Rick Wayne's Blog, page 76

In the Beginning: a bird’s eye history of religion

In the beginning was the crisis. This is the singular belief that defines the religious history of our species, the insistence that this world, full of suffering — where the race goes not to the swift nor bread to the hungry — cannot be all there is, that there must be something more: a just world, a safe world, a humane world. The perfect place where bad things don’t happen, not to good people, and certainly not to some people more than others.

But if we are not there, and such a place exists — within time or without — that means we are separated from it. In the spiritual worldview, which starts with the simple supposition that there is a deeper truth beyond the material world, that separation, as traumatic as a birth, is the cataclysm whereby the primal singularity shattered, leaving mankind bereft. So began profane time, where everything withers and dies, as distinct from sacred time, which bubbles like a spring, eternally renewed.

In one of the earliest recorded myths, the ancient Sumerian creation story, the primal universe is a divine union of heaven and earth, personified by the god An and the goddess Ki, respectively. The pair mate and bear the sky, personified by the god Enlil, whose birth forcibly splits the divine union, Anki, apart — earth below, heaven above. In the Chinese tradition, the primal universe is encased in a great egg along with the first man, Pan Ku, who cracks the egg as his consciousness stirs. The warmer parts rise to create the heavens (yang) while the colder parts settle to form the Earth (yin). While in the Indian tradition, Atman, the absolute singularity of being, awakens to its loneliness and splits, first into two and then into all things, populating the universe through meiotic division, like a cosmic cell (or a Big Bang).

Humans arise humbly, often despicably, out of this primordial tragedy. So we read Pan Ku grew to an immense size before dying and creating the mountains and the rivers with his flesh and blood. People grew from the parasites nibbling his body. The Babylonians believed the sky god Marduk, like his Sumerian counterpart Enlil, destroyed the dark forces of chaos, which must be conquered for civilization (order) to flourish. Marduk slayed the dragon-goddess Tiamat, the monster from the depths (like the Biblical leviathan, Cthulhu, or Godzilla), then mixed the blood of Tiamat’s demon general with clay to make men, who, as offspring of the vanquished, are meant to serve him as a kind of slave race. (Thus, even if they were not a slave in this world, all men were joined in symbolic bondage.) We find many of these same hallmarks in the most famous origin story of the Western world, the Hebrew Genesis, where Yahweh also makes humans from clay after conquering the void. He also splits everything: matter from nothingness, light from dark, water from land, man from animal, male from female, and finally both from paradise.

As mere mortals, human beings cannot simply cross the gap and return to the divine, symbolized in Judaism as the Garden of Eden. However, Judaism came in the middle of history. The gulf was not always imagined so wide. For most early cultures, one’s ancestors were an immediate aspect of everyday life and their anger more pernicious to the family than the gods’, who usually had far grander interests. Tribal peoples used rituals and dance, often involving psychoactive “medicines” (like peyote and tobacco) to contact and influence the powers of the dream world, which hovered just above and beyond our own. Shamans were ordinary men and women who differed not in essence from the people they served but merely in specialty — in their knowledge of the spirit world and their skill in traversing it.

That changed at the border of history, in the era of the epic — of the Odyssey and the Ramayana. As agriculturally settled societies grew more urban and stratified, we no longer lived on the bounty of the land. Kings and priests took rents and taxes, and recurrent epidemics sapped our strength. The conditions of ordinary people deteriorated, and so their estimation of the primordial divide grew both in space and in variety. Bridging the gap required more than simply piercing a veil. It required semi-divine heroes whose fantastical exploits re-tethered our world to its divine source, lest all fall into the darkness of winter and never return — as in the Norse Ragnarok.

Thus we are told that Gilgamesh, a mythologized historical king, was one-third human and two-thirds divine. His story, the Enuma Elish, was read aloud by priests at the Babylonian New Year in order to ensure the return of spring. Similarly, that was the function of the Celtic yule, whose ritual persists in my household to this day. As with Gilgamesh, many of the ancient Greek and Indian heroes were semi-divine offspring (avatars) of gods — Heracles or Krishna. Or, like Orpheus, they were possessed of divine arts or skills, and their stories, as patterns to emulate or avoid, marked the path up Olympus or up the wheel of reincarnation.

The rift between human and divine reached its peak with the advent of high cosmopolitanism, beginning roughly 500 BCE. From then, the gods no longer wrestled with men, as did the god of the house of Abraham, nor seduced them with showers of gold, as Zeus did to the beautiful Danae. Spiritual leaders no longer straddled the worlds as a mix of both human and divine. Neither Confucius nor Buddha nor the Athenian philosophers — all roughly contemporaries — were divine, and they only ascended to heaven, if at all, on revelation, which is to say by invitation. Muslims believe as a strict measure of faith that the Prophet was entirely human, and since the end of the Arian controversy a millennium and a half ago, standard Christian dogma states that Jesus was also fully human. (Paradoxically, he is also fully divine. The important point is that, unlike Gilgamesh or Heracles, he is not mixed, despite his parentage.)

But since the prophet or saint lacks the divine powers of Rama or Krishna, since they are entirely human, like us, climbing the holy mountain — retracing the primordial crisis — becomes not a feat of legend, where Heracles alters the course of a river, but a difficult and painful task that we might hope to recreate, whereas we have no hope of diverting the Potomac, however much we might like to.

In this era in the West, the prophet typically had a terrifying, often painful encounter with an angry God, so overwhelming that the elect typically denied their calling. Moses refused God’s anointment several times until at last he was allowed the help of his brother Aaron, and Mohammed was so pained by his visions of the angel Gabriel that he too refused the call:

“[The angel] came to me… while I was asleep, with a coverlet of brocade whereupon was some writing, and said, ‘Read!’  I said, ‘I cannot read.’ He pressed me with it so tightly that I thought it was death; then he let me go and said, ‘Read!’”

