YLEM

by

Eliot Fintushel

 

he Manhattan Motherfuckers were a Puerto Rican street gang that fled New York City to become hippies in Santa Fe.  They used to sit outside El Centro, the crash pad run by an eccentric Catholic priest, and watch the sun set over the Sangre de Christo Mountains.  As the sky colored and darkened, they would drum wildly on anything a man or woman could hit.  Then they would spread their army rolls and crash.

One night, hitching through, I shared a ratty sofa with one of the gang leader's girlfriends, while a dozen Motherfuckers snored on the floor.  If we rolled off the sofa, we'd fall on two or three of them.  I heaved and pressed and jammed and ground, unable to make an end of it with Sunshine's girl, while she sleepily let me poke.  Nobody seemed to mind.  Over and over and over, the whole time we were at it, a scratched record (I presumed) was playing this phrase:

     "Is that boy still climbing up the mountain?

      Has he faltered, or has he fallen down SCREEE!

      Is that boy . . . "

And we humped and we humped.  I still have a urinary tract infection that reappears from time to time, a penicillin-resistant strain of clap, which I got, indirectly, from the head of the Manhattan Motherfuckers!

That night, I had my first revelatory headache.  I was wedged in a crevice narrower than my skull.  Iron was melting and streaming red hot into my eyes, my ears, my mouth and nose.  An avalanche thundered around me, and the sky swarmed with snakes, noxious flowers and searing lights.

My second headache came in 1966, as I walked along the Susquehanna, thinking how nice it would be at the bottom, dead.  When the big blackout hit New York, I thought it was me.  Then came the news of a mechanical failure at the generating plant in Niagara Falls.

I had a headache like a mine cave-in.  Phantasms and fireballs burned the sky all over Broome County.  Again I was deafened as if by an avalanche, and I couldn't shake the smell of rock dust -- lime and sulfur.

Now, twenty-seven years later, I know --

1. The blackout: it wasn't caused by a power plant breakdown.

2. The song: it wasn't from a skipping record.

3. My "symptoms": they were a perception of reality.

Now I know, because I just had the headache again, like an earthquake demolishing a rock wall, and the wall is down, and I see the truth.

 

he occasion for my third headache was a visit from an old college friend with whom I once shared an A-frame in the hills above the Susquehanna.  Siggy was passing through Sonoma, where I now live, on business.  In college, he and I used to talk the way some people dance, cutting incredible figures in the mind, staying up late and planning great works, right up to the day theambulance came and took him, babbling and shrieking, to the state hospital; that was a few days before the big blackout.  They eventually gave him shock treatment, and his parents, immigrants, concentration camp survivers, took him home to Long Island to recover, while they got worse.

It had been a sort of contest between us, which of us would crumble first, he in his mania, or I in my depression.  Siggy won.

He seemed OK now, by and large, if somewhat dried out.  He had a beer belly and a family and a gold Bulova that he frequently consulted.  The wallet photos of his wife and kids could have been cut from an ad for home insurance.  He chain smoked, however, and ate everything in my refrigerator without tasting a morsel.  Every pocket in his brown sports jacket had a pack of Luckies in it, except for one with a bag of Bull Durham and papers -- for emergencies.

At about two in the morning he lit a cigarette scavenged from one of his ashtrays and said, "So tell me, Eliot, how long have you been with us?"

I laughed, and he laughed back.

"No, really," he said.  "How long?"  Pinching the butt between his knuckles, he stretched and yawned, allowing himself to make a grotesque, sleepy face while he waited for me to answer.

"What do you mean?" I said.  My head was starting to throb.  I looked out the window, alarmed to hear someone start to mow their lawn at two in the morning; then I realized it wasn't a lawn mower.

"You've never given me any reason to doubt your loyalty in all these years," Siggy said.  I'd seen reversible jackets before, but this was the first time I'd seen one reverse itself.  Now it was red and gold.  But the light was changing -- maybe that was it.  "And your supervisors tell me they can always depend on you, Elly, even when the other guys are frigging the dog."

"Supervisors?" I said.  "What is this?  A scene from some movie?  I don't know what I'm supposed to say."

"Just say thank you, my boy.  I'm sending you on a very important mission."  How had he turned the cigarette into a fresh cigar?  I was sure it was one of Siggy's old mind games, and I worried that he was taking it too far, that he would go off the deep end, as he had back in '66.  "You're gonna be one big man when you get back, Elly."

I said, "I like my job the way it is."  Where did that come from?  I just found myself saying it.  "I like everything, really.  I am grateful, Mr. Duba, but couldn't you get someone else?"  My head hurt so bad I had to squint to keep the light from stabbing me.

"Duba?" Siggy said.  "Who's Duba?"  The cigar was back to a cigarette butt.  His jacket had again reversed itself.  "Have you got anything else to eat in this place?"

Two AM and it was already light outside.  I looked out the window at the brilliant, blue sky, filled with dirigibles; I could make out the figure of a bull painted on the hull of each one.  When I looked back, Duba was peering at me through a thick cloud of cigar smoke.  "Come on," he said, "don't put me on.  What are you, trying to wheedle more dough out of me?  I'll give you dough, believe me.  You must have a little ambition, a guy like you.  You weren't cut out to be a now lubber."

"I don't got any ambitions," I said.

"What about Topsy?  You could take her along, you know.  In fact, I want you to take her along.  She knows the route, Elly."

There were the flowers in the air, the snakes and the exploding lights, the thunder and the pain so sharp I could see it, like fissures wedged open in the bones of my face.  "Topsy?" I said.  "Please don't talk about Topsy."

"Your little secret, huh?  Look.  Let's level.  She's not gonna stay with you, Elly.  They never do."  Topsy was a chrono-anomaly.  She had just shown up in my apt one day when I got home from work.  That was about the same time that the helium ratios changed and the dirigibles started showing up -- retroactively.

