The Word, ‘Matter’
or
How Curiosity Killed My Cat
By Joseph V. Debs

SMASHWORDS EDITION


*****


Published by Dangereye Inc. at Smashwords

The Word, ‘Matter’
Copyright © 2011 Dangereye Inc.



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When I got the email from Harowitz in the autumn of spring’s spectrum I had long finished what I had thought was the bulk of an essay, or maybe book, that I’d been indirectly laboring on for a good decade (Somewhere towards the beginning, I believe I still have a footnote citing the ontological syntax of a then recent Clinton speech). The long and short of it was that it was an inquiry into the tangibility of words, the transformation of world into word and vice versa. Where I had been stopped for nearly five years—literally paralyzed mid-sentence—was at the cusp of what I had anticipated as being a stroke of genius, the mostly blank page of a new chapter entitled, “The Word, ‘Matter.’”
The word, ‘matter,’ working as both noun and verb, was killing me.
From time to time I wonder whether I would have ever given two shits about material matter, so to speak, without my late wife’s work on quantum gravity. The only thing quantum about my understanding of physics, as she’d say, is my understanding of physics.
When she up and died she took my academic imagination with her. I immediately lost any interest I might have had in what matter had to do with mattering.
The way I explain it to my hack therapist: “Imagine the shape your career would be in if all the cocaine was suddenly gone.”
I imagined the physical universe, and all I could think of were decaying particles. Or just simply decay: Jo’s body becoming a flower or a Coca Cola can or wood for someone else’s coffin.
Practically the entire philosophy department knows the date of my wife’s death by heart. May 21st. They also probably know I’d been pretty much doodling on my manuscript and drinking not quite aquatically but honestly since that Spring. The throwaway Hallmark condolences. Disingenuous invites to faculty parties. The smiles. An implausible number of grinning faces roam the philosophy building in May.
So I wasn’t too shocked when I bumped into Giles Harowitz, philosophy chair and dean of students, after my 11:30 class on a Monday just weeks before a certain sordid anniversary. He was wiping horn-rimmed glasses on a polyester blazer, his silver comb-over leaning against the window adjacent to my classroom.
“Jimbo,” he said. It needn’t be mentioned that no one ever asks to be called Jimbo.
“Giles, how are you,” I returned, cordial, adjusting my course materials in my left armpit, offering a hand. “You’re exactly seventy-five minutes late to class. You know I keep strict attendance.” May smiles. Cordiality and humor, I thought, would belie honesty in the academy till books were no longer read.
“Very good, Jimbo. But you know I never could keep up with Heidegger. Innovative, yes, but a bit speculative. A Nazi, too, one can’t forget. I was actually wondering if you didn’t have time for a quick espresso in my office. Got one of those fancy automatic machines for my birthday from my…”
“From Rosiland,” I said. His wife. Second. “How is she?”
“Rosiland’s just fine, Jim. I’m, well to tell you the truth, and I mean this with utmost respect and…and solemnity, Jimbo. I’m wondering, concerned really, about how you are.” He grabbed a shifty syllabus hanging tenuously from my wad of ungraded essays. “Just a chat is all,” he said, scanning the syllabus. “Tell me how the course is going—“
Solemnity was Giles’ card. Hegel Studies. A reverent reader of tomes whose grave notions were either dead or irrelevant. Giles’ first wife had died in a car crash in ’89; Joanna passed in ‘05. He thought our lines converged on these facts.
“I’ve had the same reading schedule for twenty years, Giles.”
“Sure, sure, but we should catch up on—”
“I’d rather you just be upfront with me,” I said, taken aback at my own gall, a steady grip on my portfolio, reaching for the syllabus. “If it’s about Joanna…”
“Jim.”
“I have students meeting with me for office hours. Thank you, Giles.”
If anyone should say that Time is an illusion, let them live a year on Earth. I watched Spring work Autumn’s opposite on my students, saturating the air in academic buildings with the future. Which meant that students began forgetting. Forgetting math equations, faces of strangers who passed a night, the entire high school experience, books read in February. They stopped remembering and started wondering—while playing hooky napping or smoking or locking lips in the sundrenched parade—if the moment of Spring was something like time stopping. If those last mercurial blips of the school year weren’t time looking towards summer’s glare and sneezing.
“Gesundheit!” I told Jerry, who, after months of searching, had finally found his favorite tennis ball underneath my bed. Its dust had accumulated on his whiskers and by now he was incorrigibly sneeze-laden. What surprised me most was that he had even remembered the damn ball. Frankly, I thought he had moved on to bigger and better things. Torturing squirrels and mice, for instance, a sport he’d gotten almost disturbingly good at during the winter months. I’d see him dragging the carcasses through the snow, taking tails, bones, as trophies.
I was in my bedroom and Jerry had found his ball and I had just opened an email from Harowitz. Giles was contacting me, “After a series of failed attempts at connecting on a personal level,” in order to inform me of a decision made on the part of the philosophy department. I was to be let go, so to speak, from the final two weeks of courses in order that I gain “A more expedient return to a once stable and productive state of professorship.” My students were, he wrote, in good hands, and would be informed of my impending absence “In the most tactful way possible.” I would be paid for my time off, moreover, during which the university counseling services, as well as Giles’ personal guidance, would be at my disposal.
On the desk my copy of Being and Time was open to the section on “Being-towards-death,” sinister in the shadow of a near-empty bottle of white rum. I was going to finish it. But there was no point tonight, I supposed, and drank the rum instead.
“God bless you, Jerry,” I told my wife’s cat. “Thank God for you.”

