A Public Domain Con 2025 entry that leads you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, 'what is it?'
Let us go and make our visit.
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I
Site 55 • H Wing
Laboratory RA302 (formerly Laboratory HC328)
September 23, 2011 • Friday
Before the smoke can clear, before the gong can fade to silence, a fox-fur-gloved hand reaches forward, firmly grasps the leftmost of the wardrobe's twin doors, and tugs — twice — to no avail.
"Mm. Well," says Andrews, marking on a clipboard, "It was worth a try."
There was a time when Cecilia would have nodded in agreement. There was a time when she would have at least put on a thin and tolerant smile. There was a time, even, when she would have offered Andrews an annoyed sideways glare, followed by a sigh tacitly acknowledging that her frustration was not with him. But those times have all come and gone: this latest failure was the seventy-fourth experiment they've run on SCP-9291-A this week, at least the two hundredth this month, and roughly the thousandth buoyant "it was worth a try" that Cecilia has had to endure on this assignment; the finer points of her personality have been ground coarse and then smooth, eroded by relentless tedium; her face does nothing, her grip loosens, her arm falls back, her eyes track her arm as it falls back … hmm … not lifelessly, per se, but not with natural ease … more of a hydraulics-tempered motion … robotically, she decides, without much satisfaction. How did people describe robotic behavior back before robots were a thing? Mechanically, maybe? Nah, still too neoteric, too narrowly technical. She could always check with Oscar…
Hardly relevant, in any case, to this godforsaken impenetrable edifice of stately antique furniture, steadfastly refusing to manifest its anomalous properties, like a grinning older brother withholding his latest yo-yo trick because he's enjoying the poke-and-prod attention from those who actually want to see it.1 Of course, that's generally how researching these "recalcitrant" anomalous objects goes: nearly ninety-nine percent of the time spent standing idle while wishing that something, anything, would happen, followed by one percent spent diving for cover while wishing it hadn't.2 (And maybe, in the in-between, that tantalizing slimmest rounding-error of probability, triumph without tragedy — )
— Suddenly acutely and paralytically aware that time has been passing in what people less prone to wandering thoughts tend to call "uncomfortable silence" — with only the hiss of the outgassing fog machine for comfort — and that's not much comfort — Cecilia begins to hum a soft monotone to herself, a habit she has tried diligently to avoid indulging while at work —
Andrews, either a born natural at consummate professionalism or still young enough to have the energy to feign it, is exactly as oblivious to her unresponsiveness as polite decency requires. He checks his wristwatch.3 "It's quarter to. We might have time for one more reset if we use the same fogger base?"
By the time he finishes asking the question, Cecilia has lifted the mask off her head and started to peel off one of the gloves, sticky with perspiration. "Eh, let's not. Stopping now gives us time to clean up and file for the week and cruise out of here right at five."
"Look at you, boss lady, aiming for a timely clock-ouout." The last word is a muffed, distended mess, interrupted by the pops of Andrews's back cracking as he shelves the clipboard, folders the checklist, kills the Bunsen burner (which really should have been done before the test), pulls the fuel tubing, and leans on the peninsula, wincing for a little longer than ordinary fatigue would explain away. Cecilia feels her brows furrow. He's too young for degenerative lumbar problems, isn't he?4
He rallies impressively, exhales with a forced smile. "I mean hey, that works for me, Mom's flying in for the wake and I could use more time to tidy up and maybe see to fixing the strut on the trundle." As Cecilia makes a mental note to look up what a trundle is and whether it's something specific to Scottish-American funeral practices (and also: are there Scottish-American funeral practices?), Andrews waggles his eyebrows. "How 'bout you, boss? Big weekend plans?"
Cecilia could suppress the wild goofy can't-keep-a-secret grin that springs to her face, but chooses not to — she almost, almost, almost replies "probably diving down a Wikipedia rabbit hole about trundles;" it's achingly tempting; but she thinks better of it — "Oh, you know me. Always."
He doesn't actually know her that well, of course — she's not much of a "chat about life outside work during work" person — but hey, let the man wonder. Surely it can't hurt to spark a little mystery now and then.
II
Boston, MA • 55 Beacon St.
Headquarters House
September 22, 1911 • Friday
The man, standing scrunched up and coiled over the drink he's been nursing and the flame that illuminates this little corner of the study, suppresses another sneeze. The crisp rectangle he holds addresses its intended recipient by the initials J.A.R.; it is no Post Card, no chic trend for requesting one's presence at a supper over an artificial-silk tablecloth, but rather a sealed letter of conventional proportions and genteel purport; it bears a mark in one corner, not a post-mark Washington in his reds or greens, but a dutifully traced Symbol of the Minor Arcana,5 viz.:
J.A.R.
Exquisitely discreet, exquisitely cryptic.
