Hey everyone! Welcome to another Melendy Avenue Review! We’ve got a review of a weird, fun book, which a friend and I are going to do a video on soon! We also have a special treat: the first part of a novel I am working on! Consider it a teaser- if you want to read the rest of it as it is written, you will need to subscribe to MAR at or above the Citizen level. It’s called The Sons abd it’s about two brothers, Joseph and Sandro, raised apart, who find their unusual family situation tied in with an even more unusual existential scifi situation. I think it should be good fun! The ending is somewhat tentative, because I wanted to have a good stopping point before I sent even this much off. Feedback welcome, and enjoy!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Miéville, Embassytown
Fiction Preview
Introduction to The Sons
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: Smoldering Look
REVIEWS
China Miéville, “Embassytown” (2011) - I’m probably going to do a video on this! With a special guest star, as part of a new thing I’m doing. But I still figured I’d give a review.
China Miéville seems like a pretty cool type, genuinely committed to both genre fiction and to revolutionary socialism. In “Embassytown,” he does more or less straight up scifi! Though of course, Miéville seems the type to dislike having the phrase “straight up” ascribed to his writings, and there’s more than a little horror in here as well. In humanity’s future amongst the far-flung stars, there’s a settlement called Embassytown! It’s a little human spot on a planet dominated by a species they call the Ariekei, or the Hosts. In classic Miéville style, the author enumerates their many gross-sounding features but does not give a clear picture of what they look like. Roughly deer-like moss-bugs with coral extrusions that hold their eyes, multiple pairs of wings that are actually ears and/or arms, two mouths, various slimes, you get the picture. The Ariekei and the humans live more or less peaceably, with the humans sticking to the town with its breathable air and trading stuff back and forth, mostly goods the Ariekei biologically engineer.
The Ariekei speak a language, or rather, Language. It has two important features: first, they talk it out of both mouths at the same time, with said mouths each making different noises to make one word, and second, they can’t lie. Speech is thought for them, and vice versa, and they can only think/speak stuff that actually is. They have no word for “that,” for instance, just ways to specify what thing they are talking about. This creates communications problems! They couldn’t communicate with humans at all until the human started breeding people as twins of such a high empathy that they basically think the same thoughts? Or something? And can speak sufficiently in tandem to speak Language. Then, the Ariekei can understand. These twin pairs are called Ambassadors, and they and their handlers more or less run the human show on Embassytown, though a vaguely Hanseatic-themed human confederation technically has it as a colony.
Woof! All this happened in the past of the novel. In the present day, Avice is a child of human settlers who grows up on Embassytown and goes on to become an “Immerser,” which is to say, she can navigate the eerie nether space that is Miéville’s way of getting around the light barrier. She comes back with a linguist husband named Scile (who she doesn’t sleep with?) who is intrigued, naturally, by Language. Avice is also a simile in Language. In order to do similes, the Ariekei need for the thing they’re invoking to actually happen. So, using a human intermediary, they draft the child Avice to do a thing. She didn’t like it, which probably has to do with why she went out to space. But she returns to Embassytown just in time for a power play- the metropole sends a new type of Ambassador. They’re not twins! Just two guys! But it turns out that their Language is such hot shit that the Ariekei get addicted to it! Fuck!
I’m being a little facetious in my descriptions, as I seemingly can’t help but be with Miéville’s flashily “subversive” cleverness, but it’s a cool idea and it works well. It also ends a long middle period where the book wanders a little, as Avice slowly describes herself getting enmeshed in weird power/Language politics, with Ariekei who try to learn to lie, with other simile-children, with her husband and his increasingly unfortunate ideas about it all. But shit kicks off once the Ariekei get a load of EzRa (the Ambassadors all have names that are names that are also combos of names or at least nicknames- CalVin, DalTon, MagDa, etc). They quickly need to hear EzRa (who I don’t imagine as my friend Ezra, he’s a lot cooler) to function. And then they build up tolerance. And then EzRa refuses to fully cooperate with the other humans, because they’re fucked up and like being, as Miéville puts it, a “god-drug.” Then the Ariekei technology, seemingly all congealed out of bio-soup similar to that which the Ariekei come, get addicted to EzRa, and build up tolerances, and stop functioning, etc.
Soon shit starts to be some weird space-alien-drug-language-zombie-apocalypse situation! It’s pretty cool. You can’t ding Miéville for invention. The day gets saved, sort of, by some inter-species communication and language stuff. I’m not going to get too much into it, both to avoid spoilers, and because I want to get into the questions I’ve got with my friend on video! Stay tuned!
China Miéville, “Embassytown” (2011) - I’m probably going to do a video on this! With a special guest star, as part of a new thing I’m doing. But I still figured I’d give a review.
China Miéville seems like a pretty cool type, genuinely committed to both genre fiction and to revolutionary socialism. In “Embassytown,” he does more or less straight up scifi! Though of course, Miéville seems the type to dislike having the phrase “straight up” ascribed to his writings, and there’s more than a little horror in here as well. In humanity’s future amongst the far-flung stars, there’s a settlement called Embassytown! It’s a little human spot on a planet dominated by a species they call the Ariekei, or the Hosts. In classic Miéville style, the author enumerates their many gross-sounding features but does not give a clear picture of what they look like. Roughly deer-like moss-bugs with coral extrusions that hold their eyes, multiple pairs of wings that are actually ears and/or arms, two mouths, various slimes, you get the picture. The Ariekei and the humans live more or less peaceably, with the humans sticking to the town with its breathable air and trading stuff back and forth, mostly goods the Ariekei biologically engineer.
