THE FOREVER MAN

Copyright © 2023 by Robert J. Lewis

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permission requests, contact author at editor@artsandopinion.com.

The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.

ISBN: 978-1-7380947-0-7
Book Cover by author.
Illustrations by Sieglinde Margarete Schitter
First Edition, 2023

 

 

In memory of my beloved wife, Siggy (Sieglinde Margarete), who shared her life with me from 1972 to 2021.

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert J. Lewis was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Since 2002, he has been editing Arts & Opinion (www.artsandopinion.com). He composes music for guitar in the Alt-Classical genre: https://soundcloud.com/user-212469443

Everything faded into mist, the past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.
George Orwell

 

For years I’ve wanted to live according to everyone else’s morals. I’ve forced myself to live like everyone else, to look like everyone else. I said what was necessary to join together, even when I felt separate. And after all of this, catastrophe came. Now I wander amid the debris, I am lawless, torn to pieces, alone and accepting to be so, resigned to my singularity and to my infirmities. And I must rebuild a truth–after having lived all my life in a sort of lie.
Albert Camus

THE FOREVER MAN

 

Robert J. Lewis

TIME AND BEING

Harry F. as everyone called him – even his wife refused to use his syllabically unwieldy surname -- woke up with the lightweight summer sheet pulled over his head, face sunk into the depressed middle of his pillow, listening to air suck into his nostrils

It being neither too early nor too late in life, and from no direct or discernible cause, Harry F., now 47-years-old, awoke suddenly knowing for certain what he had always been afraid to know. And what he now knew could never again not be known. Draw and seal the blinds, caulk the chinks, smash the brightest lights, this room, his life would never again admit darkness. Harry F., his ever resourceful disingenuity not equal to the task, had at last become the truth of what he knew for certain.

He travelled his arm across the cool sheet expecting to find his wife's warm and smooth backside. But it wasn't there; the disappointed appendage waited for further instruction. In a sweeping motion, the obedient arm, searchlight-like, mechanically scanned the side of the bed she was wont to occupy, and, upon conforming his suspicions, that she had arisen earlier, he withdrew the baffled limb and sent it up to eye level.

Reluctantly, he unscrewed his face out of the pillow and made it face his wrist which he couldn’t see, listening to the air rush into his nostrils, his chest filling and relaxing with every breath, and waited for the digits to appear. When they didn’t, he jerked back his head and left shoulder until his head was free from the sheet. Daylight exploded into his eyes, blinding before he snapped them shut. He waited for the painful blinking to stop, and then, in a measured squint, he admitted just enough light to take a reading of his watch which, if it had been endowed with sound effects, would have burst out in applause. Harry F. had slept the sleep of a polar bear awaking to the first signs of spring. The digits read 12 noon. "It can't be,” he muttered to himself, at a loss to explain the late hour. He remembered going to bed at 22.45, being absorbed by Eliot’s Quartets until it fell on his chest two minutes later, and then shutting off the lamp at 22.55, just before the news. That meant he had slept 13 hours. “That’s not normal,” he said, trying to be upset with himself.

He knew very well that what he now knew for certain was related to his sleeping in. “Well, at least I’m not in a coma,” he mused to himself before thinking better of what he just said.

He was still squinting to better accommodate the light, trying to recall when he last witnessed the light of high noon entering by way of the north-east window. But he couldn’t, only that it must have happened when he last stayed home sick.

Including the wall and the furniture opposite the bed, the light now grazed on the lower corner of the mattress, a warm sunny spot his feet quickly found. For an indefinite interval given over to self-gratification, he just lay there, volitionless, like something that has been feeding itself all day, until the Harry F. just described was roused to reflect more seriously on the Harry F. who was an inveterate early riser, reverently greeting each and every dawn as if he was living on borrowed time, for whom existence could at any time be withdrawn.

Ra’s rays licking the souls of his feet seeped into his legs and engulfed his body like warm bath water. In a hurry to get out from under the crumpled sheet and into the new day, he kicked and twisted and turned until he was free, rolled onto his back, propped up his head with his and his wife's pillows, and gazed in deep appreciation of the bedroom awash in vibrant light. The dresser and mirror facing him looked weightless in the brightness, unstable geometries of gold and flaxen points of light. Where direct light revealed a shaft of dust particles suspended in the air, Harry F. felt as if a favourite pointillist painting had extended its frame to include him in a landscape shot through with brilliant sunlight. Surrendering to the grandeur of the moment, he was suddenly overcome with gratitude and then humility and judged himself undeserving of this precious interval.

It would have been one of those perfect moments that often arrive when least expected had it not been for his irrevocably knowing what he had always been afraid to know. And what he now knew afforded a vantage point from which he could clearly see that ‘the great lie, the great deception' had insidiously taken over not only the best minds of his generation, but the entire mind of the species. Apparently, there could be no resisting or refusing the lie because it had become indistinguishable from necessity. By the time an innocent child uttered its first syllables, took its first steps, he had already been taught that the lie was the ground of everything that was and is and will be.

Masquerading as self-evident truth, the lie’s command and authority were such that it had never been questioned. It was so above suspicion it would have been impossible to make itself the subject of its own scrutiny. In short, the lie wasn’t a lie. It simply was. Everyone, and there were no exceptions until now, was informed by the lie whose consolations withstood all doubt and accusation; the lie was the equivalent of the elusive God-particle around which theologian, philosopher and astrophysicist were endlessly orbiting. Without ever being spoken of – except in the realm of fantasy -- the consolation was experienced as essential as water to marine life, as wings to flight. Even before man’s earliest written accounts, the first men to walk the earth implicitly understood that the emergence of the lie coincided with the emergence of the species, was coeval with life becoming self-conscious, and that every future owed its very existence to the lie. Which meant that the whole of history was a lie, as were all beginnings and endings. It was as if the collective mind of Homo sapiens understood, however naively, that it would not be able to survive without the lie, or that the lie could at any time collapse into its opposite.

With all this on his breakfast table, the reader will not be surprised to learn that Harry F. had had a night of uneasy dreams, and had he awoken to discover himself transformed into a gigantic blattoptera, it wouldn’t have made any difference since that theoretical event – metamorphosis or decease -- and the truth he had been unconsciously rejecting his entire life were one and the same.

Shaken but undaunted, he was now ready to give the lie the long overdue hearing it deserved, which meant first of all acknowledging its brilliant conception and execution as the issue of an unbroken continuum of brilliant minds who themselves were unaware they were part of the lie’s propagation and dissemination. The deception was so convincing in its every aspect it was unfailingly recognized as a fact. And like the existence of the world itself, it had become a fact upon which all other facts were derived. To compare the lie to anti-matter or a creative force upon which the existence of the universe depended would not have been inaccurate.

“Since all things over time, as the great philosophers have argued, evolve into their opposite, it follows that the lie must eventually morph into the truth,” Harry F. reasoned. He wasn’t sure if he was asking the question or preparing himself to examine the lie whose very nature is unstable by virtue of it being questioned. If there was a divide or separation between the original lie and the lie as it was revealing itself presently, that development was owed to Harry F.’s abiding interest in it.

That one could acquire immunity against the preponderance of the lie was inadmissible, as impossible as getting out from one’s shadow or escaping one’s past. Without exception, the whole of reality, reduced to its smallest subatomic details, took its tone from the lie. Beginning with the new born child, then the family, the community, the polis, the region, the country, the culture, history, each category was more affirmative and inclusive than its predecessor; the farther removed the greater its authority. One might question an individual category, but the whole was inviolable. Not only would it never yield to its parts, it didn't even recognize the parts as having existence. To challenge the whole, from the outset, was an assured exercise in futility, tantamount to demonstrating the existence of God in a series of mathematical propositions. The logic of the whole was so dazzling and impregnable it caused one to tremble; it evoked awe, rapture and even sickness. To even dare to consider uncovering the smallest fraction of its secret was sufficient to discourage the most enthusiastic interrogator. And if this same naive interrogator were to fortuitously or otherwise succeed in scratching the surface of the lie, what it would only faintly suggest was so disorienting, and the ramifications so foreboding, he would recoil in fear for he knew not what, and would never again consider the possibility that the lie was not the truth. The deception was almost so perfect -- to imagine otherwise was almost impossible -- Harry F. wondered if he were its only flaw. Like all myths whose authority precludes any challenge from both within and without, the lie informed the whole of world culture. Even the most radical expressions of free will were made to bend to the lie’s dominion over everything encountered by mind. If the lie could be said to possess the equivalent of a gravitational force, it would be equal to a black hole measured in units of deterrence. In other words the lie could be exploded but there was no escaping it – a scenario that did not bode well for Harry F.

Reflecting on his childhood, he clearly understood the child that he once was didn’t have a chance; he was deceived by his parents who themselves were deceived by their -- the regression was infinite. He was raised to believe that life was meaningful and purposeful and that death, the great enabler, was as inevitable as the development of the child’s limbs into an adult’s. Which meant at some probably very early stage in his life, the lie had fused itself with the child he once was and was now inseparable from the adult he had become. He further speculated that there must be some manner of vital connection between the lie and his psychological well-being; and very likely the well-being of the entire species. And if he should presently conclude that the species wouldn’t be able to survive without the lie, he logically wondered if he would be exempt from the effects by virtue of his new relationship with it.

But for now, stretched out on like a patient anaesthetized on a hospital bed, he was content to simply let these speculations marinate in their brave new environment, and deal with the implications – if any -- later. It was all so new nothing of what he awoke to had registered to any significant extent, so it required no effort to indulge in the glorious sunshine that was streaming in through the window and the play of light on the corner of the bed where his feet were basking.

But it wasn't as if the truth to which Harry F. was now privy didn't exist in the public domain. Every single world-day everywhere caused the truth (man is immortal) to be invoked as a wishful thinking or desired outcome. However, it was categorized as something other than truth, a mental construct without a corresponding reality, a state of mind the sufferer looked to alleviate his dread and anxiety. At the mere mention of what Harry F. now knew to be the truth, the notion of `unreal' or `fantastic' was conjured up, entertaining no serious consideration whatsoever, despite being recoursed (of necessity) with a frequency that belied its `unreality.' If you were wholly captive to the lie, it meant you confused the truth (man is immortal) for fantasy, where the latter is granted eminence by virtue of its universality.

Harry F. slipped off his watch and set it face-down on the night table, on top of the small book of poetry kept at bedside. To his annoyance, the inadvertent sighting of the paperback's pale blue cover and author's first two initials compelled the titles of the book's four long poems into his thoughts. Within seconds, the involuntary recall of a favourite stanza didn’t sit well with him; in fact he found the lines trite if not laughable – for reasons he felt best not to explore.

Hoping it was all a mistake, that he hadn't woken up to what could only be described as a new and startling reconfiguration of reality, he decided to recite out loud one of his favorite stanzas, willing it to affect him as it always had. But from the outset, the words rang false, quickly collecting into a pile of gibberish as his voice sputtered into a mutter. Yes, it was all a grand lie and the poet a grand dupe who was in every undistinguished manner and aspect one and the same as the deceived multitudes for whose enlightenment he had presumably suffered.

But wouldn’t there be others who were not under the influence of the lie, Harry F. wondered? As if the answer could be made to correspond to his fondest wishes through physical effort, he pushed himself up into the sitting position, leaned his back against the bed’s head board and stuffed one of the pillows into the small of his back.

His eye caught the corner of a birthday card beneath the pale blue book of poetry. His thoughts drifted back to the wonderful party organized by his wife and daughter: the catered sea-food specialties, his favourite cheese cake, wine bottles, glasses of all shapes and sizes, a small collection of birthday cards and unwrapped presents around which family and old friends had gathered two days ago.

Towards the end of the ample repast, Harry F. gave what began as a small thank you speech to those who had come to help him celebrate the turning of the digits from 46 to 47. In his characteristically self-deprecating manner, he thanked one and all for their being there for him throughout the course of the difficult past year, that he would be significantly diminished if they were to suddenly no longer be part of his society, and it would be remiss on his part not to share his appreciation of their unfaltering community. As it was his wont to introduce levity in social gatherings that were threatening to break out into yawnfests, he brought to the attention of his East Indian friends that a case of contaminated drinking water had been especially ordered for their drinking pleasure and that the swimming pool in the back yard had been converted to a mini ghat. In the spirit of the hilarity of the moment, the off-the-cuff remark inspired Hari Gupoong, one of Harry F.’s oldest friends from his university days, to resuscitate his heavy Indian accent and feign an upset Delhi belly, while informing the guests that neither his new underwear nor the dining room floor were likely to survive the rumbling and churning travelling down his intestine. The riposte curried universal applause as the wine poured and the laughter flowed well past the midnight hour.

Prior to his extemporaneous discourse, there wouldn’t have been a friend or family member who would have characterized Harry F. as other than taciturn, which, after his remarks were concluded, served as a reminder that human beings, over time, will make mockery of the categories that have been assigned to them. A parsimonious man for whom the bells are tolling will give away in a day what he has hoarded over a lifetime just as an inveterate introvert will speak out loud against an injustice when it is least expected.

Whether it was due to the wine or the sclerotic effects of the heavy food he normally avoided, Harry F.’s birthday address went on in a desultory fashion, but it wasn’t without highlights, and from the perspective of the guests, it was as a rare opportunity to catch Harry F with his guard let down, who in turn was not unwitting to the undivided attention he easily commanded.

Basking in the notice and respect he rarely sought, he began to dilate on how he now understood that the great challenge that lay before him in respect to his work was to make the case for the necessity of intervening purposefully and responsibly in the human genotype, so that the sequence of genes that dispose individuals to care for their flesh and blood will also dispose them to care for and attend to the suffering of complete strangers, the majority of whom are victims of poverty, adverse weather events and territorial imperatives. He believed man’s constitutional indifference to the fate of strangers was the moral equivalent of genocide against the less fortunate.

He paused and waited for his empty wine glass to be refilled. “If we are to survive our worst instincts, we have to reconfigure the species, and without delay,” argued Harry F. in an urgent voice, for the first time speaking out loud on a subject to which he had been offering deep thought for many years.

He then seamlessly segued into a more detailed account of the moral and social implications his interventionism would entail, before sitting down to courteous applause. By this time, the erstwhile boisterous group had completely quieted down, recalling the persistent silence that attends a coffin being lowered into the ground “Many thanks for the good cheer, Harry,” his good friend Milan cracked.

“When can we expect you to sell your Lexus and hand over the proceeds to the homeless?” belched out one of the Cane twins, whose cavernous mouth was mix-mastering a double dollop of ice cream and disc-sized chocolate chip cookie while a free-ranging finger was grilling a nostril.

Coming to her father’s rescue, Harry F.’s model-tall daughter stood up, resting her hand on his shoulder: “Come on, Dad, you haven’t touched your 5th glass of wine. If you don’t lighten up I’m going to put on some of your favourite Rap music.” Harry F. lifted his glass in a toast: “To the end of the world as we know it, everybody.” “To the end of the world,” everyone shouted in unison. Everyone looked to Harry for a rejoinder who instead fell silent, reverting to his customary self-effacing self that mocked the distinguished person the world of celebrity would have liked to create and embrace. Persons susceptible to cults would have instantly recognized in Harry F. an infectious charm and intelligence whose ends were inconsequential to their inability to resist them. And it was these types that Harry F. feared who were bringing the species to its nadir, and that the window of opportunity to make things right was closing.

In consideration of Harry F’s uncommon intelligence and professional success, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that from time to time he felt resented by some of his colleagues, as well as his wife’s immediate family who felt they had been peripheralized by their own daughter since her marriage. But aside from these exceptions to which Harry F. gave the shortest shrift, his sincerity and idealism made those around him feel they were part of something larger and better than themselves. There was something about Harry F. that didn’t awaken the envy that most friendships cannot survive. In his presence they felt exalted, ennobled, and that included young women (mostly graduate students) who in the spirit of the unfairly demeaned groupie, were looking to invest in what was best for the future of their offspring. However diverse was the lot of Harry’s small circle of friends, they were united in their desire to spend more time with him, as well as the disappointment they invariably suffered due to his protracted unavailability. Harry F. lived for his family and research and his daily walk in the woods.

Professionally, Harry F. was not without his detractors, but none would ever accuse his headline-making immodest proposals as being even remotely related to personal ambition or self-aggrandizement. They allowed that this exceptional (and perhaps delusional) man in their midst simply regarded himself as the necessary tool from which his ideas and the better world he envisioned would take their shape. That his colleagues thought him aloof spoke more to his priorities and dedication to his life’s work than deficient social skills.

Harry F. lowered his head and began raking his fingers through his thinning longish, dirty blond wavy hair. "What a joke. What a lie. And to have convinced myself that time was pressing down on me." But when he recalled his birthday party, and the boisterous toast to ‘a long and healthy’ life, he had no doubt that the sentiment was sincere, that the people gathered around him believed every word of it, that a long and healthy life was something to be wished for -- even though in point of fact it was guaranteed in that it couldn’t be otherwise. So what had come between, or separated these highly intelligent people from their faculties of reason? Why couldn’t they see what he now saw so clearly?

Of course there were reasons, and for those reasons he would excuse them but he could no longer excuse himself. He knew their time would come because there was all the time in the world for that coming. Just as he knew that prior to waking, he was as cut off from the truth as they presently were.

But now he knew, and the knowing was absolute, and there was no turning back. He stood before the truth as Eve must have stood before Adam who had only dreamt he had ever been alone. Yes. When Harry F. woke up this morning with the sheet pulled over his head, he knew as surely as he existed that he was immortal, that he was going to live forever.

THE FOREVER MAN

That this irreversible discovery precipitated in him a vague sense of uneasiness came as no surprise. He felt that his body was still clinging to the certainties of the mortal’s world order while his undeceived immortal’s mind recognized the untenability of the former. However vague were the implications of immortality, he understood that his new life -- consequent to his just concluded awakening -- was only just beginning, that he was at ground zero, starting anew, taking his first steps, having to find his way without any guidance or role models, that mistakes would be made. His disorientation was such that it was as if the world's greatest scientists had presented him with apodictic proofs that the universal laws of gravity were lies, and that his physical mass alone would not be able to ground him, which left him dangling he knew not where – if not from the end of a metaphysical rope

Notwithstanding Harry F.'s uncertain standing in his new universe, he was nonetheless able to enjoy a moment of vegetative insouciance, while under no misconception that sooner or later he would have to find hard evidence to refute the imprecise suspicion that life was meaningless, knowing if he couldn’t produce a convincing counter argument, he was still going to live forever. That was the rub.

And if he wasn’t as disoriented as he should have been, it was only because he hadn’t been immortal long enough to grasp the implications of immortality, its shapeless and timeless tides. For this reason and perhaps the incalculable effect of the bright sunlight streaming into the room to which his limbs blithely surrendered, and observing the material things around him mysteriously forfeiting their mass, he was optimistic that given the oodles of time now available he would eventually redefine himself through purposeful activity commensurate with his most recent revelations -- even if it didn't matter if he didn't. But first he would have to adjust to the loss of his old, unreal world; and acquaint himself with his new one.

He swung his legs off the bed, pushed himself onto his feet, enjoyed a healthy stretch and yawn, and sinking, that is wobbling into the squatting position, attempted a joint-cracking knee-bend, lost his balance backwards, and landed on the mattress in the sitting position where he sat slouched. He felt listless and the sun was suddenly too hot, so he pushed himself up again, picked up his sweatpants off the floor and carefully aimed one leg and then the other through the openings before pulling over his head a plain white, shapeless T-shirt.

His bursting kidneys reminded him of a duty deferred, one that was usually answered no later than just after sunrise, regardless of the season. With prevention clearly in mind, he squeezed his gluteals and sphincter, and treaded delicately into the adjoining bathroom. Lifting up the toilet lid, a fat line of urine rushed out into the bowl, mixing turbulently with the water. His kidneys relaxed like deflating balloons. As the pressure to pee subsided, the straight line curved into a lazy arc, and then a broken one. Harry F.'s entire body experienced profound easement and relief; he let escape a long and gratifying exhalation. For some time he just stood there staring into the yellow, watching the translucent pee bubbles burst and disappear. He suddenly thought it peculiar that of the many things he could be doing forever, urinating should be one of them, or then again something he might never do again since it made no difference if he did or didn’t.

The acrid tang reached his nose, but he didn’t back away from it nor did he push down on the flusher. Instead, he contented himself with staring into the bowl until he no longer saw what was there, and continued staring until what was there might as well stay forever. “And why bother with flushing when it doesn’t matter one way or the other,” he mused to himself.

He spotted a dribble of pee-drops on the toilet rim, their diaphanous yellow showing against the white porcelain. It didn’t occur to him nor would it have mattered how they got there, or whether or not he should remove them. But when he thought of his wife who usually followed him, and for whom he always concerned himself to remove evidence of his early morning miscues, he understood that from now on, notwithstanding that his wife had already left the house several hours earlier, he wouldn’t be cleaning up after himself. The drops or whatever would stay because they were no longer an issue. Their being there or not being there was categorically of no importance.

His wife worked as a volunteer for WFR (World Famine Relief). She was as principled and dedicated to her work as her husband to his, and when she wasn’t lobbying – writing letters to newspapers, soliciting donations from philanthropic organizations -- to repeal unjust tax laws that provided for the rich at the expense of the bloated category of the world’s hungry and homeless, she was busy caring for, without distinction, people no one else cared for.

But that would all have to change. Harry F. wouldn’t be able to stand idly by allowing his wife to live the lie that he himself could no longer abide by. If he could handle the truth, she should be able to, since she invariably dealt with hardship and adversity better than himself. He understood that the truth that he awoke to this morning was no ordinary event, and his wife, like himself presently, would be forced to rethink her entire life’s meaning and purpose. With his now small experience and encouragement, he would encourage her find her way to the only truth worth living for. At least this was the plan, the execution of which really didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

As he was working out how he would bring his wife to her good senses, he noticed that his thought processes were unusually slow, that the pistons weren’t firing on all cylinders, and that he wasn’t at all concerned -- despite the foreboding challenges that lay ahead.

"She must be told she is living a lie," he told himself. The mere idea of his well-meaning wife working herself up into a frenzy of concern over famine relief was a sour joke that caused his eyes to roll. But he knew there was time for her to know and that in the grand skein of things it mattered not a whit that the lie his wife was living might resist his best efforts to unravel it.

Harry F. would soon learn that the ‘no hurry' clause would increasingly assert itself as the condition of resolution of all of his quandaries and dead-ends. As if to make his point, he hoisted up his sweat pants, walked away from the pee-drops, and never looked back.

BREAK FAST

Next, he conducted himself around through the hallway and living room and into the kitchen where he dropped onto the nearest chair. Two bushy asparagus plants hung from the ceiling in front of the open window, a translucent green curtain through which soft light and a scented breeze entered.

He leaned his chair back on its hind legs, reached behind him and turned on the radio/CD player which was set to play a late Beethoven piano sonata. Normally, his mind turned to his preferred music like a dry mouth to water, or conversely away from bad music like a mole turns away from light. This afternoon, however, the music failed to engage him. Like loaned artifacts divested of their cultural context, the notes sounded hollow, artificial, confected for commercial use. That his attention was bent to the ear-friendly low hum of the fridge spoke rather to his unsettled state of mind than the merit of one sound over the other. He vaguely decided that the fridge-hum’s purchase was no less valid than any music that moves a listener.

His lazy eye fell on his wife’s empty coffee cup and half-eaten pecan roll on the table. "She must have been late this morning. She always cleans up after breakfast." Looking hard at his watch, he said, “why not,” and went to the fridge, yanked out a loaf of 6-grain, stone-ground bio-bread by its neck, dropped two slices into the toaster and waited for the pop. He then teased one and then the other with the lightest possible application of BHA-BTU-free olive margarine, one of his many daily considerations to his well-being. Foregoing the formality of a buffer between the food and eating surface, he underhanded the stacked toast onto the table, returned to the fridge where he extracted four oranges and proceeded to machine squeeze a glass of fresh orange juice. Surveying his breakfast -- a triumph of nutrition and moderation -- he allowed a brief moment of pride to steal through him while imagining his roughage-lined digestive tract waxing superior over the chronically abused tracts of the carnivorous multitudes.

He sat down again, tucked his legs under the chair, and scanning his breakfast like a tracking device, he began examining the toast whose surface looked coarse and dry and a bit pock marked from heat fatigue. And then suddenly he wasn't hungry.

Given the late hour and presumed appetite whetted from the preparations just described, he was somewhat discomfited. He knew that he wasn't experiencing the normal not being hungry, while taking into account that in certain situations it is not unusual not to be hungry on an empty stomach.

But he soon grasped that his lack of hunger was of a different sort, one with which he suspected he would only be temporarily concerned, an absence whose horizon would have no consequences as the consequence. But he couldn't think it through, he couldn't make it concrete. The rope between what he knew now and what he wanted to know was slack. It was as if a new order of things was trying to show itself to him, but like a wooden surface without four legs, until a particular activity compelled the necessity of a table, it would remain merely a surface. To know better his immediate predicament of not feeling hunger, Harry F. would have to give the experience legs so it could stand on its own and be identified as itself and show itself as autonomous and distinct from his previous understanding of hunger. In order to disclose what not-to-have-hunger meant in its truth, he would have to enter the experience with a willingness to concede the possibility that the responses usually associated with hunger were obsolete. At which point he might then coax new meanings from the state of not being hungry which would reveal the true meaning of the absence of hunger.

It was in this spirit he threw himself into the maw of not-to-have-hunger and tried to imagine himself enjoying food, but he couldn't, and in fact was unable to recall ever having been hungry. And when he unsuccessfully tried to remember when he last ate, he understood that the experience of hunger had been separated from necessity, that both the fusion and separation of the word ‘with and from’ its existential meaning were mental processes, and that the health and survival of the word -- any word – would depend on the resourcefulness of mind in assigning necessity to the experience which would require a name, a locator.

He enunciated word ‘appetite’ out loud, fearing its meaning wouldn’t appear, and when it didn't he realized the connection between the word and the experience had completely vanished, as if it had never existed. "If a word cannot exist independent of its meaning, I had better not allow the meaning -- the heart beat of every word -- to fall out of existence," he reasoned, determined to put the hypothesis to the test. He formed a question. "An appetite for what and to what end?" He knew that he need only provide one simple predicate and the word would be rescued from oblivion.

He waited. The very idea of waiting for the meaning of an everyday common word to appear in order to save it from non-existence was, to say the least, a challenging development, if not yet cause for outright alarm. He tried to convince himself that it was just a word whose being or non-being was of little consequence. But at the same time, he suspected something much bigger was at stake, something not yet named, a development whose vast implications were still hidden from him.

Like an object in the air whose considerable mass, inexplicably, isn’t responding to the laws of gravity, Harry F. made no advance on the meaning of the word he was seeking to save. Every failed attempt to attach a meaning to the word furthered his frustration. Had he been able to view himself from outside of himself he would have reported on a mind worrisomely wedded to the process of its derangement. But he pressed on, more desperate than intrepid. He keenly felt the threat of the word being lost forever. "I will not surrender it to oblivion," he said pounding his fist on the breakfast table, as if positivist thinking alone would be enough to convert the wish into deed. "My mind cannot, will not allow this word to disappear.” But he couldn't think of the word he was trying to save, and then he couldn’t recall what it was what he was supposed to do, and then he simply stopped caring, and then his mind emptied, like all minds empty just before they enter the mindless world of sleep. Eventually his unfocused gaze landed on the toast, and he could almost speak of something that was vaguely familiar. "Appetite," he said out loud and waited for something to happen – and waited until he was no longer waiting.

The recall of what he had learned about himself this morning intruded into his thoughts like a drill bored into a slab of slate. Picking his way through the debris, he managed to find an uncluttered corner where he could offer thought to his new world and the much larger world of barely discernible consequences. And then he suddenly felt his entire body, his eyes go heavy and moments later he surrendered to a feeling of pure contentment. He had survived the initial ordeal of being born again, and was surprised at how simple it was simply being himself in his own skin. "Of course, I'm an immortal. How could I have pretended otherwise?" He felt like someone come back from the dead, whose pulse had stopped and started up again.

He now comprehended that being immortal rendered the very concept of appetite as oxymoronic, and he was a moron not to have made the connection, which in this case was a total and permanent disconnection. The concept of appetite had no meaning in Harry F.'s new universe

According to the new paradigm whose laws and first principles were only just beginning to reveal themselves, Harry F. understood that he had encountered, however fleetingly, the absolute, which set him apart from everyone else; he knew that from here on in, there would be no middle ground or fairy tale meeting of minds, that the masses, for all intents and purposes, were hooked, for life, on the big lie.

But of course from their limited perspective, they would regard Harry F. as the tragic mistake they could not commit, and would come to be genuinely concerned and fearful for his well-being. This same inverse logic held that they did not fear for their own well-being because long ago, in a time before they could remember, it had been inculcated in the collective mind that survival and truth are not one and the same, and when a people’s founding myth is at issue, the latter, and not the former, is dispensable. Harry F. was the one gravity let get away, while everyone else was inoculated against whatever delusional viruses he might carry.

As this stage of Harry F.’s metamorphosis, even if it were desirable, he was wholly incapable, like someone asking to be unborn after the fact, of undoing the truth of what he now knew to be true and reverting back to the lie he had been living. They, and not him, were the deceived ones, suffering from incontinent delusions of mortality. It was they who had fabricated the hoax of hunger, and by extension, the lie upon which meaningful existence is premised.

Looking intrepidly back at a life lived in total self-deception conferred to Harry F. the unexpected strength of mind to proudly stand his ground as the prototype of an emerging new order. Eat or not eat, life would simply and effortlessly continue because it couldn't do otherwise. The very idea of having an appetite was an illogical absurdity, a favourite drug every mortal everyday of his life was hooked on. In trying to excite the word ‘hunger,’ to make it speak, Harry F. was in fact adducing a concept that didn’t even exist, much less have meaning. To hunger for food was a fiction, one of the infinite number of links in the great chain of the greatest lie ever told. Immortals don't starve. They don't hunger. Immortals immortal. Period.

His wife’s famine relief work was a gross fiction, a lie built on lies until it became the supreme lie that could not be outdone or surpassed; its perfection was such that in defiance of every law, it produced no antithesis. It was like the word ‘tall’ existing without or being independent of the word ‘short.’

As an edifice without exit, the lie’s vast and convoluted architecture was as breathtaking as it was ingenious. To this date, no one had figured it out much less recognized it for what it was. As a way towards its opposite, it disappeared from under one’s feet the instant it was taken. Every illusion was wrapped up in another illusion; if you broke through one veil you would find yourself facing another and yet another. So for the person who hungered, there would always be another hunger to address, and the illusion would never be recognized as an illusion, and the presumption of time would continue to be understood in units of perishing succession. The hungerer would never suspect that his entire existence was based on an assertion that had never been challenged. The mortal didn’t have to be convinced of his mortality because he was already mortal; he couldn’t be or think otherwise.

The hunger and eating binary was as fixed as the delusions that sustained it. To break free from its cause and effect would require a penetration of thought so far-reaching even the most gifted and indefatigable mind would quickly discourage. Escape into reality was impossible. Every smashed illusion revealed another, every open door led to another kitchen, another supermarket, another glazed pecan roll, another rum and chocolate ice-cream cone on a desert tongue on a hot summer’s day. Cultural variations notwithstanding, eating was the staple and critical activity of every people on earth. The ethos and praxis of eating precluded an ethos from which there was no exit.

The incalculable cause and effects spawned by the culture of eating were as intricate and interwoven as they were unanswerable to their genesis, the sum of which spoke to the mortal’s remarkable powers of invention. Eating was a skein that would never untangle, a myth that could never be exploded. Harry F. wondered what was so dreadful about immortality that provoked the lie of hunger into existence, engendered the planting of the seed out of which sprouted an all-engrossing, self-contained culture that was blue-printed not to question itself. From the seed to germination to harvest, processing, packaging, marketing, distribution, the variations of each according to climate and culture, product content, nutritional data, their effects on health and aging, and then their subsumption by other disciplines in respect to nomenclature, taxonomy -- the permutations were infinite. One couldn’t even begin to question, much less exhaust the constantly expanding universe of hunger.

The truth now stood before Harry F. in the truth of it being outside of time (ens extra tempus), and it was enough to recognize the sighting as a miracle that revealed itself as a telling; and what it told was the unfolding story of Harry F.'s inauthentic past and subsequent metamorphosis. Like someone who after a life time of searching finds in the mirror the god he has been seeking, he vowed to dwell in the miracle of his immortality for as long as it would take for it to presence in its foreverness, knowing full well that he had all the time in the world to make that happen.

His resolve, however unstable, produced immediate results. The culture of eating completely disappeared into oblivion as he took his place in his new world, which in point of fact was his old world seen in its truth. Staying true to his new worldview was the challenge, and since he was not an automaton, he was still vulnerable to the calling of inauthentic consciousness, and it would require equal amounts of courage and tenacity not to slip back into his old world, its colossal temptations and consolations.

