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back Synchronicity by Paul Garner, Peter Wilson, Sue Elaine Number of episodes: 13 Words of previous episode revealed to each author: all of story "It's not set in stone..." "...everything's going according to plan." "There is no plan..." "...it's a long way home..." "...I have no home." "Where are we going with this?" "...from where we are now..." "...where are we?" The sky cracked open under a marbled polystyrene ceiling, shining rays from the light of Creation directly into Xeno's forehead. He lay back on the bed rigid, transfixed, as the voices around him drifted past. "Each moment-pair..." "...doppelganger-tachyon cancellation interaction..." "...supersymmetric diffraction ripple..." Slowly the light faded, allowing more of the room to shine dully through. There weren't many details to take in; pale-brown hessian wall panels, narrow windows up near the ceiling which looked through only to the ceiling of the adjacent internal corridor, mucus-green linoleum floor. The whole scene seemed strangely robbed of depth, as if he were not in a three-dimensional space at all, as if the perspective of the rectangular walls was just an illusion and he was looking at an arrangement of trapezoids on a plane. He still couldn't move, though no longer transfixed by the light. Looking down he saw that he was bound to the bed at arms and legs, and across the torso, by thick leather straps. Suddenly he was afflicted by a hot red pain at the back of his skull, and he convulsed and pushed himself back against the bed, trying to smother the pain against the pillow. As he pushed back he felt the resistance of the bed give way and as it diminished the pain receded, until he was free-falling, numb, weightless. He ceased to perceive time. Xeno cracked open his eyes, and for a moment was blinded by the light overhead. He felt heavy. Sitting up was an effort, but after a few seconds he seemed to get used to it, the movements becoming more natural. "Are you going to sleep here, or catch the next train?" asked a voice. Xeno looked around, and saw a man in blue uniform. "Yeah, man, I'll get on the next one," he replied, not quite understanding what he was saying, letting the response come out without thinking. "Where am I?" he wondered. At a train station it seemed. He spotted the red bisected circle of a London Underground sign. Finchley Central, on the Northern line, apparently. A homing instinct in the back of his mind reassured him that he wasn't far from where he should be going. Probably just a couple of stops on the Tube. It was always like this, he reflected. stick on gods for money loving souls, won't grow up but will grow old, slap on love when all is controlled, badges of compassion on social Darwinist drones. My mating prop well fixed; the ice on Mars is melting, I don't want a DNA trophy. I blink and think about the reception I'm getting. The light is damaging I think; harmful light, who would have thought? Lo-Fi, the drugs seem weaker than they used to. And I'm somewhat disappointed, after almost kicking my work habit I'm on the verge of a new job. I want to lay in the sun. The accent was steep. Like an African marriage proposal in a Western land. Fast and careless, I had an eye on the booty. A week at least since I had felt the warmth inside. The disease might be providing extra urgency, pressure. I got all the eggs out except one. And I did my best to fix the wiring. But the open wound really needs to be looked at. I should see a Doctor. "Doctor, Doctor, did someone call for a Doctor?" "Yes, I did, please help me." "Fine, now, what's the problem?" The white people with mutated feet view of pigeons. They look like those bound feet of the Chinese girls from long, long ago. It's sickening....it's repulsive. Now they have become slaves somehow. Maybe I was tricked into being a slave. They try to speak but they are mute. They sometimes walk around with boxes at the front of their chest saying that they want money for more medicine. The first time, they are very sweet and charming with you. But once you meet them again, they beg for more...wanting more of your money. And you can't help but turn away. Isn't once enough? Those poor wretched souls. On the street or on the road. The yellow sand drifts stinging their eyes with pain. Now my eyes are stinging. I must make it to shelter. Five minutes later I found a place... and boy what a place it is... it's a coffeeshop in tribute to Al Pacino. Why on earth is he idolized? Well, someone has to come up with a theme. A mélange of conflicting experiences drifted across the foreground of Xeno's consciousness, in real-time... I am he, as you are he, as you are me, and we are all together. Shelter, it's all any of us are looking for. Everybody wants the money; the only person who doesn't want it is me - I need it. Xeno sipped his coffee, bitter and tangy, as the many faces of Al Pacino; benevolent, cool, psychotic, looked upon him. He thought how alike he was to the actor, always cutting from scene to scene, living other people's lives, and often out of chronological order. He was part of a New Chronological Order, where the term itself had ceased to hold its meaning. Causality was just an illusion of time-perception-sense anyway and all Xeno knew, or needed to know, was that... shit happens. The hairs prickled on the back of his