“God made the integers; all else is the work of man.”
– Leopold Kronecker
“Listen, Wilbur. I know there’s no such a person as Dracula. You know there’s no such a person as Dracula.”
“But does Dracula know it?”
– Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein
I
Approaching the necessary conditions. Light overruns the trusses and the tempered glass until you can’t even see the skies beyond, can only sense their many roads, their many offers of ascension. This cockpit’s always been a womb, but it’s a matrix now, too, and somewhere in those numbers is the light by which you can finally read the Zone. All of its secrets laid bare, all of its rules now obvious – the antechamber of an infinite space is easier to find than you’d think…
If it’s possible to be drunk on chance, Penrose is very close to pissing himself. He doesn’t even understand how any of this works, yet here he is, curled up in the co-pilot’s seat, washed in a strange light, stifling giggles, trying to pretend he’s still asleep – like a kid pranking his parents. It’s really weird. Someone should probably be flying the plane.
Eyes closed, hands balled into adorable fists, Penrose says something to his parents. They’ve been dead for years.
“I’m tired!”
Waits for a response. Doesn’t get one.
“OK, f-fine!”
Lifts himself into a sitting position, squints into the light. Starts to look like himself again. Tired.
”Almost had it.”
Even the rough braze of his voice is back.
Scooting over to the big boy seat, he takes the wheel. Feels like he’s play-acting. He actually is a pilot – and a pretty fucking good one! – but the whole point of this exercise is to not take the wheel. You can’t catch the necessary currents in too literal a state, or with too conscious a hand.
But he can tell when a moment’s passed. He’s pretty good at that, too.
Another sigh. Not feeling sorry for himself. Just tired.
Time to head back. Better take the provincial channels. Any more people start to get suspicious of these little unauthorized excursions and it’ll be Wham! Shab-a-doo! Blam-o! H-H-Hey! and then back to oil changes for you, Penrose!
And that’s never going to happen. From beyond the sky to not even allowed in it? Hmm, yeah, no.
Career suicide, If the boys downstairs ever found out about this. To say nothing of what the boys upstairs would do…
–
“Corrugated metal skin! Too much drag! I hate innovation! I hate everything! Fuck this hemisphere! They can launch me from a fucking catapult next time!”
Moosewell Morris was not enjoying himself. Manicatex, who was enjoying himself, pretended to take notes.
“Naboria daca. I will tell the boys in R&D to begin designing a low-altitude parachute. Warn the agents in Saint Lucia that they should expect to see a large, yelling man flying through the sky. Don’t want them getting their hopes up that the Rapture has commenced, but as usual the white guy gets to go first…?”
“AAAAAGGGHHH!”
Moosewell now losing his footing in addition to his cool, eating shit all the way down the ladder, landing in a heap at the base of the 2-AT he had just been complaining about. Manicatex, dropping the bit, hustles over.
“Are you OK, batata?
Hand offered, hand accepted. Large man upright again.
“Fine, absolutely fine. Fat broke my fall. Sorry, Manny. Didn’t mean to make a scene.”
Manicatex shrugged.
“The more unhinged you become, the more reasonable I seem by comparison. It’s our schtick.”
“Heh.”
Moosewell dusted himself off, looked back up at the 2-AT.
“I hate that fucking thing.”
“I don’t think it much cares for us, either.”
They started walking back towards the dugout. A young Lucayan was running towards the 2-AT to finish its repairs. Moosewell acknowledged him as he passed, then turned to Manicatex.
“Was going to try out ‘manicato.’ Would that have worked?”
“He would have understood your intention, at least.”
“Ah, nuts… lost my nerve…”
“Knowing what you don’t know is more than most people are capable of. Half the reason I like you.”
“What’s the other half?”
“You fall off of more things than any human I’ve ever met. It’s fascinating.”
–
They left the airfield and walked to the adjacent administrative center that also doubled as a kind of modernist take on a yucayeque that also tripled as a trading post for all the fine people on the island who weren’t dumb enough to seek employment in this God-forsaken mail-carrying business that also quadrupled as the essential kind of seedy hub you need if you’re going to soak up all the spiciest gossip and keep abreast of the most sordid schemes. Moosewell couldn’t help but kind of like it. Manicatex tolerated it.
