When The Clock Winds Down (parts 1 – 4)

In a public bathroom in a large city: A vague, unblinking man sat on the toilet, his arms bare. The left, slick and shining in a sickly manner, was extended straight out, rigid, palm up, vibrating in minute cycles. The right hand was held flat and straight, hovering over the inside of his left elbow. His right hand flexed in a regular manner, seeming to ‘draw’ something from the arm… or was it radiating rather than absorbing? His head was straight and strong in its attitude on the outside, on the inside, he was reflecting on the words that composed his thoughts… 

‘Minute’ was spelled the same as ‘minute’ and they sounded different, and had completely different meanings… what divergence of etymology caused this? ‘Entrance’ and ‘entrance’… ‘wind’ and ‘wind’…

The floor seemed to shift underneath him. Arrayed on his lap were several instruments. A forceps, a bullet, a loaded syringe, a glass slide, matches, a strip of stained rubber, a small pistol. He was obviously a filthy drug addict. The other objects were quite discordant, but no one saw them except him. It was obsessive behavior. Before choosing the syringe, he tightly wrapped his upper arm in rubber. The steel slipped under the skin and found the target with no difficulty. The blood that flowed into the barrel was so dark as to be black… he jerked the tourniquet with his teeth, his arm and hand motionless as the black blood accompanied the drug inward when he pressed the plunger. 

‘Dove’ and ‘dove’… ‘tear’ and ‘tear’… ‘bow’ and ‘bow’… 

A feedback loop of sorts resulted from this train of thought and he sat still, unblinking, but inside, he was spinning. More questions asserted themselves; he took issue at this, for it happened fairly frequently… they really seemed to come from an outside source and he had no control over them. He often reflected on them for hours, hammering his mind in self-flagellant recursion. If he was involuntarily reducing his intake, should he be encouraged? If the veil that customarily swaddled the dark, burning center, the shrinking essentiality of his self, were brutally ripped away, would he die? Or would he be able to pin down the veil in the face of the rising psychic wind that threatened him? 
Who gives a fuck, he asked himself.

This was internally generated. Obvious, he thought. The crude, depressive ones. Bottom line: Does his intention count for anything at all? He was forced to think lately, and this did not sit well with him. He had a tendency to ‘think too much’; his father accused him of that before turning his back on him, and now, yes, he was dwelling on it. This expression fit well, as he lived and ate, breathed and sweated and slept on the surface of this unpleasant memory… he was trying to dig down to the core of the thing but he lacked the proper tools… his hands were ragged with soil and blood… and he never made any progress on that front, though he lived there still, on it.

In his last conversation with him, his father made reference to their family in such a way as to exclude him; references to his half-siblings or his grandmother were preceded with the phrase ‘my’ family… and when he was questioned about it, the questions were dismissed summarily. This created an oppressive sense of dislocation, as if he were suddenly a different person. Isolation was the rule, but he didn’t like to be so definitely reminded of his status as an outsider… he lost the luxury of lying to himself. Because it was true, you see… he was a family of one, which is no family at all.

‘I didn’t mean it that way’, his father would exclaim, before mounting another attack. Did that justify it? Was his intention somehow real? Objectively significant? His father certainly felt that way. He reloaded the pistol and packed his kit, leaving the bathroom and emerging into blinding light. He squinted hard, struggling against the stimulus, his eyes burning and streaming. He reached out with his hand, trying to avoid colliding with something or someone.

This time he did not.

Would it be today? Would it matter if it never happened? Why am I waiting when I could force the issue… He adjusted to the light presently, his surroundings resolving into familiar territory. Fifth Avenue, snowbound, crystalline white throwing light back into the sun’s face. It was pointless. He heard a noise behind him and turned.

A Jack Russell terrier was standing in front of him, legs braced and barking in a steady, stentorian rhythm, like the beat of a drum or the striking of a clock. No owner was in sight, though the dog had an ornate collar on, sparkling with gold. The dog’s head bobbed idiotically, as if it were on a spring… he seemed content to yell his day away as long as his victim stood for it.