However palpable the sense of intended mystery may be, the man has no doubts regarding the provenance of the invitation, and is cognizant of the likely urgency of a timely reply. Nevertheless, he merely holds and gazes at the envelope, turning it ever-so-slowly, in a manner that might seem reverent if he looked even a little less unhappy.
The desk is as barren as the room is sparsely furnished — some papers, a screw-cap pen, the candle-holder and the glass (and a bottle of — that would normally be tucked away). There is no letter-opener at the ready, or even in the desk-drawers; this is no accident; they are much too messy, either sharp enough to draw beads of blood or, more commonly, dull enough to merely tear; one might as well be brandishing a crustacean claw. No, the attentive and respectful way to open an envelope of this import is by the warmth of a candle, by warmth and patience6 … Coax the wax into its primordial state, until paper parts from paper … Like — so —
With a nearly-inaudible pop, the contents are his to retrieve and unfold; he stretches, sits, settles in, and proceeds:
Our dear Brother awaiting Dawn,
It is with all available pleasure that I announce to you the Preliminary Finding of this Lodge:
— that your Ingenium is in consonance with the Great Work of our Society;
— that its Perturbation is luminous in its current and patent meaning, and so a worthy offering to the Divine Light of Kaether;
— that we find your Art, in short, Considerable.
Purple prose and extravagant Capitalization aside, this is, undoubtedly, the best news this sort of missive could possibly bear, but no joy finds the man's face, and no excitement quickens his heart. He merely reads on, with attenuated glumness perhaps better suited to news of some tragedy overseas, or the death of a distant relative, or a dinner-roll dropped buttered-side-down onto a rug.
The consideration we extend to you is Induction by initiatory Ritual of the Transfiguration Grade 0 = 0; the first Purification, that your form and vibration may become unutterably splendid to Kaether; that your Art and Essence may be put before Kaether and beheld by us all, and thereby dissolved to Coincide; that you may be opened up to your fullest luminous Presence before what can only be described as a crowning achievement of the highest Age.
The greater portion of this passage merely conforms to the eclectic flourishes customary to Hermetic Orders, or Societies, or whatever faddish appellation the socialites and public intellectuals are bestowing upon themselves and their closest associates at the moment, but the last line hoists the man's attention from its stupor (and he stands as he reads it) — why, wasn't the Traveller just blaring about some stolen priceless sculpture, said to be a never-previously-exhibited work of Michelangelo himself, copped en route to its exhibition? — and the would-be exhibitor himself (here the man retrieves a newspaper, consults it) was quoted proclaiming the work to be —
"a crowning achievement of the Renaissance giant."
— ! —
…
(Maybe just … Or could they truly have … And why else would … Then perhaps … ?)
And after all, the man considers, is Charles's culpability, perhaps only as accessory after the fact, truly inconceivable? He has been reacquainting himself with the enterprises of some old prisoner-of-war comates, potential "business acquaintances" … men of ambitious and irregular character…
Hm.
Join our tapers in the Darkness, come and see what appears from Within.
Yours in LVX and its Shadow,
Hmph… Appalling, truthfully, that men of the caliber of Yeats and his theater-friends find these eccentricities so appealing. The sooner that everyone tires of and abandons all this occultist affectation, the better. But one does what one must with the circumstances as they are…
With reinstituted glumness, the man moves automatically, instinctively, to crumple the whole thing up and be done with it, to roll their world into a ball and feel it become rubbish — he almost, almost, almost indulges the urge, but stops himself — glances over the second paragraph again, lingering… and, at last, makes a Decision.
With renewed vitality, he unscrews the pen-cap, scrabbles for a clean sheet of note-paper, and sets to briskly copying down times and places and Necessities; then, after a precise refolding and replacement, and while straining to peer out the window to gauge how much time is left in the day, he begins to warm the wax again.
III
██████, ██ •██ █████ St.
Dominguez/Hartford residence
September 23, 2011 • Friday evening
It surprises no one that Cecilia keeps a paper diary that no one gets to see.7 It might surprise some that lately it's practically a dictionary, almost superseding its (generally much more entertaining) role as a repository of quips and banter.8, 9 The reason for this shift is principally technological: Cecilia discovered that she has access to the transcripts her cellphone's autorecord "feature" generates, and can export clips, even; no more struggling to remember just how someone phrased something.
The shorthand can be a little inscrutable, but Cecilia (generally) doesn't care if her spying colleagues learn her Word of the Day (for those times when she does care about successful over-the-shoulder communication, suddenly everything is painstakingly written in full).
██████████ • ██████████
Dominguez/Hartford residence
September 24, 2011 • Saturday
Brushing teeth, bleary-eyed — it's morning, early; if she had gone to the porch instead of straight to the shower, she might have caught the sunrise — and busy contemplating collocations, Cecilia is ambushed:
— "Iiiiiiiiiit's Query!"
