Participants:
| Scene Title | Episome Materious |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | ˙̷͚̐̃ƃ̸̹͉̈̕u̸̻͊o̷͚̘͘ɹ̶̰̆͒ʍ̸̗̔͊ ̵̧͎̋s̵̰̖̆͝ᴉ̴̅͜ ̶̞̝̂̕ƃ̶̬͇͂u̷̫̝͠ᴉ̵͔̭̃̏ɥ̵̡̥̄̂ʇ̴̹͌̔ǝ̸̧̡̿̅ɯ̵̺͔̐͋ǫ̵̿́S̴͎̞̋ |
“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
― Carl Sagan
Some people think that we arrived at the idea of gods from the remarkable things that happen in the world.
The Greek philosopher Democritus says that the people of ancient times were frightened by happenings in the heavens such as thunder, lightning, and thought that they were caused by gods. The notion is that we imagined our own mythology, bore it from subconscious fears and conscious desires for understanding and purpose within a large and generally uncaring universe. Others would say gods created us. They were the ones that defined the shape and size of matter, sculpted mountains and mankind from clay like a child practicing the arts.
But we are not made of clay. Nor did we imagine the supernatural.
The truth is somewhere in the middle. Neither, and both, simultaneously.
Erin Gordon understands that concept—and in this moment, that concept alone—viscerally: Neither and both, simultaneously. It’s unclear how long she has existed in that nebulous state, being neither a person, nor the absence of one. A living philosophical debate on the nature of consciousness and being.
There is no “world” around Erin to exist in, however. There is merely a background radiation of fast moving atomic particles whirling the the corkscrew acceleration of miniature universes, expanding out rapidly from a point of explosion. A point of origin.
Her.
It is in this understanding that Erin experiences—or rather re-experiences—the notion of the self. She both is and isn’t Erin Gordon, she both is and isn’t a collection of energetic molecules loosely arranged within the silhouette of a single human being.
She is a child sitting between her fathers, asking about a mother she will never know. She is a young woman, struggling with the compound desire of wanting to be a force for good within an authoritarian power structure, and knowing that future is denied to her because she is different and must keep it a secret. She is every instance of herself, and none.
But in this moment she is achingly, blindingly, aware. It feels like waking up from a deep sleep into a different dream, one in which there is the concept of the self and nothing more. No physical body, no physical world, just energy and space and time, forever.
She does not know where this began, or how this will end.
But then, she thinks, did the kaballistic sages so many centuries ago not claim to create a being out of clay? How do you define Being versus being when a person can make a vessel with אמת in its head and that truth becomes purpose, a thought and drive written on the skin instead of in the blood or the brain, etched immutably into its very act of creation? For it was not Democritus but Descartes’ Meditations that began with an atheist and ended with such an astonishing series of then-unbeatable proofs that a Catholic walked out the back door, that the signature of God was written on the brain in its very ability to reason at all, and that makes the golem story a bit more believable, a bit more palatable, even between gulfs of faith. The divide between the mind and body, the premise on which so much theology is based, is both an astonishing logical leap as well as a comforting, believable rucksack. Is it not the ultimate act of the funeral to throw rocks and soil onto the plain pine coffin, to show that we are humble, we are transient, we are Earth? That in whatever divinity may or may not have brought us to life we can also return, and provide nourishment, to clay and silt and sand?
Is she now that handful of rocks? Is she a soul? Is she learning to fly? Being, or being? Neither and both, simultaneously?
None of this is novel, somehow. The words have been written by countless others for generations, changing up syllables on the same core theme, and yet it is somehow the most certain, the most secure, the most unbroken she has ever been.
But the notion of broken brings back something. The memory of a sensation of a heartbeat. Not the act itself, not the physical knot of muscle and vasculature, but a memory of running as fast as her legs could carry her from a swarm of wasps when she was eleven. The prickling memory of stings across her skin, of her fathers’ arms and their concerned voices, rough stubble against her cheeks and tears in her eyes.
Broken brings back memories of moonlight spilling through partly drawn blinds, of tangled sheets and an empty space where another person should be. Of the cold light of the moon reflecting off a too-high tide. Of crowning skyscrapers bristling with vegetation, slouching toward a sea at the end of the world.
Broken brings back memories of a cold stone floor under her back, the white-hot memory of pain, and the sensation of choking on her own blood. A coppery taste fills her mouth. But she does not have one.