It is as if the Western world — which is to say, the western half of Eurasia — had become so stratified and unjust that we believed ourselves completely alienated from the divine. Mohammad stood ready to throw himself off a cliff rather than face his people bearing a message from the Almighty. The world owes the great and lyric poetry of the Koran, the greatest of all medieval literature, to Mohammed’s faithful wife Khadija, who sent her servants to find him.

In the East, the prophet or saint typically experienced a peaceful revelation of the human condition: that all is One. The Hindu yogi comes to this heightened self- and universal-awareness — that everything is a fragment of Atman — though deep meditation, sinking inside her self and away from the world. Thus, it is through a reverse recreation of Atman’s first stirrings, where it split into all things, that one heals the original rift. The Buddha Sakyamuni, working within this tradition, escaped suffering through an act of nonviolent resistance. And in China, the Daoist sages urged peaceful surrender the unspeakable and indescribable Way.

In both cases, East and West, prophets rarely — if ever — brought a revelation, despite what you were told in Sunday school. Rather, they bring a restoration, a rediscovery of the original crisis, which had become degraded through history. It is for this reason that major faiths become quickly conservative; they are imagined so from the beginning. Consider that after having a vision of the Sun as the one true God, bringing monotheism to Egypt 2,000 years before Mohammad, the Pharaoh Akhenaton (circa 1350 BCE) attempted to erase the traditional gods of Egypt. Immediately after his death, it is he who was erased as bands of scribes and masons scoured the architecture of the Nile valley to chisel away any reference to “that criminal.” According to the Koran, the Prophet is only the last in a long line that has touched all the people on the Earth. “…there never was a people, without a warner having lived among them.” And while Confucius may be the most revered man of classical China, he worshiped the memory of the mythical rulers that preceded him — Yao, Wen, and the Duke of Zhou — whose virtue was an example for all time.

“I am not one who was born in the possession of knowledge,” says The Master. “I am the one who is fond of antiquity and earnest in seeking it there.”

And of course, Jesus famously asserted that he had not come to change the laws of Moses but to fulfill them. (Jesus started as a Jewish reformer and he would have remained a Jew if not for the conceited efforts of Paul to usurp the disciples with his vision of a God for all people.)

Having rediscovered the ancient path, the saint carries us along by the strength of his works, which are a treasure trove of merit. In order to experience the cosmic reunion, to cross the void between this world and the next, we climb to God as it were on the back of the prophet. This is the function and purpose of ritual, which has the penitent invoke the plight of the saint as a sort of credit against the debts of our soul. Christian sinners partake of the body and blood of Christ, which was broken on the cross, and indeed, most cathedrals are shaped like crosses with the sacraments taken at the heart. Catholics repeat the rosary in much the same way that Mahayana Buddhists of the Pure Land tradition, which identifies nirvana with a kind of heaven, repeat the nembutsu, the invocation of the Amida Buddha. It is the grace and work of the compassionate saint — Mary or Amida — that elevates the impassioned sinner, who could never make the crossing on their own, to the sacred eternal land where the twins, Illness and Inequity, are stopped at the gate.

Of all rituals, however, the pilgrimage is the most powerful as it physically recreates the crossing by engaging the penitent in the agony of the saint. This is captured in the Hindu word for pilgrimage, tirtha-yatha, which derives from the Vedic root referring to the ford of a river, and of course the great Ganges is for Hindus the connection between this world and the next, the place to bring one’s honored dead, as was the Nile in ancient Egypt. Even today, Muslims participating in the largest pilgrimage in human history, the Hajj, literally follow the footsteps of Mohammad and Abraham and recreate the banishment of Satan, who bars us from Allah, by casting stones at pillars.

In the beginning, everything split — and we all stood looking back at it, at sacred time. That is, until the modern era. Today, even China (nominally) worships a German materialist philosopher. Modern ideologies, even conservative religious ones, are fundamentally different from previous worldviews — what C.S. Lewis called “the discarded image” of the universe. Such views were fixed on sacred time. But ideology is fundamentally materialist. It does not admit of such a thing. In our era, the divine gap hasn’t grown. It’s disappeared.

For what replaced it, ideology, the rational ordering of the society is the new holy mother. In her womb lies Utopia, waiting for the faithful to clear a path so that she may be born. Conservative ideologies, bearing the mark of the parent, still orient that utopia in the past, but it’s a profane past, not a sacred one — a historically ambiguous time when men were strong, women compliant, and our weapons larger than everyone else’s. Liberal ideologies place utopia in an equally ambiguous future, but both make the same promise as religion: that through the ritual practice and forced application of a certain set of beliefs, known to be true, mankind will realize an end to suffering, that it can happen, that it will happen, if only we try hard enough.

Arguments about social justice, then, are fundamentally religious in that they require the same faith and invoke the same eschatology. Both liberalism and conservatism demand you step out of your authentic present, where your only self resides — good times or bad, amid ascension or decline, facing justice or persecution, feast or famine — to worship a prophesied coming. Just like religion, ideology recruits you to its aims rather than your own. The significant difference is that, where the primitive animist typically knows that’s what he is, no one today believes they are a liberal or a conservative, a feminist or a fascist, in the same way that Paul was a Christian. Paul worshiped Christ as Lord. Ideology preaches that we are its master, not the other way round, making it both more pernicious and harder to escape than religion. And indeed, in the 20th century alone, more people were slaughtered for ideology than in all religious wars combined. Ideology is the next, more sophisticated meme running on unchanged wetware. I suspect it will reign for some time.

