III

Penrose wasn’t stupid. Well, no. He was pretty stupid. But he did have a philosophy – one insightful enough that if it was the only thing you knew about him, you would be forgiven for thinking he was smart.

Here was Penrose’s philosophy:

“Have a Goal, Not a Plan.”

Pretty good, right? To the best of his knowledge, he hadn’t stolen it from anyone, and it had remained both true and useful for so long that it was one of the few things he bothered to remember, other ideas being allowed to just kind of flutter away right after being burped into existence – probably useless against the day, anyway, so why not just let them go a’floatin’ free?

Anyway, this philosophy – which will become more important later, so please remember it! – helped him bounce back from that night with Delphine. Waking up back on Puerto Rican soil, apparently without the use of a plane, next to an elderly piragüero currently serenading and/or accosting passersby with sweet arias about both the availability and unbeatable prices of pork and snow cones would be enough to throw anyone, but because The Philosophy urged him not to think too much about any one concern, Penrose stuck the landing better than most.

“That’s disgusting,” Penrose told the piragüero, while righting himself and dusting off his pants. “Who would want a pork-flavored snow cone?”

“No one. They’re two different things that you can buy.”

“Oh. That makes sense. But they’re in two different carts, right? So the flavors don’t mix?”

“Yes, the snow cones and the pork are in two different carts.”

“Well, that’s good.”

Penrose checked for his wallet, an empty stomach being one of the few bad things he was currently capable of making go away.

“Find the zero, Penrose.”

Penrose looked up.

“What?”

“I said, ‘What flavor of snow cone would you like?’”

They exchanged glances.

“I was… just going, actually.”

“Of course, señor! Where to, might I ask? Home?”

God, he hoped so.

–

The same wind that had been blowing in Le Lamentin was now blowing in Puerto Rico, and Penrose was starting to wonder if it had something to do with him. Sure, sure, vanity, God complex, whatever, whatever, but how else could you explain people turning and watching him as he passed, s-sometimes even nodding in silent approval of actions he had yet to perform?

He headed down to Paseo de la Princesa. Old San Juan was as good a place as any to be confused, and he needed an excuse to keep walking.

It was always a little bit weird, there.

All those tears in the sky over Princess Izzy’s walkway, background hiss to something that almost was – a hidden variable here, a miscalculation there, and suddenly there are abscesses on the body excreting poisons worse than chemical – time without reference finally confirmed but eternally out of reach, because there were just too many people with too much invested in that most precious of trade secrets never getting out, or at least never falling into the hands of those who might use it – God forbid – democratically…

“Hey-hey, Penrose!”

“Penrose, my man!”

“¡Es mi mejor amigo, Penrose!”

“We’re rooting for you, ‘rose!”

He was pretty sure he didn’t know any of those people.

He came to a stop across the way from Antigua Prisión La Princesa.

He stared at it for a while.

Like any prison, La Princesa was trying so hard to appear normal that it only came across as more grotesque. It’s the same feeling you get when talking to a sociopath – that something is off, that you’re in the presence of a person only here to seek out things it can control, it can kill…

… and soon every emotion revealed to be anger… smiles all the more hideous for having nothing behind them… the insistence that civilizing requires pain, constant pain, and that you should be thankful for it… the realization that these aren’t people at all..

… and all the while, pacing back and forth inside that cell, decades left on a sentence whose terms were never made clear, wet towels wrapped around the head, anything to combat the heat… being told this is what civilization looks like, feels like, requires… black tumors running up and down the legs, body rotting a little more with each step…

Penrose stood there for a while, feeling useless.

–

Well, there he was. Child-like antiquarian of all things stupid, caught in the throes of a wind he couldn’t begin to understand, somehow managing to be essential to all this while just fucking standing there.

Why was he just standing there?

Oh. He was looking at La Princesa.

Guess he’d never seen a prison before.

–

“I don’t understand why you have to do it,” his wife had said, after the teletypewriter whirred to life and punched out Penrose, followed by At the promenade. Go. Observe. Collect.

“Because it’s important.”

“It’s a message from a self-typing typewriter. Who are these people?”

He thought about it.

“I guess I never really thought about it.”

