CHAPTER 6

Dear Grasshopper,

As an enigma, infinity is too self-consistent to be magic, but it is nevertheless magical in its inscrutability. This is what happens when we look into the heavens to see paradoxical distances without end, or try to imagine a “first cause” to reality, or a beginning to time. The difficulty, as Kant saw it, is in assuming infinities have “actual” reality in our received world. Infinities have actuality in mathematics, as with sets and whole numbers, but they do not have sensate reality. One could potentially count forever, or infinitely half distances, as with Zeno’s Paradox, but the tasks could never be completed in actuality. If something has no beginning, middle, or end, it has no boundaries; and if it has no boundaries, it can have no identity in the world of things. In short, a box cannot both have actual reality and have no sides.

Kant concluded that what we suppose to be given to us in sense perception (space, time, and causation) exist only in the mind as modes of sensibility. We cannot apply these concepts, or understand the world within these concepts, without first having a presuppositionless context in which to make them intelligible: namely, the ideation of infinity. This presuppositionless context is transcendentally idea in origin and not physical, since it cannot be deduced as a thing-into-itself from either logic (non-paradoxical as a concept) or from direct experience (non-relational as a thing). Relativity supports Kant’s view that space and time have subjectivity contingent on an observer, though with nothing like the Newtonian uniformity he supposed. Still, the assumption of space and time’s “physical” existence rests entirely on effects and geometry as a scientific concern. There is no true “fabric” to space/time. Space/time is an ingenious way of describing gravity, but it neither explains the true ontological nature of gravity nor the true ontological nature of space and time. Infinity, again, is something else. Science and mathematics have found ways to paper-over the enigma with limits, but such serviceable fixes should not be confused with demystification. Simply put: causation breaks down at the level of quanta, and no proposed number of preceding Big Bangs would ever explain a first Big Bang.

In the larger scheme, these three paradoxes (space, time, causation) form the bedrock “fundamentals” upon which all science is predicated, and this is necessarily done to make sense of the world. Yet to group these intangibles under the banner of “brute facts” is to join the exposition late. Brute facts are not scientific explanations of any kind. They are the same mysterious blank canvas science shares with theology, art, and metaphysics. It is science alone that believes every phenomenon must causally account for itself; and it is science alone that checks the scope of its inquiry by this definition; and ultimate reality does not stand or fall by this criteria. ~Omar

THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, Part Three

Michael thought a beer from the convenience store would calm his nerves, but it only succeeded in making the candle’s shadows lunge at him from the walls with greater animation. With no music to listen to, or light to paint by or television to watch, he was left to pace; and after forty minutes of circumnavigating the living room he decided to retire early. Sleep, regardless the hour he attempted it, was work, and given the lingering impression of the frightful phone call, it might well be impossible that evening. He went outside to search his car for the mailer pouch Omar gave him before leaving Chicago. On unearthing it under a half-empty Kleenex box, he opened it to find sleeping pills. (Omar never told him where he got them and Michael never asked.) The dispenser was unmarked, but likely Eszopiclone.

With beer, candle, and sleeping pills in hand, the resident climbed the steps to his bedroom. While changing into his pajamas, a low thump in the wall startled him. He walked down to the guest room with his light in a show of intimidation to the mice, but found only the forgotten suitcase from earlier that morning. He took the piece of luggage in hand and, not knowing what to do with it, removed it to his attic studio. It was placed on his worktable with the late thought he never bothered to look inside. At the moment the latches were unfastened, a rap of knuckles climbed the steps. Michael headed back down the two flights with the candle, but spied no one through the peephole in the front door. He was already jittery, and did not appreciate the Halloween prank. Another knock happened as he stood there, and throwing open the door to nab the culprit, he found Jacques (too short to be seen in the spyglass) on the welcome mat. His white greasepaint intensified his red, whiskey-soaked eyes.

“Your doorbell doesn’t work,” he complained.

Michael had forgotten about the party. He always jumped into promises blindly, only to regret them hours if not minutes later. Looking down at his pajamas, he hawed. “I’m tucked in for the night, I’m afraid.”

“It’s awfully early for a coffeeholic to go to bed. Can I come in?”

The rattled resident was relieved for the company, even if it was that of a drunken dwarf.

The performance artist sauntered in and pulled a half-consumed bottle of spirits from his sack. “We can have our own party here! Got any cups?”

The unprepared host dropped the candleholder on a ledge and set off in search of clean glasses.

Jacques stared up the dark staircase, but could not see the top. “Where’s your studio?”

Michael reemerged from the kitchen with a roll of Dixie cups. “Up in the attic, although the house is without power.”

