The Word, 'Matter' (The Extraterrestrial Anthology, Volume I: Temblar) Read online

The Word, ‘Matter’

  or

  How Curiosity Killed My Cat

  By Joseph V. Debs

  *****

  The Word, ‘Matter’

  Copyright © 2011 Dangereye Inc.

  License Notes

  When I got the email from Harowitz in the autumn of spring’s spectrum I had long finished what I had thought was the bulk of an essay, or maybe book, that I’d been indirectly laboring on for a good decade (Somewhere towards the beginning, I believe I still have a footnote citing the ontological syntax of a then recent Clinton speech). The long and short of it was that it was an inquiry into the tangibility of words, the transformation of world into word and vice versa. Where I had been stopped for nearly five years—literally paralyzed mid-sentence—was at the cusp of what I had anticipated as being a stroke of genius, the mostly blank page of a new chapter entitled, “The Word, ‘Matter.’”

  The word, ‘matter,’ working as both noun and verb, was killing me.

  From time to time I wonder whether I would have ever given two shits about material matter, so to speak, without my late wife’s work on quantum gravity. The only thing quantum about my understanding of physics, as she’d say, is my understanding of physics.

  When she up and died she took my academic imagination with her. I immediately lost any interest I might have had in what matter had to do with mattering.

  The way I explain it to my hack therapist: “Imagine the shape your career would be in if all the cocaine was suddenly gone.”

  I imagined the physical universe, and all I could think of were decaying particles. Or just simply decay: Jo’s body becoming a flower or a Coca Cola can or wood for someone else’s coffin.

  Practically the entire philosophy department knows the date of my wife’s death by heart. May 21st. They also probably know I’d been pretty much doodling on my manuscript and drinking not quite aquatically but honestly since that Spring. The throwaway Hallmark condolences. Disingenuous invites to faculty parties. The smiles. An implausible number of grinning faces roam the philosophy building in May.

  So I wasn’t too shocked when I bumped into Giles Harowitz, philosophy chair and dean of students, after my 11:30 class on a Monday just weeks before a certain sordid anniversary. He was wiping horn-rimmed glasses on a polyester blazer, his silver comb-over leaning against the window adjacent to my classroom.

  “Jimbo,” he said. It needn’t be mentioned that no one ever asks to be called Jimbo.

  “Giles, how are you,” I returned, cordial, adjusting my course materials in my left armpit, offering a hand. “You’re exactly seventy-five minutes late to class. You know I keep strict attendance.” May smiles. Cordiality and humor, I thought, would belie honesty in the academy till books were no longer read.

  “Very good, Jimbo. But you know I never could keep up with Heidegger. Innovative, yes, but a bit speculative. A Nazi, too, one can’t forget. I was actually wondering if you didn’t have time for a quick espresso in my office. Got one of those fancy automatic machines for my birthday from my…”

  “From Rosiland,” I said. His wife. Second. “How is she?”

  “Rosiland’s just fine, Jim. I’m, well to tell you the truth, and I mean this with utmost respect and…and solemnity, Jimbo. I’m wondering, concerned really, about how you are.” He grabbed a shifty syllabus hanging tenuously from my wad of ungraded essays. “Just a chat is all,” he said, scanning the syllabus. “Tell me how the course is going—“

  Solemnity was Giles’ card. Hegel Studies. A reverent reader of tomes whose grave notions were either dead or irrelevant. Giles’ first wife had died in a car crash in ’89; Joanna passed in ‘05. He thought our lines converged on these facts.

  “I’ve had the same reading schedule for twenty years, Giles.”

  “Sure, sure, but we should catch up on—”

  “I’d rather you just be upfront with me,” I said, taken aback at my own gall, a steady grip on my portfolio, reaching for the syllabus. “If it’s about Joanna…”

  “Jim.”

  “I have students meeting with me for office hours. Thank you, Giles.”