“Every bad person I ever worked for, I at least knew who they were. So I can draw lines when I need to.”

“If I draw a line, they’ll just draw a better one. Besides, I don’t think these people deal in lines.”

At least, not parallel ones.

“You told me when we got married that it was important we continue to maintain separate professional lives,” he reminded her.

“That was before your professional life made me start fearing for my biological one. And yours, too. This is a team effort, my love. We can’t move to Kütahya and become opium farmers if we’re both dead.”

“I know, I know.”

“Good that you know, better that you act. Why do you have to do it?”

Interesting question.

–

“Velocity – speed, and direction. We’ll get to probability in a moment. But first, the calculus. With the calculus, we can determine exactly how fast we were traveling at the moment of impact. This is essential. We will not always collide with enough force on the first attempt, so we must be able to determine how much harder we need to hit next time to make sure that the bonds are not just broken, not just unable to reform, but forget ever having been joined in the first place. You see…”

Believe it or not, this was an economics class. Well, kind of. It started off as an economics class – nighttime-held and invitation-only, deep in the fluorescent bowels of a building somewhere on campus, one not listed in any registry or drawn on any map, and with a name that was oddly difficult to remember, no matter how many times you heard it…

The first few lectures were actually kind of boring. Scarcity, supply and demand, monetary policy, elasticity… what was this, high-school?

It was near the end of the second week, after the students had started, possibly sub-consciously, to seat themselves in an inverted normal distribution, that he noticed something strange – a number of the students were laughing. Y-Yes, gleeful laughter, bordering on an animalistic chitter. Not at the lecture, mind you, but at… the other students. The guys sitting off to the side were oddly proud of themselves, laughing whenever they weren’t feverishly taking notes, sometimes even laughing while taking notes.

What about this class was worth laughing at? What about it was worth writing down?

People like this are only happy when they think they have some kind of an unfair advantage over everyone else, so the situation was clearly grim.

But he had an idea.

Next lecture, he showed up sporting horn-rimmed glasses and a crew cut.

”Well, men,” he said loudly, moseying over to the shadowy side of the lecture hall, “that Joseph McCarthy sure seems like a reliable fellow! Good, solid head on his shoulders, if you ask me! Bet he’ll whip that there Senate into fighting shape! Look out, reds, ol’ Joe has his sleeves rolled up, and isn’t taking ‘no’ for an answer!”

Cover secure, he slid in amongst the boys.

He tried to see what they saw.

My…

My God…!

There appeared to have been an entire second lecture going on the entire time, one only visible by shifting the apparent position of the first one. Those giddy bastards were hiding in plain sight, preserved in their stately remove by some sort of social parallax.

What were they discussing, in this land inured to both time and light…?

“The zero was discovered,” the new professor, who was also the old one, began, or, possibly, continued, “in India, by some dirt-monkey named Brahmagupta. Six-hundred Anno Domini. Now, there have been plenty of good, strong, white, virile, Christian mathematicians throughout history, many of them tough as Eisenhower and sturdy as a howitzer, so why did we need some mud-fucker from nowhere to hand us the keys to eternity?

“Śūnyatā, you idiots. That’s why. Think about it: we were unable to condense math into a straight line, or even orient it in a propitious direction, until it was first realized that lines and direction do not, strictly speaking, exist. Something from nothing, boys. Something from nothing.

“Natural numbers, integers, rationals, irrationals… we were turned away so many times, constrained by our Christian propriety, our inherent decency… numbers just keep going, no matter where you look. Nothing is supposed to just keep going. Not if we can’t. It’s not fair. Anything that tries to grow outside the light of our love is supposed to die, otherwise what’s the point of our love?”

A deep sigh, here. He wasn’t just being theatrical.

“It was all just too much to accept. Pythagoras himself took one look at the irrationals and fled back to the safety of geometry. Can you blame him?

“But Diophantus, Brahmagupta, al-Khwarizmi, al-jabr and al-muqabala… we needed those deformed minds to wander away from the light, wander to whatever dark place their sickness might take them, so that in seeing what purity wasn’t we could better clarify what it was. And it was, ever as always, direction unencumbered, inevitability confirmed. I guess the mud-donkeys were good for something after all, eh?”

