truthfront

Category: Fiction

  • Broken mirror

    And so they walked into the library, towering cathedral of light. Devotees in tandem surrounded on all sides by mankind’s greatest gifts to the universe. Dyed cloth and leather-bound truths stacked in neat proportion, titles and subtitles stamped and translated upon the spines of those immortal wardens of knowledge. The books filled the shelves and climbed to a rectangle skylight high above.

    “There was a time when our lives connected, you and me,” he said. “A symbol, a thread. Symbol of a thread. Two people mirroring each other, hundreds of miles apart. Shadowed beings in complicit multi-dimensional transit.”

    “It wasn’t like that, really.”

    “My actions as demands upon your actions. You, urging me onward, my movements and decisions like subconscious pullings from another realm. A voice in the night. It was like having a twin, a shared consciousness, our destinies converging at a precise gridline somewhere in the margins.”

    “I never felt that,” she said.

    They walked slowly past the As, their eyes darting upward into the soft light, registering those sacred forgotten names, a recollection of something intimate experienced long ago, some message renewed, a respect paid in rapid fire as another name crossed their periphery. Achebe, Allende, Andrzejewski, Augustine.

    “One and two, two and one,” he said. “One and the same. The same. An error in code, the single miscalculation of the universe. Me reincarnated as you but living in the same fluid scale of time, sharing the era. Past and future in mystical collision. Two autonomous minds subjected to the frailty of oneness.”

    “What does that even mean?”

    “But then love confronted us, showed us who we were. It was like a mirror set before our eyes, yours and mine, in our different places. Love convinced us we were two separate souls pointing in opposite directions. It broke our bond, broke us down, built us into distinct forces. Love is the reason we are alone.”

    “Who are you?” she said.

    The simple curve of the C, with serifs and without. Camus, Cervantes, Chekhov. The slender shape of primitive weaponry mutated and frozen into meaning by the men and women who have wielded the letters most deftly. Coetzee, Conrad, Cummings. To learn about a place and a people, they must be experienced directly, firsthand. Our next best option is to absorb their literature.

    “Disclosure has stricken us with solitude. We no longer share the same course of thought, driven into our shared plane of existence. I’m only half alive because the other part of me died when I met you. Before, you guided me. Now you aren’t even there. The voice is gone. I hear only my own voice,” he said.

    They walked past the Es, the Fs. They didn’t see each other, half-listening, vision stretched to the limits of stimulation. The books contain, among other things, concentrated thought, the stories of generations and caste struggle, individuality at its strongest, its most raw and vulnerable. The beauty of the mundane, the horror and magnitude of the sublime. Comedy and tragedy, Faulkner, France, Frost. The most important minds of their culture, the disdained, the persecuted, the exalted, the romanticized and peculiarly burdened.

    “I used to lie in bed at night and listen to my heartbeat, pretend it was footsteps,” she said. “The rhythm of my heart at rest was the pulse of a faceless man walking around the world. Black dress shoes shined to a luminous knife’s edge. He was walking around the world and when he finally got to his destination, I would die.”

    “What was his destination?”

    “It was me. He was walking to me. He still is. He’s somewhere on this planet, walking. And when he finally gets to me I’ll see his face, eyes dark and replete with revelation, calm assurance from pale nomadic death, and I’ll know that I was always right to trust my veins.”

    “We are a species that fears death more than anything,” he said. “We have created astounding myths to subvert death, to appease our fear. Death has no legs. It has no concept of time. When we die there is no big reveal, no fabricated deus ex machina. It cannot fool us. Death is a positive experience, it strips away all the negatives. It is the truest of truths, because, can you possibly think of anything more real?”

    Their voices bounced off the stacks around them and returned mostly the same but aged, withered at the edges, wiser and hardened. Their voices carried facsimiles of the stamped names on the shelves, Joyce, Kobayashi, Lawrence, the titles unfurling as they strolled, symbolic and fragmented histories, Ulysses, Tabishui, The Rainbow, horizontal and vertical, a tapestry of letters and colors emblazoned everlasting. Language as pure force. The skylight darkened high above, restless clouds stalking about. The library fell into shadow.

    “All these books,” she said, breaking the spell, uttering the heretofore unmentioned, slightly desecrating, or at least, de-mystifying the moment. “The names, the stories. Many of these books were written at such heavy consequence. People died for these words, these billion, trillion words.”

