Cosmogony

by Lucy Ives

  Maybe I had the wherewithal to reply in words. I dearly hope I did. At any rate, somehow it came to pass that a week later we were having coffee.

  And isn’t it clear by now? He was the exact opposite and equal of FMP/27. Oh, the symmetry! Oh dear god! Oh how fearful! How precise! He was an actual angel, and his name was Eric.

  Eric was subtle at first. To be fair, we did establish during our second encounter that I was an acquaintance, if not quite ally, of FMP. Eric built that fact out like a custom cabana, a dell we could retire to should we run out of things to say. And it was true that in the beginning Eric did not push me. This was likely much of the secret to his success, that he did a host of other things but he did not push. I do sometimes wonder: Which parts of what occurred were due to Eric’s immutable role within the cosmos, and which had to do with something similar to free will, perhaps the portion of it belonging to me, a minor anthropomorphic pleat in the fabric of eternity? Was any of it, I keep asking myself, “for” me, a human girl?

  I, for my part, was twenty-nine and, like everyone else these days, a product of the Enlightenment. I believed that dating (along with everything else) occurred in a wide, wide, secular zone. Sure, there might be devils and angels and true believers, but what did that really matter, now that we had the news? Everything was basically all about information: who possessed it, who didn’t. So, there might be some level at which Eric could bring about my salvation, but that was just one piece of the puzzle, and I was actually more interested in whether he might be privy to anything proprietary regarding me or relevant others: sensitive thoughts, secrets, insecurities, lusts.

  The idea of the network, as described in Gottfried Leibniz’s 1714 tract, La Monadologie, pretty much the number-one guide to dating ever in the history of the West, furnishes a useful description:

  To the extent that I comprehend it, in Leibniz’s conception the world is made up of various shiny, translucent cells (“monads”), and each of these cells can perceive other cells, its own unique identity being constituted by its various perceptions of these infinitely various others. If any one monad depends on something external to itself, then it depends on others—an infinite number of them, and not just an other, since it is only by virtue of the many, the perceptions they provide, that there is such a thing as a one.

  If you’re with me so far, let’s make an inference. I think it might be interesting to ask what the responsibility of one monad is to another. I think we can safely say they owe each other everything and also nothing. For what can be the meaning of a pair, a couple, in a structural environment such as this—I mean, for just two monads, given the propensity to reflect and just, like, go on reflecting? What are they to each other?

  You can imagine that, if it works for monads that they get their identity by having a unique perspective on all other monads, then if you take two of them and sequester them somewhere (say, Eric’s so-so apartment) so that they only have each other to work with, the effects are crazy. Each of these two monads, now isolated as a couple, can only take its respective identity from reflecting the other. If we slow the process down so that we can look at it step by step, in time, we see something like, monad A reflects monad B, and vice versa (they each become the other, A→BR, B→AR). In step 2, they then each reflect themselves as the other, so if monad A has already become BR and B has become AR, then in the second glance they are BR→ARR and AR→BRR. This can go on for a very long time.

  While I’m not saying that this is really what happens in romantic relationships, it might be what people have a tendency to think is going on. This is also how they decide who is the bad person in the relationship, and who is the good. Of course, given the monadical model, they’re basically the same person, if not entirely composed of each other. However, few couples recognize this simple point. There’s always one person who wants to feel worse about themself, and this, my secular Enlightenment-inheriting friends, makes all the difference.

  But Eric and I didn’t talk about ethics or psychology or the structure of the cosmos. He was an angel and thus already good.

  I was, as noted, but a human girl.

  Eric rented a junior one-bedroom. And indeed it was so-so, but it overlooked a park where some of the few birds that continue to inhabit New York City sang. I remember the first time that I learned that the etymology of “angel” brings us to a Greek word for messenger, go-between. It makes sense. “Demon” is more insoluble. It was inherited wholesale and just means demon, although without some of the negative connotation. I often wondered if Eric had looked these histories up, too, or if he knew what these terms meant innately, without research.

  Eric had a job. By this I mean he went to work every day at a small IT company with an office overlooking the Holland Tunnel. I think this was part of the reason people were so much bigger on the sort of relationship my friend and FMP had. FMP was completely consumed by his role as a tempter of souls and artisan of fate. He was vaguely famous and didn’t require a day job. I’m not trying to say that, as an angel, Eric was some kind of idealist—it’s just not entirely clear what he and his team were trying to do.

  Eric bought all his clothes from AmazonBasics. He was often online. Far from being tactless, it turned out that he did not speak very much at all. He went down to the park. He waited.

  I pondered Eric’s muscular, winged form. It was often walking away from me. He was a sort of intergalactic male model, I thought: quiet, strong, chrononautic.

