Installment Three

15.

Bear with me for the next twenty pages. There’s a reason for doing this.  I promise.  Bear with me.

“Are you sure you can do this?”

“I’m sure.”

“Are you sure you’ve got what it takes to do this right?”

“I’m sure.”

“If we fucking fuck this up it’s totally fucked.”

“I know.”

“I paid a lot of fucking money to be here.”

“I know.”

“They charge by the fucking centimeter, you know.”

“They do?”

“It’s not by the fucking hour.”

“You would think…”

“I know. But it’s movement-calculated. When you fucking think about it. Fucking think about it: if you billed a timestripper by the fucking hour…”

Unca Mundee takes a hard right onto Wayne Avenue and his turbocharged ’68 Mercury Cougar stutter-pops over 19^th century cobblestones behind a big old ramshackle spark-showering trolley in the rain. The phlegm-colored weather. The Cougar will have to get in front of the trolley within the next half block or abort the mission. They will have to get in front of the thing before the subjects get onto it. Mundee puts the pedal to the metal and rattle-bangs over the narrow space between curb and ramshackle municipal transport. An ad on the side of the trolley for a television show called The Jeffersons, 7pm on Sunday nights, a larger-than-life black woman in a wig with pearls waving a finger with bemused admonishment falling behind on the left as they g-force forward. With exquisite automotive mastery Mundee guns it wrenching the wheel over the low curb and half-onto sidewalk as the left-most subject swivels to look over her right shoulder at the rattle and bell of trolley against the roar of turbocharged Cougar so close that the grill-heat warms her ass. And then she is flying. She pinwheels over the fender like a mulatto rag doll, eyes jammed shut and holding her breath with the effort. You can just feel it won’t be a homerun and Shamton sinks inside. Mundee fucked up trying to impress her. Shamton has witnessed events of such eerie grace only in extra-lunar space before, the impossibly slowfast, baboon mechanics on extra-lunar cruise ships, usually. Red banana hardons in cloudy vinyl zoomsuits. The victim in realspeed slides and head-bounce-heaps on the sidewalk in the rearview.

“Fuck!” shouts Dr. Shamton. Mundee keeps the cool and he hits the brakes and he slams hard in reverse as the dreadlocks jerkswish and the trolley overshoots the Cougar in silent movie double-time. Ben Turpin driving.

The fat one is sort of paralyzed in a screamlessly open-mouthed crouch about twenty meters behind the supine body of her friend. Shamton swings her door out as the Mercury shoots back in a zigging screech and Shamton jumps as Mundee slows and she gets the rear right door open jogging. Mundee skid-brakes and hops out and grunts helping toss a pop-eyed Kim on the seat. On top of, incidentally, a yellow-paged paperback edition of Brotherland that’s fifty or sixty years old, right there, under her left shoulder, where she is in no state to feel it. Her hair is a mess. The humidity isn’t helping. Lyndsay has caught up to the car and dives in after her friend as the Cougar burns rubber, her legs thrashing out of the open door, howling,

“What are you doing?”

“We’re taking her to the hospital!”

“Which hospital?”

“The finest that money can buy!”

“Why isn’t she saying something?”

“She’s in shock!”

“Kim!”

“She can’t hear you! Close the door!”

“I can’t reach it!”

“You’re going to fall out of the car!”

“Who are you?”

“I’m from the future!”

“What?!”

“The future!”

Dr. Shamton reaches as far over the front seat as she can and gets a grip on the window of the door that is swinging in and out as they careen through traffic and she pulls the door mostly shut and gets a non-commital click or a cluck, more like. Mundee hits a hard right up a steep sidestreet and Shamton hands a fat envelope to the seriously freaked out Lyndsay, who assumes she’s dealing with drug addicts. Shamton says,

“I’m Dr. Jonatha Shamton and this is Kim’s neighbor, Unca Mundee, I’m sure you’ve heard Kim speak about him.”

“I am seriously freaking out! There’s foam on her lips!”

“Read what’s in the envelope, it’ll explain everything.”

There came another hard right with a screeching of tires and Lyndsay realizes they are headed for the East River drive, a major road that connects to the interstate. Weeping, and with trembling hands, she removes a folded smudged twenty-page Remington typescript from the sealed fat envelope and reads:

“What are you doing?”

“We’re taking her to the hospital!”

“Which hospital?”

“The finest that money can buy!”

