HERE IN THE Unseen, to where I have newly escaped my tormentor by using a trick I learned from Ferris Bueller Skips School, I am the Jewish giant of Ingo’s imagining via Georges Méliès’s Gulliver’s Travels—Gulliver as the Wandering Jew, as it were, in alien lands, at home nowhere. Nowhere, Oklahoma? Who can say? Here, I wear a long, fake beard. It is my disguise, my way of hiding from my creator who has marked me as Cain was once marked by his. It is also as Ingo has envisioned me. There is no value in denying my apparent Jewishness here. I am an outcast, and no one speaks to me in this silent world. Perhaps I am too far away at fifty feet high for them to bother to try, but I think, as well, they are scared of me. After all, here, I am a giant of enormous size. But, of course, the truth is that this is a silent world and no one “speaks” to anyone. So I wander the streets of the Unseen, trying to stay unseen by the Unseen, serving my purpose as legend, as myth, a scary creature that keeps the residents of the Seen from trespassing here, not that they often try, although slumming has become somewhat fashionable of late. From up here, I can see both east and west in the dimness. I can see past the tenements and factories of the Unseen to the land of the Seen. I can watch the comedy there, but it’s distant. The gags, small and washed out by atmospheric haze, lose their potency. In the third direction, past the line of demarcation that is a dense, dark stand of pine, I can see the Unseen Unseen. Those in the Unseen, not of my stature, cannot see this place, although there are rumors among them of its existence. Those in the Seen will never know about it. There lives Ingo, or the puppet version of Ingo he long ago created and animated off camera, along with Lucy Chalmers, or the puppet version of Lucy Chalmers, who walked off a Hollywood set so many years ago, never to be seen again. I can, of course, see the towering Oleara Debord as well. She is visible from everywhere, to everyone in the Seen, Unseen, and Unseen Unseen.
I climb her, looking for a place to rest, a place solid and majestic, a perch from which, perhaps, to glimpse my creator, or at least the creator of this world in which I now find myself. At her highest peak, I find a hermit meditating, a sage in this dim world. He is an ancient African American gentleman, no doubt struggling to understand life.
“What is life?” I ask him.
There is a long silence as he seems to formulate a response.
“Life is a bowl of cherries, my son,” he says, finally.
“That’s it?” I say. “After all this struggle, all this ceaseless humiliation, you tell me life is a bowl of cherries?”
Again he is silent for a long while, then says:
“You mean life isn’t a bowl of cherries?”
I am inconsolable. This is a joke, yet another joke at my expense, even here, even though I have escaped the world of the Seen in which I seemed to exist only as the butt of them. Perhaps there is no escape for me. I stare out into the distance. From up here, I can see a party in the Unseen Unseen. Maybe Ingo will speak to me. Maybe he will give me some answers. Maybe he will allow me into his inner circle, that gated community within the Unseen.
I begin my descent. Oleara is as beautiful here as she is in the Seen world. I guess mountains don’t care if they are seen or unseen. They just are. I could learn something from mountains. We all could.
As I make my way toward the Unseen Unseen, I find myself further agitated by this blanket of silence. The silent era is truly terrifying when one is in it. Existing inside it is not the same as watching it on a screen. To not be able to hear oneself breathe, to not be able to hear oneself think. For there is no voiceover in this world. Thinking is different. It comes in text and pictures. It is a conversation with oneself laid out on a page. It is a nightmare. And there is something else in silence: The people’s mouths move. They are clearly talking to one another, not reading lips. What is it? What is this nonauditory hearing in a silent world? Is it invisible waves? Or what? I do not know, but in it, I know when someone behind me is talking and I know what they’re saying. That I cannot explain how I know makes it feel somehow sinister, as if the ideas of others are being transmitted into my head by some mysterious method involving Lovecraftian ritualized mouth movements. I cannot thwart or resist. The profound quiet makes me feel as if I exist in a void, like the world around me is unreal, like the truth is hiding from me. It makes me feel numb.
All of this is not helped by my size. Now a friendless giant Jew, it is almost impossible to hide from the people who are afraid of me, who despise me, who want me destroyed. It is pointless insisting you are not a Jew when you are fifty feet tall. It is an issue of secondary, or perhaps even tertiary, concern to others.