    “No,” he said. “They died for the ideas the words represent. These are history’s truest martyrs. Timeless spiritual reminders of ourselves in retrospect. We have a duty to them to uphold our own reflections, our own struggles, and relate them to progeny. We must do this not only in honor of their sacrifice but also to satisfy our own artistic impetus. Nothing is more valuable to a culture than its art. Art is the fight of the people, the revolving paradigm, the mirror of culture, idealizing human life in its confrontation with the divine.”

    Rushdie, Sartre, Stendal. Tolstoy. Twain, Voltaire, Whitman.

    They walked the entire perimeter and then turned to face the center of the room. Drowned in silent awe, an ardor for mankind and its potential, proud sentiments for the simplest of objects in concealment of the most complex ideas. In this way, literature is like humanity itself. They felt the books looking directly back at them.

    “We are still connected, you and me,” she said. “But instead of a shared drive, we strive to forge our own paths. This is the way it is supposed to be, the way it was always supposed to be. A human being is an inherently independent creature. The other people of his culture may serve a particular purpose, but a man or a woman must fundamentally feed his or her own will. This is the most basic necessity. All these books, this room full of books. It’s like a vault enshrining the battle cry of the individual.”

    “Love is the reason we are alone,” he said again, and they turned to leave.

  • Untitled

    When the rain had left she cast her eyes down to a puddle at her feet, her own shimmery reflection. Blue and gray evening sky, air sharpened to cool guillotine clarity. She felt the weight of the world slip away from her as the sky opened up, clouds painted pink and orange with god’s metaphysical exhaust. She watched herself in the water, disfigured by the truth of the moment, and she realized a particular energy flowing up through her, those frozen moments of pure identity, what it means to be alive when the sun sets after a storm and the birds come out to confront their melodious reckoning.

    The cars sat stationary behind her, a line of idling cars stretched back to the curve in the road, waiting for her. She heard them humming in her head and looked up, patience in uniform and an acknowledgment of something greater than themselves, their pocketed moments of scrutiny. Everything made sense. Time collapsed around her, the mirrored figure, the stationary procession of cars, their spellbound drivers, the sky, Earth, the rhythmic pulse of universal energy meeting at the rendezvous of flawed humanity. She took a final glance into the puddle and walked away, watching the drivers steel their machines onward, throbbing vein of continuation.

  • Untitled

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    The man sat at his desk in the darkness. He listened to the reverent hum of the television in the next room, the adjoining wall whispering in tenored fuzz. He imagined the bluecast image of his wife and child spread together on the couch, their attention fixated on the hypnotic glow of the electric box. He could feel the warmth trapped deep down in the upholstery by the heat of their bodies.

    He reached to switch on the lamp above his head. Familiar objects spread before him, his typer, his papers and pens and their calculated arrangement like practiced definitions of his existence. A coffee mug half-filled with stale brown liquid, the surface slick with bean oil. He spent most of his hours thinking.

    The purpose of life, he thought, is not to become an object of someone’s understanding, though each minute that we are alive appears to be evidence that this is so, that somewhere out there someone understanding us must be tautological truth, that it is necessary for the migration of our souls and validation of our lives that we be understood in all our calculated aloofness. It seems that our lives cannot possibly be dignified without this.

    He lifted a pen and drowned the tip in the inkwell. He wrote: Sometimes when I’m writing, I feel like I’m doing it for progeny just as much as myself. If this documentation serves some overreaching purpose, it’s the enlightenment of others to the deep complexities of he or she who creates and transforms the data into language and imagery.

    The light went out in the lamp above him. The deep vibrato in the wall continued. He thought it strange how the electricity sometimes failed in this one room but continued in all the others. He put the pen down on the desk and stood to stare out the window to the darkened trees swaying with the mountain wind. Somewhere out there, he thought, an animal is alone, a breathing affirmation of what it is to be alive.

    His wife and child hardly noticed his shadowed presence slipping next to them beneath the blankets. It was a film about superheroes.

  • At end of day

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    She looks out the great high rise window to the sprawling city, her hand pressed to the cold glass, staring past miles and miles of steam and concrete melded with steel and all the aromas and emotions and struggles therein. We make believe this matters, she thinks. This life. We do research studies and try to find patterns and gaps in the patterns although we know well enough what shapes our lives. We spend life looking for love and more often than not we don’t find it in pure form and so we ridicule ourselves, we are bred to believe that love rather than its pursuit is our ultimate goal.

