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I fall into an open personhole.
As I am climbing out, a car parks on top of the hole. I call up to the driver, explain my predicament. He hears me but refuses to give up the spot, even briefly. He’d been driving around for a half an hour looking for a place to park, he yells down to me. I do understand his predicament as I’m sure he understands mine. And I tell him so. We understand each other’s predicament, we conclude. There is something about the yarmulke on my head that does remind me to put myself in the other fellow’s shoes. That is a good thing. He says he is heading downtown and I should do the same. If he spots another manhole, he will pry it open for me with the crowbar he keeps in his hollow leg. I nod, which serves no purpose, as he cannot see me, and begin to make my way south, sloshing through the fetid water. There should be more kindness in the world. I do have a bit of time till I’m due at Charlie Rose’s studio and I need to head south anyway. And, really, when it comes down to it, the fact that the fellow was so honest about his predicament and also seemed sympathetic to my predicament, which I was honest about, encourages me to not make a stink (ha ha!), and the truth is, I’m down here already anyway, so why not continue on my way down here? And the truth is, when I think about it, if I’m down here, I can’t fall down here because I’m already down here. So there’s that.
It is exceedingly dark though. I have the flashlight on my new iPhone, but it produces an odd, diffuse, almost useless light. When I was a young man, flashlights did their jobs and illuminated the dark, not just small-print menus in dimly lit restaurants. It was a different and heady time. I point the phone toward the floor to use what little light it gives to avoid tripping over anything fecal, not to mention rats. The rats are the thing I dislike most about my sewer forays, as I’ve come to call them. There are rumors of rats down here as big as German shepherds, the people not the dogs. I learned this from what I consider a reliable source, a sewer worker who had appeared in the Frederick Wiseman documentary Effluence (1978). I had interviewed him for a monograph I was writing entitled Pipe Dreams about sewers in dreams in film. It was the first sewer-centric film study since Mark Kermode’s 1993 essay on the C.H.U.D. series, which I believe was entitled I, Mark Kermode, Am an Asshole. I cannot be certain though; several of his essays have been similarly titled.
oh my god
“Where’s your God now?” pitches Marjorie, selling past the close. “Slammy’s. We never claimed we’re divine. Except, of course, for our hot apple pies. Mmm-mmm. Slammy’s.”
“Hypno Joe’s coffee is delicious with hot apple pie,” Hypno Joe’s voice injects into my hypnotic trance.
I try to ignore him, but in this state, I find myself highly suggestible.
“All right, one bag,” I say.
“Great. I’ll ring it up. It’ll be ready to go when you awaken.”
Flotilla, who performs regularly with the Amarillo Community Masquers and has always wanted to be a professional stage actress but does not have the resources or gumption to try to make a go of it, has gotten the notion that she can experience the life of a New York actor by persuading Castor Collins to try his hand at it and watch the whole of it through his eyes, maybe even whispering acting tips to him while he’s performing. This, in a very real sense, would be a collaboration. Due to public pressure, it is now illegal for an actor to portray a character who differs in any significant way from himself (herself, thonself). So Castor has an advantage auditioning for the role of Don Baker in Butterflies Are Still Free Again, as Don Baker is blind and so is Castor. There are, of course, other blind actors who are vying for the part, but not one of them appeared magically in a spaceship as an infant, which both the character of Don Baker and Castor Collins did.
The whale carries us along. It’s fairly comfortable in here. There’s a flashlight he must’ve swallowed at some point, as well as a bed. Although there is no refrigerator, there is a cooler he must’ve swallowed at some point, and it holds some soft drinks, luncheon meats, and a loaf of bread, which is a packaged white, but beggars, et chetera, and it’s really fine given the circumstances. I playfully coin the term glamonahing, which is a kind of portmanteau of glamorous and Jonahing. This results in a not unwelcome chuckle in these most dire of end-times. The dog pretends not to have heard. In addition, I stumble upon a library of partially digested mystery paperbacks. None of your highbrow Highsmiths, but I enjoy a decent dime-store procedural as well as the next man (woman, thon). Call it a guilty pleasure. The days pass. Since there is no sun, I count the days by novels completed. I know from experience I read forty-five thousand words an hour (three times the national average), and that’s for technical material. I’ve never timed my recreational reading (to what end? It is recreational, after all!), but let’s say double the technical speed. So that’s eighty thousand words per hour. No, ninety-five thousand words per hour. No, ninety thousand words per hour, which means I read an average-length pulp mystery an hour, which means, with time off for sleep (the bed, although somewhat soaked in gastric juices, is quite comfortable compared with my old sleeping chair) and bologna sandwiches, I guesstimate I’ve been in here for exactly three months when we start to spin. [...]
Approximately thirty “who are you?”s come back at me. It may not have been the best question to ask, as it’s conceivable they have been wondering who I am or even that they just don’t want to go first in answering. And, of course, were it an echo, it would sound like this as well. Although, I have to say, in at least some of the responses, it did seem as if the you was emphasized, which would point to this being about thirty Unseen others in the cave. Maybe some are an echo and some are Unseen others. Let’s split it down the middle and say fifteen of each. I decide to try again.
