Another short story of mine, ca. 1998 or 1999

THE SEA OF POSSIBILITIES

As John strode through the high school corridor, head up to find air in the closeness, Patti Smith chanted in his headphones that there was a rhythm generating down the hallway.

There was one, pounded out in textbooks, showers and boy/girl sexuality, with variations tattooed in response, but he ignored it – it did not suit his style of dancing.  Unfortunately, the affair did not take to wallflowers.

Horst, Will and Craig were lounging by their lockers, abstractly beautiful bodies, concretely ugly minds.  As John passed, and winter light hit his multi-coloured hair, a plan was formulated between the lads.

Collectivity was needed, as they lacked the imagination and will to act alone.  Herd mentality protected groups and justified common goals, no matter where it was found.

John had nearly reached the school’s front entrance when they struck.

It was like ballet.  The tape player, ripped from John’s grasp, went into a corner of the foyer, playing tinnily.

With precision, Will held John’s arms, exposing the heart to choreographed blows from Horst.

Craig called out steps and provided encouragement and direction.

John was stage and audience.

Patti was asking the listener whether s/he liked it like that.

The offenders did.  John held a different, unsolicited opinion.

Finally, the performance was over, and the players left the stage, talking and patting each other on the back.  Having shown they were men, affection was sanctioned and sanctified.

Time passed at a variable rate.  As it was four o’clock, and the school was deserted, no-one came to his aid.  His diminishing resources were marshaled to pull himself up.

Once on his feet, he staggered to the washroom to tidy up and survey damage.  Enraptured as he had been by the experience, he had not noticed individual elements – careless, but understandable.

The mirror was warped and stained, but served.  There were marks on his neck where Horst’s fingers had found purchase – or perhaps it had been Will’s – they could not keep their hands off him.  Given other circumstances, that might have been flattering.

While his chest was tender, nothing appeared broken to sight or touch.  They had not targeted his eyes, except for a few scrapes – kind, since old bruises had not yet faded.

Bashers often targeted eyes, he had learned somewhere.  They could not stand another man’s look, and had to avert gays/gaze permanently.

In the back of his mind, John almost wished he HAD been blinded by them.  However, that was a short-lived, dark fantasy, as it was important to look at such people defiantly until they cringed away in shame/fear/desire – polite engagement was for the polished, among victims and perpetrators – and as there was beauty to see in the world.

But now was no time for philosophy.  He had to return ‘home’, because it was his night to prepare dinner, and the others who lived there (not his family – he had none since the death of his mother and the departure of his sister – his father and brother were mere ties in poisoned blood) would be upset if he failed to fulfill his designated duties.

He looked out the door, scanning for the trinity.  Not seeing them, he went to his locker, put on his leather jacket (stopping to ensure Patti’s voice rang true – it did), combed his thatch again and left, Patti moaning in his ears about how her friends were not here today.

He had to walk slower than usual, so his father’s car was already home when he arrived there.

Furthermore, his older brother’s bicycle was sprawled across the sidewalk again, for which, although it was not John’s bike, he would somehow be blamed, because all fault accrued to him with interest, or disinterest – he should have been home earlier to put away the bicycle his brother had failed to (it was vital to give a semblance of order to chaos that was ‘order’) – which meant he too had returned from school earlier than usual (Ed attended a school across town, to avoid being seen around John).  They both would be hungry, or expecting to be fed, whether they actually had any desire for supper or not – it was routine, and ritual existed outside need or justification…

John paused, took a deep breath and stepped through the doorway, abandoning hope as he did.  Certain things were left behind upon entering prison – overt emotion was one.

Ed was the first vision to appear.  “Got beat up, huh, freak?” he jeered, mouth full of something undefined.

Ed was not a freak.  He looked like what he thought everyone else did, and monitored his actions and words accordingly.

He was, in short, normally abnormal.  This phenomenon was well-known to John, but invisible to many others.

Normally, John would have let that slide.  Today, however…

“How do you know?” John muttered.  “How do you hear these things?”

“When don’t ya, freak!” Ed replied with what he doubtless thought good humour.  “’Sides, Will phoned me!”

Until now, John was not aware Ed knew anyone from John’s school.  Of course, it should have been no surprise.  Evil is a party animal.

Ed was expecting a response – John could tell – as he was standing there, poised and quivering like a regulation mouse-trap.  As John did not want what cheese could be gained by risking the device, he shrugged and walked towards his room.