    The world is gray this evening in the fading light and she removes her hand from the window. She thinks back to what life was like as a child in the streets of New York and she can’t remember. She leans forward, her forehead on the glass and her eyes cast fifty-eight stories straight down to the rote madness of rush hour and she retreats again to the idea of love, ironic notions, thinking that when we find ourselves paranormally blessed with that rare presence of anonymous affection and deep inward truth we cringe inwardly because love is never anything like we thought it would be and it ultimately uncovers things about us we’d rather have kept concealed. It is a matter of definition, entirely subjective, but the deadly force of love is the same anywhere and everywhere in the human psyche, complete in its distinction and without prejudice. Love and its intangibles command certain things from us in order to survive in their wake. It is a weakness of youth, she thinks, that we fail to recognize the overall pervading premise of love as learning. Love and life are about teaching ourselves how to channel regret and loss into motivating themes. This is what dominates our world, it tells us more about our humanity than anything else.

    She moves away from the window and looks at the clutter of paper on her desk. She flicks off the desk lamp, washing the room in shadow. The city seems to wrap its arms around her, each flickering light distinct and filled with wonder. She turns and grabs her jacket before leaving the office.

  • Pretender

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    I opened the door halfway and peered into the shadowed hallway, rows of closed doors disappearing into the darkness, rain splattering on the roof above. I came to investigate the mysterious scratching noise but it was gone, nothing but silence and dust in the hall and so I closed the door, my back pressed against it. Solid shafts of white moonlight shot through the alley window into my kitchen. My feet were cold on the linoleum. 

    Those were the days and nights I pretended at life. I wasn’t actually living. I heard noises that weren’t really there and saw things that were hundreds of miles away or thousands of years in the past. I was a sickly Roman guard in the time of Augustus or I was a truck mechanic in Barstow in the mid-eighties, drinking cheap whiskey and threatening my wife with a butcher knife. I was an apprentice Panther in Chicago the night the cops stormed in and killed Fred Hampton in his sleep. I had all these dreams, I was living vicariously in my sleep, breathing through unfamiliar faces with a stranger’s lungs, seeing things as though I had adopted their histories and experiences and somehow suspended my own. I believed I had control over this. 

    I walked to the bathroom and swallowed another pill, water from a glass on the dusty sink. A brief glance in the mirror was all I needed to know I’d rather not see the real man, the real face. 

    I went back to the bedroom and slipped in between icy sheets, wincing at the muscular contraction in my back and legs. I settled in and lay on my stomach, the spare pillow tucked tightly in the crook of my arm, rhythm of breath, mouth twisted into a beautiful crescent-shaped lie. I wondered what I was going to be next, where I was going to live, under what circumstances I was going to die. I wondered if I would experience love and what type of woman it would be  and what time would feel like on my skin and I didn’t think about my real life, laden with taciturn responsibility. I ignored the bills that had been collecting for weeks in my real life mailbox and I didn’t care when I had last eaten real life food. What concerned me ultimately was descending back into some parallel existence I could occupy without the needless truths and trivialities of the life I really had but never wanted. 

    I had this idea, I told this friend of mine that mental waves are just like radio waves, man, only they travel on a different plane in a separate dimension, all around us. They’re out there. Just like radio and light waves, our thoughts can be intercepted if there is something to receive them. Something that recognizes the data and catches it in flight. I was sure of this. It was my personal scientific experiment. I was the receptor, the gifted one, my life completely fulfilled in subordination to the lives of others. I was the ultimate spiritual medium. I wanted to unstitch time and experience history first hand, catalog the memories, document the universe as the stories were told to me by the people who actually lived them. It would be an endeavor unrivaled in the history of the universe. I told my friend that ever since people had unlocked the mystery of the solar system and defined the hazy and ubiquitous machinery of time, they’d been trying to subvert it. 

    This was the premise. All those other lives were so much better than mine. I was enthralled by the magnificent uncertainty of it all. Each time I swallowed another pill and laid to rest I was frightened by the possibility of not knowing what to expect, where I would end up. 

    I was just happy because I didn’t have to be me. 

    * 

    There’s a cock crowing somewhere nearby, darkness, the smell of animals, dirt. Lying on my back, thick hay needles stabbing my ass, my legs. The sound of running water, chill of morning, eyes adjusting to thin beams of light fighting through cracks in the wall. I’m in a barn. I look around, stand up, acknowledge my nakedness, the wide door opens, giant rectangle of sunshine exploding inward, blinding me. 