neck as he felt an eerie sensation, a bit like the flattening of perspective he had experienced earlier, in another room, another strand... only this time he felt that Time itself had somehow been flattened... he felt more strongly than ever that he was stuck in a long now, fixed, immobile, as events and change-illusions paraded themselves in front of him. "Tonight is Scarface night," a waitress he hadn't noticed before announced, suddenly at his shoulder as she placed a polished silver tray, piled high with white powder, on his table. Startled for but a moment, Xeno yelled, "What the heck!" and set at the tray like a human vacuum cleaner. "No, no, no!" cried the waitress, "Don't snort it!" Xeno looked up, his nose burning and stinging, eyes watering chronically. "It's just a prop!" the waitress shouted at him in horror, "Don't snort it - that's icing sugar!" He licked his dusty fingers. Mmm, sweet. The stinging in his nose only grew stronger, until it was a hot red pain. His eyes watered so much he couldn't see out through the tears and his head started to throb. The noise from the cafe receded until he was surrounded by silence and darkness. The throbbing in his head passed but the stinging in his nose remained, as mucus and tears streamed down his face and the back of his throat. When he eventually opened his eyes he was struck by a light, a blinding white light, then swimming neon colours from his overstimulated retina. He looked away, and after a while he could make out familiar hessian walls. He panicked then and tried to get up, but he was paralysed, or restrained in some way. "...Helfwieger-Zittgurst continuum parameter..." "Somebody get a hanky!" "...chaotic-harmonic resonance perturbation..." "Are we any closer?" Listening to Beck, quoting Dylan or Joni Mitchell or somebody but I swear I've heard that line somewhere before, J.J. Cale perhaps. Germany. Or the Germania region, Austria included, what a mass of thought and music has come out of there. Culture. Pretty influential. Sources of modes of thought, concepts and styles that we now take for granted, not knowing where they came from, accepting degraded and mutated forms like they are original Twentieth Century mushrooms from an invisible medium. Names. Like a continuum parameter. I try to break those words into something I can understand, something that has meaning. Time/ continuity/ movement/ motion/ - - - Boundary/ limit/ measurement/ expansion/ reaction/ border. I remember feeling vaguely guilty, for my culture, for my heritage when learning about African boundaries. Why there are all those unnatural straight lines on the map. And how nomadic tribes suddenly found themselves removed from their tradition, the land they knew and were a part of. It became another cause of conflict. But what could we do, just leave them alone in such contrasting states? That would have been too antagonistic to imperial realities. So rolls on civilization, model A, Western-Christo-Imperialism. "Where's that hanky! Damn it!" "...Her skin feels so realistic..." "How much longer?" "...I like the sun, it feels nice..." Just then, he felt a pain in his mouth. It hurt like hell. What was it? Tooth decay? No. It couldn't have been. He rushed to the bathroom to look in the mirror. "HOLY BEJESUS!" he shouted. Whilst in his bee-stinging, prop-sugar snorting in the restaurant, he had blasted off into a hallucination and ended up biting his lip. It was worse than biting your lip after the novocaine wears off. As he walked he backed into the pictures of Al Pacino reverently staring at him. He noticed someone familiar sitting in the corner. Who was she? What was she? He slowly walked closer to her and stopped in his tracks. Again, he was stunned. It was his first friend in hell. His friend Dorothy. She had come straight from the Wizard of Oz. But what was she doing here? "Hello" "Oh... he... well, Holy Mary Mother of God, if it isn't the snow king!" "Yeah... uh... what the hell are you doing here?" "I was just about to ask you the same thing, but as I saw, apparently you've been attacked by some kind of alien who wants to use you as a scientific experiment." "You saw all that?" "Yes. I'm very perceptive....or have you forgotten?" "Well, it's been a year." "So it has. I wondered about that." She had the look of that beatnik chick that you see in every movie featuring one, crossed with the gal from 'Stranger than Paradise'. The last time he'd seen her, she was just an innocent flower child. Now, she was more voracious, more bold. More... but Xeno had to stop himself. He was committed to another, or was he? Her name was BettyLoo. She came from the coffeshop he used to frequent back in his wild college days. She was the kind of gal that spoke of raw innocence, yet at the same time craved adventures. He met her through a poetic mentor of his, and right away they hit it off. She invited him to her place one night, just to talk and read Rimbaud. Rimbaud was her favourite writer. But the way Xeno read it, made her shiver inside. Then their love was consummated. But, as all beginnings, it started off well; romantic, well-acted. At least on the surface. But then, something happened to her... or was it to him? He wasn't sure. He wasn't sure of anything any more, but in the end we all live life from day to day. His days just didn't necessarily happen in the same order as they did to