I DO NOT LIKE it here in this part of the cave. It is cold and dark. The air is soupy. The people are complex and hard to see. The ground is also hard and hard to see. I no longer have any sense of purpose. This morning, I woke up to find out it is yesterday. Right now, it is a week ago, and I’m not even here in the cave yet. And yet I am. I wander, disembodied, waiting for myself to show up, hoping I will be able to see myself once I do. How will I know? It is very dark. This new time wrinkle disorients me. I try to make sense of it by accessing my vast mental library of time travel literature, both literary and scientific (I minored in chronology at Harvard). I recall there was a fiction writer named Curtis Vonnegut, Jr., who, in the mid-twentieth century, wrote of the chrono-synclastic infundibulum, a space-time dimension in which one could be everywhere/everytime at once. It is an ingenious storytelling device. Curtis Vonnegut, Jr., was a fiction writer I loved dearly. I read all of his work as a child and also several pieces he wrote as an adult—wonderfully whimsical stuff heavily dosed with social satire, fully stocked with whimsical notions, doodads, geegaws. Utterly delightful. Of course, one wearies of such things as one matures, and by the time I was eleven, I was on to Stanislaw Lem, equally funny and clever but not to the average reader, who would find thonself stymied by Lem’s erudition and level of scientific discourse (Lem was himself a trained physician, as well as a trained seal trainer). To the layperson, Lem reads terribly dry and inscrutable, but of course he is among the funniest writers to have ever lived (up there with Marie-Henri Beyle). But I outgrew Lem as well, discovering him to be an imposter, bombastic and derivative.
When I was fourteen, my best friend, physicist Murray Gell-Mann, introduced me to the science fiction of R. Harrington Folt, whose sophisticated and irreverent spin on time travel made Lem look like the drooling imbecile it turns out he was. Folt’s novel Zahlungsaufforderung, which Gell-Mann gave to me with the inscription, B., You amaze me. And I won a Nobel Prize in physics, for Christ’s sake. Fondly, M., changed my young life. The book, written in prose at once transcendent and second-rate (how does one accomplish this miracle?), draws parallels between cervical and time dilation. Of course, those parallels seem obvious to all now, but Folt was the first person to understand it. As I was able to venture out from under Gell-Mann’s enormous shadow (I’m not saying he was fat, but, well…), I realized that Folt’s revelations were ludicrous and that he was, and remains, a complete fraud (turns out his editor Gordon Lish was the genius in that relationship), and I discovered Pleven, a writer so secretive, even his publisher has never met him (legend has it he lives among the Oromo people of Ethiopia). His recondite theories of time have perhaps been best characterized by literary critic George Steiner as “Chrono-synclastic infundibulum on acid.” Imagine, if you are able, a universe in which not only can an individual be everywhere/everytime, but time itself can be everywhere/everytime and nowhere/notime. Now multiply that by ten. Now unmultiply (or “divide”) it. There you have Pleven in a nutshell, a nutshell that exists in seventeen dimensions. My world was shook. It made Folt’s work appear to have been written by a common garden slug.
maybe the funniest line in the whole book
“Rosenberg’s cast, consisting entirely of animatronic, remote-controlled Trunks, does more than even a million Rosenbergen could to ease the dangerously escalating tensions in today’s cave. By peeling away the bombast to expose the tender humanity of these robots, Rosenberg allows the viewer to discover the common ground necessary for any real change to take place. Furthermore Ja—”
this kills me every time
And those still-sighted who have been moved by this astounding sermon pull out their very eyeballs, which then fall to the floor of the dim cave and roll around. It turns out it is not at all funny in real life, but rather horrifying, tragic, and disgusting. I snap some harrowing photos that, sadly, these Acolyti Edepol will never get to see. This is as they want it, apparently. Still, there is a sadness, at least for me as a neutral photojournalist, for my photos are spectacular, truth be told, capturing the brutality of war, its emotional toll, as well as hundreds of black, eyeless sockets, which parallel, metaphorically, the very inside of the cave in which we all currently find ourselves. I’m thinking Pulitzer for these, too, if it still exists. It suddenly crosses my mind that it may not. And how sad would that be, that this award, created by Joseph Pulitzer, the inventor of dyn-o-mite, who on his deathbed wanted to do one good thing to make up for this invention, would see his award disappear from the face of the Earth, if he were alive today to see it. As it is, he will surely roll over in his grave. In any event, I am certain Slammy’s has a photo competition of some sort, a prize, maybe a Slammy’s Bucks cash prize, which would be nice, as there’s a used Sega Pocket Gear that a seller called Grabyounow514 on Slambay is selling that I have my eye on. Although, let’s face it, just the recognition would be a tremendous boon, really. Just a trophy to put on my mantel. Well, I don’t have a mantel. Just a trophy to carry around with me. It’d be a great boon if it’s not too big. Maybe a plaque. A wallet-size plaque.