Opercula

The teachers made a strong effort to create a respectful silence around me. They knew my classmates would talk. Would whisper. These teachers, the braver ones anyway, gave little speeches occasionally. They talked about “delayed development” and “transgenic differences.” How not everyone’s body will bloom at the same pace. They would talk about famous late-bloomers. Great, inspirational success stories. Sometimes though, they confessed, and they would always admit this last part almost under their breath, a strong voice collapsing into a whisper, a person just doesn’t bloom at all.

They were trying to ward off meanness. I get it. But meanness (and trust me, I’ve encountered it) happens outside of the gaze and earshot of teachers. Publicly, everyone at school’s a perfect angel, nodding along with the sermon. The worst offenders usually applaud the preacher.

I used to sit in class and daydream. Instead of focusing on what numerical identity the mysterious Secret Agent x had decided to assume today in algebra class, I would steal peeks at my blossoming classmates. I would notice Oleanna’s branches, the recent growth spurts on both sides of her body. They were long and luxurious, to her knees. Once again, she would be in season. She would bring forth the loveliest fruit. Just look at our yearbook if you don’t believe me.

She was probably the most fertile girl in our school. And I always ended up sitting near her. She wasn’t mean at all. Not publicly anyway. But still. Some days I hated her. Those were usually the days when I would catch a peripheral glimpse of her picking one of her juicy dark berries and tossing it back through her perfectly glossed lips. She knew how many guys and girls were transfixed in those moments when she would taste herself and then smile her mysterious Mona Lisa smile. Other days, I didn’t hate her at all. I admitted the truth to myself. I just wanted what she had.

Of course, my parents had taken me to the usual specialists. My siblings, my younger brother, my older sister, were both branched, and my older sister had never had any problem bear fruit. I was happy for them. My older sister wasn’t nasty about it at all. She’s even tried to help me, massaging my opercula. And my mother gave me the usual liquid supplements which are supposed to help the growth-challenged. We tried everything on the market.

The specialist doctors did all the usual scans. They said everything was in the right place. They did some exploratory visualization with fiber optics and newer technologies and then even gave me a dose of nano-bots to assist in my germination. They didn’t help at all. They told my parents it could come right at any time. Nobody knew why I hadn’t even been able to bring forth one branch from a single one of the many gill-like openings on either side of my body. I was a barren waste. My mother and father both promised they would never put me through the agony of transplantation. You could always tell when someone had transplants. There were horrible stories about what happened when the body rejected the branches. Sometimes they grew in the wrong direction, into the body instead of the world. Rumors abounded that those branches came from cadavers. Those were the fruits of the dead. Yuck. In the end, the medical consensus, the recommended course of action? Home schooling. Hide her.

I began to stay in the house all the time. I joined some support groups but this was on my phone, not in real life. I became close with some of those kids and even a few of the adults. Half would preach that were would be a cure soon. And about half would say we’re okay just the way we are. A few were just as silent as me. Being fertile isn’t everything, they would say. Food can be grown anywhere. We don’t even need the transgenic fruit to survive. For the vast majority of human history, people were not half-trees. Great minds and spirits of the past did not produce fruit. Well, not literally. Not on a single day of their lives.

True, there was that recent argument that Jesus had been the way we are now. “I am the vine and you are the branches.” And other quotes like that. “Eat of my body and drink of my blood.” I think it’s funny that today Jesus is always portrayed in visual art as a total fruiter, and yet when you look at the art of the distant past, he was just like any other human.

There are still countries, I would tell myself, that have resisted the transgenic revolution. These were usually smaller countries, many of them dominated by some of the newer religions that were catching on. I can’t tell you how many times in my fantasies I saw myself moving to one of those countries, perhaps finding my great love there looked exactly like me. I knew that when I was older I could always fall back on visiting one of those dating sites exclusively for the non-germinating. But I didn’t look forward to the experience. I tried to imagine myself falling in love with someone just like me. It made me feel so weird. It made me want to just float out of my body.

Actually, if I emigrated to one of those non-transgenic countries, my foreign love wouldn’t even have opercula. He would be a “skinflint,” to use the horrible term the fruiting use to insult the fruitless. Would I be as accepted as I am? Would my love want me to undergo painful surgeries to remove my opercula, so my body would look like the cultural norm? Wouldn’t my lover want my body to look like a body he grew up fantasizing about?