  If anyone should say that Time is an illusion, let them live a year on Earth. I watched Spring work Autumn’s opposite on my students, saturating the air in academic buildings with the future. Which meant that students began forgetting. Forgetting math equations, faces of strangers who passed a night, the entire high school experience, books read in February. They stopped remembering and started wondering—while playing hooky napping or smoking or locking lips in the sundrenched parade—if the moment of Spring was something like time stopping. If those last mercurial blips of the school year weren’t time looking towards summer’s glare and sneezing.

  “Gesundheit!” I told Jerry, who, after months of searching, had finally found his favorite tennis ball underneath my bed. Its dust had accumulated on his whiskers and by now he was incorrigibly sneeze-laden. What surprised me most was that he had even remembered the damn ball. Frankly, I thought he had moved on to bigger and better things. Torturing squirrels and mice, for instance, a sport he’d gotten almost disturbingly good at during the winter months. I’d see him dragging the carcasses through the snow, taking tails, bones, as trophies.

  I was in my bedroom and Jerry had found his ball and I had just opened an email from Harowitz. Giles was contacting me, “After a series of failed attempts at connecting on a personal level,” in order to inform me of a decision made on the part of the philosophy department. I was to be let go, so to speak, from the final two weeks of courses in order that I gain “A more expedient return to a once stable and productive state of professorship.” My students were, he wrote, in good hands, and would be informed of my impending absence “In the most tactful way possible.” I would be paid for my time off, moreover, during which the university counseling services, as well as Giles’ personal guidance, would be at my disposal.

  On the desk my copy of Being and Time was open to the section on “Being-towards-death,” sinister in the shadow of a near-empty bottle of white rum. I was going to finish it. But there was no point tonight, I supposed, and drank the rum instead.

  “God bless you, Jerry,” I told my wife’s cat. “Thank God for you.”

  ***

  In the morning, feeling optimistic, I replied to an ad seeking a lighthouse keeper on the weenus of the arm of Cape Cod. I had had a brief and wondrous experience with lighthouses as a child, visiting my uncle some summers in St. Andrews, Scotland. A black sheep amongst his white-collar brothers, Uncle Joe kept a lighthouse and wrote lousy poetry. He was a professional drunk and a hilariously poor bocce player, and this had furnished endless entertainment for me.

  I guess I thought I might, in a Proustian way, recapture some of my youth.

  When my bags were packed I put Jerry in one of those stuffy stowaway carriers with the tennis ball.

  The email that I sent to the students of my morning and afternoon Being and Time class:

  Dear students,

  I have been stuck mid-sentence for a long time; so long our course together must follow in suit.

  —Though you really should finish reading Being and Time, great book, changed my life. I’m heading off to Cape Cod where I’ll be baby-sitting a lighthouse, re-reading the collected works of Rainer Maria Rilke, and searchin’ for that lost shaker of salt if you catch my drift.

  I genuinely like a few of you and want you to do well, and for that I’ve arranged your final exam around the following parameters: please send a one-page response to the following
prompt to 1117 James Peak Drive, Middleport, Cape Cod, Mass.: How does matter come to matter? Is this mere etymological tautology or a linguistic condition that speaks to primordial facticities?

  Enjoy the rest of spring, copulate while you still can.

  - Professor Beck

  I left the morning of May 7 and arrived at the lighthouse by dinnertime. The key was hidden like the owner had said under a seashell by the doormat.

  It’s funny that the very fulcrum of maritime light should need a lantern to unconceal its splintered belly—the only electricity in that hollow, wooden cyclops went to its single yellow eye. Well, a trip to Middleport Hardware fixed Jerry and I up just fine, at the high landing with the headlight orbiting our zenith—bunkered out on a sleeping bag, F.M. radio propped against the odd circle that made our shelter for two weeks.

  As in Heidegger’s case, poetry was a food I needed to survive, but which I had never tried to cook. Drunkenly muttering the verses of “The Panther” or “The Black Cat” or “The Archaic Torso of Apollo” and dragging my finger over the lines I’d hear Jerry prancing up and down the spiral staircase that scaled that ancient Massachusetts phallus, scratching at the hollow wood and having a ball, but always passing out cool and contented on my chest at the end of his jaunt. I imagined Jerry as a poet those nights, thumping up and down the stairs, plumbing the space for the right epithet.

