Michael’s father worked for Mr. Bentem and even followed him up from Memphis to Chicago; consequently, the two boys were never long separated. Omar later moved to California to go to law school, but despite taking up permanent residence in the state and passing its Bar, he never pursued law as a career. Michael was not sure what his friend did with his time apart from his two socially marginalizing passions: metaphysics and (unapologetically) prostitutes. Still, Omar was significantly more outgoing than his standoffish friend, although the mutual friendship both men shared was clearly the most valued society either would claim. The painter, having been a clumsy boy with no athletic interest in school, was the constant target of bullies, and the sturdier boy was only too glad to be his protector. It was a perfect marriage of passivity and aggression, both in a social and intellectual sphere. Their childhood bond was also reinforced by a common love of speculative science fiction and horror movies. Even though the inevitable pulls of life ended up taking them in different directions, the two never went more than a month without speaking to each other. On this particular occasion, they decided to meet at an old haunt of theirs, a trendy bohemian coffeehouse on the Near North Side, before the artist’s departure.

The door of the establishment was propped open with a ceramic Buddha, and the ceiling fan generated a nice cross breeze to keep down the smell of freshly painted turquoise thrift store furniture. Michael was the first there, as usual; his friend strolled in some minutes later.

It was a study in opposites to see them together. Omar’s arrival into any room was somewhere between Christ’s entry into Jerusalem and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra descending from the mountaintop. In short, the former high school wrestler was a force of nature. Even his small gestures were combustive. His short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair crowned his massive head like starlight. He never smiled, except at someone’s expense, but was big-hearted in the odd moment that caught people off guard. There was always a spontaneous glint to him, even if his every utterance felt studied. Michael, by comparison, was tall, delicate of bone, and painfully introverted. Whereas his friend was largely impervious to details in his immediate environment, the painter was blinded—even immobilized—by them. He was rarely talkative, but even when quiet was incapable of hiding his feelings to any beneficial degree.

On exchanging hugs at the door, Omar rubbed his friend’s head like a kid brother before handing him an unmarked mailer pouch; Michael knew what was in it. Seeing their favorite table near the window was available, the two men settled into their coffeehouse routine: Omar drank his latte with unbridled gusto while Michael nursed his like a baby chick. After dispensing with obligatory niceties, the two caught up on recent history. The mysterious benefactor intrigued the lawyer. When he inquired whether the person was a he or a she, his friend became animated.

“Well, who else is going to buy one of my paintings? Have you ever known a woman to like my art? Why do you think I’ve never had a real girl friend? They’re afraid I might kill them in their sleep after they’ve seen my paintings.”

Omar chuckled. “I tell you, man, if you’d paint naked women, you’d have a sweet little setup. You wouldn’t have to anesthetize them in a chair like some pervert dentist wanting to cop a feel, or put hidden cameras in the female employees’ changing room like some seedy restaurant manager. When they show up for the job interview, tell them to drop their drawers in lieu of the three character references, and there you go. Hell! They would already have their clothes off! In my book that constitutes consent and foreplay—all in the one-trip salad bar. You could consider the preliminaries officially out of the way and go right for the horizontal watusi.”

Michael frowned at his friend’s libertine ethics.

Omar became more practical. “Look, Mike. Painting naked chicks is a great way for someone socially retarded like you to meet girls. Besides, after you’ve slept with them—and if you have any energy left—you could actually paint them. Maybe even sale what you make.”

The artist was anxious to change subjects. “Have you ever been to Stonesthrow? I hope it’s more than one gas station along the road where people stop to pee.”

“It’s a college town. I’m sure they’ll have at least one coffeehouse. And one cute girl to look at while you are sipping your brew.” Having said this, Omar turned to eye the tattooed barista working the espresso machine. He spoke with his usual bluntness. “You know, Grasshopper, when she is fifty, those tattoos will be sagging and faded on her flaccid arms. She’ll look more like a carnie than a muse.” (Omar often referred to Michael as “Grasshopper” when he assumed the role of teacher over his emotionally susceptible friend.)

The pretty girl was suddenly a distraction.