The old man jazz-hands-jazzes the announcement, like always, and it's genuine; he really is just as excited to see her as he was the day they met for real. What a dork.10 She grins, gags a little, spits toothpaste-foam that nearly misses the basin, re-grins … and with a single smooth and gentle motion, maintaining eye contact, she shuts the bathroom door right in his stupid smiling face.
(Five or six seconds later, having not moved, he finally responds, "Mmm. I'd better make coffee." It has the air of diagnosis, or maybe prognostication, as if to say: "ahh, it's going to be one of those days, isn't it."11)
As OED loads the dishwasher, Cecilia flicks a phone browser open, tapping her pen rhythmically on her forehead (a replacement habit she has forcibly developed is resolutely developing attempting to develop to keep herself from gnawing all her Bics to bits).
Her midnight sneak13 goes undiaried: pickles straight from the jar, one-handed, because the other's busy holding open the slim paperback Robinson, Prufrock, Adams: Modernism's Lost Pilgrims and page-turning with practiced dexterity.14
Having gotten about a quarter into it (with plenty of jumping around), Cecilia has settled on some preliminary verdicts:
- Robinson seems like kind of a hack, the type who nowadays would have excessively strong opinions about feminists and regional microbreweries15 (this is neither a preliminary verdict nor a new opinion, as she was already quite familiar with him from SCP-9291-A-related research into his Hermetic Order of choice);
- Prufrock's early stuff16 comes across as a vivid surrealist type with an intensely melancholy whiskey-breathed maturity, but ohmygod is he ever a guy's guy;
- Adams is humorous and pleasantly conventional, but tying him in with the others as a "Lost Pilgrim" feels like a tendentious stretch only attempted because everything's gotta be grouped in threes. Heaven forbid someone deign to write about just two people.
She figures maybe just one or two more pages (what she means is: one or two more pickle slices) and it'll be time to turn in for the night for real this time; the next poem is Prufrock's The First Love Song.
…just a few lines into the first stanza, already oblivious to mere mortal matters of time and space and necessity, she puts the pickle-jar back without looking at it, unaware that it's unlidded; in fact, her eyes don't leave the book-pages until she's sprawled on the landing and oh! — mph! — indeed, here she is at the top of the stairs and sprawled on the landing, clenching her jaw and squeezing her eyes shut, processing, processing. Mph. There is a fifteen-second wordless pandemonium of undifferentiated pain-impulses; eventually, her left foot helpfully reports in that she has stubbed her toe and please let's not be doing that; eventually eventually, as her forearms throb to the tempo of her heartbeat, her left wrist begins to have Opinions. By this time she is back to thinking thoughts: "Well, that'll bruise," and, "Now I really do need to think of something exciting to pretend to have done this weekend," and, "You're too old to be going up the stairs inattentively. Be better."
Sitting on the top step, she eyes the book (which skidded down the hall and sits splayed chaotically, lit by the hallway night-light and casting grandiose shadows) with a grim, categorically unjustified suspicion. "Oh, I see, Mr. Love Poems," she says, "you think you're dangerous."
The book does not reply.
Joint-stiff and a little embarrassed, Cecilia fetches an ice pack, evaluates, decides she's a little too heavy-headed to try the stairs again, and ultimately collapses into her armchair, wondering what sort of creature would eat at a sawdust restaurant, and what they would order. (Sawdust, probably…) She wakes up an hour past daybreak, having dreamnt of running through half-deserted streets as they eroded their skin into the wind, an endless dust making burrs of the air, grinding her coarse and then smooth and then smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and — And all the way through, that feeling of someone unwelcome beside her, matching her stride for stride, breathing words into her ear to the pace of the run: Let us go then, you and I — you and I — you and I — let us go then, you and I — you and I — you and I…
She loses the memory to blurry half-wakefulness, details first, the dream itself growing coarse and then smooth and then small as it recedes. Then she stands, feels herself stand, feels herself breathing in the uncontaminated air, unable to remember what made her think to classify it as uncontaminated. Something smells good: something good-smelling is near. The floorboards are creaking: someone approaches. She blinks her eyes back to functionality (this involves a closed-eyelids eyebrow-stretch that makes her ears thunder) and resolves the image before her into her smiling husband.
No ambush today, no inquiry, no words even. Just a fresh ice pack and a steaming mug, held from underneath so the handle can face her. Trusting that she will, in time, explain the bruises and the chip in the flowerpot upstairs that she didn't even realize was the thing that her wrist had been having big opinions about.
Her eyes blur back up, a bit, as she bites at her lip and gingerly assumes operational control of the coffee-vessel, about as much as she can manage right now. But that's already getting better. Words cannot express the love, the gratitude she —
Well, alright, maybe some words.
What a dork.
IV
Boston, MA • ██ Chestnut St.
