Conversational Tones

Charlie didn't look so good. Usually he came and sat at the cafeteria table at the morning with the rest of us, always coming early, always bright and chipper, always happy to be there. Even sometimes when I knew he had had a streak of awful luck, or failed a test, or had too much work to do. He was always to cheerful, as if nothing ever got to him, no storm could damage his calm. He was a newcomer, and so would try to recite all our names whenever he would stop by. This morning he didn't even look at me when I sat down, and I saw that his hand was trembling. I had a bad feeling about what was going to happen next, but as I found out, my feeling didn't match by far my fate. I asked perhaps the one question I should not have.
"Hey Charlie, what's the matter?"
"Hnuh? Oh. Everything's fine."
I leaned in a little.
"Bullshit. You're never like this. What the hell is the matter?"
And so he told me. Maybe you've read novels before that follow a stream-of-consciousness model? Charlie's response took on that quality pretty fast, and allow me to say that it is much more upsetting to hear out loud seemingly at random than to read in a book. Books I can put down.

"I told you everything is fine and I meant it. Who am I to question what is clearly well within natural phenomena to transpire before my eyes while I wriggle helpless to stop it? You of course met the new arrival yesterday, and greeted him same as I did, I'm sure, though I don't remember you being around at all while I was yesterday. I really enjoyed yesterday. Yesterday reminded me of how little I like that specific airport, and even gave me a new reason, I think, but then, what I think seems to fade in and out like a huge fishbowl full of guppies who all have great hiding spots under rocks or stupid looking branches that you've convinced yourself look just like proper driftwood because the algae has grown a green fuzz all over it. Airports remind me of hell, and have you ever been?"

He took a pale breath. I wish I had a good response, but I knew it was pointless to ask the most pertinent question: how did he claim memory of Hell? I stared, and Charlie continued.

"Yes yes yes. Fine fine fine. Every last meticulous cog in perfect sequence makes the machine whirr with a fantastic motion that you only hear about in science fiction because real life engineers stopped building the damn thing as soon as it started working, and judging from the fact that the whirring noise, at least, is in perfect working order, well then the whole machine must be top notch, eh? I can hear it working. I had a toe in my ear, and that made the noise come on and it hasn't gone away yet. A ringing like a waterfall of golden loops: wedding rings, millions of them falling on a plastic placemat out of a star-shaped hole. They break the table they fall on, you know, but the machine works well enough that no one cares. I cared once. I really did, and you know what happened, Care took a huge band of twisted up garbage bags and whipped my eyes. Its a garrote of woven nylon, twisted and efficient now fast around my life up to now, and they fault me, me, just because I can see the next part coming. I can see it coming and no one else can. If all around you was a painful glow in your favorite color and people burst into a million pieces as soon as you looked at them, I hope you would have the presence of mind to act like a crazy person. As it is all I see are ghosts and ghosts of ghosts, and all the buildings turned to ash and the ground and trees all at funny angles to one another: many faceted and shiny on the edges. I feel the nylon lariat close around me as Care cares back as hard as it can. When I met him, I knew something was wrong because I could no longer feel him, and then I looked around and realized I couldn't feel anyone else either. They had all faded fast into the background of my then current field of view like a stray needle that takes on the color of the shaggy carpet all around it. You'll find it later when your dog steps on it or licks it and contracts tetanus, but I saw it all happen in a split second, the needle gone: the people faded. All of them. The top of his hair was darkened, but I suppose monotonality will to that to a mop. I could see in the darkness of the top of his hair the same fury I had felt years before, that is to say, in the split second before the needle dropped because really I couldn't feel him as soon as I met him. Or was the fury it? It burned like a meticulously designed stopwatch, clicking purposefully toward doomsday, and graying out all the lively sounds about it with that efficient whirring noise that maybe you remember I described earlier.
    It was the fury of ten-thousand hummingbird beats, the fury of a bamboo shoot that aches to become a cane and then a caning, the fury of the teaspoonful of perfectly still water that sits in your lungs and kills you, the fury of the clickety-clack noise of a room full of furious writers who can't think of what the next sentence is supposed to sound like. And then the next one too. It all fades in and out. The fury is sweeping and overtaking, and I knew that I had been forbidden, but from what and by whom? So I stood and said hello. I shook his hand like an honest man, but I didn't experience it. Not any of it. Everything had wiped clean, even the feelings of my other friends who had taken me to this place. Come to think of it I have no idea what made me think it was a good idea to tag along. I was neither driver nor navigator on the trip, and they didn't need protection from anything anyway. I'm really truly glad I went, though, because maybe I can pull myself out of this darkness by blaming the airport itself, that I already hate, but not hate, mind, because I gave up that emotion too long ago to dredge it back out. The airport was so full of empty faces, of people trying to get to where they already were, or someplace else in the vain and vulgar attempt to be outside oneself. I transcended, but I really didn't want to. That was the experience of having no experience of one's own anymore, and it took the feeling away, and this is what a massive crowd in an airport is trying to achieve as a positive good in this world. Bull. They have no idea what the trophy looks like. I've stared down into it, having wrested it from the dusty wardrobe of God Almighty, and seen the pile of sunflower seed shells inside. I guessed once that he had gotten hungry a little while waiting for the award ceremony. That's what experiences like these get you, and I shouldn't have even been there, but I'm glad to have gone, really. If I hadn't gone then he would be around just the same. The car and driver and welcomer would have come safely back just the same. I would have made it to my class instead of not, but then, I had already decided that something more important was going to happen, and after a fashion it did. But if it hadn't it still would have: that's fate in this world that you can know.
