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With great relief at escaping his nemesis, tempered by moments of what should have been an urge to find shelter––the hail storm was now undulating in titanic waves from fury to whisper and back again––but instead was an overwhelming feeling of levity, as though he had been freed from all earthly responsibilities and was now granted divine permission to participate in this obscene weather dance like a shaman rejoicing with the Gods. He wandered through maze after maze of zig zagging side streets admiring the unique architecture, which varied greatly from block to block, as he marveled at how saturated the colors of the storefronts looked when covered with a thin sheen of rain: they glowed with an inner light as though painted in some otherworldly enamel. He passed an old Victorian wooden house standing between two modern strip malls, its windows smashed and boarded and its yard unkempt, giving the impression it was an appendage of an entirely different jurisdiction, even nationality, than the rest of the city, perhaps connected by an invisible cord to some country on the other side of the world. It could have been a haunted house in a horror film, but here it just out of place, sloppy, even ridiculous. In his days as a carpenter, he would have given it one hell of a workover!
Eventually he became so wet he had no other choice but to find a café to sit down and dry off over a much-needed dose of caffein. He was not yet hungry, even though it was already close to lunchtime, but he could certainly use a coffee. As luck would have it, or rather as if he had willed a café into existence at the very thought of coffee, one appeared on the corner of the next block. He entered, shaking himself off like a wet dog, and took a seat. The décor was in transition from what appeared to be an old Viennese style with dark wood rafters and wooden paneling to match, to something resembling a nineteen fifties soda shop (there was even an Elvis clock above a cappuccino machine and the waitress was dressed in an appropriately themed uniform, but on roller skates) but it was hard to tell which theme was the final goal of this renovation. After placing and receiving his order he slowly sipped on his ceramic cup of black restaurant-style coffee, while sheepishly drying his hair with napkins pulled one by one from the chrome plated dispenser at his table. Suddenly a vibration––from where? ––a notification! It was M– asking if he was OK and whether he got caught in the storm. She was in a shopping mall and thought they could meet if he was nearby and available. It was the last of three almost identical messages starting from almost an hour before, just after the weather alert, which must have blocked the satellite system, until finally a message at the end asking simply ‘Are you there?’. He quickly responded that he was OK but got caught in the storm before stopping into a café. ‘Where should we meet?’, he texted back. While he waited for a reply he scrolled down to see if the answer was already there: it was. In the first text she had already mentioned the mall, which he found from Google Maps was only a fifteen-minute walk away. ‘I’m coming. Just tell me where we should meet.’, he texted her again. He waited five minutes, then ten, until it was twenty minutes since his last text. Where was she? Maybe she had responded but it didn’t get through the satellite network because of the weather, or maybe she had written a reply and thought she had sent it, or maybe she had just given up on him and turned her phone off, frustrated that he had not answered her first three messages. He had to find her. He paid the waitress in paper bills without waiting for the change and dashed off to the mall. There was still a chance he could find M–. If she was just sidetracked trying on clothes a reply would certainly come before he even got there.
The mall was stark and modern, the air reeking of perm solution and cinnamon buns––a uniquely sickening combination, like that of lavender mixed with tobacco which was the rage these days in designer fragrances. The smell seemed to seep out of every crack in the aluminum and plastic monstrosity; from his cursory inspection there were many such cracks, not created by wear and tear but sloppy measurements corrected with caulking or some kind of grey putty, although there were still cracks between the sealant and the plastic or aluminum. Cracks within the cracks, cracks everywhere! It brought out the ‘carpenter inspector’ in him, the man he left behind years ago but still popped up every now and then to silently ridicule whatever poor job might have been done on the interior of whatever recently built or renovated space he found himself trapped. He wandered from store to store, café or fast-food stand to café or fast-food stand, always walking on the perimeter lest a salesperson caught his eye and invited him in with a smile and hand gesture to sell him something he didn’t want anyway. ‘Always look away,’ was his motto, but his mission was to find M–. She had to be somewhere trying on shoes or sipping on an espresso, a gleaming plastic shopping bag standing on the floor beside her.
