10.10.2005

Jones

-Brian Kung

He sat at the base of the steps that rose from the concrete sidewalks like roots and enjoyed the sun. It had an almost intimate quality to it, a scent-like wafting quality that brought peace to the ragged environs that surrounded him, the squalor of a city rife with dreams of the grandeur it once lived. Now it shuffled, head in the clouds, while its tattered clothes stained with the rancid smell of sweat, the fermenting substances garnered from sleeping in the streets, and disintegrated before the perpetual grind of reality against its poor, its neglected body.

The sun lit the city as if it stood upon a hill, high above the clouds, clothed it in the cloak of nobility, cast it with a stature of dignity for all to see.

If you told this to the man, he would have nodded, not thinking about it consciously, but knowing it nonetheless, just as he knew that the clouds would rise or the hill would fall and once again the city would be weighted down by dejection. There was no realization of patterns in his knowledge, no analysis. It just came naturally. If we walked together on the timeline, whether trudging forward or running, he was always at the horizon, never looking back. Occasionally, you’d hear his muttered words, but mostly he was just silent. If you were wise, you’d value his words as gold.

His curious intuition stemmed from his being a stock market tycoon. Or perhaps it was his intuition that came first, the ability to look at a cloudy sky and see the rain clouds already on their way towards the horizon. Either way, he was incredibly successful, judging by the tabs the IRS kept on him.

There was a certain whimsical air about him, perhaps the sun, perhaps the smile he wore, perhaps the wife who would get off work and wait for him at home until five every night, where they would joke and tickle and occasionally break into impromptu dance as they cooked dinner. Mostly, though, it went undone and they shelved the ingredients for another day, sufficing with boiled water and instant noodles. The rest of the night was theirs to claim in any way they desired.

Something about him that day made him stick out, brought to mind the question why he is he in the less than refined sections of the city? Of course, if questioned directly, he would smile and say, “Nice day out.”

What made him linger, day in, day out, before completing the indirect way back to the train station, was the sheer locus of the place. It was here, in the days before the city’s fall, that he had known his greatest successes, where he had stood atop the city and the city stood atop the world. It was here that he had gotten lost, a young would-be law student on his way to a class he knew he would hate and guaranteed a job he would hate afterwards. It was here that he sat, exhausted from wandering and perspiring from the heat of the bright sun and rested his head upon the heels of his palms, looked down to the sandy grained concrete…and found himself. It was here, at the steps of the coffee house, where he’d met his wife and where he continued to meet her until, in a shower of snow made into willow-wisps by the lamplight and shaking with laughter in his embrace, she proposed to him with a plastic spider ring she’d found at the steps during Halloween. It was here that his success had survived, even multiplied in the face of the city’s decline.

A cloud laid a dark finger on his high brow, and the smile disappeared. The children who had bounced playground balls against the walls, road, sidewalk, lost them on the rooftops and marooned them in the grass…the children were gone, and the city was silent, the realization reaching him like the sudden abatement of a monsoon.

His instincts had been telling him to leave.

His instincts whispered of danger.

His instincts-

!

He got up and walked briskly away, trying not to convey weakness, trying to escape his fate, but angry words echoed down and followed him, ghosts of a different battle gleefully latching onto his spine, digging into his shoulders. Hands spoke angrily, flashed war colors, clawed and fisted and finally snatched up shining metal, harsh teeth that struck without remorse.

He watched, horrified, staring at the news that night, saw his body lifted into the ambulance, watched his lifeblood drain into the concrete, heard the death cries of the men who had shot him, smelled the latex hospital gloves used to prod his body, tasted his wife’s tears

The mouth of his fate engulfed him.

He was gone.

Swallowed.



He registered the sound of his own breath gasping inward before he realized he was awake. The sensation of a bullet entering his torso, tearing through bone and rendering a lung useless, threw him backwards, against the leather straps and the pristine white cot, which was hard and unyielding, little pieces of gravel rolling, cutting, and grinding away at his back as he fell backwards…

His eyes searched his surroundings blindly, unfocused, panic making him claw at the bed sheets, trying to forcibly bring the world into focus. He whimpered as wetness seeped from his wound, making the gravel slick.