    But so help me I upheld my Victorian and gentlemanly duty. I even took off my hat when I was going inside, and put it back on as we walked out. That's because duty is far more important than the rest of my generation seems to think. Back in the day, all men could dream about was giving up their duty or upholding it, but whichever way they felt about it, each upheld duty anyway because that's what everyone expected. Everyone in that airport, all the faded people who would not have breathed a word in the defense of my virtue still expected me to stand there and shake hands with a stranger who had made the colors run from the walls. If he had been Satan or Jesus in disguise as just another college kid, the imperative to comply and be polite would have remained still. Even if the airport had been a single broom closet that we four were crammed in and with no overhead light, the imperative would remain, and you had better believe that I would have greeted him with the same civility as I afforded him anyway. Usually what I feel when the time finally comes to shake someone's hand is much different than that time. I should describe the complete experience and then offer up the counter example, because that's what they always taught us makes a better argumentative essay.
    When I meet someone, I can see into their eyes. Not their eyes. Anyone can simply look at a face and pick out which parts of it are eye or not, and your brain does most of that automatically by now, whether learned or hard-wired I cannot say and never do. What I can do is see into their eyes. That's where all the information is. All right behind the tiny black specs, an array of text that marches back and forth like forty-thousand soldiers wearing shiny black dome helmets and carrying onyx-tipped spears in their right hands. They sit around campfires and tell me everything that they have ever seen, and we spend hours at a time jawing and telling each other every story we ever heard or wrote. You're lucky if you find a writer because then the feeling lasts longer. It's like picking up Sunday's paper instead of the front page section of Thursday. Usually it still lasts long enough to occupy your entire attention for that few seconds in-between when it is still acceptable to be looking the person in the eye without saying anything. Your attention slips for a split second back into time as you know it so that you can breathe your own name and listen to theirs. And then usually the last sound of their name begins to echo as I look to the array of soldiers once again. By now they've all grown up and out of military service, some killed in the war, some dead of plague or food poisoning, some of grief. All of the ones that remain speak to me with their true hearts, and none of them feels despair for their fallen comrades or for themselves either. They are brave and beautiful while they await the end of their lives. They look forward to it like the coming down of the man's eyelashes, striking their figures from the record. I have heard them all, and I remember their plight and plan to build a shrine in their honor. That's what it usually feels like to see into someone's eyes.
    When I met this young man, everything seemed to work the same way, as it begins it felt almost boring. Have something happen to you every time you meet someone and the feeling fades out of it too. Magic is only magic when you feel it working. And this time the banal overcame the righteous. Ennui stopped me cold, too soon to see a damn thing, so I have no idea what's on his mind. Your brain has wonderfully efficient coping mechanisms, mind you, and so I could still feel what I needed to. You start checking for other signs of danger around the face and throat. Look for dilations or contractions here and there, shifts in overall momentum, feel the pulse or the breathing rate. If he takes a preparatory breath, what you have to do is lunge at his throat without another second's hesitation. That clearly didn't happen, because I clearly didn't get any of the signs I mentioned. The coping worked, I'm sure, but as it turns out he didn't come to kill me. Maybe he should have, and I suppose I cannot yet discount the idea that he will or even wants to, as each moment flows one into the next. I shook his hand like an honest man greets another honest man, but that was no simple or honest meeting. I had by then hit the panic button in my head, and I have no idea what he was thinking, but I have a lot of good guesses, and sometimes that's better than trying to divine things.
    See I've been in that situation before. Exactly like him. I was meeting myself, and that's why everything froze. Well, no it didn't freeze but in fact kept time traveling, awarding the other team a free-throw, and stripped one second into the next like poorly designed toilet paper that you can't seem to tear off where you want to stop taking. I had never met myself before, but I sure as sugar could remember the feeling. Maybe its different for kids who have means of talking to one another. I knew I didn't when it was my turn back in the day, but I could compensate for that part of it, too. I compensated for communication with sound planning. We knew that we wouldn't be able to work out anything on the fly, so instead we worked it out ahead of time down to the minute. Of course she couldn't recognize me when I finally arrived...you look confused. I'm being too vague. Let me give you the full story, and then tell you why I knew exactly what this young man was going through because I had experienced it for myself once.