  To return for a moment to the shape of the world: in an early essay, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” the twentieth-century critic and mystic Walter Benjamin worries about human speech. He tells us, on the one hand, that “Every expression of human mental life can be understood as a kind of language,” and, on the other, sighs, “Speechlessness: that is the great sorrow of nature. . . .” In Benjamin’s account, nature mourns the inadequacy of human speech, its petty enumerative names. Speechless herself, nature receives and believes the story of the creative word of Genesis, turning a melancholy face toward mankind, who can only supply a “hundred languages . . . in which [the] name has already withered, yet which, according to God’s pronouncement, have knowledge of things.” Setting aside some aspects of this description that could trouble those of us who accept the tidings of science, I found myself thinking a lot about this notion, in those days of Eric, who was so graceful and perfect and taciturn. In other words, I found myself thinking about how everything regarding human systems for organizing the world is basically fallen and repetitious. This was weird for a number of reasons but primarily it was weird because, you know, the Enlightenment! We’re not supposed to have these sorts of thoughts anymore.

  Also we’re all supposed to be OK with the notion that we can’t fully know one another. I think about it like this: Leibniz says that the irony of being human is that you’re just like everyone else. You have all the same stuff everyone else has, just in a different order. The reason it is in a different order is that you have some sort of discrete origin, you were born in a time and place, and that, in combination with your embedding among various discrete others/quanta, is what makes you you. This difference is completely arbitrary and the system is designed in this completely infuriating way that makes it impossible to know about it—which is to say, your difference—as a kind of content. Which is why medieval Europeans all look like dolls in their paintings. There wasn’t anything unknowable about them. They were the puppets of god, and they didn’t have psychology or newspapers.

  However, one of the few interesting things about being a woman is maybe the Enlightenment didn’t happen for you. Like, you know how to speak and read and participate in democracy, but maybe you aren’t really any better off. There are analogies between being female and being left-handed, I think, or being an animal. While I was with Eric, I thought a lot about the limits of psychology—or, as I privately referred to it now, “monad chatter.” Monad chatter is going on in the world and meanwhile the world sits glum
ly by. We monads cannot get over the fact that we can’t fully know one another. We’ll surveil each other until the cows come home and pretend it’s for marketing or science or spy craft. But really all this data is just a burnt offering to a god who withdrew long ago, leaving us the mute earth and also the vestiges of good and evil. And I guess we’re free to care about, or even date, these vestiges, if we so choose.

  As time went on, things were more and more placid and even quieter, but on occasion I caught Eric looking at me in a certain way. It was hard to say what sort of way this was because, having managed to fall deeply in love with him, I was more than a little confused.

  “He’s not the marrying kind,” my friend said. “He dresses like an undercover cop.”

  I assumed she was jealous or in some other way annoyed by my righteous mode of affiliating myself with the deific. Also, I had begun to consider her immoral. Why was she consorting with a demon when we all knew demons were the one thing rendering this perfect universe impure?

  My friend, meanwhile, was looking up at me with a mixture of recognition and pity. “So I guess you’re going to play this one out to the bitter end?”

  “I guess so!” I yelped, pitying her right back.

  When I got home from the latest New American Restaurant that evening, home now being Eric’s so-so apartment where I kept a small pile of belongings neatly stowed in discarded Prime packaging, Eric was hunched at his desk. He was filling out some sort of online form that he minimized as soon as I walked in.

  “Hey you!” he said.

  “Hi there.” I hopped over and stroked one of his translucent feathers. I felt the usual electric charge and began drooling. I wondered if he felt like going to bed.

  “In a minute. I was just thinking. Remember that day, when we first met?”

  I said something about how could I forget but he ignored me. I think, anyway, that it was a rhetorical question.

  “You were in the market that day. Do you remember?”

  This was not a rhetorical question. I nodded.

  “You spoke to someone there. That person is important to me.” Eric paused. “For my work. I mean, my real work. Do you remember?”

  I nodded again.

  “And who was that?”

  “FMP.”

  “Yes and no,” said the angel, his eyes vibrating softly. “What was his real name?”

  Of course, all is fair in love and war but you don’t know how fair it really is until you become intimate with a being who looks pretty much exactly like a human but is not a human at all. At this point, I would not have denied Eric anything. I couldn’t have. He represented my salvation. He explained things. I don’t mean, by the way, that he explained things to me, with his voice and words and so forth. I mean, he, his presence, explained everything that had happened. He explained why I had had to go through what I’d gone through, all the years of isolation, my strange inability to find individuals to whom I could relate. My bizarre talkativeness. This had all happened because he was here. And now he just was.

  I said, “Oh, you mean his real name,” as if I knew exactly what was going down, as if I had known all along and was even waiting for this moment. “I’m surprised you never asked! It’s 27, of course.” I was terrified but manifested confidence. I put my hands on my hips. I stared bravely into the abyss that was opening up around me.

  Eric raised an eyebrow. “Thanks,” he muttered, stepping out an open window. He was evidently going to work.

  I never saw Eric again. And I never saw my friend again, either. FMP, I heard, was reduced to a coal briquette. All in all, given these atypical goings-on, it’s been a strange spring. I’ve realized how little I know of the ways of the world, how much there is that has come before. Yet I feel that I have made a lot of progress, that I’m slowly comprehending more. I marvel, and I try to be tough. I try to grow. I still have Eric’s so-so apartment, by the way, and sometimes I go for walks in the park. There really is something lovely, something touching about survival.