Still I move east toward the Unseen Unseen, for hope springs eternal. Along my journey, I consider what I will say to Ingo, who, in this world, seems to be my creator, which means I guess here I am a puppet. I have destroyed his film, his life’s work, and I have still not been able to make full amends, to re-create it, even in my memory. So, while here, I must continue to search my memory for it. I must know it fully before throwing myself at Ingo’s mercy. Alas, there is no Barassini in this place to assist me. Might there be an Unseen hypnotist here? Perhaps an African American? The Amazing Unseen-o? I search the Yellow Pages but find nothing at all listed between hypnale snake dealers and hypodermic syringes. A thought: Perhaps if I could extract the hypnale venom and inject it into myself with a hypodermic syringe, both readily available here, maybe that would bring some sort of altered state of consciousness—like a hypnotic or soporific drug might—and in this state, I might discover full access to the still-missing parts of Ingo’s film. After some further thought, I jettison this idea as impractical. I’m not sure I could find a big-enough-gauge needle for my giant skin.
There is everything here but nothing. Food I cannot taste, sound I cannot hear, wind I cannot feel. There is no color. There are apparently no hypnotists. If I prick myself here, do I not bleed? Yes, but it is not wet and I do not feel pain. The blood is black. I struggle to comprehend which is illusory, the painful world I’ve left behind or this one. But in the end, it does not matter, for I am in hiding here, eating tasteless trees as one would eat broccoli, squinting to see the distant entertainment that is the Seen world just to pass the frames, laughing without sound, joylessly, at the antics therein. From up here I can see that world spread out like a painting, the characters stretching through time, worms, waves, reaching into the haze of memory and into the panic that is prediction. The early days of Brainio barely visible in the far distance, if the day is not too cloudy.
On the road, I meet a woman, not my size, but a bit taller than average for here, I suppose, and fall in love. She is just up to that worrisome, changing mole on my left calf.
She leaves me within whatever the equivalent of a day is here, but not before telling me to get a dermatologist to look at it.
The woman I love here has left me for one of her own kind. I am too big for her, I realize, and she tells me this. It could never work. In addition, she says, the racial divide is too big to cross. I can still always see her, from this height. I can even swoop in like a crane shot and watch her in her new relationship, having sex, silently laughing, not thinking about me at all. But I don’t do that very often. That would make me creepy.
Instead, I continue walking toward the stand of trees behind which Ingo lives. Ahead of me, an African American man draws a chalk line on the path. A chicken stares blankly at the line. I know what this gentleman is up to, of course. He is putting the chicken in a trance. My father did this type of work. As did filmmaker Werner Herzog to the hundreds of chickens in all of his films and also to his all-too-human cast in the much-maligned and brilliant and terrible Heart of Glass. I call silently down to the man by mouthing, “You there.” He looks up.
“Yes?” he mouths.
“Can you hypnotize me as you have that chicken fellow?”
“I suppose. I’ll need a bigger piece of chalk.”
It’s fortunate that I am currently wearing the slacks I was wearing when I was fired from Howie Sherman Zookeeper School. I bend down and hand him a piece of white chalk that is wider than his body.
“Now that’s a piece of chalk,” he marvels silently.
“I would like you to hypnotize me to remember a long-forgotten movie.”
“I mostly do staring-at-a-line stuff,” he mouths. “And weight loss.”
“Please. It’s important.”
“I’ll try,” he shrugs.
So he drags his giant chalk across the ground, and I watch. It turns out to be effective, for I am falling deeper and deeper into some sort of magnificent trance.
“Now,” he mouths, “remember that movie you want to remember.”
And I do, at least some of it.
The meteorologist paces in his cave. He can find no joy. He can find no peace. The future holds no promise for him, and yet he must wait it out. I “hear” his voice (mouth?) over:
“I can find no solace in my exploration of the future. It is nothing but an unalterable slog toward my death and the deaths of everyone else. This machine I invented will be, in no uncertain terms, the death of me. Yet I am addicted to it. I switch it on in the morning and spend all day staring at its screen, searching for this and for that, looking at things to come. Perhaps it will be a happier pastime for me if I use it to look the other way, into the past, that which is gone, that which can no longer do me harm. Perhaps I’ll indulge in a bit of harmless nostalgia; I might calm my soul the way the baby boomers will do with Happy Days. And I am not referring to the Beckett play, which is nobody’s idea of soul calming, what with the being buried and the ant formication and Potsy.”
So the meteorologist flips a switch causing the images onscreen to play in reverse, as his computer, frame by frame, predicts the past.