    A mysterious young woman fast identified herself to me as the roommate of my then sweetheart. She was called "Fiji," and she had an idea that (who really knows how young women get ideas like this) it would be simply top if I were to travel there, back close to home, from my college, and visit my sweetheart because she had been walking around all glum and sighing heavily for no reason and saying aloud to people that she missed me. And who could refuse any of that? Duty called, and I felt the imperative once again, though be it certainly tainted by the fact that I had to type back and forth to Fiji. The internet has some excellent qualities, but conversation is not one of them. Sure I try to offset all that by being as honest as I can to the English language, which usually results in the kid on the other end thinking I have a mental problem because I don't abbreviate anything. I think in a way that they are usually right. Remind me later to tell you about why I have a mental problem because I don't abbreviate anything. We're talking about Fiji. Her idea was to get me there, and so it had thereupon become my idea as well. Only it was going to be our little secret, a belated birthday surprise for my gentle duck and dove. What a great idea. All the while leading up to the plan, I felt a boyish joy like seeing the husk of a japanese beetle on your Mom's gardenia bush for the first time, or jumping barefoot in a puddle right after a flash flood. Every minute I felt that pleased, one after the next, clearly this is what it felt like to be doing God's work, I thought. And pleased as I was, I suppose I should have felt more pleased to learn that I was mistaken, at least about the part about doing God's work. Whether I was or wasn't, I cannot say. Whether Fiji was or wasn't, I cannot say. Her part of the plan was a little link, and a lot of discretion, because it is harder than you might think to keep a secret from your roommate, and just as hard to keep one from your friend, and harder non-linearly to keep it from one who was both, which was the case. I trusted her discretion and her link, and in the end we achieved a level of success. There are levels, you understand. My part of the plan was the soap. I actually had to get myself across the country, this time, for the first time, without help from anyone, inasmuch as moral support is no real help. My friends would always lend me moral support while I was falling off ladders, and so later I'll make you promise to act, as act you should. I was telling about what my part in the plan was, and it has to do with the moment that I stopped feeling that same content. I had been so self-assured that I had been doing good up until then that it seemed totally mysterious to me that anything should be different. I mean, sure it had been a downer to realize that my friend from college could no longer drive me back home with him because his mom had decided from a distance, at random, and arbitrarily that he was not a good enough driver to do so, and would get into an accident and die. Nevermind the fact that that would mean a loss of hours to me, not to mention hours off of my past from the near hundred more dollars it would cost to take the bus there, which it did, or the hours from my future that I would spend actually riding across the state in that godawful bus. They had people on that bus that day who had been in barns, perhaps many barns, perhaps even clean barns, but I would not have known one from the other, and there should have been more reason than that for me to distrust my own feelings. Barn smell was all it took, and smells are a potent thing. I doubted that what I was doing was correct any longer, but what could I do by then? I was halfway across the state, going to visit a friend's house because that was the only thing left to do at the time, not driving with him because his mom had said "no," and writhing in anger with him, gradually coming to the conclusion he had confessed earlier, that he really did hate his mom. I knew of hate, then. Of it, I say, because I didn't really feel it. I never felt it. That came a little later, and even then I didn't really feel hate because I don't and can't. Honest. One day it simply stopped. Let me tell you, though, about when we finally got off the bus.