The Ariekei speak a language, or rather, Language. It has two important features: first, they talk it out of both mouths at the same time, with said mouths each making different noises to make one word, and second, they can’t lie. Speech is thought for them, and vice versa, and they can only think/speak stuff that actually is. They have no word for “that,” for instance, just ways to specify what thing they are talking about. This creates communications problems! They couldn’t communicate with humans at all until the human started breeding people as twins of such a high empathy that they basically think the same thoughts? Or something? And can speak sufficiently in tandem to speak Language. Then, the Ariekei can understand. These twin pairs are called Ambassadors, and they and their handlers more or less run the human show on Embassytown, though a vaguely Hanseatic-themed human confederation technically has it as a colony.
Woof! All this happened in the past of the novel. In the present day, Avice is a child of human settlers who grows up on Embassytown and goes on to become an “Immerser,” which is to say, she can navigate the eerie nether space that is Miéville’s way of getting around the light barrier. She comes back with a linguist husband named Scile (who she doesn’t sleep with?) who is intrigued, naturally, by Language. Avice is also a simile in Language. In order to do similes, the Ariekei need for the thing they’re invoking to actually happen. So, using a human intermediary, they draft the child Avice to do a thing. She didn’t like it, which probably has to do with why she went out to space. But she returns to Embassytown just in time for a power play- the metropole sends a new type of Ambassador. They’re not twins! Just two guys! But it turns out that their Language is such hot shit that the Ariekei get addicted to it! Fuck!
I’m being a little facetious in my descriptions, as I seemingly can’t help but be with Miéville’s flashily “subversive” cleverness, but it’s a cool idea and it works well. It also ends a long middle period where the book wanders a little, as Avice slowly describes herself getting enmeshed in weird power/Language politics, with Ariekei who try to learn to lie, with other simile-children, with her husband and his increasingly unfortunate ideas about it all. But shit kicks off once the Ariekei get a load of EzRa (the Ambassadors all have names that are names that are also combos of names or at least nicknames- CalVin, DalTon, MagDa, etc). They quickly need to hear EzRa (who I don’t imagine as my friend Ezra, he’s a lot cooler) to function. And then they build up tolerance. And then EzRa refuses to fully cooperate with the other humans, because they’re fucked up and like being, as Miéville puts it, a “god-drug.” Then the Ariekei technology, seemingly all congealed out of bio-soup similar to that which the Ariekei come, get addicted to EzRa, and build up tolerances, and stop functioning, etc.
Soon shit starts to be some weird space-alien-drug-language-zombie-apocalypse situation! It’s pretty cool. You can’t ding Miéville for invention. The day gets saved, sort of, by some inter-species communication and language stuff. I’m not going to get too much into it, both to avoid spoilers, and because I want to get into the questions I’ve got with my friend on video! Stay tuned! ****’
FICTION PREVIEW
The Sons
By Peter Berard
“Hey! Don’t you want to go down?/
Like some disgraced cosmonaut/
A million miles below their feet/
A million miles! A million miles!”
Cracker, “Low”
1
“Mom and Dad weren’t perfect, but they tried,” the burly long-haired man at one end of the coffee shop table.
The man across from him half-opened his mouth, furrowed his brow briefly, and then burst out with a snort of laughter. “I’m sorry, really I am, but… what did you think I’d say to that, Joseph, really?” His companion pursed his lip and looked down into his cup, at the little rime-circle of foam left around the remains of a latte.
Visually, they could have made a study in contrast- Joe liked to joke that when they were seen in public together, anyone would assume that he was a software engineer meeting up with his flamboyant startup founder boss. Joseph, ponytailed and keg-bellied, wore his usual black hoodie and blue jeans and tended to look at his coffee cup or out the plate glass display window of the cafe rather than at his interlocutor directly. Alessandro, on the other hand, slicked his undercut back across his head and peered out of his glasses directly at his brother. He wore a houndstooth blazer over a crisp olive-green shirt and what at first glance appeared to be a narrow, paisley-pattern bib, but was in actual fact an unconventionally tied necktie. Joe was physically blocky and a head taller than Sandro, who slouched over a mild pot belly but was otherwise unremarkably shaped. What family resemblance they had was in their wide faces, dark brown hair, and expressions that tended to worry and which they tried to manage by divergent means.
“Even if we agree mum and dad tried, it didn’t do fuck all, did it? ‘Cause here we are.” Sandro joined Joseph in looking out the window. “And another thing- the idea that San Francisco is in any sense ‘halfway’ between Melbourne and Boston shows a medieval idea of geography. Hawaii would’ve made more sense.”
Joseph looked at Sandro and spread his hands in a placating gesture. Sensing his advantage, Sandro went on. “And fuck me, we couldn’t’ve met somewhere better than a financial district Starbucks? I thought this town was supposed to have charm,” but Sandro’s usual rant against the city of his birth was cut off by Joseph’s alarmed glance back out the window. Sandro knew what was coming but resigned himself to look anyway.
