Cohesion
“And the greatest of all these is... pain.”
“What of the other two, Fred?” Asked Jacob, eyeing the mound of ash forming on Fred's cigarette.
“Fear and Despair.”
Jacob turned his head slightly to look at the television. This was the seventh time they were watching The Seventh Seal. Stealthily, he pushed the ashtray with his feet to position it below Fred's mounting column of ash.
“Jacob?”
“Fred?”
“Why do you believe in dark energy? You're like a necromancer, of sorts.”
“Because, I never want this Universe to end.”
“Like a positronic brain?”
“You watch too much Star Trek.”
Death was playing chess against the knight, and it could see that it was winning.
“So, is this the only movie you have?” Fred reached for the pipe full of cannabis in the middle of the coffee table. Half-way there, he reached for the lighter nearer to him, then completed the journey and fell back onto the chair. Meanwhile, Jacob had been eyeing the mound of ash with constant vigilance. “Why are you looking at me that way?”
“I'm not looking at you.”
With the precision of a magician, and the prescience of a seer, Fred let his cigarette drop into the ash tray.
“You're right, you weren't looking at me.”
“Are you going to smoke that or just caress it like the philosopher's stone?”
Fred looked down at the pipe, then lifted it to his mouth, puckered his lips and while inhaling lit the cannabis on fire. A cloud of smoke wafted out of his puckered lips toward Jacob, who eyed the gray floating cloud with a look of ecstasy.
The pipe made its way over to Jacob. Before he lit the green leaves on fire, he asked, “When are you leaving us?”
Fred thought about it for a full ten seconds. “In about a week and a half.”
“So, like an eternal sojourner, you come and go again. Are you ever going to settle down here?”
Jacob watched Fred's face wince at one of the words he uttered, but didn't say a thing. His face turned away from Jacob's toward the television, which was now depicting people inside of a church afraid to go outside. Jacob glanced outside at the darkness and wondered if there truly was enough dark energy to keep the Universe going forever. And if it did, what would it mean for his consciousness?
“Nietzsche said that we will keep living this existence over and over, and through each iteration we won't remember the previous iteration, which means that we've been here forever and will always be here forever. Though we won't ever know it. He stole that from Parmenedes.”
Jacob was inhaling when Fred spoke, so some of the words were lost to him. He thought about Zeno and his paradoxes and wondered if Zeno ever understood Parmenedes' concept of the eternal. He gauged the distance between Fred and him and wondered if he could ever reach him.
Down a dark and desolate street Fred was trying to make his way back to his uncle's house. She had broken his heart. Down the desolate and dark night he was walking like a forlorn will looking for its master. She had told him he had become reticent, incommunicative. He wondered if that was a real word. Jacob had said that to find another fish, he had to fry more fish. Chuckling to himself he wondered through the empty loneliness of the forlorn night back to his uncle's house.
Jacob woke up in the morning feeling as if he couldn't speak. His mouth tasted like cotton and felt like raw meat. The blinding sun light came through the blinds like a supernova in heat. Gathering some strength by wishing himself to walk, he stood up and slowly assumed the upright position from his bed.
The kitchen was full of unwashed dishes, open food containers and something that looked like a parasite. He threw the parasite away and began to wash the dishes. With wet hands he put all the food away and closed the refrigerator door. Then, he made his way to his bathroom and took a shower. Today was the day he promised he would go there once more.
In the dark room with the blinds and curtains fully closed against the bright morning Sun, Fred was dreaming about a banshee that kept crying for him. He wanted to console her, but she kept running away and he couldn't reach her.
When he opened his eyes he couldn't tell if it was morning, afternoon or night. He closed his eyes again and gently went back to sleep.
“Hi Jacob. You kept your promise.” She was standing over him in a waitress' uniform holding a pad of paper and pencil.
“Yeah. I promised.”
She smiled and jotted down something on her notepad and walked away. Jacob watched her back until she went behind the counter, ripped the topmost page from the notepad and placed it on the rotating metal thing where the cook could see it.
