THE WINTER WAS LONG and full of knowings, but it was ending, and soon.
Terrance Pot. The slender thirty-something sat anonymously in the crowded ski lodge, affecting health using his facemask. He was alone, as always, his little table half-empty. An amber drink kept him company, untouched, a stage prop like his fake face. Alcohol was unconscionable, especially during the bad season.
The People, red with sweaters and drink, surrounded Terrance’s table, their laughter as hollow as his facemask charades. Their realities encroached his own, threatening to drown him. Small, soulless creatures, chasing their highs and serving their youth—yet vicious. So vicious. The deadliest animal, and blissfully unaware of such. But Terrance would not hate them. Could not. Because then They would see it in him, and then it would become real, and then it could not die, not from words or love or money, or the cummerbund of explosives under his shirt.
He tuned Them out, along with his stupid emotions, purifying his mind. Purity was paramount in the bad season, and particularly now, on the eve of its ultimate end. The piano was into a warm adagio, and Terrance focused on it instead, letting the notes infiltrate him. He bade his facemask smile, and it did so.
He crossed his legs, surveying the ski lodge where his parents had first met. It was storied amongst Terrance’s family: 1969, his mom and dad to be, in the mountains, both single and tired of it. Dad had popped a dirty joke, their eyes had met, and the rest was history. Terrance scanned the room, stopping at the bar; that was where the fateful meeting had occurred, though his parents had never divulged this particular detail. Terrance just knew, in the same way he knew destroying the lodge would thwart his parents meeting, thus preventing his life and its uncommon wealth of pain.
The bar was lousy with People, so much in another galaxy, mingling like Terrance’s parents probably had. He looked away, again tempted to hate; it was too easy to, come the bad season, with that ugly sense of contrast always knocking on his door. The shorter days were enemy, bringing with them the cycles, the heightened awareness, the questions, and, eventually, the answers—the knowings . The answers could be scarier than the questions, and usually were, but they were necessary. To ignore them would be suicide, though of a kind wholly different than what he had planned.
A man passed—a Person —and Terrance refreshed his disguise, his facemask drawing high and approachable. It was imperative to stay unremarkable, lest They see his true face, pearls before swine. The two made brief eye contact, exchanged shit-eating nods, then the man was gone to a party of similarly vacant bodies across the room. And that’s just what They were, bodies, human only in the way Jason Voorhees is a hockey player. For Terrance, he was the only sentient creature in the room, the People being mere constructs, cartoons of their own manufacture. But that was okay; it made them expendable.
The latest question, occurring to Terrance at the start of this active Season, had been a tough one: how to cancel oneself completely. Not death; death was a misnomer, being only a change of state rather than a genuine end. It was also elementary, easily mastered, achieved by innumerable means. Nonexistence, however, was a whole other ballgame. Its question had been plague, but as of this final winter and its devices, Terrance knew the solution. It was quite simple: he had only to prevent his parents from meeting.
This had presented its own problems, naturally, but the answers had come, and, for all their magnificence, they too were uncomplicated. By blowing up the present lodge, at precisely the right moment, when the eleven-fold Reality Nexus was aligned and the gulf of time lay open and all became possible, the lodge would cease forever, past and present, therefore solving the quandary of his being. Terrance would disappear in the destruction’s wake, he theorized, erased like a bad drawing. This was pure conjecture, but, regardless, it would be marvelous.
He checked the lodge clock with his fake eyes: five till eleven.
Eleven. The number sent sunshine up his earthly person. It jibed with him, eleven, and never more than at the peak of the bad season—which wasn’t so ‘bad,’ given the knowings it brought. He turned the number over in his mind. Eleven parallel universes. Eleven people at the bar. Eleven versions of himself, in varying states of suffering. Eleven sticks of dynamite. He was eleven when the knowings had first visited him, during his incipient Season. Eleven letters to his name. He’d scarred himself with the characters, if counting his body as himself.
Eleven. Eleven. Eleven-eleven.
11:11. It was his one window of opportunity, he knew, when he would detonate his payload and efface the eleven Terrances from the multiverse, as revealed to him by God, or to whatever the bad season played agency. He said the number aloud. His facemask glowed. It was 10:59.
Terrance was pretending to sip his drink when doubt struck. It came with its familiar shock, exploding into mind so much like the fireworks at his belly. He raised a mental barrier, in the way he’d learned, but stray words came through: crazy, deluded, schizoid . He hated the last one most, for its sheer audacity—who was a paltry psychiatrist to judge Terrance’s condition, to plumb his depths? Besides, there was no schizophrenia, not in him, at least; experience was the only thing separating him from the People, nothing more. He’d once been like Them, and now, after many bad seasons, he wasn’t, by his own volition. The insanity of conventional thinking has an exit door, and he’d opened it, his enlightenment no more chemical than a rainbow was magical.
He told himself this, many times, and it slowly but surely eroded the doubt. Some lingered, of course, nibbling at his subconscious like the hate he refused to indulge, but it was contained. The bad season wrought as much doubt as it did knowings, it seemed, as though its mechanism was equal parts skeptic and believer. The conflict was extraordinary, nothing short of war, regularly driving Terrance to the brink of madness and back—why the bad season was the bad season. But he supposed it necessary; the doubt worked to keep him on his toes, preserve his integrity. The human mind is notoriously fallible, given to projections, persuasions of the ego, delusions that feed on themselves, so he was thankful for his overaggressive doubt. He feared self-delusion; it was the one true insanity, he thought.