The mall was shaped like an H, with stores and banks lining the main columns and restaurants populating the bridge. It was not crowded, although there were just enough people wandering around to keep him interested and pique his curiosity. These people were different from those ‘downtown dwellers’ who were so throttled with impatience, perhaps stemming from some deep metaphysical anger, that they seemed ready to pull out a machete at any second and decapitate anyone in their path. Here was the land of the ‘mall men’, a people even more slow and meandering than the ‘downtown dwellers’, but with a serene contemplative quality replacing the toxic impatience, like people in a museum lost in thought, absorbed in the grandeur of their surroundings, elevated by the ancient treasures towering all around them. Each item in every store carried a weight of mystical significance bordering on sacrament: this new umbrella could have been woven from the Shroud of Turin, that mink coat was an ancient Buddhist relic. But to no small degree these ‘mall men’ exuded the same oblivious demeanor as the ‘downtown dwellers’, forcing the YouTuber to dart and parry through them as though he were an apparition, which he now wished he was. The ‘bungalow ranch people’, the ‘downtown dwellers’, ‘the mall men’: they were well on their way to becoming new subspecies of Homo Sapiens. They probably had their own exclusive Telegram or Facebook groups, refusing to speak to anyone outside their chat group echo chambers, all scammers, taxation agents, and government spies for all they knew. New ideological sub-species were cropping up everywhere these days: Zero Carbon Emissionettes, Anti Bookers, Rainbow Wokers, and Rocket Launch-kateers, who advocated for the ownership of personal rocket launchers, which they believed were a household necessity to combat the increasingly despotic State––great wars were certainly on the horizon, and this was only the beginning with no end in sight. Social commentators had even given this trend the name ‘cyber-speciation’, and some postulated that such sequestering by personality type was already leading to formation of new nations which transcended all physical borders, entire jurisdictions whose embodiment existed only in ‘the cloud’, while fringe biologists, who would have been taken as quacks in any other era, applied laws of natural selection in scholarly publications, speculating that this new evolutionary phenomenon risked irreversible genetic divergence until one day these divergent sub-species would not be able to produce fertile offspring with mates from outside their ‘cloud tribe’, citing rising infertility statistics as evidence, although such theories had yet to gain any real traction.
He meandered through the crowds, searching for M– as he observed the people mesmerized by shop windows, as though they were masterpieces of fine art or five-thousand-year-old urns from some lost civilization, or, equally, gaping into the screens of their phones, often just standing in the middle of the walkway as people steered vapidly around them as though they had nowhere to go, nothing to do, but stand there staring off into space. Sometime later, after growing bored of observing the crowds and convincing himself that he must have somehow crossed signals with M– and she was now back at the hotel––probably taking a shower like she had that very morning to wake him up and start his day––he spotted a face he recognized, but only vaguely, like a face in a newspaper that stirs only the dimmest of memories without registering any real recognition. It was a man, but who was it? The irksome visage emerged from behind a row of shoes in a window, moving back and forth, now visible, now hidden behind some shoe or other, sometimes smiling, other times displaying a neutral expression as though lost in contemplation. Every now and then a hand or arm would also show itself behind the shop window display. He stepped closer, ever so carefully to conceal his interest from any possible outside observers, even himself––for who would welcome self-awareness in such a potentially embarrassing moment? ––the YouTuber, our Youtuber, as a prowler and stalker! His nose now so close to the glass that he could see the trace of his breath clouding the glass and evaporating to clarity in the rhythm of his chest expansions and contractions, he saw the man’s hand rubbing what appeared to be an officer’s hat against his red beard. It was ‘the blocker in chief’! What on earth was he doing here? ––in the land of the ‘Mall Men’ of all places. Would ‘the cloud lady’ also show up, popping up from around the corner with some new proclamation about the sky? The ‘blocker in chief’ took several steps back so now he was visible through the shop window in full view, although now to the right of the shoe display, still wearing the same kilt and warm-up jacket. When the YouTuber stepped backwards and to the right a couple of meters the perspective became even better, almost panoramic: the view of a sniper hiding behind a boulder on top of a hill. The man was trying on a pair of black pointy dress shoes, which obviously didn’t match his kilt, but seemed very expensive, intended for some kind of formal event. With his hat off his bald head took on the appearance of a Persian carpet, there were so many intricate oriental tattoo patterns. A bouncer or doorman in some nightclub, our YouTuber thought, but his expression was altogether different than before, when he was busy obstructing as many people he could in the city center for who knows what reason: he was smiling, even laughing occasionally, as he pointed his index finger down at the shoes, posing in the mirror, moving his foot around so the shoes reflected the track lighting from the ceiling, which seemed far brighter than need be, perhaps to make the patent leather gleam just that much more to justify their absurd price. Had he been too judgmental before?
He watched ‘the blocker in chief’ trying on pair after pair of shoes, sometimes smiling, and other times lost in contemplation bordering on despair, as though he was hanging on a shoestring over a cliff, staring into the canyon below, terrified of what would happen if he made the slightest slip and purchased the wrong pair of shoes: they might not match that one suit he had tucked away in a closet and hadn’t worn in years, his girlfriend might not like them––did he even have one? ––or the transaction might push his credit card over the limit, risking supreme embarrassment if the payment was rejected, or extortionate penalties if the payment went through anyway. After what seemed like an hour, he finally decided on a pair of black wingtip Oxfords. Receipt and shoebox in hand, his face glowed with the calm satisfaction of a man during his morning shave; the salesman’s face concealed, but only poorly, his great relief beneath a mask of muted congratulations––finally the stubborn lout had made up his mind, finally a sale!