Things all sped up when my sister had gone from being engaged to actively planning her wedding. I can still see my mother and her sitting before that glowing screen, oohing and aahing at the various wedding dresses with their golden and silver body trellises. There were nectar supplements to assure a bride had a bountiful harvest on her body for her wedding night. Some brides-to-be grew their branches very long in the back in preparation for the big day, so they could be woven into the train of the wedding dress. The groom would then harvest these on the honeymoon. Some guys got so hot for that ritual. They would trade stories. I hated overhearing those conversations.

I remember the day I left. I had been watching a scene in a movie in which a very beautiful young man was sunning himself on a dock. He was about my age. He was famous. He was absorbing the light he needed to complete his natural fruition. His branches were strong and wiry, like a second musculature outside his already chiseled body. He had gone through his latest seasonal flowering and now he was bearing fruit. Some sort of miniature pear-hybrid all over him. I had to turn it off. Because I imagined the look he would give me after seeing my body. And then how quickly his gaze would avert itself, knowing where not to look ever again.

I went into the river on a summer night. It was warm water, or warm enough anyway, and I had no fear of drowning. Like virtually all non-germinaters, my malfunctioning opercula hid functional gills. True, these were vestigial, but I could submerge for extended periods. This is why people like me had even been banned from the Olympics. Our unfair advantage.

I had swim googles on. And a strong waterproof flashlight I had only recently purchased. I wondered what my family would make of that, when they saw the last purchase I had made. I hoped they would not follow me, not create embarrassing MISSING notices. I wasn’t missing. I was gone.

I swam towards the Deadlands. The area of no video cameras, the area we are forbidden to inhabit. The area which the last great war had destroyed. It had once been a metropolis swarming with life. It was a long journey, but I made it. I didn’t really care what happened to me then, the night I swam away, but that has changed now.

I had to leave the river and walk the last fifty miles or so. Down the dead highways. I thought they were pretty. The desolation. The wildflowers everywhere taking back the roads. The animals come to look at you. They’re no longer afraid.

I don’t want to go back. This is home now. My problem now seems small in comparison to those faced by the war survivors here and those crazy enough to come live here. I’m able to help people here. People with greater challenges than me. Skinflints abound, but so do variant transgenic beings of all stripes. We have a loose form of government that’s almost no government at all. We are blocked from receiving news from the outside world. Our technology only operates within the Deadlands. The outside world doesn’t want us to know anything.

I hope my sister had a beautiful wedding. I hope she has a lovely marriage. I hope her children bear fruit and their children bear fruit. “Long vines to you!” as the wedding toast goes.

One night the jamming of signals they do out there must have gone down. Because an iffy signal bled over onto my screen and we were suddenly watching their t.v. for a short while. Instead of our home grown programs. It was a beauty pageant. A glittery affair. Vines everywhere. Some of my friends were over, and their children, and we all gathered around to watch the girls strut and flounce to show off their fruits.

Many of those in the room had never even seen fruiting bodies. There were squeals of laughter and disgust from the kids. Parents chided them. These older ones looked at my opercula in the flickering light from the screen and deeper lines formed in the brows of some of my friends. “You okay?” they asked, as true friends do.

“Of course I’m okay, stupid!”

We all laughed.

Later that night, after they had all left, I went into my bedroom at the rear of my house, and sat on the edge of my bed facing a pier mirror. That mirror which had just always been here in this house that we found, that was ours for the taking. That mirror which had probably belonged to someone who died a hundred years ago. I like that mirror.

I no longer wear the clothing they wear in the outside world, with openings for branches. I wear whole garments now. But I was naked.

I held a pair of pruning shears in my right hand, and as I looked in the mirror, I clipped each branch that had begun to grow from each operculum.

I felt good doing it. And then my lover came into the room. He was monstrous. He was beautiful. He was the sun in the night.

“Do my back, darling…please?”

He smiled as he took the shears tenderly from my hand.

Gift

Jason.

It would be so easy to say it’s all Jason’s fault. After all, he was the one who retrieved the package from our mail box. While Sarah and I were still at work, he opened it and read the instructions and blindly did what they told him to do. But it’s what any kid would do. We remind ourselves of that. When we get to really arguing. When we get ugly with each other. Hundreds of times we’ve reminded ourselves.

