On the Transmigration of Souls

The Spirit some called Philip had been born into this Other World in the summer after his Junior year of High School, and that other Philip, who spoke to Alex daily and planned their takeover of techno-future 2000’s America, had been severed cleanly from this one.

Or so they said. So everyone told him. That other you will fall away. The Spirit will develop its own identity and become supreme. The pain will fade. Time will heal it all.

Never happened. The Spirit felt, depending on the day, like Philip Plus or Philip Minus, but never Philip II. He tried to find meaning in this place, which often looked a lot like trying to wake up out of it. He spent years searching for Alex, kept tabs on newborns and places he might have liked, and hoped, right up until the end. And much like the other Philip, met new people and had his own wins and losses and tried to adapt to the sudden absence of his best friend and everything else he had taken for granted.

And though he had felt guilty when, after his Spirit had touched the Real that day, he had received the memory of the text and calls and a single message from Jessica that said only “he left you a note”, and found his pain hauntingly separate, like it had been some other Philip looking person who had learned of Alex’s death, as if it was all a bad dream and if he could only find the right lever to pull he would wake up and Alex would be out there somewhere, he still never felt fully separated from that other him. Never lost the feeling that he was, at most, throbbing between two lives, no matter how much he wished, especially when the pain from that other him flowed into his soul each day like an irradiated Thorazine drip, that he could, really, be of two souls.

Would you, if you could, give him away? Let that other you slip through your fingers and fall through the water, settle among the million other stones like it, and when some eddy in the surface catches the light, lose it forever, indistinguishable?

He didn’t think so. Though it was a painful relationship, it was the only one he could really count on in this place. He had come to think of that other him as a poor victim, a dead man whose pearly white eyes he depended on to see the real world.

Maybe that’s really why I come here. To feel that other me’s pain, and thus return to him. To remind myself this is all bullshit. To wake up.

Or, is it just the sickeningly sweet nostalgia, a desperate wish to step backward as simply as I have been forced to step forward? To make a dream of the present and wake up in the past. Fall into comforting delusion. There is no greater delusion than the past. No worse trick.

This place was the epicenter of the past. It’s defining feature. It's landmark. The present and future defined solely by its absence. My father and uncle speaking of their trip to the mall, their inability to get into the restaurant, the magic of the towering observation deck. The implication that one day I too, ten, twenty, thirty years in the future, would come here, that it would last forever. The promised land.

At the time, this place must have felt like the most unfragile place on earth, above it all, supreme. If one wanted to move back through time, this place would be the obvious vehicle. It had been severed immediately from the present and future, left to burn in the past like an offering.

A noise, some kitchen clatter, drew his eyes back to the interior, towards the core, a word no one here would ever use, and he thought of the sterile infrastructure. Poured concrete. Exoskeleton frame. Back stockrooms and stairwells and manager’s office. Elevator shafts and HVAC and wiring. Plumbing singing a humming note struck half a mile below into the restrooms beyond that wall. The men’s sinks, stainless steel and suspended, medical, reminding him of the emergency rooms that stood ready that day but went unused.

The mirror surfaces everywhere. Reflections, shine, glitter, light. Glass, bottle, plate, varnish, teeth that glared like fresh bone.

His eyes fled the center, where the wide planes of floor and ceiling stood ready to crush his gaze, with a choked breath in his chest, and tried to find the horizon again, but got caught on the AC vents that separated carpet from window, which reminded him, always, of hot air, and thus, of fire and exhaust and blind machinery.

Unable to tear out his eyes, he closed them, and mocked himself for the privilege. Unable to cut off his ears, he could only breathe as sounds filtered in from other memories he had forced himself through. The thuds like explosions. The radio chatter. The first unhearable crash. Then the second.

He opened his eyes. The silver light of the horizon, the twin blues of sea and sky, one shimmering, one humming, the groaning grey giant, a taught tension bridge strung between them like a vein, an artery, the color and texture of a vent grate, concealing some fundamental mechanism of the earth.

On his table, the meat no longer steamed. The falling star on his napkin seemed to have fallen asleep. The room hummed with conversation and dining sounds. The whisperings of ghosts. The warm red brown gingerbread house interior. The white tablecloths soft as sugar.