    “Well, well,” a man’s voice says. My hands in front of my face, eyes scrunched to fight off the excruciating light. Large silhouetted figures of people. “If it ain’t the great pre-ten-dor.” 

    There is women’s laughter and I feel suddenly vulnerable, exposed. I drop a concealing hand to my manhood but the organ feels too large, it’s humongous, ridiculously grotesque. Violence and death are present in the room, living beings, tangible shadows lurking. 

    “Do you think this man went and got a horse’s dick, or this horse went and got a man’s body?” the man asks the women. He’s moving toward me, holding something long, thin. A rifle or shotgun. The women laugh again and there’s an aura of diamond fire about the man’s silhouette. He wields considerable power, celestial power, and I know without seeing him complete that he’s a traveler, he’s a receptor like me, a dreamer but a killer, perhaps something even more grand. Wanton and unscrupulous. 

    “Horse-man,” the killer says softly, moving toward me, the giant gun in his hands. I can’t see his face. “You should be fuckin’ horses. Not women in this ‘ere county.” 

    He keeps moving toward me and the women loiter in the background, squealing with girl’s delight. The man approaches nearer, nearer, and I’m still standing naked and bare with one hand shielding my eyes and the other hand hovering around my giant snaking sex and I have a sudden lucid understanding of the man’s nature and his influence on history, the spirit of the murder-at-large, transient violence for all occasions and without discrimination, the embodiment of darkness masquerading as brilliantine light. 

    “Go on, now,” he says over his shoulder and the women take a final lasting peek at the freak standing naked in the barn. They leave in quiet reluctance, two dark figures shuffling out of the light, out of sight. 

    “What are you?” I ask the man, and my voice is something like a man’s but not really. There’s an animal resonance in it, a throaty tin shriek boiling up from my chest, the words barely discernible as they leave my mouth. I realize the sound of running water has stopped.

    The man walks in close and his head eclipses the bright light and I can finally see his face and I drop my hand from my eyes. It’s the same face from all dreams, eternal in its youth, a study in perfection, a million arcane and familiar likenesses of everyone that I’ve ever known, the face of those select scenes from all the books ever written in time, the man from the light, the same face that paints every decimated body  hanging on every crucifix in every building and revelation, the same eyes of the glittering mad as they pay reverence to it. 

    “Forget it,” I say, and I close my eyes and the man’s light swallows me entire, the life of the transient dream traveler, my real life as it was lived without moderation or truth of spirit.

  • Dreams

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    I don’t know, doctor. Things just aren’t right. I think the overall problem is compounded by these dreams. 

    So you’ve been having dreams. What type of dreams? 

    Well …  I guess I really can’t describe them. I mean, I’ve never tried to describe them. I probably couldn’t even describe them to myself … 

    You can try here. Just relax, lie down. Close your eyes. Think of yourself as resting easily. Think of the world as black, your body melding into the blackness. Think of the universe as a giant sponge-like void. Think of yourself as water infiltrating the sponge. 

    Infiltrating the sponge? 

    Infiltrating the sponge. Try to control your breathing. Focus on your breathing. Slow. Deep. Easy. 

    This is helping. 

    I know. That’s what it’s supposed to do. I’m a doctor. Think of the world as a giant mound of ice. Think of yourself as a flame, melting into it. 

    Okay. 

    Now try to tell me about these dreams. 

    It’s like I’m in the future, I don’t know when. I’m married to some woman, but I never see her. There’s just this sort of implicit acknowledgment that I’m married to her. 

    You’re not married in the waking world? 

    I’m not. But I’m married in these dreams. 

    How often do you have these dreams? 

    Every time I try to sleep. 

    Are you having one now? 

    No. I’m not sleeping. I don’t think I’m sleeping. Am I sleeping? 

    Tell me about these dreams. 

    Well, there’s this woman. 

    You think you’re married to her. 

    Yes. And I think she’s plotting to murder me. I don’t know how I know this. I’m paranoid in my own home because I’m certain she’s trying to murder me. 

    Are there children around the house? 

    No. 

    What is the house like? 

    It’s just a house. 

    What does it look like? How many rooms does it have? Is it in the city or the country? 