‘Kill it’, the thought came unbidden, and he recoiled. Of course I could, he thought, looking around. Few people were on the street. He could surely do it and be unnoticed. He clenched the checkered wooden grip of the pistol and stood, shaking. It was cold, he thought. I could use the fur.

His own staccato laughter shocked him out of this reverie, and he squatted, extending his hand so the dog might smell him. The dog did stop barking and sniffed, accepting him immediately, licking his hand and wagging his entire hindquarters in a craven manner. He looked more closely at the collar. Hanging from the ornate metalwork at the bottom was a USB flash drive, 10 gigabytes; a large one. Still no owner made an appearance… I will take this thing, he thought. I intend to take it. I will make this intention into reality… at which point it ceases to be intended, right? I want this. I will. He took it and made his way uptown on Fifth Avenue.

The block was crowded and he made his way through in an inelegant way, bumping and muttering while his eyes rolled in two directions under half-closed lids. The flash drive weighted his neck down, and felt like some sort of dowsing wand… when he listed a bit too far off of true, the drive would touch his armpit or his nipple in a cold-metal stethoscopic shock and he would instinctively lurch the opposite way, thereby inadvertently regaining his balance for a minute or two. A self correcting pendulum, he thought… the thing seemed too heavy… well, it was ten gigs, a bit bigger than the ones he saw on the market. He weaved off Fifth heading west, and then turned north. He stopped on Sixth Avenue between 20th and 21st, blowing vast plumes of breath like a winded horse, and he dug in his pockets for a cigarette. His rolling tobacco in hand, he cast about for a niche to roll up in… ah, there, that church looked perfect, it had a deep, shadowy vestibule and was set back from the street a few yards.

The shade was blessed if cold, and seemed to muffle the pressing street noise. The thick upwelling of afterimages from being in the sun disordered him for a minute, and he felt like he was seeing things. A flash of light, as from a scope or binoculars from across the street? Something writhing at his feet? Both gone after a second. He reflected on the twisted bronze fish of the door-knocker… it looked alive, captured mid-leap. He put his backpack down and squatted, rolling a frugal cigarette. The massive iron-banded door opened behind him.

He turned. The shadows yawned in the space beyond the doorway, which was empty. Undifferentiated, very low frequency bass noise seemed to be coming from within, it was almost a vibration. He turned again, scanning the street quickly, and clutched the flash drive. Wind must have opened the door… Or someone is winding me up… are they close? Close? Closed? …’console’ and ‘console’. ‘contract’ and ’contract’… ‘lead’ and ‘lead’… ‘bass’ and ‘bass’…

He lost some time here… this was a new phenomenon, coinciding with the onset of his drug addiction. He would have a certain series of thoughts, never consistent, and a short blackout would result; usually it would happen shortly after a shot of drugs. It was scarier in the beginning, but now seemed almost routine.

He was inside the door, and it was closed behind him. He was inside of the church. A crackling noise startled him and he turned toward the source… a weathered grey box with a round wire grille…

‘I shall record this conversation.’

He said nothing.

‘Please use the stairs on your right, and knock on the second door,’ came the voice through the speaker, and then, the unmistakable click of the circuit disconnecting.

‘Wait!’ he shouted, reaching for the speaker.

‘I shall record this conversation,’ came the immediate reply. His hands fell as he listened again to the record, shaking his head and turning toward the nave of the church… it seemed he had come through the side entrance, and further, the church was in a state of violent disarray, almost as if it had been looted a century ago. The stairs on his left rose three or four steps and ceased, splintered wood reaching up to the gaping ceiling-hole. The right staircase was intact. He ascended and knocked on the indicated door. Inside the room was a laptop computer and a wireless router, ticking and blinking to itself like a content animal. Both were on the floor, under a thick shroud of dust; nothing had been disturbed in a long time, but it couldn’t have been too long, because the laptop was a fairly late model. He immediately took out his flash drive and connected it to the machine. The machine recognized and mounted it rapidly. Now to see what the contents were…

The flash drive consisted of a single 9.24 GB text file, one page long. The text seemed to be a detailed ascii or character representation of …something; the text was very small, 4 point maybe, and the tiny symbols swam in his vision. The file was unusually large as well, spatially large, on the order of 16 inches by 24 inches. He pressed ‘print’ and a printer hidden in a corner began to sputter. It printed the document on what seemed to be vellum, or parchment, and the ink was positively stamped into the substance of the paper. He folded it and put it in his pack.