And it could happen whenever, without warning, the forgotten memory of favourite food whetting the tongue, and once again he would find himself entertaining the possibility that there indeed might be a way to reconfigure the act of eating into a necessity. After all, the illusion of mortality provided solace few could refuse; it was the rapture that turned the species into phylum of noble liars.

Feeling out of sorts in the presence of the objects (of food) before him, he stood up from his chair, and looking to regain his composure, strode with sprightly tread into the living room where he split open recently purchased crepe-coloured curtains.

COLT COMFORT

Across the street, Felix Colt, his neighbour of 13 years, was mowing the same section of front lawn he had mowed two days ago.

Felix Colt owned a used car concession. Starting up the business as a young man without any formal training in either marketing or car mechanics was not an impediment in RUNS LIKE NEW becoming an immediate success. The company physically expanded three times in its first five years of operation, thanks to the availability of what was then inexpensive, contiguous farmland.

Felix Colt was able to identify what was unique and telling in every car and small truck engine, which in turn allowed him to quasi flawlessly assess the working condition of every vehicle’s moving parts and performance. It was a gift, an aptitude that he discovered by chance in his late teens, and saved him from suffering the consequences of poor grades in school. His diagnostic technique was textbook simple. He would start up the car and listen to the running motor first from the inside and then outside. It required but a highly focused two or three minutes to determine a car’s strengths and defects, what he would pay for it and what it would sell for. During a typical diagnosis which required very deep and concentrated listening, Colt was unreachable to the outside world, not unlike a Zen master in deep meditation. Over the years, several customers had observed that during that almost mystical communion between man and machine, Colt's small ears would expand and flush red. Among the elite society of used car dealers, Felix Colt's preternatural ability to listen to and evaluate an engine was almost legendary. Competing dealerships would haul their wounded cars to his lot to profit from his diagnostic talents.

His unobtrusive salesmanship was restricted to the dry dissemination of hard facts which gave him a decisive edge over salesmen who had perfected the art of confusing data and fiction. His obsession with sticking to the straight facts had nothing to do with his upbringing or influence of the Ten Commandments -- he considered himself as heathen as the next person -- but he understood human nature and the importance of building relationships based on trust, and how that could, in due time, inspire an unbroken line of buyer confidence.

Colt would go to great lengths to present a complete mechanical profile of the vehicle under consideration to both interested and uninterested buyers. Sometimes a sale would be concluded before Colt had completed his fact-laced (interminable) sales pitch, such was the effect of his persistence and tireless integrity. His flat delivery combined with massive detail lent an objectivity to his judgment no client could doubt. He never – wittingly -- gave a misleading appraisal of a car. His prices reflected the value of the car, not more and not less. Fifty per cent of all sales came from referrals and obviated advertising altogether. In respect to his employees, they conducted themselves in a manner consistent with the text-book professionalism practiced by 5-star hotel staffs. Their salaries reflected their virtues and value, they were loyal, many were among Colt’s personal friends.

If man, by nature, is disposed to either producing great quantities of speech or being on the receiving end it, Colt fell into the former category with relish and abandon.

When Colt moved into the neighbourhood, he immediately introduced himself to everyone on the block, as if following to a T the injunctions spelled out in codebook of conduct manual. It was the proper thing to do, he decided above his wife’s objections, calculating that there would come a time when one of his neighbours would be looking to buy a reliable second hand car, and they would get best bang for their buck from him. As to the effects of his neighbourly exertions, it didn’t occur to him – his wife didn’t have the heart to spell out it for him -- that from the outset he was deliberately excluded from neighbourhood cocktail parties and barbeques.

Now that he was semi-retired and worked no more than two or three days per week, and had read and re-read all the self-help literature that stressed the importance of being socially active as a guarantor happiness and health, he made a point of going out of his way to help his neighbours in the upkeep of their yards and maintenance of their new cars. His being tirelessly available did not go unnoticed. While insisting he expected nothing in return, that he was helping himself pass time, he and his wife were nonetheless tickled pink when they suddenly began receiving invitations to brunches, garden parties, card games and croquet matches.

His evenings, as they had been for the past 20 years, were given over to civic duty: he was a municipal council member volunteer and served on two separate committees, the first of which welcomed and integrated the many professional ethnics that were moving into this once all white upscale neighbourhood; and during the day, he was part of a team that used one of his pickup truck to gather throw-aways, discarded furniture and kitchen ware that were delivered to a depot that served the cities growing poor and homeless. Felix and his wife Frances had two surviving grown sons: one was a meteorologist, the other an electrician. Their oldest son was killed in a war.

Ever since confiding in Harry F. a secret he hadn't even shared with his wife, Felix believed his relationship with his friendly neighbour was something special. If asked why he decided to open up to Harry F. and not someone with whom he was more intimate -- a brother or sister, for example -- he wouldn't have been able to say. As with car engines, he had a gut feeling about Harry F.'s running parts, and felt that his secret would get the best mileage out of them.

If, in the spirit of confession, we become convinced that relief from a guilty conscience can only come about by entering what has never been shared into the public domain, Felix Colt, who was not affiliated with any religion, felt that the time had come to finally disburden himself of a fear that he had been ashamed to own up to. And even though Harry F. was significantly his junior, he felt he was much wiser than his years, and besides, there was no one else that he even remotely considered as an acceptable alternative for the highly sensitive and embarrassing nature of his confession.

It happened one evening, three years ago, in the middle of a sports event on which Felix, to Harry F.'s relief, was fully concentrated. At the far corner of the extra long sofa they were occupying, Harry F. was happily reading a journal he just happened to bring along with him when Felix, in the middle of the last minute of a hockey game whose outcome was still in doubt, resolutely stood up from the sofa, aimed the remote at the TV which shut off, plunging the room in silence. Harry F. lowered his journal and found himself looking up at Colt, who stood over him trembling. “I have to tell you something, Harry,” he began, his nose flushing red, left thumb jammed into his right hand, eyes averted. He swallowed and swallowed again and took a deep breath.

“Harry, I have to tell you something I’ve been wanting to tell for a long time.”

“You have my undivided attention, Felix. Please continue,” said Harry F. in a kindly voice, sensing Felix was about to advice him of a negative health event.

Colt took two short breaths. “Harry,” he began. “I’m afraid . . .well . . . more than afraid actually, ah, to be totally upstraight about it, I dread, like you wouldn’t believe, being alone and I don’t know why and I don’t know what to do about it. I know you’re going to tell me that I’m not really alone because I’m married but even when I’m with my wonderful wife I feel alone because what’s going in on my mind has nothing to do with her.” Felix paused before continuing. “I invited you here this evening, Harry, to ask you to help me.”

He stood there for a few seconds, a bit surprised he had already finished saying what he had wanted to say, what he had been rehearsing for days until this moment. Not knowing what to do next, he stood awkwardly for a few seconds, and then sat down and waited for Harry F. to respond. But when the latter didn’t speak right away, he quickly added: “I’m afraid of being alone, Harry because I know that good people become bad when they are alone, and that most of the bad that is done in the world is because when you’re alone you don’t have to answer to anybody.” Without turning his head, he dared to take a quick peek at Harry F. who politely looked away. “I don’t know if I’m making sense but when I’m alone I have terrible thoughts, shameful thoughts, and it would be very easy for me to act on these thoughts, which is why I keep myself busy. You know Baggot just down the street? We’ve hardly seen him since his wife left him. He’s alone all day, and I get the jitters just thinking about what he’s thinking, and maybe doing.” Months of accumulated tension and anxiety drain out of Colt’s body. He clasped his bony fingers in reverse and extended his arms outward and exhaled. He had spoken his mind and already felt much better.

Felix Colt wasn’t the first person to confide in Harry F. In fact during the past several years, he had been roped into receiving confession so often that he was seriously considering moving to another neighbourhood or becoming a recluse. With the exception of octogenarian Wendy Woods, who 60 years earlier sold her 2-month old baby to finance a drug habit, all of the confessions fell into the ‘cheap intimacy’ ruse -- emotional blackmail employed to forge friendships or relationships that were never meant to be.

But Harry F. was too empathetic to allow his real thoughts to get the better of him and possibly result in hurtful comments which he might later regret. He also understood that the use emotional blackmail betrayed a lack of imagination for which his very ordinary neighbours couldn’t be held accountable, and he blamed himself for allowing his life, however infrequently, to intersect with theirs. From lawn bowling, to the late afternoon cocktail hour, and the evening card games, this is what most people did to defend themselves against the growing menace of loneliness, which has always been and remains the most unnatural manifestation of the human condition. For these reason, it would have been unthinkable that Colt and all the others who confided in him should be treated with nothing less than respect and compassion.

If for good effect and a small concession to vanity, he purposefully adopted the listening position of the Buddha while receiving confession, he avoided prescriptive formulas when dispensing his council. He recognized that each person was somewhere situated along his particular journey, perhaps stalled, but wanting to get to a better place.

Harry F. decided that he could best help Colt by suggesting that being alone might be the natural cure to loneliness, that he should regard fantasy or idle daydreaming as the ideal testing grounds for ideas that one could suppress or deem fit for the real world, that being alone was the best and safest environment for shameful thoughts. Before proposing that he read the novels of Jerzy Kosinski, he made Colt understand that since he was semi-retired and had more time on his hands, he had inadvertently left himself vulnerable to random thoughts taking over his mind, had allowed himself to be burdened by time because he hadn’t yet developed the mental muscle that would allow him to carry that burden with dignity. “If you can choose to think about everything under the sun, Felix, it’s only natural to wonder if some things are more worthy of thought than others. You can wonder over the content of your cat’s excrement or what’s the purpose of life. The way I see it you’re not asking the right questions.”

“I never thought of it like that, Harry.”

And so Harry F. and Felix Colt spoke well past the latter’s bedtime.

After crossing the street and quietly shutting the door behind him, he tip-toed to the living room and turned on the TV with the sound down, and decided that he wouldn’t pour himself a drink. He couldn’t wait to snuggle up to his sleeping wife.

As aforementioned, Colt was in awe of Harry F.’s intelligence and felt himself uniquely privileged having access to such an exceptional human being. Recognizing his limitations but wanting to be more than just a good neighbour, he spent considerable time trying to formulate questions that would engage Harry F., who he hoped, over time, would come to think of him as not just an obliging neighbour but a friend and confident. If from the very beginning of their acquaintanceship, Harry F. had learned to make himself unavailable to Colt, it didn’t deter the former from knocking on Harry F.’s door whenever he felt he had come up with a good question. Harry F.’s wife usually opened the door, explaining that her husband was busy at work and couldn’t be disturbed. Colt, who was immune to both insult and direct hint, promised he would try again on another day before wishing them both a productive day.

Notwithstanding Colt’s sincerity and best efforts, the questions that usually emerged from his protracted meditations revealed a man who critical faculties had been so long in disuse that nothing less than surgical intervention would be required to replenish juices in a mind that had dried up as quickly as a nickel of spit on hot pavement. In point of fact, and strictly for entertainment value, Harry F. much preferred the unrehearsed, Felix Colt, whose ideas and suggestions were so off the wall they caused the former to wonder if the latter weren’t in fact suffering from a bisociative personality disorder. “Harry, do you think the government should set aside money to harness the intelligence of porpoises that could be trained to detect ships illegally spilling polluted ballast into the oceans?” Or, “should human beings be medicated to defecate no more than once a week thereby reducing by a factor of seven the fouling of the earth?” However off the wall were Colt’s queries, Harry F., who had long ago mastered the duplicitous art of biting back a grin or a guffaw, invariably responded such that Colt would never suspect to what degree of low esteem he was held by his “good friend.”

Colt, of course, would have loved nothing more than to converse with his distinguished neighbour every day of the week. Circumstances, meticulously set in motion by Harry F., fated them to meet, at most, once a week, and usually for no more than five to ten minutes. Colt, who knew exactly when Harry F. left for work, looked forward to their impromptu ‘ocean deep’ conversations while Harry F. spent his spare time -- which he didn’t have -- browsing through real-estate ads and city maps, contemplating the pros and cons of moving.

If called upon to recommend Felix Colt to company whose only demand was that its members be civil and respectful of each other, Harry F. decided he would not allow his private thoughts to influence his referral, readily conceding that his opinion of Colt was tantamount to indictable slander. In a recurring fantasy he is unable to stop himself from insulting Colt to his face, which obliges the latter to terminate friendship.

But his wife, who normally dreaded even more than her husband that signature knock, defended their neighbour on the grounds that despite his incurable tedium and maddening preoccupation with everyone’s material worth, he showed a peculiar absence of envy of those more successful than himself, doubtlessly because he was short-changed of that ‘deadly’ sin at birth.

As to any particular contribution Colt might bring to a gathering of friends, his wanton dullness could be credibly compared to the advancing second hand of a clock, just as an anesthetist, experiencing an unforeseen shortage of ketamine, wouldn’t hesitate substituting the personality of Felix Colt to effect the same on a screaming patient just woke in the middle of surgery. In respect to the latter's sympathies, as a percentage of his not insignificant savings, thrown as we are into the information age and forced to confront human suffering on a global scale, Colt’s humanity laboured beneath his wit. But he wouldn’t hesitate to spend a thousand dollars on his beloved pet dog Arthur for a life-saving operation. If there was a category of persons Harry F. was instinctively set against, it was the petophiliacs – pet lovers ad extremis, whose priorities he considered indictable.

If, inferred from avowals and testimonials in the preceding paragraphs, Harry F.'s portrait of his neighbour could be characterized as unflattering, it was offset by the former’s inability to put on airs, which was so at odds with his stated values and ambitions, there were times when he wondered if his neighbour was secretly abusing pharmaceuticals. But that wasn’t at all the case. Felix Colt was always himself because he couldn’t be or do otherwise even when it was in his best interest. He shared his views, no matter how narrow or embarrassing to himself, without regard to either social censure or approbation; and he never modified an opinion to ingratiate himself into another's favour. This solicitous, childlike quality came to the fore every time he spoke, and while fiercely loyal to opinions that were as strident as they were uninformed, his reflex innocence secured him a place in societies that would have otherwise devised means to exclude him. If Harry F. regretted having to spend too much time with people (colleagues) affecting to be what they were not, the initial first few minutes spent with his unassuming neighbour was a welcome change. Beyond that well measured interval however, Harry F. longed for the good company of solitude.

Felix Colt had convinced himself that he was privy to a large circle of friends. Not only did he not draw any practical distinction between close and casual friends, he didn't feel it necessary to consider in any detail what they thought of him. He simply assumed that if he liked the person, the person liked him. He would have been shocked and hurt to learn that Harry F. dedicated a portion of each day scrupulously avoiding him.

Framed in the open curtains, Harry F. was about to shut them, fearing that Colt, who was mowing the lawn for a third time in seven days, might unexpectedly look up and catch sight of him. Colt would exploit the sighting as an excuse to drop in for an impromptu visit. With a hand on each curtain half, he was about to snap them shut when Colt, now turning his lawn mower to his right, showing Harry F. his sloped back, before the turn was completed, inexplicably -- undivine intervention -- turned his head left, in itself an acrobatic, rubber-necked feat, and caught Harry F. in the window, his arms spread-eagled between the open curtains. From Colt’s vantage point, Harry F. looked like he had just received an electric shock. Colt let go the mower, allowing his torso to realign with his head, and began to wave enthusiastically at Harry F., who still hadn’t blinked. The lawnmower man frantically pointed to his watch, and theatrically opened and closed his fist twice, flashing: "I'll see you in 5 x 2 minutes." Harry F. threw the curtain ends into the wall, the huge effort affecting only the smallest commotion, and shook his head like someone whose terrible luck it has been to be selected from a 1000 candidates to prosecute latrine duty in a dysentery ward.

He shuffled to the armchair where he did all of his reading, and dropped into it like boxer who has barely survived the first round and knows it’s only going to get worse. He contemplated feigning a bad cold or bad cough, but he knew that would not deter Colt, who would happily expose himself to viral infection for the cause of friendship.

Of course the very idea of illness was a nonsensical construct in the immortal's universe. As Harry F. deliberated over an appropriate response to Colt’s imminent visit, his upset gave way to a calm that could have easily been mistaken for indifference. For what he now saw through his window was not Felix Colt the individual, but an algorithm monotonously spitting out the same dreary copy of the self-same individual dwelling in self-deception and inauthenticity. Since it could have been anyone mowing the lawn, the dissimilarity between Colt and everyone else was insignificant compared to what they shared in common – blasphemous delusions of mortality.

Harry F. now found himself not caring one way or the other if Felix Colt or someone like him (they were all the same) dropped in on him or not. He certainly wouldn't simulate illness. After all, he had been unwittingly counterfeiting mortality for his entire life until this morning. Instead, he would remain true to himself, and by extension true to the truth of what he now knew. He decided that a friendly chat with Colt might be the perfect occasion to test his new truth. He was also curious to know if he would he be able to convince Colt of his immortality, just as it wouldn’t it matter if he did or didn’t?

In the calm of the moment, as serene as driftwood on still water, Harry F. waited for Colt's knock, and while waiting forgot what he was waiting for.

Looking around him at nothing in particular, the objects in the room began to blur. He drew towards him the latest issue of Philosophy Quarterly and tried to read it, but he couldn't focus on the print and wondered, in the complete absence of worry, if his vision were suddenly failing him even though his eyes had been checked less than a month ago. Perhaps it was it the diffuse light coming in through the closed curtains, or simply having woken so much later than usual. No matter.

There was as triple knock on the door. Harry F. regained his focus, but didn't rise to answer it. Instead, he listened to the knuckled woody triplets expire as quickly as they had sounded - into nothingness. In the silence that followed, something that he couldn’t turn into a word -- without which it wouldn’t rise to the occasion of speech, or being in the world -- came and went in the same instant, and then he found himself thinking about nothing at all. Until the doorbell rang -- a low sounding, pleasing-to-the-ear, 5-note arpeggio.

The image of Felix Colt, his puppet’s head twisted 180 degrees on a rubber neck while being led in the opposite direction by a roaring lawn mower jolted Harry F. out of his lassitude. He pushed himself up onto his legs, lead pipes that begrudgingly answered the command to attend to the front door which Colt had already cracked opened.

They stood face to face, neither looking away, the one bored, the other sheepish. Colt, like a school boy who has been told not to do something but does it anyway, was trying to suppress a guilty smirk etched into what was otherwise a featureless face. The slick on his forehead and nose-shine suggested hyper-active sebaceous glands. Harry F., tilting his head back as if to let an object pass, was quick to register Colt's malodorous body exudations -- a miasma of sweat, salt and sardine. He was in no mood to affect indifference, and began breathing through his mouth, holding his ground, hoping to back Colt up. But it was Harry F. who took two quick awkwardly long steps backwards, and from a safer distance, began studying Colt’s longish, streaky-gray hair -- a slick mane matted to an unusually round crown and forehead. If not for close, well shaped, elongated ears, the remarkable sphericity of Colt's cranium would have suggested a perfection before which bowlers would not have been able to resist singing the highest praises. A tennis shirt was clinging to a still trim, but shapeless upper body; his white with red trim running shoes and matching socks were stained green.

"Good afternoon, Harry," began Colt, walking right past him. Fresh grass was stuck to the back of his moist, harry calves. Harry F. waited for Colt's rank odour to dissipate. His eyes followed the trail of freshly cut grass that had fallen away from Colt's shoes, streaking across the length of the carpet to the trail-maker himself, now comfortably installed in the sofa in the deep end of the living room, legs crossed, the back of his head cupped and cradled by interlocking hands. Colt comfort, Harry F. punned to himself.

"You can shut the door, Harry," Colt proposed to the host. Harry F. just stood there, as if in deep thought, before deciding to chance a deep breath, which he unquietly released in a gesture of profound boredom. Shaking his head, he heavy-footed his way to his favourite arm chair, which was opposite the end of the sofa where Colt was seated, which just happened to allow for the greatest distance separating them. He removed the Quarterly before settling in.

Colt charitably concluded that the abyss between them wasn’t attributable to anything related to his person, but that Harry F., since he wasn’t at work, must be sick. “I saw you in the window," Colt started up. "I assume you’re under the weather?"

Harry F. glared at the blank face held in place by its ears; it might as well have been licking a block of salt. In a mind prone to pun in several languages, symmetry recalled cemetery, which in turn recalled the great lie. He began scraping his tongue on his upper front teeth. Colt was taken aback, confused. "I have not contracted encephalitis," explained Harry F. flatly.

Colt's lower jaw went into slippage, leaving his mouth agape, and a bottom row of uneven teeth. “That must be the technical word educated people use to describe a bad cold or flu,” decided Colt. His abiding indifference to words whose meaning he didn't know would have given Harry F. cause to yawn, had he not already been yawning. In the meanwhile, a disconcerted Colt offered: "I'm no doctor, Harry, “but maybe you should see one.”

Harry F., suddenly found himself commiserating with all the innocents whom Colt had trapped in conversation, decent people motivated by a kindness that only minutes later would morph into lacerating self-directed accusation.

As a means of bracing himself against the tedium of Colt’s presence, Harry F. would have turned to his inner thoughts, except none were there in this, his first day of his new life. There was only Colt himself, going in and out of focus, a smudge against the wall. Now, in a voice as calm as the sea in a doldrum dawn, Harry F. looked in the general direction of the blur occupying the left corner of the sofa and said, “Like two ships passing each other in the brilliant light of a clear day, death and I are fated never to meet.”

Colt heard what was said but didn’t react. And then, in a near inaudible whisper, he repeated what he just heard. Like a random thought that comes in goes in a measureless instant, Colt flashed brain tumour, and then he became self-conscious about his blinking which he tried to stop, until tears welled up in his eyes, at which point he gave up. Harry F., observing a freshly reconstituted Colt in the throes of consternation, allowed himself to smile, and when the latter began pulling on his chin as if a beard were there, began to chuckle. But Colt was undeterred. “I’ve forgotten my Shakespeare, Harry, and it’s a nice thought, but it’s an ill man’s thought.” Colt paused and pressed the flat of his thumb against his pudgy, oily nose. "I think you should see a doctor. You're probably running a fever, and you never know with these things. You're not the young buck you used to be."

Harry F., wearily shook his head, and saw Colt as if for the first time, a frightened man lost at sea, desperately clinging to a piece of wreckage – and all that remained of his mortality. What could he do, what could he say to shake him up, induce him to see the world as it properly turns; but there was nothing there but a pair of dull eyes marooned in space and interval breathing that sounded like wind getting sucked into an abyss.

Hanging on the wall behind Colt was an intricately hand woven Tunisian carpet; its fluid wormy calligraphy suggesting constant movement, a miniature of the affairs of the `unreal' world, Harry F. mused to himself. He was now persuaded that nothing ever changed – forever, that he and Colt might occupy their positions indefinitely because it didn’t matter if they did or didn’t. He let his eyes rest on the rug until it blurred as Colt’s head refocused. The latter had stopped blinking and appeared to be on the verge of speaking, but it was Harry F. who spoke first.

"I'm not joking, Felix," he said matter of factly, his enunciation as tight as dental forceps clamped to a tooth.

"Neither am I," countered Colt, intent on demonstrating that his friend's well-being was foremost in his thoughts.

"Death and I are fated never to meet," Harry F. repeated again, his eyes lifting to the ceiling that stood in the way of Colt’s seizing of the great truth that was on the other side of it, which was the world as it turned, but turned off to Colt and everyone like him. "I mean never," he said.

Colt decided that Harry F. was speaking in riddles, that his repeated reference to immortality concealed a message or a significance that his friend would reveal in his own fashion. So he fell silent and waited for Harry F. to continue, now very much absorbed by the mystery that was being concocted for his -- he couldn't truthfully say. Meanwhile, Harry F. had lost complete interest in the creature at the other end of the room, and right now would have been hard pressed to identify the living room as a living room. His mind emptied as he just sat there breathing.

Colt would have had to wait indefinitely had he not decided himself to break the silence that was beginning to get on his nerves. "Never is a long time, Harry" he offered up, wishing he could have come up with something more original.

"Never is forever," snapped Harry F., back on track. The admonition gave Colt a jolt; his body tensed, he uncrossed his legs and began rubbing his hands as if he had just come in from the cold. Harry F.’s utterance was so off the wall he wasn’t able to respond. Once again Harry F. began to scrape his tongue against his front teeth as Colt began seriously entertaining the possibility that his host was suffering from the effects of high fever of which a slimy tongue was a telling symptom.

Another silence ensued. "Knowing what we know to be true," Harry F. resumed in a calmer, more measured voice, "what are ‘you’ Felix Colt going to do about it?"

Unsure if Harry F. wasn't at least somewhat out of sorts -- to what degree he couldn't say -- he decided to go along with the mind game that didn't seem to play by any recognizable set of rules. "Why of course celebrate the fact," Colt answered matter-of-factly. "Wouldn't you?"

"Acknowledgement is itself a form of celebration, and `you' are a very special witness."

Colt fell silent, once again trying to figure out what real meaning was concealed in Harry F’s outrageous proposition as the mood of their encounter took a turn to the `deadly serious,' like the stirrings in the air that precede a tornado that will render unrecognizable a once familiar landscape. "And for how long will you celebrate?" asked Harry F. in a dreary monotone.

"Haven’t given it much thought, Harry,” replied Colt, trying to affect an air of nonchalance by taking a deep breath, and exhaling loudly through a forced half-smile. “Until I've had enough, I guess."

"And then what?"
"I don't know. Do what I usually do."
"And why would you want to do what you usually do if you don't have to do it?"
"I have to do something."
"But if you don't, it makes no difference. You're going to live forever, right?"

Colt had had enough. He had no idea what Harry F. was getting at, whose bizarre conjecturing was completely out of sync with the real world, so he decided that a change in the order of things was in order.

"Listen Harry, I don’t know what kind of mind games you’re up to, and I don’t have a clue what you mean by living forever except that I do know for certain that I, myself, am not going to live forever -- and neither are you for that matter."

"How do you know that death isn't something you've only invented because you can't bare the idea of living forever?" persisted Harry F. in that same leaden, lifeless voice.

"My father died seven years ago. And my son before that. That’s how I know. Do you get it now?”

Had Harry F. been paying attention, he would have noticed an impatient expression unsettle Colt’s normally placid features, that the latter’s eyes had turned into glassy chunks of dark ice, and that he was thoroughly fed up with his interlocutor’s attitude and badgering line of inquisition. But Harry F. pressed on, intent on sharing his truth and finally putting an end to his growing sense of isolation.

"Do you think I could persuade someone who believed in God that there is no such person or event?"

"Probably not," answered Colt, relieved by Harry F.’s new line of inquiry.

"Ah, what's the use," said an exasperated Harry F., pinching a budding fold of flesh just under his chin. "My great truth is falling on a mortal's ears and fears and I cannot do what only you can do for yourself. Of course there is time, and lots of it, for you to come around to seeing things as they are. Oodles of time, in fact.” Chuckle. “A universe full of time.” To himself: “Now why would Colt have to be saved from the lie he was living.” Meanwhile Colt was torn between getting up and leaving or calling for help.

Recognizing he was sitting opposite the equivalent of a die-hard, non-believer, Harry F. decided on a more pragmatic, reconciliatory tack. “Felix, my good neighbour of 13 years,” I invite you, on the ground and in the flesh, to test my thesis. If what is required of yourself is that you come to experience the first true moment of your life, don't eat or drink water for ten days. I promise you that well before the 7th day you will have learned that your pain has nothing to do with an empty stomach or dry mouth. It's a pain whose moment of truth arrives the moment you realize the stomach is neither full nor empty, the mouth neither dry nor wet -- but that the words stomach and mouth are nonsensical constructs. The pain is not being able to speak those words. The pain is not even knowing those words are lost forever. It's a new order of pain. It gathers an infinite number of indifferences unto itself that are so vast as to be infinitely incomprehensible -- but it doesn't matter if you comprehend or not -- and that's part of the pain. In fact, the great truth is that this terrible pain is exactly what you don't feel because it's an all-engrossing indifference from which you can't separate yourself, nor care to.

Harry F. stopped. He knew that what he had just said was as much for his own clarification as Colt's. And it gave him no small cause for alarm. Was this the promise, the final fulfillingness of immortality? If the question he dared to pose was correct, and the answer was in the affirmative, it meant that his mission or purpose, which ironically could be indefinitely postponed, would be to fully inhabit this brave new world order in order to reconfigure its contours and chemistry so that it would allow for the possibility of a separate and meaningful existence for himself as himself -- forever. It seemed simple enough, but was he asking for too much? All that was really required was that he exist, and there was no time like the present to make that an enduring fact that in fact would endure forever.

Despite the physical and metaphysical distance between them, Colt's eyes were clamped onto his interlocutor’s which were now full of fear and suspicion. He grasped neither the sense nor purpose of Harry F.'s just concluded outrageous declaration. And yet, even though it was in violation of everything he knew to be fact, he found himself granting the absurdity a plausibility exemption, since it didn’t have to be a fact to be possibly factual. The premise of immortality was of course ludicrous, but Harry F’s sincerity and conviction in arguing for its facticity could not be doubted, just as one can doubt the existence of God, but cannot doubt physical reality of the Church that was conceived and erected in His name.

In the realm of fantasy or daydream, what mature human being hasn’t, at least in private, not only entertained the notion of immortality but wished it from the very depths of his being. But this same rational daydreamer does not confuses fact with fancy, and since Colt regarded Harry F. as the sanest person he ever met, he had no choice but to make do with the very unsatisfying rationalization that for reasons yet undivined Harry F. was playing mind games.

Looking for an excuse to divert his attention away from his bafflement and apprehension, he leaned himself over between his thin legs that were stretched straight out, and began to busy himself with the messy patch of scattered grass that had fallen away from his running shoes and lower calves. Fanning out his fingers into a rake, he gathered into a small circle the freshly cut blades of grass that gave off a slightly grassy scent. Only when the area around his feet was swept into a neat little pile did he notice that the cut grass had cut a trail right through to where he was seated. He snuck a glimpse at Harry F. whose hands were neatly folded on his lap, head tilted a bit forward, unseeing eyes fixed on a neutral spot on the rug. He resembled a Buddha, perfectly still, in equal parts accepting of everything and indifferent to everything.

Relieved that Harry F. apparently hadn’t even noticed the broken line of grass on the rug, Colt’s thoughts reverted back to his friend’s declaration of immortality. In particular, the `pain as indifference' mention, which was easy enough to understand, but when Harry F. clarified the indifference as “what you don’t feel” and that you can’t separate yourself from it, well, that drew a huge blank. Still unable to get a glimpse of Harry F’s purpose, he suddenly felt rubbery in his legs even though he was sitting. So he leaned over again and began to massage the back of his moist calves before straightening up, after which he tried to take a deep breath but couldn’t fill his lungs. Now slouched, unsure what to do next, he decided that he would not dignify Harry F’s `living forever' threat with a rebuttal, and tried to think about something else, but he couldn’t conjure up anything to think about, and he once again found himself trying to make sense of nonsense.

Harry F.'s now lengthy preternatural stillness was in direct contrast to Colt’s growing confusion and agitation. The gross fiction proposed by his well-intended neighbour and best friend was forcing the conclusion that he, who believed himself as stable as the next man, was indeed capable of flirting with the irrational. That he dared not even think to himself the word ‘insanity’ -- second only to the word ‘impotence’ as unmentionables within the proud fraternity of men -- should have been an indication of just how serious the ridiculous can seem when removed from its usual context and placed in more hospitable one, and that absolutes dwell uniquely in the mind of the beholder and nowhere else.

Colt once again reviewed Harry F’s outrageous premise to himself, and however nutty he viewed himself for doing so, he wasn’t at all alarmed that he might have temporarily lost control of his mind insofar as he was experiencing it in live time. In fact, he was only now realizing, with some satisfaction, that the anticipation of being briefly crazy caused more apprehension than the experience itself -- if this was, indeed, a foretaste of it. At any rate, whatever it was, he was now perfectly willing to go along with it – whatever that ‘it’ was -- because he felt he could direct it to a certain extent, and perhaps even make it work to his advantage. He was convinced that control would deliver him to a better place.

In the spirit of adventure for misadventure’s sake, he began to think of Harry F., as a road sign pointing the way to a new experience, a previously undisclosed point of view. And he would follow the signs wherever they led, confident that Harry F. would never allow him to fall into harm’s way. It would have never occurred to him that that if he were to follow to its terminus Harry F.’s logic, it would mean consenting to the entire annihilation of his universe, since it was inconceivable that Colt, under-equipped in every sense, would be able to survive the implications of immortality.

How far was Colt willing to travel with Harry F.? Would he be able to handle the perhaps discomfiting truths he would encounter along the way? While the prospect of discovering something he couldn't yet name excited him, his instinctive fear of this un-named, inarticulate something made his heart pound and head buzz. “Live forever, live forever, live forever.” The words, Harry F.’s flat delivery were spinning faster and faster in his head because they couldn’t get out. "I need some fresh air," Colt abruptly announced. He stood up, letting a handful of cut grass flutter to a soft landing on the rug. "I'll let myself out, Harry.” Colt’s interlocutor calmly observed a blurred figure from a painting streaking past him.

