Borges
After
perfectly executing his plan for the manifestation and consumption of dark
energy particulates, his sturdy yet still—comatose—body was placed in a sterile
hospital tomb where it was all but forgotten. For nearly fifteen years prior,
he had been engineering the details of his plan. He caught his first accidental
glimpse of the possibility while reading through the fictionalized footnotes to
an obscure Borges story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.”
Once he decoded the labyrinthine text, he recognized that there existed a
realm of being in which the simultaneity of events in practice could be
perfectly signified in the frail body of a blind librarian. He, from that
moment, forsook all sincere human interaction in the myopic quest for the
attainment of his mission.
Through
college and his doctoral studies, while researching type 2A supernovae, he
concurrently looked out into the universe and back in time. He witnessed the
birth of the Milky Way and the earth. He witnessed the creation of the skies
and seas; the moon and Man. He witnessed the pharmakon-infused execution of
Socrates and the moment when Borges was physically pared himself, inspiring the
essay “Borges y Yo” which generations
of Argentine, French, and American scholars interpreted as a stylistic literary
fore into the symbolic.
From
opposite ends of their own looking glasses, he saw eye to eye with Galileo,
whose own lightly magnified gaze looked only slightly back through the fourth
dimension. Through Galileo's hazy pupil, he saw truth and beauty and the answer
to the questions he only at that moment knew to ask. From that moment until the
moment in which he partook of the brain-expanding serum, he existed in a ruse
to hide his knowledge from the rest of the world. He inhabited space, but did
not live in it.
As
he studied astrophysics, he witnessed history and science and the history of
science and knew that they were all one. He consorted with contemporaries who
furthered his understanding and helped hone his plan: Jesus, Euclid, Jefferson,
Descartes, Einstein, Leonardo. History and science were, he discovered, housed
in what another collaborator, Kant, had tried to describe as the “sublime.”
Watching
Socrates’s suicide first hand, he discovered that the hemlock concoction was
designed to induce a deep sleep into which dark energy particulates could be
poured. The Socratic, enlightened slumber, however, brought about such deep
satisfaction that the great and methodical teacher chose consciously never to
awaken.
Based
upon Socrates's ingredient list, he developed a potion that would swell the
brain so that it would—sponge-like—absorb dark energy into its synaptic tissue.
The final ingredient, Conium chaerophylloides, could not
be acquired in the United States. For that, he had to go abroad, to southern Africa.
So, to Africa he went with the Peace Corps, ostensibly to build a schoolhouse
for starving orphans. Within days of his arrival, he had consumed the drink and
was shipped home on what doctors assumed was the verge of death; he had
achieved Coma.
Then he arrived; the academic understanding with which I had interacted
in the precipice was made real. No longer, in his presence, was I a freak. He
made me whole. He brought the light nearer to me. Though it was still beyond my
grasp, it was closer; I was freed, at once, to glow in its omnipresent
proximity.
He
had no friends to visit him as he lay in his quiet coma. His mother came only
once a week, and then more out of obligation than love or responsibility. She
spent time doting on the two normal children she had at home. The specific
ordinariness that accompanied the high-school senior and his younger sister
were welcome distractions from what should have been a faith-shattering
experience with the oddly golden child.
He gave me more words. With more words, I became more like him: less of
a monster.
He gave me every word he had and I used them to animate.
His
sister was too young to be repelled by the obnoxious perfection of the brother
that she now knew only as the invalid in the hospital. She was never jealous of
or hateful toward him. She was never emasculated by his prowess nor diminished
by his diatribes. She—and she never really expressed it—silently worshipped
him. She was artsy: a writer and a potter. As she got older, she began to snoop
around his stuff which his parents had quickly—just weeks after he didn’t waken
from the coma—boxed. They turned his bedroom into a den. The boxes, filled with
notebooks, sat in a corner of the three-car garage attracting mold and rats.
They had long since donated his clothes.
