you look familiar
When you're heating a liquid, there's a point where its temperature plateaus. You continue to put more and more energy into the thing with no appreciable change. Then BAM, it boils and turns to gas. Game development is like that. Weight loss is like that (though if I have a plateau on weight gain I have yet to find it). Faith is like that. It's the latent stage in which it's the hardest to justify continued effort, and it's the latent stage where something remarkable is about to happen.
So, take a guy whose corpus callosum has been severed. How this came to be, I don't know - let's save that for another day. Sit him in a chair and set up a barrier so that you can show his left eye (the right hemisphere of his brain) things that his right eye (the left hemisphere of his brain) can't see. Now show his right hemisphere a piece of paper that says "Get up and leave the room."
"Looking back, I think I knew I was dying long before they found the tumors. After our daughter was born, I began to feel the press of time in a way I never had."
"All new parents feel that."
"This wasn't about having enough time, about being busy. This was about time running out, spilling away. I spent every minute I could with my wife and daughter, and I tried to be really there, in the moment. I thought perhaps I was just growing up. It wasn't until later I realized this was a kind of premonition. I was savoring life, because at some level I knew it was sliding away from me. The more I savored, or maybe just the more I paid attention, the more aware I became of time marching away. It made me impatient.
"I found it increasingly difficult to bear the common pettiness and politics at my work. I grew a temper, which I'd never had. At first people actually found it entertaining and even encouraged it. My office was filled with passive-aggressive types, conflict-avoiders. As long as I was doing their confronting for them, they loved me for it. But it didn't take long for me to turn on everyone.
"Waiting in lines and in traffic was unbearable. I found myself baffled by people who would spend minutes arguing with a cashier over a dollar or two. Lives spent so, including my own before all this, now seemed distant and incomprehensible...and tragic. Couldn't they see how time spilled through their fingers as they grasped and growled at each other?
"I began to watch the elderly. I spent time on them. Not a lot. Little things. I looked them in the eye as I held a door or lifted a bag. They seemed to appreciate just being noticed. There were some who were impatient and angry like me, but most had a pace about them that I wanted to understand. I developed relationships with several of our older neighbors. It suited my wife because we were living far from home and these surrogate grandparents plugged, for a time, the familial holes that distance made.
"Everyone thought I was wonderful, but I can tell you I was mostly driven by this strange new kinship I'd found with people who seemed to understand time. Of course I didn't know that's what was happening while it was happening. I couldn't have corrected anyone's perception of me if I'd wanted to because I didn't understand it myself. I was beginning to think I was pretty wonderful myself.
"Then I turned thirty. My life so far hadn't been terribly introspective, but I'd always understood that humans in general were full of shortcomings and that I was not unique. It made me a nice guy, this abstract confession to myself that I had the power to cause pain and that I probably had done so along the way. But now I was starting to come up with concrete examples of my...sins. Memories of old girlfriends came to mind, and I'd see suddenly how careless I'd been with their hearts, how selfish. I had a strong desire to contact them, to apologize.
"I managed to find two of them. One was an art professor at a college in Louisiana, and the other had earned a doctorate and was working as a medical writer at Johns Hopkins. They had lives, and memories too I'm sure. In the end, I did nothing. I didn't think my wife would understand, and I felt my apology, after all these years, would be selfish too. If I now understood the pain I'd caused, it didn't change anything. They'd moved on years ago. Maybe they still carried something of it with them. A memory that could end a smile. A pause when they looked through a window at the rain. But what pride to think that I could ease some pain of theirs, to assume they hadn't got past my adolescent blunders, to presume they needed me to do this for them.
"That's the real cost of sin, that after a time it simply can't be forgiven or forgotten. It has to become just a part of you, and accepted. And so I spent my time with my wife and daughter with even more vigor, as penance.
"Do you see? Do you see how I was getting things in order? I didn't, but at some level I understood it. When my wife discovered the mole on my back, it wasn't fear that I felt. The mole was the puzzle piece that made all the others fit, and that's when I knew. That's when I understood what was happening. I didn't need the doctors to tell me what was happening, though I went through the motions. I didn't need the hope that tests and treatments could provide. I was reading my life like a farmer reads the weather. The time was ripe.
"An initial test showed it was malignant. The doctor said that sometimes the immune system can beat the cancer and sometimes it can't. He wanted to remove some tissue to see if the cancer had spread. I could've told him what he'd find, but I knew no one else would believe it until they cut me open and examined me from the inside out. My own skin was killing me and I was powerless to stop it. I saw other patients in various stages of treatment during my visits. They looked terrible, and I knew the therapy and recovery would wreck me. And I knew it wouldn't work.
"I didn't want my daughter to remember me like that. I drove home along the cliffs one night and was turning all this over in my head as I approached the first of several hairpin turns. I moved my foot to brake but paused with it just above the pedal. And just like that, I ended it."
"Nothing's happening."
"This is driving me nuts. There's got to be some reason we're here. I refuse to sit idly while my eternity is decided for me."