His mind scattered in all directions, eyes targeted onto his house across the way, Colt was streaking across the tree-shaded street just as a delivery van came to a screeching halt. He didn't break stride, nor acknowledge the chauffeur's high-pitched, bilingual cussing, nor the blare of the horn, and he didn’t give a second thought to what can only be described as total indifference to having been almost run over. Even before the sharp blast of the horn had faded, he felt – and immediately liked what he felt -- that his body was no longer subject any serious harm. And then, just as he had gained the walkway to his house, a perverse smile sneaked up on him. And just as quickly, he refused to acknowledge the pleasurable bodily changes that had come over him. He understood that his giddiness was irrational, like any number of irrational thoughts and feelings everyone entertains on a daily basis.

While Colt was now struggling in vain to empty his mind of unwelcome thoughts over which he had no control, Harry F. was still seated in his arm chair, as still as the objects of the room which he had begun to resemble. Only the trail of grass on the rug reminded him that Colt had come and departed. He didn’t know when and couldn't recall the purpose of the visit; only that it happened.

He began to examine the broken line of grass, the blade ends oozing a milky plant secretion where they had been cut, their haphazard criss-crossing; thin green lashes stitched into an Umbrian coloured carpet. After a while, the grass looked as if it had always been there which is why it wouldn’t have occurred to him that it might be a good idea to clean up before his wife returned at the end of the day.

A FUNERAL IN THE DIMENSION OF TIME

In the cozy confines of his made-to-measure basement den, off-limits to everyone except his wife on special occasions, whose walls were smothered with posters and photos of his favorite athletes, Colt drifted his eyes over the wall-length walnut-wall unit that featured a state-of-the-art 52 inch HD television, a stereo-CD/DVD/mp3 combination, flanked on both sides by miniatures of the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben, and on a higher shelf under which were four Backgammon trophies, a pristine leather-bound set of an encyclopedia, an atlas from the same publisher, and a pristine 60 volume set of the World's Greatest Literature. He was sunk deep in the den's one and only sofa chair, remote controls on each arm rest.

He was desperate to regain even the smallest fraction of composure, but, despite location change, was unable to silence Harry F.'s `live forever, live forever,' which continued to repeat in his thoughts like a pre-recorded message loop. The mantra – “forever, forever” – kept repeating over and over again, their meaning taunting him, refusing to be stilled that he might get some control over them. Had he been able to salvage for himself even a moment or two of respite from the punishing repetition, he might have been able to interrogate what was concealed in the locution, if only to temporarily get the better of it, tame it, bridle it, make it understood, make its meaning equal to the user's comfort level; a depredation that would surely reassure the user but at the expense of the words themselves. Had he offered but the smallest thought to the matter, he would have grasped that while the theory of infinity could be exquisitely expressed in mathematics, as an actual experience, it was an imponderable, even as his mind, in response to Harry F.'s untenable assertion, was being swept up into a cause and effect over which he had no control.

"Live forever. Live forever." The words wrapped themselves around his brain like pincers, crab’s claws; he felt he couldn’t go on, that something both strange and terrible was going to happen, just as his first line of defense began to break down, and his last line of defense began to prepare for the emergency relief of seizure or shock, as the words began to lose their inter-connectedness, their meaning, while the syllables were separating into autonomous, formless sounds, now drone-like, recalling the stuff of the incantatory that feeds the religious sensibility.

And then whatever it was that was happening to him, suddenly passed and Colt felt well again. In the privacy of the one place he could without fear of interruption fantasize about his sports heroes who were his best friends, he now found himself idling in a calm that was so penetrating that it deprived him of the volition to even wish he could he could indefinitely prolong the state. If he were awake, it was like an animal is awake or a Zen master perfectly attuned to the present indicative.

In a very different dimension of time, across the street, still unmoved in his chair, Harry F. was concentrated on the repetition of Felix Colt's words reverberating inside his head: "My father died seven years ago. My son before that. My father died seven years ago. My son before that."

Having earlier in the day accepted, if not wholly embraced the facts and their implications that his being was infinite, the thought that Colt’s reproach might repeat indefinitely was a matter of course. He understood that notion of ‘the now’ had nearly settled the issue of immortality, that it was an empty formulation that begat an infinite number of corollaries, one of which was that whatever he was doing or thinking might be done or thought forever: music to which he was partial, a favourite stanza of poetry; or a sunrise turning a wheat field into gold. In fact the anything and everything of an infinity of possibilities, which included nothingness, might repeat themselves forever.

An impartial observer of Harry F.'s direct encounter with the infinite would have noticed that he hadn't yet found sufficient cause to do or not to do anything or nothing. Since everything was equally possible and random, there was no reason not to be presently concentrated on Colt's chilling statement of pre-meditated, asserted fact: "My father died seven years ago and my son before that," which repeated like the mirror of infinity held up to itself in his thoughts now reduced to one thought only.

Harry F. decided to step outside for a breath of fresh air, perhaps even go downtown. He wanted to experience his new world with which he was now contemporary -- an equal in the eyes of time -- as infinite as the world itself, at least until the sun would burn itself out and the world as we know it would disappear. But then again, if the sun were to implode and self-obliterate, would it make any difference if he was going to live forever? He was trying to decide whether or not to wear his strapless Greek sandals or Pacific Rim running shoes when he began to question the necessity of making such a decision, asking himself if he weren't reverting back to the mortal's illusory units-of-time-perishing fantasy, when Colt's reminder of the death of his loved ones, "My father died seven years ago, my son before that," started up and wouldn’t stop, beating him back into his chair. Despite the irrefutability of the first principles of immortality, he could not deny Colt his hard earned life experience, that the latter knew, as he knew for certain he was immortal, that those two separate events separated by time -- the death of the father and the son -- took place, happened, belonged to historical time as conceived by mortals.

He attended the funeral. It was a hot day. At Colt's request, Harry F. stood just behind the immediate family. His wife couldn't attend. She was sick. She hated funerals. She sent flowers for a week. He recalled the anguished, uncontrollable ebb of Francis Colt's grief piercing him to the quick. He felt it in his stomach, the held back sobs gathering until they burst out in a torrent, rising into the boughs and over-hanging foliage that were perfectly still in a windless afternoon; the lowering of the coffin, another surge of sobs, the handfuls of dirt thudding on the wooden facing, her swaying, keening, feeling faint from grief and heat, supported at the arms by her two surviving sons, silent and uncomprehending. He remembered the white heat of the sun burning into his dark blue suit, his back and shoulders heavy with sweat; anticipating the relief of his air-conditioned office, counting the minutes, then hating himself for thinking only of himself, until another round of sobs crashed over him. After flower and wreaths had been laid along side the dark, cool rectangle into which the coffin had been lowered, the mourners dispersed into their private grief and troubling questions.

Harry F. was unlocking his car door when he felt a hand alight on his shoulder. He turned to acknowledge the grief stricken face of Felix Colt beseeching him for answers for which there was no satisfactory response, other than the one whose mention would have been wholly inappropriate in the present circumstance. Harry F. suddenly realized to what degree philosophy failed to measure up when it came to the everyday challenges of life. "Why Harry? Why? Some young kids ask for it. They dare it. They play with their lives like it was something cheap. But not my son. He was a good boy; disciplined; a team player. And he was smart. Why Harry? Why him and not some dumb, doped up kid going nowhere?" Harry F. could only shake his head. There was nothing to be done, no posture, position equal to the eternal recurrence of injustice, the repetition of suffering, its incorrigibility. How often it seemed the good man suffered, the evil one prospered. There was much he would have liked to say to Felix Colt that day, but he said nothing. He could only lower his eyes and surrender to the inadequacy of his knowing, where to know was to act, to comfort and console. He took his neighbour into his arms and held him tight. He felt Colt's body go limp against his own, his chest heave and convulse and swell until sorrow and grief burst and poured out of him. Colt broke down and sobbed for the first time since he was a young man fighting in the war. All his strength deserted him. He clung to Harry F. and held himself there until his sobbing subsided, after which he carefully disengaged and wordlessly turned away. Harry F. watched a disconsolate, shrunken figure make its way back to wife, the stopped and stooped silhouettes of Felix and Francis Colt facing each other, united in a loss neither could comprehend. They held each other, they faltered; and closed their eyes to the world they felt had slipped away, had lost its meaning.

No one among the straggling party of mourners would have noticed Harry F., supporting himself on the car door that was ajar, overcome with emotion as he fought against his chest convulsing, and a cry rising into his throat. At last, he too broke down and sobbed. Hot tears gushed out, mindlessly, as mindless as pain, as mindless as pure feeling. He gave into it with a rush that made him feel whole again, and vitally connected to the neighbour he had spent years wishing he wasn’t. Yes. Death was real. It was the loss of all connection. It was nothingness forever and forever. It took his breath away, this pure and unmediated nothingness that held random bits and pieces of life in its shapeless orbit before disappearing them.

But of course, since this morning, he knew it was all a lie, born in the counterfeit resolve of a species terrified of its destiny. In his world where everything lived forever, death was a heresy, an inconceivable; but in his present thoughts whose allegiance was still up for grabs, the contradiction presented an imposing obstacle on the way to -- he couldn't say -- and it demanded immediate redress. Harry F. understood that before he could step outside and experience his new world, he would have to account for the present world and its worldly consolations. He had to resolve the dichotomy that treated death both as fiction and fact, as appearance and reality. How was it possible to have attended Colt's son's funeral and yet know that he and everyone else were going to live forever? He wanted more than anything for his new world, its lineaments and first principles, to finally emerge from his investigations that would bring into unconcealment the gene sequence foretells that death is a lie as well as being the guarantor of the rule of reason.

Colt junior died seven years ago; Colt senior was going to live forever. How to break the deadlock, assign final authority to one or the other since they both cannot be true. It occurred to Harry F. that if he didn’t make any advance on the problem at hand he might never again move, might never leave the sofa chair to which he was welded, as still as the inanimate objects around him; that except for brief periods of mental activity, he was the same in spirit as the object-things he was now observing with a disinterested, fraternal eye. The more thought he offered to the dilemma, the more he realized it was only the smallest matter of life and death, an afterthought, a conundrum to whose drumbeat he once marched, a thought that was quickly assimilated into the fact that he was going to live forever.

He fell into a calm that an outsider might mistake for a catatonic trance or vegetative state. His meager thoughts vacillated back and forth between indifference and disquiet, until the latter finally roused him from his torpor as he realized that what was hanging in the balance was nothing less than the truth of his being as he related himself to the world. What he had been loath to accept as a mortal -- he had dedicated the last two decades of his best thinking to discredit it – he could now enthusiastically embrace.

Relativism, in the present age, easily as widespread and destructive as the plague of the Middle Ages, came to Harry F's rescue and succour in a manner that defied the absence of excitement and fanfare normally associated with sudden insight. By quietly relegating value-judgments to non-existence, relativism became every man's last argument: losers discovered they were winners and the winner's circle grew to include everybody. Whether relativism was the bastard offspring of the human longing for immortality or the other way around were one and the same since they were both spawned in the same toxic swamp and then raised to spectacular imminence by human frailty.

Harry F. now realized that his former adversaries were in fact defenders of the faith. In their defense of relativism, where actions -- code for unrestricted self-indulgence -- speak louder than lecture, they had already, however inadvertently, signed onto the notion that immortality was the only truth worth living.

With some embarrassment he recalled a particular moment in his life as a mortal, when he had insisted, at the disregard of feelings of friends and community, that a Mozart Piano Concerto, for example, was inherently more meaningful and value-laden than an endlessly whining, one-note Rap drone or a South Indian Raga. Looking back at that period of his life, he could at least take some consolation in knowing that within and according to the limitations established by an epistemology (grounded in death) consistent with mortality, his anti-relativist stance was the correct one because there wasn't an infinite forever to do everything one wanted. Choices had to be made, just as certain pursuits were more worthwhile than others. There wasn't time to listen to all the world’s musics, read all the books. This was the law of finitude. But the relativist maintained that every art had its own unique value that arose out of a unique situation, that one culture was neither superior nor inferior than another's, that to insist was a form of cultural dictatorship. Harry F. proposed that the test of time resolve the argument, that only what was truly significant would survive the gauntlet of changing tastes and fashion. But now he saw how terribly wrong he was, deceived and ignorant such as only a mortal could be. The premise of finitude, of time, was a lie that over time must – he was the designated QED -- turn into its opposite. And in this brave new world that turned on the axis of the infinite everything was possible and equally valid -- forever.

That fact that he was presently at peace with himself in the truth of his immortal being didn’t mean that he was in any way superior to Colt who was living a lie. The duality would endure forever. His manner of being was as authentic as Colt's was inauthentic, and it would always be that way until Colt would come to understand that his way of being was merely on the way to being -- on the way to the gradual discovery of the truth that he was immortal. Harry F. inhabited a world (only partially encountered) that was in theory comprised of people like himself, self-realized, wholly and unambiguously immortal; while everyone else, each in his own fashion, was somewhere on the way to becoming immortal, though in all likelihood ignorant of the possibility in the manner mortals reflexively turn away from the fact that each and every instant of their time-passing is towards death. If the first obligation of every mortal is to take into account his finitude, the first duty of an immortal is to come to terms with his infinitude, where every individual is somewhere along the way of his journey.

Harry F., of course, didn't care one way or the other where Colt was or wasn't; or if he was or wasn't. He had finally achieved his own immortality, and that was enough. It was a perfect state that might always be itself, excluding everything else but itself.

“So pathetic a tool is the much heralded intelligence of man,” Harry F. amused to himself. Even after millions of years of evolution, mind remains incapable of recognizing, much less shattering the lie it has invented for itself, a sad commentary on a species that chooses to dwell in self-deception. Then again, maybe human intelligence should be congratulated for having ingeniously elaborated the fiction of time passing into an unquestioned myth cum eternal truth. Harry F. wasn’t dumb to the fact that he might be the myth’s only flaw, a singularity adrift in a universe without mass or dimension.

As for the mortal who fears death, his recorded history -- an unceasing bloodletting -- has not done him proud. Harry F.'s unoriginal thesis that human intelligence, presumably serving the instinct of self-preservation, has been consistently and responsible for the opposite result, rendering null and void the accomplishments of those who have managed to work the mind into a reliable muscle capable of issuing and performing certain commands in respect to self-preservation. That this moral minority might influence events on the blood meridian of human endeavor (that reason might prevail over the primitive mind) was no less a miscalculation than expecting an ape to be able to write a poem or play guitar. In the performance there was nothing to warrant even the smallest grounds for optimism; better to berate an intelligence that is off the mark by hundreds of evolutions than expect it to act on what it knows or what is in its best interest.

But today, the mind, its habitual failings, was not an issue for Harry F. If there had been a contradiction, a dichotomy, it had fallen into irrelevance. Relativism had opened the sluice gates, conferred currency to everything, freeing Harry F. for the world that allowed even for the deceived Colts to play their part. In this new world order, Harry F. might now lend a hand to the multitudes of the deceived in their journey, provide them with compass, help them unravel the sign language, the new alphabet and the grammar of foreverness.

Bare-footed, buoyant, he sprung out of his chair, and sprinted to the front door. His hand was wrapped around the brass opener, smooth and cool in his palm and fingers, when he suddenly stopped. He hadn't considered the weather. What would he wear?

The very notion of weather, slipping into shorts and sandals on a warm summer day, or stuffing a scarf into a coat sleeve in anticipation of a brittle, wintry night, struck him as -- he couldn't find the word -- preposterous, but not quite so, because he had been doing precisely those things (doffing and donning clothes according to the 4-seasons) for his entire life. But today, he found himself at a watershed moment in his epistemologically untried, infinite universe.

He syllogized that his universe was infinite because he was infinite and that one couldn’t be nowhere forever. Being required a somewhere, even though until today, Harry F. hadn’t considered himself subject to the laws governing infinity, a position that couldn’t be sustained indefinitely. A man leaps in the air and briefly appears to be no longer subject to the laws of gravity. It could be said of Harry F. that he was in the midst of that leap, slowed down like the hour hand of a time piece to accommodate the many adjustments he would be required to make with or without his consent.

In the unbroken light of principles whose essence was that very light, the necessity of having to dress and respond to a particular season's stresses didn't square with the fact that Harry F. was certain he was going to live forever. He could walk naked in the streets in temperatures of minus 50 and it wouldn't matter. He was immortal. The concept of weather had no legitimate claim to the place and powers that had been assigned to it. The entire dispensation was tainted in presumption. The weather, deviously passing itself off as the ground of all experience, was a fraud as sinister and vitiating as the lie it was founded on. Founded in the foul play of a dastardly alchemy (the belief that one could produce finitude out of foreverness), it proclaimed the lie as truth and then pronounced the matter closed.

Harry F. had just passed the threshold between the inside and the outside, and was now trying to get his bearings from the slightly raised, pine-wood porchway where he stood questioning his old universe whose eternal truths (hunger, weather) were accepted as matter of course and convenience. Harry F. readied himself to moderate a dialogue that pitted two irreconcilable modes of being against each other, and like the comically under-equipped cartoon character trying to prevent two planets from colliding, it was only a matter of time before their collision and impact would flatten the do-gooder into an unrecognizable slab of matter, his fate a sure formula for someone else’s amusement.

So while the almost obscene untenability of dressing up for the weather was causing him considerable mental upset, much like a dust-raising, dry prairie wind might upset a farmer during the seeding, elsewhere in his thoughts, two wholly incompatible universes were crashing into each other with all their might and history, one as obdurate and bellicose as the other, each matched in rectitude and self-righteousness, self-possessed to the point of bursting, granting the other only the very minimal status of being a theoretical possibility.

Harry F. looked behind him. The door was closed. Five short wooden steps connected the raised porch to the walkway which led to the public trottoir. He took those five steps and stood still. The outside, in whose midst he was standing, didn’t impress him as being all that different from the inside, which he had just vacated. The S-shaped walkway, which he painstakingly designed and constructed with sienna-red, lozenge-shaped bricks, was bordered on both sides by a molding of buttercups, shaded by two opposing pairs of huge elm trees whose light tinted silver-green leaves glittered in an easy, warm, late summer breeze. The living room bay-window's overhang, like a hat visor, shaded a motley-coloured, triangular flower bed. Across the street, in front of a neighbour's house, two doors down from the Colt abode, a hatless mother in white shorts and white sleeveless T-shirt was playing with her naked tot on the grass at the outer edge of a digitally-operated rotating sprinkler. What was otherwise a still and silent afternoon was deepened with the delightful squeals of the baby with each passing of the spray. To be sure, Harry F. concluded, these were all signs of a particular season. And if he, himself, was seriously doubting the being of such a season, he knew the others out there were as certain of its existence as they were of themselves existing. He wondered if he shouldn’t disabuse the young woman of her unreal attachment to the concept of seasonal variations in weather, but decided not to needlessly run the risk of raising her eyebrows and ire. At least for the time being. And he wasn’t completely indifferent to the fact that the young woman struck him as being exceptionally content and fulfilled at this particular instant of her counterfeit life.

What did it matter that they were all part and parcel of the lie they chose not to recognize? And yet, as if suborning his very point, when he extended his arms horizontally in front of him, it was almost as if to embrace something mortals would characterize as a breeze, whose first effects were to cool his arms and slightly flutter the blond hairs that were otherwise matted to the flesh. This involuntary, Dionysian plunge into the realm of weather-determined, atmospherics caused his mind to register the presencing of something both necessary and primordial, equally wonderful and elemental. But that quickly gave way to uncertainty, and in that uncertain mind, which Harry F. would designate as the temple where the truth of all experience finally discloses itself, the battle continued, as each world in its sound and fury attempted to subdue and absorb the other into its fiat, or failing to do so, obliterate the incorrigible heresy of the other into unintelligible, bits and pieces of unconnected pre-data, or the mortalic equivalent of anti-matter. This was a campaign, a war that allowed no compromise, that recognized no middle ground.

At this singular moment in Harry F.'s evolution, he keenly understood that there could only be one truth, one ground. And until this one ground showed itself as the legitimate keeper and maintainer of its ground, he wouldn’t be unable to lift his feet from where he stood; he would not be able to execute his next step because there was no ground before him; only an undefined, amorphous churning of something not yet born, the pre-ground of a ground struggling for actuality, a ground vitally dependent on the tenacity and ability of Harry F. to think logically.

Meanwhile, the two opposing worlds, as two unyielding wills, each vouchsafed by sacrosanct original doctrine, smashed against each other like nano-units of matter in a particle accelerator. Sparks burst, and in the flickering light of those mad, doomed sparks, Harry F. understand that the weather and all the millions and billions of interconnected concerns and considerations it generated, like some mad, ferocious mitosis, formed an indivisible unity that was as impenetrable as a fortress whose walls subtended nothing less than the known universe. And yet it was all a lie, a myth whose formidable bubble only Harry F. had managed to burst. Were there others, he wondered or was he alone. Could one of anything exist without the many?

That the universe could admit caprice and contingency was an allure as compelling as water to desert life. If he weren't so partial to what he now knew to be the truth, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to sustain and remain indifferent to the grace and nobility of the myth, the magnificence of its architecture that held the spinning earth in a warm embrace. The promise of meaning, mortality's promise, that could contract and expand over time, was hard to resist. Looking into the window of the lie, as if into the pages of a novel whose make-believe world is preferable to the world as it turns, Harry F. saw himself suffering through the worst of what weather could offer: its deprivations, its untimely assaults, its indiscriminate taking of life, its undoing of life-times of labour, all of which seemed sweeter than a world without weather, without the four seasons. And then he saw himself partaking of the precious gifts and glories of the seasons, and in particular, those of winter as an equal partner on a windless, snowy evening, stopped along a quiet city street whose sharp squares and rectangles have been snow-softened and fluffed and framed by the white streets and sidewalks running along side downy houses as weightless as the pillowy rise of chimney smoke lifting to a sky filigreed with jeweled flakes falling feathery onto the thin tracery of twigs and branches silhouetted against a yellow evening awash in lamp light.

While the poet might discover the meaning of piety in such evenings, or the meaning of contingency in the weather's confounding devastations, Harry F. knew that both homage and vigorous protest were all fabulous fictions, self-perpetuating deceptions promulgated by deluded, defiant mortals pathologically wedded to their belief in perpetually perishing time, a sham-restriction conferring illusory meaning to even the smallest, most insignificant decisions: should I wear thicker socks, or wait for it to warm up a bit? -- involvements so habitual they had long ago, with the backing of concrete historical experience, had come to be regarded as the inviolable givens of existence that informed every mortal of what was always out there: the weather, the forever volatile, vicissitudinous weather.

Yes. The myth of weather was a weave whose elaboration was so complex, the incalculable indeterminateness of its millions of separate strands would never betray its genesis, the beginning that would reveal the lie in its truth, the equivalent of the mortal’s God particle.

Instead, far removed from the cause, was the result, as far away as recently arrived light from a distant, unseen star. The philosopher Hegel had come the closest to exposing the lie when he declared that being is the least category of existence. But Hegel was a freak, a sui generis whose insights were crushed beneath the deluge of facts issuing from a global network of meteorologists and their dedicated minions who could hardly keep up with the task of analysis and classification generated by the ceaseless proliferation of weather-related facts and experience, all of which sustained the myth-concept of weather. From the simple weather report every half hour on the hour, to the weather’s effect on a particular crop grown in a particular soil, to the stock market anticipation of the yield of this same crop, the over or under supply's impact on a third world country's economy, the loan of the producing country to the borrowing country and its affect on interest rates and the deficit, the weather evinced a cause and effect so convincing in its appearance that the fiction was taken for eternal truth. By virtue of its species specific tenure as truth, it had long since removed itself from inquiry. In short, the weather's thereness was as primordial as the planet earth. And until this very morning, Harry F. was party to this insidious fiction. But now, as certain as he knew he was going to live forever, he clearly saw that content of life whose being depended on the four seasons was a gross lie; that maple leaves turned orange and red in autumn was a lie; the painters and photographers who paid annual homage to autumn's feast of colours were fraudsters; that museums and galleries, the necessary sights where art and truth presumptively gather, were, instead, places where prevarication and duplicity bullied themselves into the collective imagination.

Harry F. was suddenly overcome with shame over his ignorance and behaviour that spanned his entire life, in large part because he was unable to account for it. In the indeterminate present he could only confess to it, interrogate it, and dedicate himself to forging a way to the core of an understanding whose powers of seizing the world in its truth would, of its own internal mandate, set a precedent that would serve as a handbook of sorts in the eternal quest for self-hood.

So if Colt’s world was all one big-bang of a spectacular lie, the confection of the species in abject thrall to self-deception, what was really out there? If coloured leaves weren't weather determined, what were they? How did they become what they are?

Like a life form fortuitously preserved in deep ice, Harry F., the passive host- site for the battle of the universes, could neither act not be acted upon; he was as immobile as the stoppage of time and barely able to maintain himself in the outside where he was paused before the precipice of an absolute that included him as content. Knowing that he was going to live forever caused everything once familiar to become strange. The things around him seemed to be in-hiding, hiding behind the words that named and covered them. The name-word was so effective a covering no one could say when the things themselves were last seen, or remember what it was that was being covered. But now the name was gone, and hence the strangeness of everything.

Despite a precariousness that shook him to the core of his being, for the first time in his 47 years, Harry F. felt he was closing in on the essence of things, which included their mystery and the uneasy feeling of these things threatening to burst into life all around him. But his thinking couldn't still anything long enough to attach a name to them, they kept going in and out of focus. Just as they were about to reveal themselves, or how he might connect himself to them, they would, as if by magic, disassemble into their spectral non-selves.

So if not the four seasons, what was the truth of the-there? But no sooner was the question asked that he found himself not waiting for an answer; he was just standing there, volitionless, unmoved, un-moving. The-there was neither pleasant nor unpleasant. And it didn’t matter if words had failed him, or if the-there in which he was standing unmoved was so much like a non-experience it required no words, was beyond the reach of language in the conventional sense. And yet, in the midst of these compelling if somewhat unsatisfying inchoate deliberations, he couldn't explain the sudden satisfaction taken from drawing a deep breath of fresh air into his lungs, and indulging, however briefly, in the wonderfully uneven scent of all that was green and growing.

If Harry F. had been keeping a diary, a recent entry would have noted that the mortal that he was endeavouring to overcome hadn't been completely vanquished. Like most life-long bad habits, it would take more than merely proper thinking to correct them. Today, after all, was Harry F.'s first day as an immortal, and his self-imposed expulsion from one universe to another was a shock which from time to time would cause him to appreciatively look back at his old universe and its certainties. And while he would have forever to adjust to the shock, he could now begin to gradually accommodate himself to his new universe’s first principles over and against the pathetic counterfeit existence that was already petering out in the fading fields of finitude. But until his metamorphosis was irreversibly completed, and his old universe so nullified as to be unremembered that it might as well have never existed, there was always the off chance that he would regress, however temporarily, back to mortalhood.

Looking at his old world as if from its rim, Harry F. decided that the fact of his birth -- which was separate from the gradual discovery of his miraculous being-in-the-world -- was not deserving of any particular praise or congratulations since it was involuntary: after all, he didn’t consent to being born. But to consciously will one's self to be born again, to make the mind the measure and breadth and source all meaning, this was the mortal’s supreme challenge. And in his new world Harry F. was determined to keep himself in the center of this brave new challenge – of bringing into unconcealment the meaning of life -- by embracing the not yet fully appreciated implications of immortality.

That he was actively and willfully giving birth to himself, and therefore assuming responsibility for his true birthing, obliged him to reassess the weather-matters at hand, matters pregnant with contradictions. While his senses were registering that his city, his neighbourhood and streets were associated with a particular season (the windows were open, the bronzed torsos of the sanitation squad were bared, the vegetative world was thriving), his mind was strenuously questioning the very concept of weather, its veracity, its being. If the four seasons were lies, if everything was weather less -- what was it that was out there? Could rain be something other than weather-determined? It wasn't enough that Harry F. awoke to the truth of what he was -- an immortal: it was essential that as an immortal that he know the truth of where it is that immortals forever dwell. What was the nature of the-there (where he would dwell forever) if things growing weren't what they seemed to be and perhaps weren’t at all? In order to save the rain and clouds from oblivion, he would have to radically reconfigure his relationship with these things that made up the natural world. He would have to uncover their place and purpose in the absence of the conventional modalities of space and time. If the rain had no connection to growth, to life, what was the meaning of those infinite in number, hemispherical, transparent shapes that fell down instead of up, registered wetness to the sense of touch, and under an electron microscope revealed an orderly orbiting of electrons around a nucleus? He concentrated hard on eliciting the nearness required to save the rain, but the concept of rain withdrew as if repelled by the very effort. Then the body of the rain emptied, self-annulled; the droplets looked like photo X-rays; and then they were no longer droplets. Harry F. was looking at something with which he had no connection, that was as undifferentiated as everything else that hadn't been named. He couldn't utter the word rain, the effect of which was succeeded by a feeling of nausea.

In the first of a series of epiphanies, each bringing nearer the distilled essence of his new universe, Harry F. was suddenly able to combine two previously disparate truths into a new whole. Number 1: that the necessity to eat to survive was a lie because he was going to live forever, and number 2: that the rain and the plant life whose thirst it slaked were lies. Eliminate the rain, the entire food cycle, Harry F. would always survive. In a synaptic flash, he realized he didn't have to bother saving these things, or inhere them with purpose or context that would restore them to their former wholeness. In an instant, all his gathering doubts, like a horrendous head-ache lifting, disappeared from his thoughts. From its very first formulation, the challenge to save the four seasons was ill-conceived if not worrisomely irrational. It didn't matter a whit that the rain might never acquire a new necessity. The rain didn’t matter; it didn’t even require a name.

“So why waste my extravagantly unprecious time on it. If I knew what was important in my life as a mortal, I should now want to know what is important as an immortal.”

Harry F. felt he was making huge advances (predicate to be supplied in due time), especially after the recent setbacks and losses; the forward progress felt good and provided the incentive to stay focused.

But no sooner had he resolved to stay the course when he began to slide back into his pre-epiphanic state of doubt and uncertainty. And once again he found himself unable to attribute to either the four seasons or the rain a compelling purpose, and that the effort to do so was only delaying his comprehension of the hard fact that he would be existing in a realm that might not exist outside the scope of language and thought. To ensure himself, at least for the time being, of an transitional interval that would prepare him for that inevitability, he understood that he would require language to account for himself and the entities that constituted the world. And beyond that, as it concerned his anxieties regarding his status and comportment and purpose in his new universe, he would also require language to register those concerns. If the things of his new world were slipping away from him, language would keep them near, at least until he found another modality which would perform the same function.

Then again, perhaps there was no alternative to language, that if he were going to exist forever, it would have to be through language. But to speak of the rain in the absence of purpose or telus, why speak of it at all: the rain was a hoax, a joke, a non-sequitor, a desperate mortal’s recourse.

Was Harry F. ensnared in a circle without a beginning or resolution, but consistent with the laws of his new universe where it would be impossible to speak of the very things he wanted to save? The ‘so what’ rejoinder entered the debate. ‘So what’ that his new universe would be comprised of things not yet named, things to which he wasn't vitally or meaningfully connected, among which he hoped would be other persons like himself, in full, self-conscious possession of their immortality.

Since a substantial part of his old universe had already fallen into oblivion, the predicateless forgotten, he wondered if his new universe could be defined in terms of what it wasn't, as merely the nullification of the old. Would the principle of negation be sufficient cause to sustain a universe? And would the language required to define such a universe be a negative or positive? He knew he was going to exist forever. The question was where? He needed a there, but on the other hand, if he was going to exist forever, didn't that imply a somewhere? Perhaps it really didn't matter what kind of there it was, even if it was an absolute negative there. Why was it necessary that he be empowered to seize through the power of thought the vital characteristics of his new universe, his new there? Wasn't it enough to know that his old universe was a lie, and that he was going to live forever?

Since he hadn't yet severed all connection with his old world, he saw himself as both heretic to the old order, and initiate to his new one, an exiliac in desperate search of a sense of belonging. And yet as perhaps the first person ever who knew he was going to live forever, he was both awed before the miracle of it and fearful that he wouldn’t encounter another person like himself, which meant he would have to take special care of himself just in case his metamorphosis would become a precedent – a position which of course didn’t wash with the fact that in the immortal’s universe everybody has been living forever.

A sense of ferment and urgency gripped him. He now understood that since his awakening earlier in the day, he had been experiencing the transition from nothingness (the lie he formerly lived) to something -- to authentic existence. When he awoke, he was already birthing the very first second of being self-consciously immortal, an event in which he could both participate in and monitor -- forever. He was the first germ of the first instant fulfilling itself towards the progressively more complete understanding of the truth of what it meant to exist forever, including the possibility that the first fraction of a second of his being contained the beginning and fulfillment of what he was and would always be, that only the first instant of being was necessary. As both agent and agent acted upon, he grasped that he was uniquely responsible for the miraculous unfolding of that first split second which might endure forever. To give birth to the meaning of his life was a challenge equally exalting as daunting, because until now he only understood himself in terms of what he wasn't, or what he had lost, that he was hardly more than an empty category, a thought that quickly gave way to more pressing concerns, even though he had forever to bring the beginning of what he was experiencing to fulfillment, a fulfillment that might be as absolute and unchanging as the absolute fact that he was going to live forever. Positioned as he was between his former and new fugitive self, he was both the metamorphosis and the rope with which he could never hang himself. And however he might turn out, he was going to be that way forever.