  A good two hours before the Zoro-Agents arrived, on the fourteenth night of our stay in Middleport, Jerry had rather abruptly dropped his tennis ball, perked his ears up and began clawing relentlessly—painfully, I should add—at any surface he could find. It was the date of Jo’s death and Jerry was going nuts—three sheets to the wind at that point, I thought that he had intuited this.

  The only thing peculiar about those two hours had been a faint ringing in the air. Though I could barely detect it, Jerry’s feline faculties must have been reeling in sonic hysteria. I had his convulsing spine pinned down to the landing for nearly two hours lest he literally scratch his way through the walls to the shallow of the Middleport bay. To the moment we heard the shattering of glass, and a thud that sent dozens of staircase steps to the dusty base of our cylindrical home, when Jerry, who’d never lost so thoroughly his cool, lay silent purring on the flat of the sleeping bag.

  “Jesus!” I started, rising from a blanket of glass. “Who on Earth burglarizes a goddamn light—”

  As clouds of dust dispersed through a giant rupture in the ceiling, we were able to see that if it were a burglary, it would have to have been one from above. Two figures climbed down from an aircraft lodged in the yellow eye of our home stay. Unarmed and staggering, the most defenseless looking couple in the world emerged: the man clad in a leisure suit, the woman looking like she had just thrown on every dress on sale at a Filene’s Basement. The two seemed, for the most part, uninjured.

  “Professor Beck,” the woman pointed out, as a high school sweetheart might at a thirty-year reunion, “You look terrible.”

  “I…”

  “Look!” said the man, pointing to his arm.

  As the woman ogled at me, the man plucked a glass shard from his forearm.

  I edged backward to the wall, clutching Jerry in my arm, piling up glass and wood with my backside. The woman, strangely distanced from the idea of injury, gave her companion a disapproving glance. They stood there for what might have been a full minute before speaking, the silence intermittently disturbed by the man’s whimpering.

  The room smelled of sawdust and rum. Glass from a bottle had mixed with glass from the light fixture. Moonlight through a breach in the conical ceiling irradiated a pungent familiarity in which the shards had been swathed. Had I really drunk the rum, I wondered, as finally the woman spoke:

  “One cannot decide which is worse,” she said. “Coming into or out of your world. They both have frankly distasteful side effects. The former—the penetration into time, as it were—gives the mind the unsavory impression of being tied to a single body. The trip out, on the other hand…well, one should not spoil the surprise…”

  “You will not recall one being here before, of course,” the man, who seemed to have a handle, at last, on his flesh wound, chimed in.

  “Wha…One…?” I stuttered. I couldn’t believe I was speaking to these specters, but they had to be at least as real as their words. “You mean, you? You have been here?”

  “Do you see that starship there,” the woman asked me, pointing above her head. The belly of the behemoth was open, unlit. Gashes in the sides revealed pipes, pistons… “Would you believe one if one told you that your name is inscribed on the interior wall?”

  The man’s smile drifted over to her, then, shot through with a grimace, went back to studying his forearm.

  Too distracted to even inquire as to how they came to know my name, I started to panic, hurling obscenities, attempting to drown out the absurdity in sound; Jerry purring all the while, chin resting on his tennis ball.

  “One can wait until you calm yourself,” she said, brushing residue off of her many-layered ensemble.

  I rose with Jerry in my arm and picked up a dagger-shaped shard of glass. “Tell me to fucking calm myself… fine, that’s just fine, I’ll curl up in a nice warm glass shard blanket and pretend you’re…pretend one is not here. One can go take a flying fuck at the moon. I’m calling the police…”

  “One is here as one has been before,” she continued, through my fuss, “and as one will be many more times. You see, on a timeline, so many things happen at so many different times.” She smiled. This was funny, or interesting to her. “In your mind, Professor Beck, so many things happen at so many different points. It is a curious mind, the human’s. Everything is so…well if there was a word for it, it would be…divided, one supposes. An expanding division. A lot of… fuss. You have another word for this, however. ‘Time.’