Look, I know it -- if not for Topsy, I never would have had a woman at all.  I'm a good chess player though.  Some people think I'm a great chess player, only I don't like to beat everybody all the time, because of how it makes them feel bad.

"On the other hand, Elly," Mr. Duba told me, "if you take her along on this mission, see, she'll love it.  She'll love you, boy, because you know where you're going?  You know where I'm sending you?"

"No, Mr. Duba.  Where?"  Gee, my head hurt something awful.  I was ready to get out of there and go back to the basement offices and sort the rest of the guys' tools.  What do I know about missions and stuff?  That was hot air, if you ask me, except if I could get to keep Topsy that way.

"Ylem, Elly.  Right back to the ylem.  And that's where Topsy comes from, you know.  That's her home, boy.  If you take her there, believe you me, she'll love you to pieces."

"I know it," I said.  "You're right.  I'm gonna do it." Something happened to me then that I don't like to talk about, but my eyes kind of went out of focus, and I thought for a second that Mr. Duba was somebody else.  I thought he was an old pal of mine from college.  But I never went to college.  Then he was Mr. Duba again, and I felt better.

 

opsy was lying in the corner listening between the stations, like she always done, to radio static.  She had a name for it: "relic background radiation."  But I could beat her at chess.  I could hardly see her, black as the shadow the way she is, even her gums and teeth and the 'whites' of her eyes.  I told her, wear white at night, but she didn't care about nothing but static.  She said, "It's telegrams from home."

How come she remembers stuff that never happened?  How come she knows the colors and sizes of stuff that don't exist and the dates of birthdays for people that never was born?  It's all on account of how she got here straight out of nowhere from Mr. Bull screwing in the deep past.

When I told her about our mission she turned off the radio for the first time since a month, day and night, day and night, and she put her arms around me and pulled me close till I went inside of her.  Then we did it, like she showed me.

After, she says to me: "That bastard Duba is up to some bad shit, Elly, but maybe it'll get me home."  She knows me pretty good.  She can see what I'm thinking.  She gives me a peck and says, "Elly, you dear, it'll be a home for you too.  Nobody'll take advantage of you there, we'll be together forever, and when you win at chess, you won't have to be afraid of making people angry."  So I smile big.

My face above it, the breeze from the flushing toilet revived me a little.  Siggy laid both hands on my shoulders.  "Can I get you anything?" he said.  Just the sound of his voice was excruciating, but I had stopped heaving.

"No," I said.  "I'm OK.  I'm OK."  I pushed my head and shoulders, a leaden mantle, up from the toilet seat.  "Siggy, what's ylem?"

He laughed, "It's Greek to me, partner."  I started to close my eyes and let my head slide back down, when he said, "Hey, I was just kidding.  It really is Greek . . . no, Latin!  Don't you remember?  We used to toss that word around back in the A-frame days.  It's supposed to be before the Big Bang, when everything was in one place the size of a pinhead."

"Does it send out radio signals?"

"Sure, Doubleyew Big Bang FM.  Actually, it does, in a way.  Some guys working for Ma Bell found it in the sixties.  Very faint.  Very cool.  A few degrees above absolute zero.  Static.  The afterglow of the Big Bang.  Very funky.  You want some water?"

"Relic background radiation?"

"That's it.  So what are you asking me for?"

And then we were sitting, Topsy and I, in harsh sunlight, on a barren salt flat a few hundred yards from the base of a rocky cliff, and I really was OK.  The only thing was, I was having some trouble making one thought follow the last pretty good, and Topsy was in the middle of jabbering at me like no tomorrow, which I don't like, and she knows it too, so why do it is what I want to know, huh?  Also, some Zeppelins were grouping up on the other side of us from the cliff, and it made me nervous, and I think they were making Topsy talk fast like that too.

She was showing me some stuff from her pockets, which she had two of, one on either hip, with stuff in them, but I didn't get to have but one.  She was saying, "This is a Doppler gauge.  This dial sets the scale factor.  Yours is exactly the same as mine, and we have to make sure they're always set the same, Elly, or things will get very confusing very fast.  Are you listening to me?"

"Sure I am, Topsy," I say, "but them dirigibles aren't Mr. Duba's, and I think we should get out of here fast."

"I'm keeping track of them, Elly," she said.  "You just concentrate on what I'm saying.  Remember the hypodyne?"

"My head feels like it's cracking open," I told Siggy.  "I know this sounds stupid, but I have to ask you:  Are my eyes open?"

"No, they're not," he said.

"Well, I can see," I said.

"Tell me what you see, Eliot."

"I'm not here.  I mean, I'm not in California.  I'm not in this house.  I'm not even in this time, I think.  I'm in a dark tube.  It's like a CAT scan, but the rays are doing something to me.  I think they're killing me, Siggy."

"You're fine, Elly.  They're not killing you."

Then Topsy's voice: "Listen to Mr. Duba, Elly.  It's the hypodyne.  I'm next, Elly.  I'm right after you.  The hypodyne will make you into thoughts, Elly -- that's one way to say it.  Don't be scared.  I'll be with you soon."

"That's right, my boy," Mr. Duba said.  "Then you and Topsy here will be hypostatized into the timeship."

"I'm scared."  That's what I wanted to say, but nothing come out.  I couldn't even find my mouth.  I was all hypodyned, I guess.  Then when Mr. Duba talked some more, I couldn't even tell if maybe it was me thinking it instead . . .

"Don't you worry, son.  I know exactly how you feel.  Like air in a popped balloon, right?  It'll only be a minute.  Topsy's getting hers right now.  She'll be with you before you can say Duba Enterprises, Eenk!  Then we'll stat you into the timeship.  I know you're going to do us real proud, kiddo.  Just look out for Zeppelins, heh, heh!

"No, really, Elly, I know you're going to really give those helium boys something to think about.  Do what Topsy tells you, now!  I know you will!  This is the Second Bull!"