“He’s in shock.” Two voices spoke in unison, almost completely together. One was…one was…

“I want one-hundred - Send him under for a bit – CCs of morph – we don’t know how…”

One was…different? But how? Jones tried to fight through what his mind told him to see what his eyes saw.

Thought deserted him as he slipped fitfully back into the cool darkness.

He woke in mourning, eyes shut and tears leading through his eyelids. She’s alone now…I left her…

He curled up into the fetal position, sheets twisting in towards his body. He hugged his knees, the light white blanket distinguished from the starched white of the sheets like a work of spiraling origami, shadows radiating away from him.

I left her…just…please, God…don’t let her try to follow me…



“How is our newest patient?”

“He’s catatonic.”

“Oh? All his vitals check out.”

“Yeah, but look at his brainwave activity.”

“Huh. That’s a lot of delta waves. Is he conscious?”

“I don’t know.”

“Huh. He’s come out of shock already, physically. I wonder…”

“What?”

“I wonder if he knows he’s alive again.”

“Technically, he should know everything right up until the point where he was…eliminated.”

“Technically…yes. But there are always fuzzy lines.”

Doctor Gerard Richardson ran a hand through his hair, numbers and statistics running through his mind at quantum-computing speeds. If he had been a doctor long ago, the equivalent motion may have been to tap his clipboard.

“Well…we can afford to wait.”



“What’s your name?” Richardson asked. He knew the answer already, but it was an exercise for new patients. And a test.

Jones’s spine stiffened, still curled in the fetal position facing the wall. The images were fading slowly…no, it was not that they were fading so much as this new world was imposing itself on him. He felt suffocated, squeezed between the old reality and the new, and the voices only made it worse.

Richardson cleared his throat, and waited. A few tense, uncomfortable moments passed, and then Jones relaxed, even extending his legs a little bit. His vocal chords were hoarse from disuse and abuse.

“Doctor…the only mystery is what your name is.”

“Well-”

“Especially since you’re not wearing a name tag”

Richardson paused, wondering what a “name tag” was, then decided it was self-explanatory. These days, trivial information like that was transferred through the inquiring flick of an eyebrow, modulated quantum particles passed along literally instantaneously from one person to another, and then subsequently decoded.

Something bothered him about Jones, though he couldn’t put his finger on it. Had Jones even looked at him before…?

Jones turned from the wall to face the good Dr. Richardson.

“Ah…how did you know I was a doctor?”

“Simply put, your kind is the only one who would choose to spend more than an hour of their live every month in this stark white, sterile environment.”

Jones’s blank eyes stared out at Dr. Richardson from his skull. There were no emotions, no reaction in those eyes at all. No judgment. Just a monument to Existence in lieu of all else.

Richardson tried for a light laugh, which he thought he pulled off rather well. Just the right amount of warmth, yet it trailed away weakly, as if pulled into the black holes of Jones’s eyes.

“That may be true, Jones, that may be true.”

“I knew you knew my name.”

Richardson paused uncomfortably, but the assessment had been passed, and it seemed like it hadn’t been any exercise at all. Strangely, there seemed to be no loss of that elusive thing called consciousness in Jones, no quantitative loss of quality. And yet, he wondered if Jones had been like this in the past. Richardson cut that train of thought and started to recite his lines.

“Well, Jones, it seems like you’ve outsmarted me. Good job! But aren’t you the least bit confused about where you are right now?”

Jones’s impenetrability wavered, his eyes flickering back and forth.

“The truth is, you’ve been selected for a special treatment…one that occurs postmortem.”

“Post…mortem…? I’ve been…”

“That’s right. You, Mr. Jones, have been brought back from the dead. You have another chance at life. Different, but a chance nonetheless.” Richardson smiled at him with a kindly, condescending, fatherly expression.

Jones’s eyes became dead blank again, and affixed themselves on Richardson’s wholly human ones. Emotionless eyes…

“This…”

No, not quite emotionless. Richardson’s throat clenched as he caught a glimpse of something

“…this is a nightmare.”

There was also anger.



He saw.

He saw so much, he wasn’t sure what was real.

He saw different ages, at different paces, and it was tearing his mind apart.

He had been striding ahead for so long, yet even he could not have seen this far past the horizon. Yet…he had been taken ahead. He had been stolen whole from the past, and while he stumbled at first…he was back on his feet.