    My friend's mom had decided that he was no good to drive, and she was going to stick to it. So she decided that she would be the one to drive us to the airport (my friend had somewhere else to go after), and we were both exhausted from a long-ass bus ride anyway, so why not? It was colder, then, than I remember the same season being another year in that place. Much colder, and the numbing cold followed by a warming rush of engine air with just a tinge of sweet oil perfume, that grease that any mechanic knows, was enough to put my exhausted body to sleep. I slept for a few seconds at the most, because your body has wonderful mechanisms for coping with oncoming disaster. This time oncoming disaster had taken the form of oncoming traffic, and at first I was simply confused by the tiny lights that were growing. Wil' o' wisps, I thought, as hazy and insubstantial as my unhealthy dreams. I was doing good in this world, and could not be bothered with ephemeral phantasms right now. Is there any other kind of phantasm, really? But these were neither wisps, nor ephemeral. These are what we Americans like to call "cars," and given another half-minute they would become what we call a "traffic accident." You laugh, but keep in mind that I was living it. Somehow, this mother of my friend who had decided that he was no good as a driver had gotten us into the wrong direction of a three-lanes-wide road, and was pointing us at quite a few other vehicles, whose drivers must have been at least as confused as I was. Boy was I confused. Not scared though. I think my mind skipped over the being scared part, because the only other thing I can remember feeling right after that was a profound dislike for this woman who had driven us the wrong way. Right from confusion to dislike, like a small vine that grew out of the ground too far away from any one tree to wrap itself around, so it splits into five or six and finds several trees. Never scared. More relieved, really. I did feel relief to finally be in the airport, because I could feel in control again. This was the part of the journey that I would make with my own feet. Forget about the plane. You walk to the plane, you walk on it and off it. You have to walk across the country with your own feet. I was in control again, and it occurred to me then, and has occurred to me many times since, that the situation I had just walked away from was entirely pathological and backward. I think I'll write a story about it sometime because of that. Picture it this way, if this woman had found me in an alleyway, threatened my life and stolen ninety dollars from me, you would call her a mugger and be entirely correct. But even though that's exactly what she did, and did little else aside from that, mind, she would never have thought herself a mugger. Never once. I had just been mugged, but to hell with it, I was about to walk across the coast and couldn't be bothered. Imperious I felt as I strode to the gate where I belonged, but belonging was exactly the problem that I could feel, belonging was the reason that I could no longer maintain the level of comfort that I had felt while I was planning this whole cockamamie venture. What I finally felt while feeling like I belonged where I was was that where I was was not where I belonged finally. My content and calm evaporated while I walked, but what could I do by then? I could still smell the barn.
    The airport, as it were, was much less the problem for me than everything else had been, and really had any of it been a problem? Suppose I had changed my mindset about the entire operation, I could have enjoyed every last minute, and laughed and laughed at how silly I must have looked while feeling so sad. What an amazing series of days that becomes a story whose facts remain the same and whose tone changes with every telling. I could retell this as a love poem, or an epic ballad, or a human interest short, or a newspaper article and you would always get all the facts. On the plane I wondered about my retelling, and thought that one day it would make a good story, no matter how terribly I felt about it the whole time. Terribly you understand! I had reversed myself. The imperative had failed me, because I now saw my duty as vain and superfluous. Streaking across the sky in metal tubes that I had once myself flew. How fun it would be to have the pilot die and be the guy who is familiar enough with how to fly that he could get us all down without dying. There's a lot of time to think on a plane, you understand, while you are not walking somewhere or eating something. Both of those can happen too, but I had had coffee and was still exhausted from the bus, and probably again from having my body prepare itself for a crash, and so I slept an uneasy sleep and dreamt of my retelling of my present state. Whatever else happened, I would always have the privacy of it: the idea that I had walked across the country on my own, for no reason, that would be important much later, but that has nothing to do with the man I met last night, and so I should get on to the part where I met up with Fiji.
    Fiji had decided that she would handle my getting around once I arrived at my home airport (and never has there been a prettier one, mind you, than the one that is home). This was the one part of the plan that we up to that point had not figured out. I was supposed to be able to recognize her by her being the one who looked like she was looking for someone she didn't recognize. I had such high hopes for that last sentence while I was sounding it out inside, but you'll have to take it for gospel truth, because that's exactly what I did. In fact I ended up passing her by once, with a curious glance, and then we met up later, just a moment later, and she identified herself and I myself. Her clue had been that I looked like I was looking for someone who was supposed to look like she was looking for someone she didn't recognized, and had recognized that. We drove off in her car, you understand.
    The vanity and vulgarity of my misguided quest was made known to me by the local supermarket. I wanted to prepare gyros for my sweetheart and I to eat, and instead of settling for something else, some other most tasty dish that I had prepared before, and whose ingredients are most readily-had, I had to have those damn gyro sandwiches. Clearly, by that time, I had already gone insane, which is bad because I still feel the same way, which means I'm insane, which means that I have someone else coming to kill me right now. And is that really so bad? In my memory I have had three people to promise to kill me one day, and do you think they'll all work together, because I sure don't. One was a pact, a solemn oath to do what it takes on the day I lose my mind, because I'll be too damn dangerous to everyone if I am allowed to go on and on without stopping, and death would be a good stopping place, I think. Another was an enemy, who really never will kill me because he's too damn scared and cowardly in general to risk anything, and I would beat him besides. Another is a friend, and that was only on the condition that he himself was dying, and would take me with him so that when he went to hell, he would at least not be lonely. So, okay, you've got me, only actually two people who are coming to kill me right now. I mean to say that the grocery store did not have the ingredients I require. Now that I think about it I can laugh at the kid who thought so much of his local grocery store that he thought they would have lamb sausages and pocketless pita. In the end it turned into pocketed pita, pork sausage, romaine lettuce...other things that were never meant to go on a gyro. I prepared them later, and with all the love of my heart, and do you know what its like to cook love into something?