If you focused your vision just right, you could excise from your sight all the shit that was weird and wrong and off – a central plaza full of mechanics and carburetors and grease guns, bohios held up by steel tube trusses instead of wood, shouts in one language stopping suddenly as the speaker simply runs out of words in their native tongue and is forced to jump to another, less befitting language in order to cover the gap…
… but, of course, there was still that hideous fucking eyesore of an administrative building, dominating the scene not just because of its size but its complete incongruity with everything else in sight. It was fucking concrete, man. It had fluorescent lights. What a joke.
(The smells were good, at least, and the earnestness with which villagers and workers shouted back and forth had a sort of timeless quality to it, even if the details were weird. Moosewell and Manny tried to focus on small stuff like that. Always try to focus on small stuff like that.)
“Wouldn’t mind a bit of a detour, ‘fore I go and get all mad.” Moosewell actually looking down at his stomach, as if communicating with it via channels not available to lesser minds. “At least with some corn and beans in me I’ll be able to return fire…?”
“Our landlords are best dealt with on an empty stomach, batata.”
“Bleh.”
“I’ll meet you after.”
They separated.
–
Penrose watched the young Lucayan from the shade of a palapa. Kid was going to town on that 2-AT. Good for him. They learned so fucking fast. Probably helps to not have much of a choice. He couldn’t relate, at least not that much. He had choices. Just made bad, deeply stupid ones.
These kids, though…
He found himself leaning a little too much towards this scene of ex-empire, then caught himself. Any more and he’d be out in the sun, which wasn’t an option yet. Irrevocable day, poised with heat and accident. No, sir, not yet. Not until the good stuff hits.
Amphetamines. Stern, wonderful stimulants.
My real co-pilots, Penrose thought.
You’d think it would be hallucinogens that would get you to the good place, but you’d be wrong. Just another way intuition tends to fail out here…
Events arrange, then descend; guilty of relativity, maybe, but not meaning. Good time to either evangelize your mechanics or forget them altogether.
Penrose thought that. At least, he thought he thought that. He wasn’t sure. Felt like he was reading it off of a billboard someone else had rented space on in his brain.
He looked up at the low, thatched roof he was standing under. He was pretty sure this was a palapa.
“H-Hey, Penrose!”
Ugh. People. Penrose turned around. It was that mailroom kid. Well, technically they were all mailroom kids, but you know what I mean.
“M-Management wants to see you!”
“Tell them I just got back.”
“They told me to tell you, ‘After he says “Tell them I just got back,” tell him that he’s lying, we know that he’s lying, we’ll always know when he’s lying, and that he needs to get here right away.’ They also said to cool it with the uppers, but I don’t think it’s really their place to lay judgement on our chemical preferences, you know?”
Penrose looked at the kid for a minute, maybe even longer, time being rather suggestible out here, then started walking back to the administrative center.
–
My father sold cheese. Dumb. Fuck. Ass. I will sell something better than cheese. Like spice. Spice is better than cheese. I am a hero. I think better than my dad because I know that spice is better than cheese. It sells for more money.
My mother says there are ghosts in this house. She says they are Ancestors and Ancestors invoke us through our names. That is stupid. I don’t have to be invoked. I am right here.
Ghosts aren’t real. If they were real I would have seen one by now.
I have never seen a ghost before.
–
“Maybe placing you on the opposite end of the terminal will work out better for your partner this time.”
What the fuck? Who says that? These fucking guys, man.
They were talking about Maxwell Malrog, a veteran pilot specializing in the Lesser Antilles routes who just up and went poof oopsie-gone one day, a disappearing act which confused and annoyed anyone in any position to care, not least of which because he took an Antonov An-2 – the Grim Honker – with him.
Penrose, having the unfortunate distinction of being The Last One To See Him Alive, was called into the main office, whereupon he tried his best to recall – as blandly as possible, excising from the story as many details as he felt might be suspicious or incriminating – the final conversation the two had had, on an overnight to Martinique, when Penrose asked the ol’ graybeard why he was staring so… disdainfully at a map spread out across the middle console.
“I can move it you want.”
“That’s not the problem. It’s not in the way.”
“OK, so, uh… why the mean stare?”
“I have a problem with something on the map.”
“What?”
“That, right there.”
Malrog’s finger, quivering with the turbulence they had just hit – if not a certain accusatorial certainty – was pointing towards a corner on the map. Penrose looked there.
“That’s a compass rose, Max.”
“Yes. Exactly.”
Eyeballing the symbol like he expected it to do something.
“A compass rose is a picture of a compass.”
“I know what a compass rose is.”
A moment, not a particularly comfortable one, in which Malrog looked at the compass rose, and Penrose looked at Malrog.
