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

  She gulped a husky gulp and held up the glass, a shifty eye magnified through the liquid. “The way you deal with this—h’cup—flux is with language. You break everything apart. Spatially. Temporally. Everything is—h’cup—torn asunder with language. It is truly beautiful. It is what one lacks. A story. A timeline. A name. —H’cup—meaning.”

  “But you speak. You are speaking to me right now. Well, I might add.”

  “In bodies. In your universe. In time. True, one has taken on a peculiar—h’cup—form.”

  The man was nodding off. He seemed fortunately to have forgotten Jerry’s claws, which were at this point inextricable from the man’s bell-bottomed pants.

  “There’s no…no time where we are going. On Zoro-Whatever…your planet,” I asked. “Language…will be impossible.”

  “One shouldn’t think so,” she said, hiccupped. “It is so strong in your consciousness, in your kind. One imagines your presence alone will make language possible.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I said. “I’m not talking about installing cable. I’m saying, will I be able to speak, to think.”

  “One should mention,” she said, directed to Jerry’s tennis ball, which had drifted over to her palm, “That one’s dwelling place—h’cup—Zoropeterius, is not a planet, in your manner of speaking.” She squeezed the fuzzy yellow moon, rolled it in her fingers. “The structure it takes will depend on your presence—one’s own presence.”

  Fundamentally irked, I turned to the back wall where Jerry had tampered with the curtain-rods, finally able to see what was happening beyond the now fully exposed wall-length glass: we were making one giant flapping injury in the space behind us, blinding and colorless, its jagged incompleteness on our tail like a crazed cosmic matador after some barely lit beast.

  “That’s what that noise is,” I whispered. I looked into her eyes, sleepy, drunk slits. We were soaring. We were, soaring, somewhere. The speed was real at least, in sound, in light. “You need to answer me. You can’t just sit there silent, expecting me to believe you. Will I see her? Where is she? Will I have to die?”

  “One’s body needs—h’cup—sleep,” she said, drifting off. “This liquid…” she said.

  “And will you quit saying ‘one’ all the time? Christ! Say, I! Say, Me! It’s infuriating.”

  “Who is ‘I’?” she mumbled, lost to some remote valence of night.

  They were both at last drunk and asleep, in a cloud of lime rinds and mint leaves.

  In the course of their slumber, the spacecraft was driving like mad, making ripples in the nada—the great big Nada that we were roaming to get to some planet or mutual understanding or presence that would make some sense of the memories and anticipations of mine and the unttraversable circumnavigation of the Zoro-mind always stretching out to some gossamer end, some modest finish, as everything else, as my organs and my ego and my capacity to give anything to anyone else, as edges of universes that stretch and stretch like spilt milk on a table before they…

  In time, something was ahead and a copy of morning bore our flatulent deceleration into its atmosphere.

  ***

  But it was not an atmosphere, just a giant wall, stretching out indefinitely in all directions.

  Careening upwards asymptotically to that vast frontier, my two guides waking up choking in the bits and parts of their hangover, I with one arm hanging on to Jerry, the other to my seat, the ship lurched to a halt—did a slow somersault—and gingerly attached itself to the wall so that we were all sitting sideways on some roadblock in the jet-black bupkis of space.

  “This is the stopping point? The entrance? Hey!”

  The two agents disappeared right from their seats. They are home now, I guessed.

  “Well you can’t just leave me here…you can’t expect—”

  Just then the ship’s rear door opened and Jerry’s white paws went scampering out. I ran after him, impossibly slow, as in a dream, only to find that the wall we’d landed on was now our floor.

  “Jerry!” I yelled, in no direction at all since what I thought was vertical was in fact horizontal. “Jerry! Don’t do this to me, Jerry, where are you?”

  And there he was, not twenty feet away, scratching at the metallic ground. Or, at least, at the surface upon which we were standing. I went over to him, and it felt light as hell walking on whatever it was.