    No matter the ill preparation or the inadequate tools or ingredients, I could feel affection again for the work of my hands, and the veil lifted and my content returned. My hands and the tools were perfect conductors of my true heart, for as sure as the heat conducted through the frying pan into that sausage, so too did my heart through the wooden spoon I used, which was curiously like, now that I remember it, another spoon I had once owned and with which I had cleared away many of my friends' headaches. Every little bubble that the grease formed was an echo of my affection, and I could see the rise and pop and splash of the little droplet of oil that it left behind, each a triumph, each a grand monument a thousand years in the making. That is the sense of destiny in this world, to empathize with unliving and very much alive food that you prepare with your own hands, and empathy is a lot of what I am and what has gotten me going on and on like this. I suppose we'll come to that point later and so I shall ask you for a second time to remind me of a thing: this time of my empathy. My guess is that it will come out on its own later. For now what you should know is that I loved that meal from ingredient to digestion.
    In fact my digestion was off, but by then I was no longer cooking, you see. Fiji decided to ham the whole thing up even more by getting my sweetheart to walk into the room blindfolded. What an icon, what a sham! How awful. It was so cute it made me distant at the thought, like a single spindly leaf that decided to never fall off all winter long, and is pushed out in the spring by new growth and sits on your lawn all summer because who would rake anything in the springtime. You can see it sit in discontent, remembering the branch it came from. Clearly I was supposed to be magnanimous and magical all at once, and I did my best to act it out because I really felt uncomfortable with being a true part of blindfolding anyone. I think she did her best to act shocked and happy to see me all at once. Anyway I bought it. Hell, I still buy it, because while I have some modicum of acting talent, she didn't have the drop that all women are born with anyway: which I suppose is one of the reasons I was attracted to her in the first place. I like to find the unusual in this lifetime because there's too much of the usual about anyway, and also, come to think of it, I'm pretty damn odd myself, and a man should find someone who is like himself. A twin in spirit only, I should clarify, for twins of form outside of the family are an abomination unto nature. Some tribes even used to consider naturally born twins to be untoward, as if one of them was an evil spirit, and so they had to slay both just in case. Twins. I still buy that she was shocked and pleased. Her roommates took pictures and left, having taken care of their part of things, which was to put the idea in my head in the first place, and then to gossip about it for a month without spilling the beans, which they managed only because one of them had come up with a secret name for me, which she had only come up with because they had been whispering and she had misheard my name the first time. Fair enough. I could be Carl if it meant keeping a secret, and anyway there's nothing wrong with a little idle gossip, no? That was their part, and they left satisfied. My part wasn't done, because I was supposed to be enjoying this.
    You understand, I think I can stop the story there and spare you the part about the return trip and what she and I did in time intermediary to all of that, a gentleman would never tell, anyway. My point is that this was the very moment that I was supposed to be the happiest and most self-satisfied, having accomplished a great feat for the wellbeing of my closest friend and sweetheart. I was supposed to feel excellent and gorgeous and grand. I had a duty to uphold, but I couldn't. I didn't feel any of those things, and what I felt most was tired and confused at the fact that I was only ever feeling tired and confused. It wasn't worth it for a simple extended weekend, and that was the point of it all. My time was too short. Too short! All those hours, the eternity I had spent in compare to my simple voyage here and there, and I could not appreciate the time that I had right there and then.
    That was the feeling that had returned, the last thing I could remember before the empathy of the common man left me entirely, back at that airport only yesterday. Maybe I have the terrible feeling that he is me, that I am now only observing my own life through other people's eyes, and that rather than leaving me, empathy has become me, and thanks for reminding me to go on about why it is so important that I feel for the pain of others. In fact I know not why it ever became so important, but I thought it a simple character trait like any other. Why shouldn't I be the guy who can experience your sorrows without having ever had the same thing happen to him? It was just like me for the longest time, and it grew into quite the talent. So much so that I could boast about being a mind reader and make good on the claim whenever friend or casual observer had the chance to be skeptical. One of my favorite tricks is telling people what they feel right now, which is easy. I'm no mind-reader you understand. It never works that way. But a person's emotions can tell you plenty about what must be going through their head, and between an excellent reading of one's emotional state, and a cleverness about linking facts and experiences together as does a private investigator, yeah, yeah sure I was a mind-reader. That is until yesterday. That's the empathy part for as far as I'm willing to talk about it right now. I've never been more frightened by it, that is to say, by my own self for what else it left of me when my one greatest and most defining trait has vanished. Vanished in an hour like a photograph that you took out of your album on a busy street to get a better look at in the failing light, and then the lights all dim and a car rushes by and with all the people walking you simply forget that you're holding on to anything at all, and it all clears and you have no photo in your mitten and the album rustles in the dark and stale breeze of city life. Vanished like so many computer files that you simply no longer knew were on the same hard disk that you've had for years, and cleaned up in some massive memory purge or power surge that happens in a thunderstorm while you sleep in sound safety in your bed nearby. Poof. That part of you that is you is simply no more, and what does it leave behind? Not someone who feels anything anymore of anyone's emotions, and this I know for sure. Anyway I asked you to remind me of at least one other thing."