everyone else, or to the same person. It had seemed like something had happened to her, at first... he had been reading aloud a passage from Ophélie, in the original French: O pâle Ophélia! belle comme la neige! Oui, tu mourus, enfant, par un fleuve emporté! - C'est que les vents tombant des grands monts de Norwège T'avaient parlé tout bas de l'âpre liberté; C'est qu'un souffle, tordant ta grande chevelure, A ton esprit rêveur portait d'étranges bruits; Que ton coeur écoutait le chant de la Nature Dans les plaintes de l'arbre et les soupirs des nuits; ...when all of a sudden he felt pains, like hot embers in his skull. Clutching his head he fell back against a beanbag, and blacked out. A searing light struck his vision when he came to; it seemed monstrous at first, an incandescent cancer afflicting his senses. Gradually his eyes adjusted and he found that it was just the last rays of the evening sun reflected in the windows of the opposite building. He looked around, but it seemed BettyLoo had disappeared and he wondered how long he had been unconscious for. "Loo? You there?" He got up stiffly from the hard wooden floor he had been laying on, awkwardly, like a discarded bicycle. The room was empty, wearing only a damp smell for furnishment and... it was not BettyLoo's. It was not his own apartment either. He crabbed painfully to the window and was startled by the view from tens of stories up. Moving his limbs felt... clumsy, imprecise, like a novice puppeteer tugging new strings and... "GOD! What the hell am I wearing?!" he asked himself in shock. The stillness in his peripheral vision suddenly seemed to be rushing past him at great speed, going nowhere fast. He was dressed as a woman, and a in a moment of confusion he tumbled over onto the floor as he tried to look himself all over at once, trying to understand the anomaly. Then another, deeper, shock struck him as evidence of an impossible fact started to claw it's way up to his conscious mind. He was no longer himself. Or... that couldn't be right - what was the self but that which understood itself to be? It certainly wasn't his body though. A fear, fear of madness, that in itself was a wild, mad fear, overtook him. He grabbed his... his left breast in one hand and crushed it until the pain was unbearable, as if only the pain could convince him that it was real, that he wasn't dreaming. He stumbled frantically to the bathroom, without wondering how he knew where to find it, then froze as he stepped through the door, just short of the mirror, terrified of what he might see. Grasping the sink with both hands, as if his arms alone had the will to do that which he was too afraid to, he pulled himself in front of the mirror and stared, numb, at the reflection. Xeno stared long and hard, trying to assimilate the image that stared back into a self, a sane self, a sane, waking self. Xeno blinked, took a deep breath, and gave up. Xeno kissed her reflection in the mirror and rolled her cuffs down to cover the ugly tally of despair-scars on her wrists. She began to hum the old gypsy tune her grandmother had taught her as a little girl, and danced out into the front room. She danced breathlessly, wildly, spinning around until she was dizzy and stumbling, cavorting around the room as the sun turned peachy and rotten, and refracted shards of sunset sky blazed a ripe pink gash across the windows of the opposite building, and the shadows crept out of the corners and overtook the room. Xeno collapsed, exhausted, faint and hungry. A thought persisted, "Who? Where am I?" Hunger took the lead and she went to the kitchen, checking the traps around the skirting board for rats. There were none there, but a large, plump specimen had been caught in a trap down the hall. She pulled back the spring and retrieved the dead creature, carried it back to the kitchen and tenderly placed it on the chopping board. There wasn't much meat on a rat, but meat was meat, and she found herself salivating involuntarily. With expert hands she skinned the meagre morsel then placed it in the microwave (how she remembered the day when she'd found that treasure!) to cook. She had to stop it every couple of minutes to turn the rat by hand, as the turntable no longer worked, but that she could power the thing at all was a result of as much luck as ingenuity. The main power supply to the building had long since been cut off, but the supply to the elevator had reserve batteries charged from solar panels on the roof. The batteries had barely enough power to raise the elevator a couple of times before they had to be recharged for a week, but she'd been able to run a cable up to them and microwaving a rat now and then was well within their capacity. She sorely wished the gas was still flowing to the stove though, so she could have grilled rat or fried rat sometimes. Hungry as she was, limp and microwaved would have to do. As Xeno took the steaming rodent from the miracle oven she was dropped to her knees by an intense throbbing pain in her occipital lobe. The floor began to fall away beneath her, and as a dark void engulfed her the pain fell away too. The sky cracked open under a marbled polystyrene ceiling, shining rays from the light of Creation directly into Xeno's forehead, and he lay back on a bed, rigid and transfixed. Slowly the light faded, allowing more of the room to shine dully through. There