Roulette reality one, spin and fire. They called it a hammer, a trigger: it was in truth a massive burst of energy drawn off from a caged singularity that they used to slice and dice reality into chunks that their quantum computer told them were there. Comparing it to a gun seemed somewhat childish to him, but what could you expect when the military were all over them like white on rice? You got fucked out of originality and creativity by people who either wanted to shoot everything or beat it up.

Thank god their theory about there being a certain amount of elasticity in the fabric of spacetime was holding true otherwise they were just forcefully smashing their way into places that they shouldn’t be. It didn’t feel like exploration – it felt like invasion, and that gave him a somewhat bad taste in his mouth. How did you get rid of that shit? Find a way to scupper the experiment perhaps? Screw yourself out of a cushy job? Wasn’t there some other way?

Perhaps if he fired himself into one of these places he might discover an answer. He an idea that they may be doing some kind of permanent damage to whatever overarching structure they were failing to see due to their limited perspective. Was an instinct enough to act upon? It was all so unscientific. Sometimes you couldn’t rely purely on logic in some situations – why? Because it took too damned long to weigh up all the pros and cons; sometimes you knew you just had to act.

He drank some specially prepared fluids to adjust his electrolite balance, suited up, and began to fire up the machine. He had a re-call device attached and he had the redial code transcribed into his memory tablet just in case. He was more than slightly nervous but he had been through this procedure a thousand times.

The Insertion Cannon hummed, its iris like a whirlpool with a heart of fire, and then it released its stream of energy. The snag protocol kicked in fifteen seconds later and he felt the punch of the propulsion knock the breath from him. He was journeying into one of the multitude of worlds – off in search of answers. A true empiricist.

‘You’re acting like a child.’

‘I never took any lessons.’

‘My, then you must be a natural.’

‘Thank you. I have to admit that I am having trouble remembering your name.’

‘That is because we erased it from your mind. We are not letting your reality survive.’

‘No? And how do you intend to prevent it surviving? Isn’t reality a pretty robust thing?’

‘Strangely not – at least the subtext isn’t; meaning the individual narratives that people build about themselves. Only the superstructure maintains and that is where we live – on the shiny surface of the hyper-real.

‘If you need proof then I could waltz you back to the point in time where Earth was flat, where this little ball of mud was at the centre of the universe – pre-Copernicus; sub-lunar, super-lunar, primum mobile … all that bullshit. An idea flips the whole gameshow on its head.’

‘I’m not sure I believe you.’

‘I’m sure you don’t have to. Anyway, the editors have been released from their blue pens and are, even at this moment, snipping away at the substratum bonds that bind this whole shebang together.’

‘The editors?’

‘A mix between the nanotech and the magickal; not that there’s much difference as far as you are going to be concerned. We operate on a quantum level – moving universes around at will; playing with time; and altering things on a more fundamental level. These idiot scientists who believe that physics are the be-all and end-all of everything are missing the whole point. They are failing to perceive the most important tool that they were gifted with for interfacing with this system – their perceptual apparatus. You would think that at least one of them would cotton on to the notion that an idea is a bomb to bring the old order down.’

‘You know that my name is Machiná?’

‘We know everything, child. You were the dormant catalyst we planted here as a safety measure. When you are brought into the world it’s time is limited. Don’t worry, this is not the end for you – you will be reinserted into the new narrative and you will once again play an important role. It is as it has always been.’

The cycle was almost complete. As they talked the whole of the reality Machiná had been part of had been spatio-temporally indexed and was now being decompiled. Soon the universe would be born again and Machiná would be allowed to watch – not that he would remember it when he awoke some time later.

The first Brewlat, the original, the one from the prime timeline, the one from which all others branched off (for they had proved that theory to within an inch of its life) had to build a dimension jumper to travel to wherever his doppelganger had come from and prevent him from building a dimension jumper. He had to prevent all the trouble which had ensued when this rogue had appeared and proceeded to do whatever he desired. He was reverse engineering the device from a glimpse at the inner workings which he had managed to sneak whilst the fake Brewlat, at least fake for this universe, screwed his wife. It was a matter of honour that he find this interloper and put a bullet in the back of his skull before he caused all this trouble.

Once the machine was completed there suddenly came a rash of incidents which could only be explained by multiple Brewlats, leading him to believe that his decision to make the machine had created an infinite number of spin-off universes where Brewlats began travelling about and screwing over their counterparts in other realities. He also came to the unfortunate realisation that the Brewlat who started all this madness was himself from some future point along his own timeline. By jumping backwards through his own life he had allowed himself to develop the technology earlier than he would have originally and in the process had necessitated Brewlat becoming his own worst enemy.