 

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cover image: “Father of the Sun” by Timofey Stepanov

Franc Moody – Super Star Struck

This is the kind of song that, when I hear it, I wonder why the artist isn’t famous. Dig that driving bass. Here is your soundtrack to tonight.

And here is the full ongoing playlist: https://bit.ly/2LUXo2L

Selections from Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed”

“Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.”

“She did not reassure him. She did not tell him he was like everyone else. She said, “I’ll never know anyone like you again, Shev.” All the same, a rejection is a rejection. For all her gentleness he went from her with a lame soul, and angry.”

“It is the nature of idea to be communicated; written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.”

“Even from the brother, there is no comfort in the bad hour, in the dark at the foot of the wall.”

“He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to someone interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to a deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of money-changers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men’s acts, even the terrible became banal.”

“To look at her, Vea was the body profiteer to end them all. Shoes, clothes, cosmetics, jewels, gestures, everything about her asserted provocation. She was so elaborately and ostentatiously a female body that she seemed scarcely to be a human being.”

“He knew now what they had done with him. They owned him. He had thought to bargain with them, a very naive anarchist’s notion. The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power, and it issues the coins itself.”

The Terrans had been intellectual imperialists, jealous wall builders. Even Ainsetain, the originator of the theory, had felt compelled to give warning that his physics embraced no mode but the physical and should not be taken as implying the metaphysical, the philosophical, or the ethical. Which, of course, was superficially true; and yet he had used number, the bridge between the rational and the perceived, between psyche and matter, ‘Number the Indisputable,’ as the ancient founders of the Noble Science had called it. To employ mathematics in this sense was to employ the mode that preceded and led to all other modes. Ainsetain had known that; with endearing caution he had admitted that he believed his physics did, indeed, describe reality.

Strangeness and familiarity: in every movement of the Terran’s thought Shevek caught this combination, was constantly intrigued. And sympathetic: for Ainsetain, too, had been after a unifying field theory. Having explained the force of gravity as a function of the geometry of spacetime, he had sought to extend the synthesis to include electromagnetic forces. He had not succeeded. Even during his lifetime, and for many decades after his death, the physicists of his own world had turned away from his effort and its failure, pursuing the magnificent incoherences of quantum theory with its high technological yields, at last concentrating on the technological mode so exclusively as to arrive at a dead end, a catastrophic failure of imagination. Yet their original intuition had been sound: at the point where they had been, progress had lain in the indeterminacy which old Ainsetain had refused to accept. And his refusal had been equally correct– in the long run. Only he had lacked the tools to prove it– the Saeba variables and the theories of infinite velocity and complex cause. His unified field existed, in Cetian physics, but it existed on terms which he might not have been willing to accept; for the velocity of light as a limiting factor had been essential to his great theories. Both his Theories of Relativity were as beautiful, as valid, and as useful as ever after these centuries, and yet both depended upon a hypothesis that could not be proved true and that could be and had been proved, in certain circumstances, false.

But was not a theory of which all the elements were provably true a simple tautology? In the region of the unprovable, or even the disprovable, lay the only chance for breaking out of the circle and going ahead. In which case, did the unprovability of the hypothesis of real coexistence– the problem which Shevek had been pounding his head against desperately for these last three days. and indeed these last ten years– really matter?

He had been groping and grabbing after certainty, as if it were something he could possess. He had been demanding a security, a guarantee, which is not granted, and which, if granted, would become a prison. By simply assuming the validity of real coexistence he was left free to use the lovely geometries of relativity; and then it would be possible to go ahead. The next step was perfectly clear. The coexistence of succession could be handled by a Saeban transformation series; thus approached, successivity and presence offered no antithesis at all. The fundamental unity of the Sequency and Simultaneity points of view became plain; the concept of interval served to connect the static and the dynamic aspect of the universe. How could he have stared at reality for ten years and not seen it? There would be no trouble at all in going on. Indeed he had already gone on. He was there. He saw all that was to come in this first, seemingly casual glimpse of the method, given him by his understanding of a failure in the distant past. The wall was down. The vision was both clear and whole. What he saw was simple, simpler than anything else. It was simplicity: and contained in it all complexity, all promise. It was revelation. It was the way clear, the way home, the light.

“It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind,and turns to hate when forced.”

“In the afternoon, when he cautiously looked outside, he saw an armored car stationed across the street and two others slewed across the street at the crossing. That explained the shouts he had been hearing: it would be soldiers giving orders to each other.

Atro had once explained to him how this was managed, how the sergeants could give the privates orders, how the lieutenants could give the privates and the sergeants orders, how the captains …and so on and so on up to the generals, who could give everyone else orders and need take them from none, except the commander in chief. Shevek had listened with incredulous disgust “You call that organization?” he had inquired. “You even call it discipline? But it is neither. It is a coercive mechanism of extraordinary inefficiency — a kind of seventh-millennium steam engine! With such a rigid and fragile structure what could be done that was worth doing?” This had given Atro a chance to argue the worth of warfare as the breeder of courage and manliness and the weeder-out of the unfit, but the very line of his argument had forced him to concede the effectiveness of guerillas, organized from below, self-disciplined, “But that only works when the people think they’re fighting for something of their own — you know, their homes, or some notion or other,” the old man had said. Shevek had dropped the argument He now continued it, in the darkening basement among the stacked crates of unlabeled chemicals. He explained to Atro that he now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he still could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness entered in.”

“A scientist can pretend his work isn’t himself, it’s merely the impersonal truth. An artist can’t hide behind the truth. He can’t hide anywhere.”