The lawyer sought to win back his friend’s attention. “I see where they’re showing The Day the Earth Stood Still over on the Northwestern campus Saturday. We should go before you leave.”

Michael nodded absently before turning to eye the tiramisu in the pastry case.

Omar’s face took a puckish turn. “I think The Day the Earth Stood Still is a liberal’s benign view of space aliens, whereas Invasion of the Body Snatchers is more republican. You can see the same relationship between E.T. and Alien.”

“Which do you think will be the case?” Michael snickered. “Are aliens going to be peaceniks or conquerors?”

Omar glowed ponderously, which was always an overture. “When we look to the heavens, it is only to find our own faces in clouds. Fears of a coming World War set the mood for The War of The Worlds. The clandestine Cold War created the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And leisure-class computer nerds dreamt up the couch potato aliens of The Matrix. The boogeyman is always seen in terms of the prevailing culture of its time, as are the aliens of our better nature, like E.T. and Klaatu.”

“What can we expect from higher intelligence, then, if they’re not going to stand on the gangplank and lecture us on our shortcomings like Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still, or hide themselves in the woodwork like in The Matrix?”

Omar flicked his wrist dismissively. “Higher intelligence is a misnomer—unless you’re foolish enough to believe technology equates with intelligence.” He sat his empty coffee mug down with deliberation. “For all our dribbling-on about nanobots and artificial intelligence, what we can know with certainty and do with impunity in this universe makes for a paltry list. The Space Shuttle dates from the era of the eight-track tape deck. Its barely flies with spit and duct tape.”

“So aliens aren’t going to be to be godlike? Hopping around from galaxy to galaxy in wormholes?”

Omar was quick to disabuse his friend of the notion. “If such nonsense existed, we would already be overrun with little green men—in history books and everywhere else.”

“What’s out there, if not little green tourists?”

“Like I said, we are the true subject matter of any picture we paint in the sky, which leaves only the canvas itself—infinity—unaccounted for in the total picture.”

Michael sighed. “But infinity goes on without end. You can’t put it under a microscope or see in a telescope.”

“Precisely.” Omar settled into his professorial tone. “Infinity is God’s glass ceiling—His sublime joke! Infinity makes all our visions of omnipotence delusional, because there is never an absolute context to our domain; and, paradoxically, it makes all our delusions self-reinforcing, because there is never absolute certainty to our knowledge. Infinity would be humbling if it were not so invisible.”

“What’s the point of bringing it up?”

“Because it’s a clue. A clue greater than any message or visitation from a space man. Its presence in our mind is more allusion than illusion. We have trouble thinking outside our space/time continuum, of imagining, for example, reality in itself might be something apart from the universes we suppose to come and go in it. But whatever reality is in itself, it is not time or space sensitive by definition. Its highest achievement does not exist in some brave new future or fabled past, but always in the here and now.”

Michael’s eyes widened. “And what would that ‘highest achievement’ be?”

The friend propounded. “If all reality is surface, and has a finite beginning, then it would be only a matter of tick-tocks to rattle down the list. Right? Yet every cause begs another one to precede it, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. We work our way through these chicken-and-egg riddles, one at a time, until they finally exhaust at an inconceivable ‘first cause’. Resultantly, we are trapped, whether we own it or not, in a labyrinth of infinite regression.”

“The ‘glass ceiling’ you mentioned?”

“Yes.” Omar allowed the hissing espresso machine to quiet down before expanding on his idea. “The question arises: Is there anything inside this maze that points to an outside of the maze? Or a better way of looking at it is to say: Is there something beyond our realm of endless connection-begetting-connections? Something suggested by the very phenomenon of infinity?”

“Is there?”

The teacher pushed away from the table in a dramatic way, freeing up his arms to gesture. “Every child ponders the endless heavens with puzzlement, and in a way adults can’t answer. Yet this world-strangeness children find themselves thrust into leaves them feeling like abandoned orphans at bus depots. There are no ladders in or out of this place, but every child has a sense memory of just such a ladder.”