A New York City street scene. In it, pedestrians walk backward, the streets filled with backward-moving cars. The meteorologist is about to direct his search to some scene from his own childhood, to find a pleasurable memory or two, to find some solace, when he notices something odd. There are “entities” moving forward through this environment. Vague, amorphous blobs, almost like eye floaters, appear to be finding the external auditory meatuses, or ear holes, of these backward pedestrians and entering them, emerging moments later (or rather, earlier!) in what seems to be greater abundance, presumably having multiplied inside these people’s heads. These images are terrifying, Lovecraftian, to coin a term, and the meteorologist, with a fair amount of trepidation, zooms in for a closer look. Magnified greatly, the blobs are vaguely bullet-shaped. I presume this is an evolutionary (devolutionary?) development to allow for easier meatus insertion. They are transparent, these nightmarish droplets, and there does seem to be something akin to “food” moving through their seemingly primitive, transparent digestive systems.
“Time’s up for today,” mouths the tiny hypnotist.
I snap out of it.
“You were able to record it?” I ask.
He turns on his reel-to-reel recorder and we both “listen” to the silence as it plays back my narration word by word. I nod.
He puts his chicken in its carrying case and turns to leave.
“Same time tomorrow?” I mouth after him.
“Sure,” he mouths, without looking back.
Now I’m alone again, in the woods, with my giant piece of chalk (not giant to me) and feeling homesick. Things are different here, foreign, quiet. I barely recognize myself. I barely recognize my life. It is me, of course. Of that there is little doubt. But who am I? What seems to be missing is that constant infusion of jokes at my expense, as I now understand them to have been. Nasty, hurtful jokes. They are gone. And I am left with a dullness. As ridiculous and as humiliating as they were, these jokes were at least something. The hole of their absence has been filled with nothing. I am painfully aware of the space those thoughts took up and the time they forced me to waste. It is time that might have been put to better use, studying even more physics or French or history or the oboe. But it wasn’t, and that time is no longer available. I see my own time worm as well from here, and it is nearing its terminus.
Now it is morning. Nothing has happened, nothing much thought in this dim world. The African American hypnotist emerges from the woods with his chicken and tape recorder.
“Ready?” he mouths.
I nod. The quicker I can get this entire film remembered, the quicker I can go to Ingo and ask for help, for forgiveness.
He unpacks the chicken, picks up my chalk, and draws a line. The chicken and I both stare at it, both become transfixed.
“Tell me,” he mouths.
The chicken says nothing, but I begin:
The meteorologist, unable to face this monstrous multiplying ear-droplet discovery in reversed time, hastily returns to his future studies, the steady trudge to doom, his and the world’s. Now he is watching the entire world on fire. He wanders through the virtual version of the aftermath. The computer simulation has become ever more advanced. Now a holograph he can enter, it has become so sophisticated that the virtual smoke makes him cough and stings his eyes. He wonders what’s happened to cause this catastrophe but doesn’t have the patience to sift through all the data to research it. “Doesn’t really matter anyway,” he thinks in voiceover. “I can’t change anything.” The notion of reasons has become silly, incomprehensible. He is just biding his time, passing it until his death by green car. He is just entertaining himself. The charred landscape he now finds himself in is inhospitable, but small bands of survivors exist. He eavesdrops as a group of ragged people sits around a campfire.
“I’ve heard they have lasers in their eyes,” says a wizened woman wearing a burnt oilcloth coat.
“Can anyone confirm that?” asks another.
“Yeah,” says a teenage boy. “I saw one of them set fire to a pig. With its eyes. Just to see it die.”
“Shit,” says the second woman. “How do we fight eye lasers?”
“They’re fireproof, too, and water resistant to 100 meters, I’ve heard,” says the oilcloth woman.
A thirtyish-year-old woman with stringy hair and dressed in stained overalls drags a moping toddler to the fire. The little girl carries a stick, with which she smacks things as they pass: rocks, old car tires, broken TVs. The meteorologist stares at the girl. His ever-present mumbled voiceover comes into focus.
“That child! What is it about her? A light in the otherwise black void of my existence. Of future existence. Of all existence. Is it perhaps the biologically programmed response adults have to children? I don’t know. I have seen many children in my time. Literally dozens, but this small human seems to embody something extraordinary, a certain je ne sais quoi.”