“If you evade suffering, you also evade the chance for joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.”

“Freedom is never very safe.”

“A night-blooming flower from some unimaginable world had opened among the dark leaves and was sending out its perfume with patient, unavailing sweetness to attract some unimaginable moth trillions of miles away, in a garden on a world circling another star. The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness.”

Selected quotes from Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed”

Cover image by Oleg Kolbasov

The retro science fantasy art of Peter Andrew Jones

Even if you haven’t heard of him before, if you’ve read a science fiction or fantasy novel or played a fantasy RPG in the last few decades, odds are you’ve seen work by British painter Peter Andrew Jones, whose career in science fiction and fantasy illustration spans more than forty years. His style, while most vividly associated with the 1970s, captures the wonder and naivete of speculative fiction suitable for any era.

Click for a larger image.

Language, Security, and the IoT

As far as we know, the alphabet was invented only once* — in Phoenicia (covering modern-day Lebanon, Syria, and Israel). It spread and persisted because with it, you can render any word in any language. This is what the physicist David Deutsch called “the beginning of infinity” in his book of the same name. It is the point at which domain-specific (parochial) modes are traded for universality. The evolution of DNA is another example, as is the CPU, a generic computational machine theoretically capable of mimicking any other.

In real terms, this strength is also a weakness. Once an organism’s genetic code is no longer species-dependent, for example, it can be hijacked by any number of invaders. At the smallest (and simplest) level is the virus, which has no machinery of its own. A virus is an “inert” strand of genetic material wrapped in a protein syringe, and it’s dependent on its host’s cells to reproduce and spread.

With a universal system, then, security becomes paramount. And indeed, the immune systems of large, multicellular organisms are typically quite complex. In fact, I would argue they are rivaled in complexity only by the brain — so much so that we are still making radical discoveries, most recently that intestinal flora can affect mood. And that illustrates the next point, that despite their complexity, immune system often fail (as does the brain). This is because a universal system has a theoretically infinite number of potential configurations, most — but not all — of which are going to be failure modes. Some are going to be advantageous, but since there’s no way to know which is which in advance, and no way to encode an infinite number of states into the system even if you did, distinguishing friend from foe, or signal from noise, becomes quite complicated.

Those infinite potential configurations also create a second problem, beyond porosity: error checking. A dedicated device with a finite number of correct configurations is relatively easy to fix. At the highest level, you know that anything other than one of those correct configurations is an error. One can look at a hammer — ANY hammer — and know immediately whether or not it is broken. Figuring out what’s wrong with my novel, another device made from a universal system, is not only complex but vague and imprecise. And I don’t just mean spelling and grammar, which are relatively easy (but still difficult). I mean what’s wrong with the novel itself, which is something more than the sum of its components. With biological systems, a failure of error checking is often fatal in the form of cancer.

I like knowing why the world is the way is it and not some other way. I like big-picture answers, which in my experience most people tend to overlook. To illustrate the different types of answers, I often use the question, Why did the 8 ball go into the corner pocket? The reductive, scientific answer, popular with engineers and accountants, who like wrestling with the devils in the detail, will involve trigonometry and the angular momentum of the cue ball and all that kind of stuff. The statistical answer will involve the observation that four of the six pockets are corner ones. The answer from the humanities and social sciences is that the player’s wife went shopping, leaving him the afternoon for leisure, making it very likely that balls would be falling into holes.

I make no secret of the fact that I prefer the latter category of answers and because they are explanatory, whereas the others are merely descriptive. And that’s why I love this short talk by Thomas Dullien — first shared by computer security maven Bruce Schneier, whose blog I follow. It helps explain our moment in history by explaining why the internet is sick: it suffers from both maladies mentioned above. On the one hand, it’s growing cancerously. On the other, systems are porous and riddled with invaders.

Of course, in an open universal system, some degree of that is unavoidable. In the case of DNA, for example, if you want to reap the benefits of evolution, you need to allow some minimum amount of mutation, which leaves the door open both to cancer and to an arms race with pathogens, who are themselves evolving — internal errors, external invaders.

Dullien observes: >The “anomaly of cheap complexity.”

>For most of human history, a more complex device was more expensive to build than a simpler device

>This is not the case in modern computing. It is often more cost-effective to take a very complicated device, and make it simulate simplicity, than to make a simpler device.

He says that as if it’s a somewhat unexpected result, and for engineers, it probably is. There’s also the culture of computers, which is eschatalogical and so sees little value in what has come before. As I’ve written before, thought leaders in the world of AI are just now waking to flaw in their research programme first raised by philosophers in the 1980s and subsequently ignored. Indeed, Dullien’s observation was made succinctly by Blaise Pascal in 1657 when he said: “I only made this letter longer because I had not the leisure to make it shorter.”

I am not, by the way, suggesting that computers (or the internet) are analogous to the human body, or even to life itself. I am saying that both systems suffer the endemic drawbacks of universality.

Security, Moore’s law, and the anomaly of cheap complexity

 

*The term “alphabet” is used by linguists and paleographers in both a wide and a narrow sense. In the wider sense, an alphabet is a script that is segmental at the phoneme level—that is, it has separate glyphs for individual sounds and not for larger units such as syllables or words. In the narrower sense, some scholars distinguish “true” alphabets from two other types of segmental script, abjads and abugidas. These three differ from each other in the way they treat vowels: abjads have letters for consonants and leave most vowels unexpressed; abugidas are also consonant-based, but indicate vowels with diacritics to or a systematic graphic modification of the consonants. In alphabets in the narrow sense, on the other hand, consonants and vowels are written as independent letters. The earliest known alphabet in the wider sense is the Wadi el-Hol script, believed to be an abjad, which through its successor Phoenician is the ancestor of modern alphabets. (Wikipedia)

Iceage – Take It All

Here is your soundtrack to tonight.

