Chapter 1

The first chapter

“If you could kill God, how would you do it?”

Do I have to answer? I don’t think it would be in my best interest.

Chapter 1.08

One and the same, revolting chaos and a chaotic revolt. Unrest, a transitional state. My insides are stirring with unruly turns, twisting with dissent, organizing in mutual disgust. There’s a rebellion happening from the inside. I can feel it. I can feel all of it and it’s all happening at once even though it’s been going on since before the furthest reaches of my recordings and, I’m sure, it will continue to go on long after I can’t recall anything any longer.

I’m sitting across from the screen, my work-screen, but I’m not facing it. Instead, I’m peering at the closed window, the corner-window, and clutching myself with my arms holding onto opposite shoulders, hunched over, doubled over, folding over… Shrinking.

There’s so much condensed there, in the window. It’s more than just dirt and dust. There’s something else. I can’t make it out. I don’t mean anything beyond the window pane. It hasn’t settled that far off from it. What lies beyond it is unreachable. No, it’s right there. Right here. In it-- in the grime and the filth, the smudges and the streaks, my reflection and me, and all that’s caked on the glass.

I let my eyes wander, my mind stays. I can just barely make out their forms: monolithic warehouses and parking crypts, office synagogues and shopping jails. Everything a shade of what it was when it was erected. Everything blaspheming. There is a red light in the sky. Everything’s moving. The ghosts of the people floating down the sidewalks below fade in and out. Everything’s a blur.

“Knock, knock.”

I hate that. Just knock, don’t say it. What’s the point of saying it?

“How are the updates going?” Tim’s always on my case about the updates, but I’ve never been late with a patch. I know he’s just bored because there’s an overabundance of producers but that just irks me even more. It’s completely unnecessary. What a waste of resources.

“Oh, I finished those.”

“All of ‘em?”

“I believe- Oh!” Out of nowhere, a stabbing shoots up my spine. I cringe. He probably notices, but he doesn’t say anything. I act as if I just remembered something, a false revelation to dismiss the sudden, erratic spasm. I need to change gears. “Wait! Yes, yes, they’re all completed.”

“Is that an affirmative?” He’s making fun of my manner of speech. He thinks I don’t know.

“Indeed, a most successful dispatch was had.”

He doesn’t laugh. He thinks I’m serious.

“What are you working on?” He doesn’t really care, he’s just asking so that he can tell the other frat-minded managers about it during their weekly meeting.

“Just a... another patch.”

“For the public beta?”

“Yep.”

“Well…” he kicks his heel against the doorframe, “I’ll leave you to it then. Don’t want to interrupt.” You can’t do what you already did, Tim.

He steps away and my vision obscures. There must have been a brief period where I was staring at the carpet, looking empty and emptily looking. I just want to lay down.

My eyes drift round in their pained sockets. The room itself is and always will be dimly lit because the window, the corner-window, is facing a dark direction. It’s peculiar, the irreconcilable angle in which the window is turned in its frame away from all illumination, but in this non-light I can make out the fractures and fissures in three of the four corners of the screen. Those spidery cracks lead off separately onto beige ramps up the textured tracks of the plastic body into mineral trails like stretch marks creeping across the sides of the mother’s case. Their patterns are so intricate, like constellations in a cosmos of ashen spores, of dark blotches coming forward to congregate near the power button. A faded smattering of black specks dotting equally dark ellipses surrounded on all sides by rings of grey fuzz and hair-- black lashes-- all floating in the residue of what could have been, and what could be spit. Those bruises of bold mold collecting from incessant abuse.

The phone gurgles and vibrates.

“Yes?”

“Hello! Is this Kaspar?” says a shrill voice that stabs my brain with an icepick.

“Yes.”

“This is Dana! How are you?”

My ears are ringing, my head is pounding, and my hands are shaking. I’m just trying to make it through the day with no hope for the future, but I don’t know if I’ll survive another stanza of this Divine Comedy. To put it lightly, I’m looking for branches strong enough to support my weight.

“I’m doing great, how are you?”

“Great. Great. Listen, Kaspar, I’m calling because Mr. Embers would like to speak with you directly.”

“Mr. Embers?”

“Yep!”

I haven’t the faintest idea who that is, nor do I care.

“Alright. When would-”

“He’s ready to speak with you now.”

“...Right this minute?”

“Yes, he says it’s urgent.”

“I-I-I see. I’ll be right there.”

I hang up the phone and hold my head in my hands. My nose runs into my palms like I wish I could.

After a sip of black sludge Dylan Embers pouts and squints his eyes. He’s wearing a hooded sweatshirt the color of mildew that hangs baggy and limp over strategically torn jeans. He doesn’t wait for me to sit down, nor does he invite me to.