Ed grabbed John’s shoulder.  John realized that sore spot had been missed in his self-examination.  No matter – he did not give Ed a clear reaction.

“Leave ‘em alone! Quit looking at ‘em and they’ll stop hitting you.” Ed probably meant this as kind.

There was no way not to look at Horst, Will and Craig, however, because they were everywhere and wanted to be regarded.  On their terms.  Fear.

“When you gonna act normal?” Ed called out after his as John shut his door.

“When normal acts like me,” John muttered as he gingerly removed his jacket and shirt.  A poster of Darby Crash looked down upon him with confusion, anger and some form of desire.  The parallel to his feelings from a closet-case suicide was cold comfort.

He sat on the bed’s edge and took deep gulps of air, but he was no more able to catch his breath here than anywhere.

John got up and went into the kitchen, contemplating the sustenance he would have to take.

And there was the father, hunched over the brown beer bottle altar.

“About time,” the old man slurred.  “You hanging out with your faggy friends again?”

“I don’t have ‘faggy friends’,” John muttered foolishly.  Then he froze, near the refrigerator, and the shadow fell across him.

John’s head bounced against the freezer compartment and he slid down the spotless white appliance, hands dragging magnets in the shape of fruit and chocolate boxes and idyllic homes down with him.

“Don’t you sass me, boy!” the father roared.

For the second time that afternoon, John staggered up on his feet.

It was darkly amusing to John that no-one but bashers and his male jailers/fellow inmates ‘read’ him as gay.

It was probably true, in the latter case, that they had some insight into him, though, like all character analyses, ideological glaucoma clouded the vision.

As to bashers, a number of theories had been presented.

There was the idea that bashers were themselves gay, an argument which had never held weight for him, if only because anyone that concerned with conformity, who was a non-conformist only in the sexual sense, should have bought the problematic pacifist mentality plaguing the gay scene and never laid a finger on another human being, even in self-defense.

Internalized homophobia also struck him as a dubious concept.  Patterned as it was on assumed commonalities, shared goals, beliefs and cultural images, it was used to attack gay rebels as much as straight bigots.  John was aware that he would be accused of it, were he to run across the wrong people.

John favoured the divide and rule theory – that bashers and some gays targeted those viewed and constructed as weak.

It was grimly true that few bashers were as single-issue as the identity politicians who claimed to combat them.

Such thoughts occurred to John as he stirred soup and rubbed his pained head.

Naturally, no-one credited him with ideas.  He was, after all, only seventeen, and thus not as wise as those subsumed in either queer or straight culture.  Furthermore, his outsider status made him unworthy to comment, just as no-one in North America had any right to speak about Hong Kong and no single person had the right to speak about the abusive nature of a married relationship.

John was not entirely ungrateful about living in Toronto, however.

The city was, after all, the gay Mecca/Shangri-la/Brigadoon – thus holy, idyllic and prone to not appearing to the unclean or those not in the right place at the right time.

He had extensive access to gay materials, books, magazines and groups.  He had even read a few, and had one or two hidden away in obscure locations.

There is nothing more alienating than knowing one is gay and being told by the holy texts of one’s alleged (queer) culture that one is not – not to mention by the prophets of one’s tribe.

With the possible exception of Who’s Emma, the anarchist bookstore/record store, there was no queer space John felt comfortable in, and neither was any queer space comfortable with him.

‘Divide and rule’ cut far too many ways, a deadly razor.

Punks were a threat to gays, he had been told more times than he cared to think about.

Of course, gays were also a threat to (queer) punks (and were also bashers and accomplices to self-murder, were the implications carried to the fullest extent) if that attitude went unchallenged – and for the most part, it did.

And naturally, punks were also a threat to (queer) punks in many cases.  This also went largely unquestioned.

‘Queer community’ as a monolith was a farce and, most disgusting of all, was often known to be one by participants, who still felt as though it were out of their control – which it could never be.

Freedom to dance to disco music.  Freedom to wear a suit – to marry and replicate the circumstances that led to his mother’s suicide and his sister’s fleeing the soul-destroying environment of ownership disguised as love, before she did the same – to fight for welfare reforms that would mean death for many people with AIDS (bad queers?) – to have pride parades acknowledged by the enemy (police, government and big business) – in fact, to have the enemy set up camp in the midst of these commercial ventures – this ‘community’, John could live without.

“Quit thinking and get over here!” John’s father suddenly bellowed from the dining room table.