And here is the full ongoing playlist:

The flawless surrealities of Rob Gonsalves

Rob Gonsalves

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Taste this book!

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“Signs Preceding the End of the World” by Yuri Herrera, translated by Lisa Dillman.

Sometimes you need a meat violin

The deeply textural art of Alex Reisfar, both sculpture and painting. You can discover more of the artist’s work on his website: AlexanderReisfar.com.

[image error][image error][image error][image error]www.alexanderreisfar.com

(Fiction) Chimerisma

I sat on a chair in the hospital and swung my feet back and forth. My dad was talking to the police in the other room. Mr. Étranger walked over and sat next to me. He had a cane. He looked a little better. But not much.

He sat down and we waited together.

“Thank you for the fruit snacks,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” I said.

“You took it from her.” He was watching my dad talk to the police on the other side of the glass. “It was hurting people, wasn’t it? The other children at your school. And you didn’t know how to stop it and you tried to tell the adults but no one believed you. No one believed there was a little worm, a waking nightmare, slithering about. It was abandoned, starving. So you agreed to nurse it. And in return it let her go, little Emerald.”

I shrugged.

“And it tormented you every night. You let yourself suffer so others wouldn’t have to.”

I looked at my shoes. I thought he would be angry with me. I looked up at him.

“Did you make the symbols in my room?”

He nodded. “I saw the nightmares. I thought if I stopped them, if I trapped your fear, your love, everything, inside your house, the creature would wander off.” He shook his head. “I did not expect you to go looking for it. Someone so young.”

I shrugged again.

He leaned over to me. “Did you think if you were nice to it, maybe it wouldn’t be so mean?”

“I guess,” I said.

I ran the back of my arm across my running nose. It was still cold. I sniffed. There was a TV in the corner. There were tanks in Paris. I think that was a big deal. I watched. I didn’t know what to say.

“Am I in trouble?”

He shook his head. “I have explained everything to the authorities. And your father.”

“Did they believe you?”

“Of course.” He smiled. “I lied.”

I swung my feet more. I watched them move like a blur over the tiles on the floor, like I was running super fast.

“I thought the stag was waiting for you to die.”

He nodded. “So did I. But it wasn’t waiting for me.” He turned. “You saw it again, didn’t you?”

I nodded. I had given it the shell with the pebble still wedged in the opening. It took it and swallowed it and disappeared into a grove of trees near the convenience store.

“It’s gone, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “Back to the other side. Where they both belong. And the door is shut again.”

I asked him how the fear-eater had gotten here.

“I imagine it was summoned,” he said.

I thought. “By who?”

Mr. Étranger shook his head. He took my hand and we stood. He rested on his cane.

“A great hole has been opened. Everywhere the followers of the dark are emboldened. In cities all over the world. Just like this one. They are no longer afraid.” He looked at me. “They are preparing. And recruiting.”

I thought about the high school kids that made graffiti under the big highway. I made a sour face up at him.

“Yes. My thoughts exactly.”

We walked down the hall. It looked like my dad was about done.

“The stag told you something,” Mr. Étranger said. “Didn’t it?”

I nodded. “But I can’t say. It’s a secret.”

It probably seems like I have a lot of secrets. But this is a good one. I promise.

“I see.” His face got very serious. “Do you think you will be able to? When the time comes?”

I nodded again.

“Are you sure?”

My dad came over then. “Sure about what?”

He knelt down to check on me. He asked if I was okay and touched me a lot and patted my shoulder. He was being so nice.

“I’m sorry I was bad again,” I said. “Do I still have to go to the doctor?”

He looked at me funny. Like what I said had hurt him. In his heart. I didn’t want to hurt him.

“We’ll talk about that later.” He held me close. “But you did a very good thing this time, son. I’m very proud of you.” Then he held my shoulders and looked me in the eye. “But don’t ever do it again, okay?”

I nodded.

“Wait with Mr. Étranger a moment while I get the car.”

“I can walk,” I said.

But he scurried away. He was babying me.

Mr. Étranger and I stood at the back of the hospital near the doors. The carpet was brown and smelled like cleaning fluid.

“Something bad is happening. Isn’t it?” I asked. “That’s why there’s wars and stuff. And that big place in the desert is burning.”

He looked like he wasn’t sure what to tell me. Adults do that a lot.

“I saw tanks on TV. And that new baby disease.”

“Infectious ichthyosis.”

“And all those people lost their jobs.”

“Our enemy is throwing as much as he can at the world.”

“Why?”

“So everything will feel too big, and they’ll stop fighting.”

I understood that. In fact, that was the first thing he said that I really did understand. But I had to think real hard then.

“If I say the word, will it make things better?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “He may already be too powerful.”

I looked at the parking lot and the street beyond and the cars coming and going. So many adults.

“I think it will help,” I said. “I think that’s why they gave it to us.”

“They?”

“The good ones. The allies. Like you said.”

“It will be very dangerous.” Mr. Étranger was looking down at me again. His eyes seemed to glow. The lights overhead reflected off his bare scalp. “You could be hurt. Or worse. This is not an idle worry. Like your father’s fortunes. A great many people have already died. And your very soul would be at risk.”

“But if we don’t do anything,” I said, “isn’t everyone’s?”

He smiled. “You feel everything, don’t you?”

I shrugged. “Sometimes.”