("Second Bull?" Siggy asked me.  "He said, 'This is the Second Bull?'"  Siggy dug his fingers into my shoulders, anchoring me on Sonoma Mountain.

"Yeah," I said, "like the Zen Bulls, I guess:

          The Bull is sought.  The Bull is tracked.

          The Bull is glimpsed.  The Bull is caught.

          The Bull is tamed.  The Bull is ridden . . .
 . . . and so on.  We were tracking Bull.  It's a joke.")

Then I felt like I was dish water going around and around down the drain, like, and when I was all dripped down into the pipes, then I was out cold, and when I woke up, me and Topsy was standing in the shadow of some dirigibles, and she was showing me stuff, and she was saying:  "Remember the hypodyne?" and I remembered it.

She said, "We're in the timeship now, Elly.  This landscape is a hypostat of the whole history of the universe.  See how it looks flat for a ways and then, about two hundred yards from here, it starts sloping up, and then it's a quarter mile or so straight up?  Now watch what I do with my Doppler gauge, and you do exactly the same thing, you hear?"

"You bet, Topsy girl," I said.  "Easy as pie."

In my pocket I had one of the same things of what Topsy had, which they put there, and I took it out, and I looked at it, and I looked at what she did, and I did it.  I punched the OUTPUT button, the blue one.  Then I punched a red one and some other ones.  Then I set the big thing to REDSHIFT: LOCAL SCALE FACTOR TIMES TWO, and then I fell down.  Topsy helped me get up.

"You see, Elly?" she said.  "We just changed the lay of the land."  The ground we were standing on looked like a mountain side now.  It was slanted real steep.  Also, the dirigibles were way back behind us, almost out of sight.

"This is incredible," I said to Siggy.  I couldn't see him -- I had ice packs over my head and eyes, and even without them, I think I could only have seen the inside of the timeship.  "They've got a machine that makes time look like a rock cliff in Utah.  And then there's another one that changes the scaling of the slope according to the redshift as you go back in time.  It's like different powers on a microscope, only . . . "

"Take it easy," Siggy said.  "Don't talk, Eliot."

". . . Only, 'YOU ARE THERE!'" I said.

"No," he said, "you are there, Eliot.  We're trying to get you back."

"What?" I said.

"We're trying to get you back," is what Mr. Duba said.  I mean, I thought it was Mr. Duba, only Topsy says shush, that it isn't Mr. Duba, because the dirigible people are trying to fool us so they can shoot us or stop us.  They are Mr. Duba's competitors, that bum Bull, see, who made all the extra helium so they could corner some markets, when Mr. Duba's stock went sliding, and they did it by going back in their timeship to tinker with near the ylem like what we're gonna do, only ours is better.

"Listen, Elly," Topsy said, "we've got to hurry.  Those helium boys are on our tail.  Do what I do.  Switch back to the old Doppler scaling.  And make sure you don't touch anything else unless I tell you.  Then hold my hand and run like hell."

We started in to do our buttons, but then Topsy said, "Wait! I have to show you this, Elly."  She showed me a round black ball, so black it almost looked like a hole in the palm of her hand.  "If anything happens to me, Elly, and I don't make it up the cliff, you take this off me, understand?  You take it all the way up to where the redshift is ten billion, almost at the summit.  That's where the helium numbers got switched.  Wedge it into a crack or lay it on a flake, then come back down.  There's no need for you to enter the ylem except for me."

I said, "You're not gonna die, Topsy."

Then we did some more buttons, both of us the same.  Everything flattened out, and I fell on my keester again, but I got up and reared up to run like hell.  Topsy didn't even have to tell me.  What am I, stupid?  Those big helium ships were all over the sky, and they were shooting hard things at us, like rivets or sixteen penny nails.  It made little cracks and explosions of salt all over the place like you wouldn't want to step in or get in the way of, believe me.  A guy could die like that.

 

ake a memo," Siggy said.  The cigar smoke was making me dizzy again, and I thought I might have to run back to the bathroom to vomit.

"Don't," I said.  "Please.  Shh!"  My eyes were covered with ice packed in washcloths, but I had the idea that they were a kind of visor that would give me a real image of the state of the universe to which some land feature corresponded in the hypostat Topsy and I were traversing via the timeship.

"Push that visor up and run, Elly," Topsy was saying.

"I can't," I said.  "My head hurts.  I'm sick to my stomach."

"Push it up," she said.  She was tugging at my hand.  I had taken one stride when the visor had slid down and I had gotten mixed up on account of how I saw big lizards everywhere and the ground cracking and making oceans and stuff.  "We've gone back a hundred and fifty million years, Elly.  Just stay in the hypostat.  Never mind the damned visor!"

"I don't give a damn how you feel," Siggy told me.  "I want you to take a goddamn memo.  Do you get it?  OK?"

"Sure, sure," I said.  Anything to calm that voice of his.  It was pushing me over the edge; I didn't want to throw up.  "Sure, Mr. Duba."

"OK.  No copies, understand?  This goes to Bull and nobody else.  Burn your notes.  The usual precautions . . . "

I thought, do "the usual precautions" include having me killed once the deal with Bull is set?  I shifted the washcloths to get more ice directly over my temples.

"OK.  Dearest P period comma Nice trick you pulled exclamation point I wake up and guess what question mark The helium numbers are changed going back to God's early childhood and guess who was there to cash in from time ex minus one couple of exclamation points  What a burner on me comma huh question mark  I gotta hand it to you period  Overnight Duba is down a couple of hundred and the sky is clogged with dirigibles period  Underline Your dirigibles period  So you got back to the Big Bang exclamation point -- No, wait, make it a comma; I don't want it to look like I'm too impressed -- and you worked over the nucleosynthesis comma well I got news for you comma hot shot period  I'm going back there too comma I'm gonna change everything back and good comma and I don't care if the chrono-anomalies make your head wind up sprouting from your crotch period  My boys have got it figured out failsafe and you are not even gonna be history comma Bull comma my man period  So how about let's make a deal before my people hit the ylem comma what do you say question mark  Otherwise comma that's OK by me comma only you better get used to having piss up your nose period Affectionately et cetera.  And get that off to Mr. Bull the day before yesterday -- no, make it last Thursday.  Use the executive time shuttle if you have to."