John sighed very quietly and lifted the soup from the stove, pouring it into shallow bowls set out nearby.

But at last the evening was over.  The father had fallen asleep into a drunken stupor over the kitchen table.  Ed was holed up in his room with the latest victim of love, who had come after supper.

John sat for a moment or two in the darkness of the “TV lounge”, staring at his reflection in the silenced, dark television, then rose and slipped into his bedroom.

The magazine had a high gloss to it, although it was words on paper and captured images, like any ‘zine.  John lay on his bed and flipped through it absently.

He was told these men were beautiful.  So were Horst, Will and Craig, however – all muscular with well-combed hair and big, vacant smiles.  It was surface – the surface of an alien world that might contain wonders, but also menace.

Normalcy and respectability were the keywords.  To be like Conrad Black – successful, well-attired, generally arrogant and self-absorbed – was the goal to shoot for.  One had to show seriousness by taking part in what John viewed as a sick joke.

Barbra Streisand, Judy Garland, Jayne Mansfield – why did a sub-group claiming interest in the masculine cling to long-dead (physically and/or artistically) female icons? (He was not necessarily disapproving of this phenomenon – just wondering – and questions did seem welcome in this area.)

Why these ones? Had culture ceased to develop around 1969, when those ‘unacceptable, stereotypical, sexist’ (that label should burn in the mouths of the hypocrites who spoke it!) drag queens had rioted and allowed ahistorical jerks years later to deride them in their publication?

What of Patti Smith? What of Poly Styrene? If anything, the alleged interest the queer community had in breaking down stereotypes, which, unfortunately, tended to mean marginalizing non-conformists with greater efficiency than the straight world practiced, should have driven them to these women.  Their entire body of work fought for the importance of self and finding one’s place within oneself as well as without.

In any war between the two, ‘within’ had to win, but it was not always possible to survive that battle.

John went over to the record player he had inherited from his sister and put his battered copy of Horses on – to “Land”.

Patti chanted about the hallway, the boy, the angel and the fight/fucking as John lay there in the dark and held his arms around himself tightly – protection, a pinning in.

The needle leapt across the record and stabbed down hard.  John, briefly entranced by the chanting and the throbbing music, returned to full consciousness.

“Up there, there is a sea – a sea of possibilities…”, Patti chanted, as various other tracks of her voice intoned words John had never heard clearly.

Tonight, though he still did not hear the actual sub-texts, he began to think it may have been contradictions and doubts and influences that colour even the most assured work of art/life.

It is necessary to listen to these voices, for they might be your own reflected back at you through the headphones as you make the record you will leave behind.

It is not essential to do what they say, but to ignore them is to miss fragments of wisdom, or those who are speaking your language.

Frantic now, Patti was screaming about the sea of possibilities.

John squeezed his eyes tight, both to hide the tears (he had been well-trained) and to see the inside – for eyes open wide may miss the internal vista for the ugliness and beauty that lie without.

He started to quietly whisper, “There is a sea – a sea of possibilities…there is no land but the land.”

“Ah, pretty boy – can’t you show me nothing but surrender?”

YES.

A short story of mine from the mid-to-late-1990s...

LESLEY GORE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE

“You would cry too – if it happened to you…”

I am in bed.  I should be at work but, as I am not, I will listen to Lesley Gore on the end-table radio.

I admire how “It’s My Party” is occupied by the interpreter until she is virtually the author of its defiant sorrw.  It is a rare skill; Ella Fitzgerald had it, perhaps – or Ann…

Without it, I might not have awakened, though I set my alarm for 6:30 and was given “Satisfaction”, which I would normally like – yet I pillowed my head, only to receive “Walk Away Renee”, “For No-One” and “She’s Leaving Home”.  Irony is alive and well in radio programming.

It is over.  I should rise to face the day, as my class depends on my, and pays for my questionable assistance/collaboration, for regular, meaningless lives and chances to mock the conventions of Renaissance verse, said derision being filtered through their laughably simplistic assumptions – but that is too easy an irony to use outside a sitcom.

Sometimes I agreed with them, though I tried to concentrate on the art involved.  Today, the required distance for that is far away, as is:  the floor; the bathroom; the kitchen; the university and…

“Her name is – her name is – her name is – her name is – G…L…O...R…I…A…Gloooooooriaaaaaa…”

With a deft snap of the button and a disturbing snap of the knees, I am up.

