by Brian Short
That Proteus could tell him a thing or two about prophecy was something he was not yet ready to admit. But the Professor was as much a regular here at Ignatius! Coffee! Co! as these others, whose familiar faces and whose bodies now occupied its worn wooden chairs by their daily, dreamlike visitations, who rolled their eyes with the synchronized precision that comes with much practice, and were long used to this sort of talk, and who had learned, for the most part, to ignore it. Proteus, on the other hand, was new blood, prima materia, and had learned nothing so far. Still, he tried not to stare too rudely at the rat’s nest that was the Professor’s white hair, which stuck out at every possible angle (and some perhaps not possible), nor the unruly scruff of patchy beard, unevenly cut, disastrously grown, like wild shrubbery, nor the over-wide, gray eyes, rimmed and red-shot throughout with veins, incompletely burst and clouded by visions, and it was a near-impossible effort to ignore the ruined battleground of faded, former color that was his wardrobe. Think of Berlin, after the war. Or maybe Vienna. At least he did not smell. Proteus, Zen initiate, affected Zen-like indifference, yet his capacities still were challenged.
He actually found the old mystic rather engaging, though he couldn’t help but groan inwardly whenever he saw the Professor come through the front door – not that his manner bothered him so much, but because the drinks he ordered were… well, they were…
“Son, you know why I’ve come. Prepare for me… the Rubedo!”
The Rubedo was a drink not on the menu of espresso options, and this wasn’t merely a matter of inconvenience. Not for lack of flavored syrups or milk with appropriate fat content, nor want of the caramel sauce that Ignatius himself made in-house each week, and certainly not for any deficiencies in Proteus’s ability to pull his shots correctly or foam the milk, as he’d quickly mastered these skills – no, the Rubedo, the only thing the Professor ever ordered, which he himself had invented, or had at any rate safe-kept the formula to, was impossible. Making it correctly involved nothing less than a miracle, a circumvention of physical law. Because the Ignatius! Coffee! Co! existed these days on the goodwill of its regular customers, especially given the recent downturn in the local economy of available bodies, it was their business, if not exactly their pleasure, to accommodate their customers in whatever way they could. Still, Ignatius himself consistently disappeared somewhere convenient whenever the Professor could be heard to approach, leaving Proteus at the machine, his eyes staring, palms damp.
Because it was impossible, Proteus had never gotten it right. The Professor, shouting vague directions at each stage over his barista’s shoulder –
(“The first substance is irrelevant! All elements combine! You must join heaven to Earth, Earth to heaven, to create the golden body of the sun!”
“The… the what?” asks Proteus. “The Golden Body!?”
“Pay attention, boy!” More than one explosion has resulted.)
– has, as yet, always accepted as drinkable the product of Proteus’s many failed experiments, despite what questionable shade of red (not to mention the certainty of mercury poisoning) these processes of incomplete transmutation have typically yielded.
“Yes, that’s fine, that’s fine.”
Proteus swallowed his shame, handing over something in a cup which may have, for a moment at least, contained sentience, accepting in its stead a crumpled wad of bills that appeared as if dug from the ground, caked and crumbling with dried earth. The Professor had unique problems with money, yet he always had enough. Proteus brushed these notes off before putting them into the till and compiling appropriate change.
•
“This is the world!”
“Is it?”
The coffee shop was a largish room, one hundred years old and abnormally dark at any time. Despite its worn windows facing onto the street, despite the hours of high, bright desert sunlight that, for much of each day, should have shined straight through them (and did), the Ignatius! Coffee! Co! remained shaded, deep, ate the light that entered and did something wholly unnatural to it. It buried everything with a dense interiority. The air, despite or because of this, was charged. It crackled. It tingled the skin. This was the mountain electric. Everything metal sparked when touched. When touched again, it sparked again, just the same as before, if not worse. And perhaps this caused the mind to jump and hop, to think perhaps a bit too quickly, and not just from caffeine overstimulation. Though there was that.
“This is the world,” the woman who’d said that once said again.
“Is it?” repeated the man at the table beside her, “because I don’t know…”
Proteus hadn’t learned everyone’s names yet, though he was getting to know faces, preferred drinks…
“I’d stopped believing in it, but it never went away.”
From another table: “We used to live in the valley, back when. For decades I seen these people come and go. Whole town emptied after the mine tapped out, you understand – no more work, no money. For years, the town just crumbled. Wind blew. Ghosts kept their own company, probably didn’t notice any different. This… well, this just ain’t nothin’.”
“Only the half of it, then – the half that’s still around.”
“Yes. The half that’s broken. The other half is gone. But it was that missing half that I did believe in.”
“It was condemned,” from still another table near the back, “to crawl on its belly, having no arms or legs…”
“Then you’re saying…?”
“Yes, yes, I’m saying. The presence of God was forgotten. But by it first.”