“Why isn’t she saying something?”

“She’s in shock!”

“Kim!”

“She can’t hear you! Close the door!”

“I can’t reach it!”

“You’re going to fall out of the car!”

“Who are you?”

“I’m from the future!”

“What?!”

“The future!”

Dr. Shamton reached as far over the front seat as she could and got a grip on the window of the door that was swinging in and out as they careened through traffic and she pulled the door mostly shut and got a non-commital click or a cluck, more like.  Mundee hit a hard right up a steep sidestreet and Shamton handed an envelope to the seriously freaked out Lyndsay, who assumed she was dealing with drug addicts. O’Shamton said,

“I’m Dr. Shamton and this is Kim’s neighbor, Unca Mundee, I’m sure you’ve heard Kim speak about him.”

“I am seriously freaking out! There’s foam on her lips!”

“Read what’s in the envelope and it’ll explain everything!”

There came another hard right with a screeching of tires and Lyndsay realized they were headed for the East River drive, a major road that connected to the interstate. Weeping, and with trembling hands, she removed a folded smudged twenty-page Remington typescript from the sealed envelope and read:

“What are you doing…”

Kim is conscious and semi-lucid but pretty obviously fucked up. She is mumbling about mama. Her head is lolling and brickheavy in Lyndsay’s lap and Mundee and Shamton are speaking quietly between themselves up front, inaudible under an 8-track’s performance of dolorously soothing jazz, breaking the speed limit. Lyndsay isn’t sure how to behave, having never met a time-traveler before, but she has no problem admitting to herself how intimidated she is. Intimidated and reassured, for, surely, a woman from the future would know how things will turn out and she doesn’t seem too worried about Kim. She is the most beautiful woman Lyndsay has ever seen. She looks like a very expensive chess set’s Queen, onyx black.

They are speeding into the Pennsylvanian countryside which is quilted vegetal army-greens and bruise-purples under the caul of the thickish runny sky and just driving this far they have time-travelled, so to speak, from 1977 to the 1950s and further back, at a glance, to the 18^th century, even, seeing sheep and horse-powered buggies and huge Amish barns flamboyant with hex-signs. Even the banality of local effects mimics time-travel, with objects near to the Cougar (posts supporting a rail in a bridge the Cougar crosses) in a blur while things in the distance (in this case a mountain range) remain majestically detailed and fixed, the mountains a great analog for both the past and the future.

Dr. Shamton has already explained to Lyndsay that timespace in all the timestreams is infinite-yet-bound (the total possible past of a system decreases as the total possible future increases; time is a finitely oval spotlight moving along an infinite-and-unrelated and warping black background) and about family clusters in multiverses (the ones that this particular Dr. Shamton and that particular Lyndsay belong to are two out of a family of seven) and how the conservation of energy rule means you can’t timestrip within your own timestream but you can within any stream that belongs to your family probability cluster and that probability in this Lyndsay’s timestream is so-called weak-walled, meaning that slightly weirder stuff happens here, making it a popular destination for timetourists. The saucers are encased in measured flows of what’s called Quasi-Particulate Matter, or Menergy, which is why the saucers appear to glow. The universe doesn’t like the stuff and kicks the stuff, or any thing encased in the stuff, either forward or backward in the timestream in an attempt to be rid of it. Whether the timestrip is forward or backward is determined by certain factors in the flow of Menergy.

Shamton has also explained to Lyndsay about the Moral Autonomy Movement that will sweep North America roughly seventy years hence and the catchy acronym FIYOBIO (Farting In Your Own Bathroom Is Okay) that will embody it. She hasn’t mentioned the totalitarian Brotherland Movement that will then come about in the form of a backlash against FIYOBIO; she hasn’t mentioned how Lyndsay’s at-that-point unpublished manuscript will become, one hundred and twenty years hence, the veritable bible of a political movement that will bring about the greatest (and most damaging) social changes in human history (within this particular weak-walled timestream). But she toys with the notion of showing Lyndsay the medallion around her neck; the tri-bulge symbol (minimalized head as the apex of the curvy triangle with its bases formed by huge, head-sized boobs) that is loosely based on Lyndsay’s girlhood doodles of the so-called Mammophallus, a symbol, in one hundred twenty years to come, more fraught with signifiers than its brother the swastika had ever been.