The presumed mother sits the girl down next to her in front of the fire and proceeds to join in the group discussion, but the meteorologist focuses all his attention on the girl, who fidgets, sings to herself, pokes more things with her stick, then uses it to dig a hole in the charred ground.
“Stop it,” her mother says.
And she does, for a bit. Soon, she’s fidgeting again, then clapping. Her mother once more tells her to stop; it’s distracting. Grown-ups are trying to talk about something important. The little girl stops, and the group continues its discussion, but after a bit, she begins to dig again. The meteorologist has an idea. He steps out of the holographic projection and back to the console, types in something, receives a printout.
Iris out and iris in.
In his cave, the meteorologist switches on the holographic projection once again and steps back into it. It is set to the same scene. The survivors are around the fire. The toddler claps. Her mother tells her to stop. She does, and after a bit, she begins to dig with her stick. This time the stick hits something hard, metal. The girl bangs against it like a drum. Her mother tells her to shush. She shushes and quietly digs around the metal until it is unearthed, pulls a metal box from the hole. Now all those around the campfire are watching. The girl struggles with the latch.
“Careful!” says the mother, who takes the box, shakes it gently, hears something rattle, places it on the ground, gingerly unlatches it, and lifts the lid. Everyone around the fire, with the exception of the toddler, seems anxious.
Inside the box is a doll swathed in plastic. The mother unwraps it. It’s a beautiful little girl doll in a bright red dress, the only bit of color in this otherwise gray-brown landscape. It is reminiscent of the little girl scene in Schindler’s List, a mawkish paean to human indomitability in Holocaust drag by Steve Spielman. Everyone looks at the doll in silent awe.
“Mine,” says the little girl.
“Finders keepers,” agrees the mother as she hands the baby doll to her daughter, who hugs it to her chest and smiles.
The meteorologist smiles, too, as he knew he would, as he knows he must. But still to him it feels genuine.
And from then on he has purpose, or thinks he does. He watches all the virtual versions of what he’s going to bury for her and then buys those things, finds those locations, and buries those things, because he has to, because he will, because he wants to.
THE UNSEEN IS not seen by the Seen, but it is known. It is passed through. The Unseen is the place that protects the Unseen Unseen from the Seen. It is the rotten fence that secretes the magnificent estate beyond. There is nothing to see here, folks. There is nothing to pillage. But the Unseen Unseen is, I believe, beautiful and has been made so by Ingo, because he can make it however he wants. And he is here, at least the puppet of Ingo is—the now perfectly proportioned puppet of Ingo, the socially accepted Ingo, the chatty Ingo with no stammer. The Ingo who is all colors and no colors. The Ingo who lives here with Lucy Chalmers in a perfectly constructed love. In a place without fear. In silence.
And now suddenly I am here. How have I arrived here in this Unseen Unseen? The last thing I recall, I was being hypnotized alongside a chicken. I need to remember the film fully before I come here. My offering is not ready. I should not be here yet. Perhaps I have been brought here to protect the Unseen Unseen from the Unseen, from the Seen, from the Seen Seen. Is there a Seen Seen? What would that be? Am I to be the terrible giant who wanders this lush garden? I am not ready to meet Ingo. The film is not fully remembered. I can’t be here yet. Am I to be Ingo’s version of Méliès’s monster of the North Pole: a giant, blepharospastically blinking, bearded puppet, here to sweep the unwelcome Unseen into my maw as they comically cross themselves in terror? Am I here to be the butt of even more jokes? Well, I will not allow it. I will not. As I turn to leave, to search for a way out of the Unseen Unseen and back to the Unseen, I espy, once again, Oleara Debord in the distance. She is my North Star and I make my way toward her.
“Fucking fuck. You fucking little bastard. You sheeny kike little fucker. Do what I tell you to!” comes a voice, silently, because all is silent here, as I have already silently said, but I hear it just the same. And I stop, because it is familiar to me, this utterance. I have heard it before. But where? I stand in silence in the silence, unable to recall. It is yet one more thing I am unable to recall.
So I walk.
“FUCK YOU, HEBREW!” screams the silent voice.