He looked down at this coffee, at the black coffee and wondered how many molecules were swimming around there. Out of the corner of his eyes he could see that she was watching him. He wanted to look at her, but he knew that would be wrong. This was all wrong, but he had to keep this promise. After a few minutes of looking down at his coffee, he felt bereft of all thirst and hunger. He looked up as the restaurant door opened and a man in a beret walked in and sat down at the far side of the restaurant.
She walked over to the man and began to take his order. Jacob looked back down to his coffee and wondered if and how one could be crucified by Strings. That would make one a quantum martyr.
He felt the shift in the air as she opened the door to the back of the restaurant to go change. A few minutes later she was sitting across the table from him. Jacob looked down at his eggs and pancakes, and wondered how long memories would last in a complete vacuum. She didn't talk at all as he meticulously tore apart the pancakes in parabolic arcs and slowly ate the pieces one by one. She didn't want to be the first to breach the silence. That, she decided, would be his fate.
“If I had made a wrong decision, it would be that I never loved you as much as I should have.” She didn't know how to answer that. “My mind... my mind is not where it should be. I know, I know and... sometimes...”
She reached out and grabbed his hands. “Please, Jacob. I understand. I just wanted to see you one more time before I left.” Jacob smiled for he remembered the touch of her hands. “You know and I know that sometimes some things don't last forever.” Looking down at the empty plate she stifled a strange sound emerging from her throat. “I'm going to miss you.”
“I know.” Jacob didn't know how to say good-by. He never had to part with someone forever, or what seemed like forever. She would never come back, and he would never leave. It was something that he had accepted six months before, but forgot in the last three months. The last four years would be erased like x-rays being ejected from a singularity.
“You didn't want to come today, did you?” She was asking not to hurt him but for Jacob to confess his innermost feelings.
Jacob didn't want to answer that. He believed it would have been better if they never said good-by and faded away from each other like a distant dream.
“Don't answer me. I don't even know why I asked.”
They walked out of the restaurant together holding hands, but in silence. At the parking lot, next to her car, she turned to him and said, “I'm going to miss you,” and let a tear fall unfettered down her cheeks.
“I...” He wondered if the space between her face and his could ever be crossed. If movement meant that you had to divide space in half through each step of the way, then movement toward your goal could never be reached. “I'm going to miss you, too.” They hugged for a very long time.
“If space and time are inextricably intertwined and one is dependent on the other, then movement is a product of space and time.” Jacob accepted the pipe from Fred.
“And if space is divisible only in halves, then movement is an illusion because you can never get there from here.” Fred exhaled the smoke from his lungs.
They both burst out laughing. This night they were watching Labyrinth. There were fiery red creatures kicking their heads around the television screen.
Jacob was watching Fred out of the corner of his eyes for any tell tale sign of something unfathomable. Fred seemed to be sucked into the Labyrinth. Fred, Fred, come out! He wanted to yell at him, but he kept quiet.
“Jacob, do you remember Evelyn?”
Jacob closed his eyes because that was a ridiculous question. “Why do you ask? Fred, you should forget…”
“I know that. But that doesn't erase the fact that she's...”
“..passed on to a better life. Everything for her was better in the next one. She's probably very happy where she is and if she found out that you were obsessing over this, she'd be very sad.”
“Don't talk to me like a little kid.”
“Then, stop this.”
“OK, Jacob, I will.”
Fred went back to the Labyrinth and didn't speak again until the movie was over.
“I best be going. I'm probably going to get lost in the dark.”
“OK, be careful out there. There may be things that go bump in the night.”
Fred laughed.
“It's Lily...” The voice on the phone was familiar through the hazy fog of the morning Sun. Jacob looked at his clock and it told him that it was six in the morning.
“Lily?” He tried to recall, but then everything snapped into place. It was Evelyn's younger sister. He hadn't talked to her in years, ever since Evelyn passed away. “Hi, Lily. What's up?”
“Jacob,” her voice sounded frail, like a leaf blowing in the wind. “Jacob...” Jacob waited for her to continue. He hoped she wasn't having another break down. His heart would break because such bad things happened to such nice people. “Last night,” came her voice over something that sounded like sniffling. “Fred, he... shot himself.”
His mind went completely blank. All he could say back to Lily was, “Fred?”