“…came into town by way of the abandoned rail on a small, motorized cart I picked up somewhere. Don’t remember where. This was in ’67, ’68, I believe. The truss bridge, at the time, was suspended over empty space, so far as I could see. It’s fallen now, fell more than twenty years ago. But then, to my way of seeing it – which wasn’t exactly straight, I’ll admit – there didn’t seem to be any end to the ascent. It just kept going up and up, like I thought I was motoring into the empty blue infinite, afraid there wouldn’t be any air left by the time I got to the top. If’n there was one.”
At the espresso machine, Proteus knocked a puck of spent grounds from the filter and wiped away their scatter, polishing the metal as he went. In a display nearby on the counter, new pastries turned slowly old beside the register. To the furthest corner of the room, under a small spotlight left always on, the machinery of roasting rested silent and shadowed, a squat drum of steel painted red and black, out of which pipes retreated from the back end, and a levered mouth in the front that opened onto a wide, circular cooling tray.
“…for thereon man’s story continued, and one thing led to another, just as one thing followed another, the next after the last, the Garden a distant memory now, and there was the sound of his voice, always, the very same sound of his voice. That, but only that, and nothing else.”
The front screen door flapped open, the intrusion of sunlight through its frame interrupted by a form, tall and blocky, which hesitated a moment as if to assess everything inside before continuing on. It raised a hand to its ear, turned its head to one side.
“…But that you and I have somehow failed to disappear, what does this suggest?”
“That we knew enough to keep our distance.”
“Yes. Yes?” said the figure in the doorway into its hand.
“No… it means that we were supposed to remain.”
The silhouette started first in one direction, then turned suddenly in another. “…to hold on for the moment and just… until the inspector’s been through… They’ve put their earnest money down, so they’re that much…” The figure decisively spun around and stepped back out to the light. Its voice faded in and out depending on how it faced toward or away from the opening. “Yes, I know they can always… of course I know that. But they won’t over this, they’ve put… what it means is they’ve put the money down. It’s not an issue that will flip this… just trying to scare
you into giving them something…” The sunlight broke over this battleship of a woman in a smart pantsuit, who paced the sidewalk in slow, aimless steps.
“…So the next time that you realize, in the dream, that you’re dreaming, try and go someplace where you’ve never been.”
“But I’d rather just screw with people. It’s more fun.”
“…And the human eye will bend, but only bend… And the human eye will touch, but only touch…”
“But you should understand that while this is happening, nothing is happening.”
“Yes, I know that, that’s what I’m saying, that nothing is happening. It’s not real.”
“No, I mean that everything that happens is ‘nothing happening’. Because the dream and the real are the same thing.”
Having pocketed her cellphone, tall and blocklike Mary Margaret again entered the building, successfully this time, and approached the counter. Hers was a name that Proteus did remember – “Good morning, Mary Alice… ehrm, Margaret. Sorry” – yet still got wrong.
She waved off the offense and ordered a very dry cappuccino.
“On your way to the gallery?”
“I’m just heading up there right now.” She looked over her shoulder with a backward glance of disdain for the entire room behind. “Make sure it’s very hot.”
“As hot as I can get it.”
He poured a small amount of overheated milk in to raise the temperature of the espresso before spooning stiff froth on top, then capped the paper cup with a thin plastic lid. “You’re due for a new show soon, aren’t you?” he asked.
Grabbing the cup, “Every first Thursday.”
“Which is next Thursday.”
“That’s right.” She turned away to the other side in obvious disinterest… “Thanks…” and threw paper money onto the counter and was gone by the time he’d looked up again. The change, he gathered, was meant for him. The screen door banged shut with her departure.
“She’s a little worried. It’s a buyer’s market around here,” came an accented voice not far from Proteus’s elbow. He looked to find dapper old Albert at a table nearby, his white hair perfectly combed, sitting in a bespoke jacket too heavy for the weather. Yet the man was almost ninety. Certainly he could wear what he liked.
“What,” asked Proteus, “for art?”
“Of course not art. Real estate, young man. The market has gone haywire with all these empty properties in default lying around. Granted, half of them were occupied by squatters anyhow, but it leaves the state of their mortgages in a terrible mess. And who holds the title? And if you can find out who, then where are they?”
“Listen, Albert, where did everyone go?”
The old man guffawed.