And I’ve looked at that set of instructions hundreds of times. It’s a single sheet of paper that arrived folded in the package. It looks like any other goofy set of instructions telling kids what to do with a toy. Large, hand-drawn comic book style instructions with black and white drawings show you how to put the contained “seeds” in a filled bathtub. Kids can’t wait to see the seeds “COME ALIVE.” They can’t wait to see the “MAGIC SWIMMERS!!!” promised. The words under the drawings are in several languages, so kids around the world can understand no matter where they live. No matter which country.

I’ve never seen the seeds. I have to imagine them. I have to go by what Jason tells Sarah and me, when we ask him to repeat the story. He hates telling it now. He’s almost a year older.

He’s started talking about leaving. At his ridiculous age. Where would he go? How would he live? He carries a heavy load of guilt, we know. We keep telling him that it’s not his fault when he talks about leaving. Or when he hints at doing something worse. I take him by the shoulders and tell him. “It’s not your fault.” But, really, a tiny voice deep down inside me screams that it is his fault. It totally is, kid. You did this to us.

Jason says when he placed the seeds in the warm bath water we were at work. It was late afternoon. He had just gotten home from school. They were in the mailbox inside the envelope addressed to him. It was a label sticker, not handwriting. Later, we noticed his name was actually spelled wrong. His birthday had been less than a month before, so he figured it was just one of his uncles who had sent them. Perhaps the young uncle who travels a lot with his army job and is always late with birthday presents, when he remembers them at all.

Or it was just some sort of free promotional gift for something he had filled out somewhere. Some contest or other. He didn’t give it a lot of thought, he admitted. He just wanted to see what would happen.

It was slow at first, Jason said. Nothing seemed to be happening with the seeds. They just sank to the bottom of the warm tub and rested there on the bathmat doing nothing whatsoever. “What a rip!” Jason thought. He went downstairs to watch t.v., made a t.v. dinner, texted a bit with his friends. Then he ran back upstairs to the bathroom and looked.

And they were swimming around in there. Little black aquatic creatures. One for each seed. Five of them. Not like fish. Too many tiny little limbs attached, he said. And the shapes of their heads were different. It wasn’t all that exciting. He ran down to the basement to see if we still had the aquarium. He wasn’t sure if we had donated it to Goodwill after the last of the goldfish deaths.

When he got back upstairs, and he assured us it couldn’t have been more than five or ten minutes later, there were no longer five of the things in the water. Now there were at least a hundred of the small black creatures swimming in the tub. And he saw the drain cover had been removed. Partially. The tub was slowly draining. He watched as the black creatures swam with everything they had in them for the drain. And down they went. It wasn’t a random sort of swimming. It was directed. It was intelligent. And they were gone in seconds. He watched them go.

He watched them go.

He said he had no idea how that happened. The drain cover being partially open. Sarah slapped him once. Hard. She slapped him hard across the face when he said that part, when he repeated the story. When he said that he didn’t know how the drain cover was open. I don’t think she knew why she slapped him. We all knew by then that he hadn’t done it. They had. I think she slapped him because he had mentioned the moment when things truly became irrevocable.

We saved the envelope they came in, but the return address was fake. When I searched online, I saw how many other people had received the package too. Many of them had different fake return addresses, but no small number had our same fake address on their package too. The address in Idaho. It said it was a “toy company.” The government had begun collecting the packages. By then, we realized the government was also rounding up those people who had received one of the packages and that those people were not returning to their lives. Not even their children were returning to their lives.

So we chose to be one of the families who remained silent. We chose to proceed with our lives.

I remember when we first noticed it in our drinking glasses. It would form a black gelatinous mass on one side of a clear glass. Perfectly circular. Smaller than your pinkie fingerprint. You could turn the glass away from you and the mass would swim across and paste itself against the side of the drinking glass nearest your face. Even with a magnifying glass, you couldn’t see any distinguishing features, any sense of a tiny animal or animals in the mass. You would see see nothing in the filtered water container in the fridge. It looked like crystal-clear water. And when you filled the drinking glass and sat down to watch your favorite television show, it would be there within minutes. On the side of the glass.

Well, of course you didn’t drink it, you’ll say to yourself.