  What Jerry was scratching at was like an aluminum Bilko basement door. It rattled at his touch like you thought it would, and was unlocked and ajar as if something had just been there, and Jesus Joseph and Mary, that thing opened.

  I half expected to find Charon the ferryman beyond that door, demanding Greek currency to cross into Death. What we found was markedly more banal: a narrow, damp staircase, deep into the ground. We walked down—down, which only moments prior, flying towards it, was straight.

  Jerry was leading in my diminishing shadow and we could see some sort of terminus, some light down below. A lightness in my head. And if we were walking down…and though we were certainly walking down…whatever down was had changed. It was as though down could be whatever it wanted to be. Presently it was choosing lightness, as air, as Down donning boots descending with you.

  I took a step and felt a spring in my spine and nearly fell flat.

  I looked back up the flight and the faraway door was still wide open to the space between a shattered light on in Cape Cod and the chill of my descent.

  Looked down again: a furry tail peeking out from an opening below. Just as soon as I saw it, it vanished. “Jerry! Jerry, wait!” And I’m practically keeling over the steps at this point with the doubled weight of down… “Here, kitty-kitty…J-E-R-R-E-E-E-E-E…”

  Until the words, myself, became more compact, the air particles and I tumbling into density; slowing to a c-r-a-w-l as, sprinting through a NIGHTmarish deceleration, down became harsh and thick; and finally, the sound, J-E-R-R-Y, a monosyllable dropping like a bloodclot down from my throat, down the stairs, denser, slower, slowing, barely escaping; when at last I was c-l-i-m-b-i-n-g u-p the descent, certain that the light down ahead was u p , r e a l l y u p, up and I’d be damned if I didn’t make it out of this far-flung funhouse alive.

  I reached there, at the matter of a new light: beaming behind me the weight of fatigue, of failure to make anything matter, of terrestrial solitude; pulled myself up and lay out unbroken, yet feeling my body had been scattered far and wide.

  ***

  God knows how long I lay utterly unconscious on the new side of that roadblock. When I came to, everything seemed a hallucination. My body had, in a sense, been scattered, in that there was no tangible boundary between my sense of self and the vast plains of a new world.

  Though I did not have a body per se, there was yet a sense of I to be had, and it had intuited certain things. Among them, that Jerry was near at hand; that he was experiencing similar effects from our new environment; that the two agents had merged into their dwelling as One Selfsame Z.

  Which is not to say that we could think in any capacity analogous to terrestrial thinking: when I grasped at something mentally, I, myself was not doing the grasping—instead, there were any number of facts beheld at once and in unison between Zoropeterius, Jerry and I; when I physically grasped, hoping to find some means at my disposal, an arm, a leg, a finger, my forty-five-year-old teeth to clench some kind of geometry, I was left paralyzed, thrown back into the planet.

  Intangible, I bundled about like this for some time.

  I tried to speak, but Zoropeterius withheld my tongue. I tried to see, Zoropeterius had my eyes in its grips. Though I was certainly there, I could not have said that I was not, not there. In this ontological limbo I nearly went mad.

  My two guides, whose bodies had likewise scattered when they had merged with their planet, were finding ways to communicate how hilarious my acclimation to their planet had seemed.

  “Wonderful!” I heard, from what might have been a sky. “Yes, you�
��re doing it, Beck!”

  There, at last: my ears.

  They made a light show across my perceived horizon, the hues playing in the space as if they were being tickled. Emerald, sapphire.

  I had found my eyes.

  In fits, I was retrieving my parts.

  “That’s it, Beck! Almost there!”

  Breaking on through with every bit of my will, I was situated finally into physical geometrical coordinates. Finding myself above a surface and below the first colors I had been permitted to witness since my arrival, I had found my lungs.

  “Where did you go!” I pierced the void, but the question was swallowed up and I got it.

  It took a moment to get it: Zoropeterius could have been anywhere.

  It did not matter.