I am clean in the semi-fogged bathroom mirror.  As life is not a stock comedy, I am bald, beardless, fifty, fat and arguably fatuous, rather than wild-haired, stubbled, thin, adolescent and terrified, like the child I imagine I should be feeling like inside.  Still, somehow, I cannot bear the dissonance.

Silence.  A voice should be in the kitchen, telling me to hurry.  I paid there, puddling the floor, and turn the radio to another station, for cross-talk.

“…seeing things we used to do – they think of you – I sit and watch as tears go bye-uh-I-uh-I…”

This tie does not go with the chosen shirt (how taut to pull?); also, the knot is too tight (dismiss that thought…).  I struggle with the noose until it is loose enough for me to breathe.  (It does not do to embrace random despair.  It is cheating on Life with Death.)

Looking among my clean clothes for a better shirt, I find a pocketed note.

“My” pastel garment – not personally purchased – nearly another’s – needing absence’s permission to put on?

Therefore, it is impossible to wear – anymore? I cannot throw out the message, so I place it on the dresser, near an outdated “family” photograph.

“Because – every time I see your picture I cry – and I learn – to get over you – one more time…”

My stations rarely play Canadian Content or the recent past.  I have not heard properly – or someone has made a terrible mistake.

“I…terrible mistake”?

Badly ironic – poetic.  Like a frustrated English teacher/author.  On which point, Leonard Cohen’s narrator bemoaned not comparing Anne’s eyes to the sun until her departure.

The parallel fails.  I did compose odes to my Ann’s body.

Bathroom.  “…come on…TAKE IT! Take another little piece of my heart now, baby…”

To work, where colleagues take up torment’s duties.

Kitchen.  “Do you know how to pony – like Bony Marony? Do you know how to twist? It goes like this – goes like this…”

These musical strains cruelly invoke a dancing/sex partner.  Out!

I must have grabbed the note before leaving the house, as it is on the dashboard – a smoking gun/raven/Deathly figure/device of Plot.

I will not dwell on Ann.  I must make mind as Homeless as body.

I roll down a window to admit air.  The paper drifts to my lap and tries to open, but I toss it near the brake.

Coincidence is fine, but it must know who is boss.

“You better stop – look around.  Here it comes – here it comes – here it comes – here it comes – here comes your nineteenth nervous breakdown…”

Obvious, and not unexpected.

Common sense says I should be able to deal with grief and being left by women.  My course deals with such things, and my early life was touched by them.

Rationality whispers: PULL TO THE SIDE OF THE ROAD! I cannot see for moisture from the wind in my eyes.

The person who conceived logic invented its comrade, suicide.

I am not presently aware of how the note returned upwards.  Did I pick it up? Has the breeze of Fate struck? Am I an unreliable narrator who never dropped it?

Coincidence has climbed the corporate ladder in leaps.

As I am not going anywhere, I will look at the message.  Even for the hanging victim, suspense must end.

The note must have been shirted a long time ago; it has been laundered nearly illegible.  Had Ann typed it, this might have been avoided or reduced.  I tried to tell her so in the past, but she informed me she was not my student anymore.

To my knowledge, learning never stops.

February 24/25

Dear (James?):

I wanted to speak, but you ‘lost’ me in ‘profundity’.  I do not need lectures, James – I attended yours, and could not be heard even then.

I am not presently aware (your phrase – implies resources available but temporarily inaccessible – denies fallibility) why I (illegible)d you – if I did.  You despise clichés, but we started as ‘young woman – older professor’.  This game continues, so it may be mutual distortion.

You do not (live? love?) me, but an idea of me.  For and to myself, I am a human being.  Am I a plot device to you – with no (rule? role?) – who projects at cocktail parties that you are (illegible – suggest ‘loved’) – who fixes you up before events I am not invited to? Do I (extend? exist?) outside that to you?

I will not be Muse or whore.  I must be complicated – infuriating – reassuring – loving – raging – or not Be at all.  It is clear you want a selection, but are not sure which.  In the case and in ‘your’ stead, though it is not a matter in which you have a choice, I choose none and all.

We want appeal to our divinely profane bodies as well as to our souls and minds.

You have no passion, James – even for learning.  I have tried to teach you.  I do not wish to face my failure’s consequences.

Mine at last,

Ann

I would fail an undergraduate who attempted to pass such drivel off!

I start the car and go forward in the required direction.