People on the street were going about their business, but doing so in a rigid parody of normalcy. Walkers walked, drivers drove, beggars sat or stood, but even if an observer didn’t catch the stilted way they undertook their usual actions, they’d catch on through the phones. Pedestrians staring at phones continued to do so, but their eyes didn’t move and their thumbs didn’t scroll; those with their phones to their ears weren’t talking and didn’t seem to be listening, either. Everyone was staring straight ahead of them, except for one poor soul shrieking and sprinting across the car-crowded street. Above her shrieks you could hear a “thop, thop, thop,” low and deep, going to a rhythm that resembled the human heart.
“I’d noticed you brought the owls here, too,” Joseph observed quietly.
“Listen, I didn’t tell them to include the Minervabots in this version. You can’t pin that one on me. It’s not my fault they like my ideas better than yours.”
Joseph turned to look at Sandro, brows arched. “Is that right, smart guy?” Joseph gestured with his thumb towards the window and upwards. In the direction in which the screaming woman ran, an electronic billboard showed two men sitting across from each other at a cafe table not unlike the ones at which Joseph and Sandro presently sat. Seth Rogen, uncharacteristically long hair tied back in a ponytail, wearing a plain black t-shirt and jeans, stared stonily across the table at Jonathan Groff, resplendent in a tweed blazer and wide paisley tie (though one tied more conventionally than Sandro’s), hair slicked back over a smug expression he beamed back at the older actor. In big white block letters under this tableau was the word “BROTHERS,” and in smaller white letters under that the words “You Don’t Choose Family.”
“Going prestige tv this time, I see,” Sandro noted, peering over his glasses at the ad and pointedly ignoring the screaming woman and the large white dronecopter that had swooped down to clutch her in mechanical talons before taking to the air again. The people on the street all seemed to sigh in relief, and their movements slowly became more natural-seeming.
Sandro and Joseph both thought their thoughts and sipped their respective drinks for a moment.
After a minute of this, Sandro piped up. “Tell me,” he said, in a tone making clear he’d spent his free minute productively, figuring out how to frame his question for maximum effect, “if this is about mom and dad and you and me, and you dragged me all the way across the bloody Pacific for it… where are mom and dad?”
Joseph exhaled loudly out of his nose.
“You can’t find her, right?” Sandro asked in his best tone of sweet reason.
Joseph looked out the window and nodded.
“Nor me. We’re here. Dad’s here of course, if not here-here, right now… did you get him tenure at Tulane? Nice touch, that. I bet he likes that, or would, you know, if he really knew what the alternatives were. Are.”
Joseph shook his head. Still staring at a fixed point out the window, he said, “I didn’t do anything to this version. Nothing. You?”
Sandro wagged his head ruefully. “Nada, Joe. And mom’s not here.” He slipped from his normal light Australian accent — Joseph spoke in somewhat high-timbred newscaster American — into a repellent, gravelly reproduction of an accent that never came from a subaltern part of the United States but that invoked several to quietly exclaim “Momma’s outta pocket! She ain’t nowhere to be found!!”
Joseph pursed his lips and turned his face away from the street and towards his brother. He nodded slowly, once, twice. “The implications, after the last few versions…”
“Bugger the implications, I know the implications,” Sandro interrupted, back in his normal voice. “It’d be good to know where mom is. For everyone’s sake. Tell me,” he repeated, “is dear old Helen in this version?”
This time, Joseph stared past Sandro’s shoulder into the middle distance. Sandro nodded slightly to himself.
“I know you know I can google, same as you. Alas, poor Helen. The mom that launched a thousand-“
And here, Joseph interrupted. Reaching across the table, he seized the index and middle fingers of Sandro’s right hand in his, pulled, and twisted. Joseph’s index finger pointed up to the ceiling while his brother’s fingers were forced back towards the back of their hand. Joseph grunted in pain, slammed his left hand once, twice, hard, against the table, then thrust it into his blazer pocket. As patrons started to look aghast and confused at this display, Sandro yanked his free hand out of his pocket, gestured with what looked like a red ocarina towards Joseph, who was gazing calmly at him the whole whole, and hissed like an angry goose.
Joseph let go of Sandro’s fingers, and made the placating gesture with his hands again. Sandro shook his right hand out and his left replaced the object back in his pocket as he muttered curses to himself. The patrons went warily back to whatever held their attentions before. “Neural disruptor this time, huh, Sandro? Thought you didn’t bring anything to this version?”
“I bloody didn’t,” Sandro spat at his brother, now massaging the joint where his fingers met his hand. “I had it when I woke up here. I’ll admit, I was thinking maybe you’d start wearing spectacles, in case I carried spray again, but-“
“If I find out you killed Helen here-“ Joseph whispered hoarsely, leaning across the table, trying to find his brother’s eyes, which determinedly avoided his.
“You’ll what?” Sandro interrupted, at normal conversational volume.
“You know I can find a way to make this unpleasant for you,” Joseph replied in something closer to a normal tone as he sat up straight.
“Two can play at that game. But we don’t have to. I didn’t do Helen here, I promise you that.”
Joseph nodded. “Ok,” he said. “In any event, it’s been a while since we wound up here, and we’ve kept putting it off. You know protocol. We gotta retrace steps.”
Sandro peered at Joseph. “I assume if I say ‘bugger the protocol,’ you’ll assume I offed Helen again?”
Joseph nodded once. “There’s more to it than that, but sure.”
Sandro tossed off the last of his espresso. “Fine,” he said with traces of a groan. “But let’s at least go somewhere better than this dump for the big fucking family show and tell.”