And then – proof by contradiction, the law of the excluded middle, all those pillars of modernity were gradually relieved of their duties and replaced by softer things, things they had always been taught to mock, but that their professor now insisted had actually been stolen from them, and that they had to take back – the catuṣkoṭi, śūnyatā, something called topos theory, instructions to chant wu–wei, wu–wei as much as possible... a shapeless sea of equivalence and indeterminacy…

… and the professor fucking furious about having to teach any of it, that a class like this should even be necessary – the indignity of having to acknowledge debt, of having to ask villagers where the castle is because, uh, we seem to have forgotten the way – and, oh, uh, also, would you mind lowering the drawbridge, too, while you’re at it? We seemed to have forgotten how to do that as well, ha, ha…

(… b-but weren’t they supposed to be the ones who… yeah, yeah, of course…! so that meant… but… n-no… no… no… could it be…? were there worlds out there in which they hadn’t proven their own inevitability…? were others mocking them from the safety of yet another remove, some other remnant of home…? who was civilizing who, here…?)

“This week’s assignment: abstraction. I don’t care what you abstract, just make sure you abstract it. Be creative, and have fun with it. Remember: Viking slavers used to kidnap Irish girls and sell them in Mediterranean markets to capitalize on the higher demand. If Erik the Red can get in on the arbitrage game, you can, too.”

–

Squares inside of squares – that’s probability, baby. Each event creating its own little universe, inside of which there’s a chance another event will occur, creating its own universe inside of the first one, and so on (and so on, and so on, and so on.).

B-But the interesting part is that, from the perspective of the second event, the first event wasn’t probabilistic – it is the very foundation of reality. It had to happen, or else the second event couldn’t happen. The second event presupposes the first, just like any third event presupposes the second, and so on.

(And so on, and so on, and so on.)

His first instinct was to use weregild, that crowning achievement of human indifference, for the assignment, but someone told him that Teddy Meyers had beaten them all to it, presented weregild (the idea, not an actual amount) to the professor at the end of lecture, thereby already getting his A, and, presumably, a firm slap on the ass.

He was extremely jealous (when would society give him a firm slap on the ass?) but life is all about accepting challenges, and this was just another hurdle to clear.

He went back to drawing squares. Something about the process struck him as essential, not just to finding an historical example of abstraction, but in going a step further and actually isolating the very process by which abstraction occurs – the matrix wherein lies the rule for transforming any concern into the ghost-like projection of itself, captured and cast – dare we say demeaned and humiliated – onto a lower-dimensional space, with only its useful traits preserved.

How could that not get an A?

So there he was, locked in his damned room all weekend, tearing through maps, maps of all things, moving entirely on intuition, convinced there was something to be found in the picture of it all…

… the Babylonian Map of the World…

… eh…

… Kitāb nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq…

… no, no…

… Dr. Snow’s Cholera Map…

… hmm…

… wait…

… wait…

He was transfixed by that last one.

Yeah, that motherfucker, right that.

Something about it was beautiful. Mass death neatly charted, dispassionate black bars cascading out from a single point of infection. Snow himself had used this founding document of epidemiology to pre-empt future public health crises, which, fine, sure, whatever, but what Dr. Feelgood here didn’t see was the bigger picture: drinkable Death was taken out of a pump on Broad Street – its place of birth, if you will – and then walked around, New Street, Marshall, putting down roots in the community, stacking up more bars wherever it went… this must be how God saw death, right? Opaque killers moving, safari-like, amongst each other, piling up rival corpses, only appearing to Him as density clusters of larger or smaller concern?

D-Did he just…?

Y-Yes…!

The model was so perfectly abstracted that, just like how time and space switch places when you cross the event horizon of a black hole, the map and the thing it represented were also switching places – people were now perfectly transparent to him, nothing more than elaborate transistors, designed and kept in accordance to obvious synchronicities and oriented entirely around the fear of obsolescence… but even more fascinating was the fact that the map was now itself becoming a physical location – realer than the streets it represented, walkable, for the first time, in its true form…!

He couldn’t wait – the avenues were endless! – he had to go there now.