He was faced with a paradox, he surely was. If he travelled to the point in time where he had first invented the dimension jumper and shot himself before it could be completed then the first jump which had brought his future self into his life could not have happened, therefore he would not have built the second machine and he would not have been able to jump forward and prevent the creation of the first machine. So he waited.

He knew the secrets of this house and could disappear within the warren of rooms at will, and he could effect this disappearance while being able to keep track of his other self. He watched his progress with fascination, pondering how this version of himself was decidedly slower and therefore must be much older. The fateful moment drew near, he could sense it. He hid himself close as the Brewlat who invented the device that had caused all this pressed the button and travelled out through the dimensions of time and space. Brewlat calibrated his device to the same frequency that the aftershock resonated with and he piggybacked on the wake of his older self’s machine.

They touched down and Brewlat knew exactly where he was and he knew exactly what he had to do. This Brewlat had to be allowed to do what he had done here and then he could kill him. But by allowing him to do what he had to he was going to be forcing himself to make the machine and in so doing create all those extra universes full of immoral and amoral versions of himself. It would be a totally pyrrhic and pointless victory. Brewlat took the gun and pressed it to his temple, he squeezed the trigger.

It was the bang that ended the universe. One man free from the consideration of the proliferating paradoxes that his every action birthed caused the universe to collapse under the weight of the paradox he had already created by building the machine in the first place. It didn’t really matter in the long run – there were other universes and the loss of even a seemingly infinite number of realities was not the loss of everything. People really did tend to overemphasise their own importance in the scheme of things.

I know that when they sit there and they read the words that I have put down that they are not reading the story, they are reading me. It is good to sometimes have the distance of anonymity between you and your readers. If every described suicide, every murderer, and every zany idea expressed reflects on you then how can anyone get used to the shifting geography of what you are? Where does the truth of your survive?

I know that when some people think of me they think of a sad fiction; a tale that spins out from the impetus of a tear-drop lost amongst raindrops falling in a puddle and sending out ripples. Do they imagine me sat there on the edge of the curb watching trash floating away to an unspecified somewhere? Writing haiku post-it notes that I fold into cranes and set upon the flow. I am a watercolour under the spreading stain of spilt ink – a vision used as a blotter.

I try to imbue some of the passages I write with the quality of sunshine but they are few and far between. It is strange – the mood of my fiction is generally no indication of where I am at mentally or spiritually but it is often taken as such. People read the poetry and make that into metaphor and idea and miss the obvious messages. These are the things that happen to a writer I suppose. Strung between the intention and the interpretation; though put like that it doesn’t sound much different from everyone else’s life, though it represents another layer of the onion perhaps. Are you trying to communicate or disappear behind a equivocation? Are you playing word games?

The bad things are taken, turned around in the head, chewed over, purposely made more sharp and then left there for people to cut themselves on. The good things are polished, held up to the light, flashed at people like a momentary brilliance of sunshine bouncing off a window, and then spirited away. We glory in the shadows – they are the playground in which we exercise our minds. It is inevitable that this can colour the world.

Sat hunched over the keyboard, all the pieces of literature I have read, all the films I have watched, all the paintings I have enjoyed, all the music I have listened to, pressing behind the filter of my mind’s eye and trying to escape. It all blends together, ricochets off the events of the day that are prominent in my short term memory and ends up in whatever twisted form I wish to call the story I am working on. Always a different story – always the same story. I drink coffee, surf the internet, read, listen to tunes – all of this going on as I write. It is an act of chemistry – a living process.

Some stories are just too violent and horrible to be told; that was how he felt. But they came to him unbidden and if he didn’t put them down on paper and get them out of him he knew that they were going to poison him – that they would pool like toxic waste in the water table of his mind and they would corrupt his soul. What the hell was out there beaming these thoughts into his mind? If he could ever locate the dispenser of these evil notions he would surely dispatch them. He had a muse who delivered into his heart and head the most beautiful poetry; he didn’t need these visitations of evil inspiration. Where would these scenes find a outlet were he not gifted with the ability to write? Would they translate themselves into actual killings? Would he be out there raping and killing people like the despicable characters that he wrote about? He liked to think not but there was no way that he could be sure without putting himself and others at risk. Harrison sucked the whiskey down.

