Autumn Christian
BEAUTIFUL SURFACES, TERRIBLE DEPTHS
Reality 0
James got the notification he was already dead when we first kissed in the elevator. Maybe I should've noticed something was wrong by the way he tensed when I touched the neural-link at the base of his neck. Or how he grew quiet when I wanted to argue with him about the nature of reality as we laid together naked in my hotel room.
But he didn't tell me that his vision swarmed with biometric errors as he came. His body uncoiled beside me, all sinuous and acute geometry. A pool of city neon tangled with the bed sheets. His Versace belt lay on the hardwood floor next to my thrift store jeans.
His readout gave him less than six months to live. The cancer would spread like a languid, rotten tongue across his spine. It traced the patterns it'd later push through his bones, filling in its malignant cavity.
If I'd known I probably wouldn't have draped myself across him and asked, "Why do you want to live in a sick body?" I wouldn't have said, "You could be a great writer, if only you got rid of this delusion you have about your own hopelessness. It infuriates me. You've made a cognitive error. It's consuming you."
"Hmm," James said, exhaling smoke. "I suppose that could be true."
I thought he was staring up at the ceiling. But he was really staring down into the tunnel of his own broken DNA inside the neural-link panel, searching through the factory of stars that generated his early death, trying to find the dust on the lid of our reality, a raw and open spot in the seamless stream of infinite data where an error could've been made.
Reality 2
I stayed up all night reading Nietzsche because the idea of eternal recurrence haunted me. Even after dying and being reborn, squealing underneath the warm bath of vitro fluids, I knew I still had a slave mentality.
I wanted to believe I found it difficult to take responsibility for my own life because I'd been woken up by a recalcitrant machine, pins swelling on my tongue, metallic fingers jammed into unfamiliar hardware sockets. But if I was being honest with myself I was always looking for an excuse.
Once they took the feeding tube out of my throat, I demanded to speak with a lawyer. I had no desire to go through this whole fucking thing again.
And yet.
I found that once alive, I didn't want to succumb to the nothingness again. My cowardice kept me in a gridlock of weakness where I couldn't completely commit to either option. Life or death.
At seven months pregnant I bought a copy of James Seward’s latest bestseller, "Vacuous Gravity," at a signing event. I waited at the back of the bookstore until I was the last person there. I waddled over to the signing table, my flip flops slapping against the linoleum, belly straining against my t-shirt. When I put his book down in front of him he stared at me for a moment, trying to place me. Past realities always came to us as broken memories. Like the glue had evaporated between the strands of sense data.
Then he remembered. An animal in his eyes touched mine.
"Stop narrating me," I said. "I can practically hear it. Something about how I'm a shadow of my youth. A faded beauty. Blah blah. You male writers are all the same."
"Stop narrating me," he said as he signed his book for me. "Probably something like 'He's just a vapid shadow wearing Dolce & Gabana... a dangerous cloud where a man should've been.' That about right?"
"Fine," I said. "We'll both agree to stop narrating. Truce?"
Later we stood in the alleyway. He smoked a cigarette. I stared at the distant city lights with his book tucked underneath my arm.
"You didn't visit me," he said. "When I was dying."
"Well," I said. "You didn't ask me to."
Nietzsche would've laughed at me, because that's exactly what a slave would've said.
The baby kicked inside me hard enough that I groaned. I tried to imagine myself being something more. A woman who was more than an angry voice, an empty hallway housing a broken chandelier.
But I just saw James, skin like gray crepe, surrounded by beeping machines, an oxygen tube smeared with spray tan solution. I knew later I'd read his book with two of my fingers pressed inside me, unable to orgasm, my imagination a rotting thing, wishing both of us were better than we were.
Reality 3
God used to be a blank space. But in Reality 3 God was a Chinese man named Lin Qiáo who invented a new kind of quantum cryptocurrency that ran on consciousness. The dead weren't allowed to rest as long as money could be made.
I met James again in a restaurant in Neo Los Angeles, where the dawn never came. He sat alone as he dined on cod in miso and drank shisho tea. It was the first reality I'd seen him eat anything in.
I sat down beside him, tugging on the train of my shimmering black dress.
"This reality fucking sucks," I said. "Everything here is beautiful and I hate it."