  I leaned down with the weapon, carefully placed it with the others, reached into my pocket and pulled out another one, my thumb on the cell phone digits. “Do you have some sort of feud with the owner of this lighthouse? Is that it? Vengeance? You idiots,” I said to them, “I don’t even live here.”

  “Of course not, the commute to the university would be absurd,” the man said, slowly bleeding benignly in the shadow of his partner, sister, wife, who knew...

  “How do you—listen, I don’t give two shits about where you’re from. Unless you give me some sort of identification in the next ten seconds, I’m making the call.”

  “Very well,” said the woman. She closed her eyes, tight. Her brows clenched and she became as austere as she was condescending and peculiar looking before. The man followed in suit. Just as I was going to open my mouth, I noticed a flicker of something I could not be sure of. They looked different. Just in the face. Different, and then altogether changed. The man, eyes shut tight, walked to a standing position beside the woman. He touched her, his palm, her waist. My phone immediately fell from my grip.

  Joanna was there in the room. It was a flicker and nothing more, a phantasm in their faces. It appeared for maybe five seconds. I can’t even be sure it was there, but I was convinced enough to follow them, where or when they needed to take me.

  ***

  There were no waivers signed or any kind of pencil pushing involved. In fact, I was even offered the chance to stay behind. And I guess you could say I wasn’t exactly soaring through my chef d’oeuvre, the chapter entitled, “The word, ‘matter,’” so it wasn’t like I was abducted like people talk about, like, by force, like rape or something.

  Before boarding the ship, they had dictated a sort of disclaimer, the content of which I have a choppy recollection: “Zoropeterius is, in terms you can understand, the ‘place’ one is ‘from’…just short of our destination is a stopping point…the entrance into our world is a territory one’s ship cannot cross…you must traverse the bridge alone…you will need to train your consciousness to think in a near-timeless region …there is no singularity in Zoropeter
ius…only fragments…momentary feelings of distinctiveness, of individuality…like mental boughs on a planetoid tree…one will return you to your lighthouse this very day…”

  When we were nearly ready to depart, they were fiddling with their thumbs.

  They said: “One has no use for the other creature.”

  I said: “Go fuck yourselves.”

  ***

  Jerry was already on the ship in any case, reeling in the joy of the lightness.

  He was pawing at the curtains stitched with moons and stars like the interior decoration of a third grade boy’s bedroom, shielding the back porthole of the craft, when the rods came unhinged from the walls. My two defenseless captors were every once in a while scratching their butts and picking at their noses and teeth, trying to keep the rum and Perrier and limes together in the air with the sugar and ice and mint leaves. Jerry’s tennis ball mingled weightless, uninspired, occasionally bumping into heads. A faint rumbling permeated the space.

  “Why Mojitos?” I asked. It was my wife’s drink. Before she passed, she’d all but perfected the Mojito, practically reinvented it.

  “One is very acclimated with current trends. One keeps up with—h’cup—human affairs. Do you dislike it, professor? One is equipped with many liquids.”

  My name was inscribed on the wall like they had said, with neither a preface nor appendix. No date, no explanation. “Jim Beck.” There were other names, too, written above my own. Couldn’t recognize any.

  “You knew her,” I said, buzzed enough to break the low-gravity placidity. “How?”

  “No,” the woman spoke, despite seemingly onerous hiccupping. “Only through you. She has a strong presence in—h’cup—you. You must be aware of this.”

  “But she’s dead. How could you—”

  “One did little more than feel her presence,” she said, groping for a vagrant lime. “Or should I say—h’cup—absence? Your language is very unclear. In any case, one’s timeless—h’cup—relation to existence has a peculiar—h’cup—rapport with “the dead.” Independent of constructed concepts—say, “before,” or “after”—life dwells, faintly, through all time. A world is born—h’cup—it dies. Where did it come from? Where does it perish to? The same with—h’cup—everything. Lives. Particles. Words, too, if I understand your theory correctly. In constant momentum, nothing is, itself…h’cup.”