Never, he told me, had he felt so alive as when he was in my presence. I
could not empathize, for I knew this thing called "life" as nothing
more than a passing state upon which I could fix my gaze. How could I, never
having been born, be the giver of life?
He gave me permission. Without knowing that he had no right to grant it,
I accepted it.
His
sister, inquisitive and restless, often passed her time thumbing through the
boxes. Most of his writings were impenetrable to her. Eventually, she found a
work that he had never published nor ever shared with anyone. She was certain
of this because the binder cover was marked “CONFIDENTIAL, DO NOT EVER
PUBLISH.” The cover opened onto a coded manuscript. She quickly recognized that
it was written a la D’ Vinci, in
mirror code. She fished a mirror from the drawer next to the washing machine
and deciphered the work in short order—reading words, but not piecing them
together into the intelligible whole they represented. She thought she
understood why the golden prophet wanted it hidden forever.
Unlike any of the passing souls I had encountered before, he touched me.
Unlike
many of the other neatly edited and precisely worded essays and works that she
had little capacity to understand, this was decidedly different. In form and
content, it was unlike any other piece of his that she had ever seen.
He gave me the power to—more than merely learn—think.
Just short of human, I knew humanity. Just short of living, I knew life.
She
thought that it was—by his standards—at best, mediocre. Her first reading was
cloaked in an opacity that she would not easily shatter. Perhaps, she posited,
he wrote it when he was very young. The work did, however, provide her a
glimpse into a side of her eldest brother which bespoke his humanity: imperfect
and self-conscious. As unimpressive as this work might have been in relation to
his uber corpus, it was nonetheless amazing by her standards.
We wandered the corridors of the hospital together. I described what I
had seen. He explained it. He bridged the gap between what I saw and what I
could know.
From
grazing the surface and working from the assumption that this was a “childish”
piece, she developed empathy for the young mind whose words she read. The work
was rife with idealism and theory. The humanity and sensitivity did not jibe
with the established narrative about her brother. Not grasping the density of
the Maimonides-like text before her, she
promised not to betray him. Instead, expecting that her brother would never
rouse, she decided to appropriate the work as her own.
He gave me permission to experience time. Together we unfroze the moment
of grief which had lingered since the day I was not born. As we hovered over
the moment, he observed that I was strangled by my umbilical cord at the moment
I should have been born. He observed that the ashen man he identified as my
father was inconsolable. As we unfroze the moment, we watched a brilliant beam
of light shoot from him; we watched that bolt join the light above while the un-whole
remainder of his spirit stayed with his body.
She
wrapped the binder in a towel from the clothes dryer, picked off the
meadow-fresh fabric-softener sheet, and ran into her room with the oddly folded
package tucked under her arm. Anyone who might have seen her would have known
that she carried a notebook wrapped in a towel. Fortunately, she was home
alone. Brother was at the mall; parents were on a “date night;” and—of
course—Golden Boy was comatose at the hospital across town.
He gave me permission to feel. I saw my hands for the first time ever. I
saw his giant hands.
I saw the woman who he identified as my mother holding a limp gray
body—my body—in her own hands: she held me in her hands.
Nervous,
as though she had just stolen the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, she unfolded the
towel and slid the folio between her mattress and box spring. She was careful
to move it fully to the middle so that nobody would notice it if they were
changing the sheets on her bed. She jumped onto the bed and assumed her sleep
position to ensure that the contraband would not disturb her. The notebook was
thin enough that she would not be bothered, she decided, and was pleased with
the chosen hiding space.
He revealed what life had told him. I revealed what the lack of life had
told me. Our words commingled.
We watched as his body was poked and probed. We watched as nurses washed
him. We watched as the room in which I was never born finally emptied. We
followed the ashen body which should have been mine to the lower floors. We
followed it to the doors which led out of the hospital, but we couldn't follow
it any farther. He told me that they were going to bury my unborn body; they
were going to mourn the life that never was.