He also realized there was nothing in these quite remarkable developments that precluded he would be self-conscious throughout the process. Being self-conscious as Harry F. was perhaps not even necessary in the immortal’s universe. And while he would have liked to assign that possibility to the improbable registry, the mere consideration of it produced another wave of nausea, which, like a blast of heat escaping from an open foundry door, quickly engulfed him, bringing to a head the burning issue of his identity. To counter this sudden sickness of being, he instinctively turned to a delicious flower scent that immediately, ecstatically dilated his nostrils as he lifted his eyes skyward. And then the word-concept of the four seasons -- previously lost to oblivion -- returned. Then a vague but ostensible sense of loss stole through him, a loss thrown into relief by the memory of a particular sequence of music he couldn't identify. Then the music stopped.

If the absolute truth of the four seasons resided in their never having existed, Harry F., in full possession of that truth, in fact so near to it he wouldn't be himself without it, had to confess that he felt unfulfilled, even cheated, just as the music and its haunting correspondence to what had been lost started up again, was effecting in him alternating states of anxiety and serenity.

Once again he lifted his arms, as if to embrace something (lost) deep down he knew not to exist: the restorative circulation of chilled air whose fine spray and vapour belie the surge and roar of a nearby waterfall thrashing into a deep granite chasm on a hot August noon-time; or the sighting of a black and red monarch butterfly suspended in mid air above an hibiscus bush whose red petals and stamen are dressed at their best for the occasion of their one day in a lifetime.

Then his profound knowing it not to be true caught up with him, shaming him, as he understood that the sense of loss that had come over him was a consequence of believing in something that didn't exist; that the joys and wonders of the four seasons -- the bursting forth and expiring of life -- were blasphemous fictions that proclaimed inauthentic being as truth. In Harry F.'s new universe, the four seasons didn't exist, the thought couldn't be thought. If he allowed that surrendering to the fiction was as natural as opposites attract, he nonetheless knew that deep down he was conferring counterfeit status to a myth, which, since waking this morning, was inadmissible.

In order for his immortality to manifest in existence, achieve actuality, the four seasons would have to be banished forever. Failing to execute this banishment would leave him vulnerable to the rude eruption of the memory of all that which had been lost; might concentrate in that single moment of surrender the sum of pleasures normally dispersed over a life time; might induce a sensual ecstasy that would be so compelling that to even propose the notion of immortality during such an eruption would be the height of folly.

But to his relief, at this particular moment of his odyssey, it was now possible (in fact it was the only thing possible) for him to manifest rather remarkable indifference to the feeling of cool grass under his sockless feet. Basking in the triumph of this pure and sustained indifference, the loss had ceased to be a loss. The cool of the grass, the soft damp brush of the bent blades beneath his bare feet were banished, confined to oblivion. Harry F. was wholly in his new universe. If gravity and its laws kept mortals in theirs, the gentle push and pull of self-awareness (authenticity) would keep Harry F. in his.

In the first of the many perfect, contradiction-free moments he was to spend in his new world, all that was weather-related, from raindrops on roses to the four seasons, ceased to matter. Whatever it was beneath Harry F.'s bare feet, it wasn't weather determined. His meditations and the essence of his new universe had finally achieved convergence, each was indebted, was inseparable from the other. There was no looking back, there was no past. Only the serenity of the moment where particulars vanished as they appeared; a serenity so compelling that to exist as an individual was almost an affront to the overpowering undifferentiation and oneness that characterized his new universe. The-there in which Harry F. was paused, formerly inhabited by the recently expelled weather and hunger mythologies, was an empty form whose formatting was contingent on Harry F’s being-there. His will alone would determine the-there's content, would reveal its contours and details.

In the bright light of the understanding where he now stood, no longer paused but poised, was the light of the truth of what he now understood about himself as an immortal. It was a light wholly unrelated to the sun's light, but one in whose piety Harry F., like someone blessed, was humbled. And now, re-energized from his latest discoveries, Harry F. could once again move, undertake a journey whose purpose still remained obscure, where an infinity of time was available to enter into the nuances of the undertaking, which, if nothing else, was to better understand the notion of himself as an infinite being.

Harry F. felt on top of the world, a float on water. But from another perspective, albeit unrelated to conventional time and space, his measured strides appeared (to the mortal) strange, somehow discomfiting. It was the gait of someone who seemed to inhabit a different world, was obeying alternative laws of ambulation. And indeed, inside the mind of the man affecting those strides, it was a different world: bereft of the 4-seasons, of things that grew, of food that fed, and the enjoyment of all those things that came and passed. And in place of those lies was the truth that they were lies. Yes. Harry F.'s stride, which mirrored his new understanding, was as curious as it was perplexing; not only wholly unselfconscious, but lacking that which underwrote every stride ever taken -- until this morning. His was the shape of a new form of life founded on an understanding thus far only fragmentedly disclosed. It was a work in progress that included the possibility of random relapse that would suddenly grip him, causing his entire body temperature to escape, while all around him something like weather was brewing. And then, just when he felt he was losing himself in the old order of cause and effect, the angst would disappear, replaced by a serenity of mind emptied of content

CROSS TOWN TRAFFIC.

When he next reconnected with himself, he was at a busy downtown intersection observing the orderly criss-crossing of pedestrians, automobiles and public transportation; an order, by his first reckoning, mysteriously gained by a series of regularly repeating lights whose colours prevented and permitted people to cross the street. He knew that he was at cross purposes with those for whom purpose in life was a primordial given, and had he been so inclined, he would have observed that he was the only one who hadn't responded to the changing triad of lights, wasn't at all in a hurry, had no idea why he was in his present situation, or what had brought him there.

If Harry F. regarded the above spectacle as vaguely disconcerting, a more exacting concern was registered when he realized that he was unable to recall anything, neither concrete object nor passing thought, between his last deliberations in front of his home and his unaccounted for presence downtown, a place whose activity he normally regarded with suspicion, a place he expressly and for the most part successfully avoided. But there he was, as if called upon to illustrate life's eternally recurring irony, in the gaping maw of the dreaded downtown, hardly a popular figure among those whose way he was obstructing, on top of which he seemed preternaturally desensitized to the less than fraternal remarks directed at him, of the confusion he was authoring; and all the while, try as he might, he couldn't remember the circumstances of the journey that landed him in his present predicament.

Unperturbed, at least for the moment, that the entire experience between his leaving home and arriving downtown was beyond recall, a position he was admitting to more out of theory than cognition, he decided to direct his powers of cogitation to the causes, confident that the effort of uncovering them would set in motion the wheels that would bring nearer those recollections which for the moment completely escaped him. Attributing to fact that which was properly a product of intuition, Harry F. concluded that he was not the victim of memory blackout, nor suffering the first symptoms of dementia or Alzheimer’s. The memory lapse -- and he would always refer to it as `merely' a lapse by virtue of retaining in memory consecutive recollections of experiences before and after the unremembered interval -- had to be, by default, related and consequent to his knowing that he was going to live forever. He further suspected that the faculty of memory, whose colossal capaciousness and uniquely remarkable dexterity allows, when the option is exercised, every future to be conditionally assessed before it arrives, and without which the mortal would lose considerable authority -- in a universe where survival was not an issue meriting even the smallest consideration. In fact, had Harry F. been more diligent, which he wasn't and for reasons which could not be postponed indefinitely, he might have called into question the entire status of memory.

Instead, without second-thought, like someone who reflexively turns his nose away from an unpleasant odour, he turned his back to the call of investigating the cause of his memory lapse, and found himself not unpleased to be simply observing the uneven ebb and flow of the masses and transportation in whose commotion, like a pylon, he stood tall and still. The character of what pleased him was hardly different from the unsophisticated pleasure primitive life forms experience in the cell-proliferating ooze of primeval muck. What definitely didn't please him was the thought that if he couldn't remember anything between his last thought and now, there might be nothing at all to remember.

The mortal, of course, would vigorously and justifiably deny, with a battery of rigorous proofs and presumptive evidence, that it would be impossible for there to be nothing (there would have to be a minimum of time and space) between point A and point B since A and B cannot simultaneously occupy the same space. On the other hand, from whose offer of handshake the mortal would recoil in horror, the time an immortal required to negotiate the distance from his home to downtown could hardly be thought of as the passing of time if he was going to live forever. Time could not simply pass away or expire if there was always going to be time. Time, the perpetuation of which mortals were obsessively preoccupied, conferred meaning by inhering, without exception, all things with restrictions on endurance and expiration. In their most primordial state, things born, or which come into a manner of being through the rite of appellation, endure and change and expire over time: these were the non-negotiables of the mortal’s universe. And yet all that time might claim, it would never claim Harry F., the outsider looking in. He was change-resistant.

So if he was outside time's holding sway, where was he then? A question whose fitness was earned through a willingness to undergo innumerable refinements; a question that might prove to be the last that ever need be asked. If he couldn't recall the conveyance that brought him to where he was peacefully paused, nor the streets and their namesakes that converged, like spokes, on the once familiar city center; nor landmarks, such as the Church he knew well from without, and the grade school from within, and the park where he used to kick around a ball when he was young, it wouldn’t be because those once known things were no longer recognizable, but they simply didn't exist.

This working hypothesis, which grew out of the logic that allowed for it while pronouncing its absurdity, was received with the no small annoyance: like food stuck in his throat, he couldn't swallow and couldn't spit it out. He tried to clear his throat, his thoughts, but nothing moved. So if those places didn't exist, what was there? Nothingness? The lie? And weren't they both one and the same? However importuning were those conclusions, notwithstanding the over-indulged convenience of indolence which gives the importuned latitude to short shrift such matters, they would have to be given their due unless the objects represented to his thoughts were indeed there, but serving purposes which challenged into being an entirely new configuration of the cosmos, where time didn't exist, whose axioms and pre-suppositions remained undisclosed to Harry F.'s half-baked probing. He had already lost the four seasons to oblivion by virtue of there being no compelling teleological basis to sustain them. Would the corporation, the corner store, the cell phone plant, the Church, the soccer pitch suffer a similar fate?

The ground Harry F. was so desperate to stake out would sometimes appear like a bank of fog rolling in from an unknown source. And then, as it had stealthily arrived, it would just as suddenly disappear, leaving nothing at all where it once was.

So if it was the nature of this new ground to be as fugitive and formless as thought in the absence of objects of thought, the conventional world of things as enumerated by the mortal would be wholly incompatible with that amorphous ground. Which meant that those things would have to disappear, or reappear as something other than what they were. But either way, Harry F. knew it really didn't matter. School or no school, students or no students, they would exist forever. If the purpose of the school was to educate and prepare the young to take their place in society for the purpose of maintaining and advancing a quality of life whose goals and objectives have already been, by democratic consensus, disclosed, everything in its present state would always be as is with or without education. And if education was supposed to provide the individual the skill sets that would allow him to furnish basic needs for himself and family, Harry F. knew that with or without food and/or shelter, the individual, the graduating class, the teacher, the drop-out, the artist, the socio-path were all going to live forever. The very notion of someone knowing more than someone else, that one kind of knowing could be intrinsically more meaningful than another, was a distinction that could not be sustained in Harry F.'s new universe. The TV trivial pursuit game-shows mortals are so fond of seemed to support the thesis that one knowing is as good as the next; and beyond that, offered a nano-glimmer of hope that the mortal had already entertained intimations of his immortality, if only in play.

What was the truth of the school and the school yard where every second summer day Harry F. would stop and perform a set of painful stretching exercises on the way to his near-by jogging track? What was the truth of the sounding of the bells, the explosion of children bursting into the play ground, followed by their orderly convergence with the bell's second ringing? What was the meaning of a fast foot impacting on a soccer ball, or the brief contact between the fat of a wooden cylindrical object and the dead-center of a round one that sent the projectile into another location where it was vigorously chased down and returned -- one instance of a highly formalized sequence of inter-related, ritualized activity repeated over and over again not only in school grounds, vacant lots and neighbourhood parks, but in huge sports stadiums in every major city in the country? These activities, in their purposelessness-cum-absurdity, seemed much closer to the truth of the meaning of things, and was at least a small indication -- if you were an optimist -- that the mortal, who with each succeeding century had been delegating a greater fraction of his every day to frivolous play, might one day bid a final adieu to the mendacity of his mortality with the same dignity and equanimity a tree in late autumn -- left with only a scattering of shriveled leaves hanging by a slender stem, at the mercy of the next gust of wind or drop in temperature -- faces its fate without complaint.

Ah, to behold and be moved by a tree that has already surrendered its last leafy blush. To remember it so recently garbed in a full, knee-length green dress, now torn away, its knotty gnarled limbs exposed for all to see.

It seemed that wherever Harry F. cast his gaze, the mortal had preceded him, had left a fossil record of his fear and foreboding, his unconditional compliance in refashioning the truth into a lie, subverting reality, assigning the highest imminence to fantasy. In his unrelenting, maniacal pursuit of power, to effect and enforce his will, like the animal that marks his territory with the sharp scent of his stale, he left nothing dry, nothing undefended. But unlike the dumb animal, the mortal's obsession was contrived and cunningly conceived; it reached into the depths of history, was coeval with the beginning of history whose tainted constant was man’s shamelessness before the ever present lie; a disgraceful chapter in the history of life from whose imprisoning pages Harry F. had finally escaped. Yes. The concept of higher learning, the necessity of acquiring a profession or trade, it was all an illusion, a desperate mortal's wishful thinking, which, like the common day-dream, allows one to vicariously experience what real life has thus far refused; and that, of course, is dying and death.

Every mortal's purpose was grounded in the fantasy that he will eventually die, the sine qua non event that precludes meaningful existence. But Harry F. knew there was no such thing as sickness or demise, or a time when time would end and the thought of death would cease to exist as a possibility of thought. Since death only existed as an illusion, but an illusion that was so magnificent and fulfilling it was perceived as an all encompassing truth, and since Harry F. understood that he would have to be constantly on the alert to keep himself from falling under its sway, he understood that he couldn’t just simply walk away from the lie of death, but he would have to confront it on its own terms and challenge it to reveal itself in its truth, which was its absolute, ever-lasting non-existence.

Since the unrealness of death was responsible for the advent of meaning which everyone experienced as real, Harry F. wanted to know why mortals were so obsessed, at the expense of all other endeavor, with the procuring of meaning. Could it be that beneath every mortal's show of arrogance lurked the fear that life would not be able to sustain itself if it weren’t meaningful? That if meaning were suddenly withdrawn, the raw, unschooled impulse of life to maintain itself would, like an emptied sack, collapse into pure, unmediated formlessness. And was it this ubiquitous formlessness, which was ground zero of the real world, that mortals feared most, even more than certain death?

As both medium and messenger of a new truth, Harry F. was the one witness every mortal, however unconsciously, feared. And if he was still unable to assert with absolute conviction that the very notion of a meaningful life was a hoax, his serene indifference to meaning rang with such authority, a mortal, finding himself in the general vicinity of Harry F., would experience a sudden sickness of being in the pit of his stomach that he couldn’t account for, that caused him to fear and tremble. At this very moment, barricaded in his basement, Felix Colt was trembling like a terrified ant before the shadow of a monstrous foot about to crush it.

Yes. Harry F. was anathema to every mortal; he was the antithesis, the bridge every mortal feared to cross; he represented the end of themselves as they were. He clearly saw that if life, as élan or willed volition, was insufficiently empowered to exhibit value or meaning; it wouldn't matter one way or the other whether life sustained itself or not. Anything alive, man or microbe, untouched by or indifferent to the notion of meaning and value, would be indifferent to itself existing. So to obstinately cling to the historically deep fantasy that life, even in its most wretched and evil guises, could be meaningful to both the originators of the fantasy and their devotees was a contradiction of the highest order that was conveniently left unexamined.

Having lost the weather, the 4-seasons, hunger, and now the whole of downtown was in doubt, Harry F. knew that his continuing existence was no longer contingent on meaning; that with or without it, he knew he was going to live forever. However, he had not yet ruled out the possibility that the name and the scent of the rose might exist forever as an eternal source of enjoyment and wonder to the immortally intoxicated beholder -- a subject, perhaps, better suited to couplets than a cosmos. Harry F. had to allow for the possibility that the concept of meaning might indeed be founded on a premise other than death. After all, the proposition that life could be meaningful was not an unpleasant thought; it was simply and absolutely unnecessary. If meaning, by the mortal's calculation, was the sum total of his attachments and relationships, would it be possible to maintain these attachments in a universe where time did not pass, where things and other beings and his relationships with them did not expire? And if they didn't expire, from whence would come the motivation to enter into any relationship at all? Could one stand in the voluptuous vicinity of the rose and praise its scent forever? And if so, why? And to what end? Harry F. saw no reason not to be sanguine towards those possibilities even though these entities with which and whom, in theory, he would like to be in relation or community, were now shadowy figures, as un-named as all that which was undifferentiated, the very stuff of a cosmos as perfect as uninterrupted silence.

Between his last thought and finding himself in a downtown of shadows, Harry F. could not help but to wonder if he had finally encountered the truth of his new universe as it truly was -- emptied of meaning. But he needed the downtown. There had to be a there, otherwise, he couldn't exist. The downtown, which was now a borderless tableau of shadows and nebulous shapes, was at least something he could cling to, a somewhere where he might repose and recuperate from his losses. But what would be his options, in respect to his status, if the shadows were to disappear? He was going to live forever? Did he or did he not require a there? Harry F had visited this circle on too many occasions.

What he had overlooked, however, was the demonstrable fact that this circle, which was his universe, was contracting, and along with it, the realm of personal choice. So why wasn’t he as discomfited as he should have been, even as his there was slipping away? Because he didn't require a there since he was going to live forever?

The brilliant light that exploded into being out of the articulation of the contradiction that represented a clearing, burst upon Harry F. like a sudden discharge of energy from a highly charged magnetic field, at once dazzling and dazing him, rendering him incapable of volition, movement. If he could have now dreamt the one dream that would force him to consider and assess the ponderous ambiguity he carried in his thoughts in which two contradictory world orders were competing for his sympathy, he would have awoken, uncertain if he had fallen off the earth into pure space, or if the earth had fallen away from him. And in the dream inside the dream from which he had awoke, he would not have been able to identify what was constant in both dreams, although he would be convinced that such a constant existed, albeit dwelling in unconcealment.

His begrudging acceptance of the notion that time was in fact timelessness wore like a new pair of stiff, leather shoes wholly unfitted to the shape of his foot, causing at first discomfort and then blisters. While he would have preferred his old, worn, but comfortable shoes, he understood that he would have forever to adjust to his new ones. Or would they always wear like new? If there was no such thing as time, or if time would henceforth always stand still, would his new shoes ever fit? If he had indeed experienced pure timelessness between his last thought and finding himself downtown, was this the self-experiential equivalent of being lost to oblivion during that duration, a fate that had already berefted the weather and 4-seasons of their being?

The possibility that he had inadvertently sallied into the house of oblivion was hardly cause for celebration if not outright dread. If, according to the only partially revealed laws of oblivion, one cannot be self-conscious while experiencing it, like a mortal cannot be awake while experiencing sleep, and if, by these same laws, it is outside one's powers to determine when one enters or emerges from oblivion, one can, at least in theory, at any time, under any circumstance, fall into oblivion to remain there until he regains possession of himself -- if in fact that is to happen, that is if he should inadvertently find his way back by the way he entered. Also to be considered is that the environment of oblivion is such that it does not even admit as a possibility the motive to find one's way back to self-consciousness. And in this sublime inertia lay its essence, beauty and seduction. Even the mortal -- in whose fear and loathing of death (ersatz oblivion) is forged the grand illusion of meaningfulness -- exhibits a guileless appreciation of that universe and its endless variety narcotizing substances. But on the other hand, and according to the only partially revealed law of possibility, one would at least have to theoretically that one could somehow be self-conscious while experiencing pure oblivion. And if so, there would have had to be more than nothingness between Harry F.'s last thought and downtown. But what?

He now posited for himself the urgent task of uncovering what only `appeared' to be nothingness, a project whose urgency was being simultaneously undermined, even as it was being formulated, by the suspicion that it really didn't matter if he did or did not act on his new project. After all, there was nothing at stake. There was no risk. He was going to live forever.

Harry F. was suddenly overcome with wooziness, the defensive kind that mortals instinctively recourse after being exposed to excessive sensory bombardment. He looked around him: a maelstrom of industry and intentionality whose ordering principles lay undetected like a colourless, odourless gas. He reached for something to steady himself. The shadows were now people and they were all in a hurry. Stopped vehicles broke out in a frenzy of honking. The sharp rise of short syllables fell on his ears like the snapping of belts. The substance of these short-lived social encounters was the epithet and insult. If this was the societal imperative at work, its animus seemed more a product of accident than deliberation, and of short duration, like nascent cell life whose genetic code restricts its life span to seconds. The alleged and much heralded evolutionary superiority and nobility of the mortal, at least at this busy intersection where Harry F. stood, was not in evidence. It was as if all human volition was a product of random occurrence and impulse, and value a mere aggregate, an accumulation that had reached a critical mass, its separate parts of equal merit, the one, the many the same.

His ear followed an uneven volley of exasperation and imprecation unleashed in the vicinity of a red light perched on a grim, gray-green iron pole; the rude revving of engine-churned impatience and hostility, and finally the high pitched squeal of rubber sawing into the road when the bulb blinked green. Fascinated, Harry F. followed the alternating sequence of amber, red and green; the sudden stop and surge of activity that succeeded in the wake of each change. He didn’t question the amber’s brief duration, if it were unfair or not, and found himself equally disposed to the three colours. Then, just as suddenly, the commotion around him became shadowy again, and the roaring traffic’s boom dissolved into mist; and silence, like fog on stealth feet, tip-toed in and infused itself into everything that was there, until there was only the one color that stayed, and stayed, until it was succeeded by a strong-under-tow that was sweeping Harry F. away, now in the midst of a throng of people charging across the intersection. Not knowing what it meant, nor in the least curious as to the nature of the relationship between the charge and the colour of the traffic light, he surrendered to the moment and entered the flow with the indifference of dandelion fluff floating silently upon a stream, until the flow, as the sidewalk was gained, broke up and dispersed in all directions.

Harry F. observed people disappearing behind doors and lobbies, some of whom reappeared shortly thereafter, but when he realized that he himself used to be a part of that selfsame frenzied activity, he understood that the apparent randomness was in fact invested with remarkable purpose and necessity whose working parts owed their functionality to especially the sciences. The downtown concentrated the mortal's faith in the absolutes of quantity and the efficacy of systems operations that were responsible for both the creation and satisfaction of demand. Every part was replaceable, in service of one final end: relegating the consideration of mortality to a mere afterthought.

The physical character of the downtown – a laboratory and labyrinth swarming with people amidst tall, narrow shouldered buildings -- sets the tone for the conditions of production and the allegiance of the swarm sworn to maximum output. Not unlike, at least in appearance, the slick, pin-striped suits worn by men and women whose mandate it is to preside over the ferment, the tall, sleek, office building functions as the nerve center, receiving and disseminating information to other similar centers, regardless of locality and culture, answering to a telus that ensures that products and information reach targeted destinations, failure of which could adversely impact the survival of certain population groups.

Survive. Everything addressed the imperatives of survival. From the most obvious example: the delivery van backing up into a warehouse; the driver and assistants unloading crates of apples whisked along rollers into the supermarket's inner sanctum where they are put on shelves and made available to the consumer -- the needy, death-fearing consumer: to the least obvious, the secretary, conscientiously entering new data into her computer -- an act seemingly unrelated to the lie, she, too, is an accomplice.

It seemed that everything reached back to the lie. But the lie itself, in response to the deepest urgings of its nature, remained aloof, inscrutable, a moving target that would never still. Harry F. wondered if there was any activity, or actuality that escaped the lie. But before he could even essay a preliminary deliberation, his random thoughts turned to the downtown’s massive geometry which resembled modern art, or the play of a child manipulating building blocks, the results from which he soon tires, knocks down and refashions.

That these buildings, paeans to verticality, unlike their classical antecedents, were not built to endure might have been their only redeeming feature, notwithstanding that from their shape and flatness modern art takes its minimalist cue, gaining currency via a system of production that requires no more than a flat surface, a can of paint and a few minutes for its execution; that in turn generates a steady flow of consumers whose critical faculties of judgment have been artlessly co-opted by market forces. To be noted without blinking, that this same work, at an auction, might command the same price or more than the building that houses it.

So if the office buildings weren't what they seemed to be, what were they then? What was the downtown? Like the weather, the 4-seasons, would they too fall away into oblivion? Or would they be saved by a new paradigm, a new purpose not yet articulated, not yet an object of thought? Could thought alone hold these things in their place and keep them from falling away? Could a man hold himself in his place through thought, alone?

Harry F. wanted something concrete in his hands, something he could grip, a texture he could run his fingers over because he feared his hands were falling away from him, into a state more demeaning than desuetude, into a realm whose laws obviated every hand-object relationship. He bade himself to reach out, to furnish himself with something his hands could clasp, be shaped by, press into, move through space. The desire to hold something solid was so urgent he couldn't explain it. He readied himself to address the need, when what he intended to do was done, only that what it was that was done he could no longer say, and then he couldn't remember what he had only just resolved to do.

He felt dispossessed of himself which counterintuitively gave him no cause for alarm. Where the shadows ended and buildings began was a blur; the same where the street met the sidewalk; the moving objects were now stopped. Harry F. was precariously positioned at the outer edge of the blur where all difference was dissolved, like someone close to a precipice whose deep secrets fascinate more forcefully than the line that can be crossed but once. He felt himself merging with the dissolve, disappearing into the blur’s annihilation of difference when hot, acrid, black exhaust from a superannuated transport truck snapped him back to himself, like unresponsive animal being jerked on a leash by its impatient owner. He took a deep, satisfying breath. His eyes and lungs began to smart. He inhaled deeper, until his lungs burned and eyes teared. And then he noticed the faint feeling had fled, and he suddenly felt alert. Seeing that the truck was still stopped at the red light, Harry F. insouciantly stepped off the curb, and like a someone enjoying a walk who bends his upper body over a divide to get closer to the scent of a flower, he leaned his face into the black smoke and drew it deep into lungs, again and again, regaining possession of himself with each glorious breath. He began to cough, each cough sending spasms of pleasure through his being. His now hurting, expanded lungs reminded him of his strength, his body. And then, to his dismay, the truck inexplicably began to pull away, a movement, by Harry F.'s imperfect reckoning, no less mysterious than the origins of the cosmos. Like a man feathering his nose along the memory of woman’s limbs who is no longer there, Harry F. drifted his nose along the vehicle’s lingering spume of black smoke, keeping himself there until it had all dissipated, treasuring each inhalation like an oenologist swishing his tongue through the last sips of a favourite wine.

To the accompaniment of trumpets and horns, the miraculously recomposed Harry F. straightened himself up and began to cross the street through heavy traffic. He felt he was walking through an orchestra pit comprised of angry jazz musicians for whom the aleatoric and atonal were the only games in town; it was the soprano’s section's turn to improvise on the theme and variations of cacophony.

And then a familiar melody started up in Harry F.’s head. He tried to name it, but it didn’t have a name or a composer; a moment later he was wondering what had started up and faded from his mind. Horns blared in concert with screeching tires and loud engines. Traffic came to an abrupt halt; invectives and profanity issued from open windows while Harry F., preternaturally serene in the middle of the chaos he was authoring, and without a mote of affectation, was in the process of accomplishing an inner calm that was light years removed from any earthly consideration. His countenance, taking its cue from what had been inwardly accomplished, evinced seraphic contentment, even as a trio of vehicles abruptly braked to a screaming halts just in front of him, allowing, as if by prestidigitation, a corridor to open up, permitting his safe passage. This corridor, whose sudden coming into being was as mysterious as his presence in it, reminded him of a childhood story that recounted the seas miraculously parting so that a particular man could point to a place he himself, would never know.

"Go kill yourself somewhere else you fucked-up fucking, useless zero." The words and their fury fell dumbly on his ears like foreign language. The side of his face closest to where the epithet issued now received, like a soft slap, the impact of a sticky, viscous substance that registered wetness to his cheek, and like a fat, lazy tear very slowly descended. The sensation was not at all unpleasant. For an incalculable duration, Harry F. was wholly absorbed by it, and wouldn't have objected to a second such sensation on the untouched side of his face. The cursing and outrage intensified. The gesticulations of the drivers became more pronounced and menacing. A long, thin cylindrical object, smoking at one end, hit him in the face just below the eye. Harry F. turned to its general direction as if to receive more of the same -- a turning which further exasperated the drivers who were now thoroughly beside themselves, unable to act nor exercise restraint, while the man who could only be described as insane, continued to act as if he were indestructible.

Then there was a lull in thrown objects and insults. Harry F. registered the let-up but didn’t react. Instead, in a eerily detached manner, he looked at the infuriated faces through the windshields and understood from his new world perspective that they were in unison afraid of causing his death, while desperately wanting him dead in order to reinforce their own belief in death -- a occurrence which of course didn't exist. As the focal point of their hostility and rage, the hatred now directed against him was of a new order, the kind usually reserved for someone who has done someone else unforgivable harm. The hatred was such that even if the total annihilation of the person were achieved it would never burn itself out until the entire category was extirpated from existence.

Harry F. was the truth standing up to their lie, and he knew that the singularity that he represented would outlast the many, a knowing that in its unintentional smugness had the effect of further inflaming the intense hatred directed towards him. He was the antithesis, the indestructible principle that as soon as it was encountered elicited a protective, violent reaction. The very notion of accidents, traffic deaths, ambulances, first-aid, hospitals, emergency rooms were hallucinations, absurdities spun out of an algorithm in whose riotous proliferation were the symptoms of a universe in its death throes. The mass of the `they' pitted against him was self-convinced that the appearance of death was the reality. The `they,' from the beginning of human time, had been fine-tuning the lie until it corresponded to their theories of truth, which was their belief in death, any kind of death, and were constantly inventing new ways to die.

Among the avant-garde of the vulnerable were now young men and women in their physical prime succumbing to the equivalent of the medieval black plague, perversely adapted to the monstrous mores of the current century. The inventive force behind this new manifestation of death served to sustain the myth of dying, death and creation. Set against this blight of darkness mortals had chosen for a firmament, but which, in fact, was more like a lightless cave which was home to a faceless, feckless mediocrity, Harry F., by default, had come to regard himself as the lone emissary of a truth that was still awaiting further disclosure, and beyond that, an audience greater than himself. If I could present myself in such a way so that they would see in me what they themselves are, would they, perforce, recognize the lie and themselves as its progenitor?

He stood stopped in the middle of traffic such that from the driver’s vantage point, it appeared that he was taunting, daring, inviting them to run him over. So let them. Let them do what? He knew that every defiant, desperate attempt would have the opposite effect of awakening the lie that was unwilling to relinquish its hold over its captive creatures and their phony world. Harry F. knew there was no such thing as death, that it was a fiction that percolated its counterfeit essence through everything that existed. It was the biggest lie ever proposed, ever believed. And he would show them, right now, this second, standing there as the truth of what he was, waving them towards him, a matador with the smell of blood on his billowing red cape, daring a trio of lanced bulls to charge him – to challenge his indestructibility. But they were all afraid. The bulls, blood gushing out of their flanks and mouths, stamped and dug in their hind legs and made awful noises but would not charge. The drivers would not run him over, as if they understood that the mere attempt would awaken the lie that was sleeping an uneasy sleep, and once awoken, their worldview would never be the same; each was afraid to disturb the lie within, each waiting for the other to act. Despite the rage and implosive hatred that turns on itself like an animal at the sight of its own blood, they held their found, afraid of rousing the only truth worth knowing lurking within: that death did not exist, a truth whose telling implicated everyone in a loss equal to the sum of time and space.

The incapacitated drivers were caught up in the appearance of something that didn’t exist -- traffic. To ask the question of traffic required an act of will equal to the creation of a new universe. To the brave individual contemplating the consequences of acting upon what the effort of thought was bidding, it was no less than risking the loss of everything the individual knew to be true, without having gained as much as a glimpse of a compensatory, alternative world, a safe harbor -- assuming one existed.

With the traffic stalled, Harry F., who stood accused but was not the cause, hadn’t noticed that his face had melted into what could only be described as a benign Buddhist smile. If the drivers, both revolted and unsettled by the spectacle of Harry F., were now privately trying to justify their freeze vis-à-vis the gridlock as a temporary set-back awaiting correction, and were looking forward to a decisive lethal conclusion and resumption of order, they refused to admit that Harry F. would outlast them as surely as he knew he was going to live forever, and that they would have to wait until the end of time which had no ending.

Seizing the moment, which could have been their moment, and recalling a scene from an old movie, he ditched his serene smile, cocked his hip with the arrogance of a street youth stopped along a city street lighting a cigarette, the center of the world bursting from his uncorrupted self-esteem and vanity. A moment later he was conducting an orchestra consisting entirely of brass and a broad range of booming voices. The resulting cacophony was euphonia to his ears. He entered the sound as soundlessly a water creature enters its natural habitat, even as a fierce arm and fist tightened around his neck and pressed up into his jaw.