“Come. Let’s get you home. Your father is going to have a very bad day tomorrow. He will need your support.”

Dad pulled up and I got in the car. We left Mr. Étranger at the hospital. He was going to get fluids. I don’t know what that meant. But I waved. And I thought then maybe we were friends again.

He was right. Dad had a bad day. Mr. Étranger had collected all his findings into a report. Proof, he said. I watched him tell my dad, who sat silently in his big chair with a glass of wine staring out our front window at the world.

He took a drink.

He took it better than I expected. He took it better than the news about my mom.

“How?” he asked Mr. Étranger without turning. Then he paused. “Never mind. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.” Then after another moment, “What did we miss?”

“It’s not what’s there,” Mr. Étranger said. “It’s what isn’t.”

My dad turned finally.

“Insects. Mites. Harmless microscopic organisms. They grow on anything. Our skin. Our hair. Our books. Our sheets and mattresses. And our food. Your vinegar has supposedly been rotting under 600-year-old cork, porous enough to turn the contents to junk, yet there are almost no mites. And those few I could find are all genetically identical. They’re recently descended from the same stock, and of a prevalent modern type. Your vinegar is not just new, it’s brand new. Not more than a year old.”

“Well, shit.” My dad refilled his glass from the dark bottle on the stand next to his chair. “It figures.”

“What does?”

“I’ve never tried anything like this in my life. I wouldn’t have ever tried. I wouldn’t have even considered it.” My dad sighed. Deeply. Like it was the last free breath he would ever take. “Except the old guy up and died. Right out of the blue. Can you believe it?”

“Faustino.”

“Yes.” Dad took two big drinks. He must have been very upset. I didn’t understand. “One day we’re in a restaurant and he’s got my arm in a vise grip. He’s filling my ear in a heavy whisper. His family name. The history of balsamic vinegar. He wouldn’t let me go. I just wanted to get out of there. I felt so greasy. Slimy. I wanted nothing to do with any of it.

“But he kept protesting. He followed me into the street. No one knew, he said. I was the only one. He thought for sure I would go for it. He knew the troubles I was having. Everyone in the industry did. He needed me, that’s for sure. He needed my connections.

“But I absolutely refused.” My dad stopped. As if he realized how ridiculous it seemed to say that. Now. That he’d been caught. “I’m sure he was terrified. His great plan was evaporating in front of him. Crazy old goat,” he said softly.

There was a long silence.

“Four days later, he was dead. Just like that.” My dad snapped his fingers. “Heart attack. Stress, I guess. And I didn’t know what to do. One month goes by. Then two. Then six. Meanwhile, the lot is sitting in my warehouse. My marriage is falling apart. My son is seeing ghosts. My business is failing because the economy is shit and no one but the uber-rich can afford fine imported foods. And here I am sitting on six cases of expertly counterfeited balsamico tradizionale. The Faustino family had been making the stuff for centuries. Everyone knew that. The circumstances under which they stopped were always too salacious for people to forget. Napoleon and all that. The old man knew the power of romance. People wouldn’t care if it was real, as long as they thought it was possible. They would want to believe.

“He found some old rotting crates on his family’s estate. Some empty bottles. The actual contents were the last of his worries. All this old wine on the market selling for $130,000 a bottle. Or more! Can you believe it? Three-hundred-year-old Lafitte. It’s completely undrinkable. We all know it. It was vinegar when Victoria was queen. The bastards who collect that stuff aren’t buying wine. They’re buying mystique. Romance. Status.” He raised his voice. “Something to show off at parties.

“So I thought, what the hell. It’s not cheating if don’t care about the truth anyway. And they can afford it.”

“So what is this?” Mr. Étranger tilted an old bottle over his finger and held up a drop of dark, oily goo.

“The Mussini family already sells legit century-old stuff. It’s on Amazon for Chrissakes.”

“Yes. I have served it.”

“Cut it with acetic acid. Add some sour mash and scrapings from the insides of old casks. A little bit of dirt. Boil it all together. Who would know? Right? It would take a genius to figure it out.”

Mr. Étranger didn’t flinch.

“I had buyers lined up around the corner. It was going to be gone, the whole lot, before anyone even knew. Before the Times could even write about it and bring the world down on top of me. Every bottle.

“And then Janet chooses that exact moment to file. She’d been pondering it for some time, I’m sure. Our son is going crazy, embarrassing her. Her father. We’re hemorrhaging cash. And then there’s this discovery. Couldn’t exactly keep it from her. My wife. And she sees dollar signs. Half of my cut belonged to her. Only she thought I was underselling. She thought we could get more for it. A lot more.

“And the thing is, she was right. I just wanted to move it as quickly as possible and retire somewhere with comfortable extradition laws and let the world sort it all out. Spend time with Ólafur. Make sure he was okay. Take up gardening. Drink wine.” He took another gulp.

“But Janet got greedy. And all of a sudden, I can’t sell it. Now it’s contested property. Hung up in court. The import business has always been capital-intensive. Where do you think we get the phrase ‘my ship has come in?’ I have creditors. Word got out and they insisted it be insured. They won’t let me keep operating without coverage. Only they got greedy, too. Their appraiser gives a higher number even than my wife! Now the bankers are involved. People are throwing around numbers with so many zeros, I can’t even keep track. And the underwriters, a bunch of strangers, they won’t take it on my good word that the stuff is legit. Not for that much money. And, well, you know the rest.”

My dad stood and walked to the window. “I’m totally, completely ruined. I’m not just going to lose my wife and my business. I’m going to lose my son, and this house, and my reputation, and everything.” He took a drink. He turned to Mr. Étranger. “It’s funny to think that I was done in by my cheating, lying, multiple-affair-having ex-wife’s good opinion of me. I doubt it ever even occurred to her it was all a fraud.” He turned back to the window and spoke softly, like it was a joke just for him. “I’m a very respectable man, after all. Ask anyone.”