Several
adolescent months passed and, one night as she sat alone and otherwise
purposeless in her room, she recovered her treasure from its hiding spot. She
hovered over the first manuscript and translated it. The blank verse and empty
structure struck her as raw and guttural. How could this form have ever
emanated from the pen of her rigidly and perfectly ordered brother? How could
someone so shunned by the world perform a call to a hypothetical fraternity? To
whom was he speaking? Who was his “we?” Further, she wondered, how could he so
commingle chaos with beauty—two forces which seemed to have been anathema to
his sensibility?
We hovered over his body and he explained that he was still alive. He
told me how his body worked. He invited me to touch it. He permitted me to know
it. It was perfect. I knew it. Neither of us knew what to do with the light. At
last we touched it.
After
two hours, she completed the untitled translation.Hump-backed, she hovered over
the works, his and hers, and compared the two. She felt as though the gulf
between them was as distant as the big bang was to this moment. She pondered
that gulf for an instant and decided that it was but a matter of geographic
centimeters, measured not by the tools of astrophysics, but rather by those of
quantum physics.
Together, with our commingled touches, we knew that the light was
beautiful: indescribably, unambiguously, chaotically perfect.
She
suddenly became conscious of her thoughts and instantly unsure of their
origins. A high-school junior, she had never studied physics and had never
heard the phrase “quantum physics.” Instantly, her thoughts raced to a memory
which was not conceivable were she not experiencing it: her conception. She
watched, she felt, she lived as sperm and egg combined and an electrical halo
sparked forth her life. She watched her own meiosis. She watched as her
personal universe doubled, then quadrupled, then expanded and enveloped her.
She was at her origin. She had unlocked the pathway to the genesis.
And then were granted words—all words—that informed our previous lack of
them. No longer was anything indescribable or ambiguous. No longer was chaos a
mystery.
The balance
of the night, hours of sleepless study, she read and re-read it. She fell into
an abyss, indeed into the very chaos about which she read. Alas, poor girl, she
entered that chaos as a conspirator—part of the euphemistic “we”—before sliding
along the least-squares line into the mean. When finally she emerged on the
other side, approximating Beauty, she had come to own it, if only but for a
moment. She could not discern whether that moment was a second or a lifetime.
Just as he had allowed me time, I was now empowered to help him stop it.
We were joined in a new moment in which he and I were no longer separate: I was
no longer unborn and he was no longer undead. We were birth and death together:
we were life across time. We touched the light and were made one with it. Then
we retreated together.
Sojourner,
her understanding brought her to tangency with beauty, to a single point where
“I” and “we” converged: first and second derivatives. She was struck. She was
enlightened. Awakened from the clay and dust of the universe, she had inherited
her brother’s rib and hungered for the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
Her
hunger was not metaphorical; it was manifest in an unabatedly physical way. She
could feel it welling from the pit of her stomach as though it were from the
ninth circle of Hell. A vast emptiness encircled by an event horizon exploded
from within her womb and washed over her in waves of insatiable yearning.
His thoughts were mine. We were consciousness commingled. His
experiences were mine. We pulled away from the light toward a black hole. We
receded into the warmth of an undulant, pulsing, living womb. We fled, hand in
hand, into the darkness.
Her
body tensed and convulsed. She dropped her pen, the manuscripts—both the
original and its translation—and the mirror onto the ground. Now alone on her
four-poster bed, all other accoutrement (save her pillows) littering the
perimeter on the floor, her fits became more violent. Tiny twitches that
started at the tips of her toes and fingers flowed into torrential electrical
rivers up her extremities and converged into her torso with such ferocity that
anybody watching would have expected an explosion.
For the first time, I emoted. I wanted. I yearned for life. I longed to
be born.
For
a moment, her heart could not keep up with the seizure. Briefly, her heart
stopped and with it the seizure.