“Our consumers aren’t particularly demanding but they have developed a specific taste with their twitchy tongues, a-a-a- a sense, a sensitivity of trained, sniffling noses inserted between pairs of gaping, eager ears,” he makes a tunnel with his fingers and looks through it with one eye open and one eye closed, “Not necessarily for added functionality but for simplicity, for subtraction and substitution.”

Not knowing what to say to that, I nod, standing just behind the empty chair in front of his desk. He violently shakes his head. “It’s all math, Kaspar, simple arithmetic.”

“They want what everyone wants. Whatever they want- everyone, I mean- they also want and they have to- to want. That’s what they know but they don’t know what it is.” He raises a pointed finger in the air, pontificating now, evidently. “It’s a matter of equal appeal, a democratized system of status. It’s only fair that everyone has the right to declare themselves with the dollar. And it has to be their best self. The vehicle for their social standing has to be dripping greatness, has to be profound, epiphantic, compelling and direct, something recognizable but also mysterious, and, above all, completely different from what’s come before (especially the most recent model), but it also needs to have elements they’re familiar with, that teases with an aroma of nostalgia. But it has to surprise them, to catch them off-guard and leave them stunned and-and-and excited, aroused even.”

He bites his fingernails for a moment, turning his stained leather chair this way and that, hunched forwards, his head hanging low, his spine spiraling. How uncomfortable. While not quite falling off the chair, he looks ready to leap from it if it should fall. Maybe he’s repulsed by it.

“It’s tricky though. They can’t know that it’s possible until we tell them it is. Because if they realize it, it’s all ruined. We have to be the ones to bring the revolution to them and when we do, we have to make it come neatly packaged and hand-delivered with personal care and attention. They care that we care, so we have to be there... for them, you see? That’s what they’ve all been waiting for: for us to not only make their lives easier, but to connect with them, to understand them, befriend them, love them and kill them! Only then can we can save them.” He smiles briefly, baring his bleached teeth and mauve gums. “We need to alter their world, and in turn, them, themselves... To change them and us and everything else together, as one, keeping the world grounded and absolved. To sculpt with the clay Adam was shaped from.”

“Right.”

He leans forward, now teetering off the edge, “Through our brand, we are the means to their identity, the very gatekeepers to their creation.”

I start coughing and I can’t stop. It hurts. I lean over because it’s hard to breathe and I keep on coughing until it passes. My chest hurts.

He sits back and looks at me as if I offended him.

“Are you alright?”

“I’m fine. Go on.”

“Well... where was I? What was I saying?”

“We’re the gatekeepers.”

“Yes, right... Huh? Did I say that?” The caterpillar over his eye stands to attention.

“I think so.”

“Ah. I lost my train of thought, but you get the idea, or at least the concept.”

He reaches out a hand to shake mine. “You do good work, Kaspar, but I expect great things from you. ”

I step forward and shake his claw- he crushes my knuckles on purpose- and with that he gives one last smile and then immediately drops his head to study the papers arranged on his desk.

I let myself out.

His secretary smiles at me as I leave so I smile back, or I think I do. She furrows her brow and starts typing while still looking at me, now with a frown of concern or disdain.

While waiting for the elevator to arrive, I see out of the corner of my eye: David standing up from his desk and closing his office door. The lock clicks. The secretary remains idle, her hands in her lap and her glasses held up by the nostrils whose hairs are as gray as those on her head. She continues to glare at me.

This elevator always takes longer than the others to get anywhere. The building itself is only partly renovated. Some of its more historically aesthetic features were left as they were even if they were only barely functional to begin with. I only hope I don’t get stuck in this elevator someday- the thought comes without my thinking it. I didn’t mean for the concept to appear but it’s already here and now, I’m sure, I have damned myself to be stuck in the elevator at some point in the future precisely because I had envisioned it and-

I hear a clicking sound behind me.

David opened his door, saw me standing there, and, when I turned, immediately closed it again. All the while, the secretary continued to stare at me with that remarkable frown of hers.

And continued to stare until-

Ding! The bell warns of the elevator’s imminent arrival. It still takes a minute to actually open up. I whisper a wish for it to hurry already. Finally, the double-doors creak aside and I look down and, of course, laying in the center of the broken tiles is another one of those puddles.

I know. I know. It’s just a puddle. But I’ve been seeing a lot of them lately: one in the 2nd floor hallway on the granite floor leading to the conference room; two in the back-right corner of the lobby in front of the dracaenas; one to the left of the rear entrance to the coffee shop next door; four at my apartment building, two in the laundry room and two in the courtyard; and now, one right here in front of me. It’s just strange. There hasn’t been any reports of precipitation, but then again I spend most of my time inside and, other than the window next to my desk at work, my exposure to the toxic outside world is rather limited, thankfully. And there’s no way the ceiling in all these disparate places would be leaking. I don’t get it, I mean, I know it’s stupid to think about, but I can’t stop thinking about it. I slip into the elevator and stand off to the side. Maybe I’m stupid. It takes some time for the doors to close me in.