But, looking back, he could still see himself walking forward. He could see the present, the fake present he had been brought to, and the far future, and the only one he had a body in was the fake present, which was jarring.

Simply put, he was fake. Everything was fake. And he would never see her again…

She cried that night. He knew it because he saw it. He could still see it. She cried that night and many nights for as long as he could see before it became fuzzy. She cleaned obsessively, glancing at the clock at five o’ clock, before remembering that he wouldn’t be back. She ordered out, luscious Chinese take-out arriving at six sharp, and she just stared at it, wondering what to do with the excess of instant noodles in the cabinets.

He stared at her from thousands of years in the future, and he mourned. He reached a hand out…

She looked up at him sharply, eyes widening…

Sudden pain lit up his temples, and he sank down into his hard, white-sheeted bed. The image faded a bit, as if smudged, and then he saw his wife again, following her now-daily schedule of mourning.

Richardson came in now and then, but mostly it was his aides. It was tedious, seeing everything happen twice, sometimes months in advance. The novelty of deja-vu had faded when he was twelve, when he’d discovered his dog dragging itself off the street. He’d told his parents that it was okay, he’d gotten over it already, and they’d given him small, strange looks when they thought he wasn’t watching. He watched with a detached curiosity as the doctors and aides seemed to ignore each other, and yet somehow knew each others’ intentions, observations, schedule. It was like watching an ant-nest. Eerie. He much preferred the past.

Once, though, he became interested in the present – at least, the one he was in. Or maybe it was the one he was about to be in. It was hard to tell, sometimes. He didn’t know where the question came from, but he asked it.

“Doctor Richardson. I have a question.”

Richardson started. “Ah, what is it Jones? Are you sure it’s something you can’t find in the educational videos we’ve given you? You’ve been very lax with those.”

Doctor Richardson didn’t like talking to Jones so much. He had been skittish since he had told Jones about his current state, and they hadn’t traded words since.

“Doctor Richardson, I don’t care about those. I want to know how you brought me back.”

The doctor hesitated. He would give a much simplified version of the truth to him, though how much of that he could even comprehend was questionable.

“Well…it’s very complex.”

“Ah. I see.”

Richardson paused. There had been something else in that statement.

“Every instance in time has a quantum state, a measurable quality, though it’s more like the value of a slope, because it’s not definable with regular numbers, and…well, it doesn’t matter. Furthermore, everything in existence, and everything that has existed, has a certain resonance to it. Everything has a cumulative resonance, an identifying property that emerges from each of the eleven dimensions intersecting at every point.”

“And…?”

“And…basically, the index of the entire universe is open to us by calling up these two properties.”

“Ah.”

“Is that all?”

“But why…never mind, you haven’t figured out the future yet.”

“What? How did you know…?”

“What?”

“I can say that we are on the verge of that. Truly. It will open up amazing possibilities.”

“What will?”

“Complete four dimensional navigation.”

“You mean…the past and the future. You mean, you haven’t figured out the future?”

“Why…yes. That is, after all, what you brought up.”

“Did I?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a liar.”

“I think our time here is done, Jones.”

“I would agree…”

Richardson got up, and left. As far as Jones was concerned, he melded with the white of the wall and was eaten. He didn’t care.

“My time here…is done. Has been for a while.”

He lay on the floor and looked up at the ceiling.

“I should leave.”



Alarms in Richardson’s head went off as Jones’s brainwave activity spiked into high amplitude, high frequency beta waves, like nothing he’d seen before. Electrons were racing through most higher-function and some lower-function sections of his brain so fast that the sheer activity caused Richardson a headache.

There was a sudden drop in activity, and it leveled out to delta waves, like when they had first brought him back. But the frequency was slower, the amplitude deeper. Surely it was a coma!

Richardson initiated a quantum-level scan of his patient’s brain, and found that it was much worse than coma. It was as if Jones had never been. His mind was just blank.

2 Comments:

Blogger Dan said...

o.O

Awesome.

10/11/2005 6:36 PM  
Blogger Sunwolf said...

The bastards ruined my spacing...and this should actually be about twice as long, I was just rushed to hit the due-date.

I guess Creative Writing is useful for getting me to finish stuff. Maybe.

Eh.

10/12/2005 6:51 PM  

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