From the third to last floor of the second tallest apartment building in Greenpoint, a naked Bailey “Lee” Betts Vernheist stared out the picture window of his darkened living room, watching heat lightning palpitate the New York sky.  Between each burst illuminating the midnight air of a New York as saturated as his own skin, an assortment of numbers flared and faded like a sparkle of fireflies behind his ice blue irises.

The Vernheist family: in America for eleven generations.

The male ancestors: clergymen of renown, two admirals, two generals, a triple of brothers that turned to law in the aftermath of a Depression that reduced the family coffers and increased the colonial graveyard to tragic levels. Four or five that disappeared into mists thicker than even the humid, record heatwave air currently suffocating eight million people as the power grid spasmed on and off across the five boroughs. And, of course, eight Wall Street men, of which he was the last of the line.

The calculations didn’t math together into a whole—that was too many for too few generations. The heat and the gin and the THC all contributed to the poor accountancy. But the failure to align the digits and work histories with the storied lineage, Lee comprehended this as an inherent deficiency that had only been intensified by those intoxicants. The true source of the errors in calculation were congenital—the manifestation of a personal failing that marked the figurative and literal end of a once noble line.

No Vernheist after Lee’s grandfather qualified as well-to-do and none beyond his great grandfather as wealthy.

Flaring into his cortex another seizure of figures:
Twenty-nine years old—six years employed—only two minor promotions.

Those numbers then knocked on to produce more ripples, a series of disappointing annual figures that summed up the reason for his practical lack of advancement at The Firm—which had hired him, and likely hadn’t yet fired him, solely on the basis of his surname. That foundational name that had dredged this now infirmed metropolis up from its Arcadian muck, that had put an axe through the great Pan’s head so that his blood might fertilize the growth of a howling, screeching gray forest of steel and concrete in place of a green, brown, and breathing one. 

Lee sweated rivulets onto the leather of the Italian sofa he’d shoved around to face the window after the power had fritzed. He stared out past unlit buildings to bits of the grid that still churned wattage into cold blue LED bulbs emitting their harsh, eerie light through apartment windows a quarter of a mile off to points even farther away. He considered the possibility that somewhere across the river where the lights still burned, in Manhattan, that one of his ancestors has personally sawed down three tawny birches or oaks so that one day this pulsating assortment of angular hives and cysts could well up from the soil.

Closing sweaty eyelids, he envisioned that buckle-hatted oil painting of Pieter Vernheist hanging in the family’s upstate summer home. He carefully observed the tall, severe Dutchman with a face very much like his own walking to the edge of the frame while the scenery in the background moved to follow him—a camera panning in frame. Pieter picked up a great timber saw, dragging it behind as he approached a great tree surrounded by numerous other flora. Another Dutchman of identical build, mien, and dress—Pieter’s twin brother Ambroos (whose descendants were still doing quite well)—grabbed the free handle of the giant saw. The brothers lifted the blade to the trunk and Pieter shoved his handle as Ambroos pulled his.

Back and forth, back and forth, Lee could almost literally hear the bark and whine of the laconic Dutchmen’s saw as it advanced and retreated hundreds upon hundreds of times. He could see both men whip the hats from their heads and wipe the sweat off their shining brows after they’d dropped the saw and sprinted to safety at the first cracks and snaps.

Lee stood shoulder to shoulder with them as the giant birch tilted and smashed into the virgin soil shuddering the whole of the island. All three stared mutely at the clouds of dust kicked up by the impact of the dead oak, mesmerized by the patterns the incalculable swirl of motes made as they spiraled through shafts of golden sunlight descending through the freshly punched hole in the forest canopy. And— Lee thought—in such a fashion was this city made fit for habitation. 

…But somewhere in the double-helix that transmitted that founding-stock character, putrefaction had set in. That pioneer ethos, that adventurous spirit bordering on the demigod-like had seen the one of those two, upward spiraling strands that controlled, not the mind and the body, but the spirit and character steadily disintegrate.

Slumped with eyes closed, soaked in the wan light of a rolling blackout, Lee could feel himself rotting as he listened for a peal of thunder that would never sound.

He suddenly remembered two nights prior, Thursday. Celestina lay in bed with him as he watched reels on his phone. She’d noticed his feed was filled with videos of black teens spraying gas up their nose from what looked like whip cream cans and then shuddering themselves into eye-rolling fits.

