He’s got a plastic chair and he’s facing the opening. The gun is a Glock 19 Gen 5 and he’d never heard of it before he pulled it from the armory, but hell, anything will do, right? He blinks back tears, can’t tell if they’re grief or anger (misdirected, but not vague). Looks at the opening again.
Dare you to stop me?
He places the tip against his chin. It’s cold, tickles his stubble.
The opening does not respond. He expected as much. How can his thoughts still be so calm, even under the circumstances? Probably because they’re not his. Nothing ever has been. He’s reminded of 2012, his sister’s suicide. That strangely calm presence behind the sickness, behind the scream. Like it wasn’t real (still doesn’t feel real, does it, Jodi?), like an act. Still an act. Always an act. Faces worn for every occasion. Oh look, now he’s getting philosophical again.
How original how original how original how original
He hears that thought echo through the opening. The presence behind his sorrow feels a tingle of curiosity. Always neat how it did that. He remembers the testing when they first (first? no, you were part of the late crowd, 3 or 6 or maybe even 9) found it and threw in things and listened to its responses. He remembers that doctor—what was her name, God she was obnoxious, the preachy one (isn’t that the reason I never felt welcome here to begin with? (no, wait, that wasn’t here))—her reports all a pretentious stream of unanswerable questions and passive-aggressive shade on every male researcher on her team… what did she call them? “Idiotic.” Yes, that was the phrase.
(She called me worse things. But it was a different her. The blue-haired one.)
The opening has a capacity for echoes, but that’s hardly why he’s here. He remembers reading a book at some point—yes, even he reads sometimes—about a pool where we all go down to drink. Pool? Bool? Something along those lines. And it mesmerizes you if you look at it for too long, because it makes you see all the things you want, it pulls you into childhood dreams and
(Everything Room)
He chokes back tears. Yes, that feeling is real.
The point is, he’s already familiar with echoes. He’s seen it aplenty when he was here before. It isn’t a property that’s unique to the opening, but it makes the process much more direct. Thought goes in, thought comes back out, sometimes the same, sometimes so much goddamn louder. And sometimes completely different, mutated. That’s why you can’t look directly at it. There’s nothing there to look at. What does a mirror look like? What does space? Behold, your own gaze. When you’re looking for the one who is looking, can you ever turn around to see your Self?
His grip on the gun tightens, anchoring him to the present, oh accursed present. He isn’t like Jodi. That’s the comfort story he’s been able to tell himself all these years. Not the self-pitying (or not in the same way) mess that she was, ever too eager to live in those dark places she made for herself and refuse help. No, he’d done his share to “get help” (not for the worst things, but those were a part of him anyway, right?) and come right back around to here, the opening, stone floors and indoors, the feeling like sitting at the edge of a cliff and knowing you take one step and there’s no back, there’s only the endless place, where so many have gotten lost, where some kid died—
Some kid died there. He remembers that story. The report from the Funny Room. They found blood at the bottom of her mouth. Decomposition estimated TOD at seventeen weeks. Starvation. He remembers imagining what it must have been like. Kid steps the wrong way one day and ends up where no one can hear her or find her, because it’s the most insidious game of hide and seek, a reality next door that no one knows how to see, where the primordial forms (or copies, mimics) reside, and it sure made you feel better, didn’t it, imagining you came to her rescue, thinking “Oh, I would have saved her, I would have been the one to keep her dying in silence,” but you couldn’t save Jodi or the Eyeball Boy so why in the Sam Hell do you think you could save her?
It’s failure after failure, lined up in a marching band from the opening, the procession he’s used to but still finds disturbingly novel coming from its mouth. Thoughts riding on thoughts in a recursive spiral, hey ho, tally ho, here’s your failures lined up to see, but in such a beautifully complex and mathematical pattern that it would be foolish to deny it as reality and the one and ultimate Truth. Logic plague. He heard that in a game once, or a book about a game. But an infection starts from the outside, doesn’t it? Everything he hears now, he only has himself to blame for. No other paradigm would be acceptable.
He started out with Everett and DeWitt and Tegmark and Greene, and when their rules stopped making applicable sense, he moved on to Lanza, Kastrup, and—hell—even Chopra for a moment of weakness. Watts stuck around. He had one bad date with Danielewski, and made love to Lake but he left in the morning and took the money with him. Most of them couldn’t shut up about someone else. Every interpretation, every figuring, already done, already seen, measured, proposed and decomposed, subversion and deconstruction, a postmodern wreck of everything and everyone; coming to the only sane conclusion of all possible theories—I’m fucking garbage.
He ponders the gun in his hands. Hell, even this isn’t an original thought. Point at gun at yourself and demand answers from an empty hole. He wonders how fast they’d clean up the body. He might’ve written the report himself if he was on-duty. File it away under "the loonies of this particular anomaly." He’s almost encouraged by the shift in priorities he might catalyze, that his blow-his-brains-out episode here at the threshold brink might have lasting research implications. At least then he’ll have some worth in the long run. But he knows that’ll fade eventually too. Everything fades. That’s a song, too.
Sick of music. I only listen to the same old songs. Read a book once in a while. Stephen King reads seventy to eighty a year. How many did you read? How many?
(some kid died in there)
There’s a click from somewhere deep within the opening. That draws his attention. Back to the present, to immediate sensations. The huge, lopsided threshold door. Alien light and infinite dark and a rainy gray between. Bottomless floors and untouched structures. A little flitter of his heart. That old curiosity and wonder. Reminds him of why he was drawn here. Why he came to the Foundation in the first place. Mystery. Why has that always been so comforting to him? Why does a part of him die when he reads the author of the page? Why does he avoid the seminars and the solutions? Why, for all the terror, would he rather be here at this door (sleep here breathe here become one with here) than out there, in Sane World where the sun shines but you don’t even notice?