“It’s… a picture, Max. They just put it there. They don’t even need to anymore. Anyone knows anything knows what the cardinal directions are, what the principal winds are. It’s symbolic.”
“Symbolic.”
“Yeah.”
“A symbol of something.”
“That’s usually what symbolic means…?”
“A symbol of order in our depiction of available space.”
“… yes?”
“Sort of like stamping humanity’s seal of approval on nature.”
“I… guess? Never thought of it that way.”
“Maybe you should.”
Penrose, starting to suspect this dude might be fucking nuts, tried to lighten things up:
“Maybe we should go back to sea monsters, no?” Raising his eyebrows like Groucho Marx, ashing an invisible cigar. “See a monster in the margins, know it’s not so safe to go there? Eh, eh?”
“Oh, what I wouldn’t give for the humility of a leviathan.”
Penrose lowered the pretend cigar, placed it in a pretend ashtray.
“… eh?”
A heaviness on Malrog’s brow. Not of anger, but sadness. Penrose wasn’t the only one convinced he was talking to an idiot.
“Claiming that you’ve solved space because you divided it into grids is like claiming you’ve solved language because you realized certain words rhyme.”
“I… what?”
The Grim Honker had left the turbulence behind and was now pushing on silently through the clouds, noiseless gray space giving way to noiseless gray space. A dark withholding. The sky had something to say, but so far was content to let Malrog say it.
“We laid a coördinate plane upon the surface of the world,” he continued, “and declared it tamed. That was arrogance. But it was understandable.
“It must have been exciting, feeling like we had mounted something so wild, ridden a monster into strict compliance with our… rules. But, for Heaven’s sake, to forget so easily. To calm ourselves with a mathematical lullaby until we forget its origins and believe it to be a” – nearly choking on this one – “law! Where are we supposed to go from there? How do you build humility off of a foundation of fear? What are you supposed to do with a system that attempts to divide by zero at two separate locations?! We still argue over the true longitudinal locus! I’ll go to hell before I set my watch to the French meridian!”
The conversation had taken a turn. Also, was it getting darker in here? And w-why was the only remaining visible light falling in a horizontal band directly across Malrog’s face, making him look like a young Lugosi?
“B-But, what about n-vector representation?!?” Penrose shot back. “No singularities, everything is one-to-one… it’s mathematically well-behaved! A function you can take home to mom! A keeper! A real knockout!”
“You still need to choose a frame of reference!”
It was around this time Penrose realized he had never appreciated how interesting his knees were, and decided to see how long he could stare at them. Silence ensued. Some time later, as he was nodding off, he heard this:
“It isn’t absurd to want to head north and continue heading north, no matter how far North you’ve already gone. Direction being told to bend around and come back simply because it’s about to go farther than we’re comfortable with… why should space owe us anything? It was here before we were…
“What if I repudiate these geodesics? Would that be enough?”
Penrose lifted his head, expecting to see Malrog turned towards him with that maniacal gaze again. But the goofy old bird still had his eyes forward, was looking straight out the window. He wasn’t talking to Penrose at all.
Was he… talking to the sky?
Was he negotiating with It…?
What were the terms…?
–
They landed outside Le Lamentin without incident. They were light multiple sacks of letters, but for some reason that never qualified as an incident. In fact, it was one of the few things Malrog didn’t seem keen to discuss.
“We’ve completed this leg of the delivery exactly as was intended.”
“But could’ve sworn we took off with more cargo than we landed with…? And those couple times you left the wheel to me, and came back later in a bit of a lather?”
“Don’t think so much, Penrose, you’re upsetting me. Drinks?”
“Well, sure, if you’re feeling a little better, I s’ppose we could -”
“I was talking to myself. See you at twenty-three hundred, Penrose. Keep your nose clean. Don’t ever ask about the cargo.”
What an odd thing to say. Hey, maybe Penrose could ply this prick with some talky-sauce, and find out – h-hey, where did he go?
Now here’s that freaky old loon not just disappearing but somehow escaping responsibility for his own requisite space – yes, actually sidestepping the grosser parts of the probability distribution, hiding amongst its least likely outcomes like a man among the trees, presenting so little identifying information that Nature itself isn’t sure how to portray him, so doesn’t.
How’s that for a neat trick? Also, did the wind just turn cold?
Penrose headed into town.
–
Neat and messy winds starting to blow in Martinique. Penrose could dig it. He couldn’t understand it, necessarily, because trying to explain Négritude to a dude this white would be like trying to give a dog ennui. But he respected the vibe, figured he could show support for the Cause by not fucking it up.