    It’s the house I live in now. A two bedroom one-level in the suburbs. 

    And there’s this woman you’ve never seen that you think is your wife and she’s trying to murder you. 

    She hasn’t actually tried yet. But she’s plotting. I’m sure of it. This is really hard to explain. 

    Go on. 

    And so I lock myself in whatever room I’m in. In any room in the house. To keep her out. I go to the kitchen to cook something or get a drink of orange juice. I lock all the doors I can. There’s a hallway opening in the kitchen that has no door. I turn to face the opening, always within reach of some weapon. The kitchen is the safest even though it can’t quite lock me in completely. All sorts of instruments of death in the kitchen. One can always feel most at ease in a kitchen, even without a crazy wife plotting to kill them. 

    So she’s crazy. 

    I don’t know if she’s crazy or tall or fat. I’ve never met her. I say she’s crazy because crazy people plot. This is what crazy people do. 

    This isn’t true. But please go on about the dreams. 

    I always feel most vulnerable in the bathroom. I feel exposed. No deadly weapons in the bathroom to protect myself. Just a little razor I use for shaving. There are two doors, I lock them both tight. I can’t hear her walking or laughing or breathing but I know she’s there. I can feel her on the other side of one door or another, standing with her eyes closed, plotting. She’s waiting for me to come out of the bathroom because she’s not going in after me. She’s holding a knife. She’s very calm and patient. She will wait until I die just so she can kill me. 

    How do you know it’s a knife? 

    I just know. It’s a giant knife. It shines, even in the dark. Like it gives off a certain amount of light. 

    To be cut is the most invasive of violent acts. Body raped by steel. 

    I’m tired, doctor. 

    How do you leave these rooms in your dreams? How do you get up the courage to face whatever is on the other side of the door? 

    I don’t. That’s the thing. I wake up because I’m so frightened and tired. I’m tired of waiting to be killed. I’m tired because I wake up, because I have no courage to face her. Each time I try to sleep is a different room, same wife. I wake up still stuck in whatever room I’m in. 

    By not facing our fears we allow time to control us. 

    Sometimes I wake up and I’m holding something tightly. I’m clutching handfuls of bed sheets. I’m holding a book. The pages are creased and torn in my hands. One afternoon I woke up holding a knife that I must have got from the kitchen. I had no prior history of somnambulism. It was a huge knife. I could have killed myself in my sleep. 

    Dreams of violence and paranoia as inward manifestations of our primary urges.

    I always wake up sweating, dying of thirst. 

    Our brain matter absorbs the body’s nutrients and uses them to sustain our doom. 

    These dreams are in the future, doctor. I don’t know how I know. I just know. 

    The future frightens us. We cannot control it. We are fascinated by the violence around us. 

    I want to wake up, doctor. I want to sleep without being frightened all the time. I’m so tired. I want to live in a world where the future doesn’t matter, not even for a microsecond. I want to be able to dream peacefully, forget my backward flaws. I’m tired of stretching out on the crux of this world. I’d rather operate as a vigorous fixture of my own rules. 

    The world we know is created by us. It’s not the real world. It’s the world within the larger world. 

    I can’t sleep during the night because it’s too dark. I can’t sleep at day because the noise blinds me. 

    When we fail to mesh with the world we create, we lose all identity. 

    The strangest thing is that I’m deeply attracted to this woman. My wife who’s plotting to murder me. I see myself making love to her facelessness. She’s silent and holding a giant knife, the shiny point scratches my temple while we screw. 

    Desire is destruction. Our most primitive truth is not to reproduce, but to destroy ourselves. 

    I’m tired, doctor. 

    Every conflict forces us to either run or stay and fight. 

    I think of what type of offspring we would create. Me and this mad wife. I wonder if one night or day I will wake up and I’ll be on top of her, strangling. I won’t be able to disprove her existence. I wonder if our children will plot with her or against her. I wonder which of the forces of good and evil they’ll adopt. 

    Our identity lies in the liquid shape of our actions. 

    I’m tired, doctor. 

     We are the sum of our dreams. Take all the maddening irregularities and add them up. 

    I’m in the bathroom again. I’m locked in. 

    We cannot hide from the truth. 

    The walls are bare, doctor. Pure white. I smell gasoline. 

    Take all the lessons about life you’ve ever learned and watch them burn. 

    The mirror is rimmed with fire, doctor. 

    Our strongest moments of clarity reside in complete submission. 