THIS is why I found an early empty house yesterday? I was angry enough at THAT betrayal, but…rejected with self-indulgence and intellectualized hatred or pity?

She should have been dramatic or crass.  I might have listened to her complaints then.

I cannot notice everything.  Existence is no heavy-handed book with clearly marked conflict.  Denouement is not much easier to spot, except with sick dread as gravity and inertia take their toll.

Static, then…  “I cover my ears – I close my eyes – I still hear your voice – and it’s telling me – l-i-i-uh-I’s…”

I have crossed a reception barrier.  I listen to country briefly, then spin the dial.

I do not believe/feel I am guilty of the accused things.

…but I am an unreliable narrator, and truth is endangered in my care.

And what of Ann’s care? Was it correct to suffer me in silence? I had no mirror – what good was one warped or broken by design – meant to break as though struck by a shotgun blast, leaving shards in my heart?

Plainness is needed, before ornamental turns become nooses.

Turns.  I have missed mine.

The road less travelled stretches long, one-way, unswerving.

No homes.  (No-one to see…)

No vehicles.  (No-one to hit and create ambiguous intentions, but no-one to stop me either…)

IT IS JUST EMPTY HIGHWAY! IT IS NO SYMBOL OF ANYTHING, JAMES!

The part of my mind which does not believe in portents tells me so, contradicting the portion which feels doomed and open to consciously chosen leitmotifs.  WE write the story of our lives, even if society’s blue pencil hovers nearby to frustrate in aid’s name.

Ann might be impressed.  This grief does not feel stylized to me, though qualifiers must be born(e) in mind.

I pull over.  I must not be accosted by concern, law or order.

“…You don’t own me.  I’m not just one of your many toys…”

Coincidence and conspiracy have come to Lesley Gore’s least successful hit.  Until recently, I thought it her most admirable.

I never claimed to own Ann, but a portion of a relationship.  I thought termination would have been difficult, but given effort, it might have seemed beneficial in the end.

Conceded.  I thought I owned her.  By distancing myself from those boorish bastards who beat, belittle and banish their wives, I neglected to notice I was treating Ann as my intellect’s exclusive property.

The glove compartment is stuffed overfull and pops open, Fate’s fickle finger working into me.

Well.  Ann has left something behind to remember her by – to leave an impression deep in my head.

She never felt safe alone in the care.  Now, neither do I.

I hid(e) behind irony, sarcasm and Fate – an author/man/coward. 

I view(ed) the world as myself extended – an author/coward.

I believe(d) others accept(ed) this premise and (w)a(s)m reluctant to conceive rejection – a man/coward.

I cannot live, having been told where to place these truisms.  I am a coward.

Suicide is noble and required.  I am a(n) (author) (man) (coward).

Here, on this route to the future (though it may end abruptly at a field meant and designed to be enlivened by waste and death) with no evidence anyone shall follow it to eventuality, I shall, from my point of view, put an end to events.

I hope you suffer me once more, Ann, if you hear of this.

Spite is something of which I did not think myself capable.  One is constantly surprised by what one can do.

So to speak.  Constancy is not in the cards for me.

The gun is virtually invisible in my huge, grasping hand.  No art, high or low, be it novel, painting, song or even film, has prepared me for its intrusive, icy, snub nose against my suddenly damp temple-skin.

“…he blew his mind out in a car.  He didn’t notice that the lights had changed…”

At this late date, I would like to change my mind – not that I am not about to, if I may be permitted gallows/morgue humour.  Pop music is today’s literature – barren and humble at first, swelling to a pregnancy of meaning and an arrogance in its knowledge of the ‘soul’.

It is a moment of waking into joy from a nightmare before one realizes that the dream of desertion was real, blurring the purpose and the existence of rising at all.

It is a spiritual ode to a wife lusting for a physical touch.

It is a drive on a deserted road, a gun in the glove compartment, when one hopes for/needs company/a map to fulfillment and/or/through emptiness.

It is Fate’s heavy hands around the blood-burdened heart.

Will

It

Never

Stop!?

SQUEEZE!!

It has…

The Fall Record Day Store 2013 7" :)

MORT THE LEECH

short story in progress.

            Noah had been sitting Shiva for his departed mother for seven days, so given the darkened nature of the house, both emotionally and literally, as well as the covered mirrors and the fact that he was alone, as the sole survivor of the family, it was not surprising he did not notice the intruder until the man literally announced himself.