"It does seem to be lacking a certain dramatic tension," he said.
"You can't even cut yourself without having the wound heal immediately," I said. "How lame is that? I bet this whole thing totally ruins your brand."
“You have no idea.”
He wouldn't dance with me when the band began to play, but he liked to watch. I tossed my hair back and my necklace broke, showering the dance floor in gold and pearls. Then the beads formed back together, a strand floating backwards, and wrapped itself once more around my neck. Later we climbed the side of a skyscraper, our feet buoyed up by anti-gravity settings, and he laughed at me as I screamed at God.
"Fuck you Lin Qiáo!" I said as I leaned backwards in levitating suspension, my feet against a window. "Delete me, you coward!"
You'd think in a world without death, I'd stop being afraid. But when I looked down the side of the skyscraper, the reflection of the ocean crashing underneath him, I saw death rotting in the center of my eye. A smear where he should've been. I couldn't see him. Not really.
Even my tears shone incandescent. And no matter how far I looked forward, it seemed that everything always ended in tears.
Reality 487
I shred all my writing contracts and climbed into a cradle of alternate realities I installed in my apartment bedroom. I didn’t want to fall asleep alone anymore, so I let machines try to milk the loneliness away.
My muscles atrophied while I pretended to be a waitress in a strip mall Mexican cafe. When I was serving warm tortillas and trays of frozen margaritas to visitors from other universes, I thought I could forget where I’d really come from. I thought I could hide my grief from myself, like a magic coin pressed up a sleeve.
But one day I glanced up through the window, past the neon Modelo sign, and saw James standing on the other side of the street. He didn’t see me, but I knew it was him. He wore a blazer that swallowed the lamp light. From the angle I stood it looked like the threads of smoke from his cigarette shot all the way to the chain of satellites above.
I disgorged myself from my fake life and went back to my bedroom. It was nighttime and colors had been leeched from the world.
I rolled to the edge of my bed, my stomach pressed against the edge. The darkly patterned carpet looked like an abyss without a bottom.
I kissed the vial around my neck that I kept a lock of my dead son's hair. It felt like the bare mattress burned against my bare skin as my shirt rode up, and when I swallowed I felt like ash dribbled down my throat.
Seeing James again evoked a haunted nest of memories. I couldn't escape the feeling that I'd left something undone. That I was supposed to do something in another lifetime, and that if I didn't figure out what it was I was going to be lost forever. Belly on the abyss. A woman who'd never been brave enough to damn herself by eating something forbidden.
Reality 8942389
James texted me: I have cancer.
I thought about sending a message back, but I never did. The phone slipped from my hands and I fell asleep dreaming of a man spitting out flies, at the far end of a lonely hallway.
Reality 9123098492368
I had to have my AI helper send a message to James, because I was too sick and could no longer move my arms.
"I keep thinking about that story you wrote about that man who spreads this venereal disease. And I wanted to say it's boring. Please stop being boring. You have the philosophy of a serial killer. It always ends the same for serial killers. Boring."
He didn't respond. I didn't expect him to. Everyone I knew was dying in hospital beds, alone, in separate parts of the universe. It made me feel ashamed that I'd ever laughed at anything.
Reality 99999.999(Recursive)
My consciousness split apart into fractal mirrors. My head exploded into divergent possibilities. I’d become digital, a dancing solid state, so that my awareness was present through every synapse, every cell. I became one with the universe and my shadow burned away. Time was spatial, and now that I could see in all dimensions I found that reality was a circle, like a shimmering egg.
My first act of God was to play with the rainbow colors of every permutation of myself.
I found out why I couldn't feel love. I didn't understand the arithmetic of the universe and so had become its prisoner. I'd lashed out and made the world hate me. I'd put myself in a recursive loop of pain. I had made myself a failure by design. Nietzsche had been right. Of course he'd been fucking right about everything.
Even as I denied my own power over my life I could do nothing but use it.
When I became bored of trying to know myself, I reversed the universe, delved into its machinery, and tried to fix the eternal error. I tried to make sure my son never had to die. I tried to make my husband love me again. I tried to cure death itself. Make us shining and precious eternal beings.
But no matter how much I tried to rearrange and shape the gleaming center of existence, no matter how much I turned and twisted it, observing it from every dimension and angle, the rules didn't bend for me.