 

III-2

Joachim Penrose

in

“A Mine Can’t Exist Without Its Tío”

Everything gone beyond the zero continues on in other infinities – in dialogues of blue-black light, in shapeless derivatives of sound, in cities within cities within cities within cities within cities, of orichalcum, of cadmium, of adamant and uranium, of chromium, and zinc and tin and gold and cobalt, all of them still within their ores, all of them nearly human, all of them quivering with different kinds of life, all of them fearing only fire…

Whatever orientation serves your purpose best is possible in a land that is never allowed to stop moving – columns will rise on command, or instead be made to fall from the sky, down onto another world entirely, turned from exhaust to fog with only a change of t from positive to negative, coating roofs and filling streets in terrible and meaningless laughter, gorging factories with unexpected fuel, encouraging them to develop even worse kinds of fire…

It’s only a matter of desire to do this, only the giddy realization that your intention for the land has always been its single limiting reagent, the only thing preventing your property from becoming more of what your property needs to be… all it ever needed was you and your humble spark, to turn every abstraction into solid reality – geometries formed entirely at your discretion, physics waiting patiently for their instructions…

Regardless of how you got here, you’re here now, touched down in a dark and crystalline London –  it is this version of the City in which you must have business to attend. It must be, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.

Everything is made of heterogenite and magnetite – great buildings them, running green and silver and black towards what is now an equally solid sky. Veins of cassiterite line the street, and even smoke coming off the stacks is actually jagged, rising stone… down, then, you must’ve chosen down as the direction, because everything is rising the other way, crystalline and inert, somehow even darker than the night against which it pushes…

It’s too dark to see where you’re going. That’s what the négociants are for. They’ve set up shop everywhere, those clever rascals, anticipating every need, having invented many of those needs themselves – they’re always near a pit of some kind. It’s better not to ask.

A couple revs of the engine to let you know that he’s ready.

You climb aboard.

Sydenham isn’t very far from Soho, but you’re taking the scenic route. The négociant had already set off that way before you said anything, his only concern being a higher fare, but it’s what you would’ve asked for, anyway. You always survey the investment before making an offer.

Pedestrians of copper, nickel, lead – useful things, but runoff, mostly, and theirs to keep if they want. It’s the bifurcation that really strikes you, the replacement of light with its dark equivalent – not shadow, mind you – shadow just being the places light hasn’t touched, perfectly innocent – but anti–light, a phenomenon equal and opposite light in every way – removes information where light takes it, is neither wave-like nor particle-like instead of both, encases instead of casts out. The anti-light seems to coat the people even more than anything else, down here.

“These aren’t people, right? Just pygmies?” you ask the négociant.

He smiles.

“Fire without light is the perfect furnace,” he says over the sound of the engine.

You nod in agreement.

–

Smooth sailing. Imagine how untraversable this veldt would be without strong and proper lines. The darkness is bad enough, imagine if there was also no direction? Time left untrimmed is an unmanageable garden, as someone said, or will one day say.

There is no information desk at the Crystal Palace – people seem to be finding their way via extrasensory impulse. If you can’t sense destiny leading you to your necessary showroom then you shouldn’t be here, anyway.

And here’s the place for you.

An empty convention hall, seats descending towards the stage, on which there is a single showcase. You’re there without realizing you crossed the distance, staring down, now, at an old and fairly shitty compass.

Its needle wavers slightly, a thin steel erection, never quite satisfied, never quite still. It knows what you’ve come for.

“Can you imagine how embarrassing it was to realize where they had been hiding the coördinates?”

(…magnetic and geographic north split like a debutante’s legs…)

“It’s all about disruption, you see. Things hide inside of things, and nothing makes itself. You need activation energy. That’s where we come in.”

(…finding new land where land had already been accounted for…?)

“I mean, they’ve been mocking us all this time, with their dark and dusty coördinates. I might’ve done it to, had I thought of something that clever.

“But I don’t travel by the usual coördinates, do I? I don’t need to trace down x and y – I can smell where there’s more country.”

(…which has to be some kind of daddy issues, right? or, worse yet, mommy issues…)

The needle spun wildly, even more excited than it had been before.

… a shared language of that neither of them had even known they knew.