"Who do you think you are you fucking, fucked-up piece of shit" a brusque, moist, baritone voice blew over him like hot-steam from a busted water pipe. Harry F. tilted his neck back to get a better look at the man towering over him. His bulk recalled athletes whose porcine necks and thighs were thicker than his waist. He delighted in the sensation of being lifted off the ground, of being air-borne, of defying gravity, the rediscovery of his corporeality. The cause or incident which had precipitated his being ecstatically suspended in air had already fallen into the pre-oblivion state which held that while the event itself would be utterly beyond recollection, there would be a dull awareness that something had indeed happened, and might at any time be reconstructed, though not necessarily. He leaned his head forward into the man's hirsute chest and indulged in its acrid smell. It was salty and of other odours he couldn't identify, the mix having the effect of exciting his olfactory glands. Like someone who serendipitously finds himself in an Eden of scent, or whose long dysfunctional sense of smell is suddenly restored, he breathed deeply, profoundly. The exaltation that began olfactorily spread downward into his entire body; his arms fluttered involuntarily, his feet, dangling in the air like limp puppet limbs, began to tingle. For an indefinite interval, inert like a wet towel on a clothes-line, he simply hung there until the unrecollected situation was recalled which consisted of the spoken word that had been directed his way. But the words wouldn't combine into a meaningful whole; each was left, as it were, in the lurch, longing but unable to connect to any other word, a vapour trail that disappears as it appears. Meanwhile, the scent of the larger man continued to excite his mind in strange ways, and in combination with the words that were struggling to speak in a meaningful whole; he was experiencing a buoyancy that bordered on rapture. He heard what sounded like a sharp rip where the man's fist had collared and twisted his shirt. He looked up and with some embarrassment recalled that the man had spoken to him.

“Could you repeat that, please?" he asked of the man, trying to remember what had been said, wondering where he was.

The man, whose muscular arms held him secure like a crotch in a tree holds a bird's nest, ungritted his teeth and relaxed his straight jaw. Harry F. felt himself fall back on his feet. He was standing free now. The scent that had engaged him was gone. The larger man stepped back and stared. He was breathing heavily. He took a long look at Harry F., barefooted, as innocent as a dumb animal with a gun pointed at it head. The car horns and verbal protestations had quieted like the dark calm that invests a landscape before all hell breaks loose. In contrast to almost everyone else dressed in the latest fashions, Harry F.'s now torn T-shirt and sweat pants looked more like pajamas than clothes. The large man unclenched his fists; his thick hairy arms hanging like oars out of their element at his sides. The disparity between the innocence of the man who reminded him of a scarecrow from a childhood story and the hatred he incited was more than the large man's under-used cognitive faculties could bear. In Harry F., he saw not one but 1000 orphans, who in their pathetic unconnectedness had invented a necessary indifference to everything that once meant everything. Harry F. was grinning like someone whose neo-cortex has been dulled by prescription drugs, the center and author of a world he alone inhabited and understood. Then suddenly, in what was to be the very first short-lived instance of epiphany in this huge man's life, he cupped his large hand over Harry F.'s smaller hand and slowly led him to the sidewalk through the narrow, jagged straight created by the stopped traffic. The roaring traffic’s swoon was replaced with an other-worldly silence that was music to Harry F.’s ears. The big man helped him up the curb, released him, stuffing a piece of crumpled paper into his sweat-pant-pocket, and then slowly returned to his idling car while horns and other drivers, in their turn, began honking and shouting at him, with nearly the same fury that was directed towards the man he had just safely deposited on the nearest sidewalk. As if touched by the spirit of the man he had just helped, the big man, too, decided he was in no particular hurry to get out of anyone’s way.

As for Harry F. and his recent safe passage to a place which was no different than any other place, there was no reason for him to resist the effort and superior volition of the man who meant nothing to him, who was hardly more substantial than the oblivion with which he would soon meld. He wasn't going anywhere. What did it matter? Wherever, whenever, it could be anywhere, forever. He gave into the sensation of being led as easily as a dog-led sled sliding over crusty snow. By the time he reached the sidewalk, the world had become a stone unmoored, and the large man to whom he had turned over his will was now a ghostly, spectral thing, almost nothing at all. But just as oblivion was about to wrest the man away from him, something deep within him, perhaps the memory of his former self that hadn't been entirely extinguished, hadn't yet recognized the absolute authority of his new universe, made him decide to make a last stand against an outcome which was never in doubt. The spirit willed itself to reach beyond itself to become a something, not unlike angels longing to be human on wings of desire. It twisted and turned and contorted with the grammar with which it could express its deepest yearnings, but the words, like scattered, unconnected parts of an un-named object, refused to combine into a meaningful whole. Harry F. felt a warm hand leave his free. He felt it over and over again. The warm hand leaving; the silence; the warm hand leaving. The warm hand.

He looked up and around. Shooting up above him were long, thin vertical shadows of different volumes: some were flatter and broader. What are these shadows? What do they mean? Some flat, low ones sped by him; others, ambulatory, advanced more slowly. To where? Why?

In this vast silence punctuated with grim shadows, Harry F. felt despondent and wholly unconnected, just as he understood that any effort to relieve himself of his isolation would be tantamount to relinquishing his hard earned insights and provisional entry into the real world. The supreme challenge was to keep himself there, in the borderless emptiness of silence where time seemed to turn on itself in a stranglehold of self-annulment. Yet it was here and only here, in a boundless, weatherless grid that seemed bereft of any content, that the truth, subject to starts and fits, might accomplish itself.

If the silence, in its maddening omnipresence, struck him as unjust and unreasonable punishment, Harry F. could take comfort in the fact that the truth that was coming into being thrived in that very same silence. Equally possible was that the silence, the self-designated temple where the truth learned to defend itself against the ubiquitous lie, might, like a pillar that suddenly crumbles beneath an unruly weight, give way without notice, and instead of an Ephesus there would be a ruin, and Harry F. would be left to defend himself against a scheming, wily invisible enemy the mirror wouldn’t release. As if to make that very point, the silence suddenly gave way to furious engine roar, blaring horns and exasperated voices. Harry F. looked up and once again found himself in the space-time gridlock, and didn’t mind it one bit. In fact he was a bit ashamed of the grin that had turned his mouth into a saucer.

Many of the erstwhile formless shadows had regained their polished, granite sheen; slotted in-between were surfaces whose sole claim to individuality lay in their reflective properties. The otherwise featureless facades bristled with windows stacked high into thin, effete columns. The effect was precise and measured, the unforeseen handiwork of Euclid and Leibnitz.

Harry F. turned towards a nearby disturbance comprised of the usual suspects: a busted chorus of honking horns and fractious human voices. In the center of the disorder, he observed a man, who, as if mistaking dream for reality, was unworriedly wending his way through the confusion of traffic, with a bottle, like a trophy of which he is proud, raised above him. "Surely not a man after my own heart," proposed Harry F. to himself, hopeful and yet as doubtful as someone who isn’t sure if he’s hearing the voice God for the first time or his own voice.

He felt long suppressed emotions stirring within, but he reminded himself that circumspection, if not outright skepticism, must prevail, in case the man wasn't what he appeared to be, who had just stepped into the path of one and then a second car that came screeching to a stop. Harry F. couldn't believe his eyes which were wetting themselves. Could there be any doubt that the man was behaviourally manifesting himself like an immortal? Could it be that Harry F. had finally found a soul-mate, someone, like himself, self-realized in the certainty that he was going to live forever?

The man was now kicking furiously at the cars that were stopped in their tracks that refused to run him over, his arrogant show of indestructibility effacing whatever remained of Harry F.'s reservations about his status, about what he stood for, and whom towards he now felt the kind of fraternity that exists between identical twins even when they find themselves in non-identical circumstances.

The man, his badass bursting at the seams, alternated between pounding his fists on the engine hoods and kicking at the bumpers with his clumpy boots, while Harry F., wonderstruck, stood by watching and wondering if he shouldn’t make it a faux pas-a-deux. After all, the man in perpetual motion causing the commotion was announcing, in no uncertain terms, that he was not possessed by an infirmity of spirit, but was indisputably in possession of his immortality. Harry F. was veritably beside himself, his nerves tingling like satori bells at the discovery of an authentic other, a soulmate with whom he would be able to share his universe. And if this unexpected development wasn’t as romantic a beginning as the Adam and Eve fiction, it was a beginning all the same, and besides, since there are no consequences to anything, what could go wrong? Apple or no apple, garden or no garden, “we are forever, we are forever, we are forever,” Harry F. repeated over and over again, and in his rapture hadn’t noticed that the other man was looking his way, grinning through an ice-veined grimace and greasy eyes that were ill-fitted in their bony sockets.

After no less than 30 repetitions of we are forever, Harry F. quieted down and returned his gaze to his new friend whose manifest immortaldom had not been well received. Drivers and passengers alike were assailing him with abusive epithets, execrations and body fluids: among the released objects was a viscous substance that issued from their mouths. But of course the man whom Harry F. was admiring to the point of apotheosis was beyond hurt and pain. He was ecstatically immersed in his natural element, and was gaily, if not grotesquely inviting everyone to join him, to overcome the lie they were living, to denounce the myth of death. With one arm held high, as if holding up a pennant, his feet flying from under him, one could have easily mistaken the provocation for a dance whose festive aspects only Harry F. was able to appreciate. But alas, the man's unbound gaiety was not contagious. Only Harry F. could relate to the music, and he decided he would no longer deny himself the pleasure of getting to know his kindred spirit.

Like positively and negatively charged molecules obeying the laws of attraction, they quickly found each other, and in a matter of seconds felt as if they had always known each other. With arms convivially slung over the others’ shoulder, they led each other to the nearest building, sat themselves down on the sidewalk, resting their backs against its cold, smooth surface, oblivious to other groupings and solitudes likewise seated.

Like the exclusion inferred when two people are huddled together, the world about them fell into silence and shadow. Harry F. watched the man carefully place a half-filled bottle between his long legs whose shape was lost inside a stiff and crumpled cloth that was tied up at the waist with a piece of rope shredded at the ends. "My name is Napoleon Lepperd. I caught your admiring eye back there in the eye of the hurricane, you might say. You have been observing, my good man, the truth and no consequences in action, which is to say and I'll say it again, traffic and I get along just fine. At your service my good sir." While his head was ostensibly turned towards his new acquaintance, his filmy green, unblinking eyes were aimed elsewhere.

"My friends call me Harry F.," said Harry F., in a phlegmy, friendly, even pitch. Lepperd's cold, trembling right hand detached itself from the bottle and briefly settled on Harry F.’s equally cold but calm left hand.

"They don't believe, Harry," began Lepperd rhapsodically, his ill-formed mouth fighting off the effects of not having spoken in a long while. "They don't believe because they don't want to believe, because they are afraid to believe." Lepper paused for effect. His limp, disengaged hand fell into the small space between them where they sat. He resumed, as if a crowd was gathering, his voice building to a modest crescendo. "But every single day I'm out there waging war. Send in the cold, the rain, the snow, the hail, and shit kickers and even almighty hell itself, I'm invincible, Harry. I'm invincible." Lepperd's declaration of invincibility, understood by Harry F. to be synonymous with immortality, inspired in the latter an overwhelming feeling of fraternity with the man whose unbuffered forefinger was now foraging about in his face’s least neglected orifice. A sudden and compounded sense of brotherhood and self-completion caught Harry F. so unawares, his normally sound critical faculties suddenly deserted him, so that instead of exhorting Lepper to dilate further on his presumed immortality, he accepted, without further ado, the uttered statement at face value.

Knowing what he now knew to be true and factual, Harry F. felt humbled by what could be made from knowing. He now understood that knowing could be equal to any action. The knowing he and Lepperd shared bound them as identical twins are bound by the sameness of their genes. So unexpected was this meeting of minds and the healing that issued from it, Harry F. only now realized how lonely he had been, and that he had been waiting for this day -- worthy of an entry in any new world’s first founding chronicle -- ever since he could remember. Overcome with humility and infinite gratitude, he turned to recognize and salute Lepperd, who was now raising to his flushed and feverish blistery lips a wrinkly brown paper bag with a bottle neck sticking out. His whisker-dirty cheeks puffed and collapsed with each greedy gulp. Lepperd offered the bottle to Harry F. who looked at it and then at him, perplexed, mystified.

"There's no such occurrence as thirst, Napoleon," he stated matter-of-factly.

"I'm not thirsty," returned Lepperd, vaguely importuned, before once again hoisting the bottle to his wet mouth, as dismissive of Harry F.’s comment as the latter was mystified. This brief, if not unremarkable exchange, switched Harry F.'s dulled cognitive faculties back to alert. He knew that if there was no such internal requirement for any liquid substance, it didn't matter one way or the other if Lepperd addressed or ignored what he believed was his thirst. By virtue of having already imputed to Lepperd the determination of immortality, and thus obliged to accede to the logic therein, he concluded that whatever motive Lepperd appeared to be acting on, conventionally described as thirst, in reality it was wholly unrelated to lack of fluids or bodily need. The act of bringing a liquid substance to his lips, then taking it inside him must refer to a cause and effect completely unrelated to the implied gesture. He proposed that Lepperd dilate on the rite, which seemed to bring upon him unmistakable pleasure, induce in him a manner of peculiar indifference to everything but the contents of the flask itself that he carefully reset between his legs. If there was a cause which would explain the purpose underlying the introduction of the liquid into his system, Harry F. wanted to know it, as he once fervently wanted to know the cause and effect of the rain, and the 4-seasons, now lost to oblivion.

Tell me, Napoleon," he began in voice reserved for long-standing, intimate friends. "What is it that you are doing when you lift that container to your lips and empty a portion of its contents into a primary receptacle which then diverts the substance into the body’s interior compartments which after only a small delay seems to turn your natural grimace into a grin?" Lepperd's lusterless, murky green, half-shut eyes momentarily bugged. He leered at Harry F. and began nodding affirmatively, waiting for the slowly arriving words to catch up and foment into thought. Harry F. observed the nodding and was immediately fascinated by its precision and regularity. Finally Lepperd's mouth opened and he spoke, if not non-sequitorally, neither exactly to Harry F.'s query.

"Welcome to the kingdom of the anti-life, professor. It doesn't get much worse here in this cold, black hole. You and I and our un-named brothers everywhere have achieved perfect uselessness. We’ve been there and have come back with the weight of the void on our backs bowed by the centuries. I’ve been a doctor, a lawyer, a chemist, and an architect," he slurred, pointing to the rectangular shadows across the street, "but you’re the real thing, professor. You mind smells as true as each independent thing smells of itself, fair or foul, depending on what you're looking at or what’s being digested."

Lepperd was under no compunction to withhold a volley of high-pitched, eager-for-exit flatulence, which to his disappointment elicited no reaction whatsoever from his unmoved interlocutor. He followed up with a phlegm-laced laugh, revealing a mouthful of repairing sores. When the laughter hiccupped to a stop, he gathered the excess phlegm that had collected in his mouth, and with a dexterous, toad-long tongue shaped it into a dischargeable projectile which he calmly deposited over his left shoulder. Harry F. listened to the gooey wad impact with a wet slap on the cement. "Say it again, Harry my friend. Say it again about bringing the bottle to my lips."

Harry F. had already forgotten what he had just said, but was stuck on Lepperd's mention of the word `professor,' and was now trying to recall what he did professionally, prior to assuming his immortality. But he couldn’t recall what the word meant much less identify a particular activity or endeavor with which he was bisociated. Had it occurred to him, which it didn’t, he would have been consoled to learn that the fraternity at large would have been hard pressed to define its purpose. Speaking the word to himself in order to make it reveal something of itself, he was unable to propose a context which would either include or be centered by a professor. But it did occur to him that as an immortal, learning didn't matter; there was no such activity as learning. In fact the very notion of teacher and student couldn't be represented in his thoughts, had no correlative in his new reality. Perhaps Lepperd, who, with a purposeful sweep of his forearm and hand had just wiped away some phlegm that remained at the corner of his lip, might shed some light on that matter of zero importance.

"What's a professor?" Harry F. finally asked, more out of due diligence than interest.

"What you're doing at this very minute," replied Lepperd, examining the scabs on the backs of his hands. Harry F. was now scanning the different textures of the dark shadows looming high above him. And then the legs of himself and Lepperd’s extended in front of them, their function of which temporarily escaped him, as well as their ownership. His thoughts wandered unbridled from one object to the next where each was of equal negative interest. He was at a loss to explain why he was sitting beside a man who called himself Napoleon Lepperd, self-described as an immortal. Like a wake-up slap, it hit him hard that his recent assessment of Lepperd was erroneous, that he had assigned to Lepperd qualities and consistencies that didn’t correspond to what was there. But there was no reason to correct the misperception, since it made no difference one way or the other because they were both going to live forever. Harry F. had no idea what he was going to say next, or if he would ever speak again. Everything was possible, including nothingness.

"What am I doing here, Napoleon?" he asked, in a weary voice that could barely support the effort of speaking.

"You tell me, professor," challenged Lepperd, resettling himself, tilting his head towards Harry F. The latter responded in kind to Lepperd's show of interest.

"It must be said," Harry F. began, more to himself than his brother-in-arms, "that I'm in the midst, or process of disclosing myself to myself, of placing myself in that place, or opening, where what I am, as someone who is going to live forever, can be. For the record, it must be said that even admittedly jejune observations such as these oblige me to concede that you, Napoleon, are better-placed, more self-actualized than myself; an accomplishment I salute and to which I defer, whose methodology I hope to personalize and reconstitute into my own unique evolution as an immortal."

The effect of drink and Harry F.'s puffed-up (and highly entertaining) declaration of intention caused Lepperd to experience satisfaction bordering on delirium. He couldn't recall when he was last so enthralled by an unexpected encounter with a stranger whose tantalizing language worked on him like the combined effects of drinking from and bathing in a vat overflowing with champagne. "My modesty cannot stifle my unbound appreciation belonging to your statement, professor," responded Lepperd, stunned by his own eloquence, and then disappointed by Harry F.'s undisguised indifference to his mammoth turn of phrase. But Lepperd had long ago inured himself to injury and insult. Without betraying a hint of hurt, he continued stalwartly, a hero of his own imagination, having long ago forged a defiance and scorn equal to the indifference of an indifferent world.

"You and I are going places, Harry. We should have met 20 years ago. Only now do I realize that I've been looking for someone like you ever since I can remember, and that's why there's nothing I care to remember and why I’ve almost completely learned how to forget."

As selflessly as a voice in a Bach fugue hands over the lead to the 2nd voice, which in turn passes it on to the next, in a spirit of sharing that ennobles the precedent of sharing, Lepperd's line of thought, without the smallest break, was selflessly surrendered to Harry F., who repeated, accenting the intransitive verb: “we `are' indeed immortal, Napoleon; we `are' immortal. We are forever.”

Then, without warning, like a water pipe that has blown a gasket, Lepperd began to cry for the first time since he watched his mother die as a seven-year-old. Harry F. observed and listened, but was totally uncomprehending. The flow and sudden breaking in the voice were not unlike sounds with which he was once familiar, whose meaning he felt was almost within grasp. He turned towards Lepperd. Two separate thin lines of liquid were streaming down from both eyes, over the whisker-spiked hollows in his cheeks, along the serrated rim of his chin where the drops gathered into bigger drops before dropping off and disappearing into his smudged and soiled checkered flannel shirt. Lepperd made no attempt to staunch the flow. Observing the phenomenon of tears with great interest, Harry F., the incurable hypothesizer, baffled by Lepperd's wet eyes, in a voice that was proxy for immaculate innocence while allowing for a minimum measure of decency proper to the scale of values subscribed to by mortals, asked: "Is there a causal nexus, Napoleon, between that which is presently issuing from your eyes and the liquid substance you have been ingesting into the non-visible depths of your being?"

He waited for Lepperd to speak to the hypothesis. The latter began to wipe his eyes and cheeks with the back of a grimy hand. Like a sluggish engine starting up on a cold winter day, Lepperd's muted bawling and tears sputtered to a jerky stop and then his upper body began to heave and jerk before erupting into broken and then sustained laughter accompanied by vigorous arm gesticulation and applause made from his hands smacking together. Harry F. recoiled. Lepperd's laughter boomed and bellowed, enveloping him like body bag. He plugged up his ears with his thumbs down and waited for something to happen.

Before Harry F.’s eyes, Lepperd began to disappear into the very sounds he was producing. He observed the moving shadows of things withdraw as Lepperd's laughter reverberated and dissipated into the shadowy squares and rectangles of everything that constituted the outer world. And then he wasn’t sure if the laughter, now pure sound, had originated with himself or Lepperd. Everything was possible, including the possibility that Harry F. had become the world unto itself, and that world was home. The initial joy that had welled up within him when he discovered in Lepperd another immortal like himself had vanished. Lepperd was merely something next to him, nothing more, nothing less, a hardly there. It made no difference if he were there or not. With or without Lepperd, he, himself, might stay where he was forever.

As for Lepperd, his past was a blur of ghosts that came and went like floats in a parade, flotsam in the sea. He had never known connection, and therefore never felt its absence. Long ago, he taught himself not to think about things, but to look forward to the day when the last float would disappear from view and the parade would mercifully come to an end over a cliff into the ether of eternity.

In the unholy spirit of selective recall, he remembered he was sitting next to his friend, Harry F., who spoke an exotic, foreign tongue. In fact, he enjoyed listening to it even more than himself talking, which is what he did most of the time. Talking to himself, or someone else. It was all the same.

"Talk to me, Harry. Tell me something about yourself." Like a child getting ready for the recitation of a favourite fairy tale, Lepper made himself more comfortable, brought the bottle to his lips, drained a good portion of what remained, then shuddered himself to attention. Harry F. was more than willing to answer to Lepper’s request, but before he could begin he found himself in a quandary because the prospect of talking about himself forced him to acknowledge that before this morning he wasn't himself, or rather, he was himself living a lie. The person he was before this morning was now a stranger, whose allegiance to a lie that spanned 47 years he now regarded as a shameful and dastardly episode. Furthermore, the unforced authenticity of Lepperd was so intimidating, Harry F. feared that if he spoke about his inauthentic past, he might inadvertently fall back into its holding sway, a regression that might prove fatal to their tenuous bond. But when he tried to collect the loose strands of his past, he understood, and not without a small sense of loss, that much of it had already fallen into oblivion, and he would have been at a loss to give a systematic account of it. He decided that any recounting of himself would have to coincide with the truth of what he was, and if he were to make reference to his former, inauthentic self, it would only be to shed light on those unseen forces that effected his self-transformation.

"The truth of the matter," he began with such conviction that it wouldn't have occurred to Lepperd to asperse the veracity of whatever might issue from Harry F.'s speech, "is that I was born this morning." Harry F. paused, not for any effect but supplication, allowing, by any mortal's assessment, the outrageous implications of the statement to take effect, and himself the time to synchronize his thoughts with a destiny that was just beginning to unfold, the uniqueness and authorship for which he was wholly responsible. "Before my actual birth," Harry F. began again, at once solemn before and astonished by the facts as they were issuing, "there were instances when I `almost' gave birth to myself, but the effort miscarriaged because I lacked the necessary courage and understanding to complete the process. Before this morning, my life was an endless night, a story that began, endured and expired in darkness -- though I didn't recognize the darkness for what it was, and in fact, mistakenly took it for the light itself. To even propose that I existed before this morning is a view I cannot sustain with a clear conscience. Before this morning, I was something incipient, inchoate, the emptiest category of being, closer to nothingness than anything actual. I dwelled, with the multitude, in a horizonless sea of empty categories, all of us equipped with the minimum necessary volition to maintain ourselves as we were, as `they' are now at this very moment. It was only after the undifferentiated darkness, which included me in its content, began to admit light, a light authored by the darkness of which I was one of its active elements, my perilous journey could begin. Becoming actual, what I am in my truth which is forever, necessitated the darkness transform itself into the light of the truth of what I am now -- immortal. Therefore, to elaborate with any authority on what I was before this morning would be as specious as a mortal alluding to the zygote he was in his mother's womb."

Lepperd nodded his head in furious affirmation. "That's telling it like it is Harry. Go for it."

Harry F. dismissed Lepperd's primitive encouragement with an upward roll of his eyes, as if there had been no interruption, as if Lepperd were a state of mind that could be banished at the mind's bidding. "Being born into a strange and seemingly indifferent universe has presented challenges that have tested my admittedly, thus far, inadequate faculties of judgment. I am not yet at home in my new world. The ground that I would like to call my own continues to slip my best thinking; and in its overwhelming vastness it seems to mock the smallness of my powers of reason that vainly struggle to hold it still while fearing the consequences of failure. I'm not sure what will happen if I fail to still the ground. Perhaps the truth of an immortal's universe is that it has no ground, and I will have to find an altogether new basis to still myself, to maintain possession of myself. Yes. These possibilities are frightening, are fraught with pure dread, but none as consequentially frightening as the refusal to face them. Since this morning, I haven't been able to still anything long enough so that I can encounter it in order to know it. And there have been times when I haven't been able to still myself at all. Yes. I, myself, have disappeared from myself, have fallen out of time.

"In the telling of this brief history of time, I am only certain of one fact: that I am going to live forever. A fact which inclines me to regard all other concerns just mentioned with absolute indifference. Why must I know the truth of my universe? Why must I keep myself from falling into oblivion if I'm going to live forever? Are not these questions in themselves symptomatic of a cause and effect from whose treachery I'm forever excused?

"What I can only now say, and with some confidence, is that here I am, neither boldly nor bashfully immortal, in complete possession of myself -- at least for the time being -- where everything, including oblivion, is possible."

Harry F. stopped. There was no reason to continue. Lepperd, without comprehending the least aspect of Harry F.'s somewhat unconventional autobiography, had nonetheless immensely enjoyed its cryptic flavour, the wide-ranging albeit obscure allusions, and the other-worldly locutions that were employed to great effect. It was as if the entire recitation had been unfolded from an indecipherable scroll that had accidently arrived on earth from another solar system. The silence that ensued might have endured forever if Lepperd's appetite for exotic speech hadn't already been handsomely wetted. Calculating that it would be to his advantage to hold in check his growing impatience for Harry F. to continue, he settled on a subdued, sympathetic rejoinder. "It's not easy, professor. That I will grant you -- the life of the mind hung out to dry like a turd over troubled waters. No, it’s never easy, I’ve been there and back and the back is best. I can feel your pain, bro,’ I can feel the barbed wire up your butt.” He sighed volubly, his exaggerated exhalations the onomatopoeic parody of great suffering. And according to plan, the line had hardly been let out when he felt it tighten.

"But you, Napoleon," resumed Harry F. to Lepperd's childish delight, the former wholly unsuspecting of the latter's puerile guile, "you are still here. The fact of your stilled presence amazes me to no end. You are incontestably and self-evidently yourself, here, which is somewhere which might be forever. Can it be that you have never experienced the perils of oblivion? Can it be, and your stilled presence makes me believe so, that you don't know the dread or indifference of losing yourself from yourself?"

Like someone struggling with a new language, Lepperd seized on what he deemed were the two or three key words that unlocked the meaning of Harry F.’s declarative statement. With an aplomb that belied his peripatetic status, he answered Harry F. as if he were Diogenes instructing the young Alexander who wasn’t yet Great.

"I've never been lost because I've nowhere to go, Harry. I'm always at home. Everywhere. The everywhere is mine, Harry. It's all mine," insisted Lepperd, challenging himself to match Harry F.'s obscurantism with some of his own. In his exaggerated manner of accenting certain words, combined with, in his own judgment, a sudden show of gravity, Lepperd might have considered himself profound at that moment, and was obviously not displeased with the effect. In a symbolic gesture of territorial conquest, he spread his arms as if to circumscribe the globe. "It's ours, Harry. It's ours."

The latter fell silent and remained so. He didn't hear Lepperd's repeated requests to continue where he left off. For his part, Lepperd, mercifully life-style anaesthetized to affront and rejection, took the former’s silence at pace. It always came down to that anyway. If Harry F. initially struck him as someone with whom some sort of relationship was possible, despite the latter’s insane albeit highly entertaining ramblings, he realized, and without a trace element of disappointment, he would continue to live his days and nights like a solitary candle burning out in a benighted universe. Again he lifted the bottle to his lips, swallowed thrice, then reset it carefully between his legs, his face flushing with satisfaction that hummed softly in his ears.

Harry F. suddenly balked at Lepperd's repeated imbibations. He knew that the intake of any liquid could have absolutely no affect on an immortal's constitution, whether the intake was volitional or involuntary. And in the light of that pure science, he could no longer suppress his displeasure of Lepperd's regularly -- to the effect that it almost suggested need -- taking license. It reminded him of the shameful fiction he had been living until this morning: drinking to slake thirst to preserve life. Life would always be; it couldn't be otherwise. Harry F. would have no truck with those deliberations which cheapened and devaluated the truth, for whose existence he had sacrificed an entire universe. Lepperd was falling into non-being, and was falling fast. Harry F. resolved to break the fall, to not be an accessory, an accomplice to the perpetuity of the lie. "I promise to save you, Napoleon, from the perfidious clutches of finitude. Trust me."

"Finitude, finitude," mumbled Lepperd, lulling himself into a torpor with the strange new word that inexplicably repleted his being as he repeated it over and over again. At that very instant, Harry F. plucked the bottle from between Lepperd's legs and smashed it on the concrete. For a brief moment, there was a maddening crush of rude voices. The shadows turned into a swarm of feisty arms and legs, fleeing the shattered shards of wet glass that glittered in the light; and then, in a muted flash, there was silence and shadow.

Harry F. looked long to his left as if expecting something, someone to be there. Whatever it was, it wasn't there. He tried to remember what it might have been, but he couldn't. He now sat there as if nothing had ever been there, as if nothing had ever happened, or would happen.

Something, not unlike a memory, was now the image of a clammy wet hand leaving his, again and again and again. The clammy hand leaving.

Steel and cement
Slickin up the city
You slippin and your sinkin you don’t it
The world don’t care
If you’re not there
You’re afraid to show that you know it
You don’t know it

The song stopped and disappeared. The shadow and silence dissolved into a canopy of leafy tree-top, an umbrella of shade over a narrow street and ornate row of Victorian homes and store fronts. In this old section of town, just behind the city center, much of it, under the auspices of responsible municipal government, was designated as a Heritage sight. Formerly competing residential and commercial communities had long ago decided that harmonious co-existence would not only best serve the interests of the community, but would guarantee the municipality's aesthetic integrity, and generate substantial tourist revenue. Therefore, municipal fiat decreed all new buildings would have to conform to the turn-of-the-century architectural style, and no building shall be higher than the nearest tallest tree whose green spires had replaced the Church spire as the town's link to the heavens above.

If in the city center, the Church, now a physical and symbolic dwarf, had long ago conceded secular sovereignty to the skyscraper that alone ruled the skyways; here, in the residential area just behind the city’s nerve center, the clergy not only welcomed but regarded the only slightly taller tree as an important source of spiritual capital -- a development which would not have displeased the Druids. If the clergy of old was once fiercely opposed to pantheism (nature as manifestation of God), whose unsullied pastures were worshipped by poets and pagans, it now recognized the need to relax its dogma if it hoped to provide more compelling and pragmatic basis with which it might regain the notice of its confused and disaffected flock.

Harry F. was not unsympathetic to the fairy-tale features of this well preserved part of the city, somehow Swiss-like in its immaculate up-keep, and lullingly lymphatic in its uninterrupted tranquility. It seemed that people were its least necessary component, and except for a squashed, milky-coloured neck spiked with short, thick black hairs to which an unusually block-like, follicularly challenged head was welded, there wasn't a person to be seen.

Harry F. turned his attention to the vehicle's expensive interior; the spacious back seat sat like elegant furniture piece. When he extended his longish legs they didn’t touch the front seat’s velvet back. He noticed the windows were tinted, and a meter was ticking softly above the hardly perceptible hum of the motor. The car slowed down for a stop sign. To the right, rudely spray-painted in black on a rickety fence that surrounded a deserted construction sight were the words: "God is Dead." The nerve. Again finding himself at the scene of the crime, again confronted with the mortal's brazen, subversive propaganda, it seemed that the illusion of death was everywhere, now investing things which didn't even exist. Was this the last outrage, the final insult, or merely a consolation, beneath which, shorn of its hubris, was the transparent figure of fear looking into the shattered fragments of a looking glass. "God is dead. What was next?" Harry F. asked himself, tugging at an imaginary extension of his chin.

That there was no such phenomenon was a position the mortal should have been easily able to argue, since, despite the initial postulation of the many gods, or, more recently the one God, there has never been entered into the public domain one shred of evidence confirming His existence. In this century, Harry F. had been consoled by the development that among the world's industrial populations, mortals, a term used in the present ironic, were more and more noticeably comporting themselves as if God didn't exist. Harry F. was hopeful that these same, relatively speaking, enlightened mortals would eventually realize that death didn't exist either. Nonetheless, the graffiti that was pronouncing ‘as dead’ something that had never existed didn’t sit easy in his new world order and the laws and principles upon which it was founded.