I stop, look, and listen, as did the great American animator Len Janson in the stop-motion pixilation masterpiece of the same name. More silent voice: “Fuck you, Hebrew.” It is, I assume, directed at me, for there is no other “Hebrew” present. Even here in this veritable Garden of Eden, even now, at this point in my life, after all my tribulations, I am subject to such abuse. Well, I will not stand here and take it. I continue on my way toward freedom, or at least to not-here. Is any of this real? I wonder. Or am I now, in some clichéd close-up, revealed, as the camera slowly pulls out, to be in a padded room, and as the camera pulls out even farther, now through the peephole in my padded door, it is revealed that Ingo is a white-suited attendant at a mental institution? Is it that tired ending? I hate that ending, born of laziness on the part of the writer, of lack of commitment to the honest surreality of the concept. It is a concept likely to be found in a Charlie Kaufman movie, if one has the intestinal fortitude to be able to sit through one till the end. It’s all in the mind of a crazy person, you see, it turns out. It is all a dream. Et chetera. It is the four thousandth iteration of Walter Mitty, which was already moth-eaten when Jimmy Thurber penned it. No. This will not be that. This is not craziness. That is not how the mentally ill see the world. The mentally ill are the most maligned and mocked of all minorities, and I will not allow myself to be used in the perpetuation of that disrespectful garbage. I will defend my position on this to the death, even as I remain hopelessly lost in this place. I miss Tsai. I miss the certainty of the rightness of that amazing dynamic. I once thought I was over her, but I see now that was cockiness on my part. I long to sleep in her sock drawer, nestled among her magnificent foot tubes. I am over nothing.
And now there is the padded door. As predicted. And I am on one side of it, the wrong side of it. The peephole is for those on the other side. I attempt to look through it anyway, and the world on the other side is a thousand miles away. Still, there is a figure, a tiny figure. I cannot make it out.
“Oh, it’s you,” it says.
I try the door, expecting it to be locked, but it is not. I open it to discover a female African American puppet there. You would not know who she is. She is not famous, but she is beautiful just the same.
“I want to get back to the Seen,” I mouth to her.
“You can’t get back to anything,” she tells me. “You can only go forward.”
“That is wise,” I say. “I hope you are not an example of the offensive Magical Negro, because I will not allow myself to be used in the perpetuation of that reductionist, dismissive cinematic trope.”
“I’m no magical anything, friend. I’m just an orderly here. Sure, maybe I possess some hard-earned wisdom because of the trouble I’ve seen, which nobody knows, but I’m just here to help.”
“You do understand that is the very definition of the Magical Negro, yes?”
“I understand you’ve got to get out of there. This is no place for you. They’ll destroy you here. You’re not strong enough to make it in the Unseen, not the way I and my people are, due to our hard-earned wisdom and faith in the Almighty.”
“I mean, OK, thanks, I’ll go. But how?”
“Make love to Oleara Debord. You are large enough in this miniature world to do so. Love, true love, is the only thing that matters. If you are able to love her, to please her, she will bring you back. Love is the key to all things.”
I have always loved Oleara, as have all men and many women and many trans people of all varieties and proportions, so making love to her would be a dream come true.
“OK, I’ll try. How can I ever thank you for all you’ve taught me?”
“Just go. Your freedom is all the thanks I need.”
I hug her and run off. I will never forget that wonderful mental hospital attendant!
Finding myself at her massive base, I approach Oleara Debord as one does a potential lover: gently and with great respect, all the while practicing the series of questions of consent that must precede any eventual lovemaking session. For like everything in the universe that is not nothing, Oleara Debord is sentient, and although her life cycle is perhaps too slow for those of us in the animal and stop-motion communities to witness, that does not make her less than us. “Ephemerality is not an indication of superiority” is the slogan one sees on the placards at their marches, which are tediously slow. Of course this is true. If it were the case, humans would have to accept fruit flies as their betters. They are our equals. Oleara, born of the collision of tectonic plates, of the eruption of magma, of magnificent friction, one and a half billion years ago, stands proud and erect, watching over this nation, an ever vigilant sentry. I once again approach her, not as an explorer this time, not as a person seeking answers, but as one who woos. A wooer. One does not seek answers in love; one seeks communion. The only answer in communion is “yes,” for communion can never be interrogative. It is always and forever an act of faith, a complete acceptance of the other. An opening to him (her, thon), an abandonment of ego, a merging of selves. Questions are by definition rational, distancing, offensive, the opposite of love. And so, my list of consensual romantic engagement questions in hand, I address Oleara.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hello.”
“You are lovely. May I kiss you?”
“You may,” she says.
I kiss her, and it is a cornucopia of sensations.
“May I caress you?” I ask.
“You may.”