  ***

  Having found some sort of ground, I was wandering aimlessly, in thought and in space, with the vague sense an escaped prisoner of war must have of his feet. If I let go for an instant of this awareness—of my life in a body on Earth, my name, the experiences that belonged to me, of Joanna, the possibility of seeing her—I’d be pulled under again. Dematerialized. It is a savage torrent, the course of Zoropeterian consciousness. It wants everything to even out to One. To forego Thought. To be, and nothing more.

  With tenacity akin to Earth’s insistence on four seasons.

  This psychic riptide saturated my mind with thoughts I would never have conceived on my own. The structure of the spaces between universes. The velocity of their expansion. The pale pigment of the darkest pit in space.

  When I finally got to speak to the two Zoro-agents in bodies again, in English, fatigue was my only skin. My sense of self had been compromised so many times I could not be sure whether or not to address myself when entering a room.

  They found us, Jerry and I, ambling half-materialized, at the end of our wits. Who knew in hours, days, weeks, how long it had been. The two figures manifested larger than life this time, faces in the sky, legs like the skyscrapers of an ancient, godless metropolis. They stopped us dead in our tracks.

  “Congratulations!” the woman boomed, her lips shifting clouds. “You haven’t given up!”

  Engaged in materializing myself, I didn’t know what she meant by that, given up. If being ready to call it quits and ship back up to Cape Cod was anything like giving up, then she had a thing coming. “Get one…I mean me,” I faltered, “get me out of here!” Had it been that long since I had last spoken? “We’ve had enough of this…take me to one—to Joanna. Is she here? Have I died?”

  “Not in the least,” she said.

  “Then kill me!” I commanded, with more difficulty than I had ever experienced in indicating the matter surrounding my mind.

  “Slow down, professor,” said the man, shrinking in stature. Soon enough they were both standing beside me at my own height. “One has so much more to show you. You have seen the possibility of timelessness. Now one must take you to the moons.”

  ***

  The trip out to the moons—collecting my body, assimilating to some sense of time—was as oppressive as the trip in had been. Jerry and I were taken to scores of these moons, to partake in time experiments (whatever temporal order my two acquaintances belonged to was able to rejig the timework in the moons to presumably whatever it liked). When I would see Joanna seemed the furthest from these maniacs’ itinerary.

  The magic of mastering time, it seemed, was that this Zoro-mastermind could conjure up whatever appealed to it. Presumably in the same way it was able to show me Joanna’s face. There had been something in an essay one of Joanna’s colleagues wrote about there being no such thing as an edge when Time was properly apprehended. No such thing as an end or a beginning. All the pretty frontiers running like stags into other non-frontiers. Was that time or the absence of it?

  The experiment Jerry would never forget entailed spending time in a zero-gravity environment of mice. They just kind of left him in there like that with the field mice, to see what would happen.

  Naturally, while still under the spell of terrestrial timework, he swam after the little critters, catching scores (Jerry was the best hunter I knew of), incautiously hoisting them into his mouth and pawing at them as at an airborne irritant. Even at double velocity Jerry was able to catch one or two mice. But as the moon augmented the rate at which his surroundings transpired, Jerry began to lose interest:

  The mice began to resemble a brown and white cloud touching him here and there; then a light brown mirage he felt all over his body; and finally a presence and absence of no color at all to which he felt he fundamentally belonged. In other words, as the experiment progressed, and as the time that belonged to the mice accelerated, Jerry became more and more convinced that his favorite food was in truth some sort of expansive limb of his own.

  When his habitual time was returned to him, Jerry could do nothing but groom the mice. Look at that predator floating around, licking mice he thought were his paws or tummy or tail.

  Similar experiments were tried on me, not with animals but with humans, by and large with the same results. If you ever need to learn to tolerate something, take a vacation together at the speed of light.

  ***

  One could speak in the moons. One could freely utilize language, in a body, with a brain, untied to any other entity. The only difference, really, from being in the moons and being on Earth was the elasticity of time in the moons. In one moon, the one I had come to call memento lunaris, there was a dentist-style chair upon which one could sit and think, think like a human. As randomly as my derelict neurotransmitters, the internal membrane of this moon would render my memories mammoth and bright.