After quietly consulting with Mundee for a spell she is now explaining how flying saucers are timeships from human history and that the only other intelligent life in this entire universe (within the family cluster of related universes), even in this weak-walled probability system, is less technically developed than earthborn humanity and far too far away to travel. In two hundred years they will be discovered by evidence of radio waves (television transmissions). All of the detected and decoded television shows from this far away planet will be commercials-free hermaphroditic pornography featuring hairless pinkish-brown breast-free creatures with huge male-female belly-level genital arrays for whom ideal penis-vagina correspondence is gender-inflected by the fact that in half the population the penis is situated at the top of the array and on the other half the penis is on the bottom. The copiously milk-secreting vaginas do double-duty as breasts.

Lyndsay experiences the sensation of floating. Dreams are being made to come true. It’s tragic, Kim’s accident, and Lyndsay hopes her friend and lover is going to be okay, in the end, but what is the suffering or even death of one human compared to revelations of this historical depth and potency? It’s as though a creature who has been bred and raised in a shoebox sees the lid lifted to have affirmed the improbable theory that the shoebox is in a closet, the closet attached to a bedroom, the bedroom in a mansion, the mansion on a vast estate, the estate on a mountain in a city on the seacoast of a tempestuous hemisphere.

The Brotherland Movement will lead to a violence-free society by gradually eradicating men. There will be eighty years of peace, sensual love and creative self-expression before the country is invaded and subjugated by a ruthlessly violent all-male insurgency from one hundred and fifty years in the country’s own Past. It will be the easiest and most brutal military success in the history of Man.

But forget all that. Forget it. What are the human dimensions of the local story? Kim is dying, while her best friend Lyndsay is falling in love.

16.

(Pay particular attention to this passage…)

As ever, coming up out of a session, Kynna takes time, some time alone in her cabin becoming herself, becoming a self, the self, again. She bundles still wet in the oversized robe and her toes dig warm brown moss and her right hand braces in the warm brown moss of the curving cabin wall. The moss routes moisture back to the system. Tears, sweat, spit, piss, blood, soup, mist, puke, tea, wine, vaginal fluid, diarrhea, psyche-absorbent suspension bath, cocaine soda, banana smoothie whatever. Back home she was used to doing it in a leafpile behind the pit but up here you just drop your pants wherever and hug the wall and cut loose which explains why the whole fucking ship or at least the part she has been through savours faintly of piss. She crosses the cabin. Cheek on the gel of the porthole she keeps an eye on the dark broad African-matron face of the earth in the senseless monotony of her inertia. The muted boongs and per-thunkas of space junk and micrometeorites on the rubbacrete hull: they soothe Kynna. Like intermittent melons down a rubberized staircase in a distant ballroom.

The hull is thick as a road is wide at its thinnest and wide as the black forest at its thickest and most of the systems are buried in it, out of sight and mind. The firmy foam hull is a graveyard littered with crispy skeletons. There are the usual legends of tiny folk alive in the hull in a network of tunnels. There is a section. Off limits. Kilometers of the frozen dead, some more than four hundred years old… that’s true. But as for reports of faint and ancient melodies and/or woodland cooking odors seeping through the bulkhead in spots and suchlike quasi-mystical bullshit…

Kynna has her own quasi-mystical bullshit to worry about. Quasi-mystical bullshit of a terribly personal nature. She’s shaking because the roughest sessions leave after-tastes. Kynna can still see the pale-skinned people. Smell them. See the weird city laid out in a prehistoric hallucination of comical detail over layers of pseudo-memories of other cities, cultures, catch-phrases. Historical eras she could have no knowledge of, logically. Impossible details like clothes and music. The sessions can have a sensory after-taste. What Dokta Shamton calls gestalt echo.

First Kynna is famous for one thing and then she’s famous for another and the question is, are they related, the two things? If Dokta Shamton can establish a link then Dokta Shamton will be famous, too. Two Universal Celebrities of the New New Age, then. Fame in a Universe containing 937,568 humans, total, is always, wherever you are, strictly local. Wait: one of the humans just died…. 937, 567, then. Of natural causes. Kynna had nothing to do with it, as the joke would go.

Kynna has a violent coughing fit and spits up more psychebath and wipes it from her chin and sees it blood-pinked on her fingers. She leans against the wall and the wall sucks her fingers off as she curses Dokta Shamton.

“Don’t grip the sides of the tub.”

“I know.”

“You say you know but you…”

“I know. It’s just…”

“It feels like you’re drowning. We’ve been over this already. It feels like you’re drowning, even though…”

“Yes.”