2
They walked generally westwards towards the ocean, with numerous twists and turns up and down side streets, and compared notes. “I woke up in Sydney, pretty standard,” Sandro began. Joe nodded. “Boston for me.” They found they’ve both been in this version for six months.
“Dad’s here, we noted that. So’s Zeppe, in Milan, as usual,” Sandro went on, huffing a little as they walked up the hills. “Helen is here, or was. Is she Mom for you?”
“Nope,” Joe replied, shortly. “Who’s Mom for you?” he asked, with a more demanding tone of voice than Sandro has used.
“Well, that’s just the thing, isn’t it?” Sandro asked, resting at the crest of one hill, staring at the next one ahead of them, lined by pretty little two story houses. He breathed once, hard, and fished in an interior pocket of his blazer, found a lozenge, and popped it in his mouth. “My memories say Mom is Mom. But when I went looking, she’s a ghost. Birth record’s gone, both at city hall and in the hospital. I’ve got everything I need to get a new one, but they just keep telling me they can’t get it to me. You?”
“Same thing. I’ve got a social security number, drivers license, all that. Still can’t get a birth certificate. I hired a PI to search all the hospitals for birth records on my birthday. Nothing with my name on it, and nothing with Dad’s name as the father. I imagine you reached out to Zeppe?”
They crossed the street. “Yep, sent him some emails, fishing for memories about dear old Mum- do you remember where she first met Bruce, I’m working on a memoirs, all that. He told me, pretty similar stories to Sabrina Prime. I couldn’t come up with a way to ask about her records. He didn’t know where she was at the moment.”
“Nobody does,” Joseph responded. “I’ve got every people search modality you can get outside of actual government-funded spy agencies on it, and the one Casey Cavanaugh they could find was a seventeen year old black girl in London. No records of there being any other. No records of grandma or any of the other relatives on that side, either.”
“But you remember her?”
“Of course I remember her…”
“Don’t be fatuous, Joseph. In-vision memories.”
“Yes. Similar story to Prime. Mom and Dad lived here, or in Berkeley, anyway. They had me, then you. Then Mom fucks off to Australia with Zeppe. Then wandering around with Dad until he dumps my ass at Yggdrasil, college, grad school, whole bit.”
“Right. Tracks with me. Bruce is here too, and I remember him being around with Mum at the right time. But he’s been elusive. Off on assignment or something. Still and all, this is a lot like Sabrina-Prime.”
“You mean except the death owls? That’s a pretty big divergence.”
“There’s a few of those, smart-ass, and as you were so keen to point out back at Starbucks, you made up some of them.” Joseph nodded, ruefully. They came to a street corner and Joseph made a sharp left onto a more commercial street than they had been previously meandering.
“Why are we? Ah,” Sandro began to interject, and then thought better of it. They walked up half a block and then stopped.
“Back to where it all began, eh, Joe?” he said, amused.
Joseph didn’t respond. They were looking at a bar. The windows were dark, the red-painted wooden door had a grille in front of it. A sign above it read “The Foggy Dew,” in bold black-trimmed white letters against a background of gray, blue, and black haze, and above the lettering, a hand gripping a rifle emerged, the pink paint flaking over the knuckles death-grip just barrel-ward of the boltlock.
“Physical constants seem the same,” Joseph began, not taking his eyes off the bar.
“Including entropy’s arrow only facing the usual way,” Sandro responded.
A man approached down the sidewalk, in early middle age with a sandy beard. “Morning, lads,” he called out with a light brogue. “We open at noon. I’d invite you in early for a drink seeing as I’m here, but regulations, you know. Figure you’re safe if you sneak back in at a quarter to, and there’s some good places round here to grab a bite,” he went on as he came to the door and fished his keys from his pocket, eyeing the brothers up and down.
“Oh, it’s all right, sir, maybe we’ll come back for a drink later, but we were just admiring your sign,” Joseph responded.
The publican looked up. “Yep, it’s a beauty. We’ve changed a lot here over the years, but the sign stays.” He hummed a bar to himself and half-sung, “but the angelus bells/o’er the Liffey swells…”
The brothers waved their goodbyes and walked towards the ocean again. They talked continuously of the vision, comparing it to others they had seen. They made their way to a small park that featured a tower that looked out over where the Pacific Ocean flowed into San Francisco Bay.
It was late morning by then, so the joggers and tai chi classes weren’t there anymore, replaced by a few nannies with babies in expensive strollers and a few homeless people. Sandro and Joseph walked along the concrete between the tower and the barriers, beyond which lay dangerous rocks and the ocean. “We can rule out that this is Prime, though, right? With the owls, and without Mom?” Joseph asked, quietly.
“Well, why not let’s us have a look at old Sabrina-Prime, shall we?” Sandro replied, louder, a tone of forced gaiety in his voice. He cast his gaze around and found what he was looking for. “Do you have to call it that?” Joseph called at his brother’s back as Sandro walked a few steps to the barriers.
“This will do nicely,” Sandro proclaimed, rolling up the sleeves of his blazer, which took his shirtsleeves with them. He was gazing into a puddle one of the Bay’s frequent rain storms had deposited in a depression one of the unfinished granite blocks that made up the barrier. Joseph stepped next to him and looked into it, as well.
“Puddle, puddle, in the rock,” Sandro muttered as he waved his hands over the little film of standing water and Joseph rolled his eyes. “Show me that friend… to whom we’re in hock!” Joseph finished with a flourish of his hands and the ring of improvisation triumphant in his voice.