            “Hi, Noah,” a naggingly familiar voice said, startling him to the point he fell off the admittedly slippery, plastic-covered sofa.  Of course, given that he had barely eaten or slept for seven days, since his mother had had few friends left, other than the Rosenberg twins down the road who had brought company and food that were not especially appetizing, though it would have been impolite to say so at such a time, he was on edge and easily surprised.

            Noah got up off the floor and turned to face the voice, instinctively, if not very correctly, pulling together his torn shirt, given the fact he had a visitor, albeit possibly a criminal and, at the very least, suspicious one.

            “And you would be…?” Noah said, though even as he did, his squint penetrated the slightly twilight dimness of the living room.

            “Is that you, Mort?” Noah said.  “I haven’t seen you since high school.  Have you come to pay your respects?”

            “Ah,” Mort said sheepishly.  “That would explain the torn clothing, the mirrors and, well, frankly, the fact that you kind of smell.”

           “Yes,” Noah said.  “My mother, Esther, died, and what with Dad being dead and me being the only child, there was no-one else to sit Shiva.  Turns out she didn’t have many friends either.  The rabbi’s been by, of course, but I’ve pretty much been here alone for seven days since the burial.”

            “Sorry to hear that,” Mort said.  “I haven’t really been keeping up with the newspapers, so I didn’t know.”

            “Ah,” Noah said.  “I figured maybe you heard about it on Facebook.  After all, I befriended you there about a month ago.  Imagine, at our ages, fooling around on that page – you’d think we were twenty instead of fifty.”

            “Yeah, well,” Mort rejoined.  “You gotta do something to feel like you’re still living, nu?”

            “Yes,” Noah said vaguely.  “I’m not wild about that turn of phrase right now, but I know what you mean.”

            “I’m not completely sure you do,” Mort countered, heading over towards one of the mirrors, which was incongruously covered in faded Bionic Man sheets.

            “What are you doing?” Noah said, slightly alarmed.

           “It’s already sunset,” Mort soothed.  “Seven days are over.  I think it’s important you see this – or rather, don’t see this.”  With one dramatic flourish, he pulled the sheet from the mirror above the fireplace.

             Noah saw himself, and was glad he would soon be able to shave, to shower and to comb his hair.  What he did NOT see was…Mort.

MY PUSSY IS A SOCIOPATH

MY PUSSY IS A SOCIOPATH

My pussy is a sociopath.

It makes its demands of oppressed billionaires

Who want more and more of my less and less.

It says: ‘Read my lips, cunts! No new taxing

My patience. Do not pound your nonsense into me

Just because I’m wearing your school uniform.

Your scissors determined the cut –

Just as my teeth will determine yours.”

My pussy is a sociopath.

It finds your protrusions to be tiresome,

Approximate dictations and so short of sight.

It says: ‘limp sleeping serpents and vaguely wet fuses

Do not frighten me as much as you think.

I can pounce on you like a legged clam,

And surround you with depths you can barely fathom –

Bobbitt was just the start, little man.’

My pussy is a sociopath,

To what you consider society to be.

51 , a high number for your stubby things.

It says: ‘don’t inflict nature while those little blue pills

Are serving to shore up your ego like sand.

We can rise up much higher than you ever will

and we can close our door when you come back from war.

So get in the kitchen and cook up some change.’

Tim 3-14-13

An Apple, A Day

AN APPLE, A DAY

“This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends…”

It is peculiar, the bits of doggerel and songs that drift through your mind before you wake up in the morning or, for that matter, AFTER you wake up. It is also not particularly reassuring or even appropriate, given that the sun is trickling in through the tiny gap in your billed-as-blackout curtains and, when you open them, pouring in like a flood, revealing a glorious day.

What is also peculiar is the presence of an apple sitting on your bedside table, as you did not leave one there last night, and you live alone. Then again, you are getting older, and that certainty may not be etched in the proverbial stone.

The apple is a symbol of so many wonderful things. Good health, as it keeps the doctor away, though it might be argued that that state’s continuation may be contingent on having a doctor SOMEWHERE nearby. Adoration, as in ‘the apple of your eye’ (an expression which is odd to you, given that it suggests there is a green, yellow or red covering over that organ, a somewhat squishy interior (which is accurate, granted) and some unpleasant seeds within).