It happens every day. The sun shines every day. It’s there every day, did you notice the sun shines?
He’s acutely aware of his breathing now, and feels like he hasn’t been aware of it in a while. But that feeling slips fast. The echoes return, louder than ever, numbing him. There’s a pressure behind his ears. Pressure that says, in the alien language he knows too well: dumbfuck shitbag look at all the giants you can’t climb. In the surrounding darkness, the void he hates and loves, he can almost see their looming forms: pyramids and paperbacks, mad geniuses who spin and weave miracles he can never hope to compare to. And now he sees why they call this place the Not-Mirror. Because it’s reflecting the you that you can never be and you know you can never be, because you were born too late to be Einstein or Steinbeck or anyone of merit. (And the opportunities you might have had to make something of yourself went out the window in high school, yes, you had every opportunity to be one of the sterling scholars, to aim to be something BETTER THAN YOURSELF, but instead you settled for discontent and complaint and waiting for the world to break its ass to accommodate you, well here’s where it’s gotten you, every life is worth something except for yours
except for yours
except for yours
except for yours
except for yours
With a snort of defiant fury (defiant to what? you’re the one making a scene) he flicks the gun out toward the Not-Mirror (real mature, shoot the messenger, we didn’t do anything wrong) and clutches the trigger (the bullet won’t do anything dumbass, will it make you feel better to fire at dead air?) and screams (are you a child?) and sobs (because a child died here, remember? do you still think you’d be the hero to save her?) and fires (there he goes off again) and his eardrums explode and all sound stops but for the ringing and he drops to the floor, fucking hell that’s way louder than I ever thought a gun could be, was I seriously gonna put that thing in my head?! That’s dangerous!
And he’s laughing. Fuck me. I’m pathetic.
The rounds clink on the ceramic floor. That’s the only echo for a moment. And the moment goes on and on and on. It smells like smoke and gas.
(and evergreens)
The ringing fades. The immediacy of the present settles back in. For a brief, transcendent moment, that present is all he feels. All there is. Sensory. Qualia. He read something about qualia. But it’s better not to remember right now. Is it possible…
Is it possible that even a gate can also be a door?
He slides his hands across the ceramic. It’s cold, wonderfully cold. He stands up and his knees snap, wonderful old bones. The gun’s still where it lay before; he’s thoroughly shocked himself out of the seduction of suicide. Besides, that was never the point. He came here to induce a reaction. To literally hold a gun to his head and provoke the Not-Mirror. Like throwing a rock in the pool so the fish will swim. He remembers doing that with Jodi at the pond, with the little skitter-fish, Jesus they were such shitty kids, he and her, and he before there was a her, no let’s not think about that.
Provocation. That was the point. Forced inspiration. Even Isaac Newton needed an apple to fall on his fucking head, or at least that’s the myth, to make us more comfortable with the fact that he actually just knew all along. But hey, sometimes myths hold true. That’s all that particularly matters. One of the few things he feels damned qualified to commentate on: the power of story. The power of imagination. Even if it’s always imitation. Even if he’s just a sock for the feet of better men. Whatever. Caring less did a hell of a lot of good last time, and maybe it will this time too.
He understands what brought him here now.
There’s the tape. Running across the floor like a fluorescent snake, wrapped around both ends of the ceramic platform and tapering off with a little curve of banana yellow against the depthless void. And beyond that, mystery. Isn’t there a wonderful yearning in mystery? An ache for things you can’t explain, don’t want to explain, because something about that resonates with the deepest part of you? Wasn’t the nightmare better before someone put a footnote on it? If there’s something you want through the mirror, in the garden (there are flowers there), then maybe it’s through here.
It’ll be the best bool-hunt. The longest game of Blue’s Clues. Here I am, peekaboo!
Under no circumstances. Stringent punishment.
Ah, but who cares? I’m already a piece of shit.
(Now you get it—everything isn’t meaningless. Everything is meaningless!)
It occurs to him that, while he was pressing that gun against his stubbly chin, a message might have reached him between the echoes and the screams of his own mind. Or not quite a message, but an intuition from outside, or inside, or… ah for the Sam Hell I don’t know. It’s a feeling, maybe; that’s the best word for now. A feeling that suggests, for a moment at least, that he may be onto something. Or maybe he isn’t, and who cares anyway, if I die then it’ll be some nice spam for Ms. Preachy’s files, I wonder how she’ll spin this into her self-righteous webs, and either way smuckit.
(something is reaching out to me now, something from outside)
He thinks he can see the houses. He can see it saying, here are the things I found in your mind. He can hear it wanting to connect. He can hear the horrors too, oh sweet horrors, better horrors, the horrors that will keep his childish heart occupied maybe forever. And he thinks he can hear (dare he say, from deep within the napping house) a child’s voice, a cry for help, a voice in the walls that’s saying I’m not dead, they thought I was dead but I’m not dead, please help me.
He knows he won’t be the same person when he goes through. He knows he already wasn’t. He knows there won’t ever have been a Jodi and Ms. Preachy, because it changes the past as well as Fate (is that her name?) and it promises dark spaces and lawn chairs (like the ones from Montana, remember, under the tents, in the fields, was it somebody’s wedding?) and childhood memories (a meets-game, a pretending that’s more real) and best of all, best of all—do you want to know?
(lila maya, olly olly oxen free, peekaboo, here I am!)
He steps across the tape.