The wasps reappear, turn into cucumbers, not yet ripe and spiked like a morningstar, like the morning star, shining brightly overhead. They prick her index finger on the balcony of the Park Slope apartment complex, and the copper taste returns as she sucks the drop of blood instinctually back into her mouth, as though to bring the life force back into her body before it all leaches out and she fades into a waste.
It is the memory of copper. The impression of copper. But not copper, no – only the idea of it. This is the noumenal world, not the phenomenal world. She feels, for the first time, as though she can sense the machinations that turn the gears that show us what we perceive, never reality, only sensory lies. There is a divide in experience versus reality. Reality is, itself, broken.
Another instinct, to look at her hands, to make wings, to distort the void. There is nothing.
Her fathers look the same, but neither looks familiar. Neither is enough. One has too long 90s hair when it should be cropped short; another carries a bit of weight around the gut as though a single beer has made all the difference, but his laugh remains true.
It is four eyes, it is six. It is deep love and the most intense loneliness there has ever been.
A sternum-deep vibrato changes the context. Brings to mind a hallucination of concrete walls and bitter cold. Brings to mind a howling wind that cut through clothes. Gasoline and gun oil. Sweat and blood.
“Erin!” Someone shouted. When? Impossible to say. Maybe they never did.
Maybe—
????
«—thorities insist that there is, at present, no cause for alarm.»
It was all just a bad dream.
«NACA officials believe that the sea level rise associated with this event will be less than six inches and should pose no threat to coastal cities.»
Except the dream lingers.
«Residents in low-lying areas of coastal regions should prepare for potential minor flooding while state and local emergency response teams are on yellow alert.»
The newscaster on the television has a crisp, authoritative voice. But it fades into the background as the rest of the brick-walled apartment comes into clearer focus. It’s a sunny day, there’s plants everywhere in this house. An unfamiliar old dog sleeps on a bed by tall mill-style windows. Erin does not recognize this house, its hardwood floors, the art on the walls, or the book laid open across her lap: Future of Humanity by Dr. Kara Price PhD.
This is (not) home.
She takes the book in her hands. Its weight is real. It smells new, and indeed, the spine is barely cracked (like her own, which could use a pop or two in this too-soft chair, unsupportive in a way her dads never were). Her hands themselves feel drier than she’s used to, and she spots some no-name lotion in a bottle on a table to her right, crusted with leftovers whose chance for absorption never came. She does not touch it. She turns the book over, and over, and looks at the plants, looks at the TV. The ticker tape doesn’t really register. Have I been here before?
It only takes a moment for Erin to realize she’s always been here. She remembers the name and face of her ex-wife Laura. She remembers shrouded blankets and dim lighting, the scent of freshly washed hair and a hand on her cheek. She remembers a wine bottle and two glasses, lightly falling snow and Christmas music. She remembers the weight of a wedding band on her hand and misses that weight in its absence now. She remembers, because this is what is.
The scent of sea air and rust, the cry of gulls, the screams of the end of the world. Those feel like dreams. Distant and painful, but ephemeral and unreal. The flood was a nightmare that lasted a few hours during a cat nap on her couch. This is reality. It always has been.
After all, you don’t imagine Christmas music, for fun, as a Jew, without cause. You don’t invent noelle, noelle, noelle except to scope a twisted irony or underscore the soundtrack of the season, any more than you wake up to a night terror and see a blurry figure before you put your glasses on – for if the hat man were a figment of the imagination, would he not be clear before imperfect eyes? But of course, how could she forget Laura! The silliest, clumsiest, most wonderful ally she’d ever had, a marriage rushed into and which coalesced into years of bliss before, as suddenly as the bliss came on, it vanished as the coastlines did under rising tides of banal marital discord?
So tempting, it is, to fall into this reality (one of an infinity, of two infinities, of infinite infinities) when it is warm and it is here, a breathing body. It is as when she was a teen, staring into space in her bedroom, wondering if this was really all there was in life, if there was naught further to strive or reach for, her eyes settled and seeing past the weathered copy of Stratego sitting forgotten on the top shelf of the open closet. She took in collapsed corners of the box top being held together with the world’s oldest and weirdly-stripiest and yellowest scotch tape from decades before. She took in the wallpaper, also yellow and likely from a similar era as the game itself. She took in the sound of pressurized silence in her own ears, the phantom ring that came from no other sounds being presented to her, the need for something to hold onto in a deprivation tank of meaning. Why not accept that sometimes a Stratego from 1972 is the touchstone you need to remember that this is real, and that you can keep going? Why not accept an old wedding ring and painful memories of a life that could plausibly have come before?