One at a time, he steered the obstacle course of her questions: Those jet-black cans are called Cosmos Cannisters… They’re filled with nitrous oxide… Supposedly, it’s a euphoric high… I don’t know why it’s mostly black people doing it… No, I haven’t done it… Because I like when they say it feels like they were somewhere else, another dimension, gone for hours, days, weeks—como se dice, “staycation?” Unas vacaciones en casa, pero mas dura? Monts of vacation inside of a few minutes? Real vacations to where, Celeste? And how do I get the time off for us to go with all this work? 

She’d missed the gentle attempt at a polite brush-off for her suggested joint vacation. Lee suspected she was unclear about his emotional value to her, though she was “certain” in a wildly overestimated way about his financial value. That this specific intellectual and emotional admixture can reliably produce gift-giving from women is a well-known fact. The reliability of this somewhat rare, but nonetheless real, phenomenon only increases when the woman is under the strong impression the man pouring and stirring this volatile psychological mix is indifferent to her attention.

The next night, last night—the first evening of what would become a heat wave that lasted the remainder of July—they drank until midnight at the bar of a fusion Korean restaurant. Lee hadn’t planned on taking her to the apartment. But after she’d had to dump him in the back seat of an Uber and the tote him like a wounded soldier into the elevator, it was something of a foregone conclusion she’d be in his bed.

As she pulled off his clothes and pushed him onto the couch (at this time in its proper place by the teak end table inherited from his maternal grandmother) she reached into the oversized Hermes bag he’d bought her and procured two large black cannisters with crisp, white nozzles affixed to the end. Laughing, she said something about how they could both go on a staycation and then maybe at the beginning of August head out on a real trip—at which point he blacked out…

Lee opened his eyes. Peeling off the sofa leather, he groped around the cracks of the cushions, found his phone, switched on the camera light, and began searching the living room, then kitchen. Shoved into the bottom shelf of the refrigerator door, two coal black aluminum columns capped with tiny white tunnels. As the power had been out for only four hours, the cannisters were still cold. Grabbing one with his left hand, Lee ran the refrigerated metal across his face as he dropped back onto the couch. He stared at the can.

From his right hand a beep and a flash. Just as he looked down, the still activated camera light switched off. The phone was dead. No television, internet, and now phone. He took the absence of all three as a sign.

Inserting the nozzle into his head, Lee squeezed the trigger—one, two, three…

*

Before he could count to five, a tremor set in that built at lightning speed, the violent vibrations of which set incalculable neurons to sparking and shorting out. Various fuses in the left prefrontal cortex of his brain began blowing. Lee’s field of vision thrashed in every conceivable direction simultaneously as his ears filled with a nautical roar that obliterated every thought.

The dark of the apartment sprouted innumerable points of light, each one encompassing the entire color palate of the visible spectrum. That profusion of colored points quickly connected one to another, expanded, and rendered the whole of his vision into a swirling rainbow.

In the instant this vortex of hues infused and dissolved every last atom of his physical person—the full spectrum of which he was now a constituent of every portion the light spectrum—that infinite flux of colored light suddenly, violently contracted, slamming together into an infinitesimally small point. In that shrinking mote, whatever it was that Lee now existed as was being crushed—a tremendous pressure suffocating from all directions and dimensions summoning an incomprehensible agony that seemed eternal.

And then a slight crack, a fracture at his compressed core that shattered like the ice of a freshly frozen river hit with both boot heels on a flying leap from the highest point on its bank. White—an infinite expanse of white that was whiter than any white possible in the material world—a searing, uninterrupted and untainted absence.

A bleached ivory of pure emptiness on all sides, it was an unspoiled void. It would have likely remained as such were it not for his suddenly reassembled body—the hands of which he numbly examined with his regenerated sight. Balling and opening them with a sense of wonder, he recalled that these things belonged to humans, obeyed his commands, and so he must be one of them, a human.

Looking up from his flexing digits, he saw another figure, a man, before him in that blank void at only a slight remove.

At a distance Lee would later estimate to have been a gradually but continually fluctuating five to ten yards sat a man behind a large mahogany desk—the feet of which were eagle talons gripping blank, round orbs. The man was tall, broad and white, with silver hair set back on a high forehead.

Bent towards a ledger, he made entries with an antique fountain pen, a stack of correspondence situated to the left of him on the broad desktop. Despite the man being bowed to the ledger, Lee could make out a large moustache above which protruded a bulbous—deformed to the point of hideous, in point of fact—nose with skin that looked like blanched alligator hide.

After a strained but wholly ineffectual effort to approach this seemingly oblivious man in a late Victorian era suit that could have lasted moments or hours—the being that was now dimly aware of having been Lee gave up on trying to close the distance between him and the man progress. With tremendous effort, each foot could step, but not step could gain the purchase needed to advance.