The ‘blocker in chief’ left the store, Admiral’s hat under one arm and shoe box under the other, leaving a surprising silage of some cologne in his wake––the man wore perfume? Intrigued, the YouTuber (or had he now not become ‘the stalker in-chief’?) followed in his slipstream, trying to guess the scent. It always seemed strange that men wanted ‘beast mode’ fragrances to assert their masculinity, leather and tobacco bombs that created a nuclear scent bubble around them to announce their presence before they are introduced or even noticed, like kings whose heralds sound horns immediately preceding their arrival. On his YouTube channel he always taught to be more subtle. Less is more. Seduction is discretion. Discretion is the better part of valor. A man with too strong a perfume was sure to be insecure about his looks or reputation and felt the need to amplify his presence: a sure sign of weakness. Smart women knew this and avoided men with strong perfumes, even more so because they, the women, always wanted to be the one noticed first for whatever dress, shoes, or scent they were wearing without having to compete with a needy partner. He continued following the tattooed man, always in his slipstream but never at his heels, the unlikely pair passing by a fountain before the ‘blocker in chief’ turned into a flower shop. Was he getting ready for a hot date? Going to a wedding––maybe his own? It was then that the memory of the kilted man’s scent and not the scent itself, because it had already faded from his trail, tipped our hero off. It was Parfum de Marly Layton, one of the most popular niche fragrances. It was a woody oriental with a lavender, bergamot and cardamom opening, and an unusual mid featuring apples and coffee: ‘the blocker in chief’ was obviously more refined and sophisticated than he had thought!
There was a loud pop from somewhere and the YouTuber suddenly looked around––had he been found out? He was immediately transported back into a recurring dream where he posts a fragrance review standing naked––how could he forget to dress? ––and no matter what he does he can’t delete it; but strangely nobody notices––or do they? After rotating his head back and forth a few times, searching for the source of the pop which never revealed itself, he noticed a crumpled peevish figure standing there in the reflection of an overhead mirror. The figure, a man, had something immediately annoying about him, broadcasting the look of a criminal about to do something unspeakable to someone. It suddenly dawned upon him that it was himself, our YouTuber, standing there hunched beside the window like some cheap voyeur! His mind flashed back to a time he was a young paperboy and had noticed himself in similar fashion, first as an ugly stranger wearing a soiled red parka, convincing himself that he was so ugly that no woman could ever love him, exactly as his brother had always told him. It was the same year he saved up all his money from his paper route to buy his mother a set of crystal wine glasses for the first Christmas after his parents divorced. If only ‘the paperboy’ could see him now, The Midnight Rider, how much better his youth would have been. When his attention reemerged in the present, he looked back into the store and everywhere around him: ‘the blocker in chief” had disappeared.
Without buying anything––not even a light beverage––our YouTuber took a seat in a nearby food court, which was centered around a white marble fountain with a large overhead television screen, half the size of one in a movie theater and large enough to be on the side of a small office building. There was a talk show of some kind on a news channel he rarely watched because of its caustic rightwing diatribe. But today it held a different significance, perhaps a form of entertainment to keep him from doing something he would later regret like buying an expensive gift he didn’t need to, or some kind of mirror from the other side of eternity functioning as an oracle through which he could inspect his personal failings and flaws––he did not know, but what he did know was that he wanted to sit there that very moment and do nothing but watch. The volume was just so loud that he could barely hear the commentary over the din of shoppers eating their stir fries and pizza slices as they discussed matters of the day, or just sat there gaping into space, or at the television screen, not unlike what he was doing.