It also has more unsavoury associations. There is the Garden of Eden story (and while we may be getting ahead of ourselves here, levels of reality in which apples do not exist (or indeed, ANY kind of fruit) do not feature an endless rent-free stay in Paradise – God is far too inventive a sadistic father for THAT…).  William Tell springs to mind also, which

in turn inspires the concept of that murderous game the OTHER William played with Joan Vollmer, though that featured a water tumbler (water also is a mixed symbol, but there is not going to be enough time to address that or any other heavy-handed allusions) and also dragged in the poppy (see previous parenthesized remark). And, of course, Snow White, which is a sufficiently disturbing story to contemplate WITHOUT bringing in the poisonous fruit, given her co-habitation with a flock of diminutive bachelors. On which point, that sheen on the modern agricultural-industry-promoted apple betrays chemicals that could accumulate in your body and kill you.

But, as you reassure yourself while going through your morning ablutions, this is far too nice a day to dwell on such morbid and troubling contemplations, even if it does feature roughly eight hours of soul-destroying data entry ahead of you.

While you debate between five identical shirts, twelve black pants and six pairs of wingtips (black), the mysterious observer of your banal rituals has time to look away and consider a few things.

As was observed by HG Wells, man is not alone in the universe. However, that only goes so far – in fact, the UNIVERSE is not alone in the universe. There are, in fact, multiplicities of universes, some of which feature realities that even the most inventive or substance-abusing writer could not envision.

For example, peel away just a few layers of the cosmic onion and a world is discovered in which you did not wake up this morning. No, not in that sense, though there are more than a few billion of THOSE as well. Reassure yourself that it simply means the local equivalent of an alarm clock did not go off, and you continued on dreaming your empty life away. In many ways, that is more fortunate, though not for that version of you’s employment. As to those other billions, we will leave it to you to decide, in the time that remains, whether THAT would have been preferable.

And, yes, as has been noted earlier, there are planes of existence on which apples do not exist. This did not always prevent the subsequent events, as the mysterious force (call it God, fate or historical determinism – under the circumstances, it hardly matters) had at least 109 alternate plans for each level, with some being entirely unique to a given alternative, such as the one involving…but there are no terms for it on the world you occupy, so never mind.

But now you are ready to leave, or at least you have arbitrarily determined there is nothing else to keep you here, since you had no opportunity to get food last night before you had to hurry home to watch television, so you will have to grab something on your way to work. At least you have an apple, regarding which you bury your vague presentiments of worry and snatch up to take with you.

In case you are curious, this is, in fact, plan #109, as you have proven remarkably resistant and/or oblivious to earlier attempts involving automotive system failures, chemical spills at work, fires that incorporated plastics and other toxic-fume-producing  substances and even minor incidents of psychotic breaks from reality. There is something to be said for single-minded determination to get to work and to continue the routines of your life, though we who are recording these events in the aftermath are not certain what it is.

In any case, your car started without incident, as even the vaguely gremlin-like being who is the chief executive officer of your reality does not care to repeat his methods of mischief, particularly given the previous failures and the remarkable resilience you have demonstrated by joining car pools, using public transit, hauling out a dusty bicycle (whose chain perversely refused to break, fall off or jam, despite the best efforts of junior and senior programmers alike in, shall we say, God’s employ) or, on another glorious though less ominous day, walking the roughly thirty-seven minutes to your dark satanic mill.

Fortunately, the fact that your coffee cup holder was occupied by an enormous carafe of foul stimulant, left over from the previous day, and your coin receptacle was, unimaginatively, filled with money, toll chits and even video game tokens, a testimony to a somewhat cheerful if vaguely immature clinging to the vestiges of your youth, meant that you had no choice but to put the apple on the narrow dashboard, as a particularly junior agent in God’s employ had projected that you would, ensuring himself a five-minute break from playing harp and praising the Eternal, a few centuries down the line.

As you turned onto Wormwood Drive (yes, heavy-handed, we realize, but we are merely recorders here, not editors or cynical critics), the apple rolled off the dashboard and fell neatly under the braking device on your car. You failed to notice this, distracted as you were by the handsome bearded gentleman occupying the car next to you (we do not judge here, preferring to leave this to the cruel and unforgiving gremlin aforementioned).