I said, "Yes, Mr. Duba," and I stumbled to the toilet to throw up.

 

 couldn't help it because the visor kept flipping down on accident, and then I would see some stuff and I would almost fall except I made myself, and I was getting plenty of bloody scratches from them spikes and rivets, even a bad one on the back of my neck where something stuck in there.  Once, my foot slid a little on a pebble, and I looked down and so the lousy visor clacked over my eyes again, and when I watched that pebble roll backwards under my feet, well, it wasn't a pebble, brother, but it was a whole sea full of funny fish boiling and steaming and going back and forth from eggs to skeletons and winding up back there with the big lizards near to where we come from.  Then I pushed the visor back up and run.  Don't worry, Topsy.  Here I come, and I'm fast.

Another time I got scared because the visor fell down and I got the feeling that Topsy was only somebody I read about in a book, because she was a jillion years ago, which she really was in a way, because she was so far ahead of me right then, because I stopped for a second to fix that visor.

Then, in maybe fifty yards I stopped worrying about the stuff the dirigibles was throwing at us -- big rocks was falling straight out of the sky and making holes, and Topsy said, "We've gone nearly four and a half billion years."  That's what Topsy said.  She was maybe fifty million years in front of me, which means behind me really, because of how the farther we went, the earlier it was; it looked like about two feet.

"We've lost them," Topsy said.  "Bull can't follow us here except on foot.  From here on, every step we take is a quarter of a billion years, Elly.  Pretty soon there won't be any planets any more; they won't have formed yet.  Not even any solid rock -- I mean, in the real world.  Here in the hypostat, we can still move all right . . . "

" . . .  but only on our own power," I said.  Siggy was falling asleep under the reading lamp.

"What are you talking about?" he said.

"The hypostat, Siggy," I told him.  "Once you get back to this point, where the redshift is about to spring up by powers of powers, you can't use any kind of vessel.  You can hardly wear any clothes.  The Doppler meter and the visor are a compromise.  You see, you have to mix yourself with it, Siggy.  You have to struggle in the landscape of the hypostat, become one with it.  That's the only way to stay inside the timeship.  Otherwise you blow out the hull to God knows where, synchronous to nothing in this world and nothing in the next."

"Oh, I get it," Siggy sighed.  He smacked his lips and snuggled into the cushions on the sagging easy chair.  In two breaths' time, he was asleep.

I'm taking a minute to check my bod, now that I can afford it.  I smart all over, but there are bruises and scratches in only a few places.  The worst is my left ham, where one of Bull's little projectiles has wedged itself.  I can tug at it, but that hurts like hell, and whenever there's bad pain, like it or not, I see where I am: about four point six billion BC, with celestial rock heaps piling up around me, free-floating in space, dark snowmen rolling to planet size.  I clench my eyes like little black fists, and I pull the spike out.  I remember doing this before -- I've learned that that's a sure sign that it never happened.

I lift my black arms like wings, to scan along the length of them for other injuries.  I survey my legs and my torso.  Nothing serious.  Elly is dying, but he doesn't know it.  The brass-colored dart embedded in the back of his neck is slow poison, Bull's calling card.  There's nothing to be done except to hope he can make it to the summit with me before his nerve tissue starts to lose integrity.

Like the terrain of our journey back in time, shaped by the logarithmic rise of the redshift, the rate of recession of galaxies (exploding out of the ylem, lo, these billions of years), Elly's illness will be slight at first, then sudden and catastrophic -- Witness the sheer cliff some five hundred feet ahead, erupting toward all our origin, Amitabha Buddha, the Densely Packed, ylem, my home.

          Grant, Oh Amitabha, that this pathetic fool's

     death will help to bring me back.  Grant that the

     bastard Duba be foiled in his machinations, and

     Bull in his!  Let me come home!

A quake rocked the entire landscape, throwing me into Elly's arms.  We struggled to remain erect while up and down went missing, and we found ourselves half-skidding, half-tumbling forward into the collapse of the protosolar nebula.  The timeship itself was suffering an attack; our hull was being battered by volleys of HHC.

"HHC?" Siggy asked me.  His voice sounded strange, but I couldn't see why; the melting ice packs were pressed around my eyes, and I felt weighed down all over by something irresistably heavy, like a lead sheet.  The place smelled faintly of chlorine.  Our voices echoed harshly, as if from foursquare plaster walls.

"HHC," I said.  Then, hearing the sound of my own voice, I realized it: I was Siggy.  "Hypostatized Hubble Constants."

"Mm hmm!" -- the new voice.

"The Hubble constant gives you the recession rate of the galaxies, based on their distance," I explained.

"Tell me about it," the dark man said.

"Well, it isn't really a constant . . . ," I said.

" . . . I see . . ."

" . . . Because it changes as the universe ages.  But it's:

                            r=Hd.
Do the math . . . "

" . . . Uh huh . . ."

" . . . and you see that H, the Hubble constant, equals r over d.  But d is just r times t."

" . . . Distance is rate times time? . . . "

"Yes.  So you get H equal to r over r times t."

"The r's would cancel out."

"More or less.  So you get:

                            H=1/t
You see?  That's what they were throwing at us."

"I don't think I follow."

"It's time inverse!" I said.  "The Hubble is time inverse!  It kills regular time!  It neutralizes it, cancels it out!  You see what they were trying to do to us?"

"Take it easy.  Sit back down, please.  Just relax.  Breathe.  Sit down, please."

"What do you mean, breathe?  What do you think I'm doing?"

"Nurse . . . !"