  “You want to understand Death,” the woman put right out there, for me to consume. “To you, that is what matters.” The moon wall displayed an assortment of vegetables and dip on a plastic, expandable Funeral Home table. Trembling hands reaching for baby carrots.

  “Is it.”

  “Then what matters?”

  “…I quite like the bluish glow in this moon. Is it natural? If it were any other way I think I’d just die of a broken—”

  “You have no more interest in mattering, then…in the adventure and uncertainty of language…?”

  Giles at a book reading on the terrace at the University library. Rosiland looking down at her feet. Jim, you look fantastic. We haven’t seen you in ages it seems.

  “The adventure of—what are you?” I asked.

  “As in, by what matter is one constituted? …Free of time, in most cases, and space, one is…one is, professor Beck. Curiosity is,” she replied. “What are you?”

  “Jim Beck,” I cupped my hands as a walkie-talkie, “reporting to Zoropeterius, from the…zillionth quadrant of I-don’t-give-a-fuck-about-your-asinine-experiments-now-take-me-to-my-wife.”

  The spacecraft. A yellow ball drifting in air. A human face cemented to my own, tumbling with me, melting, losing itself in my skin. Crowds of people evaporating into one air.

  “Jim Beck, tasting timelessness, with an inquiry about death.”

  “No. No, no, I don’t care about death, I’m over it. She’s gone. But I saw her. In your faces I saw her. She was there. I want to understand that. That vision. I want to see her.”

  “What will that solve, seeing her?”

  “What do you mean, what will it solve? That’s why I’m here, that’s why I’ve allowed you to take me to hell and back is to see her. Look,” I scanned the bluish murk about the chair, “you are not even real. For Christ’s sake, I’m talking to a voice in a hollow moon!”

  “Not real…as in, one does not have a body?”

  “As in, you are in my MIND.”

  “…”

  “Then one matters at least,” her voice finally echoed.

  “You…no, you don’t even matter. You’re not real and you don’t matter, how do you like that?”

  “One has shown you an image of something you love and can’t have, taken you from your planet, subjugated you to time ex
periments from which you will in all likelihood never recover, and, overall, ruined your vacation. Do you mean to say, Professor Beck, that none of this matters to you?”

  “Listen, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care. I’ve had enough. If you’re not going to take me to her…when are you going to take me to her?”

  “And what if that was a one-time thing that happened on Earth? If it was just a singular vision one had of your wife’s presence on Earth. One apologizes. But in your own life, your very own, are there not more important reasons for you being here? Your book…”

  “Where,” I bellowed, at the top of my lungs, in a moon that has no name, inside a celestial dwelling that has no ground, “is here?”

  And they left me like that, alone with my cat, before a giant screen emitting random memories of mine. The hollowness of the moon rounded the reverb of sounds I had once heard, visions I had witnessed. College. Forgotten friends. My parents. A house in Connecticut. Roadtrips. Streetlights and state lines. Academia. My first-grade girlfriend. Graduation—from preschool, grad school. Uncle Joe, the lighthouse. Joanna. Her eyes. There is an apprehension of a lover’s eye caught when kissing, smudged, blurred—immense not because it’s close but because it’s so far away, like a city seen from a plane at night. That vision. My recollection of her dressing. Our bodies together...

  The screen began focusing solely on this image of Joanna and I together, closing in on the fault line of our flesh: the molecules at the borders of our skin, which were always doing the lindy-hop around each other like two negative magnets and never, not even once, touching. Closer, further, deeper into what seemed to be a gap between our bodies: the subatomic particles of those marginal skin cells, all the skittles at the fringes of matter that fed the nada, which never touched each other, which never touched their selves, which kept dividing, getting too lazy to exist as one, multiplying to an easier, more infantile alterity…the screen was left like this, zooming into the gaps at the borders that thought they were particles, further and deeper and more ashamed to stay together…