    So much blood in the tub. 

    We see what we never thought we’d see when we simply allow it to take shape before us. 

    My throat is dry. I’m having trouble breathing. 

    When we are too afraid to kill ourselves we thrust our imaginations into guilt. 

    I’m bleeding, doctor. My throat. 

    Our lives flow away from us in pigmented thickness. 

    I’m tired, doctor. 

    We spend our entire lives speaking to ourselves. From idea to thought. From thought to language. 

    I’m dying, doctor. 

    Our voices carry eternally. They are the tokens we keep. They add substance to our memories. A whisper becomes a breeze in the cold night across the galaxy. 

    I think I’m falling asleep, doctor. 

    Death is a state of eternal subconscious activity. I think you’re cured. For now.

  • Psalm

     

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    “Surely you must be mistaken,” he said. “No one could possibly remember the moment of his or her birth.”

    “Well, for me, it wasn’t exactly a singular moment. More like an all-day affair,” she said, sipping her coffee. “And I remember it clearly, but in snatches, like stop-motion flashes in time. Sort of like a surreal film where certain frames are paused for dramatic effect.”

    “But how could that be?” he asked. “Human beings aren’t equipped with that type of memory. A newborn doesn’t have the capacity to assess perceptions and store them. This has been proven.”

    “Proven by who? A team of neurologists? A psychologist somewhere?” They continued to stroll through the neighborhood and the late morning shine submitted to a dull gray winter afternoon. Her gloved hands held the cup of coffee like a promise. Cars smashed together on the nearby highway, a violent resonance of shattered glass and twisted metal off in the distance.

    “And even if it were true that newborn babies have at best only a slight ability to remember things,” she said, “are you saying that in this vast universe of strange occurrences and scientific anomalies, that it would be impossible for at least one child to win the memory lottery? How can you know anything as an absolute? Certainly you can entertain the idea that exceptions are always made.”

    He didn’t say anything. They walked shoulder to shoulder beneath the giant elms, their eyes focused downward, stealing truths lying in the cracked pavement.

    “I mean, come on. You’re smarter than that.”

    “What makes you so sure you’re remembering your birth?” he asked. “How certain are you that these things you’re experiencing aren’t simply mental constructions, fabrications, some sort of cognitive detritus, equally as true as any other memory you have? Our memories change over time, they become distorted with the added stimuli of our lives. How can you be sure that what you think is a memory is not just a mish-mash of subconscious pieces, a mental scrapbook of all the dreams you’ve ever had?”

    They walked past a small pond, the surface glazed and brittle with ice. Geese walked about in the frigid air, their nostrils emitting tiny plumes of steam. A large house beyond the pond leapt into flames, orange and blue fingers reaching upward past a black curtain of smoke. Alarms sounded.

    “I can’t. But that holds true with every memory I have. It’s the same with you. How can you be sure the memory you have of playing basketball in grade school really ever happened? You can’t. The actual moments we remember are gone forever, never to be true again, their facsimiles suspended in time by our ability to process and store them as separate events. All we have are archives, broken timelines, sensory input with specific associations. It’s a chain of associations. Our mind finds patterns, and if there are no patterns, the mind makes up its own. Obviously, my mind has associated something with my day of birth, and I’ve been the recipient of some strange sensory phenomenon of late.”

    “That still falls quite short of a valid explanation.” He took his hands from his coat pockets and held them in front of him, trying to shape his words with them. “The human brain isn’t mature enough at birth to make associations, to store data. This must be an absolute. I can easily consider the idea of an adult having a flash of nightmarish clarity from their past, maybe even as early as the birth process. But it couldn’t possibly be more than that. To remember the entire birth event would be to ingest tremendous amounts of data, incomprehensible amounts to a newborn human being. Imagine the rush of stimuli a baby encounters as they exit the womb. Imagine how rapidly the brain is working to analyze the sudden flood of data, the light, the sounds. Imagine everything you’ve ever experienced suddenly radically changed. That’s what being born would feel like. It would feel like becoming something entirely different in a totally strange and chaotic environment.”

    Exactly,” she said, looking at him, her eyes wide. “That’s exactly how I remember it. The world as a five-dimensional cubic sphere. Sensory overload. Madness.”

    Children ran after each other and screeched playfully in the schoolyard to their left. A large jet broke apart in the gray sky above and began a wide-arching fiery descent to the earth.

