “Find it, locate it. If you can do that, you will be mine forever.” And that’s how I met her, my Darling One. I am afraid I embellished on so many details, I lost point of my writing this to you, and I must take a break. I will finish my explanation at a later time… Love, Astronaut It was the late morning of Christmas and all through the house
A creature named Ingrid was stirring in her peppermint blouse The foods baked, boiled, simmered, and cooled with care Because both sides of her family soon would be there Torn in half by COVID and elections of Presidents She’d begged them to unite for Christmas at her residence But the smells from the foods hung in her stomach like plaster She started to realize this would be a disaster Both sides split apart by an agreed-to quarantine Would make little comments, and things would get mean Her brother would mention the drug dealers in her park Then accusations of white privilege from her sister would start Ingrid despaired that this could actually end the Averys Blaming each other for Communism and slavery The stockings once hung near the chimney with flair Now looked like voodoo dolls pinned to a hellfiery lair Atop the Christmas tree, an old family heirloom A diamond-encrusted angel now glistened with doom Ingrid clutched the little lady, passed down from Great Grandma Jade And for a little holiday magic, she eagerly prayed To return to when Christmas meant family together all day Back when snowfall was magic dust from Santa’s red sleigh She begged the spirits she could find that magic once more When there appeared a gleam of orange far beyond her front door Kissing the angel, she bustled outside, into the snow in her Uggs Crossed the street, through the park, up to three brightly dressed thugs “Excuse me,” she asked the young men, “Do you sell magic powder? One that can make Christmas cheer grow brighter and louder?” “Yeah bitch, we got that. It’s my own special blend But that shit is expensive. This ain’t make pretend.” He quoted his price, expecting the woman to up and leave But Ingrid just smirked, pulling the diamond angel from her sleeve The young men all gasped, for its value was empirical They cheered and hugged Ingrid, for this Christmas day miracle And in a neat plastic baggie, they handed over her dope Ingrid scurried back home, filled with optimism and hope The dust felt silky and fine, like Santa’s real magic powder As she stirred it liberally into the corn chowder Then into the wines, green beans, turkey, gravy and hams Into the potatoes, squash, salad, and even the yams Oh, Christmas that year was quite a sighting! For after dinner, the Averys forgot why they’d been fighting They hugged, kissed, laughed, danced, cackled, jittered and shrieked Ingrid swelled at the family joy for so long she had seeked And because Ingrid ate too, she could see Santa before her He said he knew what she did, and simply adored her And even though the Averys stayed up three days in a row And climbed on the roof, and shattered some bones The family never forgot Ingrid’s very good deed Except for the few who unfortunately OD’ed |
AuthorTarryl Benedetto writes fiction for the attention, so don't give him any. Archives
May 2023
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