"If God doesn't exist, why did the mortal invent him?" Harry F. asked of himself, a query that vaguely informed him of a nagging pre-occupation of his before waking this morning; an existence he thought, until this very instant, permanently lost to oblivion. "The mortal surely would not have invented God so that he could one day proclaim him dead? Was God simply another combustible fuel (a metaphysical one) on which death thrived, whose lethal flames all mortals feared? Perhaps the mortal invented God in order to have as a cause outside himself; something commensurate to the wonder and humility he experienced when he first discovered himself sentient and self-conscious, an event so miraculously unlikely that to designate it as merely an accident should have been, by default, tantamount to heresy."

With preoccupations of the past breathing life into the present, Harry F. was convinced the concept of God served the mortal in a variety of ways, that between the positing of God and the pronouncement of his death, there was a spiritual and utilitarian necessity to both God and mortal existence, notwithstanding both were saturated in inauthenticity. Man could not resist the temptation that, whether in the execution of good and evil, the whole of his actions were decided in advance. And beyond that, it was in his best interests to convince himself that existence would be unbearable without God because in a Godless universe there would be no heaven and hell; which presupposed the `after-life.' "Yes," said Harry F. out loud, pounding a closed fist into his hand. "The after-life was the incomparable, sought-after solace. God was invented and invested with the highest earthly significance and authority in order to give credibility to the after-life. In such fashion, the mortal's single greatest fear -- mortality – was, at a single stroke, meta-naturally appeased by the promise of the after-life, which accorded death the highest value. The mother of all con jobs in light of the fact that death doesn’t exist.”

Harry F. scoffed at the thought that he, himself, might one day be tempted to invent a God. After all, the very last thing that he needed was an after-life. His most pressing fear was not that he was going to live forever, but that it wasn't necessary that he be self-conscious of himself in the great foreverness, that he might lose himself to oblivion. Therefore, if he were to invent a God and fear that God, it would be in order to be consoled by a belief in the existence of death-after-life which would guarantee the immortal's individuality, since only the individual can die his own death. Furthermore, and no less ancillary to the promise of enduring individuality, belief in death-after-life would render meaningful everything that happened prior to death, with the promise of maximum meaning vouchsafed to those courageous enough to posit the question of meaning when one of the possible outcomes is that meaning may turn out to be nothing more than a chimera or guffaw-generating conceit spawned in the debilitude of craven cowardice.

Harry F. took a deep breath, and blew it into the back of the whisker-spotted neck that didn’t react. In this adult playground of thought and private amusement, Harry F. would have no truck with the idea of death. It didn’t even merit consideration as an abstract idea. If it exists at all, he concluded, it is only because everything that exists implies its opposite.

At this still tenuous phase of Harry F’s transfiguration, not only had he no need of God -- a weakling's recourse which revealed the believer either unwilling or unable to take responsibility for his life -- Harry F. was simply too much of a realist to sustain such an absurd notion (hope). He instead resolved to live each instant of his infinite existence as if there was no possibility of an after-death; as if his infinite life was the only one of which he could be certain.

The cab pulled away from the stop sign. As it was gathering speed, it suddenly slowed down to let an errant dog cross the street. Harry F. shook his head, sighed, and averted his eyes from the driver who believed he would have killed the dog had he not slowed down. "Are you actually afraid of death?" Harry F. asked, his incredulity getting the better of him. The cabbie's milky neck paled and then its black hairs bristled. Harry F. heard a hum. A bullet-proof, plexi-glass divider rose out of the front-seat back support, dividing the cab into two separate universes. The car rudely swerved over to the curb and braked. Harry F. was thrown into the divider, his hands and knees absorbing the not insignificant impact. He heard all the doors lock. From a speaker somewhere under the back seat, the cabbie, talking over static issuing from a cheap speaker, politely asked Harry F. to leave. He heard and then looked to where the back door lock popped up, while the window soundlessly disappeared into the door slit.

Harry F. was now looking outside at what could have been mistaken for a post-card if it weren’t so real. He was standing before a greeting card store whose farthest corner was rounded and topped with a turret. Next to it was a red and white ice-cream parlour and next to that a book store. Each entrance was framed by simple wooden columns flanked on both sides by bay windows. Beneath the terracotta building roof that housed the stores was a fretted soffit that ran underneath the tubular tiles. There was no reason to remain in the cab so he got out. In the distance he heard children's voices.

Then he heard the roar of an engine, the squeal of rubber on the road, and turned just in time to catch the cab speeding away and vanish right after a sharp turn through a stop sign. Harry F. was unsure of what prompted the sudden commotion, and where he was and why. Had he inclined himself to pursue the meaning behind the peculiar movement of the vehicle, he would have been hard pressed to give even a general dictionary definition of the word-concept transportation; mobile object of predictable shape, with objects or people inside that seem to move of their own volition. Had he been asked to dilate on the specialized function of the taxi, he would have pleaded ignorance or indifference as the operative causes of an extended silence that stayed the course until he found himself looking for the taxi that was no longer there. And then his eye was drawn to a corbelled balcony whose wooden, latticed railings were festooned with flowers and fronds. Behind it, inclining like a French mansard, rose a summer-blue, 2nd story facade with 3 dormers, each crowned with a deep red pediment, while the windows below were framed in softer red. The effect of the happy colours and variety of wooden surfaces was pleasing to the eye. Lit up by a bright sun which caused him to squint and look away, the squinting triggered the memory of another kind of beauty before which he and his wife stood many years ago.

Regardless of geography and climate, Harry F. and his wife were mutually fascinated by the aesthetic distinctions that shielded and protected cultures from each other, as if language alone weren’t a high enough wall. Why were certain forms and colours so natural in one place and wholly unfit for another? The bright reds and purples that work so well in the Peruvian Andes would be laughed out of the Canadian prairies, especially in winter. Since every culture places considerable importance in the production of and preservation of beauty, Harry F. was convinced that being available for beauty was as essential to one’s health and well being as essential proteins are to the body. And beyond that, he felt that instructing the young in the appreciation of beauty was moral obligation.

In remote villages that receive neither electricity nor running water, where paucity of building materials severely restricts creative expression, Harry F. would unfailingly encounter beauty in the simplest hut or dwelling; a sagging line of a multi-coloured wash hung to dry, the deliberate planting of two banana plants in front of a crude bamboo entrance, or the setting of wild flowers on a flat interior surface -- nature and necessity providing freshness, colour and proportion; lost latitudes to where inspiration-starved interior decorators and designers plan their annual pilgrimages. And where terrible poverty and the politics of starvation conspire to create ugliness, Harry F. understood that the deprived imagination must be pardoned. Contrast this, he would say, to the depressing ugliness found in the industrial world that produces a value system completely out of touch with its vital center, despite the amenities being available at the flick of a switch.

Squinting away from the acid glare of the sun, Harry F. was reminded of a steamy, tropical noontime, when he and his wife were exploring a very poor, unvisited part of the old and still venerated city of Bangkok, its narrow roads and alleys congested with food stalls, hawkers, women, with their babes in pouches, balancing baskets on their heads while wending their way around stopped rickshaws and bicycles and bullocks yoked to squeaky carts. The dwellings, clapped together from corrugated aluminum, wouldn't survive the next monsoon.

On one of the busier streets, almost unnoticed in the human combustion that starts firing before dawn and continues well into the evening, was a Buddhist temple whose building and locale were separated from the secular world by a high, white-washed wall. Entry to the grounds was gained through a heavy iron-wrought gate held up by 2 over-sized, rusty hinges and their latches. Its main bolt was unlocked, so they entered.

Of the many lasting benefits of travel is the stretching out of under-used mental muscles that become indolent through over-familiarity. By willfully or inadvertently submitting to the dislocations and deprivations linked to culture shock, the traveler often finds himself at the mercy of contradictory emotions. At the cusp of his every experience that can leave both a sense of wonder and welts in the psyche, even normally unremarkable events such as purchasing food in a market place take on heightened significance. The traveler might experience, on the one hand, a sudden, impulsive love for his fellow man, and then later in the day, an equally impressive repugnance or even intolerance towards that which had just brought him to the verge of tears.

Such are the extremes of the travelling life. The intrepid traveler awakens ready to conquer unknown lands; and the following morning, to a home sickness that is so overpowering he feels shame admitting it even to himself. By taking himself to the breaking point, he begins to discover his true nature and that the world is his oyster.

After a long, jerky bus ride in an overcrowded bus, followed by hot and sweaty 20 minute trek along a canal into which raw sewage is dumped, Harry F. and his wife were finally rewarded for their pains. In contrast to the universe they had just left – a humanity reduced to jostling, squabbling and haggling -- the temple, its grounds, was a medicinal in its immediate effects. The difference between the two worlds, separated by tall white-washed walls whose inner facings were ringed with thick hibiscus hedges, could not be explained by the strictly physical contrast.

Narrow, miniature pebble-and-shell foot paths crisscrossed the sun-stamped green grounds. These connecting paths were as small and delicate as the people themselves over whom Harry F. towered, a monument to the western meat and dairy diet. Between the gate and the temple was a pond crossed with a cruciform ramped bridge. At the edges of the pond, reflecting the profusion of vegetation whose roots it fed, clusters of glistening water lilies were basking in the sun. It seemed from every nook and cranny there was the gentle gurgle of trickling water. In the air wafted the scent of orange blossoms interfaced, mixing with the fragrance of sandalwood burning in two braziers guarding the entrance to the principal shrine. Two majestic acacias threw a vast area of shade between the pond and temple. Elsewhere, young, trimmed, junipers were standing tall at attention.

Into the clipped corners of the low stone foundation were cut five oversized steps. They invited the visitor to mount, and circle the shrine which was topped with a steeply pitched, up-turned roof. Unlike the city center's more famous tawdry temples, whose gilded, shelled towers literally blinded the eye in direct sunlight, this place was without ostentation. Its disarming quietude and understatement set the tone for the occupations of the inconspicuous, saffron-robed monks tending the grounds, or in a shady, leafy corner instructing a group of children -- most of them war orphans.

After the tourist rites had been performed, one lingered on, idled. The place had that unspecific gravity of being able to detain one indefinitely in its midst while maintaining an agreeable air of inscrutability. The visitor might first be taken in by the prettiness that suddenly catches one by surprise, and then the delicious silence punctuated with the low buzz of insects and crickets and barely audible voices; and last but not least the site’s understated grace and equilibrium that even an architect would be hard pressed to explain.

To be in a Buddhist retreat is a seduction that holds sway even as one has to dash off to catch the last bus. The experience lingers in the mind long after one has left the premises. If only for a few hours, worldly entanglements disappear like incense into the air. The ambience, the quietude dispose the visitor to the unfolding of -- one can't quite say -- and that, perhaps, is the secret of its allure. There is a charming, if not lulling slipperiness and equivocality to both Buddhist precinct and doctrine. If the Christian catechism intimidates the mind, the Buddhist or Zen Koan teases it where the working out of the answer is a life-long undertaking. As a system, or alternative culture that provides for both the stomachs and souls of its votaries, religious duty is performed against a background of carefully considered aesthetic effects.

In contrast to these sunlit oriental places of worship, the Occidental Church is a strictly foreboding affair: muscular, peremptory, symmetrical, rational. Harry F.'s guide-book would warn the unsuspecting visitor of a descent into an ornate dungeon whose magnificent workmanship is invariably obfuscated by poor lighting. Instead of being welcomed by a preternaturally peaceful, recumbent Buddha, one is surrounded by -- like a wagon train by hostiles – and without intermission throughout all of Christendom, the tortured, emaciated figure of the bleeding Christ. Taking into account the persistent gloom built into every catholic Church he has ever visited, the many hundreds of great art masterpieces he has never properly seen, it came as no surprise to Harry F. that finally, in this century, the Church had not only lost much of its influence in shaping human destiny, but that it had spawned a species of lurid indulgences from which it would never recover. If it is a law of nature that everything, over time, turns into its opposite, the erstwhile venerable institution of the Catholic Church has demonstratively not risen to the occasion of being the exception to the rule.

In most of the great western churches (from the Romanesque to the Baroque), the central nave does not lead directly to the main portal where one exits: instead, there is a usually buffer area or narthex that serves as an entrance or porch. Harry F. believed he discovered the reason for this architectural oddity, the deliberate interruption of the interior’s natural flow while visiting the Madeleine in Paris.

He was deep in the inner recesses of the Church, immediately before the altar, admiring the finally sculpted stalls and retable, when he turned around and was seized by incandescent light flooding in through the open portals. Compared to the pervading darkness of the interior, the light took on the likeness of a warm bath or place of healing. Almost against his will, he found himself streaking towards the resplendence, as if only the light from the outside could cure him of he knew not what. To an outsider, it must have looked as if he had come upon something horrific inside the church, the solution of which was to exit as fast as his legs would carry him. To someone else, it might have seemed as if the secular world had finally emerged victorious and that the dark interior of the church was the last place for a curious, engaged mind to be contemplating the mystery of creation.

Even before he reached the grand portal which he couldn’t see beyond for the brilliant luminosity, he understood that the outside light was more amenable to uncovering the great truths of life than ritualized, interior, theological light. It was as if God himself had materialized outside the church in order to demonstrate that the light that precedes every insight discloses itself without prejudice to place.

Waiting for his wife who was selecting postcards, he fell into conversation with an attractive, cosmopolitanly attired, bespectacled woman in her mid thirties, who explained to him that in this part of the world there was no shortage of monks and would-be-monks (orphans), whose upkeep depended on local charity and tourism. She advised her western interlocutor that if he wished to donate to the temple, there was a drop-box to the right of one of the smaller Buddha figurines just beside the main shrine. She discreetly nodded in its direction, then clasped her hands, bowed courteously before leaving as quickly as she had arrived.

A cloud arrived, interrupting Harry F.’s remembrances of time past. Gone were the temple and the monks, replaced by a balcony overgrown with flowers. He tried to recall his most recent thoughts but there was only a blaze of red and yellow draped over an iron wrought frame, and then he saw his wife taking the steps leading to the shrine. He stopped and admired her elegance. Before entering the temple, she sat down just outside the entrance, on the edge of a plinth supporting a reposing Buddha, a wide-brimmed, floppy sun-hat dividing her finely sculpted face into light and shade, a slender arm gracefully set on a drawn-up, bare knee, beyond which her hand, like a wilting flower, drooped. At that moment, which of course wouldn’t last and might never again be recalled, he couldn't have imagined anything more present perfect in life, just as her face blurred and the bright colours spilling over the balcony brought him back to the present. And then he saw that it was all a lie, the temple, the shrine, his wife now adjusting her over-sized sunglasses.

What is the meaning of preciousness, the sharing of it, if it is to last forever? If there is no such thing as weather, the 4-seasons, hunger, aren’t the very notion of contrasting cultures and languages absurd, laughable? Why should something be more beautiful than something else? Why should someone be more attractive than someone else when they are both going to live forever? Why should someone choose when to choose makes absolutely no difference? And if the choice makes no difference, why would a religion, or place of worship go to the trouble to differentiate itself from other religions and places of worship? Could it be, or even not be, that the church, the temple, the super-market, the home, the hut, the dog-house, the apple-crate, are all the same; and their existing or not existing doesn't matter. Just as it wouldn’t matter if he never laid eyes on his wife again who is going to live forever, someone who was so much a part of him that that the thought of her not being there for him would throw him into a state of despair and confusion that might last for hours – and now the syllables of her name were just that; syllables that wouldn’t speak, a alphabet that refused to yield its secrets. A tiny, delicate hand held a flower delivered by a young boy; long thin fingers, supple like reeds, cradled it. What need had Harry F. of his past? He was going to live forever. There was no need to learn anything at all for future use – what a joke, what a waste of time that couldn’t be wasted or used up.

He stood staring, unseeing, up at the balcony, unsure of what had happened, unsure of what had passed through his mind, vaguely sensing that something had been cut away from him, something that was once a vital part of him, something that once mattered, but no longer. He tried to vibrate the meaning out of the chain of what mattered, but couldn't because meaning no longer mattered. Nothing mattered. There was no longing for the places of his past which no longer existed, or regret over the years used up which were infinite. The meaning of his life had finally achieved singularity, was concentrated into the now. Everything was now. There was only pure, unmediated being that was unfolding. The now was emptied of all content but itself. He looked up at the balcony and saw it for the very first time. He looked at that which now had no name. His senses were sensing, receiving impressions: colour, scent, a light breeze. A rubber shaped bone landed near his left leg. Why not pick it up. “Here Rex,” said a little girls voice. “Bring it to Becky. Bring it to Becky.” He hadn’t begun to bend down for the bone when it was whisked away by a creature with four legs.

And then he felt an emptiness in his gut, a vortex, or maelstrom sucking him into some sort of strange negative capability, and it wasn’t going to stop until it stopped. His entire world was concentrated there, and it meant absolutely nothing to him that he was presiding over his apparent self’s undoing. Like an entity whose emotional circuitry has been surgically dismantled, he was serene before the fact that his sense of self was slipping away, that he was losing connection to the world whose unstable ground had, at least up to now, provided the means and motivation to keep himself intact as a self-conscious immortal being.

In fact it wasn’t even worth mentioning that he could find no good reason not to cooperate and yield to the pleasant sensation of becoming contentless, unselfconscious, when suddenly the emptiness, however tentatively, inchoately, revealed a previously hidden aspect of its nature: it longed to be fulfilled, completed, as every nothing longs to be something, requires a minimum of something other than itself to assure itself of its quiddidity and separateness. The emptiness's nature was such that it would not be able to maintain itself indefinitely as emptiness without mediation, without the possibility of becoming something other than what it is. Just as the temperature 30 Celsius must eventually disappear or become meaningless if it cannot vary or contrast itself with degrees other than itself.

This was the real war of the worlds, and Harry F. was the battleground. If emptiness carries within itself the germ of its undoing and subsequent transformation, in Harry F.'s particular case, who would have happily willed himself to challenge the emptiness that claimed him, neither his courage (in facing the truth of what he was) nor his acceptance of his circumstance (being alone) as the prototype of a new species, nor his indefatigable will which up to now had kept him self-consciously himself in his new universe, nor the affirmation he received from his self-directed striving to become authentic could provide the charge that would awaken in the emptiness the anxiety or dissatisfaction that would cause it to long to become something other than itself. The emptiness, impervious to everything outside itself, held fast as itself, like something self-determined as permanence, and forced upon Harry F. an unspecific feeling of nausea that, of its own nature, must arise out of its own indifference. Recognizing the perilous proximity between emptiness and oblivion, Harry F., abruptly moved by his own violent palpitations, was likewise moved to challenge the staying power of the emptiness, as if in doing so, he would, by association, assume some of its aspect, which he would employ to short circuit its strict identification with itself, which would allow him to regain possession of what would then be his no longer threatened self.

Could it be, since waking this morning which felt like an eternity ago, after surviving tribulations that would have bested any lesser immortal, it was now critical to his status as an extant being that he be `in-community' with another immortal like himself, with whom he could share not so much the joys of his new universe -- for the joys were in fact painful insights into his inability, thus far, to arrest the shrinking of his self and universe and the deadly nature of his struggle to maintain himself as himself while knowing that it didn't matter one way or the other if he succeeded or not -- but the experience of his universe in which the other, as a concrete reflection of immortal existence, would be the antidote against the intoxicating nothingness of oblivion whose fascinating formlessness was once again beckoning him?

He understood that if he were not to forfeit his being to nothingness, he would require outside help, a brother-in-arms. And if this yet-to-be determined brother -- upon whose existence he was suddenly dependent -- could not be sighted or contacted experientially, Harry F., at a minimum, had to be certain that there would always be the possibility that this other, like himself, existed somewhere in his universe -- a place he had up to now only negatively defined, whose ground hadn't revealed its nature except that it would shrink or disappear each time he attempted to lay hold of it. If he was certain of anything it was that his universe, however presently small and contracted, was large enough to include him, and that there must be a minimum of one other person like himself somewhere, where ever that somewhere was. But this reassurance, despite its internal logic, failed to produce the exultation required to induce in Harry F. the optimism required to stay the course, to hold his ground. On the other hand, slitting his throat was a non-starter since he was immortal; and there were worse fates than being condemned to watch replays of The Gong Show for eternity.

At this critical juncture of Harry F.’s evolution in both directions, towards and away from being, he had to determine, or demonstrate, if not in practice then in theory, that he wasn't alone in the universe, which begged the question: was it possible for one of anything to exist? Could one tree, one snow-storm, one poem exist? While the answer to this question must seem self-evident to even the least astute mind -- who would be so foolish to argue against the demonstrable plurality of all things -- only the rigour of systematically applied logic would deliver the result which would set Harry F.'s mind at ease. While his new universe had not yet demonstrated the necessity of anything, such as a tree, which would anyway probably slip away into oblivion when put to the test, Harry F. gave himself the latitude to hypothesize the existence of many trees so that he could ask the question of how the first tree comes to be itself as a separate and wholly self-contained, self-standing entity?

He imagines himself in a homogenous state of nature where nothing has been encountered or named. Suddenly, standing out from all that which is an undifferentiated blur, there is an entity that offers shade from a hot, burning noon-time sun. He rejoices in its showing itself to him and is thankful for the relief provided by the entity. He reduces it to its essential colours, contours and textures, qualities which will repeat themselves in every member of the entity's diverse and dispersed family. In citing the entity's irreducible essences, it is encountered in a meaningful way, and as such, it stands out from everything else; it acquires special status; it can be encountered again. In order to preserve the mind's unique relationship with it, it is vouchsafed a name in a rite as sacred as the discovering and naming of a God. In this rite of appellation, the entity becomes a tree, which distinguishes it from all other vegetations which haven't been meaningfully encountered, like the many textures of snow only an Inuit sees and has named. In naming the tree a tree, an understanding of tree-ness has been grasped, which is the bare minimum of being required for a tree to be a tree and for the name-giver to recognize all the other species of trees, including those he may never personally encounter.

Once something has been named, the many belonging to the same family are implied, and are there without having to be phenomenally experienced. Even in precious works of art, hailed as masterpieces because of their uniqueness and inimitability, the many are implicated. And while a particular landscape or portrait may indeed be unique, each is merely one of many possible landscapes; just as a unique portrait of a conceited man will imply portraits of other conceited men. The one and the many are discovered simultaneously; they are indissoluble; that one of anything could exist is as inconceivable as the number two existing without the numbers one and three.

If the thought of being the only existing immortal in the universe gave Harry F. a scare equal to the scare that he might not exist, he was now persuaded that having encountered and named himself immortal, many immortals were implied. That is to say, somewhere out there, there were other immortals like himself; and he decided that it was his present task to seek them out -- even though it didn't matter if he didn't.

As a matter of self-preservation, it didn't occur to him that if he was indeed ‘sui generis,’ uniquely immortal, he did not and could not exist (forever) because it is impossible for one of something to exist, which, by the laws of reverse temporal logic, would have meant that he had never, in reality, encountered himself as an immortal, had never named himself as such -- a calculus which describes the terminal category of oblivion. Yes. Something would exist forever, but it would be un-encountered, un-named, undifferentiated -- forever.

Small wonder that Harry F. kept a safe distance between himself and the lethal corollaries that threatened to un-make him, bereft him of his being, relegate him to indefinite non-being. His very existence depended on that logic not reaching his mind. Would his Intelligence Quotient make the necessary adjustments on such short notice? Was he up to the challenge of repelling the truth that could completely un-make him? Was the goal of authenticity still morally valid if it its hot pursuit it left him prey to the randomness of events that could result in his losing himself forever? One lapse could mean the end of being self-consciously himself. And once in oblivion, there would be no guarantee that he would ever emerge from it, ever find himself again.

It was dawning on him, who was least suspecting of a particular cause being responsible for an undesired effect, that his very intelligence, which for the mortal was the first cause of meaningful existence, was threatening to undo him. Every act of mind, every thought, every insight resulted in the further fragmentation of his self and universe. He recalled that the mere thinking of hunger, the weather, the 4-seasons obliterated their necessity, caused them to disappear. He suddenly understood that the greatest threat to his existence originated in himself, was himself. But because he had only at the very last looked to himself as the cause, which forced him to acknowledged his complicity, his culpability, he couldn't help but to let his lips form into small smile that rounded the severe lines of his face, temporarily refining the creases that had gathered into a knot at the edges of his eyes. Yes, so misdirected and inappropriate were his attempts to preserve himself, the effort now appeared comical.

Mind. His very own mind was unraveling him, stealthily disabling him, drip by drip leaking the virus of non-being into his bloodstream, a virus against which he was defenseless, a virus for which there was no effective antidote. But there remained a choice. He could become mindless, voluntarily self-directingly mindless so that what would remain of his vestigial self and his universe would be safe from the plunderings and depredations of thought. What need had he of mind if it was the cause of his undoing? But then again, what kind of being would he be without mind? How would he recognize himself? Harry F.’s considerable dilemma gave new meaning to the expression caught between a rock and hard place.

BETWEEN BEING AND OBLIVION

Harry F. holds his breath and stiffens like a passenger on a plane that is misbehaving, and would have soiled his pants had the possibility not already been lost to oblivion. He’s caught in a no-win (no exist) situation. Like a dumb animal yanked out of its natural habitat and fearful of everything, he trembles for he knows not how long. And then the solacing sounds of children's voices reach him.

In no time, which is the truth of his time, he surrenders to the chorus of ebullient voices, their music filling the spaces his own resources can’t supply, a depthless greedy space filling with a fulfilingness whose goal of achieving self-hood is propelled by its own advance.

Harry F. listens, as if in a trance, to these small voices bursting with life in the freedom of play, the lines of his face alternately contracting into humility, expanding with wonder. The unpremeditated harmonies are so perfect they induce the unprompted articulation of a previously undiscovered law of the universe that can now replicate itself in the universal mind. Unlike a children's choir bent into serving a religious ideal of which it has no understanding, these flowing, flawless exultant voices at play are the very miracle of life itself. Harry F. is suddenly hopeful that he isn’t alone anymore, that his moment of rescue is at hand. Are these the immortals he is seeking? Their euphonious cries and laughter, giggling and squealing constitute a world as complete and fulfilled as time itself whose constant flow and perishing succession are one and the same, like the fountain whose form remains the same despite the constant displacement of water.

Ablaze in a the rage to live, these children, without distinction, are the unadulterated truth of the pure unfolding of time. Beholding only to a succession of instances, they require neither hope nor consolation and cannot be cheated of their joys and sorrows, victories and defeats. In their own time, these little ones are the gods who stand tall and speak the truth to all things. And in their own time, which is always the now-happening, they are spared from that other god ticking away just beyond their time, waiting for the green fruit to ripen and fall into the tick tock of the stately clock, into the everlasting hell of temporality whose iron-tight grip allows for no escape, no peace, no respite, until the erstwhile immortal child is wholly, irrevocably saturated in time, and made to swear finite allegiance to Chronos.

Could it be, wonders Harry F, if in those marvelously random harmonies there is already sounded the first dissonant note warning of that imminent fall from grace, from timelessness? As with everything that comes into being and is inhered with the urge to endure, the first rupture must want to replicate and proliferate its own kind and purpose, which is to destroy the dimension that separates the unsuspecting child's world from the world of time. And once inside the time capsule, it is a life sentence: the voices grows deeper, huskier, and become reticent and self-conscious, until the child has all but been forgotten, vanquished; and they, who in their time had once lived the moment as if it would last forever, are now the blank pages upon which time-honoured social conventions stamps their pallid injunctions.

So why not pirate them away to his universe where they will always be immortal? Isn't this what his solitude craves? But the laws of his universe will never vouchsafe these children the self-consciousness he requires of them for his community. In his world, the child must always remain a child -- forever.

Perhaps between them and what he is seeking there is an opening, a path that leads to the kind of knowledge and know-how he needs to preserve himself against the threat of losing himself. Yes. He must now go to these voices and replenish his spirit and convalesce from a solitude whose menacing permanency inspires in him a fear that issues from a man no longer afraid to live in the truth of his being-in-timelessness, but for whom the beast of oblivion lays in patient waiting. Yes. He decides he must immerse himself in these voices in order to break free from the kind of thinking that is threatening his very self-hood, now hanging by a synaptic thread in the balance.

The children’s voices, their cadence, and sharps and flats, sweep over him like sea spray whipped up by the wind. Harry F. no longer fears his universe might be no more than the content of his mind. He has stumbled into a reality where he can gather and stay himself, in a realm replete unto itself.

He is standing perfectly still, slowly turning his ear, like a tracking device, towards the not-so-faraway voices. When he determines the sound's source, he hastens towards it with almost comic urgency, a cartoon-strip character summoned to save the universe. He feels a growing but unspecified need to place himself in the midst of these voices at play. Like those artless, anodyne fields of ambrosia hypostasized by the soft-minded mortal in his itinerant poetry, the promise is so potent the mirage he projects is taken as something palpable, concrete.

He plunges into the nectar of babble and chatter. The little ones look at him and just as quickly look away, absorbed in play. He feels he has always been there, that he is one of them, that they are the immortals he has been seeking. The feeling is so exalting and imperious, he feels as if he has been chosen as the necessary sight the truth requires to disclose itself.

The voices speak in one voice which is also his voice, demarcated by a trimmed ring of shrub surrounding a bejeweled surface of water, glittering, dappled, its silvery saucers forming and disforming. Near the rectangle of the water's extreme corner converge a flurry of little legs and tiny torsos around a big blue ball. Around and under the ball are thrust a concentrate of pudgy pink arms. In the wake of the commotioned water, spangles of light appear and disappear. From out of the knot of young flesh, beyond the pink thrust of outstretched arms, squirts the big, blue ball. It rises like a weightless globe and settles just beyond the little arms’ reach. The chase is on. The knot disentangles into a ragged rush of bodies, distends into an elongated shape of giggling, squealing, delighted children at play. Play. Pure play. Boundless. Wet hands around the big blue ball. It escapes and is pursued again. Little legs and little arms plowing through knee-high water.

Finally free to be himself, Harry F. instinctively subordinates his physical advantage and lets the little ones run ahead of him. All wet in the water he feels grounded, and stayed. It is so perfect and natural it is as if it has never been otherwise. The spectator that he was is now the spectacle, and there is no curtain separating him from the rest of the world.

At play with his fellow creatures in the world’s water, he is unsuspecting of the mistrust of the many mothers observing this stranger in their children’s midst, whose appearance is comic, intentions unclear, whose heavily lined and limned face betrays a man caught breathless in the throes of innocent abandonment and joy. They observe in silence, watchful and fearful. Harry F., holding his breath, has already gone under; the mothers wish he would stay there, and wait for him to surface.

He is under water in the midst of toes and tiny feet and short legs. The they -- the spectator and the strange stranger in their midst in his element. Wetness. Slippery wetness. Wonderfully warm wetness. T-shirt and sweat-pants assume the specific gravity of their watery element, willowy, floaty, belonging to both the body and the water. Above him, the world speaks in the language of a sea-shell held close to the ear, pierced by the giggles and cries of children’s voices. Where is he? Does he live there? They see bubbles escaping. And more bubbles. What’s under there? Who is making the bubbles? The crash of water, loud voices, gasping for air. And then under again. Silence. A stone floor. Hand-walking on a smooth, stone floor. Limbs and fingers refracting, unstable, but sure things that stay, that move and slide over smooth surfaces. The crash of water, amplified sounds, sucking in air. Under. Out. Under. Out.

A furry, aqueous creature, he vigorously shakes his head and sprays the water into the broken semi-circle of faces tentatively gathered around him. The attention emboldens him; he slicks his hair back, pressing out the water, and then, as if giving thanks to something unseen, he stretches his arms out laterally and opens his hands to the universe. With his head now tilted onto his right shoulder (to unplug a water-stopped ear) ribs flashing through a wet, clinging T-shirt, he looks like a modern day Christ figure. The children, in varying degrees, are fascinated by this strange man in their midst. The sudden emergence of this curious creature-animal from the water's deep has sent a delightful shiver through the semi-circle, causing it to separate into its component parts as each transfixed tot refracts the bursting of something newly issued in human behaviour and human nature. Caught unaware between fear and fascination, in groups of twos and threes, hands and fingers reflexively clasp and interlace, waiting for this strange and mysterious creature to declare his intentions. His eyes are lifted skyward, he seems to mean no harm. Two bolder children step forward, the impulse to explore trumping their apprehension. The shiest ones retreat while others simply giggle through their curiosity.

Not far away, and no less curious than their children, a concerned platoon of mothers, like an army unit put on sudden alert, hastens to the edge of the pool, faces flashing mistrust and menace -- a warning to the man whose benign features and posture belie his suspect behaviour.
Is he a weirdo? A sociopath? Or simply a former father, who, upon seeing (their) children at play, finds awakened in him a long held-back regret for the things not done in their proper time, a longing to be again the loving and playful father of children whose own have long since left home. The mothers, assuming the proportions and propriety of their territory, dig into their positions. Emboldened by their numbers, and close enough to eye and hand-signal to their children who, catching glimpses of their mothers, suddenly fall silent, they track the man's every move and shift of his disarming eyes, poised to come to the immediate rescue of their flesh and blood.