Two blocks away on the top of a tall building which not many people have any security clearance to know about stood Berger. He was testing out a revolutionary new communication device – one that beamed microwave transmissions with encoded instructions out to one target that they had picked at random in the hopes of a fair test. They were actually wanting to create a serial killer just to prove that this thing had military applications, but thus far no luck. They knew that the guy was receiving them. He’d taken on a therapist and they were listening to the tapes and his fantasies getting increasingly worse. They knew he was sublimating the stuff but he had to break soon. He had to, didn’t he?

Harrison had been reading about microwave transmitters; about how the government beamed thoughts into your head and how you could prevent that by wearing a tinfoil hat. You had to interrupt their signals or god knows what you might end up doing. It made him sweat but he was sure that it was working. He hadn’t written any of that trash for quite a while now. He felt much better about himself than he had of late. He was sleeping ok. The poetry was once more a thing of beauty. He was happy.

On the top of a block of flats with direct sight-line to both Harrison’s house and Berger’s building sat Currell. He was smiling – it had worked. They had managed to derail Berger’s plan thus far by beaming a signal into Harrison’s head that was shutting off the possibility of Berger’s trial run being successful. The next stage of the plan was finding some way to totally scupper Berger and his associates. Currell clicked send and the email went winging its way to Harrison’s inbox.

Grit smiled. A fucking rest – just what he needed after all this time spent chasing numb nuts around and putting bullets in the back of their heads. He had the easel set up and he had some jazz playing – Mingus, he felt, was perfect for the painting of watercolours. This landscape was something that he had loved since his childhood and he had been trying to capture its essence since those first times when he had picked up a pencil and sketched the grass and the trees, drawn out the cloud formations.

He wished that it were possible for him to consider retiring but it wasn’t. When you got into a profession like this one you went out of it in the same way that you entered it: through violence. There were no hitmen living comfortable lives; well, ok, there weren’t many. His downtime was sorted out pretty well but that was primarily because the people that wanted to kill him were still scared of him: that wouldn’t always be the case. At some point he was just going to be a old dog that needed putting down.

Did he regret what he had done in his life? No. Did it bother him the number of people that he had sent to early graves? Not in the least. If you let one of those fuckers bother you then you were going to be haunted day and night by the ghosts of your victims. Business was business and everyone that he had ever killed knew exactly what they were letting themselves in for. When you entered this world the signs on the door were plain enough – you had to make a conscious decision to ignore them.

Ah, sweep this shit out of his head – he was here to relax. No need to concentrate on the bullshit day-job. He took a lungful of the fresh country air. Smiled again.

Standover men were muscle-drive machines on the whole – people that had just enough grey matter to know that they were not bright enough to hatch master plans that were going to bring them riches beyond compare, but just enough cunning to know how to trap those who could. Occasionally you would get one that had enough brains to be able to run their own operation but who chose not to; who chose to cut down the amount of work they had to do by just stealing off of those men who could work the system and generate capital. Standover men were often scarily capable, totally insane and blessed with the luck a lot of madmen find in attendance, or an even more worrying combination of the two.

No one was sure about McGovern. What did he represent except a threat to the livelihood of several men? They came to Grit with their tails between their legs and their wallets in their hands. Ready to pay Grit whatever he asked. He didn’t want to be greedy. He was thinking that if he gave them a good deal and got rid of this guy the they were going to owe him big time. That one guy could turn this many career criminals into scared little girls didn’t bode that well for it being a cakewalk. The only thing was that these guys were soft like most people in management positions were; they had grown fat and comfortable – they had younger men doing the running about. He didn’t bother to ask them why their foot soldiers couldn’t deal with this guy because he knew – they were only used to dealing with the scared and the stoned.

He would have to check out McGovern’s routine and be careful in how he approached this one. It wasn’t like the schmucks who he could just walk up to and plug in the back of the skull. This would take some planning.

Grimoire was gone and Grit knew that this would result in a rush to assume alpha dog status amongst the heretofore small fish of the pond. It was a great business opportunity to play all ends off against the middle. None of these jokers would be a big enough threat to him even combined if they cottoned on to what he was doing so he didn’t feel compelled to tie up any loose ends at all. Some people might compare this bullshit to playing chess but no way was this as mentally demanding as that. He often watched Scarface and he sometimes recommended it to these people to see if a single one of them might learn the lesson about not getting high on their own supply but they never did.

You earned the money, you had the coke, and you could afford the whores – why not experiment a little bit? You were a drug dealer and you knew that someone would be snapping at your heels all the time. Enjoy it while you could.

Grit had seen so many of them lose their edge to the white powder and not be aware of it in the least. They failed to see that they were starting to make bad decisions and that the only reason that someone was able to infiltrate their territory was that they couldn’t think straight. He swam like a shark through their masses picking them off as was necessary. He knew that there would always be more. Scumbags were a self-replenishing resource.