For the first time, he emoted. He wanted. He yearned for life. He longed
to awaken.
When
her parents returned home, they checked in on her. Surprised that she was even
home, they commented to each other on the peaceful repose that she maintained,
even as she slept fully clothed upon her bed. They decided against rousing her,
but merely shut off the lights. Her mother, lit by the hallway light through
the doorway, gently tugged off her shoes and set them neatly on the ground
beside the schoolwork they assumed she had been working on. Quietly, they
pulled the door shut as they wandered further down the hall to the den.
Then he left me. Immediately, I missed him. I hurt. My soul craved his
touch, his words—his presence.
He had taught me much. He had given me permission to approximate life,
though I could never truly know it. Together, we had touched the light and
returned. I was still unborn. He was free to wake, without me.
I sped to the still-empty unfrozen room where I was yet unborn, yearning
for the ignorance with which I first viewed the scene: a soulless camera.
Across
town, in a quietly white and untenably sterile room, repose was stirred. Like
gently sliding down a stainless steel pole and landing in the bosom of a serene
pool of life, the eyes of the precocious sleeper flittered open. As they
adjusted to the soft light of the room, fingers stretched and clenched in
rhythm with deep breaths. More like waking from a yoga position than a
fourteen-month coma, movement was both fluid and exact.
Powerless, I tried to freeze the moment; I attempted to reclaim
instance. Yet, I knew too much. I had words. I had time. I had knowledge. I had
emotion. I had loss.
I had nothing.
A
nurse, expecting that the ringing from his room indicated a malfunctioning
monitor, took her time before sticking her head through his door. She
experienced eurhythmy herself when she saw the still, perfect, shirtless body
of a young man sitting up and looking her way.
Looking down, I saw his living form and was lustful of its corporeal
perfection.
“Hello,”
he managed to speak as though trying to comfort her.
The
nurse fainted. This set off a flurry of activity—footsteps and yelling—in the
hallway, all of which froze as one nurse after another was struck dumb and
motionless beholding the resurrection.
Methodically,
he removed all of the life-sustaining and monitoring tethers from his body. “I
need a shower.”
Please, come back.
One
of the nurses entered the room and turned on the lights. Another could be heard
running down the hallway while a third attended to the nurse who had passed
out.
Our light!
“You’re
going to need to remain still for me,” a nurse requested as she approached him,
fiddling with the disconnected cords and constructing a strategy for
reconnecting them to him.
We have stood at the second derivative of chaos.
We looked behind us and saw ether through which floated flashes of
incandescent genius.
“I’ve
been still long enough,” he responded. Already commanding the attention of the
room and verging on annoying, he listed a series of demands: “I need a shower,
I need my clothes, I need a computer with wi/fi, I would love a Mountain Dew,
and I need somebody to call me a cab.” His demeanor indicated both cool
concentration and warm distraction.
Remember?
A
doctor walked in, followed by another doctor, and another. Within minutes,
there were no fewer than six doctors and four nurses in the rapidly shrinking
hospital room. Two groups huddled, one by the window and the other by the door.
One at a time, they would leave the huddle to address the patient and report on
stats. Different voices called out and to the patient, interacting with and
describing him:
“Do
you know what today is?”
“Ninety
seven point seven”
“How
do you feel?”
“Seventy
four.”
“Describe
the pressure when I do this.”
“One
forty over sixty two.”
“What
is the last thing you remember?”
“What
is the square root of sixty four?”
“Can
you feel this?”
“Is
your vision blurred?”
“Here’s
some water, drink this.”
“What
is the capital of South Carolina?”
“Can
you grab my hand?”
“Columbia.”
Please, grab my hand!
Finally,
a pad and pencil were provided, “Write down all of your thoughts, however silly
they might seem.”
We looked before us and we saw an infinitely untenable synapse,
a Styx, whose gondolier waved from some undefined center of pre-chaotic
bliss.
