12.09.2015
“Which way?” Tern asked.
“Toward the south?” Christy suggested.
“Sure, south is great.”
They made their way down the pedestrian mall again, and the free MallRide shuttles hummed past them in both directions.
A stand nearby gave off strong scents of burritos and tortilla chips. The sounds of fajita meat searing carried a surprising way. They passed the tall bell tower, and as they stood waiting for a crosswalk sign to illuminate for them to cross, a bird came wheeling in from behind the bell tower and sat atop a tall light pole.
It ruffled its feathers a bit and then stared around, jerkily moving its head every few seconds. It wasn’t a pigeon, and that was about the only type of bird he knew.
A man underneath the light tossed an empty aluminum can toward the top of the light pole, and screamed at the bird, “Seven blokes and you limestone a mauve? Rattle scattle and boom!”
The bird took flight. The can missed wildly and clattered back to the ground, only to run under a car’s tire as it rolled past. The man gathered gathered his coats closer around him, and stepped into the road to gather the flattened can. Tern shook his head a bit as they passed the man, who now grumbled to himself about the can in his palm.
Tern couldn’t picture what that man had against the bird, but he imagined it personal and long-lived. Another whiff of fajita meat wafted past, and a few pigeons swooped to the ground to look for crumbs.
A lonely fit of rage, held for the public to see. Tern imagined that man to be more honest than anyone else on the street. What rages had they within, but would not let it show but for brief, violent bursts? Suffering alone, silent - that was the face of a civilized person.
“What’s it feel like?” Christy asked.
“Being crazy like that guy?”
“What? No, I meant that brain renting.”
“Oh, yeah. I don’t know. I don’t really even notice it on a regular basis.”
“Does it seem like you have less space in there?”
“I feel pretty regular. They used some sort of chemicals to rewire a few areas and wall them off from other parts. But it’s not like we notice our subconscious anyway, right?”
“That’s true. What would it even be like for your subconscious to go missing? Would you even notice? Or would you feel normal while the rest of the world realizes you’re off your rocker?”
“I figure you would be all logic, but no emotion.” Tern said. “No gut feelings. And maybe your bodily functions wouldn’t even run. And you’d stop breathing, without realizing it, and just topple over, suffocated, and wonder what kind of sand they used in the concrete (or is that tar?), that’s right in front of your eyeballs now, until you thought at a word a-word-a-second, and soon you couldn’t even think words. Just feel the pregnant pauses as empty space floating about you, because there aren’t even thoughts to think. And then it just stops, but you don’t even feel the end. In your mind you’re just always on the edge of a huge revelation, but to us you’re dead. Like Schroedinger’s cat; you’re dead and alive.”
“Like those dreams,” Christy said, “where you get closer and closer to figuring out some huge, shocking discovery which will change the world, but you never actually find it. Until maybe you wake up and think you’ve got it, but in reality that idea is just the wind blowing through your hands. You can try to hold the grandeur in your mind, but you can’t even remember a single detail. And you feel silly for dreaming something so wonderful, and then not even being able to remember what it was, beyond the feeling it was amazing, and then you figure that wonderful think you dreamscovered was really just something common like a plot twist at the end of a movie. And when you lie back down to sleep, you hope you’ll dream it again, except that is impossible. What you kept inching near was no more real than any other grand dream dreamt in the twilight, so you would not ever find it again, because it was never a real thing.”
“So maybe no subconscious would be like living a dream?” Tern asked.
“Maybe,” Christy said. “You wouldn’t have any rules.”
“Or if you did, you wouldn’t understand them. And gravity in action on a pebble would be as mystical as a supernova.”
“You’re weird,” Christy said.
“And so are you,” he replied.
They both looked at the other sideways and smiled.
Tern said, “I like those long, roaming tangential thoughts that don’t seem to make sense, but also kind of do.”
“It’s called imagination,” Christy said. “And it’s your subconscious creeping up into your conscious, I bet.”
“Like getting closer to that revelation, except you can’t because you can’t ever have the conscious gone.”
“Right,” she said.
“But that’s almost the opposite of what we talked about. What would it be like to have no conscious?”
“Say those chemicals,” she said, “had a weird reaction and rented out your conscious instead. What would you feel then?”
He said, “Probably like a dream, where you don’t know you’re dreaming. And everything brings you to that cliff of revelation and then you spend eternity crashing over that ledge again and again. Repeating the intensity of that amazement for eternity. Like the water continually rushing over a waterfall and just pummeling that ground. Bare of grass or moss. Wearing those stones down atom by atom. You end up trapped there. You’ve discovered Atlantis and Nirvana and all you can do at that point is keep experiencing it. You don’t just approach it; you become it. And you can’t move away from it any more than the water can move away from the gravity well down which it falls. Eternity, a bliss of impact.”
“I’m guessing you just had one of those kind of dreams,” she said. “Didn’t you?”
“Yes,” he replied, “and all I want to do is go over that waterfall just once and see what gravity is like when it’s a supernova.”
“What if there’s no coming back?”
“Impact for eternity.” Tern gave a slight smile.
“Sounds pretty nice.”
“Couldn’t hurt to try.”
The bell on the very top of the tower rang out with twelve deep notes. Tern’s chest expected it to continue, but there was no thirteenth strike. He felt a bit of disappointment at that. There’d never be a thirteenth note, or any beyond.
“Can I see it?” Christy asked.