Instead, Lee attempted to speak so the man might know of his presence. As with “physical” movement, here too he encountered a terrible resistance—whether internal or external it was impossible to discern—that required the utmost effort to overcome. Experiencing an almost unbearable agony from trying to formulate words, with the utmost focus of will power he succeeded in producing a single, low syllable—beyond which the onset of an exhaustion that extended past the mere physical forced him to cease attempting another, let alone a full word or sentence.

“The subject is amenable to heat, displaying anemic potential.” The figure seated behind the desk spoke these words without raising his head from his ledger work. “The escutcheon as an untethered parade float. A downpour of shooting stars. You seek a solution but must be heated to produce one.”

At this, Lee managed to blurt “What?”—a question that issued with a shout, relieving him of an enormous internal pressure he instantly realized as the source of that strained agony of movement and speech. A sensation of tremendous relief and relaxation permeated through the bleached ivory dimension in which he seemed to be loitering—and which Lee intuited this strange figure before him “rented,” in some inconceivable way, as a “workspace.”

Without looking up, the man at the desk gave an almost imperceptible nod. “From ebony to ivory through the facets. Put as much money as you will against towels and shirts and go about your business—but never another man’s.”

A sensation not experienced since boyhood overcame Lee all at once—a pulling at his back as his if he was being lifted by the belt loops. He was invisibly hoisted, and the “raise” quickly transformed into a feeling of intense attraction from above that elongated him like a stretched rubber band. A terrible, deafening roar and a horrendous strain equal parts mental and spiritual engulfed him.

As if he was Jonah spat by the whale onto some remote shore, Lee gasped and coughed. The power had returned. Every lamp and overhead light in the living room was switched on. As the cool air from the overhead vent cascaded down, Lee rapidly opened and closed his eyes in an attempt to reconstitute within and then reacclimate to physical reality. With steady, deliberate breaths, he surveyed his naked body in the reflection of the picture window, beyond which now stretched panels of LED lights trapped in towering cubes that stretched as far as his sight could venture.

“Cotton.” He heard it three times, each repetition coming forth with increasing intensity before the fourth and final shout that alerted him to the fact that he—and not his reflection in the windowpane—spoke the word. “Cotton!”

 

*

The following morning, Lee placed half of his savings into shorting cotton futures contracts, then emailed into The Firm that he was sick and taking the rest of the week off until he felt better. By noon he’d made his way down to the boat slips at the Brooklyn Marina. Purchasing an eighteen-pack of Heineken, he toted it and an inherited duffel bag—a WWII affair owned by one of his great-great uncles stuffed with a change of clothes, his laptop, a few bottles of water, and some snacks—aboard a small Herreshoff with polished wooden decks and a mast painted mother of pearl originally purchased by his great grandfather.

Once out of the city, for three days he lazily sailed north up the coast, dropping anchor at various docks overnight to restock on beer and food. For seventy-two hours, he spoke no more than two dozen words, listened to no podcasts, scrolled no social media.

Aside from lines, hooks, shackles, sails and all other manner of nautical gear, the contents of the yacht were sparse. His duffle aside, a half a bottle of tequila from a jaunt he’d made with two friends and three women the prior summer were all that he’d contributed to the current contents of the boat.

Beyond that, a bench compartment of life vests, an assortment of nautical-themed knickknacks, jugs of water, bed linens, towels, and, of course, maps. Above the bed hung a mobile of prisms—“light chimes” his mother had called them—he’d hung there with his grandfather as a child. He opened the drawer in the built-in nightstand by the head of the bed.

As always, there sat a pocket New Testament and a pair of guns—a six shot flare pistol sealed in a clear waterproof bag and a military issue Colt 1911 with an extra clip that had seen action in the First World War. Removing the pistol, he held it up in the light of a porthole, slipped the magazine out, racked the slide, ejected the chamber round and caught it as it twisted through the air of the cabin.

As the waves gently rocked the boat, he examined the bullet for two or three minutes before thumbing it into the magazine, which he then smacked back snug in the grip of the pistol. As he bent to replace the handgun, he noticed what he’d first taken to be papering on the bottom of the drawer.

It was a print periodical—the only piece of reading material aside from the Bible and nautical maps on the Herreshoff. A yellow-paged and steadily disintegrating Farmer’s Almanac from the year he was born. Replacing the pistol, he opened the Almanac to a random page, landing on a diagram done in the style of something from the Renaissance.