The 12:00 O’clock News. A girl had fallen from a building and contracted critical injuries in some Asian country––he guessed from the lush foliage and ad-lib mishmash of lines and slashes posing as characters on the shop fronts. As he listened over the din of the lunch area new facts emerged: she had jumped and tried to film herself falling onto a trampoline seven stories below, but as fate would have it she bounced off her safety net and struck the pavement head-first, quite possibly breaking her neck. It was a stunt she had planned to boost her TikTok profile but had obviously gone terribly wrong. Everything should have worked. The trampoline had been rented from a respected athletic company and set up by expert trainers. Her friend had even been with her in the room holding her hand just before she jumped out the window, phone in selfie video mode as she fell to what should have been a perfect landing on the trampoline, only something went wrong after the first bounce, sending her on a direct trajectory onto the pavement. An expert geometer was brought on for video commentary: it would have been fine had she not landed in that just one-in-a-million way, critically endangering her neck. After the trampoline team called an ambulance, the girl’s friend retrieved the phone from the gutter and posted the video for her anyway––it was what she would have wanted even as she lay there in critical condition in the hospital, in a coma they said, possibly paralyzed for life. The newscaster went on to show many such bizarre TikTok videos posted that same day from around the world in what he said was a rising epidemic of perilous showmanship: a spurned groom let a jaguar loose to maraud through the hometown of his runaway bride, filming from the safety of a rooftop as it mauled the townsfolk, killing one pedestrian and wounding several more until it was finally put down––the spurned groom was still at large; a man just about to bury a beehive in a gravel pit shouts out ‘now your done for!’ with triumphant glee that bordered on ecstasy, suggesting it was the conclusion of his life-long war against bees, or perhaps against just this one particularly menacing hive, only to be swarmed a split second later before he even had a chance to dump the gravel from the shovel, accidentally hitting the ‘post’ button on his phone as he tried to fend off the angry cloud; a man setting a fire inside an empty church in darkness, tears streaming from his eyes as the flames blazed on behind him and from every corner––the church burned down and his charred remains never identified; a man wearing a conical party hat swinging back and forth on a wrecking ball as he sipped champagne from a bottle (you could even see the foam) only to swing into a high-voltage electrical fence and die instantly; a man crushed to death in a metal compressor at an auto scrap heap, obviously a gruesome drug cartel payback, because who else would have filmed such a thing and posted it? The livestream then switched to a talk show about the impact of social media and AI on modern society and where it would take mankind in the future. Manufactured AI interviews with deep-faked celebrities, or more controversially, Leaders of State shown in hospitals with terminal illnesses uttering their final call to arms when they were alive in a mansion somewhere drinking scotch with their friends, were getting generated and shared in exponentially greater numbers by the day with countless lawsuits always following. There were two debaters sitting on either side of a neutral male host of who knows what age––it was so hard to tell these days with all the antiaging biotechnology––dressed in a steel-grey suit. One debater looked like a prominent scholar from his scraggly white hair, tweed jacket (leather patches on the elbows) and pipe, which he held in his hand like a prop without ever taking a drag, while the other was an attractive––no, drop-dead gorgeous––brunette with the curves of a Marvel superheroine and achingly wide bedroom eyes, a preternatural shade of sapphire, glittering in the stage lighting––how could they be that blue? It was impossible. He guessed she was on the rightwing side of the debate from the way she constantly interrupted her rival, jeering at him, heckling him, and barking out random insults as he tried to speak. The man presented the hypothetical view that if AI could predict everything you were about to do, being fed with data from all your social media accounts, society might eventually reach a state where the police would know you were going to rob a bank even before you knew you were going to rob a bank––the commissioner would be there in his office signing the arrest warrant a day before you went berserk, while at that very moment across the city at home or at work you had no reason to think you would go berserk the following day, let alone rob a bank. But he went on to argue that what prevented this from becoming a reality was reality itself, the fact that there were all kind of random events that AI could not predict and would throw a wrench into any prediction model: a man about to commit a murder sees a butterfly landing on his shoulder and has a sudden and miraculous revelation; another is about to commit suicide when a ray of light exits a cloud layer at exactly the right angle and frequency to create a rainbow in the absence of rain and suddenly he backs down with tears in his eyes because it could only have been God sending him a sign.