He ducked into his favorite haunt, The Suspicious Smell, to get a little happy, and maybe do a little snooping re: The Malrog Situation.
It was the usual crowd. Everybody so familiar with everybody else that you could probably balance the whole shindig on a pole and it wouldn’t even wobble. How’s that for a zeitgeist?
He worked his way towards the end of the bar, nodding along the way at the people he knew. The bèlè was already in full pomp, physical soundtrack to events Penrose knew weren’t for him, and even if they were wouldn’t want anything to do with, anyway. It was all that percussion, man. Made him fidgety. He had no idea how these people could dance so gracefully to it.
“Ah, finally, my lover arrives.”
“Gaaaah!”
Now here’s Delphine, this deliciously self-possessed local gal eternally and – if we’re being honest with ourselves, here – rather salaciously toeing the line between the espiègle and fatale varieties of femme. She slid onto a stool next to Penrose.
”Did I scare you?”
”Mais non! I always scream and wet myself when I’m not surprised!”
“Your silver tongue has always been your most attractive trait, my dear. ”
There was a time when Penrose craved naughty banter like a man straight from solitary, but he was feeling oddly self-possessed himself, tonight, and was going to have to raise an eyebrow rather than a glass to opportunities for both the hanky and, God save him, the panky.
”Am I being roped into something, here, Delly? Would normally be all for it, but trying to be on my best behavior, re: fornicating? Stranger in a strange land, and all that.”
“And a stranger there you shall remain, mon chéri. I just wanted to know if you were interested in seeing something – I think the word you sometimes use is ‘rad’? – before you fly back home tonight.”
“Was actually keen to do some reconnaissance on that Malrog character? Thought I’d ask about him to some of the gents in here, collect eyewitness accounts just like that Philip Marlowe would do?”
”This concerns him, actually.”
“Marlowe?!”
”Malrog. At least, it likely concerns him. Even if it doesn’t, it might present you with some… contextualizing information.”
Penrose, suddenly aware that there were more eyes trained in this conversation’s general direction than could reasonably be explained by honest curiosity or random variation, nodded.
“OK, Delly, I’ll bite. Where’re we going?”
–
“When the moon hits your eye,
Like a big pizza pie,
That’s amore!
When the world seems to shine,
Like you’ve had too much wine,
That’s amore!”
Delphine was really letting Penrose have it, lyrically. It was actually kind of impressive she could belt so cleanly while also piloting their canoe. And in such inky darkness, too! What a woman.
It was just, Dean Martin didn’t seem terribly relevant to the topic at hand. Also, what the fuck was the topic at hand?
”There’s an island I want you to see, Penrose.”
”OK. And, uh… may I ask about the musical accompaniment?”
“Dean Martin songs are like if someone wanted to write a tragedy but didn’t want to have to feel sad first. Imagine feeling like the next market you should move into is the sadness market. Imagine thinking sadness is a market.”
“… where are we going, Delphine?”
“The island does not have a name, nor a set location.”
“Oh, I can dig on that. Like an artificial island.”
“No. Rocks, forest, the whole shebang.”
“… but it moves.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“That’s not how islands work, Delly.”
Delphine paddling now in a state of sudden passion, one might even say agitation, all while throwing looks back over her shoulder at rock-brained ol’ Penrose.
”Ahh, so mon chéri is an expert on islands now, eh? Hehehe… oh, my plucky boy, my caddish lad… did you learn behavior re: islands from a map, perhaps? And who made that map, I wonder? Our old friend Waldseemüller?”
Penrose, feeling less like a gumshoe and more like a doofus with each passing moment, grimaced an apology back at her.
“Sheesh, Delly, was just making conversation, is all. It’s your canoe. You call the shots. I’m just a passenger. Couldn’t go back if I wanted to.”
Delphine returning her attention to the dark water before them.
“You people can always go back. That’s your privilege.”
–
Well I’ll be damned, there really was an island here. Sneaky little fucker seemed to surprise Delphine, too, with her asking Penrose if he wanted hear anything from the Sammy Davis Jr. catalogue when:
“Ahh, fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck! Fucking rocks! I swear, this damn island hides in the fucking shadows!”
And then, after getting them ashore:
“I’m not in the mood to sing ‘Mr. Bojangles’ anymore.”
“It’s OK. No longer seems like we’re in the proper context for it, anyway?”
You got that right.