 

 always get up early, even after a very late night; it's just the way I am.  When I hear that Sonoma Index Tribune whack the front door, my day is beginning, and never mind the clock, the hangover, or the dream sludge sticking my gears.

I was nibbling on a toasted bagel, sipping hot water -- "zen tea" -- and listening to the rain slashing against the wall.  I'd had to settle for margarine, since Siggy had eaten all the cream cheese and the butter.  He was just where I had left him, slumped in the easy chair under the reading lamp, which had been left on all night and was still on.  Through my ursine yawns and lumberings about the fridge, Siggy snored.  But when I unspindled the newspaper, popping off its red rubber band, he woke.

"Eliot!" he said, expanding from the cushions like a crushed sponge in water.  "Jeez!  I gotta get to work.  What time is it?  What Bull have you got to?"

"What?"

"I said, my Bulova stopped.  What time is it?"

"I don't know," I said.

"You don't know what time it is?"

"Uh uh.  I don't want to look yet.  I'm not ready to leave infinity."

"You got the paper, though," he said.

"Guilty," I said, scanning the headlines.

I heard Siggy open the window in the bathroom, close it again as rain poured in, flush the toilet, and then urinate.  "So what's the news?" he shouted.  "Did Bull make that deal with Duba?"

"Yeah," I shouted back.  "It looks like they came to some kind of accommodation, the bastards."

"They get you coming and going, don't they?  Those dirigibles were just too good a thing.  Too cheap.  Too accessible."

"Too good for guys like us," I said.

"Now they'll fix prices any way they want to.  It's always the little guy who gets the shaft, Eliot."

"Don't I know it!" I said.  "Don't I know it!  Don't I know it!  Don't I know it!  Don't I know it!"

The wind was blowing right through the window glass, tearing the paper out of my hand and nailing Siggy to the wall as he emerged from the bathroom, half-zipped.  It drove back his hair, throwing his necktie back like a scarf and deforming his face -- escape velocity.  My head hit the table, and I couldn't lift it against the wind.

The wind said, "I thought you'd see the light, Bull.  There's no sense us beating up on each other.  This way everybody wins."

"I almost had you, you old coot," I said.  The floor was bucking in waves like a streamer on a fan.  I held onto the table for dear life.  "One of your guys was all right, I guess.  But holy, holy, where'd you pick up the other one?"

"In the mail room!" the wind laughed.  "You think I wanted to throw away my best people?"

"What about the good one, the black one?" I said.  I had to scream just to hear my own voice.  The window shattered and glass sprayed across the room.  I heard Siggy cry out.

"That woman was your gift, big guy," the wind said.  "Some joke, huh?  When your boys wiggled the equations back near ylem to squeeze more helium out of it, we got Topsy."

"A chrono-anomaly!  You son of a gun!"

"An orphan of time!  Hey, if she lives, I'm gonna help her file a paternity suit against you, Bull!  You gotta take some responsibility!  Heh heh heh!  I'll get you, big guy, right down to the Zen Bulls tattooed on your fanny.  Heh heh!"

That was a good one.  I knew I could make some money with this guy.  He was on the ball.  He even knew about the Bulls.  But you had to watch him, of course.  I said, "So now that we've shaken hands and smiled upon each other's countenance and squared off our attorneys, now that you've agreed to stay out of the ylem, friend Duba, and I've stopped strafing your chrononauts, tell me, what are you going to do with them?"

"With Topsy?  Elly?  The timeship?" the wind said.  "Oh, you needn't concern yourself.  Measures are being taken."

 

hey've broken through.  It's leaking," I said.  They were forcing cotton into my mouth and fastening me to the table.  I could smell methyl alcohol from the electrodes they attached to tiny, shaved sections of my scalp.  I was too groggy to resist.  I tried to explain.  "It's leaking time.  Real time is streaming in through leaks in the stern."  The causal fissure which formed the spine of our timeship, guaranteeing controlled disjunction between what happened inside and what happened out, had been violated by an HHC.

Elly was lying on his back, kicking gravel.

"Don't!" I shouted.  "Every speck of dust you raise is somebody's world out there exploding.  Look!"  I pushed down his visor; he froze at once.

"It's all mixed up, Topsy," he said.  "The lizards and the stars and the lava and the fish and all the moons -- Are they moons, Topsy, pocking up with holes? -- they're getting me dizzy."

"We've got to make a run for it," I said, "before it gets any worse."  Sequences inside the timeship were starting to be blown awry.  My mind was squinting to see things in order.  In representing them now, I'm just writing them out in the logical, causal order, with question preceding answer, and consequence following act, but the lived reality was quite different.  It was only after I had helped Elly to his feet that I made the effort to do so, for example, and the entire sequence was repeated four times at the same o'clock.

Think of a child's puzzle: a drawing divided into vertical bars.  The drawing comprises two pictures spliced together in alternating bars.  By covering every other bar, you can see one picture or the other.  Multiply that a hundredfold and translate it into three dimensions in real time, and you have our fractured timeship world, riddled by eddies of time swirling together with multi-headed HHC's, winking random moments out of existence.

"Come on!" I said.  I took Elly's hand.  "Let's go!"

I walked along the Susquehanna, thinking how nice it would be at the bottom, dead.  When the big blackout hit New York, I thought it was me.  Then came the news of a mechanical failure at the generating plant in Niagara Falls.

I had a headache like a mine cave-in.  Phantasms and fireballs burned the sky all over Broome County.  Again I was deafened as if by an avalanche, and I couldn't shake the smell of rock dust -- lime and sulfur.

It was a spray of pulverized limestone and pebbles dislodged from a shelf just above us.  Elly and I had gained the base of the cliff, and bits of rock rained down on us.  The base curved up slowly for about a hundred fifty feet, from the collapse of our protogalaxy -- resulting in the formation of the stars of the Milky Way -- back to the final decoupling of matter and energy, less than half a billion years after the Big Bang, at redshift of ten thousand.  (The present value was four!)