The woman disagreed, and vehemently so. She declared that all events were predictable, especially now, in the advent of quantum computing, even the rainbow or butterfly on the man’s shoulder, because what seemed random was only the mathematical outcome of a chaotic system unstable to starting conditions, which is always predictable with enough computing power. Her line of reasoning was based on real systems like seven a ball combination shot in pool, where the tiniest micron of deviation from the target angle in the first shot leads to a deviation of several meters by the seventh ball. The distribution of balls after such a shot only appears chaotic but is all predictable, and AI would nail that too, given enough capital investment (she clearly favored private investors and companies over government in this regard). Big business and the rich elite would know everything they would do, their enemies would do, the markets would do––everything––before it even happened, and because of this the world would enter a new Utopia. The presumed academic calmly rebutted what he called her ‘sham argument’ with the claim that the universe was not Einsteinian––or deterministic––but random and all particles existed simultaneously in multiple states (all solutions the Schrödinger equation) until observed. ‘The beauty of randomness! The poetry of silence! A cherry blossom falling at your feet reminding you of that sweet day in your past when your eyes first met, a marble found sitting there dusty in a gutter that goes rolling down a drain in a flash flood and when you pick it up it acts as a mirror, exposing your errors in life, a sudden breeze that makes you change direction, only to bump into a friend you haven’t seen for years...the poetry of existence! God in the machine! The dancing Wu-Li Masters!’ he exclaimed as he stood up suddenly, holding his finger in the air as though to emphasize the profundity of his statement––a deliberate provocation. The woman, who could have been Cat Woman in her sleek hip-hugging black velvet skirt, ripe bulging breasts and cherry red lipstick with perfectly rouged cheeks, stood up in the middle of his diatribe, signaling she would ‘not take this sitting down, pun fully intended’. She leapt across the coffee table that had up to that moment––along with the host––acted as a safety barrier, a kind of neutral zone, and in a torrent of flailing fists and shrieks started beating the man. The host looked on, seemingly paralyzed with disbelief. As the YouTuber watched he wondered what it would be like to sleep with her, the wild woman, that angry far-right ball of sex and estrogen, to plunge inside her from behind––forcibly and delicately at the same time, the way it should be. But suddenly, the commercial break: some new drug with an unpronounceable name coming from who knows what language, that was such a gamechanger that it enabled the elderly couple shown in the ad to throw Frisbees and walk their dog, although there were multiple side effects including death.
How strange was the Universe. If he blinked one eye instead of the other, would it ultimately lead to a different outcome with his daughter later that day, or did it really matter? He had read once about ‘spooky action at a distance’ whereby once a particle is observed, forcing it to randomly choses its state, its sister particle, which could be on the other side of the planet––or galaxy for that matter––immediately choses the opposite state, the information exchanged between the pair moving faster than the speed of light. Einstein tried to refute this phenomenon because he believed that nothing could move faster than the speed of light, but he turned out to be wrong (although he was right in so many other ways, such as predicting that the Universe was expanding rapidly and would continue to do so until all stars were too far away to see). What was the Universe expanding into? Nothing was the answer, because there was nothing but the Universe and therefore there couldn’t possibly be a boundary between it and something else. Stars were like ants on the surface of an inflating balloon, or so the analogy went, with the distances between them becoming greater by the minute, and nothing existing outside the surface of the balloon. Only the Universe existed in three dimensions, not two, or four if you counted time. The Universe had as many galaxies as there were grains of sand on our planet, with a few hundred million stars per galaxy, and it was still getting bigger. It was simply unfair. Yet where did people, or human consciousness, fit into all this? Was it possible to be connected in real time with another person thousands of miles away like two quantum particles? Spooky action at a distance, but between two minds? So many unanswered questions.
The commercial ended and the news programing shifted to covering the stock market. There was an old man seated below the TV screen, who looked like he could be Afghani elder with his white robe, beard, and fez. The YouTuber watched the man eating a bowl of noodles with a pair of chopsticks as his thoughts increasingly turned to metaphysical questions and how they led to his involvement with Theosophy during ‘the deluge’. He had first encountered it when he was a teenager through a book on the subject he found on his father’s shelf and was immediately fascinated, but never had the time or inclination to take it too seriously. But much later in life, living in a new inhospitable city, trying to make ends meet as a carpenter, often alone and unable to meet new people, it gained renewed significance. After searching the internet, he found a local group that held open meetings, which took place every second Friday night at the home of another elder, even older than the one eating noodles before him, a man who had studied Theosophy for an astounding seventy of his ninety-two years on this planet. The attendees, all eight of them including our YouTuber and the leader, would always sit quietly in chairs arranged in a circle. After an opening prayer to the leader’s wife, who most of the members had known before she recently passed away, they would read passages from some solemn Theosophical text, each taking a turn to read a page or two. One man, who acted as a kind of lieutenant, always stood out on account of his white cowboy hat and western shirts with pearl buttons––he could have been Marty Robbins in El Paso, or one of the ranch hands at the end of The Wizard of Oz with his wide trusting smile that brought to mind a serene mountain landscape, a glint of the old West in his eyes, and his firm trusting handshake. What was such a down-to-earth man like this doing talking about Ahrimanic beings, essentially the Zoroastrian version of Satan’s hordes, inserting thoughts in your mind as you slept, the second coming of the Cosmic Christ as foreshadowed on the Akashic Chronicle (a spiritual record of all events), or the Atlantean period of human evolution during which men had gills and communicated through telepathy? The man’s simple and trusting demeanor gave our hero, who was not yet our Youtuber, or even The Midnight Rider at this stage of his life, confidence that all this might be true, and not anywhere near so bizarre as it seemed on the surface. Western religions had failed because they ignored reincarnation and karma and were based solely on belief of an afterlife without any means of entering this higher world before death, while Eastern religions failed because they didn’t acknowledge Christ or the emergence of the Western ego as the seed of the Godhead in an ever-evolving mankind. Like beads on a necklace, we passed through endless incarnations––serving as fires of purification––throughout the various earthly epochs, all headed to a future, so inconceivably remote from our understanding, where we would rise to join hands with angelic beings in their vast cosmic dance.
