an exerpt from my brand new epic novel 'The Omniconstant'

Chapter Twelve





Dabolmort remained motionless with his head
up. He was mesmerised looking at a beautiful vitro glass dome. His eyes pierced
through the eyes of a woman depictured on the glass and his thoughts tried to
go outside, to fly around Rome, the city he was abandoning forever. Despite the
effort, his thought did not manage to take the small trip. He only stared at
the eyes of this figure. He thought of Roxanne. Is she safe? Is she coming as I’ve told her?   





As he was thinking, he got a pile of blank
epistle paper and started writing what seemed to be a letter. He wrote one full
page of directions with bulletins, very few words at each line. Some lines
included whole words in capitals, and he even bolded some words with strong
fast strokes of the pen on the letters. He got a second piece of paper and
continued. He never paused for a second while he was writing; all his body was
assigned to this intense guiding of the pen on the paper. He was bending to the
centre of the small table as his legs were slowly going round the table as if
he were in a sort of scripto-transcendence, as if he was visualising.





Outside in the dark yard, the figure of a young
woman disguised to a middle-aged chubby woman was hard to miss. She was looking
down as she was crossing the marble path from the front cathedral entrance to
the back premises where the modest chapel she was looking for was standing. She
was solely looking down, because she wished nobody to see her face. The dark hood
was covering most of it. She was dressed in a modest, red, spring dress and
blue tights. She was strangely wearing a raincoat on top, covering three
quarters of her head and face together. She put her hand on the doorknob of the
side door of the chapel and tried to turn it rightwards, and then, foolishly as
it felt at the moment, leftwards. It seemed that it required some extra strength.
As she was trying to place both her hands on the knob for extra strength, she suddenly
stopped. 





“Do not come in! Stop there!” Dabolmort’s
voice came loud from inside to deter her from turning the knob.





Her blood froze. “Why?” she called from
outside. His call remained firm. “Do not enter. I have Klotho now; I cannot tell you anything more than this. I am going
to leave.”





Her concern was growing rapidly. “Leave?”





“You will find an envelope for you on the
throne. But do not enter until after ten minutes exactly from… now, and get it.
Keep it safe, away from any inquisitive eyes. Everything written in the letter
inside is highly confidential and of the outmost importance.” Saying that, Dabolmort
continued his writing.   





Roxanne’s hand was glued on the knob. She
could not let go. “No! Jordan, wait! You know I love you! What the f…? Wait,
don’t go!” She was bumping the strong door with the rear of her fist but she
dared not enter without his permission. 
“Who the hell is Klotho?” she exclaimed, her patience going under
consecutive tests.





She got no answer to any of her desperate
pleas. Jordan continued his writing, trying to ignore her desperate calls.





A trillion images passed from Roxanne’s
head within that ten-minute span.





She kept looking at her watch. Nine minutes to go. What with all this secrecy? She thought. Out of a sudden, among the
silver dials, she thought she saw Dabolmort’s face transform from angelic to
monstrous and then back again. Am I
losing it?





“Who the fuck is Klotho? Why won’t you tell
me? What are you doing in there?” she repeated, knocking on the door, but she
still got no response, struggled as she may have.





Looking back on the watch in curiosity, she
fantasized  him kissing her and making
love to her for a second. She blanked her thoughts immediately as it all felt totally
inappropriate outside a church, the surrounding gargoyles closing in, looking at
her angrily from above. Am I going mad?
She thought in panic.





As her heart pounded violently, the dials
of the watch became his hands. She felt he was ready to hug her. She felt
touched. But on the tears that started running down and falling on the marble
steps she saw these loving hands suddenly close their fingers together and push
her away. The pain she experienced during those three minutes was a lot like a
small death she knew she could not skip. She blanked again. After exactly ten
minutes of painful idleness she moved. She got up and turned to the door taking
deep breaths to loosen the anxiety. Her fingers started turning the knob of the
chapel door to unlock the humble, wooden stopper of time.





Dabolmort heard Roxanne but he was not
ready yet. In a calm and not at all accusative voice, he told her again. “Wait,
dear, I am sorry, I told you I have it, it’s in our possession now, we can use Klotho,
to our benefit, I’ll tell you how, but first I must finish what I am writing. Without
my written directions, you will be completely lost. But I guess I needed more
than ten minutes after all…Please wait…”





Roxanne paused at the door and waited for a
new order. She knew how keen Dabolmort was on writing notes to her. She also
knew that his writing directions to her was giving her hope in its own means.
It meant she had to be patient. Patience was all she had to endure Jordan’s
weird life. A life so mysteriously elusive that she felt she was caught in a
baleful web of a giant spider that meant her no harm, loved her, but always controlled
her on the sticky web.





‘Please wait…’His alleviating tone did
offer her some relief. The ‘she’ that had been haunting her for the past few
minutes became an ‘it’. Still dazed from the incident and the accident she had
had near Coliseum, she found balance in the warmth of his words, but the stressed
skin on her cheeks deterred her from grinning or showing any other emotions on
her face. Only tears could run, dangerously wetting the bandages half-over her
left eye. She finally realised that ‘it’ was what she had to withdraw from the
bank she never went to. ‘Klotho’ was what she had to claim with the memorised
codes Dabolmort had written to her in that note he gave her in Fumiccino
airport before he left with the train. The note with the directions she
memorized after destroying it, the ones she never managed to follow. The only
direction from the note she had managed to follow was to go there, to the
chapel. She felt blessed for still having her memory after the incident, after
losing so much blood, but she wondered how she could tell him that she had not
followed his directions. Well, if he has
Klotho in his possession already, it means I might have been used as a decoy
that was unnecessary after all, so he will easily forgive me. After all, it
wasn’t my fault. Forgive me, if not praise me, for that matter. Then I will get
mad at him as usual for not letting me know of his full plans from the beginning,
and so on. Hmm, this time I will not play the game.