She shakes her head, musses up her hair, and grabs a glass of water, waiting on the coffee table, having been there all along, whenever that means.
«—say that the asteroid, 4581 Asclepius, will be a spectacle when it passes between Earth and the moon’s orbit in a harrowing near miss later this year in November.»
The television comes back into focus. As clear in her ears as the water is crisp down her throat. A fluff piece on a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event in the fall.
«The last time Asclepius was in our neck of the woods, was the near miss just two years ago. If you call six hundred and eighty-four thousand kilometers near.»
The newscasters laugh, the sun shines, Erin’s glass is empty, life goes on.
Did I drink that, or did I just need a refill?
Perturbed, she replaces the glass onto a long-dried moisture ring on the table, and her ears pique.
Asclepius? Wasn’t he that guy who wrote all of those recipes from the Roman Empire? Or was it the asteroid in Armageddon? Is this a Truman Show? This is real, right? We can’t have the derealizations of a teenage bedroom be popping back up, now. You’re 35. Or 40. Or 26?
She looks and spies a copy of the offending VHS on a shelf, wedged between a slanted Jurassic Park and a well-worn Speed, and it’s suddenly in her hands, inspecting.
Erin’s attention is jolted away by the sound of her cell phone vibrating in her back pocket. The buzz travels up her spine in that first moment, a sudden anchoring but an unwelcome jolt like someone sneaking up behind her and yelling ”Boo!”
The VHS cassette fumbles from Erin’s hands, though she doesn’t feel like she dropped it. Armageddon stares back up at her as the phone continues to vibrate.
“Caller Unknown.” Ah yes…the clarion call to Not Answer. She rejects the call, puts it back into her pocket, and continues inspecting her surroundings, half listening to the continued local news on Spectrum 1.
The news broadcast continues to talk about observational spits to see Asclepius cross the heavens, weather conditions, and the timing of the northern lights hitting a heightened state of activity in the coming months. While Erin listens to the television, that copy of Armageddon still stares up at her from the floor. Truman Show still rests safely on the shelf. But something nags at the back of Erin’s mind.
It’s the eyes.
The cover of Armageddon’s VHS is both correct and not correct at once. Keanu Reeves’ face stares back at Erin, causing a disorienting sense of vertigo. He’s right there between Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler. Intellectually she knows that’s correct, but some disassociated part of her is windmilling at the presence.
That’s when the phone rings again.
Caller unknown.
But of course, she shakes her head, as though to clear the dust of a hundred years’ rest. Armageddon was Keanu’s best performance by a country mile, almost as good as his performance in The Sixth Sense. She never understood how the man could bear the weight of losing a daughter, when he looked as though he could have graduated high school with the daughter. Some men just never age, between the hair plugs and the lack of emotional labor thrust upon them. Keanu had won an Oscar for that role, hadn’t he? Or was that Leonardo DiCaprio?
Wait. No, she’s getting her movie trivia messed up. Leo was the one in Speed, and –
As she goes to open up her phone to pull up IMDB, the call returns, and she unintentionally answers the call as she’s sliding to unlock.
Shit.
“Uh. Hello?”
«“Please don’t hang up. I’m in trouble and this is apparently the number that dialed in an emergency.» The voice on the other end of the line is both familiar and not, like someone Erin once heard speaking in a dream. Or a friend from years ago whose voice has faded from memory. Their panic is real, though. The call quality is also shit, full of crackling static.
«Who— Who am I speaking to? My name is—» There’s hesitation. The woman on the other end of the line sounds unsure of herself before saying, «Kara.»
The book that was laid upon her lap comes to mind. The Future of Humanity by Dr. Kara Price PhD.
“I’m sorry,” Erin says as she holds the phone awkwardly close-far from her face, pressing the button to engage speakerphone to ensure she’s hearing correctly, “I won’t hang up but I don’t … I’m just a person. I’m Erin. I’m a botanist. Hi, Kara. I’m worried you have the wrong number?”