“Even though you know you won’t drown. How many times…?”

“I know. Thousands. I should…”

“You should be used to it by now. Do not grip the sides of the tub. Keep your hands at your sides. Close your eyes. Fill your lungs with the fluid s the level rises. It should be a calming…”

“It tastes like blood.”

“The flavor is neutral. You and I both know the flavor is neutral. It should be a calming…”

“I know. It should be. Sometimes it is. Most of the time it is. But…”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“Relax, Kynna. Close your eyes. Breathe it in like air…”

17.

The Government is a midsized-town-sized teardrop, rubbery brown. Bulbous-bottom-first in the elongated groove between heaven and earth. The attenuating tail executes its perpetual inertial wiggle.

18.

Dokta Prabhalawrjidaraj and Dokta Shamton are having lunch. The music playing in the background would be unrecognizable to you as such.

“Could the enigma you experience with Patient One… be some sort of deeply rooted, psychotic sort of …  reaction…?”

Shamton gestures grandly with a hunk of bread. “To all this, you mean?”

“Well, the girl was born and raised in a village. They barely know what the moon is, down there. They think the indoor lighting is magic. The poor thing gets whisked up here…”

“What else could they do with her? She’s dangerous.”

“Or was, at any rate.”

“Oh, still is. Make no mistake. In a much larger sense. Make no mistake. When…”

“There is progress, at least?”

“What is ‘progress’?”

“What is ‘potato soup’? Yet, here we are…”

“I wasn’t being pseudo-philosophical, Sindra.” Dokta Shamton smiles and soaks another hunk of blackweet bread in her bowl.  “I was being technically cautious. Every session we extract more material. Impossible volumes of it, in impossible detail, very few drop-outs, very little taint or distortion, like a direct…I don’t know. The quality is almost suspiciously high. But if you mean, by progress, are we. If we have a theory. If…”

“Not even rough?”

“Not even intuitions. But it would be extraordinary if the two things… if it’s not…”

“Related. Her almost hallucinatory bath results and the…”

“Obviously. The first human murder, in a legal sense, in three and a half centuries of perfectly-recorded history. And a probe of the killer’s mind turns up these…”

“Movies.”

“Yes, they’re just like movies. Just like movies of the middle and distant past. That only a scholar…”

“Yet they barely make sense. You told me yourself, before, that the material you’re extracting now, it barely makes logical sense.”

Dokta Shamton laughs and Dokta Prabhalawrjidaraj looks perplexed and then looks irritated about being perplexed, drumming her fingers on the table.

“Maybe it’s Art,” says Shamton, finally.

Dokta Prabhalawrjidaraj laughs.

Shamton hasn’t done a moment of thought in years on what was, prior to all this, her life’s work, which being the gradual shift, a few centuries years back, from competitive to collaborative sports. Shamton is the finest Archeopsychologist of her era. Patient Number One isn’t ancient and she’s far from being dead. So why is Shamton even assigned to Patient One? Why must Shamton divert attention from the very good work she was doing in order to take on a case she isn’t, technically, qualified to handle? She often wonders.

Shamton wonders but Prabhalawrjidaraj knows.

Keeping it to herself.

“Would you be open to fucking a little later in the day?”

“You’re just trying to get my mind off my problems.”

“True. Still.”

Tribunal authorities promulgate the Freed Love doctrine on Government but people, stubbornly, keep pairing off. Prabhalawrjidaraj thinks it’s like any job you’re better at with experience and that every individual pussy is a very different job.

Crossing the vast unfluctuating twilight of the plaza of the Hall of Poets hand in hand with Sindra, Shamton thinks Which poets? Why poets? and the thought brings her a shame that inspires new resolve to be a right-thinking citizen so she frees her hand and adjusts her posture and feels a little better.

19.

“Who is Kith?”

“My lover.”

“What is Kith?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you do with Kith that you can’t do with humans?”

“Suck on a pipe that comes out of Kith’s belly.”

“Describe the pipe.”

“I can’t.”

“Try.”

“It sounds silly.”

“Say again.”

“I said, it’ll sound silly.”

“Try anyway.”

“It’s this long. About this big around. Round at the end with a little hole in it.”

“A hole like the hole in your pussy’s crown?”

“No.Yes. I don’t know.”

“You suck on this pipe.”

“Yes.”