Nevertheless, no matter how much she tried
to ease her worries, she was still scared to meet him and tell him that some
reporters and a sharp edge on an alley door did not allow her to fulfill the
task. She was even more terrified of telling him that it was Mark, his chauffer
who pulled her away from the “paparazzi” and perhaps saved her life from the
nasty cut and the bleeding. She was almost certain that Dabolmort would start
shouting against Mark, place all the blame on him and draw the absolute
conclusion that, had he not pulled her inside, she would have not been injured
and of course that she would have outrun the stupid reporters and find a way to
do everything in detail. She was a hundred percent certain that these would be
his exact reactions and words. Hence, she would not tell him about Mark. Mark
was a friend to her. Though Dabolmort sometimes overreacted, as if jealous of
their friendship, she knew in her heart that the only man she ever admired and
placed even above herself, was Jordan. 





She simply admired him. Adored his
ingenuity. She understood that everything Dabolmort would do or say would have
an extension of years, as he could control the realm of choice in his life like
no other man in the world. He was after all, one the few people in the world to
have understood and deciphered the theory of coincidence.












***





Jordan
Dabolmort’s Science.





Before he even became well-known for his
book ‘Crises and Eurematics’, in 1991, he had already achieved numerous publications
in reputable scientific journals, and in architecture magazines. In his early
articles about ‘Architecture in the Time of Quantum Physics I, II and III’, he had
talked about the basic principle of Aristotelian physics which was to deny the
existence of any vacuum in space. He had pointed out that the existence of vacuum
would be absurd, and, just like Aristotle, he tried to prove it logically through
a series of arguments about construction of the universe to reflect the simple
human life, suggesting that the world must be a COMPLETE and finite space, the
same as the wholeness of human life as oneness. 






Jordan Dabolmort was actually trying to explain
the notion of Destiny in modern terminology. He considered vacuum an ‘a priori’
force, or there would be no cause of motion or stability.





At that moment of waiting in anticipation,
Roxanne remembered details she had never known she had been keeping inside her
memory. It was as if she was celebrating all his science in that strange moment
of revelation for her. Little did she know, though, that by remembering
everything this way, she was in actual fact emptying a very big well of
absolutely insane submission to this man. A deep well, inside where her
weakness against Jordan’s absolute control had been hiding successfully for ten
years until that day. It was as if this well was closing down that day.





Roxanne could not help but continue
remembering in an awkwardly perfect brainstorming.





In empty space, no wandering stone would
have reason to move towards earth. Because if there were a gap between every
two of the smallest particles, what would then motivate motion and unity in its
true, or visible proportions? It was like attraction between two people. What
romanticists refer to as ‘chemistry’. But
do they know that it is more chemistry than anything else? She wondered. Do they know that the human skin can smell
the pheromones of other skins and choose the ideal partner according to their
gins? I am pretty sure Jordan knows, and that is what he says about planets as
well, that they attract each other according to their electrical kenosis that
translates to gravitational forces. Oh my, do I remember his bedtime stories?





Then she remembered that in his essays he had
always used parallelisms with recycled and environmental materials, so as to
make sure he had always promoted his business. However, Roxanne also recalled
that he had also always compared the wholeness of being to the insignificant
moments of life that surpassed our consciousness without leaving any marks, yet
it was those that mattered the most to create our future. 





As Dabolmort supported, and Roxanne found
it extremely hard to comprehend, although easy to remember word-by-word, those
insignificant moments were the only ones that were pre-written to happen, that
is why they were so undetectable. Those mysterious moments that, when something
happened, our minds would switch off, and our memory would be incapable of
recording. Malicious moments, as if
coming from a conspiracy movie. She thought. That is what Dabolmort claimed
that the sum of déjàvus was. A part of The Plan. Erasing the sum of moments
when humans took critical decisions in sheer oblivion at times. If humans
understood, then there would be no ‘Plan’. They would destroy it with their
by-no-means-controllable arrogance.





So advanced his ideas had always been, that
when she found out that the same philosophy about the vacuum had been followed
by Parmenides, she was not surprised at all. She was confident, though, at the
same time, that Dabolmort was not stealing these ideas. He was elaborating and
building his own science on them. As Parmenides had argued that if the atom is
the basic unit of matter, then the forces controlling it, make the various
bodies of the world impossible to break down to the size of the atoms that
comprise them, accordingly, Dabolmort supported that if ever a split of that
magnitude happened, a continuum gap in all spaces would be realised. Roxanne
knew that at that point Dabolmort had tried to defy all previous theories and
support that the literal notion of a vacuum means absolute nothingness, not
only in space of events, but also in lack of such space, time, matter, meaning
and everything. Thus, such word as ‘vacuum’ could not exist. Consequently, the
meaning of 'nothing', for Dabolmort had become an absurd notion that included
even the exclusion of ‘vacuum’ as notion and even as a mere word. So for him
there could be no ‘space’ or vacuum between atoms, therefore only pure
functionality in architecture, and absolute control in human life, no luck and
no coincidence. The general conclusion that Roxanne remembered deriving from
Dabolmort’s articles was that everything was pre-determined.





She looked at the wooden door in front of
her. Suddenly it seemed to her like a passage to another dimension. She did not
know what lay ahead and what she had to leave behind. Jordan sounded very
serious in there. All this game with enter-no-enter really had gotten her
confused. All the brainstorming over Jordan’s philosophy and articles switched
off abruptly. Perhaps the well was almost empty.