The puddle shimmered and then shone. An image flickered across it. It showed a slender woman with close-cropped sandy hair, in her late twenties and hence a few years younger than the brothers, in an airy room full of houseplants and electronic parts. She wore a blue jumpsuit and stroked the fur of a black cat on her lap as she used her other hand to guide a trackpad on a laptop.
“There’s our girl,” Sandro cooed. “Right where we left her.” Joseph looked away before Sandro did. Sandro looked up at him, then back at the puddle, then waved his hand over it. Light ceased to emit from it.
“So we’re not in Prime,” Joseph said, looking out towards the city. “Next step is to do an outre edit. What haven't we done recently?”
“Speaking of lame terminology,” Sandro lamented, looking out to the sea, “you and your frog words… could’ve used ‘uberspannt’… I dunno…” he cast his gaze around. “Sea birds?”
“Fine, sea birds, you ready?”
Sandro nodded. “On three,” he said, fixing his gaze at something out to sea. They counted down.
After both said one and made an effort of will, they looked around them, and at each other. The built environment looked the same. But standing to Sandro’s right was an anthropomorphic seagull, about five feet tall, dressed in blue jeans and a hoodie. Standing to Joseph’s left was an anthropomorphic seagull in a blazer with a necktie like a bib down its downy chest. Sandro, for the nattily dressed anthropomorphic bird was he, skwaked laughter, and pointed out towards the sea, flexing the end of his left wing, which acted like an ersatz arm, with the feathers at the very articulated themselves into crude but serviceable, in a cartoonish way, fingers.
Seagull-Joseph turned towards the ocean. There, he could see two anthropomorphic seagulls flying through the sky, wearing sweatshirts, jeans, and other practical attire. Under their bellies were papooses where little fledgling seagulls, dressed in the height of toddler fashion, rested, gazing out with vaguely smug expressions.
“That’s what they’ve got instead of strollers!” Seagull-Sandro exclaimed. His voice was more strained and higher than usual, but still the product of roughly human vocal chords.
“Ok, ok, point proven, outre edits still work, and the Monitors make them consistent. Let’s end this.”
They counted down together from three again and were back in their human forms. Sandro looked behind him and waved at the two nannies with completely conventional earth-based strollers, and the women waved back.
“Ok,” said Joseph after a big inhale. “Prior versions?”
“Check,” Sandro said, “better than the Internet, hands down!”
Joseph shook his head. “I haven’t checked. Haven’t needed to.”
Sandro chuckled. “Still on your boycott, eh? I’m sure someday the Monitors and the Viewers will notice.”
Joseph shook his head again, this time as though bedeviled by flies. He looked around him, and satisfied no one was looking at him, he used his fingers to sketch a rectangle in the air, and then made a swiping motion across where the rectangle would be.
“Way to go, Minority Report!” Sandro cracked as Joseph’s brow furrowed. “Nothing,” Joseph said. “Static.”
“Static?” Sandro repeated, incredulous.
“Yeah, fucking static, Alessandro. You ever see static on a Viewing channel before? Come look for yourself!” Joseph was swiping at the air in front of him, growing frustrated. Sandro came to his side.
If Sandro craned his head a little, he could see the rectangle his brother described as a sort of window on the air, and this window showed a classic, broken-cathode-ray-tube-style snow display. “The fuck?” Sandro breathed to himself. He went back to the rock with the puddle. Muttering himself — whether curses, another incantation, or both, Joseph couldn’t hear — he waved his hands over the puddle again. “Same thing. Fuck. I can get fucking Sabrina whenever I want. I can get Sabrina’s fucking past versions. But none of mine!”
Joseph looked behind him, and walked over towards his brother, where the stone and concrete mass of the viewing tower could shield him more from view. He drew another rectangle in the air and swiped across it. “Can’t get your past versions either,” he said, an abstracted tone entering his voice. “You said you’ve been watching?”
“Fuck yes, I’ve been watching!” Sandro was hissing his words at this point, strangled shouts. “Just this morning before I came to see you, I was watching past versions!”
Joseph nodded. “Ok,” he said. “We can see Prime. We can’t see our past versions, as of now... so as far as I can tell… they either didn’t us to meet, and this is punishment?” He trailed off.
Sandro shook his head. “Nah, Joe. They know we always meet when we’re in the same place. Unless we commit and try again and the same thing happens… but I don’t want to commit just now. For my money, they’re throwing a wrench in the game.”
Joseph nodded. “How about this- try knockoffs,” he suggested. “Try past versions not made by us. We know they have them, the Viewing Public.”
Sandro nodded and hastily waved his hands over the puddle as Joseph swiped air. “Yep,” Sandro affirmed, “we got knockoffs.” Joseph glanced away from his rectangle into Sandro’s puddle.
“Nice,” Joseph intoned. The puddle was showing a wide angle shot of the area around the Sydney Opera House, which was on fire — a feat that would require some pretty serious engineering, seeing as it’s made of metal — and a man in a suit with a necktie tied like a bib riding what looked like a giant mechanical thresher down the road in front of it. In the foreground were dozens, hundreds of people in various states of undress, crawling on their bellies and dragging their tongues across the pavement. Joseph snapped his finger above the puddle. Instantly, the puddle shimmered, reassembled the image, but this time vibrates with sound. “Clean! Clean the streets, you filthy piggies! Faster! Faster!” the man on the combine shouted.