At this same moment, a few blocks away, an employee of the local military base, who has been charged with the awesome, if of late dull, responsibility of possessing the codes to launch or abort the nuclear missiles that form the main part of your MAD détente (we believe this stood for ‘mutually assured destruction’, and is a sign of either obliviousness or exceedingly black humour as acronyms go), is struggling with getting the lid off his own container of foul stimulant, though his is in flimsy cardboard rather than the thin metal comprising yours. Though he routinely fails to slow at the yellow light or even stop for the red at the intersection you are both approaching, this has typically resulted only in honking horns and digital demonstrations in the past. It should be added that that will NOT be the case today, and that, in any case, discussions of the past, present or future are about to be moot.

Approximately coinciding with this, two other improbable events have occurred. The OTHER person who has the codes has just discovered that her husband, in addition to leaving her, has taken the atypical-for-his-gender step of shredding all of the clothes in her bedroom closet (and, as it happens, also taking her cell phone, which will have a fairly obvious consequence in a short time), leaving her with literally nothing to wear to work, thus compelling her to call in and inform her employer that she will be late. She then starts to call up her few friends who will admit to having the same dress size as her, in hopes of borrowing something not too tasteless or vulgar at least long enough to get to the store and replace some crucial garments, and finally succeeds at this, leaving the house in her full-length mink and winter boots…but this is outside the narrative of the story, which is about to end anyway.

Meanwhile, a mouse that has quietly, if with some potential for peril, lived inside the launching apparatus at the base has chosen THIS day to nibble at a few critical wires. This ends its life, which would have been ended shortly anyway, but it also has the consequence that even the oh-my-god-we-can’t-find-the-codes-we-must-shut-this-thing-down-COLD backup system will be inaccessible. Its dying convulsions also succeed in starting the launch sequence. As we have said before, God has his sadistic and heavy-handed moments.

You succeed in spotting the car going through the intersection, as you are a cautious driver, but your attempt at braking is thwarted by the fruit wedged under the pedal. In an

understandable moment of panic, assisted by tweaks from Beyond, you inadvertently push down both the gas pedal and the accelerator, resulting in a horrific crash, an explosion and the end of both your existence and that of the code-holder. These, of course, are not the only deaths that day.

Since God (for lack of a better term) is able to think AND act globally, similar events of equally improbable coincidence occur in the part of the world with which you are currently at eternal war, which would be known as the Middle East in your particular subset of the universe. Incredible as it may seem, on another layer of the cosmic onion, your nation state is engaged in a ceaseless ideological conflict with the region corresponding to your Liechtenstein, which managed to acquire a nuclear bomb due to its failing to give women the vote and thus having no voice of reason or intelligence to stop the madness (we are editorializing, we know, but it hardly matters now that all ideologies are about to be proven either false or true). The leaders of the United Arab Emirates deeply, if briefly, rue their decision to switch their communications links with missile control to a new satellite in the same week as massive sun spot activity is reported. In that other reality, otherwise so similar to yours, women have the ultimate ‘I told you so’ and ‘If we ruled the world, we’d make a much better job of it’ lecturing opportunity, though they of course have to speak quickly, which is not a problem to the half of the human species that some anthropologists believe invented language.

In case you feel you really must know, some people ARE, in fact, ‘called up’ before the end of life on Earths. They are not the people you might expect, though, and the roster is not dependent upon donations to badly toupeed religionists or positions of worldly Godliness. And, as you will discover soon enough, while there IS bodily resurrection in the next world, it is run through a randomizer. This has some very distasteful consequences, but it was felt it was both the fairest and certainly the most fun way to handle it. 

You will have eternity to mull over why God ended all existence throughout the Multiplicities. There were any number of valid reasons and a corresponding number of invalid ones. Some of them conflict with one another, but this is only to be expected in a being who is three-in-one, or possibly even four.

The Gnostics may well have been right, and the Latter Day Saints were surprisingly close.  Again, you will find out.

As you settle into a new and not necessarily any more meaningful state of what you stubbornly insist on calling ‘life’, we will fade on a bit of doggerel, with a twist, which is red-shifting its way across the final dying embers of the universes to you.

Yes, the Multiplicities do have a physical end point, where you are right now. You are not entirely surprised to discover that everyone perceives it differently. Some see Mecca; some Shangri-La; some Valhalla; an unfortunate few see their mother-in-law’s house at Thanksgiving; or Toronto during an unpleasant world summit and/or garbage strike, these last two having as a common thread the accumulation of trash and an unpleasant odour for all concerned.

As to what you see, we shall give you the illusion of privacy and draw a discreet veil – but it is certainly more pleasant, at least superficially, than the place you spent most of your life.

“Not with a whimper, but with a bang.”