***

In the morning, feeling optimistic, I replied to an ad seeking a lighthouse keeper on the weenus of the arm of Cape Cod. I had had a brief and wondrous experience with lighthouses as a child, visiting my uncle some summers in St. Andrews, Scotland. A black sheep amongst his white-collar brothers, Uncle Joe kept a lighthouse and wrote lousy poetry. He was a professional drunk and a hilariously poor bocce player, and this had furnished endless entertainment for me.
I guess I thought I might, in a Proustian way, recapture some of my youth.
When my bags were packed I put Jerry in one of those stuffy stowaway carriers with the tennis ball.
The email that I sent to the students of my morning and afternoon Being and Time class:

Dear students,
I have been stuck mid-sentence for a long time; so long our course together must follow in suit. 
—Though you really should finish reading Being and Time, great book, changed my life. I’m heading off to Cape Cod where I’ll be baby-sitting a lighthouse, re-reading the collected works of Rainer Maria Rilke, and searchin’ for that lost shaker of salt if you catch my drift.
I genuinely like a few of you and want you to do well, and for that I’ve arranged your final exam around the following parameters: please send a one-page response to the following prompt to 1117 James Peak Drive, Middleport, Cape Cod, Mass.: How does matter come to matter? Is this mere etymological tautology or a linguistic condition that speaks to primordial facticities?
  Enjoy the rest of spring, copulate while you still can.
- Professor Beck

I left the morning of May 7 and arrived at the lighthouse by dinnertime. The key was hidden like the owner had said under a seashell by the doormat.
It’s funny that the very fulcrum of maritime light should need a lantern to unconceal its splintered belly—the only electricity in that hollow, wooden cyclops went to its single yellow eye. Well, a trip to Middleport Hardware fixed Jerry and I up just fine, at the high landing with the headlight orbiting our zenith—bunkered out on a sleeping bag, F.M. radio propped against the odd circle that made our shelter for two weeks.
As in Heidegger’s case, poetry was a food I needed to survive, but which I had never tried to cook. Drunkenly muttering the verses of “The Panther” or “The Black Cat” or “The Archaic Torso of Apollo” and dragging my finger over the lines I’d hear Jerry prancing up and down the spiral staircase that scaled that ancient Massachusetts phallus, scratching at the hollow wood and having a ball, but always passing out cool and contented on my chest at the end of his jaunt. I imagined Jerry as a poet those nights, thumping up and down the stairs, plumbing the space for the right epithet.
A good two hours before the Zoro-Agents arrived, on the fourteenth night of our stay in Middleport, Jerry had rather abruptly dropped his tennis ball, perked his ears up and began clawing relentlessly—painfully, I should add—at any surface he could find. It was the date of Jo’s death and Jerry was going nuts—three sheets to the wind at that point, I thought that he had intuited this.
The only thing peculiar about those two hours had been a faint ringing in the air. Though I could barely detect it, Jerry’s feline faculties must have been reeling in sonic hysteria. I had his convulsing spine pinned down to the landing for nearly two hours lest he literally scratch his way through the walls to the shallow of the Middleport bay. To the moment we heard the shattering of glass, and a thud that sent dozens of staircase steps to the dusty base of our cylindrical home, when Jerry, who’d never lost so thoroughly his cool, lay silent purring on the flat of the sleeping bag.
“Jesus!” I started, rising from a blanket of glass. “Who on Earth burglarizes a goddamn light—”
As clouds of dust dispersed through a giant rupture in the ceiling, we were able to see that if it were a burglary, it would have to have been one from above. Two figures climbed down from an aircraft lodged in the yellow eye of our home stay. Unarmed and staggering, the most defenseless looking couple in the world emerged: the man clad in a leisure suit, the woman looking like she had just thrown on every dress on sale at a Filene’s Basement. The two seemed, for the most part, uninjured.
“Professor Beck,” the woman pointed out, as a high school sweetheart might at a thirty-year reunion, “You look terrible.”
“I…”
“Look!” said the man, pointing to his arm.
As the woman ogled at me, the man plucked a glass shard from his forearm.
I edged backward to the wall, clutching Jerry in my arm, piling up glass and wood with my backside. The woman, strangely distanced from the idea of injury, gave her companion a disapproving glance. They stood there for what might have been a full minute before speaking, the silence intermittently disturbed by the man’s whimpering.
The room smelled of sawdust and rum. Glass from a bottle had mixed with glass from the light fixture. Moonlight through a breach in the conical ceiling irradiated a pungent familiarity in which the shards had been swathed. Had I really drunk the rum, I wondered, as finally the woman spoke:
“One cannot decide which is worse,” she said. “Coming into or out of your world. They both have frankly distasteful side effects. The former—the penetration into time, as it were—gives the mind the unsavory impression of being tied to a single body. The trip out, on the other hand…well, one should not spoil the surprise…”
“You will not recall one being here before, of course,” the man, who seemed to have a handle, at last, on his flesh wound, chimed in.
“Wha…One…?” I stuttered. I couldn’t believe I was speaking to these specters, but they had to be at least as real as their words. “You mean, you? You have been here?”
“Do you see that starship there,” the woman asked me, pointing above her head. The belly of the behemoth was open, unlit. Gashes in the sides revealed pipes, pistons… “Would you believe one if one told you that your name is inscribed on the interior wall?”
The man’s smile drifted over to her, then, shot through with a grimace, went back to studying his forearm.
Too distracted to even inquire as to how they came to know my name, I started to panic, hurling obscenities, attempting to drown out the absurdity in sound; Jerry purring all the while, chin resting on his tennis ball.
“One can wait until you calm yourself,” she said, brushing residue off of her many-layered ensemble.
I rose with Jerry in my arm and picked up a dagger-shaped shard of glass. “Tell me to fucking calm myself… fine, that’s just fine, I’ll curl up in a nice warm glass shard blanket and pretend you’re…pretend one is not here. One can go take a flying fuck at the moon. I’m calling the police…”
“One is here as one has been before,” she continued, through my fuss, “and as one will be many more times. You see, on a timeline, so many things happen at so many different times.” She smiled. This was funny, or interesting to her. “In your mind, Professor Beck, so many things happen at so many different points. It is a curious mind, the human’s. Everything is so…well if there was a word for it, it would be…divided, one supposes. An expanding division. A lot of… fuss. You have another word for this, however. ‘Time.’
I leaned down with the weapon, carefully placed it with the others, reached into my pocket and pulled out another one, my thumb on the cell phone digits. “Do you have some sort of feud with the owner of this lighthouse? Is that it? Vengeance? You idiots,” I said to them, “I don’t even live here.”
“Of course not, the commute to the university would be absurd,” the man said, slowly bleeding benignly in the shadow of his partner, sister, wife, who knew...
“How do you—listen, I don’t give two shits about where you’re from. Unless you give me some sort of identification in the next ten seconds, I’m making the call.”
“Very well,” said the woman. She closed her eyes, tight. Her brows clenched and she became as austere as she was condescending and peculiar looking before. The man followed in suit. Just as I was going to open my mouth, I noticed a flicker of something I could not be sure of. They looked different. Just in the face. Different, and then altogether changed. The man, eyes shut tight, walked to a standing position beside the woman. He touched her, his palm, her waist. My phone immediately fell from my grip.
Joanna was there in the room. It was a flicker and nothing more, a phantasm in their faces. It appeared for maybe five seconds. I can’t even be sure it was there, but I was convinced enough to follow them, where or when they needed to take me.