A sudden stiff breeze rose up through the open doorway to catch a stack of loose flyers and sent several tumbling over the threshold.

Omar fanned his large hand over the top of the table. “Remember when we were children playing, Mike? How larger-than-life everything was back then? How the further back we go in time, the more wondrous it becomes?”

The artist smiled. “Yes.”

“Do you remember your birth?”

“Of course not.”

“Do you have any recollection of a beginning to you? A point where you were new in the world?”

“No.”

“Do you remember the first time you saw a starry sky or heard a bird sing?”

“No.”

“The first time you felt a desire?”

“No.”

Omar paused. “Do you feel like you’ve always existed? Have never not existed?”

Michael thought on it. “Now that you mention it—yes.”

“That your life had no actual beginning?”

“Yes.”

The friend squeaked in his chair, darkening. “That’s because your memory preceded you into the world.”

Another stronger breeze wafted in from out the door, smelling of rain somewhere down the sidewalk. It wrapped a loose flyer around the smiling Buddha. Both men looked over to see it, and at the gathering clouds pushing the last of the late afternoon light up the street.

Michael spoke disconnectedly. “Memory?”

The furrows on Omar’s brow deepened in the dipping light. He tapped the edge of the table. “A piece of a puzzle lies in every experience of sense, Grasshopper. A picture already finished in our heads at the time of our births. Our coming to it is not a process of discovery but of recovery; and from our inception it passes into us with such transparency we experience no discontinuity in receiving it. Reality’s highest accomplishment is we’re born knowing everything, even as we are bound of necessity to commit much of it to forgetting on leaving the womb.”

Michael offered a challenge. “But couldn’t all this Platonic stuff be a recasting of your childhood in rose-colored glasses?”

Omar stiffened. “But everything we are—everything we value—dates from our childhood. Native Americans say we inherit the Earth from our children, and it’s true.”

Michael empathized. “But I think many folks abort their inner child early on.”

“Yes.” Omar sighed. “When it comes to recovered memory, some opt for minimum coverage. They wake up in a dark room with a flashlight in their hand, and have no interest in knowing how they found the flashlight without first having a flashlight.”

The friend agreed. “A flashlight may be able to cast light on everything but itself, but what it illuminates is enough for most. The things you talk about may feel true, but you can’t demonstrate your transcendental realm exists.”

Omar stared off through the panes. “There is a reason why we forget at birth, Grasshopper. And even method in what we imperfectly recover.”

“Oh?”

“We forget because to retain that memory in full would be too terrifying—too beautiful—to endure. Forgetfulness is the price of admission into enter this earthly realm, and what we recover is only what serves us in this place until, in death, we can bear to have the remainder of that memory restored.”

“I don’t understand?”

The philosopher glanced again out the window. “Do you remember what we started talking about?”

“About space invaders. About how we always see ourselves in them.”

Omar paused in the proceedings to establish a mood. His voice became subterranean, worming its way under the tablecloth toward his friend. “Here is the proof of the transcendental realm, Grasshopper, uncolored by fond remembrance.”

Michael, hearing thunder over the skyline, moved in closer as the Sun’s light shrank from the windowsill.

The friend continued in his graver tone. “The boogeyman is also an enigma born of childhood. But, unlike infinity, this enigma can grow legs and bump into furniture.” He looked over the table like a chalkboard. “Do you remember when we used to play Bloody Mary as children? How we would say ‘Bloody Mary’ three times and turn back to look in a mirror in a dark room?”

Michael’s response was hesitant. “Of course.”

Omar picked up the empty coffee cup at his elbow and placed it in front of him. His eyes hardened in a hypnotic way. “Is this cup in motion or not?”

“Well, the atoms inside it are moving around.”

“Exactly.” Omar shoved the cup in the direction of his friend. “Now I want you to pretend you are a cosmic camera, and I want you to blink your eyes very fast, as if a shudder. But the increment of time the shudder will be open will be so infinitesimally small that the atoms in this cup will effectively appear frozen for the duration, and will be crystal clear to you.”

“Why?”

“Humor me.”