At this point I got a little break. It lasted only a second, but felt like your first breath after being submerged for too long. Charlie had lost his mind, I thought, but through it all he kept a grim lucidity about his entire situation. If he were only crazy that would be one thing. What the hell was happening if he wasn't?

"About the part of why I'm insane because I don't abbreviate things. I had mentioned internet text conversations before and that had gotten me on the topic, but what I mean is a more general sense of abbreviation. I in fact admire my own penchant for cleaving to the rules of English grammar and even style while I am supplying a friend or enemy with text to the face. The common practice is to get it all out as quick as you can, because you're talking to so many people at once that you can't bother to make them all good or pleasant conversations, or even one of them. Text to the face means that it all must go quicker than you can really think about it or think it through at all. At that I wonder why anyone would bother at all. What you end up with is an endless string of pointless words. One into the next, any one conversation interstateable with any single or single dozen others. One into the next. When your conversations lose tone at all, that's when you end up like this, one moment into the next with no aim or heed. Not even a goal in sight, and though I doubt goals as a good reason to do anything, I would prefer it to having no reason at all. At least for the sake of conversation. Which is a sake! Don't think that it isn't a sake, and a principle in which I used to believe. I still believe with whatever sense I can still claim over the use of the word "I." Saying anything in the self-reflexive sense doesn't feel correct anymore. I'll get to that part a little later, I suppose. Abbreviations though, are the common side-effect of having huge strings of heedless text-speech. Imagine if you were actually trying to sound out the words or read it aloud to yourself or to the community gathered around for some interest that I could likely fathom given time. You would hate it, says I, you would want to garrote the guy on the other end with a velvet rope, or beat him to death with an abridged dictionary. But you will too. Later today even, you're going to go home and while you're describing Charlie the raving derelict to some other friend of yours, no matter how you feel about it, because I sure as hell can't tell, you'll speak in the same hackneyed and cropped and chopped up words that the others of our generation do, and whatever is left of me will hate you for it. But not really hate, you understand, and at that there's probably not even enough left of me to feel much at all. I think at that you're off the hook, but allow me to extend abbreviation into a more general sense.
    Imagine if you had to think about everything. Really everything. When you walk, you would have to think about each individual contraction and expansion, each contact and motion, each tiny little bit that composes the whole event. If you had to think this way about walking, you would be paralyzed. You would never get anywhere for want of thinking the motion through in its total form. So you abbreviate, as we humans must necessarily do to survive, or to even accomplish any actions. All you think about is walking as a whole, the motion and event itself, and after awhile you don't even need to think about that anymore. You think about going forward and it happens, you will yourself from one place to the next without a further second spent in worry over the components that make the whole. The little things that build up to a larger dynamic. This is my plague, you understand, that I can no longer abbreviate life where I ought. I am stuck in the description of that moment and meeting. As, indeed, it peels on into more than a simple second. Oh it lasted the whole night long, and I wish I still had my natural talent for abbreviation, but that left me, too. What I can experience takes no abbreviation any more. You can tell, for instance, that I can still get myself from place to place with my legs. I am not paralyzed, but I am stuck in a sense. When I walk, I can feel it all.
    I can feel the hatred that the ground feels with the passing of my feet. Every instant wants me gone, surreptitiously replaced by a doppelganger or simply another human being. The call to endings rushes up through my feet like a bead of oil in a hydrophobic gradient. The feeling comes from elsewhere, too, and feeling is not really the correct word. I told you my empathy left and it is very true, and I know these feelings are not my own, though I am little aware of what the self-reflexive means in this case. It is not a feeling or an experience that seeps up through my feet as I walk, so I will call it a dream.
    And the dream that I breath in with each passing moment speaks with perfect clarity to my faculties. It washes over me with a gigantic and enormous hush, like the muted gibbering of an upset but polite crowd of onlookers, something so large that you cannot deny it is there, and so quiet that no one else around you is even remotely awake of it. I can read the clouds and listen to the trees that I pass with the same lucidity that I could understand a familiar and friendly novel. That is what began happening, but it is what the dream meant to me that has brought on the fog, I think.