A naked man bounded on all sides by a wheel stood with a cloak draped over one arm and a club in the other. Stationed along the wheel like numbers on an analog clock were twelve figures, human and animals, each partitioned off in their own segmented section and each tethered to different parts of the man’s body with cords. At the top of the page were the words Homo Signorum. Lee lay on down on the bed and began reading in the humid air until daylight faded to the moon’s glow…

He slept only three to four hours in the final stage of that first night and each night subsequent night. After finishing the almanac, every other evening was filled staring up from the cabin’s bed at the mobile of prisms. He stared as the moonlight struck them, stared until achieving trance, at which point his waking mind gave way and collapsed into unconsciousness.

Every night, a single fevered dream: A fire raged beneath a bulbous glass container, inside of which a solid dark substance heated down to a viscous black liquid that bubbled and, as the flames grew more intense, began to evaporate.

Waking in the morning heat, he’d then lie motionless watching the sunlight strike through one of the portholes and set a collection of rainbows waltzing over the sweat soaked sheets and the wood paneling. Watching the colors reel and spin on the morning of the third day, he rose—ten pounds lighter from loss of water weight and minimal food intake over the last few days—toweled off, powered up his laptop, and connected to the Satlink. Before he could even check the terminal, the news popped up in his feed.

A once-in-a-half-millennium cyclone had slammed across India. It reconstituted in the Pacific, grew even stronger and ravaged swaths of Southeast Asia before flooding some of the best farmland in China. Buildings smashed to matchsticks, dams burst, ports ruined.

Lee held off covering the position until a half hour before the market closed. The profit after taxes was $10 million. Within an hour his phone wailed ceaselessly. He’d used the Firm’s blotter feed and terminals to make the personal trades to get better fills and minimize fees. This had made the trades visible on the blotter feed. All this had auto-reported to the compliance dashboard.

The jaws of IT and Compliance had come unhinged, and quickly the gossip spread. Big bosses, sub bosses, would-be managers and formerly distant co-workers, his only two friends on the thirty-second floor of The Firm’s high-rise—he’d made the trade on his private account, which was within the company terminal, making it visible to all these as well as anyone in the office that was logged in for the day.

An unceasing pinging of Slack messages and a phone that wouldn’t stop ringing heralded an onslaught of congratulations and questions: “How did you do it?” “Luckiest trade of the century.” “Providence!” “Let’s go for drinks tomorrow.” “Where are you now?—I’ll send a car. Off the coast of northern Connecticut?”

“Jesus, are you going to quit?”

 

*

In the next four weeks, Lee made himself an additional $20 million in private trades and the firm $150 million. Like an unhooded falcon, the SEC swooped down fast and tore through every digital file and scrap of paper, but could produce zero evidence, let alone proof, of any insider trading.

Alone, this was the stuff of legend—the kind of run rare since just before the tech-bubble burst in the late 90s. Paired with his behavior in and out of the office, however, it was a mixture of matters the likes of which transform legends into myths.

Out all night at executive soirees held in the most exclusive members clubs in the financial district and the upper east side, then partying on super yachts with venture capitalists and old money. After which it was partying in afterhours clubs or warehouses with Celestina—to whom, it was rumored, he gave $2 million in cash to disappear back to Columbia, and of which it was certain she’d vaporized to the final particle from the lives of her friends, companions, and acquaintances.

Towards the end of the second week, he was given a corner office. At which point the “research” commenced. Tabs and tabs open on every laptop and desktop computer. He visited his office at The Firm no more than three days a week, coming in late, executing his miraculous trades within a matter of minutes and then spending four or five hours with an array of LLMs, Wikipedia pages, 4chan posts, and social media accounts flung across the three massive plasma screens which formed an illuminated crescent atop the mahogany, Victorian desk he’d had shipped over by air freight from an antiques dealer in Liverpool.

Perfectly coiffed and shaven but with eyes that appeared as if they been soldered open and injected with strobing liquid electrons, he flitted through a galaxy of tabs covering the gilded age, ancient chemistry, modern chemistry, the effects of various narcotics on brain chemistry, the effects of neurotransmitters on thought, the obscure writings of renaissance doctors, the scientific findings of Goethe, pre-Islamic Persian myths, and of course any bit of biographical information he could dig up about the mythical founder of The Firm—Jupiter himself.

Despite the mania, Lee never entirely relieved himself of discretion. At no point did he bring Cannisters into the office. A fear of such sacred information falling—even in its raw, un-synthesized form—into the hands of neophytes and fools led to no notes from his various tabs being placed in digital files. Every observation and connection about Greek humors, or calculation of the interactions between Adderall and N2O or THC was penned with a Montblanc Meisterstück 149 across three dozen massive leatherbound notebooks—the spines of which he used a Faberge letter opener to carve volume numbers in Roman numerals and his initials into—which he hauled in and out of the office in his grandfather’s duffel for security purposes.