She’s speaking fast, babbling to keep the thoughts out, but babbling to make sure the person doesn’t die, and babbling to get through it and make sure that someone else can handle it from here. Unless it’s a crank call? No, she thinks, absently catching Keanu’s face on the spine of a weathered VHS copy of Titanic as her brain moves a thousand miles a second to consider what to do next. Please let this be a prank. I’m not qualified for this.
It’s in that moment a little kaleidoscope of light catches the corner of Erin’s eye. From out the window there’s a shimmer of light reflecting in the window and blossoming out like a prism. Some kind of iridescent shimmer just outside of arm’s reach if her apartment window was open. But the way the sunlight catches it makes it shimmer and waft like a reflection off the ocean’s surface on her walls. On her.
It brings with it a sense of deja-vu. But also a feeling like Erin has forgotten something deeply important. The woman on the other end of the line, Kara, hasn’t said anything for a long moment of crackling static. She’s still there, though.
Erin turns to face the window. The moment’s gone, but – but it also lingers. It lingers too long. Time has run a fever. Dust lingers in the sunbeam, incorporeal, settling into the air rather than onto objects. The remains of exhaust, of human skin, float in wrong gravity. Sweat beads onto her palms, and she can feel oily fingerprints etch themselves onto the matte rubber of the phone case. With her free hand, she shields her eyes, but it’s too late, she’s seen something of time’s misstep.
“Kara? Are you still there?”
«Yes!» Kara replies, crackling over the phone. «Erin. It’s okay that you’re just a person, a botanist,» comes next with a breathy, anxious laugh. «I’ve always thought botany is really cool,» sounds panicked. «Where are you located? What city?» Desperation, now. For anything. For help.
«Does the name Odessa mean anything to you?» Kara suddenly asks before Erin can answer the first question. «Or Juliette?» She sounds terrified, of something. But those names both do and don’t mean something to Erin. Vague, nebulous sensations of maybe and probably not’s. Unhelpful to someone who sounds like they’re scared for their life.
Electricity crackles up Erin’s spine. “You mean like the city in Poland? Or the Shakespeare play? I–”
There’s wondering there. Feeling. Fear, somehow? But recollection is lacking. Where am I, anyway? “No. I don’t think so. Should I? I get the distinct sense that I’m…” A breath. “That something is wrong here. Where are you? I’m in New York, and I don’t…”
She trails off. Why is she in New York? I live in Ithaca.
I live in Ithaca.
I? The notion of self brings a wave of vertigo.
Stereoscopic colors flicker outside. Red and blue like those flimsy 3D glasses from old theaters. The unreality of it hits Erin hard. Nausea wells up from the pit of her stomach and the world spins. No. Ithacha isn’t the shape of the word. It’s got more consonants, it’s cold, it’s windy, it’s full of screams that will not stop.
«Something is wrong.» Crackles over the phone, which feels soft in Erin’s hand, like she could squeeze it and it would pop like a balloon. «I think I’m in Utah. Raffle Township.»
That is solid, like here, but it is not. Here. Erin isn’t in New York. The kaleidoscopic fractal outside is not New York. It is a little town in Utah. A little town with a big satellite dish, silhouette in the smear of color and geometry turning into knots outside.
But in the same revelation, Erin isn’t, either.
Erin squeezes the phone, just to test that it won’t, in fact, shatter. With her other hand, she throws an ashtray an ashtray? What year is this? We don’t smoke. with all the force she can muster at the closed window.
It never happens.
Some people think that we arrived at the idea of gods from the remarkable things that happen in the world.
The Greek philosopher Democritus says that the people of ancient times were frightened by happenings in the heavens such as thunder, lightning, and thought that they were caused by gods. The notion is that we imagined our own mythology, bore it from subconscious fears and conscious desires for understanding and purpose within a large and generally uncaring universe. Others would say gods created us. They were the ones that defined the shape and size of matter, sculpted mountains and mankind from clay like a child practicing the arts.
But we are not made of clay. Nor did we imagine the supernatural.
The truth is somewhere in the middle. Neither, and both, simultaneously.
Erin Gordon understands that concept—and in this moment, that concept alone—viscerally: Neither and both, simultaneously. It’s unclear how long she has existed in that nebulous state, being neither a person, nor the absence of one. A living philosophical debate on the nature of consciousness and being.
There is no “world” around Erin to exist in, however. There is merely a background radiation of fast moving atomic particles whirling the the corkscrew acceleration of miniature universes, expanding out rapidly from a point of explosion. A point of origin.
Her.