He sipped the beer, clutched the cold glass, felt it thud on the table and press spongy cloth to firm wood, forked the squab and ate a piece with broken root vegetable. Inhaled through his nose, the smells, the air. Held his eyes open and let the sparkles and shadows play. He was not here. He did not see. He did not remember. The illusion shuddered and he felt the truth, he was floating in memories, carefully arranged to catch some light he could never see.

A decade and more of “earnings”. Money. Memory. MEM. A Hardworlder at the top of his game, of

the

game, even, with nothing to spend it on. Once the inquiries had been made. Once access to the databases and registries had confirmed no Alex anywhere, what then?

The idea had been a single day totally realized. No embellishment. Like a photo in a museum. And not the day before, dear God. Any other day. A still of normalcy. A piece of the past preserved. That’s it. But recreated flawlessly, with real memories, only. A single piece of shining truth in this swirling merry go round world of fucking lies, like a blade glaring in the sunlight, cutting through it all.

Or so he told them. They ate it up.

Breathless by the Corrs was playing over the sound system. Jesus. He had asked the Archs, the first time he heard it, if it was some kind of sick joke, but no. It had really been on rotation around that time, so the only joke had been God’s.

The Archs. The makers or Keepers or whatever they were that had taken his contract and worked in ways beyond his comprehension had been solemn, noticeably non-artistic and dead cold compared to his other experiences with their trade, and one had even told him, seriously, near the end of it, that,

“This is a great thing you have helped to make. This is the reason we have all been placed here in this world. To create the final records.”

And the guy fucking meant it.

“These Makers you found are fucking insane, even for this place,” Philip had told his broker after the preliminary meeting, and had been told in a serious tone that these makers were not like any others he would ever meet, and that they preferred to be called Archs. Like architect and archeologist and archivist smashed together.

Philip didn’t care for the intimidated tone, and made a point to ask the “Arch” the next time they met what the deal was with the terminology.

“So is Arch like, a portmanteau of architect and archeologist, or is it like Archangel, Archmage, like supreme, in charge?”

The Arch had smiled, like a priest who had long since become immune to blasphemy, and got in on the joke.

“Maybe it’s like A R K, as in Noah, as in the only guys left above the flood.”

Philip still felt the chill, years later, that had run through him at that. At every meeting along the way, he had felt like he was talking to the emissary of Armageddon, the human face of earthquakes and solar flares.

They had met, of course, at the restaurant itself. Over on the south side, unreal Manhattan stretched out below, still foggy in places, the restaurant itself frozen like a still image. You never noticed how much a carpet floor or support beam or ceiling panel moves until you see them truly frozen.

The Arch had eyes like the silver blue line on the horizon. A voice like a hypnotist. Suit and skin white by nature of being desaturated, with a cobalt blue tie like a carved slice of summer sky. Fountain pen, scalpel, and fucking paintbrush stuck in his coat pocket, apparently a symbol of his order. He sat with his legs crossed, body in some kind of GQ pose, sipping an Aqua Velva with a maraschino-cherry-impaled orange wedge bleeding into the tropical sky blue like a new dawn. Philip would have laughed at his drink, if they hadn’t been sitting in the enclosed manifestation of his power.

And he was powerful. Philip had been in enough meetings and hearings in his time as a Spirit to know real power when he saw it. Some poser playing Dreamlord versus a real creature from the deep. But despite all his power, he or it was here for the money. Philip had amassed a fortune large enough to draw this foppish magi from the Other Otherworld like a carrion bird. Looking at him, Philip had to wonder, how many and how great were the monsters that lurked in the black?

They had met three times, and the conversations had long since been tangled in his memory, but the anger and disgust hadn’t faded. Every time he talked to the mother fucker, he was sure he had made a deal with the devil.

“A cemetery on earth is a sad thing,” spoke the Arch. “Stone and withering flowers and dull government names standing in for life and laughter. But here is a monument of memory, a celebration of life itself, through preservation. Far superior to hollow fountains and etched words.”