If he had to attend some high flying social function immediately after wrapping up his monomaniacal researches, the journal-stuffed duffel would go into a safe he’d had installed in the office. The invaluable contents locked away securely, he’d then slide elbow-to-elbow at apex social functions, breathing the perfumed mists of rarefied air before slipping home at or near the witching-hour to fill his nostrils and set sail through firmaments insensible.

He’d added a few minor embellishments to the setup from that first July night, the most important of which was the module of prisms. He’d taken them from the boat and used a folding ladder to hang them above the spot where he’d initially positioned the couch before the picture window, and to which he returned it each night.

Naked, with the main breaker for the apartment switched off, he’d then fire a cannister up his nostril and be off. Each time the process was virtually identical, with The Founder, Jupiter, beginning the interaction with a series of seemingly nonsense statements, ending it with one or two cryptic sentences that would indicate for Lee to go long or short on cobalt, lithium, pharmaceutical companies dealing in telomere elongation technologies (“Reaching for elixirs made to draw out the days of Odysseus’s faithful son” as old Jupiter put that one and Lee filled half a notebook deciphering), uranium, silk, and so on. 

But somewhere in the first ten days of rare sleep and regimented chemical sojourn, the primary allure began to shift. Lee became less interested in the quasi-supernatural strings of words concluding each meeting, those half-riddled Delphic boons that had elevated him financially and socially. The dimension itself took primacy of interest. At this stage, the serenity of that glaring, album void became his obsession.

He’d first become aware of that feeling after the third or fourth visit—an all-permeating sensation of incomparable calm and stillness. A state of being more profound than even peace. For peace doesn’t infuse one with a sort of radiant self-confidence which transmutes into a trust in the Divine. Unperturbed peace—with its psychic consistency of freshly laundered and ironed bedsheets—doesn’t imbue the one experiencing it with the conviction that they’re a microcosmic stitch in the infinite fabric of consciousness.

Much more than the words of Jupiter, this state-of-being engendered by the dimension—or from which it was composed?—is what drew him back again and again. So much so that eventually the old man’s utterances presented to Lee as diabolical intrusions into that transcendent serenity.

The first 50% of any statement was essentially gibberish. Half of the tabs on his monitors in Manhattan and Brooklyn were devoted to decipherments that terminated in dust coated dead ends. A good portion of the maniacal analyses could best be summed up as the frenzied compilation of antique glossaries—cataloguing reams of random, archaic terms, persons, and places, an external hard drive’s worth of esoteric references like rubido, albedo, negrado, Paracelsus, Scorpio, Antares, Strasbourg Cathedral, the Italian Notebooks, etc.

None of these terms were beyond discovering the literal meaning or history of. But the connections between each term—the occluded meanings in each that did or didn’t pertain to that radiant dimension, the fabric of waking reality, the history of the human species, his own life—these were obscure almost to the point of imperceptibility.

Only the stock-riddles and askew investing tips could be constellated in any understandable pattern or applied to personal benefit—and even then, only after tremendous, frenzied exertions of Adderall-powered research.

The initial, hyper-cryptic phrases, sentences, and sometimes harangues that constituted ninety percent of old Jupiter’s speech—these became his obsession. Not only because Lee intuited they held the key to understanding and permanently accessing that transcendent realm, but because every bit of that seeming gibberish reverberated in his core, producing a similar sensation to one experienced in his boyhood.

Each quasi-intelligible statement harmonized with the memory of the repeated hammerings of the kickstart his father gave to a Vincent Black Shadow on the autumn afternoons of Lee’s pre-teen years. Those recondite statements produced the same sudden, aggressive bursts of racket that heralded the glorious roar of power that preceded a blast of forward thrust. He could feel each kick rattle him in anticipation of that thunderclap, arms wrapped around his father in preparation of the break-neck ride beneath the winding arbors and leaf strewn roads of Rhinebeck or Fishkill.

But as much as Lee cherished that bygone sensation of meteoric propulsion, it was not what he desired. He wanted the stillness and wholeness, the perfect and silent understanding of the bleached ivory in which he and the Founder were the only stains—each “physically” separated from the other by an unbridgeable chasm of five feet and a barrier to comprehension that he swore to tear down.

 

*

As the cosmic rituals increased the frequency of his dreams decreased. By two weeks of twice daily inhalations, they were sparse and smeared. At three weeks the capacity for dreams dissolved into blackness. Though he couldn’t recall precisely when, Lee had repositioned the mobile of prisms—the “light chimes”—above his bed.