During the readings the room assumed the hushed solemnity of a funeral service, however it was not a feeling of mourning that engulfed them, but a sense of rapturous bliss, making it seem the entire room was hurtling through the Astral plane, basking in the light of the Spirit. The more arresting passages dealt with themes of the coming Kali Yuga, or dark ages, where Ahrimanic beings would try to trick mankind into denying the existence of the spiritual world, or even communicating with the dead, which was accomplished by imagining they were asking you the question you wanted to ask them the moment before you fell asleep, and when you awoke the answer would be the first thing that popped into your head, left there by the dead as you slept––he even tried this with his friend who had committed suicide, however it later came out that those who killed themselves existed in a state of isolation from all contact as a punishment for denying the gift of life. Every time you thought or did evil, you were creating terrifying astral forms which would take on concrete existence in the next phase of the Universe, which presumably came after the collapse of our current Universe and a new big bang (it was never quite clear, but the leader emphasized that Theosophy was meant to complement modern science and not deny it like most religions), but if you loved another, even if only in your thoughts and dreams, you were creating indescribably beautiful forms which would populate the landscape of this new Universe. So, a man who wrote a love poem before throwing it away in a moment of self-doubt was still doing good for the Cosmos. During these readings the walls dissolved, and eternity blossomed around them. At times he could hear the gentle rustling of branches against the windows, a sound that changed with the seasons, from a light scratching to an even lighter brushing, as the bare branches budded and gradually grew leaves, which expanded to lush maturity before drying out in the autumn cold and falling to the ground, leaving bare branches once again. Many times a tiny bird or other would fly in through an open window––far more than could be explained by mere coincidence––and circle the room before perching on the knee of the speaker, who would pause and look askance, but only slightly, from the sacred text before continuing reading while the bird sat there chirping, warbling, tweeting, singing or whatever it was that everyone knew was really the voice of the Cosmic Spirit rewarding them for their reverence and servitude. After the speaker finished there would always be discussion, except on one occasion when everyone just sat there in utter silence gazing into space, but never at each other, for at least twenty minutes before someone (he could not remember who) exhaled loudly and the next speaker took this as a coda and began reading. These sessions would last about ninety minutes in total and afterwards there would always be jovial discussion about world events, gardening, or sports, but never the content of the readings, over delicious home baked cakes and biscuits served with organic juices and tea.
It all seemed––no, was––so outlandish that it couldn’t possibly be true, but you didn’t have to just accept it, because if you mediated enough (by concentrating on the image of a rose cross and imaging you were the cross and each rose on its arms and vertices were virtues of the spirit) the walls would dissolve and you would one day ‘awaken’ into the world of the spirt and be able to verify everything from the Akashic Chronicle, which you could now access like an archeologist unearthing fossils at a dig. Now in the nadir of ‘the deluge’ with only darkness around him, ever appearing as light, he dove into these rose cross meditations with a zeal he had not felt since his early twenties. After focusing on the rose cross image for twenty minutes to the exclusion of all other thoughts, which were always trickling and bubbling away somewhere in his head, the next step was to make the image vanish, leaving only a void our of which ‘the higher self’––that entity inside you which was reincarnated and served as ‘the witness’ of all thought––would emerge and reveal itself if you had done the exercise in earnest. Yet no matter how many times or for how long he meditated, and he did so for almost four years, there was never a moment where he could split his own thoughts away from that which witnessed them. It was as if thinking and ‘the thinker’ were one and the same and the ‘higher self’ or ‘witness’ was only a mental image or cartoon thought balloon a split second after the actual thought of a ‘thinker’ and a ‘thought’. The mind was trapped inside itself and could only look at recorded mental images and never at the actual ‘entity that looked’. All you had was a memory of having just thought something and when that experience itself became a memory, you then had ‘the memory of a memory’ strung together ad infinitum. It was like words of a song he used to like during this period of his life––always marveling on how they seemed to have a different meaning depending on what situation he applied it to: ‘In a hall of mirrors you get sick of yourself’. The thinker was the thought, the observer was the observed, and could not be separated, as they claimed, completely consistent with the views of Krishnamurti––a figure he gradually became aware of in parallel to becoming jaded with Theosophy––who had been crowned as the ‘Maitreya Buddha’ (i.e. the Second Coming of The Buddha) only to make a public announcement several years later in front of thousands of his followers that it was all a hoax, or rather it wasn’t a hoax, but it was not something that could ever be practiced or followed, because, like the wind, once you captured ‘The Spirit’ in your hand, it was no longer ‘The Spirit’. And any ‘Guru’ who told you otherwise was just exploiting you. What about the will? You could move a leg without thinking about moving a leg, where did that fit in? By the end of all this, exhausted and confused, he started to feel like he was going crazy, and would often sleep late in the mornings, afraid to wake up lest Ahrimanic beings tried to plant thoughts in his head. Who was right if anyone at all?
