The Millennial Reincarnations: A Novel

by Daniel Mark Harrison

  And roll they did; they rolled and rolled, the wooden ball bouncing from pocket to pocket high into the air, keeping the crowd in suspense, between gasps, not ever given the relief of feeling some kind of euphoria or despair, but always at the point of waiting.

  Ω

  I guess by the time I reached Shanghai I had grown tired of waiting, and so I became a local celebrity of sorts. It’s then that none other than the most talked-about girl of all Shanghai stopped by to pay me a visit one afternoon.

  “You can call me Number One Sister,” she told me the in car.

  “I have a Number One Sis-”

  “My name,” she went on, interrupting me, “is Sofia YuZheng Lincoln. Now, are you going to help me get the sorority back from my cousin, or not?”

  And so that’s why I went to New York for three months to see my brother Chase. And it was during that time that I lost my virginity and gained – well, the world in return for it.

  My life was to become a part of the whirlwind Asia Tabloid.

  Ω

  New York – probably because it was so near to home, where we had grown up half a decade ago – reminded me so much of Alyssa. I had not forgotten her, you see: how could anyone forget such a girl? Alyssa: the lightest of all devils in Hell, the darkest of gods in the glare of heaven’s bright city lights, the farthest fallen of angels of all who fall from flying too close to the brilliant, burning sun of another galaxy even hotter than the one that is our own. Who had she been? Who was she? It was my own personal unresolved psychosis of sorts.

  The question as to her true identity had weighed on my mind for years after I saw her in Church that one time. It’s what also led me to become the person, I often thought.

  It may be her that that it was who had led my brother to design the Minority Collective, I often thought afterwards, until I found out who she was, and then of course, I knew it was her. The Minority Collective was hers, and she was its chosen ambassador here on planet earth.

  But back then I was much younger still, remember – just a child, barely twenty years old. Thus, as I had mentally willed myself to heal (from what injury I did not know what) over the course of the long five years that ran from mid-2004 up until the beginning of the subprime crisis, I took to going for long walks by impractically designing huge detours between my point of departure and destination, zig-zagging across the city’s avenue-street-avenue gridlock, stopping somewhere occasionally to gulp latte upon latte of mediocre coffee, where I wrote an unremarkable string of poems and thoughts that made me cringe even as I was composing them in letters.

  It was this habit I still pursued when I went to visit Chase in New York in the Fall of 2008 (although by that time more out of habit than requirement, it must be said).

  During one of these long walks, it occurred to me as very possibly true that, judging the evidence as it was presented to me, that Alyssa was not real at all, but perhaps a fractional offshoot of my hyper-hormonal mind. My parents didn’t recall her; I never found her number; there was obviously no effort on her part to communicate with me, despite my more public profile lately in Shanghai (which surely, I figured, she would have noticed. Even with the thousands of miles that separated us, the internet bound us together more than ever before as neighbors to one another’s celebrity, after all.)

  It was as if she had been nothing more, nothing less than the apparition in my semi-hallucinogenic sexual fantasy all those years ago. And yet I could still smell her perfume on my sleeve and my pillow from time to time, and her words that had that balmy morning cut through me like Japanese carving knives still sliced the same way when I considered them again, which I did not so much these days.

  “Call it something godly or ungodly – it’s all the same at the end of the day,” Alyssa had told me. “Just cause I push and you pull doesn’t make pushing or pulling any better.”

  No words, I realized, could have been more prescient in summing up the attitude of this city in which I now found myself not just a cohabitant of but in some small way also a part of. It came to feel more and more to me as if she was in some sense my own guardian demon, back then portending my future and offering council on the way to accomplish defiance of the occasional headlines and daily doses of masterful sociopathic force that were now my reality.

  I have no reason to claim that she came back into my life – no reason I could provide you that was rational, anyway – but I confess here that I did for many years believe that Fall of 2008 in New York that she came back to pay me a visit from her place of abode, wherever that might be.

  Of course, what I didn’t know, was that she was the one who had sent me to New York in the first place. It had been her plan all along. That was how the Minority Collective worked – it found value where no one else saw anything of particular note or variety, and when its wheels were turning, the utility that it generated was always predisposed to the greatest Collective, as opposed to the way most people worked, where they served the smallest minority in the world that they could get away with serving.

  Ω

  One night, around eleven, towards the end of one of my perambulations around the city’s maze of street-side salesman-turned-brand-name-artists, some still alive, such as Prada and Gucci, some now dead by murder, such as Versace, I dropped in at another coffee-shop-cum-bookstore to compose yet more average poetry.

  I opened my back-pack to look for my notepaper, but it wasn’t there. Then, as I walked over to the counter to get some more paper, I knocked a book off the side of one of the shelves. It was one of those popular science books on the theory of time travel, parallel universes and the beginning and end of the galaxy. I can’t say why, but up until this point, I had recently felt deep-down that such theories were nothing more than academic fraud – faulty concepts dreamt up by the best of the anti-conceptualist core, physicists. I couldn’t pin-point exactly where this intuition had come from, but I was sure it was somewhere deep in this depressive lull I had been experiencing lately; somewhere inside one of its more violent flares.