***

There were no waivers signed or any kind of pencil pushing involved. In fact, I was even offered the chance to stay behind. And I guess you could say I wasn’t exactly soaring through my chef d’oeuvre, the chapter entitled, “The word, ‘matter,’” so it wasn’t like I was abducted like people talk about, like, by force, like rape or something.
Before boarding the ship, they had dictated a sort of disclaimer, the content of which I have a choppy recollection: “Zoropeterius is, in terms you can understand, the ‘place’ one is ‘from’…just short of our destination is a stopping point…the entrance into our world is a territory one’s ship cannot cross…you must traverse the bridge alone…you will need to train your consciousness to think in a near-timeless region …there is no singularity in Zoropeterius…only fragments…momentary feelings of distinctiveness, of individuality…like mental boughs on a planetoid tree…one will return you to your lighthouse this very day…”
When we were nearly ready to depart, they were fiddling with their thumbs.
They said: “One has no use for the other creature.”
I said: “Go fuck yourselves.”

***

Jerry was already on the ship in any case, reeling in the joy of the lightness.
He was pawing at the curtains stitched with moons and stars like the interior decoration of a third grade boy’s bedroom, shielding the back porthole of the craft, when the rods came unhinged from the walls. My two defenseless captors were every once in a while scratching their butts and picking at their noses and teeth, trying to keep the rum and Perrier and limes together in the air with the sugar and ice and mint leaves. Jerry’s tennis ball mingled weightless, uninspired, occasionally bumping into heads. A faint rumbling permeated the space.
“Why Mojitos?” I asked. It was my wife’s drink. Before she passed, she’d all but perfected the Mojito, practically reinvented it.
“One is very acclimated with current trends. One keeps up with—h’cup—human affairs. Do you dislike it, professor? One is equipped with many liquids.”
My name was inscribed on the wall like they had said, with neither a preface nor appendix. No date, no explanation. “Jim Beck.” There were other names, too, written above my own. Couldn’t recognize any.
“You knew her,” I said, buzzed enough to break the low-gravity placidity. “How?”
“No,” the woman spoke, despite seemingly onerous hiccupping. “Only through you. She has a strong presence in—h’cup—you. You must be aware of this.”
“But she’s dead. How could you—”
“One did little more than feel her presence,” she said, groping for a vagrant lime. “Or should I say—h’cup—absence? Your language is very unclear. In any case, one’s timeless—h’cup—relation to existence has a peculiar—h’cup—rapport with “the dead.” Independent of constructed concepts—say, “before,” or “after”—life dwells, faintly, through all time. A world is born—h’cup—it dies. Where did it come from? Where does it perish to? The same with—h’cup—everything. Lives. Particles. Words, too, if I understand your theory correctly. In constant momentum, nothing is, itself…h’cup.”
She gulped a husky gulp and held up the glass, a shifty eye magnified through the liquid. “The way you deal with this—h’cup—flux is with language. You break everything apart. Spatially. Temporally. Everything is—h’cup—torn asunder with language. It is truly beautiful. It is what one lacks. A story. A timeline. A name. —H’cup—meaning.”
“But you speak. You are speaking to me right now. Well, I might add.”
“In bodies. In your universe. In time. True, one has taken on a peculiar—h’cup—form.”
The man was nodding off. He seemed fortunately to have forgotten Jerry’s claws, which were at this point inextricable from the man’s bell-bottomed pants.
“There’s no…no time where we are going. On Zoro-Whatever…your planet,” I asked. “Language…will be impossible.”
“One shouldn’t think so,” she said, hiccupped. “It is so strong in your consciousness, in your kind. One imagines your presence alone will make language possible.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” I said. “I’m not talking about installing cable. I’m saying, will I be able to speak, to think.”
“One should mention,” she said, directed to Jerry’s tennis ball, which had drifted over to her palm, “That one’s dwelling place—h’cup—Zoropeterius, is not a planet, in your manner of speaking.” She squeezed the fuzzy yellow moon, rolled it in her fingers. “The structure it takes will depend on your presence—one’s own presence.”
Fundamentally irked, I turned to the back wall where Jerry had tampered with the curtain-rods, finally able to see what was happening beyond the now fully exposed wall-length glass: we were making one giant flapping injury in the space behind us, blinding and colorless, its jagged incompleteness on our tail like a crazed cosmic matador after some barely lit beast.
“That’s what that noise is,” I whispered. I looked into her eyes, sleepy, drunk slits. We were soaring. We were, soaring, somewhere. The speed was real at least, in sound, in light. “You need to answer me. You can’t just sit there silent, expecting me to believe you. Will I see her? Where is she? Will I have to die?”
“One’s body needs—h’cup—sleep,” she said, drifting off. “This liquid…” she said.
“And will you quit saying ‘one’ all the time? Christ! Say, I! Say, Me! It’s infuriating.”
“Who is ‘I’?” she mumbled, lost to some remote valence of night.
They were both at last drunk and asleep, in a cloud of lime rinds and mint leaves.
In the course of their slumber, the spacecraft was driving like mad, making ripples in the nada—the great big Nada that we were roaming to get to some planet or mutual understanding or presence that would make some sense of the memories and anticipations of mine and the unttraversable circumnavigation of the Zoro-mind always stretching out to some gossamer end, some modest finish, as everything else, as my organs and my ego and my capacity to give anything to anyone else, as edges of universes that stretch and stretch like spilt milk on a table before they…
In time, something was ahead and a copy of morning bore our flatulent deceleration into its atmosphere.

