Foucault's Vacuum

My story, “God of Fire”, is published over at Apollo’s Lyre. It’s Christmastime fun for the whole family.

Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together, as I may say, and one man’s a blacksmith, and one’s a whitesmith, and one’s a goldsmith, and one’s a coppersmith. Diwisions among such must come, and must be met as they come. If there’s been any fault at all to-day, it’s mine. You and me is not two figures to be together in London; nor yet anywheres else but what is private, and beknown, and understood among friends. It ain’t that I am proud, but that I want to be right, as you shall never see me no more in these clothes. I’m wrong in these clothes. I’m wrong out of the forge, the kitchen, or off th’ meshes. You won’t find half so much fault in me if you think of me in my forge dress, with my hammer in my hand, or even my pipe. You won’t find half so much fault in me if, supposing as you should ever wish to see me, you come and put your head in at the forge window and see Joe the blacksmith, there, at the old anvil, in the old burnt apron, sticking to the old work. I’m awful dull, but I hope I’ve beat out something nigh the rights of this at last. And so GOD bless you, dear old Pip, old chap, GOD bless you!

- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

One of the Bow Street Runners, being more intrepid and enjoying the fortune of having taking up residence near the disturbance a month before, found a complete series of letters in the house, the perfect order of which which was almost completely derailed from the donnybrook a mere half hour earlier. The letters, held in two separate plain pine boxes and faintly reeking of some kind of combustible residue, were found undisturbed right near the fire-place and were unusual in that it held correspondence from either post-end.

The conversation’s beginning was written by a young spinster schoolteacher somewhere in Hertfordshire, to her father in London. Both were diligent grammarians and experts in the realm of linguistics, though the inspector had strong presuppositions that the father held a slight advantage as a prestigious university-level department head and held various scholarly titles of the highest-sounding order.

The letters were filled with questions and conversations on comma usage, dangling participles, the correct deployment of the pluperfect tense in Victorian fiction, the authenticity of loan words, and predicate logic. The correspondence on both sides got progressively more contested and personal, as evidenced by the harsher glyphs, hasty ink blots, and meticulously crafted curses and insults. The inspector, with the trained scales of his internal and informal jury, blamed such hotheadedness on the daughter’s uprbringing by her father’s spoiling hand, which instilled an excess of presupposed and deposed royalty (the family’s pedigree was assuredly not royal, much less overthrown).

Wishing to reconcile their professional differences, the pair decided to reunite in person at the father’s estate — the scene of the crime — and to symbolize the amicable reconnection they planned to surrender the evidence of their lengthy correspondence to the flames of the father’s fireplace.

But academic passions prevailed once again, it was concluded, and made the injudicious and injurious leap into the physical realm right there in the father’s study, where we now found our hero. Much afterwards, the case, was settled with nary a barrister’s inclusion (or intrusion, if the reader prefers) and the perpetrators went back to their own professions and lives as it was before the start of the entire protracted disputation, but it took the inspector an entire month to shake the fright and mental agony of ever scratching out a simple sentence.

The chimp could give no visual indication that he understood what was said to him. He sat there, quietly excited, with the pen tied to his hand and the lined white paper in front of him, tacked securely to the table. The man left the room and a wave of intense concentration caught up the chimp, and a simple story began to assemble itself, coherent and conclusive, in his mind. The fluorescent light winked without end, eventually slowing in the chimp’s eyes as the story took written form and dragged his perception of time. Its increasing delay was only subconsciously noted — after the story was finished he went back and forth in the narrative’s chronology, changing small bits here and there to his quiet satisfaction. He truly felt like he appeared, as told by the nice man that left earlier: like a god, traversing measured spans of time at random will to alter the course of history and the lives of men.

In autumn, Jim liked to walk the alleys when it was windy. The light gray swirl of newspaper pages around his knees spoke to the chaotic nature of last-minute journalism and the stress veins on the foreheads of grizzled copy editors.

Once in a while an orphaned page would fly straight for his face. It would annoy him for obvious reasons, but the sense was augmented by his awareness that the pages’ enumerations were two sets of two consecutive numbers and not one set of four. He wish his breath was fire so he could make ashes of the mental discomfort.

One time this happened, he could read the headline and subhead as it approached his face, hovering and creeping like a cold, slow slap. It told him something he didn’t know. He relished the quite literal act of knowledge chasing after him for a change.

Roger’s personality description on the site labeled him as “down to earth”, but the minuscule photo threw up red flags in my head as to its veracity. I didn’t have high hopes for our meeting so I gussied myself up unflattering on purpose — I don’t consider myself top drawer but I’m also not one to throw pearls to possible swine.