The stifling heat of the Los Angeles air was grating upon his lungs. Smoggy and hot, the air was making Jacob suffocate in his black suit. This existence was a fleeting one, and all of existence depended upon electromagnetic and gravitational attraction. If those were to disappear, all matter would tear loose from each other and scatter away faster than light. The Universe would just be a mass of wandering electrons. He was riding with Lily, and he remembered how she looked when she was a little girl of eleven.
Lily didn't like air conditioning, so they had to ride with the windows rolled all the way down. Forest Lawn Mortuary next exit the signs told them. Her hand gripped his tighter. Jacob couldn't understand how she didn't break a sweat in that black dress of hers. Her mildly tanned skin showed no moisture, no hint of any wetness. Only her tears told him that she had any liquid within that small body of hers.
Her husband was on the other side. He had not said anything from the service until now. And it didn't seem like he was going to say anything else. Heaven's gate was approaching and beyond it all three could see the green pastures where the deceased were laid to rest.
“We're here.” Her husband spoke. Those would be the first and last words he would speak throughout this whole journey. Jacob glanced at him then turned to look out the window. There was a delay as the leaders tried to figure out where they needed to go, then they were on their way again.
The priest was standing over the hole in the ground. The Bible propped up upon his two hands, he was about to give the last rites to one Frederick Michael Dearburth. Jacob was staring at the sky, at the clouds passing by, and wondered if the ethereal formations of the condensed water molecules were a natural Rorschach test. I see a dead rat, followed by a multitude of cicadas rotting in a field of red.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…” the priest began his chant. Jacob looked down at the ground, the brown casket’s metal hinges glistening quietly in the hot afternoon sun. “…we all know that Fred was a junkie…” Jacob concentrated intently upon the grain patterns on the top of the casket. “…from the amygdalae to the zygote, existence is but a mighty mite on God’s divine ass…” The grains began to oscillate then like a photonic resonance imaging scalar torpedo, they did the divine dance of quanta and free radicals. “…scattered through vacui horrortensis, eschatological uncertainty pervades our delicate wisdom of tellurian cogito nihil est…” Strings of vibrating matter forming into walls of vibrant plasma made their journey from the casket to the walls of the freshly dug grave. “…Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo…” Jacob looked up at the priest, his left mouth corner slightly raised to the sky, then closed his eyes to the world. “…At vero eos et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus qui blanditiis praesentium voluptatum deleniti atque corrupti quos dolores et quas molestias excepturi sint occaecati cupiditate non provident, similique sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollitia animi, id est laborum et dolorum fuga. Et harum quidem rerum facilis est et expedita distinctio…”
He raised his right hand to his forehead, and with Catholic rigor and orthodoxical acuity, the priest crossed himself down to his navel. Fred’s parents threw the first lumps of dirt onto the still casket. Then his eyes locked with Jacob’s and a shrill sub-sonic sound wave made Jacob think that he had a radio wave sensor in his brain. Everything shifted blue.
This time he convinced Lily that air-conditioning was good for her health. As the chilly air hit his moisture ridden face, a sense of peace and tranquility overrode all the anguish and uncertainty of the past few days. Fred, I’m going to miss you.
“Jacob…” If she was going to continue, she would have to speak louder, thought Jacob.
“Yes, Lily?”
“I found this in his apartment…” She brought out a ream of paper from under the seat. “It’s for you. He left…” She couldn’t continue because the pronoun uttered was the utterance of his name.
Jacob took the ream of paper and read the first page on top:
To Jacob:
The Senseless Being
Or
How To Be Occluded and Be Happy
This was the last book he was working on. Fred had told him that he was almost done. Maybe he had finished it just so he could leave a legacy for all his friends. He flipped the cover page over and read:
Chapter First: Antagonistic Sense Rituals
Schopenhauer was wrong. We have no will, so the world is devoid of any paradigmatic moral justification for good or evil. Everything is good and evil, because we have no will and Schopenhauer was wrong…
Jacob smiled and put the cover page back on top. He looked over at Lily, who was looking straight ahead at the freeway that told them they were going North, but you could tell that it was lying and you were actually going West. “Thanks, Lily.” He closed his eyes and his mind wandered around the world, and he mentally hugged every single individual who was suffering from pain. After all, he told himself, Aesculapius was a scientist, not just a healer and philosopher.