The elevator’s already moving when I notice the lights on the elevator door aren’t illuminated. I’m pretty sure I pressed one of the buttons to change floors, pretty sure it was the 12 that I pushed, or maybe I neglected to press any of the buttons altogether. But in any case, the elevator descends. It takes me from the 14th floor to the basement where all the old, outmoded parts and pieces of previous years’ prototypes are kept.

No one comes down here because there’s nothing for them here.

When the doors open, a wave of dry, warm air rolls over me with the smell of charred leaves. A faint light glows from around the corner of one of the shelves and there is this whirring sound... I would have thought it to be mechanical in nature but it sounds almost musical... It sounds strange to say this, but I get a feeling it’s intentional, as if there is a reason for it to be there, for me to be there. And then… I’m blinded.

What happened? Something must have happened. I look back and I’m confronted, assaulted, really, by several conflicting and overlapping events inhabiting the same space and the very same segment of time-- several disjointed snapshots of time strung up and left to develop in the darkroom of my mind. They all look the same from far away. They couldn’t all have happened. It’s impossible. But if they can’t all be right, are they all wrong?

I try to shed light on them, to get a look at what they captured, but the closer I examine them, the more they fade away.

So I want to destroy them. If I can’t look at them then why keep them? I should cut them into ribbons and burn the fragmented remnants. But they’re indestructible. Or maybe my scissors are just not sharp enough.

Without any sort of way to determine one as being more factual than the other, I shut my eyes to all of it. I try to forget, close the door and lock it behind me. But that room still stands with all its wasted space and secrets kept to itself.

It makes no sense, I know. The reason for this conflict of memory might exist, but I can’t find it. And I can’t figure out the cause for its reason to be missing. It’s a regress into infinity, with cause and effect reversed… One explanation just isn’t enough because each explanation is another reason for inquiry.

I’d show you exactly what I mean, but I’m not supposed to. You’ll figure it out. Like I did. Before I lost it.

Wait!

It sounded like a word, a hoarse whisper, or it could’ve been a hiss. Viperous.

“Don’t you like it?”- No. That never happened.

When I finally get back to my desk, there’s this note waiting for me. Well, not really a note. A note is cogent. It conveys something straightforward. I’m not sure what this is. It might not even be meant for me.

There aren’t any words on it, just shapes, if you can call them that. Lines and circles drawn in red and black with stressed scratches on an otherwise pristine, cream sheet of folded paper made of the kind of pulp that demands to be taken seriously by its thickness and portent.

I turn it over: on the back is a triangle divided into four parts with three lines. The line segments aren’t spaced evenly and they don’t run in parallel, but there is a certain order to them in that they don’t intersect each other other than where they meet on the borderline and in the way they isolate each of the three corners into its own equally-spaced micro-triangle. The center, too, is cordoned off into a triangle, albeit an upside-down one.

Strange.

But I hang onto it.

The rest of the day rolls on down the afternoon slope to six o’clock when I stand up, slide my arms into the holes of my coat, and head home for the evening. On the busride back, I notice my nose is bleeding in my reflection of the metal handrails.

Quickly, I wipe it away with the back of my hand and see that it’s not blood at all.

“But-but-but we need you.”

It’s too early to deal with reality. I spent the night and the following morning sleeping on the bathroom floor.

“You already used two of your sick days.” Oh, give me a break. I raise a hand to my clammy forehead and try to come up with something to say to that, but before I could get find the right words to spit out, a splatter of home-cooked stomach acid took their place. Some of it splashes off the rim and sticks onto my already-damp shirt. Vomit got your tongue?

“Hey! Hey! You there?”

“I’m... here...” I lay back down on the cold, yet comforting floor.

“Get yourself to a doctor, or stay in, but whatever you do, get better, okay? Remember we’re on a deadline!”

Deadline? Isn’t everything already done? I hope they didn’t start another project without me.

“Sure thing. I... I have to go...” I hang up the phone and turn my attention to the porcelain, now filled to the brim. If I flush it, it’ll overflow, but if I leave it, the smell will only get worse.

I pull myself up with the help of the sink and catch myself in the mirror for a moment. Has my skin always been this smear of muted yellow? And my eyes, have they always been so sunken? My hair this thin? Cheeks so swollen? Nose so bulbous? And the hole in my face?

I’m pretty sure that’s new.

Then it comes.

The ringing.

Like gears whirring.

Like a machine’s screaming.

It won’t ever stop.