Michael, studying the cup for a second, obliged with a bat of his eyes. Instantaneously, a bolt of lightning seared the windowpanes beside him. The brief hot white flash sent the shadow of the coffee cup crawling away slowly over the tablecloth like a black finger; the artist shivered.

Omar broke the rumble that followed. “Was something still in motion?”

“What?”

The philosopher tapped the cup. “Was some part of this mug still moving?”

“The shadow,” came the terse reply.

“What was your impression of it?”

Michael pondered the afterimage burned in his cornea. “You know Hans Holbein’s painting, The Ambassadors?"

“Refresh me.”

The artist recalled the crucial detail of the Renaissance painting. “At the feet of the ambassadors, there’s a dark, attenuated form running diagonally across a mosaic floor. It is distorted beyond all recognition, and only viewing the painting edgewise restores the image as a skull.”

There was dark smile. “A skull, then?”

Michael’s look was harsh. “But you planted that stupid idea of Bloody Mary in my head.”

Omar eased back in summary. “If we could approach the innermost realm of reality as a perceptual matter, then the last thing we would see still in motion would be the shadow of what was, in truth, unmovable and out-of-time.” He pulled his cup back toward him. “We share this surface-begetting labyrinth with an interceder, Grasshopper: a Minotaur.”

Another crackle of lightning underlined his words. The flyer wrapped around the Buddha tore away in another gust to scurry under the table and onto the painter’s feet.

“The Sublime,” Michael blurted. “You’re talking about the Sublime, aren’t you?”

The philosopher gazed over the dimming environs with a face larger in the more delineated table lamp. “This monster can be conjured up out of our space and time, although it is barely in either. It always moves in slow motion for us, because it is the last thing in motion for us. When the airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center, when people leapt from those buildings ledges to keep from being burned alive, when the towers finally came tumbling down—the Sublime reached up through the world to slow its spin, almost making it stop. Our taken-for-granted surfaces were briefly embodied like a glove, and with ancient and outsized fingers that reminded us in no uncertain terms surfaces are only doors.”

Michael was meeker. “Then the Sublime is the boogeyman of our childhood?”

“Yes.” The friend explained, “The arms of the angel that bears every child into the world becomes those of a devil in letting go. This recollection lingers in every adolescent imagination to become a monster hiding under the bed, somewhere always between sleep and death.”

“And what becomes a devil on the way in becomes an angel, once more, on the way out?”

“Precisely.”

The artist’s face brightened to make a connection. “It’s like in the movie, Jacob’s Ladder, where the chiropractor quotes Eckhart about angels and devils being the same thing. Only in different contexts.”

Omar, approving, added, “Lucifer, the most beautiful angel, only became the Devil in being cast out of Heaven.”

A sharp ring pierced the tenebrous veil that had settled over the table; Michael once again jumped.

Omar reached into his pants to pull out a cell phone. “Hello?” There was a pause, one marked by his customary shade of opaque. He clicked the lid shut without saying more.

Michael noted his change of facial expression. “Wrong number?”

Omar poked the mailer pouch at his friend’s elbow, indicating it was one of those questions he was not obliged to answer.

With his curiosity quelled, the painter retraced a step. “The Sublime, then, is proof there is something beyond our labyrinth of infinite regression?”

“Yes.”

Michael sank back in his chair, grinning solemnly at his friend. “We started out talking about movies and ended up talking about metaphysics. You always do that to me.”

Omar laughed. “We started out talking about The Day the Earth Stood Still and ended with Jacob’s Ladder. Where did we veer off-course?”

The artist looked up to see the first plops of rain striking inside the doorway by the Buddha. His voice was still searching. “So what does the Sublime have to do with little green men?”

The philosopher finished his lesson. “We carry the boogeyman into adulthood with us. Make stories and symbols out of it. Revere it even as we fear it. But this Sublimity is never very far away, hiding in our surfaces with the balance of our memory.”

“Hiding behind our faces in clouds?” Michael interjected.

‘Exactly, Grasshopper.” With this, the nearly mythic friend stood up to put his phone back in his pocket.

Seeing an end to it, the painter followed him to his feet.