"Oh I think it's probably already decided. Most religions emphasize the living world as the arena for offering service to God."
"We're like the lover in The Lady, or the Tiger. The hope that remains is to open the door that has already been chosen for us. Can we trust the chooser?"
"I'd like to punch Stockton."
"How long do we have before we're sifted?"
"Hard to say. 'Three days and three nights' is idiomatic. The people who formed the belief counted time by inclusive reckoning: Any portion of a period is counted as a whole. By traditional interpretation, we have at least thirty-eight hours before we're truly...dead."
"There must be a reason for us to be here, like this, together? Something we're supposed to do before the time...before the time expires?"
"But what?"
"It's possible our task is just to wait."
"Psalm 46:10."
"Come again?"
"Be still and know that I am God."
"Yeah but, for thirty-eight hours?"
I don't really know what got into me, but last Fall I wrote several short stories. Most of them were poo, but one has stuck with me. I briefly entertained trying to sell some of the stories and therefore resisted posting any of them online. Almost a year later, I've changed my mind. Here's what I think was the best of the bunch. It's the last one I wrote in that brief spasm of do-somethingedness. I'll post it in parts so that it's digestable. What you're reading is the very first draft as it came out the week I wrote it with one quick editing pass as I paste it here in the blog.
"It was over before I really felt anything. I mean, I felt the impact, sure. Felt it in my teeth mainly. I remember that. But there's that moment after the impact, before the pain, when the part of you that controls the involuntaries is too stunned, too overwhelmed. All the fuses are blown. You wait for a breath. Your lungs will fill, and you'll be back online. And you know it's gonna hurt. It never came. That breath never came. The pain never came.
"But things were amazing in that moment. Clear. Everything looked so real. So...there. I felt like Lewis's damned ghosts on their field trip to heaven. Everything looked so solid. My book was lying near me, open, the top pages on either side fanning back toward each other, wanting to close back up. My face was pressed sideways on the asphalt, and the book looked like some alien temple at the edge of a charred waste. Each craggy chunk of tar cast a perfect miniature shadow. A street-cleaner must've been by recently -- black pools dotted the landscape, reflecting another, larger world. I saw my face in all of them. It didn't look good.
"There was an awful sound. A great creaking, grating sound. I realized it was my jaw working. My tongue was moving. I was trying to say something. Maybe I was saying something, I don't know. Then it all...winked out."
"What were you reading?"
"Pardon?"
"What book were you reading?"
"Oh, it was an anthology of classic short stories. You know, the kind profs love but mostly just bore or enrage everyone else. Or both. Great for classroom discussions but for the most part, just miserable as far as what people want from a story.
"It had fallen open to Stockton's The Lady, or the Tiger. Are you familiar with it? I swore to myself I'd never pull a Stockton...leave the conclusion entirely up to the reader. No one wants that. Ambiguity sure, give them something to talk about, but to just leave it all to the reader with a wink and a nod? Not me. Never. Unless you know going into it there'll be no tidy conclusion, you feel you've been wronged. It's all about expectation. So much of how we move through life comes of expectation.
"The worst of it is that Stockton gets what he wants. You catch yourself thinking about the question he leaves: What fate does the princess choose for her doomed lover? You remind yourself that you hate the story when you find yourself picking it up the second time, and the third. Soon you're writing your own Lady or Tiger just to get the thing out of you. For me, writing is often exorcism."
"Excuse me, may I remind you two of where we are? You're going on like we're on some kind of holiday."
"And where are we, precisely, would you say?"
"...we're not on holiday."
"Thank you, that's quite helpful."
"I think I might know what's going on."
"Do tell."
"We all ended up here after some trauma, yes? We should all be dead, but there are no demons dragging us down into fiery pits. No loved ones with angel's wings leading us toward a wonderful, white light. We can't feel anything; an effect of our condition. We can't see anything; an effect of our location."
"If you could dispose of the pedantry and move on to the point it would be most appreciated."
"Sorry. We can hear and smell and speak. We can shift, but can't seem to move. We seem to be...anchored. I think we're hovering."
"Hovering?"
"Hovering. There's an ancient Hebrew belief that after death, the spirit hovers over its body for three days, intending to reenter it if possible."
"...It's vapor lock."
"It's a load of crap."
"I'm sorry, vapor lock?"
"When an engine gets hot, a bit of fuel can evaporate and block the rest. The engine stalls and you don't go anywhere until it condenses. Or is siphoned off.
"...We either phase shift back into our bodies or get sifted off?"
"Shift or sift."
"I don't think we're headed back in. This isn't the first century. There's no grace period in the twenty-first century -- when you're dead you're dead."
"Nevertheless, here we are."
"And again I ask where, precisely, is here?"
"Tilt your head back. A very faint line of light, do you see it? I'm guessing each of us has one of our own. I don't think those are above us. I think we're lying prone, and those are doors...drawer doors."
"God have mercy, it's a morgue. We're in a morgue, aren't we?"