    “I’m not calling you a liar,” he said, looking at her. “But I just don’t see how it’s possible. I mean, that’s a pretty impressive feat, being the one human in history who can remember the moment of their birth.”

    “Like I said, I wouldn’t encapsulate it into just one moment,” she said, their stroll leading them to the frozen banks of a creek. They paused and stared at the soft rushing water, listening to the dripping flow. Snow and ice collected in the crooks of the water. An old woman with deep recessed circles around her eyes sat on the far bank, bleeding from her nose, staring up at the sky.

    “Okay, so it was a lasting event,” he said. “In any case, that makes you a pretty special human being. Did I ever tell you about my friend Georgia? The woman with the artificial heart?”

    She shook her head.

    “Well, Georgia was born with a rare heart condition. She almost died at birth and surely would have, were it not for the ingenuity of her delivery doctor. She told me his name and I can’t remember it now, but he was apparently an amazing man. Georgia was born and her heart was failing and this doctor immediately turned the delivery room into an impromptu surgery ward. He actually performed the procedure himself.”

    “Wow.”

    “Yeah. So anyway, this doctor practically saved Georgia’s life right as she was born. He got her heart in working order so that her parents could take her home after a few months, but her health was still very delicate and she was under strict hospital supervision throughout her infancy. She wasn’t given a decent chance to survive into adolescence without some sort of miracle procedure or something.” He paused and stared into the current. A parade of screaming emergency vehicles sped past them and disappeared up the highway ramp. He watched them and waited for the commotion to settle. They began walking again.

    “When Georgia was ten, her heart started failing her. She had rigorous therapy sessions to try and strengthen the heart, but it was just too weak. Her parents went broke enlisting the help of these world-renowned specialists that couldn’t do anything for Georgia other than recommend experimental and dangerous procedures, one of which was this project a few graduate students at MIT had been working on, a project called, “Project Athena,” obviously named after the Greek goddess. These MIT students had basically created this artificial heart which functioned primarily as a computer, telling itself how to adapt to whatever circumstances the body commanded. It was really an amazing invention, and should have won the Nobel Prize that year, but that’s another story.

    “Anyway, Georgia was dying and her parents were desperate and they enlisted the help of these MIT students and succumbed to the mercy of Project Athena. They had little hope, but somehow Georgia survived the three-day procedure. Her body actually took to the digital device, didn’t reject it. She recovered, and the whole thing was ruled a medical miracle.”

    They walked through the concrete tunnel beneath the highway, cars and trucks thundering past above their heads. A nearby explosion rumbled the ground, the walls of the tunnel trembling. They watched specks of dust shake loose from the cracks in the tunnel wall and fall to the ground.

    “So the idea is, this little girl who wasn’t even supposed to survive birth has somehow defeated the odds yet again. Georgia ended up living into middle age, the little computer in her chest still ticking away like new. It’s really an amazing story.”

    She doesn’t say anything, waiting for him to connect the analogy.

    “When she almost died as a girl, she had these visions,” he says. “She said she could see a bright light, but it wasn’t exactly white. At least that’s how she remembered it. She said the light was too bright to be white, or any other color for that matter. She said the whole experience was like being born, even though she couldn’t really say what being born was actually like.”

    “Interesting,” she said, discarding her empty paper cup into a waste basket overflowing with identical cups. “Death as birth. How Eastern.”

    “That’s what I thought, but Georgia said I was missing the point. She said it wasn’t about birth or death, or even life. It was about the transitory nature of our souls, like the idea of moving to different cities, but instead of cities, we’re moving into different realms of consciousness, of cognitive existence.”

    “Weird,” she said. “Is Georgia still alive?”

    “No,” he said. “She died in a car accident three years ago. Killed by a drunk driver.”

    “Damn,” she said, and they were back at campus now, skateboarders and bicyclists stopped eerily still and lining the curbs, their heads tilted back, eyes held vacantly upward. Automobiles sat empty in the middle of the street, their owners standing in the open mouths of their car doors, looking toward the heavens. A giant red mushroom cloud swelled in the sky above them all, a luminous, foreboding and entirely beautiful phenomenon.

    “I’ll see you later?” she said.

    “Okay,” he said, and walked away from her, smiling, feeling somehow nourished by her presence, as if he would encounter the remainder of the day as nothing more than a simple passing rush of stimuli, the details superfluous and redundant.