weren't many details to take in; pale-brown hessian wall panels, narrow windows up near the ceiling which looked through only to the ceiling of the adjacent internal corridor, mucus-green linoleum floor. At some unconscious level Xeno knew he was back in a familiar body. He flexed his arms, but they were bound, strapped to the bed. There was little sound, only the whine of a fan and some indeterminate environmental noises; the shifting of furniture on another floor, the hum of machinery from elsewhere. He struggled against the bed, trying to get free, but gave up after a while as it seemed futile. He strained his ears for any sound or clue, until he almost thought he could hear voices and whispers in the whir of the fan, but they were ephemeral ghosts of an understimulated sense. Whatever he did, he could not turn it off. He switched it off with the remote, then at the set, finally pulling the cord from the wall-socket. Still the cathode green glow, still the banal background chatter. "Why?" he thought to himself. Was there a power source inside the box, was it residual energy? How long would it last? He didn't want to watch anymore, he wanted to go to bed. What about the others? They were sleeping, wouldn't this wake them up? Fear struck him as he explored possibilities, ran through scenarios in his mind. It had no face, no features, no signs. The horror was complete, he felt like a helpless child in a garish nightmare world. Recognisable yet completely unquantifiable, he could not join the dots and make a rationalisation; that this triggered this response, which thereby caused this reaction, and so on. This was pure. The fear before life, carried into life from the moment of conception, an invasive molecule that had become the foetus, symbiotic to identity. Familiarity is not without its benefits. I guess we've all heard that it breeds contempt, that old hoary, but also it breeds security, comfort. Xeno looked at his familiar claws, the old scars from years gone past. Some of those battles! He wondered and marvelled at how he'd lasted this long. He saw the flash of mottled white in the green below. Released from thought to instinct he swooped down steeply, pulling up at the last moment and sinking his claws into the rabbit's soft hide. The rabbit felt vaguely familiar. It was like that rat he'd seen being decimated and cooked in the kitchen. His mind ached. His head ached Every inch of his orifice was in pain. What caused all this? Was it the powder from Al Pacino's? Was it the yellow dust outside? Did he drink some kind of poison? He kept milling these questions over and over in his mind... until he could hear only the noise of the silence around him. He got up. But he was numb. When he walked he couldn't feel his legs. He was in a haze, as if he had just woken up from some dream, or nightmare, as was the case. He went to the refrigerator to grab a drink. He found the biggest bottle of alcohol he had. He took it out. Looked at it. "Figures," he thought - a 2.99 bottle of cheap champagne left over from the New Year holiday. However, he didn't care. He didn't give a shit. He opened the bottle. It was stale champagne. But it tasted so good. It tasted so sweet. He let the flavours dance around his tongue and his mouth. He savoured every drop of it. It felt so good to him. "AH! SUCH IS LIFE!" He said that catch phrase over and over again. He couldn't help it. He'd been through hell and back and then... back to hell again. He finished the bottle. Then he went to kitchen table where a pad of paper just happened to be. He flipped to the third sheet from the back and started writing, halfway down the page: The Story Of My Life (Xeno) I remember my birth. My head hurt and the world outside was so bright it hurt my eyes. I kicked and screamed. He stopped then, thinking how to proceed, how to describe the subsequent events of his life without simply repeating himself. "Why don't I keep more bottles of wine in the fridge?" he wondered. Because he'd only drink them all, on nights like this when the physical pains in his body conspired with the psychic pains, the emotional pains of his fractured existence, in order to torment him. They wouldn't let him rest. That was all he wanted, to rest a while with a little warm company. He'd had it briefly... not so much with Dorothy, the Oz-zie beatnik... that had been a kind of torment in itself, but for a few nights there had been a little poetic peace with BettyLoo. He could clearly hear music, a song, coming through the walls from the neighbouring apartment. A lazy sound like a sleeping alligator; a little country, a little rock 'n' roll, he recognized the voice instantly as J.J. Cale. Me and Charlie Blow Down on the bayou Get down and lay back We're on the right track Got the chaotic, harmonic, resonance perturbation blues - An exotic, erotic, lonesome dance by the moon... The words caught his ear, strange and familiar. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck. Was it a sign? What did they mean? Are we any closer? Do you really think you chose her? Her skin feels realistic But the strands are all twisted And tangled up with you Me and Charlie Blow Down on the bayou Get down and lay back We're on the right track... Snatches of the song sounded so familiar, like things he might have said or heard himself. He couldn't think where. He felt as if the music were somehow directed at him, coming so clearly through the walls. He banged his fist against the plaster, and shouted, "Hey!" for want of something better to say. There was no response. I like the sun It feels nice against my knees But, oh Dorothy, You feel better... A blue guitar cut in, winding its way unhurriedly through the chords. Xeno ran out of his front door and started hammering on that of his neighbour. "Hey!" he shouted, "Who's there?" There was no reply. How was the music connected with him? He had to know! Xeno kicked the door as hard as he could, where the lock met the frame. It splintered a little, encouragingly, and he kicked it again and again until finally it gave way. He ran from room to room but they were all starkly empty, and now it seemed the music was coming through the wall... from his own apartment. She already knows What you put up your nose Wearing your sister's clothes In a room of mirrors But the starving gypsy queen Princess of the obscene And all that you've been Ain't any nearer... "Shut up!" he yelled, and banged on the wall, "Shut up!" Xeno stopped then, as he felt the same old explosion going through his mind. He collapsed to the floor boards and waited as the floor boards collapsed to nothing under him, and then the pain receded as the void embraced him, and he wondered where he would wake up. The first drop fell hard on the parched earth. Like a drum the soil vibrated, undulated to the love song so long gone. What followed were many more drops of water, until finally the rains eased. A puddle had formed. Days later, much faster than you'd think, the pond was alive. A vast universe where the tadpole is king and birds of prey are death. Microbes breathed and coloured the pond, reeds of young plants broke the surface and Xeno woke up. The music was gone. He felt no trauma from his past. Although he remembered it, it was encased in a protective bubble, his mind knew of events and who he was, who he used to be but was coolly nonchalant, detached from it all. There were more pressing things concerning Xeno, demanding his attention. Like eating, swimming and keeping an eye out for the birds. He was very much consumed and enrapt in everyday life, survival without the neurotic trappings of his former life. Did he wake up from a dream? He didn't know. But somehow, he felt almost relieved. He felt as if he was reborn. What was all that? At this point he didn't care. In a strange sardonic way, he felt at peace with himself. Through those traumatic events he was somehow able to eliminate whatever underlying pain, suffering, and/or torment he had stored deep inside his soul. Now it was released, whether through the music, the sex... he didn't know. Neither did he care. He lay there listless for what seemed like thirty minutes... but in reality was three hours. He listened to the silence around him. He appreciated the silence around them. Relief! No noise! No rats! No Al Pacino! For the first time in his whole existence, he felt truly alive. The water flowed over his gills as he swam, their hidden frills gleaning oxygen dissolved in the aquatic world around him. Its thick, tactile fluidity made conditions above the surface, beyond the interface, seem rarefied, as if living there would be like you had been cast naked into a vacuum. But still he was curious. Curious about the interface. Curious about the edge of the pond. Curious about the boundaries and limits of his world. He had achieved peace at last, and yet he knew that he would destroy that peace in time. Peace was death, but he was alive! In time he would have legs. He would breathe through his skin and clamber out of the pond and across the pebbles. He would take the lives of small insects and absorb them into his own. Lungs would grow, his skin would dry out. His blood would warm. His legs would straighten under him, no longer splayed out to the sides. He would learn to climb trees and eat the sweet fruit in their branches. His toes would become fingers, all the better for grasping the fruit, and nuts. He would find ways of using sticks and stones to exploit new food sources. For breaking bones. He would learn many things, make many tools. Eventually he would learn ways to pass on what he had learned to others; his family, his tribe. What did it mean to be him, and not an other? In time he would find ways to record what it meant, so that the others might know. He would puzzle over things; parent and child, egg and hen, which came first? And the others would grow with him. Eventually he would be swamped by them. Them, all around him, making their own tools, puzzling their own dreams. The world awash with them. He would learn from them, as they learned from each other. Their thoughts would fill his mind as if he'd been born with them. He would know too much, see too much, would drift, afloat in a deep ocean, and here and there begin to see shards of light in the darkness, cracks in the egg. And falling through those cracks he would lose himself, amongst the selves, until one day he'd wake up in a pond somewhere, at the start of the rains. But for now, he smiled. Life was a splendid mess, a pointless horror... peacock roadkill, a beauty beholden to no one. It was time to spawn. Written between 19 March 2002 and 11 April 2002. back © All work herein copyright the stated authors.

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