Waking flat on his back in twisted sheets, each morning he’d observe the prisms and their multicolored shrapnel dancing in the breeze of the overhead A.C. vent as the light cascaded through the east facing window of his bedroom. Across all four corners of the room, a hundred shatters of rainbow gently veering. Interdimensional “staycations” aside, it was the most peaceful part of his day.

Perhaps for an hour or hour and a half, he’d lay entranced by some earthbound force weakly struggling within his marrow to absorb enough energy from that dancing light to energize him into action. Then he’d rise, bathe, dress, and either make trades from home, head to the office, or meet some of the newly enamored from The Firm for lunch.

And then one morning, tracking the detritus of Noah’s bond-promise as the crystals swung hither and thither, he rose with only the thought of shaving. Running the razor across the lather, he stared carefully into reflected pupils and saw with a sight other than what waking vision can produce an unending arctic plane mute with snow—a frozen, limitless naught resting in a small sphere three inches above the vertebrae that hitches spine to skull.

Peering through his pupils and into his own recesses, he surveyed that interior arctic waste and found that while life was suddenly brighter, it was no warmer. In every direction the snow-covered steppe of his inner-most being ran to infinity—a sterile version of Jupiter’s own abode that revealed to him (through that mysterious, barely perceptible intelligence whose presence he could feel but not discern) the emptiness and hardness of what he’d managed to smuggle back to the material world on his sojourns.

Worrying over reputation and status had given his life focus. Alleviating those burdens temporarily invigorated Lee. But from co-workers to casual hook-ups and “friends,” the brilliance of the expanse within him only illuminated how hollow, cold, and unrelenting those interactions were.

In physical, three-dimensional space the moments that mattered most since that initial trip were the trio of days spent floating alone in relative silence on the Herreshoff, that first waking hour of tracking rainbows waltzing across the sheets and walls of his bedroom, and the hours of furious research upon his Victorian desk which towered above the roil and gurgle of the city.

Lee made resolutions and preparations. He would collate and compare every line in those three dozen notebooks, fill a dozen more with his insights if need be, in order to comprehend. With whatever was decipherable he would storm the bleached ivory and wring answers from the old man. Increasing the dose of amphetamine to double the prescription limit would—his research indicated—likely generate more intense and vivid visions.

This could work, he thought as he dressed hastily, but what about duration? He needed more time. Not simply to enjoy that peace, but to command the full attention of stately Jupiter. Speaking to the old man demanded a tremendous effort that, thus far, had yielded only a handful of words.

Without an extension, he’d have to strain his mind to the point of destruction to produce even a pair of sentences. But in achieving that feat of concentration, he’d likely have little energy—despite how much additional time he could gain through altering the proportion of the nostrum he’d concocted—left to spare for any follow up reply to old Jupiter’s answer before being wrenched back to sweat-slicked sofa leather.

He struggled to lace his shoes. Repeated use, it was true, caused brain damage. Dents and tears to the hardware could accumulate to the point of having a totaled nervous system rather quickly—a fact he’d been aware of even before his first excursion, but which was increasingly salient with every trip. As acclaim and acquisition had transmuted to a mouthful of ashes, Lee had begun to worry that the mental frame was already warping from repeated impacts during transit.

But without a faith beyond that blank dimension and that hulking old man bent to the ledger as he reeled off cryptic sentence fragments and riddles, what was the true danger? To find what matters what matter is it to ruin the material, to wreck the body? Hit after hit if necessary, he assured himself.

What did shuttling back and forth until one left the road in a tumbling corkscrew of destruction even matter? What importance if he burnt up? Who was there to mourn?

 

*

There was no normal, protracted period of silence. The founder’s voice instantly shattered the standard, initial peace that accompanied a full constitution within the ivory void. “Arrivals or departures, young Galahad, which is it?” came the first question that had ever been posed to him by The Founder in those sixty-odd journeys.

Old Jupiter licked a finger beneath his Walrus moustache and bulbous, deformed nose, pinched the corner of the still unseeable ledger sheet he’d just finished filling out, then turned the page without donating as much as a glance of acknowledgement to Vernheist. “Any question,” he put his pen to a new page, “is futile until you concentrate on the cliché: Are you coming or going, and what’s the difference?”

With the utmost intensity, Lee strained to produce a response. A sensation of profound discomfort built within. In a reduced form, it was the same extreme compression that proceeded his customary entrance to the dimension. It built a tremendous, near-debilitating internal pressure as he struggled to squeeze the words from himself. As the first syllables rose slowly but steadily from his core, he experienced a disembodied, immaterial smothering. It was a diamond-birthing pressure—suffusing the entire dimension, collapsing the expanse of nothing along with himself, crushing everything but the unbothered old man.