My brains felt like cold pabulum.  I sensed that I was sitting up in a chair, but my mind was telling me that I was horizontal.  I could see the dark man talking, but my mind told me that my eyes were closed.  I knew that my mom and dad were coming to visit me any time now, and I wanted to get this over with, even if it wasn't happening.

"I'm going to ask you a question, and I don't want you to get excited or angry.  I want you to sit still and to think about what I'm going to ask you."  So said the dark man.  He leaned forward.  I knew that if I gave the wrong answer and he told my parents about it, it would break their hearts.  "If the New York power outage was caused, as you say, by a rock slide in a timeship billions of years ago, then what do you make of the mechanical failure at the generating plant in Niagara Falls?  Was that just some kind of coincidence?"

I said, "Give me a cigarette."

"They're bad for you, Siggy," he said.

I said, "I know it."  He handed me a cigarette from the box he kept in the wide drawer of his metal desk, and he lit it for me.  I took a deep drag, and as I blew out the smoke in a big, blue billow, I said, "Causal recovery."

"What's that?"

"Causal recovery," I said, watching my smoke swallow his shaggy head.  When he left the hospital and went home to wifey and kiddies, he'd still have my smoke in his whiskers.  "That's how it always works.  It has to do with the way the human mind is made.  But it's not just the human mind.  After all, the human mind is a reflection of the laws and the forms it evolved from.  All reality conspires together with the human mind to bring about causal recovery . . . You're getting impatient with me."

"Not at all.  I'm waiting to hear you explain to me what 'causal recovery' is."

"There is a disruption of the causal order of things.  It's not really a disruption; there is never really a disruption.  But the distance between the world of the cause and the world of the effect is so vast in space or time, or in conception, that it seems a perfect disruption.  However, in causality as in pneumatics, Nature abhors a vacuum.  So there comes into being, apparently, a new cause, local to the effect, not one many billions of years ago, or in another world, or in another Mind, but one right here, right next to the perceived effect: a Niagara Falls."

"But nobody made up the failure at Niagara Falls.  It really happened, Siggy.  Do you doubt that?"

"No," I said.  I had to stop for a moment.  I had to look at my fingertips.  They were so yellow!  I had not realized how stained they had become from the nicotene.  I don't think they were that bad before I entered the state hospital.  "Niagara Falls happened, all right.  Only, that wasn't what caused the power outage.  Both the power outage and the plant breakdown had the same cause."

"So that we'd have to interrupt your electrotherapy and complete it the next day?"

"No, goddamnit, I'm not a madman.  I don't think the world revolves around me.  That was just an accident.  I'm talking about timeships.  I'm talking about the evolution of the goddamn universe."

"Take it easy.  You don't see your explanation as a little far fetched?  You don't believe in Occam's Razor?"

"Occam?  The simplest explanation is the true one?  That what you mean?"

"Yes."

"Doctor, if we really believed in Occam's Razor, we'd all be goddamn solipsists.  Please . . . "

"What is it, Siggy?"

"Please don't tell my mother and father that I said any of this."

"We'll see."

The smoke eddied and swelled, sunlit, through the doctor's room, filling it like a cloud of exhaust.  It was a cloud of exhaust.  It was the exhaust of Duba's executive time shuttle retroing forward, mission accomplished, to the time of his completed deal with Bull Interplanetary.  It was real pretty -- that's what I thought.  I like it when there's pretty smoke, if it doesn't make you cough and stuff.

"You bastard!"  When I heard Topsy say that, I felt bad, even though rocks was falling on us and before and after was getting mixed around and there was for sure plenty of other stuff I ought to be paying attention to if I knew what's good for me, because I'm not stupid, you know.  But I thought she meant me.  But she didn't.  She meant Mr. Duba.  She was looking up at a hole in the sky, and she said it again and again: "You bastard!  You bastard!"  Then she says it backwards: "Dratsab uoy!  Dratsab uoy!  Dratsab uoy!"  like the sound was being pumped back into her, what come out before.

She sat down.  "Don't sit there, Tops," I tell her, "because there is rocks falling on us."

She says: "You are a dear little man, Elly, but I'm winded.  I just feel winded.  That wasn't Bull attacking just now.  This time it was Duba.  See that smoke trail?  That's his shuttle, for sure, hypodyning the hell out of here now that it's ruined us.  Whatever he was using us for, it's finished now.  He's just going to dump us."

And she folded in just like an empty sack.  She looked like she used to back in my apt when she would lay there inside a shadow, when she would listen to the static between the stations and think about home.

"Cheer up, old Tops," I say.  "We gotta get you to home.  Don't be so low, because we gotta climb up to the ylem now, girl.  Then you'll be OK."  I sat down next to her then, because my neck hurt and my arms was feeling numb.  She laid her big, black hand on my head and smiled while there was lights like fishes and fires all in the sky, swarming into heaps way up behind my Topsy.  She looked like an angel to me, boy!

"I just feel so lonely, Elly.  I'm sorry.  Tell me -- Is there really such a thing as Mr. Duba?"

"Sure there is, Tops," I said.

"And we're in a timeship, right?  That isn't just some time-anomalous sense-image stuck in my mind?"

"Sure, Topsy," I said.

"And we can get to ylem.  We can climb up there.  That's the idea, right?  That isn't just in my time-orphaned brain?"

"That's the idea, Topsy."

"And Siggy is with us?"

I said, "Yeah, sure, Tops," on account of how I didn't want her to feel funny, but I sure didn't follow her on that particular one.

"Siggy is with us?" Siggy said.  "She said, 'Siggy is with us?'" He laughed and threw some underwear down onto my head from the balcony of the A-frame.  "You crazy jerk, Eliot," he laughed.  "I'm sure glad I don't have your dreams."

"Listen," I said.  "It gets better.  Then this ash woman, the one that's all black, Topsy starts to climb up the cliff.  She takes one, two steps, and -- Whammo! -- she's climbing hand over hand past galaxies unclustering, unforming, backwards in time, like strings of spittle stretched to mist.  Are you listening, Siggy?"