“At least you won’t lack for jerk off material,” Joseph remarked as Sandro crossly snapped his finger and waved his hand over the puddle, turning off both audio and video.
“Let’s see what you’ve got, Mister Morality,” Sandro said with a hint of a snarl, doing a sort of bob-and-weave thing as he got in front of his bigger, clumsier brother. “Ahh. One of your Fearless Leader scenarios. Again.” He was looking at a motley-dressed crowd with various weapons, improvised and otherwise, marching down a broad thoroughfare. Sandro squinted and said, “that’s you in front, with the long coat and finally, a hat that can fit your melon head? No need for audio, I know what the ‘Internationale’ sounds like… imagine all your dirty deeds are in discreet basements…”
“Enough,” Joe snapped and wiped the rectangle away with his hand. “We haven’t seen this before, have we?”
“Partial lockout? No, either total lockout or total access,” Sandro agreed.
“No Mom… and you woke up knowing, right? About the Viewing Public and the Monitors? I did.” Sandro nodded, uncharacteristically grave.
“What is this…” Joseph muttered, turning away from his brother and staring at the ground. “What is this, what is this…” Sandro had started turning away towards the ocean when he heard the slaps.
“Wake up,” Joseph said to himself at conversational volume, then slapped himself hard enough in the face to leave a red hand mark. “Wake up,” he repeated, louder, taking the same hand to one of his eyes and using thumb and middle finger to cinch the eyelid, already open, unnaturally apart. “Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up!” he cried, louder each time, cinching his eyelid and slapping his face with his other hand, alternating it with pounds on his thigh with a clenched fist. “Wake up!” he screamed.
Sandro reached into his blazer pocket for the little object that looked like an ocarina, fiddled with a knob on it, and the stuck the muzzle of it into the side of his brother’s neck.
Joseph stopped mid-scream. His face went lack. “Oh,” he said. He looked over at his brother. “That’s a good setting.”
“I know,” Sandro said. “But don’t try to wrench my fingers again or you’ll see one of the nasty ones.”
“I don’t. I’m sorry, Sandro. About that, and the yelling.”
“It’s ok, bro,” Sandro said, gingerly clasping his brother on his shoulder then removing the hand. “Happens to the best of us. Come on, I’ll buy us a Guinness.”
3
It was the last day of his final year at Yggdrasil Academy and Joseph gazed out the window embedded in the pond exit bathroom of Asher Hall at the boat house across the little rolling green outside.
Last days at Yggrasil resisted ceremony. The faculty presented very few ceremonies to the students at the best of times, and none on last days. The students themselves generated informal, ephemeral ceremonies on a regular basis the rest of the year, but not on the last day of the school year. The awkwardness of goodbyes, the demands of such tasks as cleaning out lockers or arranging summer plans, and maybe a certain adolescent ironic stance towards moments “society,” a concept Yggdrasil students often put in scare quotes, deemed poignant, stifled the students’ usual mythopoeic capacities.
And so, Joseph, eighteen years old, six foot two, two hundred fifty pounds, long hair (freshly washed for the occasion) tied back and descending down the back of his Hawaiian shirt, didn’t have much to do. He had cleaned out his locker. He had gotten everyone who was going to sign his yearbook to sign it. He knew in the future (how do I know this?) that he wouldn’t have done this, but he had bothered at least three peers and one faculty member with his thinking aloud about what last days at Yggdrasil — this was his eighth and final — meant, in an effort to bait confessions of feeling out of them. The other students he did this with, friends of his but many years seasoned to his ramblings, politely blew him off to run down yearbook signings or some other pressing business. The faculty member he spoke to, Marko, smiled the smile of the man who made a good career out of being a Zen island in a neurotic and vaguely legalist sea at Yggdrasil at him but said nothing.
And so, Joseph was looking at the boat house.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t going to see the boat house ever again. He could go to alumni functions or just plain old campus visits, as alumni tended to do for the first few years after graduating. The college he was set to attend in the fall wasn’t so far away. It wasn’t that he had so many good memories of going to the boat house to get rowboats out so he could punt around the pond. He had never done that.
Because Yggdrasil, as he knew it, did not have a boat house.
In fact, one of the first things he was told when he and his dad had toured the campus, was that you never, ever, go into the pond. You could go on the pond when it froze over in the winter, if Stephen said it was ok, but if you even accidentally chased a ball that had rolled downhill into the pond and got a finger in the pond, it was a guaranteed one day suspension. It had to be that way, it was explained to him and his dad- insurance. They had to keep people out of the pond for the insurance. Joseph’s dad, a man terrified by the forms and procedures of the world, nodded sagely at this. He knew the terrors of insurance.
Insurance problems were a sort of standing state of exception at Yggdrasil, a raison d’etat, that the faculty could wave at the students and parents to get stuff to go their way, Joseph thought, looking the pleasant building that shouldn’t be there, white painted shingles with a sort of royal blue trim, up and down.
So there was no boat house, no boating of any kind at Yggdrasil, and moreover, Joseph had not read Carl Schmitt, did not know what a “state of exception” was, when he was eighteen. He wouldn’t read Schmitt until grad school. Schmitt’s limpid, sinister formations echoed in his head with a clanging wrongness in the little foyer between the pond exit bathroom and the pond exit coat room and the pond exit door. It didn’t belong. But there was the Schmitt reference, in his head, and there was the boathouse, on the green by the pond.