We wondered where we were, and discovered that we were not even there
yet.
The
flock of doctors quacked about the unprecedented and historical occasion which
they were witnessing. “We cannot afford to miss a single data point;” one
carved out the obvious.
Remember?
One
of the attendants excused himself and made the call from the hallway, “You’re
son…you should come quickly.”
At
first fretting that it was the favorite son who had not yet come home from his
night with friends, the increasingly frantic mother recaptured her senses,
“What? He’s awake?!”
The
quizzing, testing, and probing continued for ninety minutes.
Finally
the room cleared and one of the nurses came in with a sponge and wiped him
down, removing the few days worth of grime that had accumulated since his last
bath. He grudgingly accepted this excuse of a shower. He had a particular
endorphin-infused scent that had been missing during his slumber. He glistened.
He glowed.
The light shone from him. I moved in his direction but, the faster I
flew, the farther away he became. As I sped toward him, his retreat became
equally emphatic. I reached out my hand but was rebuffed by a force I couldn't
see. And then I couldn't see at all. The only power I ever truly had,
observation, had abandoned me.
Finally,
he pushed his right foot toward the cold floor, in deliberate revolt against
the bather. As if under a spell, the nurse threw down her tools and gently
grabbed his hand. With the other hand, she supported him at the elbow as he
strongly forced himself in the direction of gravity, then immediately defied it
as he stood tall and peacefully and menacingly at the same time.
He is beautiful. I am blind again. I am voiceless again. I am alone with
my thought: lightless chaos. Cursed words!
Fourteen
months of stillness yielded no atrophy. His body was as sturdy and perfect as
the day he fell asleep. In his full nakedness, he commanded awe. Other
attendants entered the room and, jaws agape, stood in silent subservience. He
nodded his head in their directions, acknowledging each in their due.
His
parents walked in and his mother, in an action which she had stopped a full
four years before his accident, ran up and hugged him. He was clearly surprised
by this outpouring of emotion from a woman who had not looked him in the eyes
since he was a college freshman. She sobbed without control and fell to her
knees. She wrapped her arms around his legs and washed his feet with her
constantly streaming tears.
“Wake
her up!” she cried. “Please, I know you can. Wake her up. Wake her up!” Then,
turning on him, “You freak!”
In a shudder's snap, I felt a new presence. Time returned.
Time returns.
He
looked behind her and saw his father, holding a limp body in his arms. As if carrying
her to a sacrificial pyre, he held her loosely horizontal. His father held his
sister in his arms, scooped sturdily beneath the knees and below the shoulder
blades. The fifteen-year-old girl’s head fell back and her hair hung straight
down toward the floor. Her mouth was opened slightly and she breathed with the
casual abandon that should sustain any adolescent. Her eyelids sat loosely over
her eyes and he could see a sliver of white through her thin eyelashes.
“She
won’t wake up,” said his father, a sliding bubble of salty water traced down
his cheek and rested on the corner of his mouth. “We just can’t wake her up.”
I am awakened.
Save
the naked patient—awakened as he was from his self-induced slumber—a stunning
stillness overcame the room. The maturation of his critical method made real,
the oscillation between distraction and concentration made singular and
ephemeral Beauty in the face of chaos made tangible, the awakened creature
flexed his chest as though to make room for a swelling heart: a blossoming
soul.
Tenderly,
he walked over to the sleeping girl. The eyes of four doctors, three nurses, a
distraught mother, and a heartbroken cub of a father followed him with the
intensity of the Hubble staring into space.
For me?
She is beautiful.
I stand at the first derivative of chaos, and her name is Beauty.
“You
may have witnessed Beauty, dear sister, but I have endured and mastered Chaos.”
His empty eyes sparkled for a moment before he kissed her forehead and left the
room.
I will teach her.
I do not know which of us
has written this page.
Come with me.
Take my hand.
She never awoke.
I will teach you. Follow me.