He wondered what was making him so bold. He was not a bold person. He had no contact with anyone since he started doing drugs, indeed, he started doing that out of fear as well. Yet here he was, stealing and burgling and molesting small dogs. He had never even owned a gun before… he couldn’t remember who gave it to him, it was in the last week, he knew, but as far as who…? He only had one bullet, anyway. This bizarre non sequitur made him look up. He should get out of the church. He felt the old weakness and smallness of spirit re-establish themselves, and he felt ashamed. What was he doing standing in abandoned churches, fiddling with things that had no value? He headed down the stairs and left through the now-open door.

He smoked in silence for a while. It was plainly a cigarette smoked in confusion. When he turned and looked at the church door behind him, it was a perfectly ordinary locked door, no impending doom, no fraught invitations… He could not articulate the feeling of loss he experienced… what did he lose? What, really, did he have to lose? He thought of the parchment. Here was a mystery, he thought, and felt a fierce, jealous joy. I intend to unravel it, to force it to relinquish its secrets… to dominate it in no uncertain terms. He drew it out of his pack and gazed at it. The seemingly random symbols undulated in what was almost a pattern, but not quite. He noticed something odd: about two inches from each edge along the top of the page were two dots… no, upon close inspection, they were crosshair-like devices. They seemed to form two parts of an integrated whole, with the cardinal points of a compass denoted on the left, and the ordinal points indicated on the right. He squinted at the vellum and saw that the two symbols shared a slightly skewed axis… each of the two axes were offset by less than two degrees counter-clockwise. He folded the page so as to bring the sigils into alignment and held the page to the still-blinding light. As he concentrated on seeing through the two layers of parchment, his light was abruptly interrupted, a shadow falling on him. His vision cleared and he saw someone standing in front of him.

‘I see you have found the St-’ The newcomer cut himself off. ‘I am going to take that from you. Please don’t resist… it will be ever so much easier.’ The newcomer’s voice was smooth and sure, his water clear intention almost as concrete as the deed itself. He reached his hand out to receive the vellum. He anticipated no resistance, and indeed, he may have found none. If not for the fact that his victim was beginning to see the difference.

He folded the parchment and put it back in his pack, wasting no movement or time. Here we had a clear conflict. However, he knew he had the advantage, because his enemy (it was so clear) had only his intention at the moment, where he himself had the fact of possession. Not to mention a .380 pistol. If he were to want to decisively shift this decision in his favor, he would have to pass very quickly though intention and into deed. He stood and drew the gun in one motion, disengaging the safety as he brought the pistol level with the other man’s brow. His face shone bright with the glow of absolute surety; the sun endorsed his act and embraced him in warm, liquid light; there was a miniature sunrise over the other man’s head, a subjective dawn on a subjective new day. He hesitated not a whit to aim and fire at his opponent’s broad head. His opponent’s expression had not even the time to change when he pulled the trigger.

He applied even pressure to the trigger lever and brought it through its full range of motion smoothly. A small ratchet engaged the rotating cylinder and spun it round with the motion of the trigger. As the cylinder’s chamber aligned with the barrel, the hammer of the gun was drawn back in a perfect demonstration of the ‘double-action’ principle, allowing a single pull of the trigger to engage the entire mechanism. At the end of its motion, the hammer fell violently onto the firing pin. This would have caused the charge in the bullets shell to explode, driving the bullet out of the barrel, had the one loaded bullet been in the appropriate chamber. A dry click accompanied the misfire. While this might have startled and distracted another man, this man simply pulled the trigger twice more in quick succession. As his target’s hands began to rise in futile self-defense, the hammer fell on the loaded cylinder.