It all came to a crux when, on vacation in a mountain city known for its regenerative tourist retreats, he lay hidden is his hotel room, afraid that the people outside were there only to wrest him away from his ‘path’. It seemed that through his mediations he had created a thought and image world inside himself that was so overpowering it had begun to sever his ego from his five senses, which was ironically the goal of mediation in the first place: he had brainwashed himself into a state of madness not unlike that of a schizophrenic. In a state of utter exasperation, gazing out his hotel window on the frosted mountain peaks in the distance, wishing for more simple times, wishing to be that person he was before he ever heard the word ‘Theosophy’, he finally realized what was happening. He wanted to quit, throw in the towel, leave, wish them all goodbye, sayonara, embark on a steamship to a new country, fly to the moon, whatever he needed to do escape from the Theosophists who he suspected had knowingly lied to him––but what if it wasn’t a lie and he would get punished in the next reincarnation for abnegation of ‘The Spirit’? ––God punishes those who knowingly reject him more than those who have never encountered him. No, Krishnamurti was right: the snowcapped mountain peaks towering there before him told him so, and he would be his new guide, leading him away from ‘the poison’ and out of ‘the deluge’ to a new state of independence. He was done, and after that fateful day in the mountains he never attended a meeting again, selling all his Theosophy books and, after a few months of emotional adjustment where he tried to reintegrate into his former self, The Midnight Rider was born, and he never looked back again––or did he?
The YouTuber looked up, expecting to find ‘the Afghan elder’, but he was gone, now replaced by a woman who, with her slanted blue eyes and straw blond hair, looked conspicuously like the mother of his children. His first impulse was that he wanted to strike out the woman for all the pain she had caused him, walk over to her that instant and knock her over the head with her purse, or better yet her ceramic coffee cup, still steaming and filled to the brim as far as he could tell. Just looking like her was enough to warrant such an attack. ‘How dare you look like her of all people,’ he almost shouted out but stopped at the last nanosecond, glaring right at her while she stared obliviously into her salad. His father once warned him about how she was poisoning the minds of his children against him and had been doing so since she left him so many years ago, a period of his life that seemed so far back in time it could have been a film about a protagonist he didn’t even know. ‘You’re throwing pearls to swine,’ his father exclaimed one day as they wandered along a beachfront picking up driftwood as it was presented to them on their path. ‘You’re better off starting all over again with a new woman. What about that? Find someone new, have a few new kids that will treat you better, love you and respect you the way you deserve. No way you can win against her because they will always love their mother more than you, as I am sure you love your mother more than me, even if you don’t see it yourself. Can’t blame them for that.’ With his usual wisdom, which often bordered on the callous, he was right. She had poisoned their minds, working quietly in the background––no doubt in league with ‘the bookseller’––behind closed doors, out of plain sight, in pitch darkness, or sometimes shamelessly out in the open at family meals while our YouTuber was away in some other country trying to make ends meet in whatever way he could.