Adams residence (1910-1911)
September 22, 1911 • Friday evening
"…I am terribly sorry for the error, John. Sam was clearly too hasty with the deliveries…"
The man offers a forgiving nod. Until this moment, he had held out hope that the envelope was merely mislabeled, and contained an invite meant for him after all. "J.A.P., J.A.R., a pairing worthy of a comedy of errors, to be sure; please, don't trouble your boy over it. It was good fortune's happenstance that I noticed before opening the envelope."
"Yes, and thank you for its return, you have gone quite out of your way to spare me no small amount of potential trouble.17 I will see to its inerrant delivery personally. And for all future correspondences, let me assure you that I will forevermore take the time to write out "John Arthur Prufrock" in its august totality.18 There would be no sense in tempting the Fates to meddle again."
"Indeed. Although, it would be John Alfred." Charles mumbles an apologetic acknowledgement, and there is a pause while John considers how to proceed; he settles on asking a question with an indubitable answer. "Speaking of correspondence. You would not happen to have the letter intended for myself?"
"I do not. I presume that Jeremiah19 has received it, and I will inquire as to its whereabouts when I deliver this. But I can inform you now of your letter's content, and offer you my condolences…"
This last word, of course, apprises John Alfred Prufrock of everything that needs to be told, and it strikes his solar plexus taut. Although the rejection is exactly what he conditioned himself to expect, and had been conditioning himself to expect from the moment he offered his work for apprisal, that conditioning was based in fatalist conjecture, and there was always the slimmest inextirpable hope of deliverance. Until now. "I see. Was any reason given?"
"Yes and no. The inquiry committee was quite effusive in their praise for your work, John. Two of the assessors in particular commended your poetry as a 'promising start,' a summation to which we all lent our support with great enthusiasm. It was decided unanimously to encourage you to continue in your efforts and to nurture your talent to its fullest achievable maturation."
"Charles. I am forty-two. I am not one of Mr. Benson's cherub-faced students. My submissions to your fanciful Society reflect decades of maturation —"
"… John …"
"— why, in this year alone I have been published in The — and reviewed in New Literary World — favorably —"
"— John! Please —"
"— if the fruits of such endeavors as mine amount only to a 'promising start' then perhaps I should prove a worthy mermaid20 to your audience in a mere — few — centuries!" The last words are spittle-flecked; it is dawning on Prufrock that his anger must constitute quite a ridiculous spectacle for Atropos to enjoy. The burgeoning awareness of his asinine momentum is excruciating, a far-too-brightly-colored efflorescence that roots his guts and breaches his flesh.
"John!"
"You would do as well to praise Sisyphus for his 'promising start' toward cresting his hilltop!" With this, Prufrock looses the reins of Lyssa's chariot; having exhausted the remainder of his agitation, having expended himself to present audiences divine and Earthly with ample cause to guffaw or snicker at his expense, he withers, utterly, draining until there is nothing left to drain. He is a dry and sunless garden when the flowers are dead. His soil is bitter and laced with salt.
In theatre this would have elicited one last jeering round of snickers from the spectators, as it dawns on the Character that they have become the Fool. Here, there are not even witnesses, no utilitarian profit from his loss of dignity. He is the nova stella with no Tycho. He is the butt of a joke told to an empty room.
Charles is John's dearest friend. Charles knows that Charles is John's dearest friend (though it is hardly mutual). He chooses his next words, and his tone, accordingly. "John. We only admit a precious few, and the qualities that my 'fanciful' colleagues fancy are peculiar, even to me. And while I value the proficiencies we cultivate, we surely do not constitute a Trust when it comes to Enlightenment. This is an age rich in luminosity and luminaries, and there are also, surely, so many other Societies, of ours or greater esteem…"
"Surely." Prufrock is a speck alone, there are miles between him and any and all things; he is nothing left, an unmarked point in geometric space; he is a shell with the egg blown out. Empty, small, befouling the floor below.
Some simulacrum occupying Prufrock's space conducts the remainder of the conversation, politely. It walks the body back to its estate, an awkward locomotive many-jointed thing, and enters the rooms it uses to prepare itself for night-time. It has no need for a candle, nor for either of the electric light-switches; it knows the ways. It places his Decision into safekeeping.
Eons within, his ego is already healing. He is the unseen secret space inside a deep and winding cavern, a repository of unbreathed air. He is the point of intersection of infinitely many as-yet-undrawn lines.
He is an Adam with no spark, newly new, already reaching.
He is a seed, discarded, with the roots already breaching.
He was the soil in which this seed will grow.
Prufrock dreams of Michelangelo.
V
██████████ • ███████ St.
Dominguez/Hartford residence
September 25, 2011 • Sunday
██████████ • ██████████
Dominguez/Hartford residence
September 25, 2011 • Sunday evening
Collimations
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to be continued