An amount of gas was vented through the small space in between the frame and the cylinder, and the bullet passed through the barrel and the target’s head in the barest fraction of a second. The target, now the victim, died instantly.

Screams erupted from the two or three passersby on the early-morning street as they commenced to flee the scene. Oddly, he knew he was safe; all he needed to do was to head diagonally uptown, stopping in a restroom to wash the backspatter and smoke smell out of his hands and hair. This he did, and came to the edge of Central Park unnoticed, unremarked upon, and utterly unrepentant of his deed.

He shivered and shook.

‘What in the fuck am I doing…’ You think too much, just let it come… ‘I don’t want to do this!’ Who does,

then? Address and address. Sewer and sewer, house and house, buffet and buffet. Abuse and abuse. He let the words come unbidden this time, freed of the numbing focus of intention. They flowed with ease now, never so smooth and unhindered. Something else guided him now, taking away his doubts, his fears, his hesitation… taking away his self, filling the now empty vessel with a foreign intent. He was sick, sicker than he had ever been; this was far beyond simple lack of opiates, this was terminal. He knew it. He knew he had brought this on himself to potentiate the effects of this last dose, this last overdose, so as to enable him to see. See through the Stereopticon; look into its depth and understand.

The Stereopticon was similar to a stereogram. A stereogram was two slightly offset views of the same image, broken into its grainy constituents and overlapped back into one picture, obliterating any visual meaning upon a casual glance… but, when the eyes were aligned as though focusing beyond the surface of the image, the two elements coalesced into one complete, revelatory sign, in all three glorious dimensions.

What happened if, however, the focal angle required to resolve the combined image was greater than the focal angle of the human eye? What could you do if the angle required would rip the rectus and oblique muscles, thereby blinding you to the image? What if the angle was beyond the 160 degree limit? Would he see all four dimensions reduced to a three dimensional representation? Or would his mind simply snap instead of the muscles of his eye?

And if he did see it… what would it be?

He knew that he had to release his eye muscles… he knew that he had to allow his eyes to roll loosely, the muscle tone reduced to that of jelly… His eyes must cross like they had never crossed before, and he knew of only one way to do it. Massive overdose.

He knew this was the way because of an experience he had when he was a child, having taken quadruple his dose of codeine painkillers. He lay in bed, a half hour after swallowing the four pills, and dreamed in more vivid a manner than ever before. His eyes showed him two different aspects of his room, impossible aspects, the walls and floor and ceiling skewed and bent far out of true as his mind struggled to absorb the visualization of the fourth dimension… Time slowed until it stilled, and he lay paralyzed. Fully conscious, he fought to move his arms, his legs, anything; but he could not. His eyes slowed their mad rolling and he tried to lock them on his ceiling… it was no good, he could properly focus on nothing. One superhuman effort seemed to produce a movement in his arm. He threw his entire being into the effort, and started to move… started to sit up, feeling as though he moved through honey or thick gel… he finally sat on the edge of his bed, hyperventilating and sweating. He stood, moving easily, and walked across his room toward the kitchen. As he left his room, he turned toward his bed and saw himself upon it, eyes wide and face slick with sweat.

Two perspectives. One intent. This was the key to the Stereopticon.

One word, two meanings… this was the other half. The offset. Four elements, classical in its symmetry… He was so close to a revelation, and yet so far… He was sure the linchpin was in the parchment. Two syringes, one massive overdose. One shot per eye, a vile admixture of heroin, meperidine, diazepam, and saltpeter… he could only hope that he survived the experiment. The stakes were too high! He had to have the answer… it had been kept from him too long.

A tiny voice dissented… ‘the answer to what?! Who kept what from you? You don’t even know the question… you are going crazy, you are killing yourself, you are giving your life for a reason that exists only inside of your head… there is still time… give it up…’

Never.

He made his way to the site of the experiment.