I caress her, and although she is made of granite, I feel her tremble.
“May I penetrate you?” I ask.
“You may,” she says.
And I do, my engorged member finding a nearby cave entrance. I hope it is the correct one. The fit is perfect and I feel as if we were made to be together like this. It’s true that the entrance is rock and it is extremely dry and this causes abrading on my penis, but the moment of congress has begun and nature propels me forward regardless. I will deal with the repercussions after; I have penis bandages in my satchel. I thrust, I caress, I moan. I descend into a state of oneness with this beautiful mountain. It is no longer B. and Oleara. It is Boleara, curiously, the first-person subjunctive form of bolear, which in Spanish means, of course, to shine. And shine I do, my light into her darkness. The eternal masculine and feminine, yin and yang, both necessary for wholeness, although yin and yin and yang and yang can form perfect unions as well. And with this very thought, I ejaculate mightily into Oleara’s cave, my spunk spelunking deep within her. It is a force of nature, and with it, I find myself propelled into the coming brightness, desperate to continue on my path, to return to the world of the Seen. The disorganization of this other world without God has been too much to bear (I must tell Dawkins!). It is a world without narrative. Although I have long been an atheist, I must admit, as a child, I loved Hanna-Barbera’s animated series Willibald and Winibald, an ode to the saintliness of two selfless sibling saints with identically beatific demeanors who fought crime (sin). Their run-ins with their sister Saint Walpurga were classics of charming dysfunctional family comedy: “Mom! Walpurga’s hogging the bathroom again!” It was all so comforting to those of us of the late baby boom. But the disarray of this world, the incomprehensible motives and results, the tangled threads, dead ends, the trillion meaningless details to trudge through at each moment have been a waking nightmare. I must push forward through this light to find my way back to the analyzable, the world of causality, the world designed for humans, with street signs and social mores, where the good win and the bad lose, in theory, at least on occasion, at least in movies. The path down a mountain is simple. One must simply desire it, it seems, and then plummet. But the path back up requires immense reserves of fortitude and perseverance. Even then it is not guaranteed. Gravity is only your friend in the other direction. But I watch the Seen world from here, and although I can no longer follow the concepts, the story line, the character motivations, I see images, now fractured and confused and shifting, as if I am witness to the dream of another, someone whose life I do not know, whose motivations I cannot comprehend. And in these fragments I have seen myself! I have been replaced, I discover. Of this I am certain. I can tell his story is comical because from here I can hear strains of a musical accompaniment. There is a xylophone. There is a trumpet with plunger mute. There is the inevitable tuba. I recognize these as the comical orchestral instruments, but I can no longer understand the jokes. The story is distorted by distance and fragmentation. But I have been replaced, this much I know. My descent has been without consequence to the world. The show continues. The trombone does its humorous thing. I must return and reclaim my part in this. It is not fair. The mountain analogy goes only so far. It is a climb but not vertical. Rather, it is a tunnel with a bright light at the end, the light an oncoming locomotive. It is a jungle laden with unruly vines and screaming monkeys. It is a room with no doors from which one is both trying to get in and out. It is the party to which one has not been invited. It is a forever skipping record. It is trying to understand my life. It is the wind and I am a leaf smashing futilely against the interior of its wind tunnel prison. It is a woman who won’t love me, no matter how much I change. It is the hopelessness of a bad diagnosis. It is fire. It is flood. It never gets closer. It is my broken heart, my shame, it is how I measure up. It is first this direction, then that one. It is my face in the mirror in unfortunate lighting. It is what it is not. But I move toward it, and when it is elusive, I walk anyway. I walk, I swim, I climb, I crawl for years, decades, eons, forever. And still I get no closer. And then I do. I sense that it is getting bigger, that it fills more of my field of vision. It is a subtle difference. It is the difference of Proxima Centauri as compared to Alpha Centauri A. But it is progress, and in this progress exists a whiff of narrative. Of reason. Of hope. So I continue. For more eons. Through sucking, waist-high mud, through nothing, through biblical plagues, through the eye of a needle, through the mouth of madness, through alien landscapes, through sewer tunnels…Then it is there above me: an open manhole. I climb the ladder, suddenly oddly hesitant. Is this what I want? Can this world support two of me? Will I simply disintegrate as I step into it? A return to the Unseen would be simple. I can look back and see it from here. It is one simple step off a precipice. Instantaneous.
But I look toward the sky and climb.