A sharp BANG resonated to and from every direction as the founder smashed one of his broad palms on the surface of the desk. “Nonsense is what you’ve heard half the time because true concentration is beyond you. At a rap of the hand, you’ve lost it now. A skeleton key of Volksdrugs grown tall and tucked under arm as a bone crutch. You limp forth addle brained to hack up frail requests for angels, florijns, and paper notes. Focusing on what matters least you receive in abundance the like. Now you presume to thunder after answers you were given from the start—truths you brushed aside for paltry sums.”

Stilling his fountain pen, Jupiter raised his head. Locked upon Lee were two eyes of blinding, molten gold. The Founder’s gaze pierced him through, instantly deflating the pressure that had nearly compacted Lee into a spiritual full stop as result of trying to speak.

“Back and forth, back and forth, but nothing in between the teeth, between the poles, between the thoughts. Every escape advances towards nothing and every advance escapes nothing. Until you resolve to go further into nowhere, you’ll have none of what you most desire. Going nowhere in life is what brought you here. Beyond here is what you seek and is accessible only by ceasing to scurry.” The aged Jupiter bent the thick neck within his Victorian dress coat, casting that citrinitas gaze back to the ledger. “Do not come again until you’ve gone to the middle of the map, abandoned yourself as the subject and discovered yourself as the object.”

Eyes to the ledger, Jupiter flicked an index finger in the direction of Lee, “Dismissed.”

Like a bolt lightning, he ejected. Naked in the bed instead of on the couch, both eyes shot open. As he gasped for air, the prisms overhead swayed in the vent’s artificial breeze. Lee made to move but couldn’t.

To stifle the panic, he inhaled and exhaled slowly and evenly—box breathing as he silently observed the faint glints of the prisms. Within five minutes the fear passed. Exerting the utmost effort, soon after that he was able to blink, at which point he relaxed, observing the wan light of the crystals waltz around the room.

As his body steadily regained sensation and movement, he tracked the rainbows and listened to the muffled, eternal racket of shouts, horns, bangs, and screeches that wafted up from the slightly higher than sea level position of the asphalt.

He could not comprehend how he could hear them that high up. He could not comprehend how he’d wound up in his bed when he’d launched himself from the usual spot in the living room. He did not comprehend anything.

Tracking the shatters of the visible spectrum swaying in the wan light, he sank to sleep with both eyes open. 

*

From sunrise to sunset, he walked. Up to and across Pulaski Bridge, through Long Island city and Hunter’s point with the buildings squat and brown cutting into his vision like rigid, angular eruptions from a pop-up children’s book. Three hundred steps and each page would heave leftward in a lazy fashion as a new set of tenements and office buildings hove upward before him like cut, painted, and glossed cardboard.

On and on like this until crossing over the Queensboro bridge and having the light off the water practically scrape the blue out of his irises. The sound of slowly turning gears acted like a sonic substrate in his ears that rumbled just below the screeches, honks, shouts, bicycle bells, and rattling base of sound systems that blew like a scalding wind over him as he moseyed in a fugue state towards Manhattan.

The entire journey was propelled by thoughts unbidden and unbounded. Thoughts that were not his own and which wound through his myelin like serpents slithering into a culvert that would transport their scaled bellies from cold dark to warm noon sunshine—all while the machinery of God’s own mold-and-press minted fresh images while the invisible pistons driving that cookie cutter multiplication boomed and shrieked from every direction.

Without any conscious exertion, information Lee had never acquired transited through his skull as he drifted. Unknown facts bloomed like botanical time lapses, shifting with every twist and turn he made along his unplanned route before fading in tandem with the materialization of new strands of bridge cables, sections of guardrails, city blocks, and neighborhoods.

Casimir Pulaski’s cold, grapeshot-riddled body wrapped in a shroud that was painted with a square and compasses, shoved from the deck of the Wasp into the waters of the faraway South’s Savannah. Dutchmen in capotains and breeches smoking sotweed from churchwarden pipes while resting against the surveying chains they’d just marched through the fields of what would become Hunter’s point. A slender Japanese man furiously sketching a manicured garden as the whir and clang of a printing press thrummed behind brick walls to his rear.

And in addition to these visions of historic figures unknown to Lee until the very moment of their entering his mind, the names, faces, and last words of centuries’ worth of bodies coming to a stop between the rail of the bridge and the bed of the river—falling bodies frozen in midair. In his mind’s eye and bleeding into Lee’s physical vision, a frozen tableau of descending bodies halted side-by-side and stagger-stepped—a ghostly candlestick chart of human suicides stretching across the decades that ran alongside the guidewires from the top of the bridge to the less dramatic but no less despondent souls that had opted for the fast short drop and simply hopped the bridge railing—all of them halted in midair between the East River and the Queensboro Bridge.