Harry F. calmly observes the mothers gathered at the edge of the pool but is unable to connect their proximity to his behaviour. He ascertains that his clothes are wet, that his thin wet hair is clinging to his scalp. He has been frolicking in the shallow waters of a children's swimming pool, or so he dimly recollects. He registers the heaviness of his water logged T-shirt and sweat pants, and then the broken necklace of children’s eyes staring at him, and behind them the unblinking eyes of their mothers’ and decides that something isn’t quite right, even though nothing can ever go wrong. He ruffles up his matted hair, smoothes the water off his face, shakes his arms, and returns his gaze to the broken circle of inquiring little eyes examining him with unconcealed excitement and trepidation while behind them, the mothers gather and form into a single purpose. He has news for them, that they are all going to live forever. No need to worry. In the real world there are no consequences.

He notes the exaggerated show of hostility and promise of lethal consequence to any unwanted form of aggression, as well as the unmistakable signs of dread and anxiety that even the utterly fearless betray before the possibility of a physical confrontation. He can’t help but to laugh out loud, so ludicrously detached from reality are they. But they aren’t laughing. In fact his bemusement seems to have elicited a very contrary response. They’ll eventually get it right, he decides, knowing very well that they have all the time in the world to figure it out.

He looks up at the bright sun and squints. There can be no doubt. Everything is pointing to a particular temperature, and a passing season that favours light apparel. They are all wearing shorts, and wide brimmed straw hats and large sunglasses. They all look alike, which means there is nothing to look at.

He exhales and lets his head fall forward, dismayed, perplexed, and finally unforgiving of himself. Despite his fierce loathing of the lie whose universe he has vowed never to revisit, and no stranger to the dreaded consequences of failure and capitulation, he once again inexplicably finds himself deep in the lie’s treacherously seductive confines, and eerily feels as if he has always been there, as if he has convinced only himself that he has never been elsewhere -- in a universe perhaps known only to one. And while he can't recall the circumstance that has brought him to his present predicament, the thought of having to once again do battle with the big bully of the lie is a most unpleasant prospect, one he wants to avoid at `almost' any cost. He takes note of his situation, in the deep green of the summertime, in the company of half-naked mortals believing themselves to be partaking of season's precious short-lived favours. The unreality of it all suddenly weighs heavily on him. He is weary of exertion, the seemingly fruitless struggle to be himself in a world foundering on the big lie. If only he could be elsewhere. But he knows the lie is slippery and insidious; it can appear in the most unlikely places when one least expects it -- so it really didn't matter where he is. He must out think it, entice it to negate itself.

The mothers once again come into sharp focus, the shape of a claw. He shakes his head. It’s one thing to be living and giving in to the lie, but altogether something else passing it on to their unsuspecting children. Do I intercede, or leave them there to live and die in their cozy little lie? He becomes convinced that his best efforts will be all for naught, that mother and child are catastrophically non-illuminable.

He knows, as surely as he knows about the lie he awoke to this morning, that the 4-seasons don't exist, neither does the summertime, nor things that grow and are green. Is this random encounter a sleight-of-mind, he wonders, a hallucination self-induced to divert him from the more pressing matter -- which is -- yes, to keep himself intact, to keep himself out of harm's (oblivion's) way?

He looks up at the sun and narrows his eyes and then returns his gaze to his present circumstance where everything is shadowy and silent. Some of the shadows seem to withdraw, leaving a dark recess in their place, a recess that stays perfectly still. He tries to recall his name. But why? Has someone asked him? He isn't sure. He knows his own name; he just can't speak it. His name is like the first of anything that disappears before it arrives. He waits. It is only a thought away. One single thought. A stroke away for a drowning man's rescue. He thinks hard. He understands that something (he can't say what) decisive is at stake. He suspects that if he could only speak what is at stake, he will be able to speak his name. It is one and the same. He has become his own question. But is he the last question? If the question overpowers the answer, how will the result play out in respect to his status as a sentient being? Will he still know himself, who is ____________? He was taught that the best questions are those that don't yield quick answers, that endure as questions. And so he asks himself the question of all questions: "Who am I?"

Out of a vast, incommensurable, unchanging, everlasting nothingness, a something, however improbable, or inchoate that stumbles into existence, must impress upon the nothingness like an explosion or big bang. The nothingness, shocked out of innocence, in its turn, must recoil into something smaller than what it was before, when it discovers alongside itself the existence of something (which can be anything) other than itself. This something is a breath, a hot, quick, desperate, nervous breath, the breath of something fearful for its existence.

Harry F. is panting like a mouse dropped as fodder in a python’s den. He is engulfed by his own smell. The odour, faintly chloro-swampish, is strange to him. What does it mean? He questions it, briefly loses himself in it. He has never been so anxious. But how is this so? No harm can befall him.

His name has just come back to him. But he experiences no relief. He has no idea for how long he hasn't been able to speak his name: days, months, years, epochs. It's all the same.

His fear and anxiety suddenly vanish, and he finds himself enjoying the serenity of a reprieve, but he isn't the cause of it, and therefore he knows that it can be withdrawn at any time. He knows there is no reason, no necessary cause that caused him to remember his name, that suddenly made it possible for him to once again recall himself to himself. He knows that whether or not he succeeds in holding on to his name, of keeping his body attached to his name, he is going to live forever. He knows that he could have just as easily remained forever in the nothingness of oblivion, and never again known the experience of his uniqueness, of being separate from everything else. He listens to himself panting. His short breaths are uneven, his chest is tight, he can hardly move, he feels himself becoming inanimate.

From a past which he has long since disowned, which has long since fallen into oblivion, an old-world proverb escapes and crowds out his other thoughts: "It is wonderful to look upon the things of the world and terrible to be them." It means nothing to him. And there is no reason for its appearance and disappearance. He fears he might once again lose himself. And he is helpless to forestall it. He waits for it to happen, for the waiting to turn into prophecy.

"My name is Harry F.," is his meager doing and saying. "My name is Harry F." His universe is undergoing a cataclysmic contraction. It is so small there is hardly any place for the smallest, least category of anything. Mantra-like, he repeats his name as his universe collapses into a drone, the sleep-inducing hum of the fridge at night.

When he awoke this morning, finally accepting of his condition, life was full of possibilities. His new universe had just been born and the mere consideration of it caused it to expand, as did the discovery and recognition that his old universe was grounded on an all-pervasive lie whose every injunction was saturated in mendacity. But now, he’s not sure if he is able to endure his condition, to act upon his hard-won principles. Authentic existence is exacting a terrible price.

He concedes that thus far he has failed to find the necessary cause or law of physics that would allow him to exist self-consciously forever. If the necessity were somewhere out there, perhaps in the form of a riddle waiting to be solved, he has so far been no match for it; even though he takes some satisfaction in knowing that he is living authentically, which of course implies that self-consciousness is superfluous, that in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter if he should cease to be himself. In an irony which has thus far only hinted that there are graver implications, the authenticity, which at first was instrumental in the expansion of his universe, is now causing this same universe to shrink. It is as if he has stumbled upon an irreversible set of teleological principles that are laying the ground for his permanent oblivion. Yes. It has come down to this. Authenticity and self-hood are apparently incompatible. Authentic existence is unable to provide him the means of preserving himself as a self-conscious, immortal being.

Harry F. commands himself to move but can’t. And then forgets about it. At least I’m breathing. He listens to himself breathing: uneven, jerky. An involuntary spasm jolts his body. His throat tightens. The tongue curls and recoils, partially blocking his wind pipe. He knows he can disappear at any moment and it might be forever. He gasps for air while fighting off muscle and nerve apoplexy. Is this the final and conflict, he wonders, wheezing for air, sticking a finger past his tongue into the tightness at the back of his throat.

Co-existence is impossible. One world will finally vanquish the other; Harry F. will emerge either forever himself, or forever never be himself. It is either/or.

Another sharp spasm shoots through him, distorting his face. His can’t hear his breath. He’s not sure if he’s breathing. His entire body jerks and convulses, and then a terrible, piercing half-moan, half-scream issues from a strange part of his throat; hands and arms flail wildly out of control like near-severed limbs dangling from a knotty rope of flesh. His jaw separates from the rest of his face and holds fast, stretching and contorting his features, and then snaps back, driving his teeth into a brittle clench. A tremor tears down the left side of his face and into his neck’s quivering twin tendons. His flushed cheeks are on fire, his teeth burning hot in their sockets of palpitating flesh.

He is breathing again, short desperate breaths, his heart pounding against his chest. He feels himself about to explode into a million particles and fill the void with the billions of bits and pieces of himself – a last stand against an enemy that has no features or purpose or prerogative. In that split second of time, in that uncompleted idiom just before the most decisive moment of his existence is about to arrive, he understands that the violence of the paroxysms which have been shredding him to bits are internally wrought in order to incite a discordant multiplicity of competing physical shocks causing him to experience himself in all his physicality, the purpose of which is to awaken the self-preservation impulse in a last-ditched effort to safeguard himself against the forces of annihilation which are bulldozing him into oblivion. As long as he is sensate, can feel, he will remain intact, will know himself as Harry F., the person who is having the fit.

But what if these self-induced, nerve-pinching flagellations over-extend his ability to absorb them, that instead of resuscitating him they have the opposite effect and cause him to lose consciousness, to enter a state (of nothingness) from which he might never recover? Has it come to this?

His fate as a self-conscious immortal is now hanging in the delicate balance of violent forces erupting within him. Like a heap of dead leaves being whipped up by an unruly wind, he feels like the raw material higher force have set themselves upon, greedy for un-made destinies they feel compelled to shape, and that he is about to disappear in the process, like a blank page disappears as soon as text is printed on it. What if, in the midst of what to an outsider must look like a life-threatening epileptic fit, he gouges his eyes out, or smashes his skull on the concrete. But even that won’t matter. There can be no consequences to any injury he might suffer, to any damage he might inflict on himself. He is going to live forever.

As long as it takes a struck match to catch fire and light up a dark space, Harry F. has forgotten why his subconscious induced the fit as well as the throes and contortions that produced the memory of it.

He listens to his breathing return to its normal rhythm; and then his entire body goes slack as he vaguely recalls that he has been through an unpleasant ordeal, the details of which are murky – somehow related to the recall of his name. Why is he mumbling his name to himself? And why does his tongue feel numb. He presses and stabs it at his teeth, and then scrapes it against his uppers until sensation slowly returns.

CHAPTER III: ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME

He is standing in front of a 2-coloured cube wearing a pointed hat with letters inscribed on it. His eye falls on the word BAR NONE. He decides to enter but a sudden tremor tears down his legs and stops him in his tracks. Harry F. understands that he is not doing so well and he needs help. He steadies himself until he is able to advance. He opens the door and enters a poorly lit, stale smelling carpeted space. Repeating his name in a barely audible whisper, he approaches a long L-shaped bar, and drops himself on one of the backless stools. A whale-shaped bartender is bent over a small sink, showing a large gummy back.

Drying his hands in a small towel, the red-faced man with shaggy, over-hanging brows and fat cheeks, neatly attired in a clean white shirt with button-down collar and black vest with red trimming around the small pockets, turns around and is caught unawares by a client sitting, or rather imitating a lifeless wax imitation of someone sitting, his hands palms-down and spread apart as if steadying himself. As a rule, even when the place is full, the music cranked up and his back turned to the commotion, he never misses anyone coming in. Although he would insist that nothing surprises him anymore, that he has seen all there is to be seen in life, and at least twice, he is, if not taken aback, not at all pleased that his customer is mumbling his name to himself, has chosen his establishment to advertise his derangement -- not the kind of message he wants to send to his straight-laced, late afternoon clientele that will soon be arriving.

Not one to suffer the sufferings of his fellow man, the bartender, who on a good day `might' recognize himself as somewhat frugal in the dispensation of his sympathies, is suddenly moved to respond to his customer's obvious fright and precarious mental state. Harry F. is presently so self-absorbed the bartender can gaze straight into his eyes and effect, through direct staring, the kind of intimacy exclusively granted by eye contact, the kind usually reserved for couples or between parents and children.

Whatever it is that stirs the bartender to look into the soul of Harry F – perhaps an unacknowledged connection deficit -- it is presently lost on his very absent interlocutor. And what he sees in Harry F.’s alarmed, disengaged eyes is a man in total disarray, a man who is hurting and hurting bad. His clothes -- sweat pants and T-shirt -- are drenched and reeking of chlorine, thin streaky hair is matted onto a scruffy forehead and there is debris sticking to his arms, as if he had fallen into a swamp and barely managed to crawl up a grassy embankment to safety.

In his twenty five years behind BAR NONE’s bar, the last 15 as its owner, like many ordinary people who think themselves cheated by circumstances from some undefined higher calling, he has convinced himself he has uncovered and appraised all the peculiarities of his profession, and has met and studied every conceivable personality type. Persuaded that in another life he was meant to be a psychologist, he believes there isn’t a problem he hasn't heard about or one he can’t solve. He thinks of his bar as a kind of ersatz analyst’s couch of which people from every walk of life avail themselves, pouring out their problems in proportion to the drink poured into minds still learning how to walk.

Closely examining the palpably disturbed, unmoved and unresponsive subject facing him, the bartender decides that Harry F. represents a new personality type that periods of great social upheaval produce. A dedicated follower of headline journalism, he is concerned that more and more of society’s bloated category of the disenfranchised are resorting to violence as a means to non-specific ends, but he is certain that his disturbed client who keeps repeating “my name is Harry F” is not one of them. He wholeheartedly supports a recently floated right wing proposal (the Clockword Orange Mandate) that violent offenders should have to submit to a benign form of prefrontal leucotomy, a relatively inexpensive operation that would significantly reduce prison violence and guarantee the permanent rehabilitation of all offenders, and by extension, restore to the city’s streets and neighbourhoods, many of which have been taken over by gangs and turned into de facto war zones, their erstwhile dignity.

The bartender further concludes that Harry F. is harmless, except maybe to himself, and that enlightened biological forces are at work preparing a useless man to eliminate himself. He is a great admirer of the lemming voluntary suicide response to over population, and concerning his own troubled and proliferating species, he approves of controlled famines, heroin and cigarette addiction, alcoholism, obesity, civil war and inveterate life-style abuse as proof that man is at least as biological as he is rational, that the collective unconscious operates as primordially and efficaciously as the lemmings and the like. He suspects his client has recently known better days, and like many educated and successful professionals, despite remarkable advances in technology and medicine, they, and the society that presumably benefits from them, don’t seem any happier than his grandparents who knew of only a few of the modern conveniences. He further concludes that Harry F., does not suffer from financial want, that beneath the pain and panic gathered into a knot on his brow, there is an unhappy confused man far beyond the reach of the material world, its fatuous claims and cures.

The bartender decides that the longer he allows the man to continue to mutter to himself, the less likely will be his rescue.

“Harry F.,” booms the bartender. "So what'll it be?" His voice splinters on Harry F.'s ears like a stack of plates dropped on a marble floor. The latter shoots up his hands and sticks his thumbs into his ears and waits for the ringing to subside as tears form in his eyes which blur his vision which he tries to clear with rapid blinking. The outline of a pale smudge with a red crest appears and gradually resolves into separate colours and recognizable features and the fuzzy form of a large bear of a man standing opposite him. "Harry F. Harry F." he hears the voice repeat.

"That's right. I’m Harry F.," says Harry F., nodding in the affirmative. "Do I know you?” He examines the contrivance that separates them. “And where am I?" Looking past the large man standing in front of him, he scans the ceiling high mirrors behind the bar, the collection of bottles arranged in front of them, and the neat rows of upside down glasses hanging from a low ceiling, but is unable to assign to these objects any utility, and instead finds himself admiring their different shapes: the bottles’ labels and logos, the stylized print, the different sizes of thick and slender masculine and feminine necks, the slim and stocky torsos.

The bartender, no slouch when it comes to reading an inscrutable face, is quick to note that Harry F. is back in the world where he can be reached and engaged. "Forget about what a man says," he has often said to anyone with no one else to listen to. “But take note of what he's looking at.” His words of wisdom fall on deaf ears. He thinks Harry F., is pining for a drink.

"So what'll it be, Harry F?" He feels the man’s moist breath in face and leans forward and says, “I like that.”

Harry F. is becoming increasingly aware of himself, his body and immediate surroundings which confers palpable relief, but from what, he can’t say. So he repeats what he has just heard: "So what'll it be? What'll it be?" refusing to concede he hasn’t quite grasped what is being asked of him. "Be. Be. Be." he enunciates, waiting for something to start up?

"You mean “B” for brandy?" queries the bartender. Harry F. nods without any understanding what he has set in motion, but hopeful, that by advancing a process already begun, he will eventually catch up with the cause and effect of which he presumes himself an actor. Harry F. nods and then nods again. "A double?" The bartender unfrowns his brows and smiles conspiratorially as if to say: "Your airs can't fool me. Being alive hurts and drink heals and you’re no exception."

For Harry F., it is all too complicated. Perplexed, disoriented, unsure of his balance, he again steadies himself as if his once familiar culture’s repertoire of signs and symbols have been changed without him being advised. He fixes his anxious eyes onto the bartender's whose own are fixed on his hands deftly setting up and filling two shot glasses.

The nimble, medicine-ball shaped bartender, who judges himself an expert in small talk, believes he would be rich and retired if he had charged a dime for everyone customer who has unloaded on him. A self-proclaimed master of techniques of disarmament, no customer could remain a stranger once he set his mind to prying him open -- with a little help from the hard stuff, of course. He looks at his watch, studies the digits, then takes out from under the counter two additional shot glasses which he prepares to fill for himself from a whisky bottle he fills with tea every morning. "So where are you from, Harry F?" In direct disproportion to his avoidance of alcohol was his immoderate consumption of Triple-X-sized breakfasts, lunches and suppers and everything in-between.

Harry F., momentarily preoccupied by the drink master’s busy hands, repeats the question to himself, and manages: “Not from your universe."

The bartender meets the latter’s distracted gaze with a charged mix of curiosity and contempt, but he is far from being unamused by the proceedings. He interprets Harry F.'s unspecific response to mean that he was formerly a member of a respected profession, perhaps an executive who had just lost his job, or a doctor or lawyer ruined by scandal. "So tell me," he continues, in a buttery vice, undeterred by Harry F.'s unintended exclusionary slight, "how is life in your universe?"

The query, which inadvertently addresses Harry F.'s most pressing concern as an immortal struggling to maintain himself in a universe about which nothing is certain and nothing concrete can be said other than in negative constructs, strikes, or rather shreds a nerve. His breathing begins to speed up, but the bartender pretends not to notice. Harry F. very deliberately raises and relaxes his arms, briefly places his hands palms down onto the smooth, coffee brown laminated wooden surface, before gracefully folding them into his lap, their easy, lyrical movement contrapuntal to his nervous breathing. With nothing to support his back, his posture gives way to a hunch and he stares blankly into the two shot glasses set before him. "Life in my universe is terribly lonely,” he begins, unbeholding to context. “To exist there on a continuous basis requires a strength of mind of which my mind has not been equal to – lately," he adds parenthetically.

Preparing to be exceptionally entertained, the bartender grins and encourages Harry F. to drain his glass by raising his own. He likes what he’s hearing -- it’s unreal realness -- and he makes no secret of his being intrigued. He concludes that whatever it is that ails the distraught man before him, it’s a weight that he shouldn’t have to carry, and for reasons which he can’t explain, he would like to help him, despite the tatterdemalion look and suspect comportment. If over the years, he has learned how to affect a show of sympathy for the bloated stream of losers that pass before him like refuse being swept down a sewer by its own excess, there is something about Harry F. that awakens his nearly exhausted reserve of sympathy, and unlike all the others for whom temporary obliteration is the promise paid after a hard day’s night, with BARE NONE supplying the means and mercy, his customer doesn’t seem at all interested in or in need of annihilating himself through alcohol.

"I haven't uncovered any necessity to my existence,” continues Harry F., who would be the first choice of the society of solipsists if they could only find a way to connect to each other. “It's easy for you because you're living a lie. You believe in your necessity because you don't know it's a lie. It hasn't occurred to you, any of you, that you are categorically unnecessary." He pauses briefly, weighing his words before resuming. "When I find myself in your fortress community, sustained by a certitude that is so complex it can’t even question itself, it is sometimes tempting to give in, to join up, to become one of you again. But I can't. I must never. It will be the end of me." He stops.

The bartender, unable to make any sense whatsoever of Harry F.’s cryptic self-analysis, nonetheless feels, if only at the gut level, its sincerity, the man’s thoroughly bizarre account of his place in the world. He does not take umbrage at being accused of living a lie since the source is patently unstable. It requires no effort on his part to allow Harry F. some slack, and even though the latter’s views are totally off the wall if not megalomaniacal, they have been in good faith shared with a sympathetic listener and are therefore somehow deserving of something, although he can’t say what. He prides himself on being able to make those subtle distinctions, and that it would be pointless taking issue with his client.

If he has convinced himself that he could come to care for Harry F. in the limited context of client-customer relations, in point of fact he regards him as nothing more than a temporary diversion, albeit a highly entertaining one – but if only he would simply his speech. Almost without exception, every closet genius who has ended up in Bar None has used his intelligence to obscure instead of illuminate what it is he wants to say, or wants to be, or how he’s hurting, and how unfair life has been, and to this long list of losers he now adds Harry F. whose arms are smudged with mud and hair and T-shirt reeks of chlorine.

"You're right, Harry. It's easy to live a lie, and I'm not about to deny that I don't on occasion do what I ought not to do. But what I want to know is how do you manage not to?"

By Harry F.’s rough estimate, the bartender’s unexpected query reveals exceptional discernment, an intuitive understanding that there is indeed a metaphysical entre deux monde that separates as well as links their worlds. He begins to toy with the possibility that he might be conversing with an enlightened mortal, which he knows is an oxymoron that he nonetheless grants a certain degree of, if not gravity, then possibility. Allowing the inquiry a status that it hasn’t earned, but which rather reflects Harry F.’s present disposition, he demurs with unaffected humility and replies: "The choice isn't mine. And thus, the credit isn't mine. Once you understand a magician's tricks, you can't be fooled by them again. Once you `truly' understand that something is wrong, it's impossible not to know it's wrong. In my particular situation, it would be impossible to go back to living the lie. The mere thought of doing so causes me to revolt from self-loathing. I have come to realize there exists something much greater than myself -- and even more infinite if that's possible -- and that is principle. What I am and shall forever be pales beside the principles I have uncovered. To live the lie you are living has long ceased to be a possibility."

Harry F. is sufficiently in the here and now to realize that the man before cannot help but to be confused and confounded by his cogitations, so he falls silent, allowing the other the necessary time required to interpret his latest pronouncements. Harry F. knows that his options are not bound by the laws that derive from the pleasure principle which holds all mortals on tight leash. Guided by the highest principles, committed to the pursuit of authentic existence, he understands that two choices lie before him: he will either be himself forever, or never again be himself, where the difference between the two cannot be qualified or quantified.

The bartender in the meantime, despite the time allotted to him for reflection, is still unable to make any sense of what he characterizes as evasive double talk. Suddenly unwilling to play along with Harry F.’s word games, he asks straight out: "And what kind of lie were you living before?" He drains his shot glass of tea, slamming it down on the bar.

"The same as you, the same as everyone else," says Harry F., as if it were self-evident.

The bartender has suddenly had his fill of metaphysics for the day and decides on a ploy he has used on numerous occasions in order to change the conversation. "You were mumbling something about your wife a few minutes ago?"

"My wife?" Harry F. is slow to grasp the word's relational implications. "Yes. I do indeed have a wife." He can’t repeat her name nor conjure up her features and isn’t at all nonplussed that he feels no sense of connection with someone referred to as his wife, even though he understands that the designation of wife represents a special category.

Observing consternation and vexation registering on Harry F.’s pained face, the bartender congratulates himself on the immediate effects of his ploy, and plays next the card. “Should I conclude that your presence here at this early hour is related to problems with the wife?

"I can't recall when I last saw her," says Harry F., trying to recall her face. "In fact I've forgotten what she looks like. But I don’t remember anything negative happening between us. In fact . . . . well . . . . it could be that we are no longer together . . . and perhaps for a long time now."

The bartender pours another measure of tea into his shot glass, a rite he performs throughout the day everyday. He suspects that Harry F. has only recently been given his eviction papers, but he is keen enough to appreciate that a man's pride is his most precious commodity, and that being spurned or cuckolded goes to the very root of a man’s sense of himself as a man and is a subject whose messy details are best left unsaid, or reserved for the confessional, which he assumes is the implicit function of not only his but every bar that stays open past midnight.

Harry F. doesn’t notice the bartender casting a concentrated look towards a table at the back of the premises where a couple of young elegantly attired women aren’t talking to each other. The bartender wants to bring a smile to Harry F.’s face and considers using the artifice of denigrating women as a means of reconstituting a man's faltering ego, but he concludes that his interlocutor is too intelligent to fall for such an artless ploy. So he once again raises his shot glass of tea which Harry F. doesn’t notice much less rejoin, downs it in one gulp and then again, for effect, half slams the glass onto the bar. "Sometimes couples just grow apart," he offers with an exaggerated, breathy sigh. Affecting sympathy comes as routinely to him as turning on the beer tap, just as it is unlikely that the drink master, now well into his 3rd decade behind the bar, will ever suspect that the transparent performance of the first is instrumental in driving his customers to their second and third. "Sometimes couples don't discover they're totally different and unsuited for each other until late in life, until the children have left. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about.” The man manning the bar has never been married, but has listened to many a tale of conjugal woe.

Harry F., meanwhile, is unsuccessfully trying to remember something about his wife: a facial feature, a speech mannerism, the shape of her body. "Who is my wife?" he asks out loud. "Why can’t I remember anything about my wife? Did I ever have wife?"

The drink fixer shows his first signs of impatience. He refuses to believe that Harry F. is just another nut case off the streets, but he knows that it’s one thing when you’re seeing double and talking to yourself under the influence and altogether something else when you’re sober. He doesn’t ask Harry F. to show him a photo because that latter isn’t carrying a wallet.

Harry F., who still hasn’t touched his drink, begins studying the ceiling high mirror which reflects a row of wine glasses suspended up-side-down from a notched beam, and the paneled ceiling from which hangs a dimly lit chandelier. “Nice place you got here,” he says. The bartender peers into Harry F.’s vacant eyes. “When did you last hurt a fly?” Harry F. ignores the friendly question. “So tell me more about the lie you were telling me about. I like to hear about lies which usually tell more than any truth you’re likely to hear.” The big bear of a man takes pride on being quick on his feet which he confuses for being wise, but he understands that running a successful business depends on customers liking in equal parts their booze and smart-assed bartender.

"It's the worst of all lies," resumes Harry F., looking past the drink maker into the mirror but he only sees what he has to say. "It is indestructible because it is sealed off from choice, so if you’re caught up in it you will never suspect it is a lie. Which means the people who are living it are not living it because for them it isn’t a lie, but that doesn’t make it any less of a crime. It's one thing to invent a lie and to lie to one's self -- even for a lifetime -- but to spread it and infect everyone without a single exception is something that ignorance cannot excuse. And it just didn’t happen by itself; human agency removed all traces of the lie’s origins and initial dissemination. Remarkable if it weren’t so tragic for the species. The most daunting, insinuating evil is one that has no beginning, has cut itself off from all semblance of inquiry. Who would even consider asking someone to untie a shoelace that has no ends? The lie you and everyone are living is regarded as the single greatest truth. There isn't a single human being who isn't convinced that he is going to die. When I come into direct contact with your world, I’m forced to live a nightmare that I know isn't real, but it is one from which I can't wake." Harry F. places his hand over his breast and raises his eyes. "And it’s just my luck that thus far, I’m the only person who sees the lie for what it is.”

The bartender, however rattled by Harry F.’s obscure discourse, and the man himself whom he regards as a moonbeam out to lunch, can’t help himself from feeling that this crazy guy in front of him is somehow on to something. He knows that Harry F. comes from another place, just as he knows that he’s never been anywhere near there, where ever that is. As to the man’s mental state, the bartender has indulged enough nut cases in his life to know that Harry F. isn’t like any of the others, that in point of fact he might be as sane as the next person, so long as you don’t confuse what he says with what he means, whatever that might be. If, by what he says, Harry F. wouldn’t be the first person to misrepresent himself, except that those who usually do so want to be more admired and respected than is warranted. But that was not so with Harry F. whose lunatic ravings force even the most generous nature to conclude that he should be either locked up or permanently medicated.

Unlike his clientele for whom bar culture properly anaesthetizes them against either life’s tediums or trials, the bartender has long regarded his venue as an opportunity to engage the world in all its diversity, from the comic to the tragic, where every happy ending betrays a sad one. But despite his inability to penetrate the least aspect of Harry F.’s mental state and life situation, he admits, like giving into a guilty pleasure, that he’s thoroughly enjoying the latter’s company. Yes, his theories and crazy ramblings about life belong in the “out there,” category, but their internal logic and his accounting of them are not without their charm and eloquence, and he wants to hear more. “So we are all convinced of death and you are not," asserts the bartender, restating Harry F.’s general position.

"I wish it weren't so," says Harry F., his heavy thoughts dragging down on his eyes and mouth. “I wish it weren’t so.” He pauses, pulls on chin and sticks his finger in his ear to relieve an itch. “Of course if the one begets the many, there is always the hope that my truth will take root and spread its seed and fecundate the world with the only real truth. But then again, if the one proves himself unable to maintain himself -- referring to himself in the 3rd person -- then the lie will continue to rule probably for as long as there is semi-intelligent life on the planet. However , meaning however unlikely, if true intelligence answers its calling and manifests and multiplies -- and I should add that it will be recognized as such only when it overcomes and nullifies the myth of death -- death will not simply lose its powers (and may I remind you that even as I employ the word `death' in this here dialogue, it's only in reference to your world which is the antithesis to truth) it will cease to be a possibility, it will share negative powers with all that which falls outside the scope of language."

The bartender looks up at Harry F. as if to say: "You are one screwed up dude." Whatever allowance he has made on behalf of his interlocutor’s state of mind, it’s now all used up and in danger of slipping into deficit, which is usually reason enough to be asked to leave the premises. An intelligent nut case, but a nut case nonetheless, the bartender concludes. So death doesn’t even rate as a possibility. Well, we’ll see about that. I wonder if a bullet to his brain would change his line of reasoning. The bartender has never had cause to recourse the firearm which he keeps in a drawer just below the cash.

A derelict man with a duffle bag thrown over a sloped shoulder, enters the bar as if he knows where’s going, slipping past Harry F., and taking up a stool at the far end of the counter. The bartender excuses himself and goes to take the order. “What it’ll be?” “From the tap,” says the unshaved, unwashed man, tucking in his shirt. “You have to show me you can pay.” The tall, wiry man, looking much older than his 50 years, opens a clenched hand, revealing a crumpled five dollar bill. “Coming up,” says the bartender who reaches under the bar for a glass which he sets under the tap and overfills. “Here you go, my man,” and slides the glass in front of him and then looks over at Harry F. whose facial expression hasn’t changed. He tucks the bill into the cash register and returns the change, before rejoining Harry F.

“I get your point,” he says. “And I couldn’t have stated it better than yourself. Death shouldn't be so traumatic. We all know it's going to happen, and when it does there's not a hell of lot you can do about it, so why think about it. For quite a number of years now, I've been contemplating the biggy out there, and it changes you, it humbles you down to what’s left in life and what’s left isn’t what you’ve saved up for – that’s for sure.” His self-deprecation surprises him. He pours himself and then puts down another shot – of tea. "There's a time for living and a time for dying and everybody knows when his time is up, notwithstanding sudden accidental or violent death - and we all know there's too much of that out there.”

Harry F. shakes his head. The bartender, like every other Homo sapiens he has met thus far, all dwell in catastrophic ignorance. For their entire lives, their every volition is a function of the lie. And yet if they were to out-think the lie they would become instantly enlightened, so why isn’t it happening, why hasn’t it ever happened, why can’t it happen now? Please let it happen now, but he knows better, he knows that he’s not going to find what he’s looking for in his present circumstance. In an attempt to draw closure but addressing no one in particular, he says in a weary voice, "You and your kind are pathetic, miserable creatures and it is my duty to pity you forever, whatever that means, since it doesn’t matter if I do or do not pity you, or if my pity falls on deaf ears." An ironic smile firms his lips, the king’s fool amused by a dysfunctional universe of which he is prisoner.