Mr. Étranger walked slowly into the room. I saw his palms. There weren’t any more gaps. The symbols were back. “I checked your paternity.”

“Paternity?” My dad scowled. “What are you talking about?”

“Ophiocordyceps is a powerful aphrodisiac.”

“Aphrodisiac? What do you—” He stopped. “Wait a minute.” My dad pointed. “I haven’t had a wet dream in twenty years. And the other night—”

“I needed a sample.”

“A sample? How did you . . .” He stopped. “Do you routinely rifle through other men’s laundry to steal samples of their semen?” He was getting very upset. I could tell because he set his wine glass down.

“No.” The chef paused. “But this wasn’t the first time.”

“I don’t know why I let you back into my house. Oliver warned me about you. He was right. You’re insane.”

“And you’re two-faced.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean? You’ve got nerve, insulting your host in front of his own son!”

“Technically, Ólafur is not your son.”

My dad knocked over his wine glass as he darted forward. The dark fluid ran over the exposed wood. He didn’t even look at it. He didn’t check to see if the expensive wine glass broke. He was upset. “That’s a lie!”

“That’s how he was missed. That’s why little Ólafur is alive where so many others died.” He put his hand on my head and smiled at me. “Thank you,” he said softly.

“For what?” I asked.

“Don’t touch him!” My dad was so mad he was shaking.

Mr. Étranger started pacing. I think his muscles were working better and he needed to use them.

“Sometimes our legacies are our weakness. Translated, the spell He would’ve used reads ‘of all the daughters of woman, of all the sons of men.’ But Ólafur is the son of no man who has ever existed, of no man who has ever been born. He was missed. Overlooked. Let’s hope no one rewrites that spell to take account of modern genetics.”

My dad’s face was red. He’d had all he could take from the chef. I could tell he wanted to hit the man. He was protecting me. “Mister A-tron-jay!”

He spun and raised a finger to my dad. “Sit down!”

They were yelling. Like him and Mom used to.

Dad’s beard quivered. “I demand to know—”

“You are in a position to demand nothing. People don’t go to prison for cheating the poor, sir. They go for cheating the rich. Remain calm. Listen. Or I will have you arrested for fraud within the hour. And in front of your son. Is that clear?”

My dad looked at me. He looked at Mr. Étranger. He seemed hurt, as if the chef had grounded him. He sat. He looked at the broken glass on the floor. But he left it. The wine was staining the bare wood.

“Chimerism”—Mr. Étranger let the word sink in—“is a rare genetic condition where one person bears two genomes, where the chromosomes in their body are different than those in their gonads. You had a twin, sir. In the womb. Not identical. Your mother released two eggs that cycle. Another boy. But when you were both nothing more than little clumps of cells, there was an accident. It happens. It’s rare. But it happens. Two zygotes merged into a single embryo, from which emerged a fetus, then a baby, and now the two-faced man sitting here.

“The germ line is kept separate from the rest of the body. The tissues that grew into your testes came from your twin and were different than those that made your brain and your face. A swab of your cheek will reveal a wholly different genome than an analysis of your testes.

“You had a phantom brother. A man who was never born, who never existed, but who bequeathed to you his legacy. And you’ve been carrying that legacy in your scrotum your entire life.” He turned to me. “Little Ólafur is a sort of ‘holy birth’ if you will—born of woman but no living man. That is the source of his great and endearing compassion. Like the Christ.”

“You expect me to—”

“I expect nothing! The science is freely available. You may investigate on your own. Most private laboratories don’t know to test for chimerism. Those that do won’t unless asked. The far more likely scenario is that you’re a victim of good old-fashioned cuckoldry. That is what everyone will assume.”

The chef was speaking quickly now. He had it all worked out. Everything. Our whole lives.

“Supply an independent paternity test from a reputable laboratory and you’ll have solid evidence of your wife’s thus-far unprovable infidelity. Threaten to make it public. But don’t go to her. Go to her father, the congressman. Use it as leverage to get her to settle out of court. Be fair. If she is the person you describe, she will take a fair offer over the risk of losing everything.”

My dad sat back. He had his hand in front of his beard again. He was thinking.

“With your divorce settled, you can sell your forgery, give your ex-wife her cut, and donate the rest to a children’s hospital. On this I am adamant. For your own good. If the deception is ever uncovered, you can always say you didn’t know. You may blame me. For fraud to be criminal requires a benefit. That you did not profit from the act should keep you out of jail.”

“But that means you’ll have to validate the lot. You’ll have to validate a multi-million-dollar lie.”

“Yes. Fortunately for you, I am not a saint. Nor have I ever been. I will perpetrate your fraud on the world. And in return . . . I need to borrow your son.”

“Borrow?” He stood. “What do you mean borrow?”

“I require his assistance on a matter of great importance. He will be in mortal peril. The chances of our success are marginal. At best. And it is entirely possible his soul will be condemned to eternal torment.”

“Like hell! My son has already been through—”

“I’ll do it,” I said.

Both adults turned to me. I was petting Wilson. He came to see what all the yelling was about. I said it was nothing important. Just adult stuff.

“I’ll do it,” I said again.

I rubbed his ears. He smiled. He always had a big smile.

“Ólafur—”

“There are bad things coming, Dad. That’s what the fear-eater showed me. But the stag gave me a word. I’ve been practicing it. He said I’m the only one who can say it. It’s a new word in an old language. The first language. It’s never been used, except for him to tell it to me. And I don’t think that counts. And when it’s the right time, I have to say it reeeeally loud.”

