79
He held me inside the viscous glow of candlelight, wrapped in white sheets.
“What are you thinking?” he asked me.
I didn’t respond.
“You have to be thinking about something. Come on, what is it?”
I wanted to say: “I’ve got to be honest, nothing turns me off more than someone trying to pry into my brain when I couldn’t think of a response, except the ones I couldn’t say: this is a mistake, it would’ve been better to let myself be kicked by that horse. Silence is sexier than sex.”
But instead, I said, “nothing,” and pulled him into my hips
80
In the dining halls on The Halcyon, the writer eats freeze-dried strawberries with the other empaths. She’s managed to make a few friends besides the cleaning robot that roams the halls: There’s Gertrude, the gothic hairstylist who appears to be around 50, with a bat tattoo on her wrist and a portrait of Frida Kahlo tattooed on her wide forehead. The writer doesn’t know much about Gertrude, because Gertrude prefers to listen instead of speaking. And there’s Gene, another writer, but unlike our writer talks loudly and boisterously, seems quite energetic and pleased with the world. He drinks his coffee and slams it down with a loud, satisfied sigh. He’s in the middle of some story.
“And so I said to her, ‘Lady, you don’t have to worry about me making a fool of myself. Writer’s drink alone at home!’”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” Gertrude said. “You, managing to not make a fool of yourself?”
Gene laughs.
“Okay, so this one night I was working to a deadline, and I had 10,000 words to go. I might have turned to liquid courage and downed a bottle of schnapps.”
“And?” Gertrude prompts him, smiling not with her mouth but with her whole face, with the spaces in-between.
“I might have called a few of my ex-girlfriends.”
“You might have?”
“And three of them might have shown up.”
“So you’re charming as well as irresponsible.”
“Ma’am, I do believe it’s the irresponsibility that is part of the charm.”
“You’re right, If I was a little bit younger and half as intelligent I’m sure I would’ve shown up on your doorstep too.”
The writer picks at her strawberries. One of them is stuck in her throat, but she’s smiling for the first time in what feels like years.
“So I think, okay, something’s going to go down. I better defuse this situation. So I invite all of them in, get them glasses of wine, put on a record.”
“Was it Barry White?” Gertrude asks.
“No,” says Gene, laughing. “It wasn’t Barry White.”
“So I’m sure you had quite a civil discourse after that, right? Everyone just had a nice time.”
“Well, can you believe it? And keep in mind I’m pretty sloshed at this part. They’re real quiet at first, kind of staring at each other through their wine glasses. But then they begin to talk. Small talk at first, about where they work, their names. Then, well, they begin to talk about me.”
“Your favorite subject.”
“Well, not when it’s three of my ex-girlfriends, who get to see my most intimate flaws! This one girl, she starts going on about my curious habit of eating olives and listening to thrash metal while I was working on this one novel, The Dialectic Egomaniac-”
The writer doesn’t need to hear the rest of the story. She stands up, picks up her tray, and pushes it through the kitchen window. She’s halfway down the hall when she realizes she’s still smiling.
She returned to writing:
I once thought that everything would be okay if I could build a tower and fill it with people like me, surround it with a dark moat full of flesh-eating fish, build a garden on top of the tower so that we could enjoy sunlight in solitude. Then, I thought, I would be happy. I’d be able to write because the environment would reflect the interior world.
But all I ever did was throw my happiness up on top of an impossibility. And people like me are as cruel as the rest of them, we live in a microcosm of skin, a suit, built up of years of damage, of bone and ivy and concrete and dark, straining hair. Through our interaction with the world, we’ve become hardened, we’ve developed coping mechanisms. An empath is not any less capable of hurting others.
Today I talked to Gertrude and Gene and I listened to their stories and they did not puncture me with their sadness. I smiled and I did not put up the boundaries that fill my mouth with dirt.
It spilled out of me. Those little tentacles of feeling and I felt everything but they did not retract.
They can’t hurt me like they have before, because I know what hurt feels like and there’s nothing to fear.
81
Imagine that we can create our own universes - we’re beginning to, with the advent of video games, and the crude renditions of virtual reality that you find in such devices as the Oculus Rift. There are some people who say that they don’t wish to live forever, that they’ve encountered everything there is to experience within a lifetime and are tired and wish to die.
Confront these people at the hour of their death - do you think they’d wish for more time, or less?
Imagine you could live in virtual reality with any body or capability you wanted, perhaps you didn’t even own a body at all. Imagine you could select any life to live inside of, or construct your own. Imagine time streeeetched so that you could spend millions of years constructing lifeforms from singular-celled organisms, all the way to humanoid, conscious creatures.
Imagine one moment you could be hunting elephants across Africa, and in another you could be living in a space shuttle a million light years away from earth, making love while below the city shone in resplendent blue glow, spinning on an axis around a simulated sun.
Imagine someone saying, “I’ve done everything I care to in this lifetime,” while racing toward dark matter, in a spaceship made out of diamond, pressing your fingers to the dashboard and feeling planets that beat to match your pulse.
Imagine someone saying, “I’m bored of life,” and having a woman reach through the medicine cabinet through a hole in the wall, blue pills for fingertips.
“Make life with me,” she’d say, and the two of you would travel to uncharted moons, to the bottom of the ocean, grow fins like fishes, lick the sunspot off her chin, watch her burn away, rebuild her from the ashes, molecule by molecule.
You could be a particle, drifting in space.
You could be an anthill, or an empire.
Sometimes I think the wonders of an unlimited universe would be lost on a generation who was raised on it, not born in meatspace where they were limited in capacity. Imagine if the mind was uploaded into a database for all eternity - but a new mind, born out of the digital world. Would it be able to understand its unlimited capacity?
Which brings the question - is damage and limitedness necessary requirements for appreciating “unlimitedness”?
In an unlimited universe would one be immune to damage - unlimited means that the possibilities open us up further to suffering. The girl who came back from the ashes of the phoenix may decide to collapse into the arms of another, leaving her glow and her ash and her trail of flaming feathers on his shirt coat. You program the perfect cyber lover, with eyelashes made of halogen bulbs and fingers made of soft silicon that sighs as it touches your spine, only to find that when she touches you shiver, and think of the mountains you traversed on a distant planet, and how you sank into the cold. You can’t love her because she makes you think of sinking,
Perhaps you develop a program if you wish - a damage program, in which you’re given a traumatic experience to deal with. Because growth happens through pain, doesn’t it? Or am I misinterpreting something here?
In the damage program pick: An unhappy childhood, a death in the family, starving to death in an Ethopian desert, influenza, Asperger’s, the uncanny ability to open your mouth and make people hate you. Ride it out to the end: You’re immortal after all, How does this influence your decisions from then on? Do you carry the damage like a coyote skin sewn to your back, like a hollow tree, its branches puncturing your shoulders?
Or do you hold it in your palms, like dandelions covered in blood, that have travelled through your veins and burst out through your wrists, and blow them away?
On the space station a million light years from home, you finish making love and the girl turns her face from the city. And the city is splayed on her back, illuminated in blue. And there are windows
And she doesn’t love you. And this is okay. You think, touching the buildings that open up like mouths on her spine, this is all going to be okay.
Note: This is part of my Psycho-Surreal Memoirs Series. You can find more by looking through my feed. They're designed to be able to be read in any order.
You can find me on Twitter, Facebook, and my website. You can also buy one of my books here.
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