  As I bent down to replace the book on the shelf, I scanned the chapter heading: “Black Holes”. Just then, a short passage – just two sentences – suddenly beamed out to me on the open page as if it had been written in hieroglyphics or bold, except that it was in perfectly ordinary typeface:

  An object’s relative darkness is a manifestation of its lack of photons. In other words, darkness is constantly absorbing light particles, which is what makes it appear to be dark to the observer.

  Right at that moment, a shrill, high-pitch metal hammering pierced the bookstore-café. One of the burly nightclub bouncer type who was acting as security for the place at the door began yelling. “FIRE! Out, everybody out! This is not a drill! Out people! There is a fire: this is not a drill!”

  I hesitated, out of shock, out of confusion, out of I-don’t-know-what. The security guard caught my eye as he wadded through the small store. “Everybody OUT!” he said more aggressively this time and looking straight at me, pointing backwards with his thumb outstretched. “It’s a FIRE Miss – you wanna burn alive in here? There’s a fire on the second floor, and there are flammable items up there so it’s spreading FAST. THIS IS NOT A DRILL!! C’mon, get out now.”

  I complied. In typical New York hysteria, a crowd was building outside the store. “Everybody BACK!” said one of the other security guys who was working the front of the shop. This is archetypal Manhattan: it’s the only city in the world where people want to jump into a burning building just because there’s something going on.

  I walked alone back to our new Park Avenue co-op, minus the book I had replaced on the shelf and without my backpack, which I had been terrorized into leaving, despite the obvious presence of any threat (“NO items are to be removed from the store. LEAVE, Miss! This zone is a FIRE HAZARD! Taking your items with you could lead to further EXPLOSIONS!”). It was probably a small fire that was put out by now, I figured, as I noted the familiar towers of gas-lit offices and their
anonymous computer monitors flickering with spreadsheets and porn and whatever else.

  I picked up pace, keen to get out from the tall shadows of midtown, which at this time of night, made almost everything a much darker pitch of black than I was comfortable with. As I quickened my step, my crotch gave out a momentary itch, rubbing softly on my panties. I had only masturbated twice in the past two-and-a-half weeks since I had gotten to New York, such had been the affect of the one-day-ahead drag of the jet-lag from China, which had worn my libido little more than I was accustomed. But for whatever reason, there was something interlinking the event in the store and this sudden hint at sexual gratification.

  At that moment precisely – I recall it like it was yesterday – a certain familiarity of feeling struck up inside my heart, and it was as if the passage in the book I was holding just moments earlier was lit up inside my head in many brilliant lights.

  Alyssa had said, I recall it still, all those years ago:

  “Darkness is constantly absorbing light, which is why it’s dark. Light is constantly reflecting light, which is why it’s light, at least to us. So, here’s the thing: if God is light, as is agreed by almost everyone who believes in him all over the world, then he must be, over time, getting a lot less Holy than the devil, since it’s the devil that is absorbing all of God’s light, all of the time.

  My point is, there is a little bit of the devil in God, but more importantly, there’s a whole lot of God in the devil, if the rules of physics are anything to go by.”

  The words sung inside my mind in a chorus sung by young choirboys, pure and angelic and Holy and not needing rhythm such was the harmony of the melody so clearly defined and self-regulating in acting as its own metronomic constant.

  Then, as I turned into Park Avenue off Lexington, the streets became bright again, my elongated shadow abandoning me into the light. Here movie stars did all-day product endorsements and charity events for orphaned kids on offensive Technicolor LED screens. It was, I thought, what China wanted to become, only the twenty-first century version, which would be so much more magnanimous and yet so much less impressive in a way, than this. For these LED screens came from a time of paintings: to achieve the same sort of high-drama today one would have to invent holographic commercials.

  I squinted slightly at one of screens, and right there and then I could read in clear print a final parting adieu to me, one I knew that Alyssa had written, only it wasn’t Alyssa at all of course, but rather the real girl who was Alyssa, the one who I know as my savior and who you, if you do not know her by fame or personality yet, will surely know her by the time this story is finished.

  The parting message written on the screen was phrased more as sort of question, in a way:

  Can’t you see all the stars shining out at you?”

  It was the last thing she had said to me all those years ago.

  I looked up at the stars but in all the chaotic grandeur, amidst the cross-section of this information mecca, the stars I had seen so brilliantly shining about the milky way up above me back then had all but vanished, taking with them all the edges and ridges and contours of our neighboring constellations.

  Instead, there was the fastidious stop-start glare of the beaming lights at the front and back of the out-of-town SUVs KA-BOOM-BOOM-ing from somewhere deep within, on the other side of their blackened-out windows as they accelerated around the corners of the city’s streets and avenues at speeds of the guilty and the mentally wounded.

  And then, suddenly and randomly as I had several times before now, I smelt Alyssa’s perfume again, just a whiff.