But if you didn’t drink it, the pain would start up inside. Inside your guts. Sometimes in your head. In your brain. It felt like knives twisting or sometimes like hot coals placed inside one of your organs. Other forms of pain were something new on earth. Like nothing anyone on earth had described in any medical textbook. I know because I would type words in the search bar. The only matches were people describing similar pain that started only with this year. It was dangerous to confess such things on blogs or websites. The government was tracking us all down by then. I stopped typing things in search bars.

So we did as our bodies told us.

Soon, we learned the pain would stop if we walked outside the house.

If we walked a certain direction, the pain increased. If we walked the other direction, it relented or completely disappeared. You’re getting warm. Warmer. Warmer. Very hot. No, you’re cold. Go back the other way! You’re feezing! You know this game. Cold hurt like hell.

So now we leave the house when we’re told. All three of us, Sarah and Jason and I.

Remarkably, we are still able to keep our jobs and Jason goes to school every day. Except for the days when the pain tells him to stay home “sick” and then go out. While we are at work, he goes on what we now know are missions. We go out in the evenings. Sometimes in the middle of the night, Sarah just leaves. I say nothing when she slips out of our bed and begins dressing. She says nothing on the nights that I get into my clothes at two or three in the morning and leave as fast as I can, to stop the gnawing pain.

We don’t talk with each other about the places we go on these “guided journeys,” or the things we must do. The things the pain makes us do. Because on the few occasions we have tried to pool our information, the volume on the pain was turned up to its highest level. We are still allowed to have normal conversations, to pretend that life continues as normal. But it’s a hollow thing, an exercise in calming our own nerves at the dinner table. It helps to pass the time.

I think we’ve all thought of suicide by now. Probably we’ve all thought of familicide too.

You probably would too. In our shoes.

There’s always the government. We could go to them. But the pain would be excruciating. And nobody has seen any of those people return. The word on the street and online is that those people were probably all seen as collateral damage. They’re just gone. It makes sense.

I don’t want to tell you all the things I’ve done. I don’t want you to hate me any more than you already do right now, as one of the uninfected reading my words.

I don’t want to tell you how I’ve had to open my mouth and disgorge a dark, gelatinous fluid into the food of my coworkers kept in the little mini-fridge we share in our university office bay.

Only the oldest colleagues in my office still leave their food out of their sight. That generation doesn’t seem to get what’s happening. The younger coworkers are well aware. I’ve seen some of them eyeing me. They talk to me differently now. A few of them do, anyway.

I’ve started to get the pain around them. They know, you see. They know which ones know. Just as they know if I try to talk to anyone.

I know what I’ll have to do in a matter of a very short time. The pain increases and the thought forms in my head. When they approach and speak with me. The ones who have guessed I’m on the new “down low.” They might have already spoken with the government. It might be too late.

I know what I have to do.

Unless my young colleagues are better organized than I am. Part of me, and it’s a large part, hopes they are. Hopes they win. I’m tired.

But for now I must go and have another ordinary afternoon, stand before my host of angels, my paying students, and explain William Burroughs (how ironic, right?) to the innocents in a way that the words will walk carefully on society’s eggshells, and yet still perhaps give them a hint of a warning that the safety they are feeling is a safety within a placid dream that someone other than themselves is dreaming.

Fiction, Fiction, Fiction

An editor with "a startup seeking to bring short fiction to modern readers" contacted me about one of the short stories I'd published on Medium. He wanted that for his new journal. So that will be appearing in that new mag and I'll share more info when it debuts.

Here's one from tonight.

HELPING HANDS DAYCARE


I can’t remember Jake. I mean I can, but I won’t. Because Em and I have two other children now. And we want them to have a normal life. They don’t even know they might have an older brother somewhere. But since you asked, I’ll tell you. I can’t talk at length about this, so I’m going to be very brief. Just the basic facts. We don’t know any more than those few “basic facts.” Probably we never will.

I told Em from very nearly the beginning there was something different about that daycare. Helping Hands Daycare. Well, you know it’s gone now. The building burnt to the ground. There’s a Goodwill store in that lot. You’d never guess there had been anything else there. There’s no trace of it left.

When we first encountered it? Well, sure, it looked fine if you took a quick glance. Fingerpaintings hung proudly on the walls. There was up-to-date and safe playground equipment and stringent supervision at boisterous playtime. A current license. Healthy food. A strict sick-child policy to protect everyone. The staff was friendly and, most importantly, they interacted beautifully with the kids. Perhaps too beautifully. I just felt something was off with “Miss Marsha.” It was her business. You know they never found her. That was some other woman’s body in the fire. They said there had been an attempt to make it appear that it was Miss Marsha’s body. Well, DNA testing put that to rest.