“I’ll tell you where, boy,” called the Professor from across the room, who stood from his small table as if given his cue, whose face showed all but incandescent, as if by some personal spotlight that followed him, and he walked forward toward the counter, to where Proteus was trapped. “I’ll tell you something, my boy… Perhaps the question is less ‘where’ but ‘why’? ‘Why’ did they go? Do you understand? What purpose have they served? Or maybe whose purpose, yes? Listen, maybe the question is better, is more radically addressed, if you ask ‘when’, as in to ‘when’ did they go, to what location in time? Because time is recursive. It loops in on itself, it consumes itself, creating itself, in and out of phase with itself and is always branching off to further alternatives, these silent, simultaneous, exponential radiations. Time is never still and it is always, I repeat, always hungry. It makes things – yes, listen – time is where the things that are made come from, they come straight out of it, so it is the Great Mother to us all. And that is where they also return to, because time is also the Devouring Mother, she who eats her young. Don’t you see? Consider how it is that the things created by time seek their own expression, their very particularity, and become manifest by means of and according to the dictates of all that is already un-manifest. The first principle of everything – see? – is nothing. Yes. Is silence. There can be no other way. And so the dark becomes the light, and the light, in this other place, this extra-temporality, turns to darkness, void, blackness, the absence of. Those who in this place are hated, reviled, once transported over there reside in dignity, while everything here so damnably probable becomes… becomes impossible, and… and the impossible, at the very least, is now maybe slightly less difficult. There is something, of course. Something? Is it the world in reverse, the world as it moves? Is it a warm place, perhaps fine for a family vacation, because it moves at least a little faster than our own, and thus the friction, extra heat? Imperceptible perhaps as it is, it is still this Ultraworld, where men and women carry on upside-down, their lives, their bodies, inside-out, where nothing has ever begun but that must also be finished.”
“But, Professor…”
“These minds, boy, minds all connected, as if by spirit radio, where Earth and heaven meet in that same impossible shape, where the sky and the mind are the same… the blur of the artifact, combined as it is of so many lives once lived, of yet to be lived, yes… that they would speak… and say… what? And their bodies? Yes, we ask, because we have to – because you have, boy, you have asked – how it is with their bodies? That they should be not present? That they should be inside-out? What then becomes of them? Their winds and humors, long ago physically sucked, sucked into the belly, physically sucked into the earth itself, where it is perhaps the stuff of angels now, I know… but imagine, boy, something that is so utterly alien – or perhaps something only just slightly alien to us – how it might attempt to know our human mind… or just to hold a conversation, to show itself in some least fragment only of what it really is, what we could never understand, because our means of understanding are fundamentally unfixed and incompatible. How complicated then, how unhelpful would it be, to ask if you’ve seen it, or what it is you’ve seen? Would you know its face if you had?”
“Uh, Professor, I…”
“What is it, son?”
“Give the boy some breathing room,” said Albert. “Can’t you see he’s not well?”
“Not well? Oh. My…”
Enter Ignatius himself, screen door held open, framed in sunlight, doorway, himself in shadow, it now conveniently just past the hour of the morning rush. He took a moment to survey the scene, the busy press of bodies at tables, slouched, reclining, or leant forwards, in movement while simultaneously at rest. And here were the two old men, bent with flailing and awkward urgency toward his employee, who seemed maybe a little gray-yellow, maybe a little not-so-steady. He moved on past and toward the back, where the bathroom, sink, and stockroom were, and disappeared.
“…toward an application of the science of the eye.”
“Of whose eye?”
“No. No. You’re not listening. You’re twisting it up.”
“…By 1974, of course, it was a different town. Very much so. Different rules applied. Buildings were all occupied, what of them could be occupied, and not by squatters, not anymore. Things had gone legitimate, the owners stepped in, though God knows where they came from, or what made them the owners. Money, I suppose? Okay, let’s say it was money. They certainly thought we ought to’ve had some too, some for them, expected we should all pay rent…”
There was someone once who nearly dropped his cup of coffee – this is the story. He juggled it between his hands, the cup danced from finger to finger, but not a drop was spilled. The scene replays in degraded form again and again, everywhere, throughout the years. Like a photocopy of a photocopy. The faces change, the shapes of the fingers also. But the coffee is always spilled.
“You told me once about the man in the hood. You said he wore a hood? He came into your room?”
“No, I woke up and he was there. He didn’t ‘come in’. He was just there.”
“And, but… he seemed familiar.”
“Everything about him. He stank of these familiars. But I’m sure I�
��d never seen him before.”
“And he was…?”
“Just there, only there. I was happy that he’d come, so happy to see this burglar. I smiled and I smiled. I reached out to touch his hood. When he left, I was sorry to see him go.”
There was a bang and a crash from inside the stockroom, then an audible “Goddamnit” through the door. After that, only silence.
Outside, in the sunlight, a golden retriever with no owner trotted past the entrance, looked in, moved on. A moment later, it returned from the opposite direction, looked in again and stood there, waiting hopefully. The sunlight bounced brightly off its high-albedo coat.
“I followed outside a moment later to look for him, but he was gone. I would’ve asked him to come back, but there was no sign of him. I wondered to myself where he went to. Because there was no place he could’ve hidden, nowhere he could’ve disappeared. He was just gone.”
“This, after he was just there.”
“Just and only there. He was there and gone.”
Ignatius emerged from the stockroom looking not happy. The front of his shirt was covered in a viscous brown stain that ran down it in a wide streak from shoulder to waist and down the crotch of his jeans. He gently closed the door behind him, as if afraid of breaking it. Beside the door to the stockroom was the door to the bathroom, which he disappeared behind next, shut, and audibly locked.