    What the dream meant as I soaked it up, now from my feet, from the gloves on my hands and the hood on my head, from the sounds of the city in the distance, and the roar of engines nearby, all a symphony, one movement into the next as I accompanied my friends back to the car. I had been there before, this time I knew it for sure. Not only in my past but in my future as well. This had happened and was happening and was going to happen to me. A gentle tingle, an electric rush, a fel breeze, and a cacophony of uproarious giggles. Getting to the car was more difficult than I had imagined it would be, and though duty demanded that I hide my plight, I suspect I had become more transparent than before. Actors are supposed to be most opaque you understand. Actors and housepaints. Everything else should be varying levels of aloof and into transparent, like looking at a mountaintop from near away from the base, you can see the top and the bits beyond it in the sky blend in with a hazy stroke, as if the top of the mountain itself had no color to it other than the sky, and was made of crystal glass that bows and shimmers like the ocean. That's aloof into transparency, which are two most distant things mostly, and too much of an opposite fades into the other, and so there I was stripped of my front. I in fact took a position as rearguard in case we were attacked, or so I convinced myself and others, and besides, walking four wide is for military color guards. As it was we had a VIP with us who needed, probably, no amount of looking after at all, but he got it all the same. He had earned a looking after because he had made the colors run from existence. In him I had the perfect reflection of the dream, which manifested for me once before long ago, in a location that I cannot remember at all: that of the box of crayola crayons that is sized and shaped smaller than you're used to and says simply "One," on the outside, as they usually do with the numbers twenty four or fifty six or whatever vulgar mixes of absurd and unusable wax the company can convince kids they really want. I oppose Kelly Green with all the passion that I have left, do you hear me? Kelly Green.
    I was raw, and needed to hide very badly. I think after I finish this I will go hide somewhere, maybe across the state. I wish I could leave, go far away, maybe even on a plane, and how ironic would that be? Hell, I'm sure that the VIP and I could at that convince people that we are Batman and Bruce Wayne. That's if I could leave. My being was stripped away, and so I cannot really go anywhere. Wherever I go, really I am back there at the airport. You can't hide from that. Where is there left to go when what you are is caged elsewhere. I admit it is a curious and most perplexing puzzle to try to tackle if you're not living it out. As it is I can barely understand it myself, and the only fix I can see is to somehow reverse things, as if going to visit the site of my spirit's abandonment would somehow call it back, as if to say that the physical has a literal and real attachment to the spiritual: the ways of the alchemists linking things that they thought ought well to be linked. Plants that have leaves of a shape like a body part are clearly meant to treat illnesses of that part. Elements that can be found under certain phases of the moon or take on the properties of the gods-namesakes of the stars are clearly linked to those stars, and should be combined only under the timely astronomical conditions that correlate. It sounds like perfect madness: the mixing of logic and the ludicrous, but without it we would have no chemistry today. So perhaps I'm building up to something greater, but the best I can hope for is cautionary tale. Do not do not do not let this happen to you."

I cut in, I didn't want to end up this way or see anyone else like it. "Whu-what? Don't let what happen? What!"

"I'm not surprised that you haven't been listening, and maybe I am even approaching pleasure at the fact that I have awoken you somewhat to the dangers ahead. Though these be grim tidings for me, I can scarcely imagine what would happen if the situation reversed itself, and spread the dream through all of you as well. Take a quick look behind me and you will see the same revelry that you usually do at our happy little cafeteria community. The same smiles. The same games. The same conversations of the topical and real. The same emotions, if you have talent enough as I once had to be able to read that, too. But I tell you it is nothing the same as it ever once was. I can feel the dream there, too. In every chuckle and tone, in every glance and glare and look, in every play, every throw of the dice, at each drop of a card. There is the dream.
    In the chuckle I hear an echo of the dream like ten rusty knives covered in corn husks and bits of rice strewn about. I can see a little girl playing with paper dolls off in the corner, where the only wallpaper of the old room still hugs the walls and peels ever more toward the corner. She cuts with safety scissors an outline traced from a book that lies at her side, next to a box of crayons that misses at least fifteen of its once many colors, and all that is left are the ones that the girl in the corner no longer likes. That part of the floor still has carpet, too, though the rest of the room is showing the dusty and warped and old wooden floors that fell out of style at the turn of decades ago, and once again into the mode in only the last two years. The knives sit on a table that became a chopping board out of the necessity of a fevered mind of years and years past. I can turn and feel the blades, I brush aside the husks and feel the crackle of the rice beneath my feet, crushed between my soles and the hard floor. A stale light burns the reflection of the only shiny parts left of the knife into my head, and I turn to realize that the girl truly left years ago, she had been part of the room only when the wallpaper was still on all the walls, and the carpet still covering the whole floor, but the rust is real, and I become the uncooked rice crushed under my foot.