"I'm listening," he shouted from his bedroom, upstairs.  "Do you mind if I put on some music?"

"Yes.  Then she hits the vertical, at about nineteen and a half billion years back, redshift close to ten thousand by the Doppler gauge."

"Doppler gauge!  You're a nutcase, you know that?"

"There's more," I say.  Siggy puts on a record . . .  

                     Is that boy . . .  

"Come on, can it, Sig!  I said, there's more."

                        . . . SCREEE!

"Thank you," I said.  "It's redshift ten thousand by Topsy's Doppler.  Every inch of ascent is about twenty million years back in time.  Elly . . ."

"Eliot?"

"No, Elly!  Not me!  Elly is back a few feet, say, three quarters of a billion years or so closer to now.  There are still galaxies forming around him where he is.  The air is thick with HHC's from Duba's cannon, viscous with time currents and whirlpools of inverse time.  Even with his visor up, Elly sees galaxies and ferns and positrons kaleidoscoping through his field of vision.  He's not very smart except at column addition and chess; he doesn't know where to find a foothold.  Topsy is talking him through it."

And Siggy said, "Here they come now."

"Huh?"

"Look out the window, champ."

So I looked.  From our big picture windows you could look down the mountain and north over Broome County all the way to the airfield.  Scrambling up the final cliff, grabbing onto vines and scrub growth for leverage, a jet black woman in a khaki jumpsuit was leading a man who looked much too much like me.

 

t was a clean rise, thin as they come, with slight ripples and few visible scoops for a hand or foot to grip.  The prominent weakness was a line of cracks zigzagging up out of sight, the hypostatic image of a causal ravine dating back to the Planck Epoch, bare inches from the summit.  The sides of the cracks corresponded to causally disjunct parts of the primordial mass; the distance between them was greater than light could travel before they separated even more.  Perhaps one could jam one's knuckles or even just the shanks of one's fingers into the line, to pull up, hand over hand, through the earliest millenia.  Perhaps not.

There was no shortcut here; that's not how the timeship worked.  " . . . you have to mix yourself with it, Siggy," I said.  "You have to struggle in the landscape of the hypostat, become one with it.  That's the only way to stay inside the timeship.  Otherwise you blow out the hull to God knows where, synchronous to nothing in this world and nothing in the next."

But there was no "Siggy."  That was just another cul de sac in my chrono-anomalous nerve circuits, my mind like crystals of iodine, brown dust from a brown vapor, sublimed by a random puff of time.  There was only me with dear Elly, the half-dead half-wit clinging to my black calf, and the defiled timeship, bleeding eons into empty space-time while we muscled our way toward ylem.

I tried flattening out the cliff by fiddling with the Doppler, rescaling, reducing the apparent Hubble slope, but that would increase our travel distance.  With the timeship crumbling about us -- while Duba's hit men trundled home to their bonuses -- we could only rush up the vertical and hope to make ylem before the leak killed us, well, me; Elly had a different death in store.

I hazarded a peek at my Doppler -- close to ten to the fifth; now came trouble.  Just above me, the seam was so narrow I could only lock one pinky in it and torque up maybe a hundred fifty million years, which looked like eight inches.  I called down to Elly to do the same.  His head was starting to loll from the poison in Bull's dart.  "Suck your chest into the wall!  Stay vertical,"  I warned him.  Down where he was -- galaxies dissolving backwards in time -- there was still a slight rib on which to get a foothold.

I heard pebbles sliding below.  Elly's fingers had slipped against a chockstone wedged inside the crack.  It was a Bok globule, a cold, dark cloud about to collapse into protostars.  He slid down more than a billion years and was flailing and yelling among crowds of infant galaxies.  Suddenly he sat quite still.

I called to him: "Are you OK, Elly?"

"It's so pretty!" he said.  "It's like big ghosts, Topsy.  Look at them.  See there how they're lacing their fingers together?  One's got a ring on it."

"Push your visor up," I said, but his visor was up.

"It's all shining, Topsy.  Gee, it's pretty.  Big necklaces and diamonds is eating littler ones.  You go home.  I'm gonna stay and watch, honey."

"What?" I shouted.

"Honey!"

I held Sunshine's girl tight and tried to ignore the Motherfuckers snoring and fidgeting on the floor.  We beat against each other like a jellyfish pulsing, but I wasn't getting anywhere.  She was too sleepy.  I was too weak.  I began to feel that we were a figment of the imagination of those sleeping gypsies, and in a way, I guess, we were.  They were listening behind closed eyes, storing our sounds for their erotic fantasies.  In the next room that record was skipping over and over:

     "Is that boy still climbing up the mountain?

      Has he faltered, or has he fallen down SCREEE!

      Is that boy . . . "

And we humped and we humped.  Somehow, I couldn't get proper traction.  We must have gone on like that for a couple of hours; I just wouldn't give up.  Can you believe it?  And then my head hurt.  It hurt something awful.  And everything was so bright, it hurt my eyes.  The air, it felt like hot lead all over me.  There was barbells exploding in the sky and smoke rings and fiery things like slingshot stones.  No, you go on home, Topsy.  Follow your static, honey, right back home.  I gotta take a snooze.

"What's wrong?"

I opened my eyes and said, "Elly's dead."

The doctor said, "That's what you're seeing?  That's what you're experiencing right now?"

"Yes," I said.  "Elly's dead.  Bull's poison killed him.  He didn't make it."

"Who is Bull?" the doctor asked.

"He's in with Duba now.  They were fighting at first, but now they're in cahoots.  Elly and Topsy were just cannon fodder.  The big shots walk away from it with their pockets bulging and their arms around each other's back."

"Do you want to use my handkerchief?"

"No."

"You're mad at them, aren't you?"

"No.  It's just the way the world is, I guess."