The performance artist rallied. “If the old masters could paint by candlelight, we sure-as-hell can manage a quick look-see. Don’t you think?”

The painter nodded, though doubted the inebriated man was capable of negotiating so many steps. He led the way slowly, pausing halfway to let his visitor catch his breath and view the Daedalus Monet painting. The picture was too high on the wall to see well, so the short man shot a glance into Michael’s open bedroom doorway.

On spying the camcorder set up by the bed, he asked, “Are you making pornos?”

“More like a documentary on the nocturnal habits of a sleepwalker.”

Jacques held up his paper cup. “Enough of this stuff and I guarantee you won’t budge from bed to piss.”

With the utterance, the attic door above the two men creaked on its hinges; a chill shot down the steps to extinguish the candle.

“I left the skylight open,” Michael explained, placing the candleholder on the floor while he groped in a pocket. “The matches are downstairs.”

Jacques’ voice was weaker in the darkness. “That’s alright. We can look at your work another time.”

The two poked their way back to the ground floor where Michael relit the candle. The guest, plopping in a chair, wore a spooked expression the feathery light could hardly mitigate. After a few awkward seconds the host tried to distract him in conversation about performance art.

Frowning, the graduate student was brittle. “I think Emerson said art was a jealous mistress. But for me, we’re just in an estranged marriage.”

Jacques’ relationship to his art appeared to be more incidental than passionate, although the painter could relate to his inertia in not wanting to be engaged on the topic. The alcohol, however, went no ways towards loosening either man’s tongue on any other subject, or in lightening the gloomy mood of the house. Michael’s capacity for casual conversation was easily exhausted, and on stumbling into silences it was like being strapped in a dentist’s chair. He was in a position where he would either have to toss the drunk fellow out after awhile or cave-in on the idea of the party. Given his overall reluctance to assert himself, the latter seemed the lesser of two evils. If the party proved unbearable, he reasoned he could simply bug-out and make an inconspicuous exit, by which time Jacques would probably be too plastered to notice.

The host, throwing back the last of the repugnant drink, placed his crumpled cup on the coffee table and eyed his guest with resolve. “Let’s go to this party.”

Jacques brightened.

Michael stood up. “I need to dress.”

“Don’t bother.” The provisional friend pulled a tuxedo from his sack, still in its dry cleaner’s bag. “Here’s your costume.”

“Costume?”

Jacques’ brows arched innocently. “Didn’t I mention that part?”

The painter stiffened when the suit was held against his long body for size.

The dwarf gazed up. “So… are you still game?”

Michael’s anxiety dulled with the kick of the drink. “Give me a second to change.”

Jacques tore the plastic off the suit. “Throw it on over the pajamas.”

The disinclined man dropped to the edge of the couch to negotiate the trousers. “I need to get my shoes, at least.”

“No time for that, either. The slippers will do. We’re just walking up the block. This is a slipper-kind-of-town.”

The legs and sleeves of the tuxedo were mockingly short, and the pajamas sticking out at both ends only added insult to injury.

The performance artist was satisfied. “The jacket covers the worst of it.”

Jacques endeavored to keep stride with his taller companion, but spirits considerably impaired his motor skills. He had underestimated the distance to the party, but as the men neared their apparent destination, a large two-story house practically staggered down the street to greet them. It resembled a snaggletooth jack-o-lantern belching boisterous revelers out onto a porch; Michael drew in breath before hacking his way through the melee at the door. Costumed partiers were thick in the overheated front room. The momentary opening was promptly sealed off to bar any retreat, leaving the mismatched pair to push forward without a heading. Michael was immediately regretting his boldness in coming, but stuck close to the slighter man; Jacques, in spite of being nearly trampled, was instantly in the flow. The crowd rubbed along the walls and was rapidly approaching a place where spontaneous combustion seemed probable.

The graduate student eagerly pointed out a painting over bobbing heads. “That’s the work of the professor!” he exclaimed. “The guy who lives here!”

The painter squinted through the cigarette haze at a portrait of a nude woman hanging on the wall.

Jacques’ voice bristled with envy. “This prof has screwed more coeds than law should allow! And he gets to hang his trophy hides up for his wife and the faculty to praise! What a racket!”