How it began? Jake began coming home with dirt under his fingernails. I would ask him to explain and he used to shrug me off. He’d get that nervous look. I told him it was okay, tried to turn it into a joke. So eventually he said that disturbing thing, he just came out and said, “We have to feed them.”

My wife thought it was nothing at first. She said it was typical fantasy, a story sprung up between Jake and his playmates at Helping Hands. When he told us that the things lived under the daycare, in a sort of tunnel, that Miss Marsha would take them down there and they would feed these creatures, she laughed. She just snorted and whinnied and told her friends. She thought it was hilarious. “The monsters that live under Helping Hands Daycare.” I heard her mother and her laughing on the phone about it. I distinctly remember that. They hooted.

Em actually liked to hear Jake tell the stories. She’d encourage him. Even at the dinner table. Then she would correct him, but oh so nicely. She would say that she liked to hear him tell stories, that it was good he had an imagination.That someday he could write books and tell others these stories and they would enjoy them as much as his mother did. She said imagination was something about which Jake should be proud. He would nod at her and finish combining his mashed potatoes and peas. But I saw in his eyes that he thought she was crazy.

It all happened very quickly after that. The fire at the daycare. Miss Marsha presumed dead. Everyone wondered at the time why she would have been at the daycare in the middle of the night anyway, which is when the fire broke out. They still haven’t identified that young woman whose body was found in the fire. Maybe they never will. They did determine she died by a gunshot to the head and not from the fire itself.

Obviously, no children perished in that middle of the night blaze. But four of the children, the oldest enrollees, did disappear shortly after that fire.

“Abducted” is what the media report. In a sense, that’s true. But in another sense it isn’t.

I began waking suddenly at night in the period immediately after the fire. I’d often find Jake awake and creeping around the house. At three or four in the morning. Often, I’d catch him at the windows peering out into the night. My wife thought he had become a sleepwalker because of the trauma from the fire. We didn’t enroll him in a new daycare. It was all too disturbing and we wanted to keep him close to us. Em’s sister would watch him in the daytime. In our house.

I’d always ask Jake what he was doing up and what he was looking for out the window. He told me he missed his “special friend.” I was terrified there might have been sexual abuse going on and that Jake was turning it all into some sort of surreal fantasy narrative. I really only thought this after the fire. That’s what made me think the conflagration was used as a cover-up for some serious shit at Helping Hands. But, thinking back, I remember the strange fur we would find on his clothes. We knew animals, even pets, were not allowed in the daycare. We’d drop him off there and pick him up. He didn’t go anywhere else. So where was he getting that? And what sort of animal was it? My God, when I think back at how I just shook off so many anomalies, I want to go back in time and shake the shit out of myself, and that “normalcy narrative” to which I kept clinging.

Anyway, you know the end of the story. Or what I told the police. There is no real end to the story. I say I don’t remember, but I do. In the middle of the night, when I’m lying in bed, I think of Jake. And I listen. I leave the windows open in spring, summer, even late into autumn. I listen for the sound of that…beast. If it came once, it might come again. Jake might ride it back here. The way I saw him riding it that night.

My only consolation is knowing this: that beast would not harm Jake. Even with its incredible size (where does a creature like that even hide on earth? under the earth, of course, they must be under the earth!) and even with its monstrous tusks and that barbed tail, I could see it was tame to him. I saw him run to it in the backyard. It had been patiently waiting for him. I saw the beast lay its head to the earth, in submission. I watched as Jake scrambled up its back and took its reins in hand. And then the thing let out a weird guttural cry and they were off. I chased it. I chased them in my bare feet, in my underwear. But they were swallowed up by the forest behind our house. I heard Jake calling out commands to the thing.

The police didn’t know what to make of the tracks. They said I had been hallucinating. Ambien is known to have that effect. And I had been taking that drug at the time. I won’t deny that. The wouldn’t even put that in the police report. About the tracks. The only way it got in later was when I accused the police of covering it up, of trying to make me look crazier and more like a suspect.