  On that last point, a few final remarks. Even more recently, over the past few days, maybe the last week and a half, I’ve been experiencing these headaches. They’re brief, but when they strike they’re like nothing you’ve ever known, believe you me. They feel like something stiff and sharp is trying to bore its way out of your skull.

  It’s made me start thinking more carefully about demons. You do see them now and then, doubled over in some discreet location, given the month. I think, too, as it can’t be avoided, about Eric, an angel, whom I’ve come to regard less as a self-idealizing sociopath than a sort of amphibian, although he definitely put one over on me.

  I’ve been told by numerous acquaintances that I’m looking pretty good. Their softballs re: breakup weight loss sail over my head. Sometimes it’s because I’m dealing with a migraine, but at other times it’s because I’m lost in thought.

  Immortals, I’m thinking, they’re just like us.

  Recognition of This World Is Not the Invention of It

  The first time I understood the way things work, I was in control. My control was going to be short-lived, which was part of the way things work and how I started to know it. I stumbled guilelessly into this understanding, and I’ve never forgotten it, in no small measure because of what happened next.

  What happened next I will explain in a moment. It was night. I was seated in a circle with ten or so other people. We were outdoors. At the center of our circle was a campfire, and at the center of this campfire was the invisible point in space and time at which our respective gazes met. At this point, bobbing and weaving among white-pink flames and sometimes passing out of view, something was taking place, was being exchanged. Let us call this process of exchange D. We can then represent D through the following equation, given what we know of the other variables involved:

  D = p(g)

  . . . where the small p is the number of persons implicated, with g standing for the gaze sum average, the calculation of which, along with related contingencies, we have already discussed in the precedent chapter. As was also intimated there, D is, in any given instance, affected by ancestry as well as the styles of ignorance, repression, passion, and fear tolerated by a given subject at a given moment in the subject’s mortal trajectory. Therefore, in order to render D in non-ideal circumstances, i.e., outside the lab, we need to subtract the blind-spot quantum, b, from the equation, so that:

  D – b = p(g), and, therefore, g = (D – b)/p

  This was what I wanted to know. g. g! Everything was g. I wanted to know how my looking contributed to my own agency, which was the meaning of this sacred variable, g. I wanted to know if what I saw was more or less than the average, if my g was a normal one, because, to be perfectly frank with you, I seemed to be seeing quite a lot in those days, possibly too much.

  For example, on this particular night at this particular gathering (office workers pried loose from their urban setting and reassembled in bucolic surrounds), I was playing a game. Or, rather, we were playing a game, a sort of trust-building exercise which had the surprising, given the stated intent, name of Murder.

  Murder is, as I found out that night, fairly well known. Just because I hadn’t played it before and did not understand the rules did not mean that others were by any means unfamiliar. There were, in fact, several versions or strains or modes of Murder: San Francisco Style, Toronto Rules, and, finally, Bloody Boots, the last of which is a faster-paced technique of play. Everyone tried to be patient as various experts among us weighed in. Everyone poured more whiskey or Fernet into their cups of melted ice cream and cake fragments and smoked; everyone, that is, save Keith, who was nursing a flavored Pellegrino.

  Keith was sort of my boss, but more on this later. Keith wore long shorts and crossed his excellent legs. He sat shyly in the darkness. Or perhaps he sat immorally. I was very drunk and very high and could not tell.

  I was, however, not so drunk nor so high that I could not muster up the desire to win. I wasn’t sure w
hat it was to win at Murder, but I was determined to be the person who did win. I wanted to dominate, to play Murder as it had never before been played.

  To this end, I began creating in myself a space of resolve. I used to have an equation that represented the dynamics of what went on in this space, but by this point in time I’d pretty much abandoned all attempts to quantify it. The reason that I had abandoned this descriptive project was that my representations of what was taking place inside me in no way corresponded to what was happening outside, in the world. Just when I thought I’d figured out how to square a given circle, it would turn out that the terms of engagement were being rewritten, I’d missed some key detail, I was ineffective, overambitious, and wrong. I still had the ability to create my space of resolve and I still did stuff with it, it just wasn’t all that clear why. But I was sauced, as I said, and high, and so I began freely scheming.

  The way that our game of Murder was shaping up was, insofar as I understand things, pretty much the norm. One person, Gary, a junior designer and a member of the Murder cognoscenti among us, was acting as Narrator. And, oh yes, the murderer had already been selected through a secret, random process that I do not recall. (Were slips of paper handed out?)

  “It is night,” intoned the narrator, which was doubly true. He meant that we should close our eyes.

  And this was where it began for me, my understanding of the way things work, because although I comprehended the rules of the game, and although I was the sort of person who liked to respect rules, I could not help perceiving, perhaps via the aid of darkness and my altered mind, that the rules were only there to provide a pretext. The rules were there to soothe the troubled and take in the gullible. Any realist up to snuff was bound to comprehend that winning existed on a different plane. If you were interested in winning, then, while you needed to make a lot of outward signs indicating rule-respect, internally you needed to admit to yourself that rules, as they say, were created to be broken, and you needed to go about carefully selecting which rules did not pertain to you.