Ripheus23

“Why ask why?” the book says silently, and Simon Tylerson answers the question while whispering to himself: “There is no reason to ask why unless the inquirer intends to do what there is a reason to, afterwards.” But the book does not agree unless by invisible implication; instead, the question it poses also ends the book itself.

            Simon starts reading something else, uneasy. Outside the shelter, wind battles with nightfall, both armed with lightning and scythe-shadowed moonshine. It’s just a coincidence. Or a synchronicity? Confirmation bias? Doctor Marcus Wheilf would say that it’s a probable improbability, maybe. Just the same, the very paragraph Simon had started to read, at random, begins with the words, “Outside the shelter, wind did battle with the quiet of the night, thunder and the blade of the moon for the two enemies’ rearguard weapons.”

            Wherefore Simon continues his perusal of the text, flipping ahead twenty-three pages. That quantity of flipping, he intends exactly. As if some demon or spirit intends for him to read the ensuing words, the text now proclaims, “Tyler Samuelson flipped through the book randomly, hoping to find a passage poetic enough to be used by the man in composing a love letter to his estranged girlfriend.”

            That part doesn’t line up. Simon doesn’t date girls. To be technically honest, he doesn’t date anyone, neither does he sleep with anyone, but if he had a chance to do either, both would be with some other guy. Once in a while, Simon wonders what it would be like if it was with more than one guy at a time (on a given night), but otherwise he’s a hopeful romantic—hopeful in the way the philosopher Immanuel Kant advises when it comes to religious judgment in general, no less.

            Fidgeting—too caffeinated and none too blazed—Simon sets the book down and turns on a radio. Explosions in the Sky explode forth to the tune of their “The Birth and Death of the Day” before, inexplicably, Lifehouse chimes in with “Simon.”

            Cursing, Simon shuts off the radio.

            As its display fades, it reminds the man of the late hour: 2:23 AM.

            There are rules at the shelter, and then there are exceptions. Although the else itinerant men who reside there are presumed half-helpless, in need of discipline if they are ever to make it back into the normal run of the social mill, leeway is granted them on this score: if they don’t want to sleep for the few hours they’re allotted before being sent on their way for the day, they don’t have to. Simon does wish to sleep, as much as or less than he seeks to keep reading, though. He could chew all his fingernails off ten times or more, he’s so nervous as he keeps reading the coincidental book.

            This phenomenon—he calls it “the Pattern,” in honor of Robert Jordan’s fantasy series The Wheel of Time—haunts him more than almost any mistake he’s ever made. No matter what book he picks up, under whatever circumstances, motivated in whatever way, however he finds the book or wherever he sees it, it always turns out that the problem of the characters in the story maps one-to-one, or 0.99-to-one, or 0.989999999…-to-one, onto the problem Simon faces in his own life, at the same time. Is he living with wannabe drug traffickers and possible prostitutes while trying to join a quasi-Catholic church and learn how to play a guitar? Why, it will just so happen that The Mice of the Ninth Cat (for example), by some obscure Russian authoress, published seventy years ago and almost doomed by Soviet censorship, only purchased (or checked out of the library) by Simon for the sake of a flash of literal intuition, is about someone whose neighbors are smuggling amphetamines and pimping out their underage sisters while the benighted protagonist outskirts the Eastern Orthodox in the area and fiddles with a banjo on behalf of their Sunday choir. —And that’s a rare indirect example of the alignment of another’s text and the reader’s mind. Usually the identity of story and reality is far more extreme.

            … “Long ago, or in the beginning,” the angel-man says, “all of the substance of the physical universe was condensed into a perfect point in space and time. As this point transformed into lines and then shapes, the matter flowing into this matrix of energy assumed as many configurations as it could under the circumstances. Quantum freedom allowed objects to appear, there, that either quickly collapsed or sundered themselves under the immense pressure and expansion of being—or to endure from the beginning until the ever-ending story of the present.

            “This echthros-city you have envisioned… is one of those Machines. Assembled by spontaneity in the genesis-crucible of the universe, it did not and never will die, until the destruction of the end of time. It imprinted its power on all the history from the Planck epoch onward, until now its teleology corrupts everything in its path, so far as life across the worlds resists it not, or even serves it as utterly as can be.”

            Simon nods, looking at the equations and addendum-jargon. “The acceleration of the expansion of space: that’s being caused by this Machine.”

            “You can feel that?” Sarah asks. “Because… Because I think I can feel it, too.”

            “Anyone can, if their moral intuition has been honed by reason enough,” the angel-man observes.