The clock hands spelled out three after eleven, and the piano upbeat, joined stealthily by a bass. Terrance almost fell into the music, the chords visible behind his eyes, but he caught himself. He couldn’t miss the window: 11:11, his one chance for salvation. He would surrender the song for that—would trade this roomful of ‘lives’ for that. And perhaps the People would cease to exist, simply dissolving into whatever Zen awaited Terrance. Perhaps not.
There was dancing now, couples swaying over the parquet dance floor. One couple, a tall dark man and an elegant redhead, were inching uncomfortably close to Terrance’s island table, and he suppressed a snarl. If there was one thing that stabbed him more than the People, it was their illusions of love. Terrance was not unacquainted with love; he’d known it as a teenager, while still receiving the basics of his strange discipline, and it had been just enough to reveal to him its lunacy. Using his exceptional faculty of examination, he’d dissected the devious emotion, deduced it to mere hormones and selfish attachments. His insatiable doubt had a hand in this (plus several branding rejections, though he would never admit this, even to himself). The saying was all wrong: knowing is bliss. Ignorance is pitiful.
Eight after. Three more minutes in this hell.
Or was it heaven? Terrance wasn’t sure. The trials of his thirty-three years had, after all, awarded him his knowings, without which he would never have reached his current pedigree, nor gained the understanding necessary for his undoing. Life is strange, he thought.
Nine after.
The dance floor surged, sending the dark man and his redhead even closer, dangerously so, enough for Terrance to suffer their conversation. He didn’t want to listen, but his keen ears heard anyway: she was having such a great time, how beautiful the mountains were, is your sister all right? The words waxed vile in Terrance’s fake ears, faltering his facemask so his true self peeked through. The woman went on and on, and Terrance had to resist muffing his hands over his ears.
Then he caught something in the woman’s voice: the hallmark of sincerity, of warmth, of sentience . The antithesis of the soulless drivel he expected, in any case. He again tried to ignore it, block it out as he did when he was scared—but no, not now. He was too aware, thanks to the bad season and its voodoo. He upset further.
The doubt reared up then, perhaps scenting weakness: Could she be alive? Could she have feelings? Could you be wrong in your meditations? Before Terrance could tackle the first three: Might she have a soul? The last pierced him to the bone, monkeywrenching his entire theory of existence—he was the only besouled, the only one who truly thought and felt and lived.
But weren’t you once like Them, by you own admission?
No answers. Terrance felt to be sinking, the rug pulled out from under him. In his upheaval, the facemask fell completely, for one moment revealing his actuality, what might’ve been a twisted slab of hickory. He looked madly about the lodge, feeling suddenly naked, sure everyone would be looking—pointing, gasping, perhaps in awe. But no one was looking.
11:10.
Terrance calmed some, his facemask recomposed … until the redhead bitch reappeared, bringing up the doubt like puke.
Could she …? Could you …? What if …? Maybe …
The questions left holes in his doctrine, contagious holes, spreading through his entire house of cards, all the way to the task at hand. His knee bobbed. He ground his teeth. Ugly sweat beaded his forehead, red in the lodge’s mood-lighting.
The clock clicked 11:11 as Terrance warred with himself. The couple again came very close, and Terrance had to will away violence. It was her, the woman—her fault for infecting him with this broken thinking. He knew she was just an empty body, knew … but didn’t, not anymore. The bitch had hurt him, the way so many of Them did, their dirty thoughts queering his compass, leaving his processes out of true. Fouling him. Raping him.
Once like them … could be wrong … have a soul …?
The second-hand passed the one, the two, the three, Terrance’s precious window evaporating before his eyes. Panicked, he activated his defense mechanisms, to parry the questions, relearn the mysteries which had seen him to this place.
He was enlightened—
Deceived .
He was aware—
Deluded .
He was pure—
Corrupt .
He was beautiful—
Abominable .
He was perfect—
Flawed .
The hand rounded the five, the six, so much the grains of an hourglass. The detonator was duct-taped to his chest and he clutched it as a nun would her rosary. How could he kill them if they weren’t soulless monsters? Or, was he the monster, lost in some crazy, egocentric fairytale?
He had let go of the detonator, resigned to indecision—when she looked at him. The redhead, her eyes, locked onto his. Time ceased, and Terrance was overcome: by the disgust he was sure he saw there, a million pointed fingers, as he’d seen in every woman he’d ever known. It was that bitter old rejection, like knives in him, what he secretly hated more than anything and could never ever admit, much less confront. In that eternal instant, Terrance knew her, the elegant dancing cuntwhore who thought the mountains were beautiful and is your sister okay I hate you forever you ugly bastard jerk die.
Their eyes broke, the contact lasting just a heartbeat. But Terrance had seen inside her, and there was no soul of which to speak.
Projection … delusion …
The words murmured from his depths, like bubbles underwater, and he choked them off. There was no doubt. He was certain. Like the Reality Nexus. Like his unmaking. Another knowing. Eleven. Yes.
When the second-hand met the hour-, forming a perfect trinity of his beloved number, Terrance gripped the detonator and smiled, with both his facemask and the real thing. Tears pushed from his eyes. The button made a dull click no one heard.