“I have asked you before to fucking spare me. I’m here to make sure the mem is sourced correctly.”

The Arch had a way of making Philip regret speaking out of tone.

“Your contract gives you that right. I must warn you our memory is more thorough than you’re used to, but our vaults are open to you, up to the point of protecting our IP.”

He smiled at that, as if he knew how much Philip hated discussing the ownership of souls.

“And as to our sources, we are the only entity with access to memories salvaged from the last diners themselves.”

“Bullshit.”

Another fucking smile. He had claimed that some of those who had died that day had been Spirits and had sold their daily mem just before the event. He said it like it was an interesting bit of trivia, and not definitive proof of one of the most debated questions of the Other. Yes, sir, by the by, Spirits died like all the rest. Vanished, if that supreme you in the Real got in a car wreck.

Unless he was lying. Papering over the missing pieces with best guesses and telling Philip and the others it was accurate mem, honest. Philip had dug enough through their mem to be satisfied, but never enough to be sure.

But he had asked the Arch, despite himself, and trying to make it sound as sarcastic as possible and not at all like a man approaching an Oracle, if the dead come here too, if, as he had heard theorized, they make one final touch with the Real then slowly fade away throughout the day, like a spot of damp concrete drying in the sun.

“No, the dead don’t come here. They go somewhere better.” Another smile.

“You mean Paradise? Trying to sell me a ticket?”

“No, and no.”

One conversation, he was almost sure, had taken place during their final meeting just after the “This is a great thing,” comment. Philip had brushed it off with mockery, and the Arch had revealed his faith.

“When you think about a tragedy, what do you do to cope with it?”

Philip couldn’t recall his answer, but it had been sarcastic and ignored anyway.

“You imagine yourself there,” the Arch had declared, just above a whisper. “In the body of the victim. What would I feel like, to fall, to choke, to see it coming or to hear those sounds and know? That’s your empathy. Your desperate irrational desire to help them. There are parts of your mind that cannot understand time or distance, and thus see no difference between thoughts and reality. It sees them as alive, right next to you, waving, falling, and that part of you wants to save them. That’s what God wants too. That’s why he’s placed himself in all of us.”

“Well he sure as fuck doesn’t want to stop any of it.”

“Don’t you?”

“I’m not the supreme power of the universe, last I checked.”

The Arch had smiled at him some more.

At some point, he had assured Philip that something good had come out of it, and Philip replied,

“Wish I could put it back.”

Near the end of the conversation that wandered from talks of final costs into discourse on philosophy like a nauseatic looking for a good place to vomit, the Arch had said,

“I feel you have something to say by helping us create this place. A message to send to the world.”

“Yeah. Some things are gone forever.”

He had heard many things about the Archs, both during the construction and after. That they were trying to use caches of memory to “alter time” or “break into the Real”, and he wondered, when his mind slipped its leash and really got into a good run, if it was possible, in a place where it seemed, or where he was told, anything was.

Is that your plan? Take all your hard-earned wisdom and memory and break into the only place it could bring you real power, that old fairy tale? Well, if you can get to it, you can fucking have it.

A pause fell over the restaurant like a sheet. Then ‘Everything you Want’ started to play. None of the diners took any notice. This far into the new millennium, it was already white noise.

Under the guilt and the disgust, another question flowed like a cold river in an airless cave.

What the fuck is this? What is the Other?

Here was the only place he let himself ask. Out there, he had long since let out a sigh and picked himself off the curb, accepting the bus wasn’t coming and he had to make do with this existence, whatever it was.

But here, lies felt like another murder.

The obvious answer was a dream. Not the usual kind that broke down and recycled itself and was made of brittle reflections of waking hours mingled with muffled screams of the subconscious, but another kind that he had heard described once or twice in the Real. The kind of dream that solidified, becoming more real and logical by the second, until it reached a gravity and continued for weeks, months, years, so that when you woke, you felt you had lived another life, sometimes right up till death.

But if this place is all in my head, then what is my subconscious trying to communicate to me? A man who kills people to bring them back through violence without consequence. A world where no one ever dies which the dead can never reach. A safe delusion, perhaps in a post suicidal coma, where death has lost its sting.