The artist’s model was denied a head, and her body was enlarged and cropped in the frame so as to elevate through abstraction even as it titillated. Given Jacques’ remarks, this was perhaps done to guard against self-recrimination as much as for aesthetic reasons. Michael wanted to take the art in critically, but the quality of the work denied him his customary feeling of superiority. He hated art as much as loved it, and precisely because it had a nasty way of making high-minded such men of low means and character. His attention, however, could not long be diverted from the bustling around him. None of the revelers were swinging from the light fixtures, per se, but many were stepping on the hems of drapes and bumping into precariously placed vases on tables. The alcohol coursing through the painter’s head was more successful at blurring his senses than staving off his agoraphobia; a barrage of elbows and cackles pelted him from all sides. In spite of the commotion, one fellow seemed more out of place than he. The partier wore earmuffs and a blindfold as part of an incommodious costume, and his movements were glacial compared to those around him. He appeared to be a little island of calm in a sea of calamity.

Michael bent down to grab Jacques’ ear. “Is that a costume?”

“No! He’s part of a sensory deprivation project! He was over at Peters Hall, but some students set fire to the building after the last home game, so the psychology department has put him up at a hotel somewhere in town!”

Michael was bemused. “But why is he at a party if…?”

Jacques threw up his hand to acknowledge several comrades huddled in a dim corner; one gestured the latecomers over. No one in this enclave was wearing a costume, and their standoffish appearance seemed more to make an impression than to mingle. Jacques made introductions before launching into departmental politics with the fellow grads; the painter, being pushed to the periphery, was left to drift. Michael was never comfortable in groups of strangers, so to evade catastrophe he visually graphed himself onto someone and used them for cover—no matter how superficial or nonexistent the acquaintance. After a while, the performance artist was oblivious to his presence, and the painter was finally free to melt into the background.

Several underage gatecrashers queued up in a keg line near the bottom of the staircase. Above them on the banister, an inflatable woman had been violated with a red highlighter pen. Michael’s sense, warranted or not, was that every set of piteous eyes was on him and preoccupied with his being off by himself. He looked over the multitude of decorated heads to surmise the level of difficulty that lay between him and his desired exit. Unable to see anyway to get to it, he sought temporary refuge by taking a path of least resistance up to the darker, less-populated second floor. The air was cooler there, although the half-seen costumes were creepier than those downstairs. As the unsure guest negotiated the terrain, he realized he was on the backend of something untoward. Several men were gathered around an open door and watching a couple going at it on a bed. The rhythmic clinking of a loose belt buckle tingled unpleasantly in Michael’s ears. He pushed through the clogged artery, but glimpsed the rude hieroglyph of a splayed Cleopatra under her laboring lover. The woman’s gaze was fixed on him in the doorway, though it was her cry that chased him to the opposite end of the corridor.

A wiry pirate with a coat hanger parrot stepped out of the shadows in front of him. “Mermaid, matey!” he shouted. “Dat be ‘er siren song! Tie yore self ta de mast to escape ‘er lure—if ye takes me meanin’!”

The painter pulled up short in the jaws of the trap, realizing it was only a partier parodying the delusional wino. He smiled nervously before turning back toward the staircase with half-a-mind to dive down it. If it was possible, more people were in the house than when he came in. Michael almost made it to the bottom of the stairs before becoming stuck. He fished around for Jacques, but the little man could no longer be found in the fray. A scantily clad girl passed down where he stood on the steps. There was a whiff of cinnamon in the brush, and a sprinkling of fake bronze skin cream. Michael spotted a coiled snake bracelet around her arm and knew she was the exhibitionist from the upstairs bedroom. Without making eye contact, she smiled like a thief in her slink; tufts of black wig slapped her satisfied cheeks. Her ample and all-but-liberated bosom flopped about under a safety-pinned chemise, and was reason enough for the crowd of men at the foot of the stairs to let her merge into traffic; the painter, however, was left in the bottleneck. As he continued to stand shoulders above the gatekeepers’ disinterest, both in body and moral compass, Michael detected the smell of pipe tobacco mingling with cigarette smoke. He glanced up at the top of the landing to see an older man who was also not wearing a costume. A trimmed beard had him looking like the lord of the manor gazing smugly over his domain, and this alone pegged him as the other party to the sexual shenanigans. He did not notice the painter, but drifted down the steps in the manner of Moses parting waters. With elbow patches on his blazer, and a sense of entitlement only the tenure track could engender, he pushed effortlessly through the throng. He headed toward a handsome woman his own age dressed as a water sprite. She leaned precariously on a walking cane, yet appeared effervescent while she engaged students in conversation. On seeing the man approach, her hand lit on his cheek. He swooned over her like a lovesick schoolboy, although Michael suspected from her composure she knew what had transpired upstairs. The two turned to share a staged kiss before moving together toward the kitchen; a retinue closed ranks behind them in pursuit of more alcohol.