Everyone has a book in them. I was born with a pen in my hand. He had the scars to prove the first one and the photographs to prove the second. He was baptised in ink and now it slid over his skin like a memory. He wrote everywhere that he could – his house was one big wipe clean surface that he scrawled over – a neverending, ever-changing epic poem of randomness masquerading as cohesive thoughts. He started the tattooing off with quotation marks on his shoulder blades – waiting for the perfect words to leap out at him and find their place in the cupped hands of this beautifully rendered punctuation.

He hated those two lines – they were cliched. The first was patently untrue: he knew people who barely had a post-it note in them let alone anything substantial. The second statement – well, exactly how many people used longhand anymore which is what he felt that remark was supposed to imply? He felt that he was the exception that proved the rule. Mind you that kind of thinking was his own particular brand of arrogance – if something was becoming less true of people in general then he nominated himself as an exemplar of it. If something bad was sweeping the nation he was the hero that stood against the tide. He was valiant.

Giving birth to a child was easy; giving birth to a book was a commitment. He had gone through several midwives in his time; women who soured like milk in the heat of birth pangs, contractions, dilations and the like. There had been certain abortive attempts that he kept stored around the place like pickled punks; souls that had suicided even before they had made an entrance, possibly because they had glimpsed some presentiment of what they were letting themselves in for. Non viable was what they said about some things he produced – they could have been talking about him. He preferred to think of himself as being a genetic testament to built in obsolescence. The book would last – would represent a legacy that he himself was incapable of generating as something physical. He didn’t want permanence in the sense of some patrilineal line cast out into an uncertain future. Books could be translated and thrown through time in any number of formats; was dna such a reliable carrier of information? He doubted it.

There were countless titles, synopses and character sketches collected in a folder which disgorged notes and shed random bits of itself at will. Things had taken on a life of their own – he had created an ecosystem in his house that mirrored the dilapidated internal structures of his haphazard and constantly spiralling mind. And the world outside? That seemed to be taking colouration from his ideas and images … he had perhaps infected reality with his own seditious information.

]]> http://paulgrimsley.wordpress.com/2008/07/11/write-in-1/feed/ insomnihack http://paulgrimsley.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/sidewalk-chalk-heart/ http://paulgrimsley.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/sidewalk-chalk-heart/#comments Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:04:17 +0000 insomnihack http://paulgrimsley.wordpress.com/?p=189

They’d expunged the murder from his permanent record because after long and careful consideration they had determined that the victim was of no real significance and that the resources his death had freed up may mean that in death he was actually able to contribute positively to society, something he had been unable, as far as records displayed, bee able to do in a forty year lifespan. The judge had expressed his regret that the matter had even got this far – what was criminal was that a man such as Farrell could even be questioned in his actions.

The family of the victim were summarily shown where to go by the institutes that had mistakenly thought that they might have a point about the value of someone’s life. If one person loved you that was not enough – not as far as the legal system was concerned. Brewster was sidewalk chalk artist – his life was a testament to impermanence. Farrell, with every decision he made, bolstered the local economy and put food on the tables of countless families.

Mrs Brewster’s suicide went unremarked in the larger papers and was buried in the side columns of pages people skipped over in the smaller papers. The turn out was not inconsiderable. Farrell watched from the edges of the cemetery, a blur-screen erected between him and the mourners to protect his privacy. He could afford such luxuries. That the family of the person being buried had no such protection did not strike him as the least bit ironic. Irony was for people who had to put a twist on something to be able to view it without it being the equivalent of staring into the sun.

Charles Brewster, inspired by some photographs of the pictures by his father, which had kept him with food through most of his life, moved into the spot on the street where his father had painted without the slightest protest from the more established people that did their thing there. He was working on something large; working on something with a bit more permanence. He painted the pavement with paints that would not wash away when the rains came. He painted a picture of his father transfigured by the cruelty of his death and the lack of justice in the world into something indescribably beautiful, obviously holy.

He slept by the painting, guarded it. People unaware what he had painted it with believed that its beauty protected it – that it was somehow a sacrosanct space.

Shiny shoes came down hard on ribs, the dull thud of night-sticks hitting flesh, the muted crack of broken bones. Five days after the painting had been completed Charles Brewster died of internal injuries. Shortly after the body was removed the blood and the painting were bleached away.

It was said that when Farrell passed away, screaming himself hoarse, strapped to a bed in the local asylum, that he complained of a painting on the wall of his cell that couldn’t be washed off.