A knowledge that he was generally more careful about subjecting people to his thoughts also didn’t belong, because they referred to a now he had yet to experience on his last day as a Yggdrasil student. In the moment he presently inhabited, he was perfectly capable of sidling up to friends, teachers, and acquaintances and unburdering his soul or otherwise using them as sounding boards for his adolescent ideas without so much an “if you please.” So… what gives?
In any event, Joseph was bored, so he wandered away from the pond exit towards the front entrance of Asher Hall. Asher constituted the centerpiece building of the Yggdrasil campus and was once the mansion of some
Connecticut Valley magnate or another. A century of use by roaming, self-educating children had transformed the interior of the building so that only a few of the rooms were recognizable for what might have been their purpose, once upon a time. The hallway Joseph passed through opened onto small, open rooms used as hangout spots, mostly by teenagers. They were decorated by framed photos of candid moments at the school taken over the years, and most of all by the hodge podge collection of books that made up the decentralized Yggdrasil library. Not content with having a single building or room for books, the long ago founders had decided to have portions of the library scattered throughout the school. Something about flattening hierarchies, inspiration to read wherever you went, and helping insulate the old buildings.
Maybe there were more side-rooms, and maybe they were decorated more oddly — high chintz, fringes on the sofas, creaky glass-fronted cabinets full of oddities and tchotchkes that never would have survived a month in a building full of roughhousing teenagers and even younger kids — than Joseph thought Yggdrasil could normally boast, but he could cope with that. It was when he passed through the front door onto the porch that wrapped around the L-shaped front of the old Victorian that he decided that he needed to wake up.
Because instead of Barnard Hall — known as The Barn — sitting at the crest of the short rise at the end of the wandering roadway that led from Asher and towards town, past the wisterias and the swing sets and the great big ash tree, it was his mother’s house, several houses ago, in Woollhara. The old Georgian, with the bushes and the vines with the funny Australian names he never bothered to learn, just plopped right there in the New England landscape where the Barn was supposed to be.
Wake up, he told himself.
He was on the little rolling green between Asher and the pond, facing Asher. The facade of the old Victorian, with assorted child friendly accoutrements, looked right. Ok, just taking a walk around the old campus before moving on, Joseph thought as he strolled towards the front of the building. He couldn’t see anyone else. That’s normal, the ebbs and flows of a day.
He rounded Asher Hall’s corner. Goddammit.
Between Asher Hall and the edge of campus sat the little neighborhood of decaying vacation homes in the cheap part of Cape Cod that his father took him to for spring break during Joseph’s first year at Yggdrasil (“we will never be able to go here during the summer, never,” the old man averred). Joseph’s father is a Californian and a snob about it, a believer in the greatness of California literature over the East Coast variants that threatened to overshadow it, and this snobbery bore down all the way to the geographical level. When his son enrolled at Yggdrasil, the father took on an exaggerated interest in the region, part superstitious dread, part one-upsmanship of the sort that expects easy victories.
Joseph’s dad thought driving from Western Massachusetts to a town far out on Cape Cod would be a short, easy trip, because “these New England states would barely count as counties back in California!” Father and son were in a miserable mood after an interminable drive along the Mass Pike, down Route 3, waiting in traffic at the Cape Cod Canal (“you’re telling me the ships couldn’t just round that minuscule little sand bar!” the dad demanded aloud), and finally winding their way along the little two-lane roadways of the Cape itself, as ten year old Joseph tried to help his profoundly nearsighted and almost nightblind father, glasses flashing with the reflections of too-bright headlights from oncoming cars, find their cottage.
Joseph couldn’t see what it looked like until daylight. Unpainted, unprimered, untreated, decayed-looking brown shingles; the word “clapboard” reached his mind, both now seeing it on the Yggdrasil campus and back when he saw it as a child, though he wasn’t sure if it was the right term. Low rooflines and a surprising amount of window frontage for the part of the New England coast that got hit most by hurricanes. Inside the windows, dusty darkness, but Joseph knew the piles of vaguely nautical and “good time” (burgers, dancing girls, sunglasses) -themed tchotchkes that covered more or less every surface on which one was not expected to prepare food. There was a whole quadrangle of little streets in this port town that had been dying since the whaling trade was healthy that was made up of such houses.
“You can see why people would come here to get divorced,” was the first thing his dad said to him that morning, and for the rest of the three days they stayed there continued to make references to bad east coast fiction that he was compelled to read in grad school.
For all that, Joseph’s time wasn’t entirely miserable. He enjoyed the misty beach and the fried seafood, and his dad bought him a toy bow and arrow set that lasted the rest of the vacation and no further- probably for the best, the other Yggdrasil boys his own age would probably scoff at that kind of chintz, aimed towards much younger boys had Joseph brought it to campus. It was only when he reminisced about the trips years later that other kids, and occasionally adults, looked at him with dismay.
“Your dad took you to the Cape in March to prove a point about books? That’s fucked up!”
And here the town was now. And just to add insult to injury, behind the little block of cottages, just where the Barn should be, stood Mom’s house outside Sydney.
Joseph slapped himself on the cheek. “Wake up,” he said to himself, aloud this time. Wake up, wake up.