***

But it was not an atmosphere, just a giant wall, stretching out indefinitely in all directions.
Careening upwards asymptotically to that vast frontier, my two guides waking up choking in the bits and parts of their hangover, I with one arm hanging on to Jerry, the other to my seat, the ship lurched to a halt—did a slow somersault—and gingerly attached itself to the wall so that we were all sitting sideways on some roadblock in the jet-black bupkis of space.
“This is the stopping point? The entrance? Hey!”
The two agents disappeared right from their seats. They are home now, I guessed.
“Well you can’t just leave me here…you can’t expect—”
Just then the ship’s rear door opened and Jerry’s white paws went scampering out. I ran after him, impossibly slow, as in a dream, only to find that the wall we’d landed on was now our floor.
“Jerry!” I yelled, in no direction at all since what I thought was vertical was in fact horizontal. “Jerry! Don’t do this to me, Jerry, where are you?”
And there he was, not twenty feet away, scratching at the metallic ground. Or, at least, at the surface upon which we were standing. I went over to him, and it felt light as hell walking on whatever it was.
What Jerry was scratching at was like an aluminum Bilko basement door. It rattled at his touch like you thought it would, and was unlocked and ajar as if something had just been there, and Jesus Joseph and Mary, that thing opened.
I half expected to find Charon the ferryman beyond that door, demanding Greek currency to cross into Death. What we found was markedly more banal: a narrow, damp staircase, deep into the ground. We walked down—down, which only moments prior, flying towards it, was straight.
Jerry was leading in my diminishing shadow and we could see some sort of terminus, some light down below. A lightness in my head. And if we were walking down…and though we were certainly walking down…whatever down was had changed. It was as though down could be whatever it wanted to be. Presently it was choosing lightness, as air, as Down donning boots descending with you.
I took a step and felt a spring in my spine and nearly fell flat.
I looked back up the flight and the faraway door was still wide open to the space between a shattered light on in Cape Cod and the chill of my descent.
Looked down again: a furry tail peeking out from an opening below. Just as soon as I saw it, it vanished. “Jerry! Jerry, wait!” And I’m practically keeling over the steps at this point with the doubled weight of down… “Here, kitty-kitty…J-E-R-R-E-E-E-E-E…”
Until the words, myself, became more compact, the air particles and I tumbling into density; slowing to a c-r-a-w-l as, sprinting through a NIGHTmarish deceleration, down became harsh and thick; and finally, the sound, J-E-R-R-Y, a monosyllable dropping like a bloodclot down from my throat, down the stairs, denser, slower, slowing, barely escaping; when at last I was c-l-i-m-b-i-n-g u-p the descent, certain that the light down ahead was u p ,   r e  a   l    l     y       u    p,  up and I’d be damned if I didn’t make it out of this far-flung funhouse alive.
I reached there, at the matter of a new light: beaming behind me the weight of fatigue, of failure to make anything matter, of terrestrial solitude; pulled myself up and lay out unbroken, yet feeling my body had been scattered far and wide.