Each and every step further churning this psychic maelstrom of unknown and, by any logical metric, unknowable facts as the sun wrung every bit of moisture into his shorts and shirtsleeves. The footpath melting beneath him to the point where Lee could feel the fraying molecules in his shoe soles sway and split apart like dandelions in a gust of wind.

But in the instant of that first solid footfall on patrilineal land, ancestral ground, a total cessation of dazzle and racket. From that stillness resolved a destination. A voice within—flat but stern—stated a location terminus. With clear coordinates punched into his motor cortex by this mysterious but familiar voice, Lee made a journey of miles in what seemed like an instant—traversing the distance with the impersonality and ease of a belt driven airport walkway.

At which point he found himself standing on the sidewalk roughly 22 yards away from a twenty-four-foot-tall ruby red cube with a hole through its center. Balanced on single corner, Lee experienced the cube with awe and dread. Before the giant statue he stood motionless, the blood in his veins thinner than bone broth. The entirety of his consciousness flowed into that enormous cylindrical hole at the center of the crimson metal cube.

How long this vaguely sinister reverie lasted is unknowable, but what terminated the trance was the din of a crashing tree. He glanced over his shoulder to the street. A good five yards behind him, at the far edge of the sidewalk, a Toyota Sequoia had hit a Brink’s truck head-on. The Toyota was hissing smoke and spilling gas onto the asphalt as Lee matter-of-factly removed the phone from his pocket and texted his resignation—effective immediately—to the Firm, the main office building which stood no more than twenty-two survey square chains to the northeast.

The instant he sent the text, he dimly perceived that someone or something was beckoning him. A divine, magnetic force pulled him, directed his footsteps as close as possible to the statue. With each step, the tumult of shouts of those around him rushing toward or away from the wreck and the distant but approaching sirens grew increasingly muffled in his ears. His eyes were fixed on the cube.

After he’d walked fifteen or so yards away from the far edge of the sidewalk, a blast rocked the air. A spark or a stray cigarette or some bit of electricity had ignited the gasoline. The force from the Toyota’s explosion knocked him unconscious before his knees hit the ground. When the side of his head struck the concrete only feet from the statue’s base, he was in no state to be aware of it.

….Wherever he was, it was dusk and there was a river cutting through an uninhabited mountain valley. A fat, severe looking man with a German air about him skipped stones across the river. He was dressed like a down-at-heel Peter Pan but with a cape and a large, orange, floppy hat and a wide leather belt covered in pouches with a broadsword fastened to it. In the quiet evening, some of the rocks he skipped failed to reach the far shore of the river and sank with a plop. The stones that made it across, however, transformed into Vitruvian men—each one naked, wide eyed, dazed—that then wandered off towards the far mountains. In a hypnotically rhythmic fashion that never saw him bend to the ground to collect a stone, the fat German must have skipped a hundred rocks all secreted in the palm of his left hand, and seventy-five must have made it across to turn to flesh and stagger barefoot towards the snowcapped peaks…

Lee awoke to a blinding light directly in his eye and point-blank shouts. “Sir, sir, sir, can you hear me?!?” As his vision coalesced, Lee realized he was on his back in the plaza, staring upward. But it was not the sun that blinded him, it was a pen light. He sensed a pair of tiny, latex-covered fingers against his neck as he groaned.

The light moved away and the first thing he could see was a paramedic’s uniform. Just above the shapely breast pocket was a name tag: “Crystal.” A deafening racket filled his ears. Shouts and wailing sirens, blasting firehoses—in the time he’d been unconscious, the Brinks’ truck had also caught fire, and the entire emergency services crew had arrived to put out the flames and treat injured bystanders.

Lee felt a gust of hot wind and from the corner of one eye saw a burning banknote somersault like a French circus acrobat across the concrete in the red and white flash of an ambulance’s lights.

“Sir, sir, you’re fine. I need you to look at me, I need you to follow this light.” Halfway through following the pen light from left to right, Lee saw her face. She looked no older than twenty-two, had the largest and palest green eyes he’d ever seen, a sharp pixie nose, high cheekbones, unmarked alabaster skin, and platinum hair that was pulled into a ponytail.

“Sir, sir, I need you to follow the light.” Lee continued to stare into her eyes as she tried to keep him immobile.

“I am. But you’re not moving,” he answered. She stammered, and he thought she blushed slightly. At which point, he passed out.