I couldn't go back to that place before his conception, put a breaker in the code, and stop James from dying. I couldn't rearrange his DNA so that the sickness wouldn't spread, that he wouldn't bloom toxins, his mass exhaling soft tumors. There was no error.
I discovered that even when a God cries, prying apart the nucleus of each atom in existence, nothing changes. And it never would.
Even a God could be a slave.
I sighed and exhaled stars, spattered white-hot tears made of cosmic heat.
And when I came to the end of infinity and back around, I found there was only way to go.
Back in. To the beginning.
Reality 0
I walked down the long, dark hallway toward the back room where James lay dying. I asked his caretaker to wait outside. The room smelled of antiseptic, but it couldn't cover up the scent of cancer. It was like a rotting flower. A fist inside of overripe pulp.
A slice of moonlight seemed to cut his ragged body in half. An IV snaked away into the darkness. Every breath he took seemed like a miracle.
I hesitated in the doorway. A thousand lives, fractionated realities split off into eternity, and I still thought maybe there was a way to escape from this moment. That there'd been some kind of error I wasn't able to find, that death itself was some kind of error. I thought maybe we wouldn't always end up here and that I wouldn't have to go through with this.
I'd reread one of his books on the flight to Los Angeles. I'd fallen asleep with my head against the window, the book splayed out on my lap. I dreamed of the gleaming demonic streets of Los Angeles. Corpses walking backwards. Parasites pretending to be vampires bending over to kiss my throat. I always hated the way his writing insinuated himself into my dreams. It meant he'd gotten to me. A choke hold I couldn't deny.
But I knew I'd never get another book from him, at least not in this reality, so for once I welcomed the intrusion.
"I brought you cigarettes," I said. "Please keep it a secret."
I took his oxygen tube out of his nose and lit the cigarette for him. I was careful not to get it near the bed-sheets as the flame flared with all the extra oxygen in the room. I placed the cigarette between his cracked lips, and he reached up with a slender hand to hold it in place.
Then I shut the door behind me and took off my clothes.
"I've been thinking," I said as I stepped out of my skirt.
"Careful," he said, and his body shuddered as he smiled.
"Nietzsche said the idea of eternal recurrence was the most burdensome thought," I said. "He wasn't kidding."
I walked back to the edge of the bed, and sank down onto the mattress. The box-springs groaned. I pulled my hair behind my shoulders and exposed my collar bones to the juice of the darkness.
I climbed on top of him. He couldn't have been any more than ninety pounds by that point. I hesitated. I was afraid of hurting him. It seemed like the slightest movement would crush him. My uterus tensed in the way it did when I saw dead animals by the side of the road. I almost stopped. I almost put my clothes back on and walked out the door.
But then I remembered what I'd seen screaming at the edge of a thousand realities. All those times I could have come, and I didn't. I saw the woman who had been too afraid to even see him, like I could somehow stop what was happening if I ignored it. The woman who saw the truth over and over again and tried to burn her eyes out. She always died a slave.
It was difficult for him to get hard, but I managed to slip his cock inside of me. He was semi-soft and cold, his heartbeat slowed like it'd been ensconced in glass. I wasn't even sure he'd be able to feel me, but when I thrust against him his eyes rolled in the back of his head. He moved as if to take the cigarette out of his mouth, but I stopped him.
"Don't," I said. "I always thought you were so fucking sexy when you smoked."
He reached up to touch my face, and the smell of acrid death bloomed upwards between us. I thrust harder, so that his whole body heaved underneath me. I orgasmed to the sound of his heart rate monitor beeping a warning. And when it was over I began to cry. Then I laughed. Heaving, gulping, shivering waves of emotion that enfolded into each other until I didn't know up from down.
"What's wrong?" he asked me.
I wiped away the wetness on my face, and bent down, spine open to the closed door, the emptiness behind me, to hold him. It felt like he was fading in and out of consciousness in my arms. He twitched with irregular motion. The cigarette, still lit, slipped out from his mouth. I stubbed it out.
The truth was it always did end in tears. But it always started with a bang.
"Nothing's wrong," I said, and for the first time in all my lives it didn't feel like a lie, "Nothing at all. Everything's perfect."