For him, the most tempting solution, the most pleasant, was that this was all part of some far future inconceivable software, a program written by life forms not at all human, and that the real Philip died long ago, his ashes and the earth around them now recycled into some sun already near the orange end of its life cycle, trillions of years after Alex had taken his last breath.

Maybe this is all some glitch in a simulation machine, but not the purposeful kind designed to enslave humanity, more like the post lightspeed future equivalent of New Folder (9), a forgotten piece of software as malicious as a post it note, a process some dust sparked server deep in an alien abandoned computer complex had kicked on. A fitting origin for this bizarre and ridiculous Other world.

But at the very least, he knew what this place was not. It was not the afterlife. It was not anything close to heaven or even as dramatic as hell.

He had spent over a decade searching for Alex here while he was still alive, and another decade waiting for him after he was dead. If he had been here before, he would have found him, and if he came here after, there was only one place he could be. And Philip had helped create it.

Sometime after the funeral, or maybe even the night before, that other Philip had dreamed he was eating at Windows on the World. The décor and patrons were just as they had been in the 70’s, in the magazine he had found some time in his childhood. There was a playful murmur, a happy roll of conversation. But he sat alone, trying to remember why he was there and who he was waiting for, if anyone. He looked around, and there he was. Alex, at a far table, sitting with people Philip had never seen. They caught eyes, and as if to confirm all of Philip's fears, Alex frowned, excused himself with his friends, and marched over to Philip’s table.

“You shouldn’t be here.”

Philip felt the tears in his eyes, the choking fire in his chest, as Alex hissed at him. He remembered he tried to speak, to tell him he was so fucking sorry that he was alive and Alex was not, that it should have been the other way around, that Alex was a million times smarter and kinder than he was and could have done more for the world than Philip ever would even if he lived to be a hundred, but mostly he wanted to tell him how much he missed him, how much he cared then and now about his pain, that Alex never had to suffer alone.

But Alex didn’t hear him, or didn’t care.

“You need to leave. You’re not supposed to be here.”

And all the people had gone silent. And all the faces had turned red and glared. And the room was still as a tomb. And so he got up and ran out and felt Alex’s glare on his back and when he made it to the elevator, the world flipped at the horizon and he flew up out of the roof into the sky, and the last thing he saw before he woke up was the towers floating upside down in the air.

When he was a kid, Philip’s father regularly asked them about their dreams from the night before, and reminded them of the story of Daniel. It was a tradition that, like most familial things for Philip, he had fallen out of in his teenage years and returned to in his thirties like a missile fired over the horizon.

So one day, almost a year after the dream, he and his brother got drunk enough that when Nico asked how he was doing with “the whole Alex thing”, Philip told him about the dream.

“Shit. Why do you think he was so mad at you?”

After the tears were managed, Philip said,

“Because I didn’t go. I didn’t enlist. Because I don’t deserve to be feeling fucking sorry for myself. I’m alive.”

“Are you sure that’s what he meant?”

“What do you think he meant?!”

“What did he actually say?”

“That I wasn’t supposed to be there!”

“And where was he?”

Oh, oh God.

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

The other people. The laughing dead. The overflowing tables. His own, empty white tablecloth.

He had lost control of the sobbing then. Nico had put his arm around him. The only words they said after that were “goodbye” and “text me when you get home so I know.”

He didn’t have to tell him about the helium, the shotgun, the storage locker.

He let his knife and fork fall to the table. The silver light on the horizon rippled through his tears, rendered perfectly in this mausoleum. The light, suddenly, became the light of unspeakable unknowable silence.

And what had he done to earn it? And what had he given to that light? After his dead friend had begged him to live, had he?

Or was he only passing time here, and there, waiting for his chip to burn out, or the dream to end, or for his light to extinguish or his soul to pass through Samsara…

God, get on with it.

In the sunset, he felt the familiar pull of the Real, and tried to tell himself he was dying, at last, that this was it, but when his Spirit recovered from the flash, from the touch so brief he had to focus on the memories to know it had even happened at all, to consciously remember, or else forget, that he was still there. He was still there.