Excerpt Seventeen:
Synchronicity Times Two
By and by…
…things grow…things die…
…some kept alive…some buried…
So what?
Anyway…
…it eventuated thusly…
Kirk’s, ‘lead-male-in-an-indelible-movie-classic’ presence, had been of Sybil’s own construction, it turned out, and as hasty fictional narrativising succumbed to entropy, Kirk’s features, stance and bearing sank like an iron crouton in a veganized mulligatawny soup.
And likewise, opposingly, the circus-clown dress-sense Sybil had exhibited, jaded into beige, dolefully cut fabrics that seemed to apologise; gesticulating frantically from the sartorial blooper graveyard.
But before then, the two found themselves willing a fair wind; in the doldrums; flapping about, blowing raspberries… They had neither a place to go to, nor a place to return to: betwixt and betwaxed… They pretended, but pretending wasn’t the same as imagination.
The two took to sitting apart, avoiding visual interaction, because the other’s presence reminded them of their own predicament; stuck and stale with an empty sail.
But…
…soon….
…and by means only unknown forces could divulge, a video presentation from an old TED talk by Marcus Godstrand found its way mysteriously into to their respective office’s. Offices they were thinking of distancing by some kind of barrier mid-corridor; nothing permanent, unless permanence was the answer.
The short but tedious TED talk merely explained that imagination was, could be, a portal to a theoretical parallel world. Godstrand’s theories threw out enormous challenges. He explained:
‘…not just in the obvious; to those with an imagination sense, but in a perceptionated reality that was, soon, unstoppably, going to be created autonomously, built by robots…(nervous laughter)…within the collective/personal, cognitive space…’ It was not clear whether anyone understood what he was talking about.
‘Those were innocent days,’ Kirk said, ‘Godstrand and his audience were lambs, doing lamby things until going off to lamby throat slitting market. These are now guilty days and we are all paying the price of playing with fire.’
Our heroes-in-waiting picked up on some underlying sentiment within the talk that was so pregnant with meaning that they painted their offices in baby colours. A meeting was arranged at a neutral space mid-corridor. Much chattering was exchanged, widening the corridor. The two sides visited and stayed with each other in the small, unconvincing township of Much Chattering. Something big was brewing; fermenting in the small.
There was a way out of this and into something else, but it would necessitate a situation where they both had the imaginative powers that filled the criteria needed to enter the parallel space. Excitement splashed over the rimmy confines of its receptacle and stained the walls of the lengthening corridor with a pattern that depicted yearning and wilfully defied the stuck laws of symmetry…
They still needed help and it was surprising that they took so much effort to remember they had options outside their new cosy, closed club of two.
Who was that person Kirk once knew? That weird person? That weird creature person? Oh, oh! Ah! Professor whatsaname: The Professor, he would have answers, Kirk was sure. He mulled, agitated and swirled around in his to-do tray.
And Sybil always had the Nagasaki Blood Cancer Choir’s parental adjudication and puppetry in reserve, she fancied to remember; at first with solidity spilling out of invisible holes and, but, bit by bit a satisfying assemblage of memory presented in a folder bound proudly with ribbon: a thing of great power, albeit a thing with conditional accessibility; sworn under pain of voidal-disexistence (not death exactly). Written upon the front was: ‘Only open if humanity is doomed.’…
Kirk could not summon the real Professor, he could only bring into existence a cheap copy in the hope the imagined presence would spark some kind of reaction that would let the real Professor know he was wanted for a word dance.
The best way to contact the Nagasaki Blood Cancer Choir that Sybil could think of was to put a saucer of soy milk and a vegany, biscuity morsel, crumbpile; reinforced with all the vital necessities a cat’s biology demands, out in the mist perverted corridor, and hope for a bite or lap or a suck.
As weak and vague as this seemed to Sybil, it did the job; the Nagasaki Blood Cancer Choir appeared before her to answer her demands; she was in control, she had the moments roughly by the scruff of the neck, until her imagined version turned in to a sort of real version and the Nagasaki Blood Cancer Choir had her in front of it. The Revolving Head of the Chair of the Committee made her realise she was beginning to get phantom bodily functions that were both unwanted and swollen with neatly wrapped potential.
The next day, in the office, which had been knocked through; two into one, Sybil and Kirk buddied up. They chose their new names…Kirk was going to be called Kirk James, and Sybil was going to be called Sybil, with this approach they really had something. They’d dug a well that would always be theirs; dry or not.
‘My people have expressed an urgency that we come to some kind of arrangement between this world and the next.’
Kirk was slightly worried she was working towards a suicide pact arrangement, to which he was not prepared to commit. ‘I also have my person on my back, weighing on me, playing tiddly-winks with my ears…we need to move… This imagination control system seems radical and unwieldy, but here we are…’
‘Wherever we are we need to be in the same place.’
‘Agreed, but…?’
‘What?’
‘…but…we don’t have to kill ourselves to be born again?’
‘Wow, shit, I hope not so much, Kirk, that shows imagination or a lack of imagination…’
‘We need to make an agreement on what good imagination is and what bad imagination is.’
‘We do?’
‘That’s set then.’
Sybil writes out on a piece of paper: ‘We agree.’ They both sign it and then retire for a nap; a joint nap.
They slipped away under the hypnotic tones of Marcus Godstrand explaining how two minds creating a narrative create a larger story, that can affect the twisted chemistry of Mother Nature’s corral, and enter worlds which have not yet been dreamed of… And that wasn’t even in the video of the TED talk…
Sybil hung around outside a nightclub in an industrial area of San Diego. The queue to get in strung round the building several times and the crisp dry night buzzed with frustration and rang with opposing promise; hope and desperation fought doggedly amid the enveloping heavens.
Kirk sat on a bench on the boardwalk overlooking the ocean as the sun dipped below the horizon, thinking that he was close but not close enough. He was close, he was also in San Diego, but somehow they needed to get closer before humanity could be saved from its own wild imagination.