We met after I had texted him with full intentions of implying stupidity on my part (he would think a conspicuous landmark near my apartment passed by my attention). The affected turtleneck and the haughty downturn of his cold gray eyes sealed the deal, prejudicially, for me. If he didn’t mean to come across as arrogant in his profile, he was certainly that way in real life.

There was one way to easily dissuade a pretentious deep-thinker like this specimen: public disingratiation. This would not be difficult: I think I impressed upon him unfavorably, which was my aim, judging by the quick flicker of disdain that ran across his stubbled cheek. However, I wanted to make this quick and as painless for me as possible.

I mercilessly bugged him to go with me back to PPG place so I could skate. I actually had already gotten my fill the night before as I returned to a routine I used to do in high school — with surprisingly good results. He agreed to come with me but refused to accompany me onto the ice. It was of no consequence. My plan would still see its end, because once on the ice I did all that one could do to loudly embarrass someone in a crowd from ten or so feet away.

After perhaps ten minutes of forced, raucous unskillfulness, I noticed that he was gone, overpriced cigarettes and all. “Good riddance,” I thought. I did a few victory laps and finished with a rather flawless double axel.

Returning to my apartment overlooking the rink and the Crystal Palace — the first building I really noticed in the city after going the wrong way on 3rd (or was it 4th?) — I made some tea. With a random new book purchase in hand, I sat at the frozen window in my bathroom and kept intermittent watch over the teeming crowd well past the midnight hour.

“So you want to live forever?” she asked finally, and handed me one of the small square pamphlets. Then it all fell into place, like the click of an unlocking door.

The Halloween party had spilled out onto the Ellsworth and Negley corner, and eventually onto Walnut, with a good ninety percent of us thoroughly buzzed and was quickly approaching blitzed status. We all mingled with the amoeba of other parties: I was in my Danielsan-inspired red shower curtain, mounted on the showerhead overhead like a halo gone awry; John with his cyclops eye and trident thing; Chris with the gray bodysuit, helmet, and Program’s blue neon strips and modified frisbee; and finally Jesse, missing the entire point of the party’s theme, in the stock, unimaginative catsuit.

Then the zombies flooded our area like a bodied sunrise alighting the streets. Their initial lurching gait and gore makeup was flawless, I will admit, but my admiration became infested with superstition when they began to corner everyone, man to man, and launch into an animated undead monologue — as if a long-forgotten friendship was rekindled on only one side.

Then at last it was my turn to fall prey. She approached me with the guns of her mouth blazing loudly already with a fake compliment on my shower curtain, extolling the benefits of whatever-church-she-goes-to and the efficacy of spiritual devotion. Through the layers of expertly-plastered corpsepaint, crusted blood, and tattered clothes — and even through the unseen armor of prudish religiosity she undoubtedly wore — there was something deeply sexualized about her. The deadened eyes sparkled an untamed blue, the mussed hair was still lustrously thick, a tattered and soiled silk blouse was held up by two ample mounds.

I coughed to cover up a quick glance around the area. John was being verbally pummeled by a porker in a ripped sundress, Chris was held in submission by a guy in a smudged blazer, who was old and big enough to be bouncing at Diesel (probably the youth leader), and Jesse was nowhere in sight. All were locked in battle. Looked like I was on my own, like everyone else.

The girl recited her undoubtedly rehearsed lines with an amazing degree of sincerity, and I just couldn’t feign interest for protocol’s sake. So I blanked out. I imagined all the carnal wisdom I could impart, as her elder: that vampires would be a more apt literary creature to adopt for their purposes, that the mind-numb of religion is too farcically suited to their current brain-consuming costumes, that her parents want to divorce in the near future because of her, that she would most likely abandon her idyllic mores the second she hits the soil for freshman year abroad (or when the next horny asshole convinces her he loves her…whichever would come first). But her glaring innocence — those sky-colored eyes projecting total vulnerability and somehow successful masking the living, functioning mind behind them — killed the urge, the fact that I may very well have misjudged the character of her fanaticism notwithstanding.

Now here she was, the square pamphlet stuck rudely under my nose, with its stylized rounded corners and minimalist orange-flecked design aesthetic. The church’s address was crudely dot-matrixed on a printer sticker, annoyingly nonparallel to the bottom edge of the paper. She certainly was a looker; perhaps more so under the rotting facade and outmoded belief system.

I took it from her and pocketed it. We exchanged smiles. Maybe I will take her up on the offer.