It was an island, kind of. More like a soundstage on which the set for EXT. ISLAND – NIGHT had been built. Context for a movie interrupted right before they could roll camera. Everything was poised and primed to explode into action, into subjective life. Just missing the fuse.
“I don’t think I was so wrong, Delly, about this being an artificial island…?”
She led him deeper into the jungle. They passed through clearings in moonlight, settlements of such robust orientation and preserve that they didn’t seem cleaved from any one particular culture so much as ready to adopt as their new purpose whatever new body was violent enough, fresh, dumb and indifferent enough, to believe itself Next…
(W-Wait, was that moonlight? It was so perpendicular, so flawlessly lustrous, flawlessly white… were there… spotlights up there?)
“The distinction between real and artificial becomes harder out here, Penrose. Intention, familiarity, seniority, dominance, submissiveness, proper and improper power, proper and improper channels, capacity for cruelty… these things all become far more important than the material something is made from. ‘Natural’ and ‘normal’ and ‘true’ are all about who’s willing to act like they’ve been here longer…
“… like here, for instance. This place right here.”
Here did not seem particularly distinct from any of the there they had passed along the way. Identical space, identical sand, identical lighting, identical air, identical quiet.
“It’s important to make things look both impressionable enough to be, well, impressed upon, and also as similar enough to expectation that no one will ask too many questions. Getting something right is significantly less important than getting it correctly wrong. It’s basic sales, Penrose. People love to feel like they’re getting a deal.
“I don’t know if your friend Malrog just crashed here, or read about it, or if it came to him in a fucking dream, but now I’ve got seeds perilously close to sprouting that were never even supposed to be planted in the first place.
“But the details of this latest erasure are somebody else’s problem. Mine is rectification and return – ironic for a lot of reasons.”
“Delphine, girl, I have no idea what you’re talking about – ”
“We’re almost there, Penrose.”
–
A sudden… not movement, per se, but acceptance – of intent, of meaning, of a weird new kind of sound, echoing in sick and lonely waves, like faded breathing. The ground now a stage, the stage now a Floor, that Floor, like any other space, capable of becoming a roof or another membrane, depending on where you wanted to go, and if you had any intention of ever going Back…
(W-Where are we?)
Penrose?
(Are we… below stage?)
Penrose?
(Sure are.)
(Be careful! This isn’t just a stage!)
(W-What am I going to do…?)
(You’re doing fine, Penrose. Hang in there.)
(Be careful! This isn’t just a stage!)
(Delphine?)
(Yo.)
(Where are we?)
(You said it. Trap room. Green room. Room room. Room room. Room room.)
Penrose?
(Room room Room room Room room Room room…)
(I said that out loud…?)
Penrose?
(Not much of a difference, here. Heh.)
[PENROSE sees THE UNTIMED DARKNESS.]
(What the fuck…!?)
THE UNTIMED DARKNESS: Imagine being defined entirely in your enemy’s tongue.
PENROSE: Huh?
(Focus, Penrose. Focus.)
THE UNTIMED DARKNESS: Heh, heh… allow your enemy nothing but the wrong words and your enemy will castrate themselves simply by existing. A savant’s knowledge of the many types of Death… what the fuck? What an awful thing to be good at. Learn an instrument, or something, you fucking weirdos.
(Delphine, who is…?)
(Just listen, Penrose. Please.)
[PENROSE starts to make out THE TIMED DARKNESS, who is standing “close” to THE UNTIMED DARKNESS. The metric by which this distance is measured is unclear.]
[THE UNTIMED DARKNESS continues.]
THE UNTIMED DARKNESS (CON’T): You can’t even allow Nothing to remain uncapitalized upon, because Nothing belongs to you, too, doesn’t it? You don’t even feel hate… at least do us the dignity of hating us. Don’t just chase us into darkness under the auspices of a mindless inexhaustion, like a ball rolling down a hill…
(Delphine, what do I…?)
[THE UNTIMED DARKNESS shifts its massive flesh. It is not done.]
THE UNTIMED DARKNESS: You haven’t even lost anything, but you still want the ways to bring lost things back. Because if someone else can do it, your lusts are threatened – your lusts for inevitability, for inertia, for anything that might belong to someone else, for lust itself…
(Be careful! This isn’t just a stage!)
THE UNTIMED DARKNESS: I won’t ask you to right this wrong, Penrose, because you are an idiot. I will only ask that you take these undiscovered avenues to different places. Leave us this one, because this place is the Republic of what, and where, and when we used to be. It means nothing to you, but it is all we have left.