Fewer cottages now, but if he looked up, you could see the upper floors of the sort of vinyl-sided triple-deckers that made up Joseph’s part of Brooklyn during his try at grad school. As if to make up for this, a cast of little kids ran around the grounds of Yggdrasil, tear-assing, playing tag, yelling. Joseph couldn’t focus enough on any of them to tell, exactly, who was whom. Wake up wake up wake up.
Upstairs in Asher Hall. The bedrooms of a nineteenth century elite family converted into office space and classrooms, but somehow the two superimposed on each other. The inevitable Victorian over-decoration but several degrees lower in social class (more of those damn tchotchkes I can’t stop dreaming about, Joseph thought to himself, growing angry at his own subconscious) molded around fluorescent lighting, scholastic tables, institutional shelving for magazines. The computer room — Joseph graduated high school long enough ago for an expensive private school to have such a room, rather than just expecting their students to have laptops — also held a book, perhaps fifteen feet long, seven tall, and a foot and a half thick. The only word on the spine was MASSACHUSETTS. He slapped himself again. Wake up.
Flood. Pounding rain, the pond starting to rise. Dozens of kids in various states of rainwear — yellow slickers, hoodies, a few adventurous boys in early teens shirtless and in jean shorts — looking on. Joseph watched from the back porch and Wendy, the faculty member who gave him his entrance interview, asked “what do you think is going to happen?” Two more slaps. Wake up.
Sandro strolling along the walk with him towards the Barn. Ok, dumbass, as if you didn’t know you weren’t dreaming before, Joseph chided himself. Alessandro had never set foot on the Yggdrasil campus, holding to an infuriated childhood promise to never grace the school with his presence, except to destroy it if he could. It was a fine autumn day- nothing looked destroyed. An impulse seized Joseph- run. Wake up.
Looking down at his running feet, Joseph saw new sneakers with the letter S as a main motif. Not just one, to denote a given brand of shoe, but interlocking S’s, all up and down the surface of the shoes. Whatever. I’m bored of this. Joseph slapped himself some more and also began to pry at an eyelid. Wake up wake up wake up wake up wake up
This dream had been going on a long, long time, and had been well before he got to Yggdrasil, he knew. Superpositions were coming thick and fast, layering onto the campus- the Allston Super 88 loomed over the line of bushes in the distance that separated the Yggdrasil property from the horse farm that bordered it. But if Joseph was going to get there, he’d have to get through the Borders store that he found himself in. We get it, Joseph fumed at himself, Borders, defunct bookstore, you’re aging you remember the nineties we get it we get it now wake up wake up wake up wake up WAKE UP and by the end his grunts of effort had turned into a strangled scream.
When Joseph woke in his bed, he tried some of the “mindfulness practices” that he had heard friends of that persuasion talk about. OK, what was it, five things I can see? It was dark in his room. Joseph couldn’t see much. He counted the display of his old alarm clock: 4:13 AM. He waggled the phone, on his mattress next to his pillow, into wakefulness, to make two. The dim light of the phone illuminated his pillow and his old paperback copy of Burning Chrome, so, he was going places. He was reasonably convinced he wasn’t dreaming. He decided to move onto other counting off stuff he could perceive using other senses, and by the time he was forgetting whether he should name one thing he could smell (laundry? His own drying spit on the pillow?) or two things he could taste (bile?), he was heading back to sleep.
Joseph woke up again around eight AM and performed his morning ablutions: shower, coffee, antidepressants, brushing teeth. He logged in to the data entry portal for his job, which had been remote since before the pandemic. He was preparing for another day of audiobooks and car insurance data — you’d be amazed how much data is still entered manually, perhaps on the logic that the labor of failed humanities grad students is cheaper than that of the coders who could write programs that would do it digitally — when he looked out the window.
Great. Just great. There’s mom’s house again. Plonked down into East Cambridge. Even the light was wrong, the Australian sunshine beaming down on the old house, while the neighboring triple-deckers had just the cold morning light of a New England winter.
And he remembered. He had already remembered the parts of the dream that had taken place at Yggdrasil, was thinking about texting friends about it, but he remembered more. There had been many dreams that night before he got to his old school. There had been dreams about other schools, and dreams about his friends. They had shaded into each other. A dream where his friends and he were playing an immersive game of some kind where they were grunts in Vietnam turned into a dream where someone had turned the storyline of their game into a movie, which had turned into a movie poster which featured in another dream where he was on some kind of game show set in a middle school classroom and had to play twenty questions with a family of Holocaust survivors, and if they lost, they went back to the camps.
And above all the sense that he was being watched the whole time. He didn’t will himself out of and into dreams. Someone was changing the channel.
Separate from the dream where Joseph and his Yggdrasil friends had played the Vietnam game, he had seen another friend. This was a friend from the socialist organization he was a part of, Sabrina. Sabrina had gotten him the job at the car insurance company, where she was the sort of software engineer Joseph supposed would eventually write him out of a job (“oh no,” Sabrina had said in between puffs on her vape pen when he broached the possibility to her, “your wages are a rounding error for these people.”) She had told him, in this dream, that he could control where he went. That “the Viewing Public,” as she put it, allowed a certain degree of agency from those they watched.
“Is there any way to wake up? Really wake up?” Joseph had asked Sabrina in this dream. She looked at him sadly, and was gone.
Well, let’s try that one again, Joseph thought, and looked through his phone for Sabrina’s number.
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: Smoldering Look
What does Mithra mean giving me this look during work time? (She wants pats and I give them)