  But for the first time that I can remember since that experience in the Church that I shared with her, my heart did not ache, and my body did not feel weak and my soul did not feel as if it might never love another the same way again or as if my world would one day collapse. Au contraire, I somehow felt empowered, engaged, clear. I thought about the light in the abyss, about the stars in the galaxy, and as I did so, I saw them clearly in my mind’s eye as if some of the stars were rapidly moving, heating up and collapsing lop-sided upon each other into diameters of empty, dark space beside them, being sucked in almost, while others whistled past planets and crazy (almost artificial) structures I can only explain as multifaceted planets. These ones glowed, and it was beautiful, the way it had been beautiful to see Alyssa’s cheeks glow with her orgasm (or had that in fact, been my own orgasm, a multiple-orgasm of sorts)?

  I wondered then if, despite my previous life as an above-average, if somewhat ordinarily so, small town girl with a normal life planned for herself, it was somehow my destiny instead to become one of them, those little shards of light trapped inside the blackest ether of modern Sino-American political family folklore? That is certainly the direction in which my life had recently begun to steer me, what with my appointment to the Sorority and everything else.

  Such was my state of anxiety upon our chance encounter at the back of the Church all those years ago, and possibly my young age, that I hadn’t really listened to what Alyssa had told me as I lay in her arms before we parted. I’d also dismissed it, since it sounded sort of corny, and to be honest, unremarkable. But this is what had said: “You’re like one of the shards of light, making its way into the darkness, making the unholy sacred and becoming the unknown to yourself while becoming the known to many around you.”

  I realized now, as I approached the home where Chase lived with some of his friends, that in fact, this was precisely the person that I was now in a state of becoming.

  I turned the key in the lock, breathing in that familiar musk of my family.

  Suddenly then, just as a power source within me had surged up moments ago, I experienced a completeness – deep and sensual, arousing – and within it lunged up an overwhelming desire to masturbate hard and long into the night. I crossed my legs for a moment, welcoming the return of my libido with what came out as a random, almost ecstatic burst of laughter and moaning combined into one another. It was just like the time I had volunteered to do what I did in front of the other sisters, to as to avoid them shaming themselves – then, more than anything else, it was this lunging sexuality that came out of me that made me able to performing, and from where I knew not where it came at all, but rise like a dragon from the pit of the ocean it did, and a mighty, fire-breathing dragon that was.

  I could hardly wait now, and the feeling intensified the further into the house I ventured. Eventually, I just sort of stood, frozen by my own immensity of desire, in the corridor that ran a long way down to my room, my insides burning up. And of course, such was the agony, that just before I reached the door of my bedroom, I gave in and pressed hard into my crotch. I stifled my moan hard then, but clearly not hard enough to avoid arousing the attention of my younger brother and his friends.

  “What-the-fuck, you OK, Milana?” Chase was standing at his open door in boxers and t-shirt. Behind him three boys about a year younger than me tried to shove the bong under the sheets, I guess fearing that one of my parents would walk by. For the first time since I had first set eyes on them, I realized that his friends were actually pretty cute, in a scrawny, upper-class ruffian sort of way.

  I waved softly over Chase at them.

  “Hi,” they smiled back.

  “Don’t mind these ones, Milana. They just helpin’ me with some shit … Hey!” Chase called out at one of them who was looking right at her. “Cut it out! She’s taken!”

  “Laters then maybe? What’s meant to be …”

  “Get back to writing the damn code,” said Chase and the kid shut up.

  Chase it seemed had taken to life in the Big Apple well, and he and his new-found friends were always getting high in the afternoons after school, and then sat around talking about art or girls or whatever until it was late. But what no one knew but I was that he was still the same sweet, innocent kid he always had been in our family growing up, and I still had a crush on him in a way, right up until the present day.

  Cha
se frowned and startled a little as I bit my lip and suppressed the urge to push my fingers against my jeans again and stimulate myself. It was as if all the previous months’ of deliberate filial self-censorship, along with my dalliance with Sophie recently, were giving way to a roaring, unstoppable desire; I guess there was some sort of chemistry in the air, some telepathic call-to-action that I must have sent out then into his head as suddenly, only briefly, such was his deftness in covering himself, I saw the shape of his cock harden slightly under his boxers.

  I walked over to him and took his hand, looked him in the eyes as Alyssa had to me some months ago. He gave a look of mutual recognition – I am sure of that – though why I could not have known of course.

  I knew right then and there that there was only one thing that could relieve this overwhelming agony inside me, and I knew as well that he felt exactly the same way.

  “Yeah Chase, it’s kinda urgent,” I said.

  And then I lead him by his hand over the landing and into my bedroom, all the while feeling his bulging cock harden and throb-throb-throb against the back of the palm of my other hand impossibly quickly into a far tougher, stiffer rod than I could have ever hoped for in my wildest dreams from the boy who I was about to let become the one to take my virginity.

  I awoke the next morning and slipped my arm over the pillow to ruffle my brother’s hair. As I did, I opened my eyes and could barely keep from screaming.

  “Chase?” I said out loud.

  The eyes looking back at me were not my brother’s. They were someone else’s.