***

God knows how long I lay utterly unconscious on the new side of that roadblock. When I came to, everything seemed a hallucination. My body had, in a sense, been scattered, in that there was no tangible boundary between my sense of self and the vast plains of a new world.
Though I did not have a body per se, there was yet a sense of I to be had, and it had intuited certain things. Among them, that Jerry was near at hand; that he was experiencing similar effects from our new environment; that the two agents had merged into their dwelling as One Selfsame Z.
Which is not to say that we could think in any capacity analogous to terrestrial thinking: when I grasped at something mentally, I, myself was not doing the grasping—instead, there were any number of facts beheld at once and in unison between Zoropeterius, Jerry and I; when I physically grasped, hoping to find some means at my disposal, an arm, a leg, a finger, my forty-five-year-old teeth to clench some kind of geometry, I was left paralyzed, thrown back into the planet.
Intangible, I bundled about like this for some time.
I tried to speak, but Zoropeterius withheld my tongue. I tried to see, Zoropeterius had my eyes in its grips. Though I was certainly there, I could not have said that I was not, not there. In this ontological limbo I nearly went mad.
My two guides, whose bodies had likewise scattered when they had merged with their planet, were finding ways to communicate how hilarious my acclimation to their planet had seemed.
“Wonderful!” I heard, from what might have been a sky. “Yes, you’re doing it, Beck!”
There, at last: my ears.
They made a light show across my perceived horizon, the hues playing in the space as if they were being tickled. Emerald, sapphire.
I had found my eyes.
In fits, I was retrieving my parts.
“That’s it, Beck! Almost there!”
Breaking on through with every bit of my will, I was situated finally into physical geometrical coordinates. Finding myself above a surface and below the first colors I had been permitted to witness since my arrival, I had found my lungs.
“Where did you go!” I pierced the void, but the question was swallowed up and I got it.
It took a moment to get it: Zoropeterius could have been anywhere.
It did not matter.

***

Having found some sort of ground, I was wandering aimlessly, in thought and in space, with the vague sense an escaped prisoner of war must have of his feet. If I let go for an instant of this awareness—of my life in a body on Earth, my name, the experiences that belonged to me, of Joanna, the possibility of seeing her—I’d be pulled under again. Dematerialized. It is a savage torrent, the course of Zoropeterian consciousness. It wants everything to even out to One. To forego Thought. To be, and nothing more.
With tenacity akin to Earth’s insistence on four seasons.
This psychic riptide saturated my mind with thoughts I would never have conceived on my own. The structure of the spaces between universes. The velocity of their expansion. The pale pigment of the darkest pit in space.
When I finally got to speak to the two Zoro-agents in bodies again, in English, fatigue was my only skin. My sense of self had been compromised so many times I could not be sure whether or not to address myself when entering a room.
They found us, Jerry and I, ambling half-materialized, at the end of our wits. Who knew in hours, days, weeks, how long it had been. The two figures manifested larger than life this time, faces in the sky, legs like the skyscrapers of an ancient, godless metropolis. They stopped us dead in our tracks.
“Congratulations!” the woman boomed, her lips shifting clouds. “You haven’t given up!”
Engaged in materializing myself, I didn’t know what she meant by that, given up. If being ready to call it quits and ship back up to Cape Cod was anything like giving up, then she had a thing coming. “Get one…I mean me,” I faltered, “get me out of here!” Had it been that long since I had last spoken? “We’ve had enough of this…take me to one—to Joanna. Is she here? Have I died?”
“Not in the least,” she said.
“Then kill me!” I commanded, with more difficulty than I had ever experienced in indicating the matter surrounding my mind.
“Slow down, professor,” said the man, shrinking in stature. Soon enough they were both standing beside me at my own height. “One has so much more to show you. You have seen the possibility of timelessness. Now one must take you to the moons.”

***

The trip out to the moons—collecting my body, assimilating to some sense of time—was as oppressive as the trip in had been. Jerry and I were taken to scores of these moons, to partake in time experiments (whatever temporal order my two acquaintances belonged to was able to rejig the timework in the moons to presumably whatever it liked). When I would see Joanna seemed the furthest from these maniacs’ itinerary.
The magic of mastering time, it seemed, was that this Zoro-mastermind could conjure up whatever appealed to it. Presumably in the same way it was able to show me Joanna’s face. There had been something in an essay one of Joanna’s colleagues wrote about there being no such thing as an edge when Time was properly apprehended. No such thing as an end or a beginning. All the pretty frontiers running like stags into other non-frontiers. Was that time or the absence of it?
The experiment Jerry would never forget entailed spending time in a zero-gravity environment of mice. They just kind of left him in there like that with the field mice, to see what would happen.
Naturally, while still under the spell of terrestrial timework, he swam after the little critters, catching scores (Jerry was the best hunter I knew of), incautiously hoisting them into his mouth and pawing at them as at an airborne irritant. Even at double velocity Jerry was able to catch one or two mice. But as the moon augmented the rate at which his surroundings transpired, Jerry began to lose interest:
The mice began to resemble a brown and white cloud touching him here and there; then a light brown mirage he felt all over his body; and finally a presence and absence of no color at all to which he felt he fundamentally belonged. In other words, as the experiment progressed, and as the time that belonged to the mice accelerated, Jerry became more and more convinced that his favorite food was in truth some sort of expansive limb of his own.
When his habitual time was returned to him, Jerry could do nothing but groom the mice. Look at that predator floating around, licking mice he thought were his paws or tummy or tail.
Similar experiments were tried on me, not with animals but with humans, by and large with the same results. If you ever need to learn to tolerate something, take a vacation together at the speed of light.