The bartender looks a little spooked. He clinks his empty shot glass to Harry F.'s untouched one. "To the end of death," he says raising it. “I’ll drink to that,” says a phlegmy voice at the end of the bar. Harry F. doesn’t relate to the gesture of clinking and raising glasses, but feels that he is being invited to do the same. So he picks up his glass, touches the other’s, and observes the bartender fill and drain his shot glass in one motion. He does the same with his double, and near doubles over, gasping for breath. The bartender, who has Harry F. pegged as a teetotaler, lifts his brows and says: "You drink that stuff like water. I’m impressed.” Harry F. does the same with the second, which has him again gasping for air. The drink fixer pours him another one, and this time a real one for himself. He downs it as if there will be no tomorrow while the other as if there will always be one

Seconds later, Harry F. is fighting off a burning sensation tearing down his throat and esophagus into the red-hot pit of his stomach. He begins inhaling and exhaling in rapid succession in a misguided attempt to douse the fires but instead only exacerbates the blow-torched feeling scorching his lungs and gut. Like a fire that has suddenly choked off its oxygen supply, Harry F. can’t get enough air into his lungs. He tries to take a deep breath but he can’t fill his lungs. His veins are near to bursting, first on his neck and then his temples. He grabs onto the bar for support while the bartender looks on passively as Harry F. goes through the motions of someone is in the terminal throes of apoplexy. “Get a hold of yourself, Harry,” urges the bartender in an exaggerated bored voice. Seconds later he’s laughing his head off. In an undisguised effort to prolong his pleasure, he pours his reeling customer another shot. "On the house," he announces, barely able to speak through the paroxitic hilarity that shakes his entire bulk, vibrating the entire premises. From his fat forehead to his blubbery ankles, the bartender is so thoroughly rippled in adipose, had he been a woman in the crosshairs Renoir, his prodigious folds of flesh would have been immortalized in the art world’s timeless tableaux.

Harry F.’s air passages open up, the coughing subsides. He takes long, deep, uninterrupted breaths, wipes the saliva from the corners of his mouth, and looks up at the bartender whom he now sees in an entirely different light: a squat sugar beet drained of colour to which stubby legs and arms are attached; a fleshy pale face of a man with wet, swollen lips, tears (from jeering) collected at the corners of his eyes, and an expression comprised in equal parts of self-righteousness and vindictiveness, whose principal enjoyment in life derives from the misery and misfortune of others. A mediocre man consumed by envy, whose index for virtue cleaves to negative integers and whose every natural advantage is contaminated by pride.

Harry F.’s normally upturned mouth collapses into the shape of dough hanging over a spatula. It fills with sour and saliva, which makes him grimace and swallow. He has to get away from the bartender hulking in front of him, the sprawling spiteful grin greased onto his full face, his fat eyelids squeezing his eyes half shut. He snatches up his drink and decides to make for any table at long end of the premises next to the woman’s washroom. Like the updraft of sewer gas escaping from a man-hole, he feels the force of the bartender’s wheezing and derision at his back.

Deftly navigating around the empty tables, he glides his feet along the cool and unusually thick commercial carpet, his arches yielding to the pliant thread. The light massaging effect travels up his body into his spine. Feeling happy and light-headed, he sits down.

Settling in, he sets his arms on the dry wooden arms of the chair, smooth like ivory under his skin. He becomes aware of his mind emptying, of his body registering the world around him, and he surrenders to it: the stale smell of cigarette smoke mixed in with traces of perfume, the ghostly light catching the side of the ashtray facing him, the far away phantom figure of the bartender attending to his clientele, the quiet hum of a generator or air conditioner, the snugness of his chair, the slackness of his spine fitted against the padded back support. His senses surfeited, he feels as if he is emerging from an illness which until this very moment he had confused for good health. He is so overcome and overwhelmed with his physical being, he can’t remember himself before this moment in time. This is it, he concludes to himself. This is really it and how it was always meant to be. May the senses forgive me for I have sinned against them. Without them there is nothing, what is an idea without flesh and blood? Not even a seed.

Harry F. feels restored to the fullness of his being. He finally grasps that the world that he’s been looking for has always been there. Can you see it? Can you touch it? Can you smell it? Taste it? Can you hear it, asks a mocking doppelganger voice that sounds like it’s coming from the deep end of a cave. He understands that what he was, wasn’t deserving or fit for life, that he was all soul and spirit, but not life, just something stillborn or waiting to be born. But now, there is no turning back. This is his moment, this is his time, the movement towards his becoming, the end of one journey, the beginning of another.

He feels he is coming into possession of his body, which is by way of the senses, which is life. This is how it always begins, and then it loses its way, and then finds itself again. He rolls his head on his shoulder, and like heated wax poured into a mould, gives up his body to the shape of the chair in which he is deliriously slumped.

He becomes aware of the easy rippling of muscle running down his thighs into his calves, the strength in his fingers as he opens and closes his hands. His chest feels firm and when he fills his lungs he feels his strength return. He runs the ends of his fingers through his scalp, and then again. If he weren’t seated he would be rubber-legged, overcome by the rush of sensations warming up his erstwhile frozen body. Expunged from possible experience are those random descents into the analytical mode, caprices over which he previously had no control.

His eyes fasten onto the silhouette of a young woman making her way to the bar, only to disappear behind a ceiling high column. No longer in view, there is no break between her physical disappearance and her image stenciled into his mind: long shoulder length hair, a narrow waist, a knee length skirt, an attitude of someone familiar with the territory, somewhat guarded, but not at all shy. He replays her walk over and over again, the small waist line exploding into full hips. In no time, he is physically reminded that there is much more to life than his daily meditations on the phenomenology of mind. He observes the bartender, whose girth no column can hide, serving and talking up his client. He feels a pleasant numbness creeping into his cheeks, his thighs heating up, and then a pounding in his penis pushing against his sweat pants. He’s in the 7th grade, only minutes before class is dismissed, and he doesn’t want to stand up with an erection. But no matter how hard he tries to think about something else it won’t go away. He leans his body as far as his chair will permit and catches a tantalizing glimpse of arm and elbow resting on the bar. She sits without moving, only the bartender moves away. What is she thinking about? Why is she drinking so early in the day? Or is she drinking. Why is she alone? Maybe she isn’t; maybe she is waiting for someone.

Like an animal at the bit, he yanks himself up straight, lets his head fall forward onto his chest, then throws it back and fastens his eyes to the ceiling painted in black but for equidistant ovals of muted light. He closes his eyes. A spinning sensation starts up in his head. Against the pitch black cuts a swath of iridescent dots vibrating like the Milky Way or light ejected out of spray can in a dark room.

As he stares into the frenzied dance of dots that vanish as soon as they appear, he finds himself a room, in the middle of a dream that began a long time ago and was interrupted, but now it has started up again and he is eager to see it through to the end.

THE DREAM

He is preparing for a challenge before which he used to cower. But this time he is ready. He understands the outcome will change the course of his life. He is surrounded by high walls that are thrusting higher and higher upward; he wants to see where walls end but he can’t keep up with the speed at which they are shooting up. And then he sees a cupola of pale blue light that looks as far away as objects when looked through the reverse end of a telescope.

And then he hears what sounds like paint cracking, and the walls pealing back until they are stripped naked to their wooden beams and metal struts. He can see into the dark spaces behind the struts and he can count the floors all the way but there are too many of them. And then a switch, like from a fuse box, snaps. All the floors light up; they are stacked with books. He performs a 360 degree spin around. He is surrounded by books, and they all want to be read. The great disciplines are there, dressed to the nines: physics, mathematics, anthropology, literature, philosophy. He can read their spines. And he can hear them breathing. The spine of each book moves in and out like the systolic-diastolic contractions of the heart. He doesn’t dare reach in. He has made no friends there and wants to keep it that way; to choose or favour one book is to offend all the others. Despite his love of books he is uneasy among them. He decides to leave and looks for an exit, but there is none. There are only books, and they are undecided about him. All of them are asking him to be read. He knows that in his lifetime he can read only the smallest fraction of them. He feels guilty, inadequate and confused. The spines of the books begin to swell and flush red, and press in on him. The cylinder of his space is shrinking, and there is heat coming off the books that are closing in on him. He must choose or they will destroy him. He begins to panic. How can he choose from the millions of books without insulting the millions he must ignore forever. He knows that not all books are equal, that some are more worthy than others, but he hasn’t identified the criteria that will enable him to distinguish between the worthwhile and non-worthwhile. He realizes too late that this is his single greatest failure, that those truly indispensable books will never be found, will remain indefinitely invisible among the millions of other books in whose midst they lost in waiting. The books are now so close he can smell their paper. One book opens and rattles its pages. Then all the books open; the noise is deafening, like thunder, sheets of glass crashing to a granite floor. No longer young but still light on his feet, Harry F. slips the page. He has only seconds to formulate the criteria that will enable him to impose an order, a hierarchy on the books, some of which have launched themselves from their shelf positions and are beating their pages like wings against his head. There’s no time. It’s too late to react, even though he’s had his entire adult life to think about this very matter. He tries to apologize to the books. He falls to his knees and begs forgiveness, begs for more time. He can read their names written on the spines as they fight among themselves, strutting their content: Dante, Kant, Jacqueline Susan, Conrad, Wordsworth, Ann Rice, Proust, Kreviss Brown. Their spines want to be first on his list but Harry F. freezes, fearing for his very life. Why aren’t I better prepared, he asks himself, cowering beneath the flapping pages. Who is to blame? Who kept him in ignorance? His parents? His culture? An unbroken sequence of poor decisions and choices made over a life time? “It’s not just me,” he explains to the books. “I didn’t ask to be born into this culture. I never had a chance.” But they aren’t listening, they have been violated, and now their time has come. Harry F. sinks to his knees and resigns himself to the worst, as the books swarm around him, entreating him with their contents while slowly asphyxiating him.

In all the dreams previous to this one, he awakes, gasping, perspiring, but thankful to be alive. But upon wakening from this dream, he finds himself returned to a world order whose entire ordering is owed to the principles derived from the notion of mortality. Harry F. has fallen back into his old ways such that what happened earlier in the morning might as well never have happened – that is until he recalls it.

But in that world, the best of all worlds, the mortal’s world, of the countless number of books gathered about him, some will become his closest friends, and choosing among them, however daunting a challenge, will rank among the great pleasures and accomplishments of his life. In an all encompassing unifying gesture, Harry F. grasps that the human being that he is (and all of us are) must choose, and since no two possibilities are identical, his very humanity depends assuming the responsibility of choice and choosing responsibly.

But what about this morning, what was that about? Not that again.

However confused and hazy is his recollection of what happened to him when he awoke this morning, he knows that choice was not possible, that it didn't matter if one chose or didn't, that choice had not only ceased to exist as a possibility, the word needn’t even or ever exist, that objects and the concept of choice inhabit two absolute, self-contained spheres separated by infinity. "To choose, to choose," repeats Harry F. in an intoxicated, rhapsodic, mucous coated-tenor. "Is not this the greatest of gifts, the final piety and true measure of the self-debased, wretched species we are?"

"I'll say so," says low velvety feminine voice. Harry F. opens his eyes, lowers his gaze from the ceiling and recognizes the women at the bar standing, facing him. She is young, supple and alluring; her wide-open expressive ink-black eyes fastened to his his; eyes perfectly set like jewels beneath a double arch of eyebrow. Desire and connection are instant. He studies the shape of her mouth that he wants to find with his mouth. He is transfixed, breathless, as she pulls a chair away from the table and sits down and folds her arms over her breasts; her waist is deliciously wrap-around narrow.

"Speaking of choices," she continues. "I love your T-shirt, it's refreshing understatement." The young woman wets her full, lightly rouged lips, uncrosses her arms and sets them on her knee, and smiles. Adjusting to the ritual that is unfolding, Harry F. grins to himself and says what he has to say come what may as he cruises his eyes over the muddied, splotched, damp, food stained runway of his T-shirt. “It’s a souvenir from the ghats,” he explains. “Baptized in the Ganges. It looses its powers when you wash it.” A look of amusement registers. She adjusts herself, wanting to communicate total absorption and fascination in the person sitting opposite her.

“It’s a one size fits all. Perhaps you’d like to borrow it one day.” In a playful, exaggerated manner, she scans the surface area of the T-shirt, its complex history, its colour schematic.

"Are you sure it's mud?" she asks, arching her thin, elongated eyebrows, drawing out the vowel in the word `mud' just long enough for it to suggest something else.

"Actually, it's a combination of decayed corpse and excrement," says Harry F., thinking the remark funny and flattering to his wit, ostensibly unable to play the Don Juan for very long. “Several copraphiliacs have expressed interest in the shirt,” he adds for emphasis. The young woman, unphased by Harry F.'s no-nonsense description of his low-brow attire, crosses her smooth, and shapely unstockinged legs, and firms herself in her chair.

"I like a man who doesn't mince his words," she replies, tucking back her hair behind elegant ears hung with oversized Cleopatra earrings. "Our so very unromantic century hasn't been kind to your types, has it?"

"No. No it hasn't" says Harry F., suddenly serious and quite taken aback that this delicious creature sitting opposite him should seem so intelligent and sympathetic to the plight of the those whose incurable warm bloodedness and hyper-active emotive centers have rendered them defenseless and ultimately inconsequential in the timeless flow of history. Or is he reading into her words more than is merited?

“There’s no escaping our calling and the unmarked graves that await us – so we seize the moment when it arrives. Waste not, want not, to coin a cliché.” He looks into her eyes as if to say what has already been said and understood. What he has always desired is before him and it answers perfectly to the moment that is unfolding in an unpredictably wonderful way. He falls silent. She falls silent, a balletic movement allowing for everything that is supposed to happen to happen. He rests his hand on the table. She rests her hand on the table. Their eyes lock.

Without so much as a grimace in their direction, the bartender elephants past them, bangs open the washroom door and then the toilet stall door. They can hear him coughing and clearing his throat.

"My name is Pillory," she declares above the washroom clamour. "They call me Pill for short. And yours?"

“Nice to meet you, Pill,” says Harry F. “They call me Harry F.” She lays her hand over his and leaves it there for several seconds, long enough for Harry F. to feel its warmth and generate some of his own. “You’re lighting my fire,” Pill, Harry F. says to himself.

Like someone who tells himself a lie over and over again until he comes to believe it, Harry F. speaks and conducts himself as if he is a mortal, and with the combined affect of alcohol spinning his brain and the intoxicating presence of the woman who calls herself Pillory sitting opposite him, he’s not about to consider the possibility that he is willfully dwelling in self-deception. “Authenticity is not all that it’s cracked up to be,” he assures Pillory, who, with the flick of her eyes, assures him she knows what he means. “There’s a time and place for everything, isn’t there?”

Harry F. is still able to vaguely recall how he had only very recently suffered terribly in pursuit of truth and authenticity, and resolves to keep himself whole and intact, that is being in his present state, for as long as possible. He understands that it is his good fortune to have the perfect accomplice to help him recreate the illusion of time passing, or in his particular case, the remembrance of time or time regained.

Pillory withdraws her thin delicate arms and lays them on the smooth wooden arms of her chair and then leans backwards like a cat indulging a voluptuous stretch. Harry F. notes that her shoulders show as much bone as flesh, but her perky breasts now pushing against the fabric of her sleeveless top dissolve any suspicion that she is a recent escapee from the bleak house of anorexia.

Harry F. is all eyes.
“You make me feel like I’m hanging on a wall inside a museum,” she says, and then recrossing her legs, opens a small purse, takes out a compact mirror, glances at herself and returns the mirror. “I’m not so sure about this.” She laughs to herself.

Harry F. isn’t trying to say the right thing or make his language and comportment correspond to an expectation or reach a goal. Like a child wholly in the present at play in the great chain of cause and effect, everything that comes to pass is both novel and inevitable.

He feels a surge of heat travelling up his body and he can’t quite believe his good fortune. He has recuperated from his catastrophic losses from earlier in the day – the equivalent of an entire, self-contained universe -- and now, enjoying the fruits of his recovery, he finds himself being reintroduced into the arcane mysteries of meaningful existence. “I feel that I have known you for a long time, Pill,” he declares. She extends her hands that Harry F. instinctively reaches out for and clasps.
“Would you rather have this or infinity in the palms of your hands?”
”Is there a difference?”

They fall silent again. They devour each other’s inquiring, happy faces, children giddy over their new presents. "Are you Egyptian?" he asks, following the voluptuous curve of her brow to her Nefertiti earrings.

"I played Cleopatra when I was a drama student. Et j’adore les pyramids, but I’m actually French, from a small town in southern France.”
“Ah, oui oui oui,” says Harry F., feeling rapturously bilingual with his 25 words of Berlitz French.

Like a woman who has just purchased a new pair of shoes and finds herself involuntarily passing judgment on everyone else’s shoes, Pillory is now comparing Harry F. to a composite of all the men she has known or imagined knowing. She doesn’t for one second believe he is even remotely represented by his tatterdemalion appearance, but at the same time she can’t account for it. She knows he’s not the accountant type, that he’s probably successful in life but she’s afraid to ask him what he does, in part because she can’t explain to herself the physical attraction she feels for a man significantly older than her, who is not particularly handsome or physically fit. It’s not that she doesn’t see the red flags, but that she is unable or unwilling to respond to them. She feels she has to follow this through, where ever it leads, that an unusual opportunity has presented itself, and even though the rules of the game haven’t been made explicit, she’ll play by them, come what may. Despite the growing list of unknowns, she feels exceptionally safe in his presence, and she wants that, above everything else, to last.

"I guess it’s no secret that you intrigue me, Harry F." Her face blushes blue in the dim bar light but it’s not the blush of embarrassment or self-consciousness. She is being totally upfront about her feelings as they arrive, and feeling right about it shows in her face. It has been a while since she has felt that way and Harry F. picks up on it immediately, not by answering her directly, but by making her feel like they are non-identical entities emotively conjoined at the script that is being improvised.

“It’s so nice not to have to edit,” Harry F. declares matter of factly.

“Yes,” she affirms with a slight nod, the implication of his words sinking deep into her soul.

She sees that the contrived equipoise she has learned to wear like a second skin, the ever reliable enabler of her friendships with men and women looking outside of themselves to heal their hurts, is now an empty category drained of purchase compared to how comfortable and whole she presently feels, a state of mind that makes the Harry F.’s of the world possible.

Rising from her chair, she takes Harry F’s hands, stands him up, and on tiptoes invites him to lean his nose into her neck, offering him her warmth and natural scent. He closes his eyes and breathes her into himself. He glides his arms around her waist and presses her close; she slides her hand under the back of his T-shirt and squeezes his flesh.

She knows she is giving her consent to a man whose acquaintanceship is still measured in minutes, but she knows what she is doing is right.

Neither hears the bartender noisily exiting the washroom. He has seen it all and his contempt for what he has seen has grown into a habit that he doesn’t suspect.

The realm of the senses have returned Harry F. back to time. He understands that the seriousness with which he awoke this morning resolving to confront a truth he could no longer ignore -- that he was going to live forever – is a project he cannot pursue on a full time basis. Pillory has brought him back to his senses whose origins begin and end with the flow of time. He is greedy for all physical sensations that in their perishing confirm the passing of time.

What compels him to Pillory even more than her artless sensuality is her delicious impermanence that he wants to save and savour. They are both equals in making explicit the notion of time, without flesh and blood, must turn into its opposite. Harry F. has spent an unwholesome stretch of time on the edge of time and he knows that he not only wants to never ever go back, he knows he mustn’t go back.

* * * * * * * * * *

The continual hum that marks the world’s turning at every instant is faraway but for Pillory’s pliant arm around his waist, pulling him against her. They weave themselves through the tables, exit the bar, its stale air, cross the tree-lined boulevard, cut through a park, past a children’s wading pool, along a flower-edged path that connects to a quiet narrow residential street, duplexes shaded by stately trees. She leads, he follows, she lengthens her stride, he shortens his, their hips pressing together with each step.

His mind empties, everything is as it should be, she is a part of him, everything else is incidental, as remote as the barely discernable soundtrack of life that surrounds them.

She slips her hand under his T-shirt and enfolds his flesh in her eager hand. Their legs touch all the way up and down; an electric glide in two. His hand untucks her blouse and finds the smooth and very narrow waste of the young. She tilts her head onto his shoulders and laughs. “It’s not far,” she says. An updraught lifts up a wisp of her hair over his ear and cheek; he shivers and feels his body pulsating against his sweat pants. They cross another street. With her free hand she snaps open her purse and takes out the keys. They cut across the grass, up two short steps, she disengages, inserts the key, and opens the door.

He is lying on his back in bed, the blankets pulled back, his head perched on a pillow. Sunlight pours in through the small window striking the corner of the mattress. He sends his bare feet there to graze in the warmth. He pinches his cheeks; the effect of the drink is beginning to wear off. He props himself up and scans the room, the dresser that is overflowing with woman’s paraphernalia glittering under the direct sun. He closes his eyes and feels himself in his hand. From the bathroom he hears a tap close with a muffled thud. And then the shower starts up. He opens his eyes. In a small ragged pile on the floor are his sweatpants, T-shirt and her things. On top of her black skirt, like a crushed orchid on dark earth, the collapsed shape of a white panty that gives off a faint feminine odour. He mouth fills with wetness and he swallows.

On the dresser, unframed, propped upright against a jewelry box, is a photo of a child, maybe five years old, probably a girl but he’s not sure. It's a happy beautiful child, healthy cheeks, short curly hair. It can’t be hers, he thinks to himself. It doesn’t look like her. He looks long at the child and then reaches down over the bed for the white panty and floats it in front him and breathes deeply and then lets it drop onto his stomach. He looks at the photo and feels himself in his hand and looks at the child. Harry F. knows that the child is immortal, it shall live forever, no harm can befall it, that in the real world there are no consequences, that all choices are equally valid, that there is no unlawful object of lust. He pinches his cheeks and feels himself there. And then he doesn’t feel himself at all. And why should he?

He listens to uneven spray of the shower coming from the bathroom. That’s what I want he says to himself. With both hands, he lifts up the shapeless panty lying his stomach, opens it up and imagines her body stepping into it and pulling it up over her long legs and thighs – he is fascinated by the crease that is forming as the panty tightens. He brings it to his face and inhales and covers his eyes and everything grows dark. The shower stops, the door opens a bit, and hears a towel muffling over her flesh.

This is a lie, he decides, abruptly whisking the panty off his face and letting it drop to the floor. The child, its mother, their relationship, it’s all a lie. Everything is permitted, or nothing, it’s all the same. Right and wrong, it’s all the same. Everything is always right. He looks up at the photo and then past the now wide open bathroom door where he observes the moving parts of a naked body and the deft movements of a towel being led in and around a naked woman’s limbs. He lays his hand on his own flesh and keeps it there while staring at all the moving parts of her body. There is expectation, no anticipation, everything, nothing, it’s all the same. The naked body with the towel approaches the bed bringing with it the scent of soap; droplets of water on her shoulders and perky breasts glistening in the sunlight.

Pillory stops at the edge of the bed and begins sensually toweling off her breasts, the loose end of the flowing towel covering and revealing her nakedness – a narrow waist that explodes into perfect hips. She grabs the towel at both ends and pulls it between her legs, lowers it to her knees and playfully slides it up her thighs, stopping just short of her sex. She lets go one end of the towel, and grabs it between her legs, and passes it through her legs and lifts both ends up, tightening it like a rope she pushes against. She holds it there, closes her eyes, lets out a breath, and then lets the towel drop to the floor.

Her nipples stiffen, she parts her legs, and then brings her hands up to her breasts, floats them over the tips she pinches before pulling them up. She arches her head and presses her legs together. Harry F., his head perched on the pillow he has doubled up for height, looks on, unblinking, still holding himself in his hand. Pillory steps forward and leans herself against the mattress and lifts her leg and swings it over his face so that she is straddling him. Lowering her hips, she slides her hand down her stomach to her sex and with her middle finger she opens herself up and draws her finger up and down her slippery moistness before pressing it into her and making small circles on the button of flesh at the top of her opening. She involuntarily lets out a jerky breath. “Oh Harry,” she whispers. Harry F. looks into her open flesh; it’s all pink and wet. She says something. She wants him to take her. Still turns around, straddles him again, and lowers her backside onto his face and removes his hand and takes him whole into her mouth. He observes the narrow that separates her buttocks, and then the ceiling, back and forth, back and forth; she lifts up and shows him her sex that she strokes with a free hand. She lowers herself on him again; he feels her hips rubbing and twisting over his face, and then she brings her sex to the bridge of his nose; he feels and tastes her heat and wetness all over her face and then her hips jerking and contracting, “oh Harry, oh Harry, what’s wrong, what’s wrong.”

His eyes follow the curvy line that separates her buttocks, and then the ceiling that is moving away like an object in space before turning his head on its side facing the dresser whose shape and colour give way under the light. Harry F. feels the weight of Pillory’s body on top of him, and then her hips twisting and forcing his head upright until she once again finds the bridge of his nose, her heat and wetness all over his face. "What's wrong, Harry. What's wrong?" he hears say an unhappy voice. Why is the voice unhappy? What can be unhappy? There’s nothing wrong. He knows nothing can ever go wrong. It’s all a lie, attraction is a lie, desire is a lie, procreation is a lie because whatever is, is going to live forever. Gender, the senses, copulation, birth, death, all are part of the same grand deception, like his genitalia, and the opening she wants him to fill. Lies upon lies derived and contrived from the unmagnituded myth of meaning whose each and every offspring is bastard.

* * * * * * * * *

Suddenly, wonderfully, everything is settled. Harry F. is outside somewhere in the nowhere. He hears what sounds like a splash, but he sees nothing but shadow.

When he isn't concerned about the fact or non-fact of his existence – it comes and goes -- the thought of having lost his genitals, if not his entire reproductive apparatus, doesn't exactly put him in good stead with himself, even though it doesn't matter. Nothing matters, including the fact that sometimes when he looks for himself he can't find what he's looking for, and when he touches himself he feels almost nothing. Extending his arms in front of him, he is unmoved by the observation that he is beginning to resemble the shadows that envelop him, in whose shapelessness he finds himself disappearing, dissolving. As he contemplates his ostensible diminution, it gives him a start, but only temporarily, a gratuitous blip in the timeless stream of pure indifference which isn't quite perfect. It isn't the absolute unecessariness of his genitals that are exclusive cause for concern, but the growing awareness that the genital area is fed by a network of veins and arteries which transmit vital bodily fluids whose vital transport depend on the systolic diastolic contractions of the heart, that most majestic of organs that lends itself, in metaphor at least, to represent the essence of what it means to be human: "have a heart" or “he or she” has a good heart,” idioms, without exception, current in all the world’s spoken languages.

Purpose, volition, endeavour, teleology: all lies, all complicit in the conspiracy to deceive, self-deceive: plasma, capillaries, enzymes, acids, hemoglobin, corpuscles, platelets, in mortal's tongue words which embody the very secrets of life; but when withdrawn and consigned to oblivion, the life they presumably maintain will continue without them. "My endocrinal, respiratory, digestive and reproductive systems are totally superfluous," he tells himself. "And the notion of metabolism, the burning of calories, a joke, an hilarity born of hubris and the deliberate routing of reason. There is no ejaculation of fluids, excretion of wastes, hunger, bodily pleasures of any sort. There is only being, pure unmediated being, which is forever.”

If it weren’t for this last vestige of a lingering predicate, a one final qualification, there would be no stopping Harry F. from entering and then becoming one with the pure stream of being, or non-being, since they are one and the same.

Harry F. feels something like a shudder run through his body which is hardly there. It occurs to him, without suspecting the loss, that if he is going to live forever, he doesn't need a body. In fact, at this very moment, he isn't sure if he has one. He wonders if a thinking thing can exist without a body – in the forever? Is it enough for him to be able to simply think himself, to know himself through thought, to gather and maintain himself around the name of Harry F. -- forever? Then again, why be concerned over losing his body if he is going to live forever. It could very well be that according to the laws that govern the immortal's universe, he will discover he can exist forever as pure thought; that becoming pure thought, or recognizing himself as pure thought is what is decisively required of him to get through foreverness.

Harry F., is everywhere and nowhere, is free from all desire because every desire is fulfilled except the desire to be what he isn't which lies outside the realm of possibility. He doesn’t even desire to know himself by name. As pure thought he requires neither name nor space. He is everywhere, forever. As thought that will endure forever, a world unto itself, a universe without dimension.

Is this the final contraction, the truth of Harry F. so reduced he can be reduced no further, that as pure thought he is going to lose himself forever and it doesn't matter if he does or doesn't and that this outcome is consistent with the laws of physics and metaphysics (they are one and the same) of the immortal’s universe? This is surely not what he bargained for when he awoke this morning determined to rescue himself from inauthenticity (to wean himself from the belief in death), only to discover through an unrelenting series of logical contractions that he requires neither a body, place or name.

This morning, like the multitudes of the marvellously deceived, he could have said `no' to this higher calling, and settled happily ever after into the big lie and all its certainties -- the most outrageous being that life is meaningful because life terminates in death, non-being.

But Harry F. refused this flat middle road of mediocrity, and chartered for himself a hazardous course towards self-hood, only to discover that what he is in his authentic being is an idea of himself, and that this idea might not come to his attention ever forever. "Since wherever, however and whatever I am is safe forever, why breathe?" he asks of himself. The question is as perfect and complete as an entire universe that requires nothing for it to be what it is: content or no content are one and the same, are self-identical. The question he poses requires no answer since the question need not be asked forever.

He looks around him and sees nothing. He looks. He stops. He moves. He doesn't know that he is somewhere or nowhere or that he is looking, stopping and moving. His eyes blink. Sunlight strikes his eyes. His eyes find a dark spot on the ground. His legs advance him. The sensation of wetness down his leg, round his feet. What does it mean? The wetness is no more. Now something firm, and dry. He moves. He stops. There are sounds other than his own. They register unlike, unequal. He adds his own sound. Some things move, some things stay. Wetness down his leg. Warm. And then not so warm.

Harry F. is trying to recall something. He is in a fright which almost immediately disappears. He has just recovered some part of himself. He has been utterly lost to himself, has once again slipped into oblivion. He has wetted his sweats and it doesn’t connect. He tries to speak but can't. He can’t form words, he can’t move his mouth; it’s neither alright or not alright; it just is. He listens to himself breathe, and then the silence when he doesn't breathe. One or the other they are equally themselves, equally valid. Everything is always as it should be. "I am Harry F.," he suddenly, involuntarily blurts out. He is not sure what the words mean. "Yes. Yes,” he says, encouraged by something which he still can’t speak. "I am Harry F. I am Harry F." But this purely fortuitous recovery of momentary self-consciousness is hardly an occurrence, other than a reminder that he is still dwelling, however fragmentedly, ephemerally, in inauthenticity. He only barely grasps that knowing his name is Harry F. is the only thing that separates him from all that which is undifferentiated. He barely comprehends that he presiding over his knowing that he is in the process of disappearing into a forever of undifferentiated nothingness, and it doesn't disturb him in the least. In fact, at this very instant, he has to think hard just to remember his name. Sometimes it comes back to him and he utters the syllables, Har-ry-F, Har-ry-F, in an unnaturally loud, sharp voice, as if the exaggerated mouthing of the words will keep his fugitive self intact, keep him separate from everything else which is the everything he is becoming, which wants to claim him, and absorb him into ubiquitous, self-identical, infinite allness. But moments later he forgets his name again, the syllables, and has to fight hard to recover them. But then he forgets what he is fighting to recover, and stops. And then he does nothing, and then he just is.

Yes. It has come to this. He now knows -- as surely as he knew that when he awoke this morning he was going to live forever -- that there is only one thing left to do, something to which he vowed he would never lower himself. Negating the entire content of the understanding he has suffered so hard to attain, his knowing, in a final decisive contraction,contracts to knowing that there remains but one last opportunity to keep himself separate from everything whose nature it is to be totally indifferent forever not to know. He now grasps that he must submit himself to reconditioning and join the vast and vapid legions of the inauthentic, the pitiable, wretched sprawling mass of the pusillanimous, invertebrate multitude, pathetic weaklings who have chosen to dwell in ignominious self-deception; a species without agency, without purchase, creatures who have forged in the fires of the grotesque a common destiny that flourishes in the anti-truth as the antithesis of everything that is. And what remains is for him to become one of them. If he doesn’t capitulate at this last moment, this will be his last chapter.

He finds himself at the threshold of a final opportunity for the rebeginning of endings, for his self-command to seize and abide. "Yes," says a young, figureless man with a thick back who leads Harry F. into a room which narrows into a bull’s blood coloured corridor, its black on white ceiling lettered in the world’s alphabets. "When you come out ofthere," the figureless man indicates with a dry flick of his eyes, his arms hanging like mechanical limb at his side, "you will be certain of one thing only: that you are going to die, that you are mortal. As for meaning and all that, well -- the rest is up to you." The man smiles. It is an inscrutable smile, but Harry F. doesn't care what it means. The man lays his plump hands on Harry F.'s hunched shoulders and gently turns him towards the corridor. "Follow it until you come to a door that reads DEATH." Harry F. doesn't bother to thank him. He has forgotten his name again and is no longer sure what brings him to where he is, or indeed even where he is, and why he is running down a dimly lit, then dark corridor that seems to go on forever. He hears what sounds like laughter chasing him, its echo becoming louder and louder. But it means nothing. It is just a sound, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, a vibration that is sounding. A sound. A sound. A sou . . . A. s . . . A. . a . a . . a . . . a . . . .

THE END

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Arts & Opinion, a bi-monthly, is archived in the Library and Archives Canada.
ISSN 1718-2034