My dad knelt down in front of me. He put his hands on my shoulders.

“No, son. I know this all seems fun to you, the things Mr. Étranger is saying. Like an adventure. And I know I invited him into our lives. But one day you’ll understand. These things he’s saying, they’re not real.”

“But they are.”

“No.” My dad turned to the chef and lowered his voice. “Go ahead. Have me arrested. I don’t care. Just leave. Now. And don’t come back.”

But the chef didn’t leave. He sat. He didn’t seem worried at all.

“If that is what you wish. But think on this. Your business will fail. Your assets will be seized. You will be broke, disgraced, and unable to walk into any fine cellar in the world.”

He pointed to the wine on the floor.

My dad loved good wine. It’s why he was an importer, which is sort of like a pirate. Or a smuggler.

“You will go to jail, and your wife will get sole custody of your son, who will spend his most formative years in a boarding school and his holidays hearing all about what a terrible man you are. So perhaps, before you come to any final conclusions, you should sit a moment and think. Have a drink.”

Dad stormed into the kitchen to get his phone.

“I won’t let you put my son in danger. Not to stay out of jail. Not to spare my reputation.” He tapped the screen. Then he scowled at it. He turned to our guest. “Why is my phone dead?”

Mr. Étranger remained still. His voice changed. “Hear me. And imagine. The continued demonization of the poor to perpetuate wage slavery, and of the foreigner to prosecute war in the name of justice—to raving applause—the financing of which will bankrupt governments, leaving them dependent on wealthy bond owners, while at the same time critically injuring the world economy and diverting from sustainable investment to perpetuate a necessary near-term dependence on oil, eventually leading to environmental collapse.”

My dad stared. “I’ve never met a crazy person before. My God. You’re even worse than Oliver said. Get out.” He pointed to the door.

“It doesn’t matter if you believe me, sir. I am merely discharging my duty.”

“Duty? What are you—”

“To make sure you understand what’s at stake. And why Ólafur is so important. For later. After. When you remember.”

“Remember?”

Mr. Étranger didn’t answer.

My dad’s eyes fluttered. He swayed on two legs. He seemed confused. He touched his head like he was dizzy. He sat down on the couch.

The chef went to the kitchen and retrieved a towel, and then he knelt and mopped up the wine from the floor. He picked up the glass. He took the bottle to the kitchen and dumped it out. I immediately turned to my dad, expecting him to object, but his eyes were drooping like he was about to fall asleep.

“You’ll need a few things,” Mr. Étranger said to me. “Go upstairs and pack. But only what is necessary.”

I ran upstairs. Wilson and Pringles and everybody followed me, barking. I packed my Phillies pajamas and some gum and my gamepad and my toothpaste. But I forgot my brush. I ran back down. Dad was snoring.

Mr. Étranger put a hand to my head.

“Are you ready?”

I nodded. I walked over to Dad. I looked at him. I looked up at Mr. Étranger.

“Is he okay?”

“He is quite well. Why don’t you hug him goodbye?”

So I did. That woke him up. He blinked. He looked at my bag. He smiled.

“Sorry, I must have dozed off.” He stood and hugged me properly. It was full and genuine. I liked it. “Do you have everything you need?” He jostled my backpack.

I nodded.

He was grinning like it was Christmas. “I know this is scary, but I’m so happy for you! This is a big opportunity. A new beginning.”

I was going to ask, but Mr. Étranger cut in.

“Yes. And don’t worry. We’ll take very good care of him.”

My dad looked right at Mr. Étranger and said “Thank you, Doctor. And thank you for taking him on such short notice.”

They shook hands, and then Mr. Étranger scooted me toward the taxi that was waiting out front. I got halfway there before I ran back and said goodbye to Wilson and everyone. Even Sudoku came. But not Ribbon. He was hiding somewhere. But I bet he was watching. Silly cat.

When I got to the car, I stopped and looked back. Dad waved from the porch. I don’t think it really hit me until just then. That I was going. That maybe I wouldn’t ever see him again. And my pets. Even Speedy.

I looked up to Mr. Étranger.

“You don’t have to,” he said. “What you must do, you must do of your own free will. Because it is right. And for no other reason.”

That seemed right.

“What happens next will be very scary,” he said. “Scarier than anything you have ever faced. Even your secret. Scarier than you can imagine. Scarier than anything a mere adult could face. You will feel alone. Terribly, terribly alone. Worse even than when you tried to help your friend Emerald and held her hand through the bars. Do you think you can be strong?”

I nodded and looked back to Dad. I waved.

I love my dad. I’m doing this for him. I want him to stop worrying so much. And to be safe. And Mom, too. I know she cares about me. And Wilson and Betsy and the white raven and little Trevor. And everyone.

I climbed into the back seat of the car. Mr. Étranger removed a coat from his bag. It wasn’t the coat I had seen, though. It was made of bright feathers of all different colors. I had seen feathers like them in a picture book at school: Birds of Paradise. He sat next to me and set it on his lap and held out his hands, both of them, and I took them and we drove away.

It wasn’t until we got to the bus station that I looked down and saw my palms had Mr. Étranger’s symbols on them. I tried to rub them off, but they were under the skin. I looked at his hands as he led me through the crowd to the ticket counter. His palms were bare. Like any old man’s.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS. A blend of hard-boiled whodunit and contemporary urban fantasy, it’s scheduled to be released later this summer. You can sign up here to be notified.

You can start reading in order here: The old ones are patient.

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

Cover image by Jamie McKiernan

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