***

One could speak in the moons. One could freely utilize language, in a body, with a brain, untied to any other entity. The only difference, really, from being in the moons and being on Earth was the elasticity of time in the moons. In one moon, the one I had come to call memento lunaris, there was a dentist-style chair upon which one could sit and think, think like a human. As randomly as my derelict neurotransmitters, the internal membrane of this moon would render my memories mammoth and bright.
“You want to understand Death,” the woman put right out there, for me to consume. “To you, that is what matters.” The moon wall displayed an assortment of vegetables and dip on a plastic, expandable Funeral Home table. Trembling hands reaching for baby carrots.
“Is it.”
“Then what matters?”
“…I quite like the bluish glow in this moon. Is it natural? If it were any other way I think I’d just die of a broken—”
“You have no more interest in mattering, then…in the adventure and uncertainty of language…?”
Giles at a book reading on the terrace at the University library. Rosiland looking down at her feet. Jim, you look fantastic. We haven’t seen you in ages it seems.
“The adventure of—what are you?” I asked.
“As in, by what matter is one constituted? …Free of time, in most cases, and space, one is…one is, professor Beck. Curiosity is,” she replied. “What are you?”
“Jim Beck,” I cupped my hands as a walkie-talkie, “reporting to Zoropeterius, from the…zillionth quadrant of I-don’t-give-a-fuck-about-your-asinine-experiments-now-take-me-to-my-wife.”
The spacecraft. A yellow ball drifting in air. A human face cemented to my own, tumbling with me, melting, losing itself in my skin. Crowds of people evaporating into one air.
“Jim Beck, tasting timelessness, with an inquiry about death.”
“No. No, no, I don’t care about death, I’m over it. She’s gone. But I saw her. In your faces I saw her. She was there. I want to understand that. That vision. I want to see her.”
“What will that solve, seeing her?”
“What do you mean, what will it solve? That’s why I’m here, that’s why I’ve allowed you to take me to hell and back is to see her. Look,” I scanned the bluish murk about the chair, “you are not even real. For Christ’s sake, I’m talking to a voice in a hollow moon!”
“Not real…as in, one does not have a body?”
“As in, you are in my MIND.”
“…”
“Then one matters at least,” her voice finally echoed.
“You…no, you don’t even matter. You’re not real and you don’t matter, how do you like that?”
“One has shown you an image of something you love and can’t have, taken you from your planet, subjugated you to time experiments from which you will in all likelihood never recover, and, overall, ruined your vacation. Do you mean to say, Professor Beck, that none of this matters to you?”
“Listen, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care. I’ve had enough. If you’re not going to take me to her…when are you going to take me to her?”
“And what if that was a one-time thing that happened on Earth? If it was just a singular vision one had of your wife’s presence on Earth. One apologizes. But in your own life, your very own, are there not more important reasons for you being here? Your book…”
“Where,” I bellowed, at the top of my lungs, in a moon that has no name, inside a celestial dwelling that has no ground, “is here?”
And they left me like that, alone with my cat, before a giant screen emitting random memories of mine. The hollowness of the moon rounded the reverb of sounds I had once heard, visions I had witnessed. College. Forgotten friends. My parents. A house in Connecticut. Roadtrips. Streetlights and state lines. Academia. My first-grade girlfriend. Graduation—from preschool, grad school. Uncle Joe, the lighthouse. Joanna. Her eyes. There is an apprehension of a lover’s eye caught when kissing, smudged, blurred—immense not because it’s close but because it’s so far away, like a city seen from a plane at night. That vision. My recollection of her dressing. Our bodies together...
The screen began focusing solely on this image of Joanna and I together, closing in on the fault line of our flesh: the molecules at the borders of our skin, which were always doing the lindy-hop around each other like two negative magnets and never, not even once, touching. Closer, further, deeper into what seemed to be a gap between our bodies: the subatomic particles of those marginal skin cells, all the skittles at the fringes of matter that fed the nada, which never touched each other, which never touched their selves, which kept dividing, getting too lazy to exist as one, multiplying to an easier, more infantile alterity…the screen was left like this, zooming into the gaps at the borders that thought they were particles, further and deeper and more ashamed to stay together…

***

Left in Memento Lunaris for dead. Jerry, a pile of paper and pens, and that stupid tennis ball, which must have made its way with Jerry across to Zoropeterius when we first landed. You want me to write, I get it. You want me to forget Joanna, forget why I’m here and write the chapter I’ve been avoiding for years. When I’m ready to write, I’ll do it.
So what if Joanna and I never touched, not even once? So what if there are only spaces rather than particles, only constant division…does that mean that she wasn’t she, I wasn’t I? Ludicrous. I felt her. That is all that matters anymore. There is nothing to be written. What matters is in my head.

***

Obviously there was no such thing as “yesterday,” but during the closest approximation to that Earthly phenomenon, I had felt that something kooky had happened. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I asked the woman, from the chair, how this place got that name—why it was called “Zoro-peterius” in my language, and she responded, without missing a beat,
“You named one that.”
Which made absolutely no sense.
“When did I name you that?”
“The first time you were here, even before the Speakeaters existed, you named one.”
“What do you mean, the first time I was here? And who are the Speakeaters?”
It pulled up a message, which displayed itself on the screen.
“You wrote, the first time you were here:”
You shall be called Zoro, as in Zoroaster, meaning dualism, representing the contrariety of unity and multiplicity in our universe. And you shall be called Peter, meaning rock, representing the matter and mattering in our universe. This name will allow every human who comes into your presence to understand the expansion of the universe, the falling-apart of edges, and the possibility of Death, which is the condition of mattering.
“I never wrote that,” I belted. “You introduced your planet as Zoropeterius!”
The screen proceeded to show me pages and pages of notes on the human experience of Zoropeterius, insisting that I had been here working on this subject for centuries.