‘When I first saw you, you were not loud and garrulous like the other girls. Your legs were naturally tanned although your face was white, and you ran like the wind, faster than anyone in the city, state, province, or territory. And you looked like an actress–– maybe Bibi Andersson in an Ingmar Bergman film––but a happy one where everything ends well. Who wouldn’t have wanted to have you in their arms, their bed, their life? But after we moved in together you started to cut me off from my friends, became obsessive, then violent. Fearing I would try to escape, you stopped taking birth control pills without telling me (only admitting it years later) to ‘keep me away from other women’. You foisted things on me no young man should deserve, children you used as your insurance policy, playing them against me like a pair of dominoes. How I loved them, even though I had no means to bring up, but I did anyway in my own mediocre way, as best I could, and even after you left you continued to lash out and try to hurt me, you said it was because you loved me but all I felt from you was hatred––it was you that chose my life’s path, like a rapist choses the path of his victim, and even when I accepted your untenable rules without recrimination, happy to be a father, you wrested them away from me and poisoned their minds against me. You held up our three-year-old daughter to my face and chanted ‘dad is bad, dad is bad!’ getting her to repeat this unprovoked accusation the same night you kicked me in the face while I lay asleep asleep for simply going to a party that night with a friend. No wonder they hate me! You were the casino, always winning when I lost. You accused me of beating you up right in front of a social worker when it was you that beat me up, raining your fists down on me for no reason, cashing my child support cheques (that weren’t even ordered by a judge and were given freely without conditions every month, without fail) before the post date to make them bounce––a plan you concocted to destroy my credit rating. You smiled like you were lily white the day you ran off with that flute player, the day you dumped our son by a pair of garbage cans, and all but abandoned him for four years––no wonder he sucked his thumb well into his school years and is now a closet hypochondriac, afraid that every tingle in his toe is some rare and deadly neurological disease. You maintained relations with my brother for no other reason but to undermine me with your lies, blowing your toxic winds at family dinners when I wasn’t even there to defend myself, smoking dope behind a shed with my dad at our daughter’s wedding, always acting like Little Bo Peep. In another world you could be a harpy, gorgon, griffin, gargoyle––the Witch of Circe! ––but no, you are just a cackling old hen warming whatever eggs of sin you have left. If you could attack me with a sledgehammer, chainsaw, or flamethrower, and get away with it you would. But tit for tat, because if you burned to death in a fire, I would hardly mourn. If you drowned at sea, I would barely flinch. If you fell into a pit of vipers, I would only be mildly shocked, and might even laugh beside myself. I will hate you until the end of time, in whatever Universe we are I will still hate you, in this Universe, the next one, and the next after that until there are no Universes left that will take us.’
He took a deep, almost ceremonial breath to signal the end of his silent invective, as he would often do after being lost in thought about some other troubling manner, a breath resembling that of a man’s final inhalation before jumping in front of a train or closing his eyes to die in a hospital bed, a breath of no small significance serving as a kind of coda signaling the end of whatever passage came before it. These were utterances he would never speak to anyone, especially his children, and not even her, lest she tell them he said such wicked things and therefore didn’t deserve their love or respect. What if she died some day? Would that change things? He sometimes taunted himself (or was it a form of entertainment? ––he was never sure which) with such dark musings while walking alone through some forest or under a train bridge alike––anywhere would do, even the seat of a toilet in a bus station. Maybe years after some fatal tragedy befell her, he might see things in a different light and regret whatever role he had in ‘thinking her into her grave’, much like the gruesome death of a universally reviled celebrity might lead the public to soften and see him in a different light.
He looked up to check the time––did malls even have clocks these days? ––something he rarely did because he always seemed to know what time it was without checking his phone, which was now asleep in the pocket of his military jacket: he didn’t need to wake it up. He could feel the time in the air, in the solitary leaves that scuttled along a gutter, in the way light reflected off those same leaves, or all other leaves still hanging from their branches, glittering in the sun like ripe limes somewhere in the tropics; when there were no leaves the time manifested itself in the slow motion of service vehicles ploughing through the snow, or the feel of that same snow in his palms, or the faces of people he passed on those snowy streets. Time would seep into him, and he would know, within five minutes at most, what time it was even if he had not checked for several hours. One day with M–, while on holidays in a European city, he challenged her that he could guess the time within five minutes whenever she asked and if he was off just once he would have to buy her dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant. As it turned out, he was off, but only once and by just thirteen minutes, an aberration he blamed on the distracting crowds in the city square in front of a popular gothic cathedral. Likewise, he always knew if his favored sports team won the morning after without checking the scores. He could never predict beforehand, so it wasn’t some kind of ‘second sight’ into the future, but he always knew afterwards. It was how he felt in the morning, as though he were connected by a network of psychological mycelia to all other fans rooting for his team and he could feel their jubilation or disappointment inside him––or was it in the vibration of air molecules around him? Whatever the case, he felt that it must be 1:35 from the way the mall ‘felt’. He had no need to check. Why would today be any different? The only important thing was that somewhere, clearly not inside this mall, M– was thinking about him, doing something kind for him, if not just thinking good thoughts about him, which she once confessed she always did in his absence. This notion, which was far more than a notion but concrete act on her part, never failed to make him feel safe and secure, even lucky, and in no small way, because somewhere else in the world his son and daughter and their mother and no doubt ‘the bookseller’, together or individually were probably thinking terrible things about him, or not about him at all, which was equally terrible because it meant he was so low in their estimation that even thinking bad things about him was a form of supplication he didn’t deserve.
On that impression he stood up, at first precariously but then with ever more conviction, and made his way to the exit mezzanine. The storm had passed, and it was now sunny outside; he could feel the warm rays on the backs of his hands through the glass doors––they seemed much warmer than they should be given how there had just been hail. Today the weather, it seemed, was always changing.