"Tell me something," the doctor said.  "Do you feel like it's your fault that Siggy ended up the way he did?"

"Of course I do," I said.  "I was with him the whole time."

"Is that why you tried to kill yourself?  Is that why you ended up here as well?"

"Maybe.  But there's something else."

"What's that, Eliot?"

"Elly, Doctor -- he's dead.  And I don't know if Topsy's going to make it."

 

t was not a skipping record that played that song over and over as I sweated on top of Sunshine's girl.  The record player was another instance of causal recovery.  A bullet from Bull's dirigibles had struck a certain mound of salt inside the timeship.  The salt had exploded into the air and was caught up by one of Duba's HHC's.

Of this salt one crystal was actually the hypostatic image of an event which had not yet unfolded at the time of Bull's attack: Duba sitting in his office at the headquarters of Duba Enterprises, Inc., in a mammoth building that used to be a mountain near the Pennsylvania border, just outside of Binghamton; Duba blowing smoke rings from his fat cigar and humming to himself absent-mindedly; he is thinking about Elly's demise, a slight debit to his massive profit from the helium deal.  Duba, his mind sugary, fat and lazy with wealth, sings to himself in a breathy voice:

"Is that boy still climbing up the mountain?

 Has he faltered, or has he fallen down . . . ?"

That's what the salt crystal was -- a voice, a song, a disjointed revery.  It swirled against Hubble time, became pocked, duplicated, altered, melted into other o'clocks and other venues, one of them a crowded room in Santa Fe, New Mexico, twenty billion years past ylem, where two weary primates made the beast with two backs.

 

y arm was pumped to the limit.  I jammed the other hand into the fissure, pulled out my right and let it dangle for a minute, shaking blood back into it.  This was the part I had been dreading: redshift above ten to the fourth, a week or so from the Big Bang itself, twenty billion years into what I used to think of as the remote past.  The hypostats built into the timeship -- the life of the cosmos as landscape -- were competing with volleys of images and sensations swirling in through the leak in the hull.  I wasn't supposed to feel the terrific density and temperature I was passing through; they were supposed to be land features I could deal with in a dispassionate way.

I leaned into the hot rock face, frictioning my foot against a wrinkle in the stone, hoping my toes wouldn't butter down off their hold.  I lunged upward.  Hovering at the dead point of my maneuver for what must have been millenia on the referent time scale -- I threw my right fist back into the crack and gained purchase at redshift ten to the ninth, one minute from the Big Bang.

Then I glimpsed my poppa's tattoo.  Straining till I saw blood, I chinned up to my highest hold and saw The Seventh Bull, the size of my face, chiselled into the rock.  It was Bull Interplanetary's "Kilroy was here."  This was the spot where Bull's operative had managed to alter the primal nucleosynthetic process, to change the percentage of helium produced, creating me, inter alia, as a byproduct.

The Seventh Bull was a picture I knew -- or thought I knew -- from the series of ten Bulls in Buddhist lore:

          The Bull is sought.  The Bull is tracked.

          The Bull is glimpsed.  The Bull is caught.

          The Bull is tamed.  The Bull is ridden . . .

              And seventh -- The Bull is passed!

I reached into my pocket, next to the Doppler gauge, and fished out Duba's black ball.  I knew what it was now -- a dud.  I threw it down the cliff and watched it disappear into the blinding clouds of the protosolar nebula.  Then, with nothing more than a prayer holding me to the headwall, I reached up to grab the overhang separating me from the summit.  It was like biting a high power line.  I mantled over the edge on bent arms, pumping to the limit, till my stomach was scraping against the summit.

I had reached Planck's Epoch, redshift nearly a dectillion, temperature of ten million billion trillion electron volts, density 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms per cubic centimeter, but then the whole observable universe was only a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a centimeter across.  I was deaf, blind, completely numb to sensations of any kind . . .

I vaulted onto the summit and into the Eighth Bull: Oneself Passed!  And I realized -- I was numb to the world because I was the world.  I had passed inside my own Compton wave length, into the absolute freedom of the infinitessimal, Heisenberg's sanctum, the undefileable mystery in the womb of the world, redshift going to infinity, data to zero -- or whatever I would make it, I, Topsy the Primum Mobile!

 

hat was twenty billion years ago.  Topsy has achieved her goal: to have never been born -- As my grandfather used to say, "And who is that lucky?  Maybe one in a million!"  But there are two more bulls:

               Ninth: Home (ylem) is passed.

                          Tenth: And life goes on . . .  

I'm sitting by the window on Sonoma Mountain, writing these disjointed notes as the sky starts to glow with radiation from our five billion year old progenitor.  The sun is hazy, the mountains dark green.  My head still hurts like hell.  The ice packs are limp rags staining the corners of my notebook with their leakage.  No dirigibles remain.

Siggy has the most disagreeable snore on human record, if it's not just my migraine.  This is the Ninth Bull: I'm one little person again, star ash, denoument.  I'm Eliot, just like it says on the byline of this story.  And the Tenth Bull is that in about five minutes I'm going to have to wake Siggy up so he can get to his appointment in San Rafael on time.

I'm all for causal recovery.  God bless causal recovery!  God bless wives or husbands and children in wallet photos; dull, local explanations for dull local events; even migraine headaches, if you like, to wedge a spanner twixt this God-blessed world and the goddamned inexplicable others.

When I was leaving El Centro in Santa Fe, Sunshine collared me.  He wasn't mad that I had been banging his girlfriend.  He even liked me.  "Don't go home, man," Sunshine told me.  "Don't be like everybody.  Stay here with us.  Be a hippy."

But I didn't take Sunshine's advice.  Afterall, what is this life, deep as the night sky, mysteriously rich, each moment, each creature immeasurably ancient?  A speck of dust touches my brow.  It is Duba's black ball tumbling from the peak of time, where Topsy let it go.  The radio spits static.  It is a quiver of the primeval fireball.

It's quite remarkable enough being like everybody.