***

At the peak of our miscommunication Zoropeterius had suggested visiting the Speakeaters just to experience the mattering of a non-verbal language. We would be left for what would feel like 14 Earth days amongst the Speakeaters.
“They communicate with food,” the woman said.
“With food,” I said. At least we’d maybe get to eat for a change. “We’ll have bodies on their planet? I can eat their food? Jerry and I can eat there?”
“You may have to seek out food yourselves. The Speakeaters are fasting,” said the man.
“For how long?”
“Until they die,” he said, unmoved. “They have given up on the industry of meaning-making. They cannot eat without thinking, without making some matter of what they have just eaten, the meaning they have just ingested. It is no longer possible for them. So they have quit.”
“Quit eating? You’re taking us to a mass suicide?”
“As you’ve said, you’ll be able to eat there, and maybe you’ll come up with something for your own inquiry about matter. You have stomachs, don’t you?”
“They have stomachs? The Speakeaters?”
Zoropeterius pulled up a picture from the annals of its over-comprehensive archival memory.
“Well, they’re human.”
The trip to the Speakeaters was just a skip and a hop over to another one of the interior moons of Zoropeterius, the moon of Speakeater dwelling, whose conduit of travel was (you guessed it) another damned dentist-style chair.
Smiling in the blue murk of a moon not unlike Memento Lunaris, the man agent encouraged, “One thinks you will find that they are quite a peaceable folk.”

***

Peaceable indeed! When we appeared on the beach the little men didn’t even look up from their tropical coma; that’s right, they just kept on gazing up into the coral atmosphere, the nihilists. Jerry and I tried getting their attention, many times to no avail. If a tree falls in a forest of Speakeaters…well, they don’t give a shit. Nothing matters to them. Zoropeterius had warned us about this.
“Hey!” I barked, hopping over naked legs like hopscotch lines and making the ruckus of a thousand tourists riding Hummer limousines through some peaceful beach retreat. Jerry tiptoed across bare chests that were breathing softly, making temporary homes for the cleanest air we’d ever touched. I lifted feet. I gave noogies. I tried to tickle them. Their eyes were open the whole time, breathing that crisp air.
Nothing.
We holed up in a cabin less than a hundred yards inland. Day and night came and went effortlessly, swifter than I could ever remember. There were stars. There were tides and a breeze and clouds, and shadows. I ate like a king and felt the weight of time again.
Jerry, the hog, had inexplicably lost his appetite.
Five nights passed like this, every day Jerry and I walking out to the beach to the same sedentary arrangement, making some meager attempt at communication. They would not even open their eyes. But the same breathing—peaceful, wanting. Human.
In the morning there was an arrangement of assorted cuisine at the foot of the cabin door. I ran out to see if one of them had brought it, but no one was there. Not even footsteps. Jerry watched me devour food not unlike Earthly tropical fruit—the juicy, colorful stuff, seeds and all—and tender meat.
The food was delicious, and it didn’t matter what it was.
Of course nothing matters without language; this was taken for granted in the writing of my chapter. But are words real? Real as strawberries; or coconuts; or the delicious and mammoth half-carnivorous pods of flesh that hang from Speakeater trees?
Jerry didn’t eat a bite. I realized finally that he must have felt cannibalistic eating meat after he’d entered into timeless union with mice, and whatever other species Zoropeterius had tried out on him. Jerry, incidentally, was allergic to all berries and most vegetables. He’d throw up his goddamn stomach if he came within a ten-foot pole of anything that he didn’t have to chase after.
I had eaten soundly but not without a trace of guilt, and had placed the empty wreath outside the door. The next day, the same combination of color and texture and taste was replenished. The same for the next week.
I tried to communicate with the brutes, I really did. I brought a different combination of food to them every day, hoping it would mean something, something peaceful and productive. Hoping it would spark some resuscitated élan for speech. But their loss of appetite, like Jerry’s, for completely different reasons, was incorrigible.
According to Zoropeterius the Speakeaters have only existed since Victorian times on Earth. Their planet evolves at a mystifying pace, and will expire probably even before your grandchildren are discovering their sexual organs.
Apparently short-lived planets happen all the time across our universe, as if the great big nada were trying out brands of makeup. Some try language, some don’t, and the dim light of concern flickers on and off like Christmas lights across the plains of the planes of sentience.
Apparently.
Zoropeterius had let me in on a few more facts about the Speakeaters before it had sent me off to them like so many charged particles toward a molecular desert. Their race was born and had thrived on a planet as far from their present one as Earth is to the now defunct planet, Pluto. Their birthplace had died, and so they, like me, were widows and widowers.
That is not to say, it should be noted, that I found any kinship in or empathy for those pitiable humanoids.
What Zoropeterius had also told me about the Speakeaters: their indisputably thorough silence had occurred directly as a result of their planet’s death. How’s that for irony! If they had lent their ear for even five minutes—however long that might actually be on their planet—they might have found in me a kindred spirit.
As the days wore on, I came to remember these facts, the bond I had with this people. No wonder they were such miserable suicides! All their words were frozen on a dead planet lifetimes away. The cat that had got their tongue, so to speak, was language itself.
Speaking of cats, Jerry looked ghastly at the end of that week, I could count his ribs; and, to boot, his hips were completely shot—he was walking like a cripple. I found him that twelfth night curled up outside cabin back with a family of island mice who were licking his paws.
The next day I walked down to the beach with Jerry in my arms to the exact spot we had appeared on the planet nearly two weeks prior and lay him at the feet of a Speakeater who hadn’t budged the least bit in all those hours, and said: “Now will you listen to me you hideous mutes! Now that my companion is nearly dead and I have no way of getting home! And where are you, Zoropeterius?” I screamed at the coral sky. “Help spark some ideas, my ass!”
I spent the afternoon bringing Jerry to various half-dead Speakeaters who wouldn’t even spit on our faces.
13 days, and Zoropeterius would return on the 14th.
The rhythm of Earth-like time had made me cognizant of a few things, philosophical epiphanies not being one of them: I remembered it must have been at least a few weeks since I’d left Massachusetts, and that my students had probably finished the semester. Which meant a small clusterfuck of envelopes bearing final exams must have been sitting stupidly outside the lighthouse I was supposed to be watching. I had gotten nowhere with my chapter, I had nearly lost the vision I had of Joanna, and Jerry was knocking at death’s door.
I brought him on the thirteenth night down to the water to try and wake him up a bit in the cold, and he would have drowned if I hadn’t kept him afloat. I grabbed his tail once from the tide and what I saw in the water made me drop him right back in the wash: my beard was light grey and I had lost most of my hair. I looked thirty years older than when I had arrived two weeks ago.
I grabbed Jerry and ran to the cabin and didn’t eat that goddamned poison the ugly mutes were killing us with and didn’t sleep a wink, clutched Jerry for dear life till dawn.
I thought of his body, flush to my chest, never touching my skin. The language barrier was not enough. There had to be a physical one, so that anything that ever loved would have to remain a prisoner unto itself. I could feel my face as it truly was, older, heavier—silver, sagging whiskers.
As I lay Jerry on the bed, I noticed a fading mark where the bed met the wall. I dragged the bed away from what I hoped would be some sort of signification, any word at all.
What I found was a poem, in English:
Though mind is past,
yet past needs life,
and so their tryst
keeps late the night:

between the bows
the past ignites
and so the Now
beats out its light

endure late night
endure blind sight
the awful future
in you delights

-Jim Beck

The bed got back to its place and I settled finally beside the animal. Before I fell asleep I thought I felt our heartbeats in sync, something I had been told happens when hearts are close in proximity. But could anything ever be in sync when presence was so infected with death? Old Wives’ Tales.
When I marched us out to the landing site Jerry had already died. In the night on a planet of thieves.

***

The two Zoro-agents (if it were one, I might strangle the fucker) ship me back to Cape Cod without crashing this time, and I walk to the door of the lighthouse. Paint peeled, windows boarded up. No envelopes. It must be the middle or end of June as I’d suspected, on account of the envelopes having been taken away. I look to the town of Middleport, a pretty, hunched-over scape in the dusk, its dusty winding streets meandering to its center like unassertive sentences. A dark, hushed kind of language. But the lighthouse—corn flake panels flaking at my touch, the doorknob’s sheen dull as my memories of things like doorknobs and lighthouses.
The beings posing as man and woman are shuffling gingerly by the ship as I crouch down to a grey mound of sand beneath the doorpost of the lighthouse. It hadn’t been there before. I brush and I dig, and there are the envelopes, hidden beneath a foot of sand.
We mount a little rowboat making a seemingly concerted effort of non-mattering in the wettish sand, for a funeral on the water.
They try to explain to me while rowing that the offering of food the Speakeaters had incessantly placed outside our cabin had meant something, and that it must have been hard for them to break their vow of silence.
“You call that breaking a vow of silence! They didn’t say a word! How was I supposed to know…”
I try to describe the preparation of food.
The woman says: “The arrangement meant something like, ‘caution: your species ages faster than one’s own.’ The red, soft fruit stands for a warning. When it is placed beside other signs, it is an omen. The fleshy, pink stuff means life or life form, species. The dry, black berries with the thorns indicate death or decay. It was a grammatical sentence. They were looking out for you.”
“And what were you doing? Were you looking out for us?”
“Well, did you finish your book?”
“Stop here. Stop the boat.”
“One is only—”
“I don’t give a shit, stop rowing.”
I must look real wise out there on the water, like an old sailor. I must look like I’ve seen everyone I’ve once loved grow and flourish and die, and it’s two weeks to my forty-fifth birthday.
“Look at Jerry,” I croak. “Look at the cat. Look at what you’ve done. Does that matter to you? Does anything matter to you? No, I haven’t finished my goddamn book, no thanks to you. What do you have to say? Have you gotten what you wanted?”
The man looking agent squints into the distance, then back at Jerry’s corpse. The female opens her mouth.
“Death is the only thing that matters. That’s why one found you.”

***

The agents leave shortly after we show Jerry to his permanent resting place. He’d always loved the ocean.
I manage to break into the lighthouse with the envelopes, open every single damn one when I awake. Sifting through asininity, I find a few interesting responses; among them, a pretty familiar verse of a poem. I feel like I must have read it before. I’m starting to think that my aging body is taking a toll on my mind.
Otherwise, it takes me all morning and all day to realize just now that my cell phone is still lying in a pile of glass. Flip it open—11:17, the 21st. The 21st of June, 2010, I’m realizing, is not, in fact, a Wednesday as the screen indicates. The 21st of June finds itself on a Wednesday in the years 1995, 2002, 2009, 2016 and so on. I thought it must be a mistake, but on satellite time?
It is night and there is a familiar ringing in the air. If I am correct, Massachusetts should be receiving some intergalactic company within the hour. They will not find me here. I’ve left a note and I’m heading into town to find a calendar, maybe a mirror. Some food that isn’t talk.


###


About the Author
Born in New Milford, CT, Joseph V. Debs moved to New York City to study literature and philosophy, briefly studying in Paris. Since graduating, Joe has worked odd jobs in NY and focused on writing short fiction. He has published in NY journals. He is haunted by the number 1117 twice a day, which, incidentally, is his birthdate. Joe lives in Brooklyn, NY.


Acknowledgements
Andrew Gray and Dave Robinson provided development editing for “The Word, Matter” with support from D. Yon Klempnar and Linda Hull. Andrew Gray developed the cover art concept and the cover graphic was illustrated by 3DGarden (www.3dgarden.org).


Other Dangereye Stories



“The Extraterrestrial Anthology, Volume I: Temblar” is available here



“Cooter” is available here


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