    In glances and glares and looks, I can remember a party off in the distance across the lakes, and in front of me a flock of ducks and drakes wearing little party hats that children placed upon their heads. They sparkle with iridescent substance and colors uncountable and indescribable to my eyes. The yells of revelers across the lake send a peal of discontent in the water and out from the ducks, whose feet I can see are also adorned with tiny boots that don't seem to fit, or at least make me doubt the shape of their webbed feet. I am sitting atop a bronze cannon that had been well-polished for the event, for the party that no one attends but everyone knows about, and in the dim of the night I can make out a reflection of the leaves and trees around, it becomes only a single standing tree by the water's edge and I can feel the water slowly flow up from the ground. The lake empties entirely and I realize that the ducks have all flown away, leaving their boots and hats behind. The tree has become a circle of logs, arrayed about the bronze cannon still polished and imperious. I stand next to the scene and the sky collapses around me, showing only white, and the logs and the empty lake, and the boots and party hats now human sized, and I hear the sounds of revelers from inside the cannon.
    In every play and fall of the dice I see the footsteps of an irrational beast that has known only the hatred of the ground it walks on. It is lithe and unusual, clearly malnourished. I look up from the ground to try and see the top, but I cannot because it is too tall, and seems to stretch ever further away as I look toward it. I am going upward on an elevator that is carpeted on all six of its walls, and doesn't appear to have a door at all, but I can feel the tug of up up up. Somehow I already know what awaits me when the elevator gets to the top, and in preparation I have a small length of rope in my hands. The rope used to belong to a ship, the one I came in on, and I would soon enough need it to tie a knot around a heart shaped box made out of granite. I really want to know what is inside the box, which is rough and reminiscent of a British courtyard, but the beast knocks my hands away as soon as I finish the knot, which I can't remember having tied at all.
     In each drop of a game card, I can hear the chime of a bell the size of the world through molten marble casing surrounded by the fleshy and rubbery substance of a racquetball. The bell tones and shrinks to the size of a paperweight, and forms the shape of a pyramid, a tetrahedron, and rests upon black velvet atop a bureau in the middle of an open field. I am holding the racquetball in my left hand, and as the breeze blows it spins some nearby siren whistle suspended in the tall grasses. Then the chorus of crickets chirps once. Just once, and all at the same time. I can hear a noise from inside that ball, too, and it sounds like the bell from before, only more rapidly one tone after the next in the sequence of Big Ben. It is muted and rubberized, and I try to tear it away to get the sound out but I cannot breathe, and the crickets all hop once, and all at once, and I can see the velvet cloth on top of the bureau begin to slip away. The paperweight is gone, and it is slipping off into the field. It appears to fall beneath the earth, and when it does, the bureau shatters from within, making the rain fall as toothpicks that clickety-clack as they land one after the other on the ground. And the ball in my hands still makes the eerie chime of the bell the size of the world. And the chorus of crickets chimes once, and all at once.
    In each tone of the conversation, I am warped to another place and time. Some of them have no time at all, and others are places that don't exist. I am there. I am in every whisper and breath. I am in every hint, and the hints have shown me more of the dream that is coming upon us from all directions: even directions that don't exist themselves, either. The dream continues in a sky blackened with soot next to a volcanic crater. The ground has only smooth white rocks and rough black ones that grow in size as you go out to the crater's edge. Next to a seething mountain of smoke as dark as the sky stands a form that peels into itself in disconnected ribbons of an earthy brown color. Each ribbon flutters leaflike in perfect step with the others, sometimes making the giant creature look like a shape, and sometimes shapeless at all. Beyond the ribbon-body are two more stones that glimmer with the fury of the smoke next to it, and gradually emit subtle waves of white mist from the red glow. They are the eyes, and they are so far away, and the creature so large that I cannot believe that the mountain is really next to it. The ribbon-body flows faster now, and it moves in my direction, each bit in perfect step and sequence fluttering past me like a razor wind. I am cut apart, and in my last moment I can see the eyes focus on a shining green speck that I must have been holding. It rolls and bobs, an emerald crystal fob with a gentle and radiant fog about it in halo. I can focus on it too, and then I am standing elsewhere with it gently floating in my hands. The entire landscape is an array of parallel pipeds of deepest blue tone. The next gigantic creature appears, hovering in the sky by a power I cannot know. It looks in total like a huge tiara of bone. Part of the loop is missing, and it is connected to another broken loop of bony white below by thin red columns. It moves the bottom piece up and down, and I can see at the back of the jagged hump of the corona a glass bubble filled with blood. A beacon of light appears in the middle, and the blue earth below is suddenly thrust upward and through the light. The light fades and it hovers to above me. The creature alights the beacon again, and I can feel the light brighten to all round me. I am somewhere else and I see the next gigantic creature. And the next and the next...the fleet of bug wings, the mass of shiny crystal spikes, the chainmaille man-shape, the beast of water, the beast of wind, the beast of thought alone. Everywhere somewhere new. Always with the unknowable trinket of an emerald in my grasp. Again they kill me and I see the next one and the next one. This is the tone of the conversation.

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