But then, in their hearts, the cops knew I hadn’t done anything to harm Jake. Because he was one fourth of the “Ravenswood Four,” the kids who disappeared that night. All Jake’s age. And all former enrollees of Helping Hands daycare.

Who knows who Miss Marsha really was. And who knows where those four kids are now. I think Jake still has his mount. And I think he’s still riding that beast even as he becomes a young man. If I tell you I think he’s down there, under our feet, you’ll think I’m crazy. Far, far under our feet. But I know it’s true.

In the Future

     A man had killed his wife and her lover. He had done it in the classic style, right there in the matrimonial bed where he had discovered them enjoying their blood sport. The case was not adjudicated in the usual manner, for it was discovered that the man had complete belief in his innocence, indeed he was innocent, as he had used neurotech to excise not only all memory of the murder, but all memories of his wife involving her lover. He had curtailed the story, substituting a narrative which ended the day before he had discovered his wife had a lover (the day he had murdered them).  He had used a bootleg Chinese program. So he knew nothing of his wife's murder. Such innocence is a social problem. Forensic neurologists testified that they had discovered the tell-tale signs of erasure throughout the man's brain. At that point in history, such erasures were not yet done in a seamless manner, neurologically speaking. For those who specialized in such work, there would be traces they could search for and find. The technology used left its own little markers and such bootleg technology rarely came without some largely harmless spam serving the political agenda of the country which had manufactured it. You might see some political shifts in the individual as well. They might be a walking billboard defending that foreign country's interests. That part of the investigation sometimes yielded very funny stories. There was even a television program about that. It was a humorous show. You had to be careful with what you bought on the street and used on your brain. Murderer X had actually moved to a new city, started a new job, deliberately lost most of his friends and acquaintances. He didn't like the feelings they aroused in him, how they looked at him as a guilty man and attempted to make him feel like a guilty man. Because most of them knew he was guilty; the facts were pretty bald. He had established a new life and it wasn't a bad one. He had just distanced himself from his family and friends because he didn't like the cognitive dissonance that came with this set of people. In due course, he was found guilty and sentenced to have his memory restored. The false end of the narrative he had contrived was removed and the truth was re-ingrained. He would be tested for cognitive revisitations of the murder while in prison. If the process (call it guilt or self-punishment) showed signs of lessening over the years (and this often happened with inmates) his mind would be wiped, retooled, and the memories of his love for his wife would be "freshened" to bring a new and revitalized sense of loss much closer to the surface. If the murderer in question lacked guilt, there was a special process whereby it could be successfully simulated. So even sociopaths were no longer immune from corrosive regret. Also, the diminishing pain of the punitive sense of being imprisoned (after five years or so, the mind adjusts) would be "fixed," refreshed at the same time. In the future, one could not "get used" to prison. Prison did not allow this to happen. The way some might touch up the grey in their hair, the State could now touch up the pain in the conscience of its prisoners.. It was a great help and a great pleasure to those involved in doing the work of the fatherland, with the rare exception of those few nervous nellies who suffered pangs of conscience, who might still believe the rank doctrine of the autonomy of the human mind. But these were soon themselves corrected through the miracle of neurotech, if they wished to remain in their well-paying jobs. Most exercised this option and were fine literally overnight.



---after Foucault

Getting There

A mathematician and computer scientist, N., who had been working with Cantor's theories on infinite sets and cardinality and the physics of parallel universes, devised an experiment he felt could vindicate the much-maligned C.

Georg Cantor was often vilified for having produced unprovable, assailable mathematical conjectures regarding the infinite and its interplay with the individual constituents which composed it. The encyclopedias of the day include skeptical notes on Cantor: "These results are highly counterintuitive, because they imply that there exist proper subsets and proper supersets of an infinite set S that have the same size as S, although S contains elements that do not belong to its subsets, and the supersets of S contain elements that are not included in it."

N. wondered how he might definitively prove to the world that Hilbert was indeed correct with his "Paradox of the Grand Hotel":  "It is demonstrated that a fully occupied hotel with infinitely many rooms may still accommodate additional guests, even infinitely many of them, and that this process may be repeated infinitely often."

The experiment N. devised was ingeniously simple. He decided to email himself a simple message whose text would explain that he was exploring the infinity of the set of himself and searching for proof of an alternate version of himself in a parallel universe. If he wrote back to himself, without ever setting his own fingers to his keyboard, he would be vindicated.

He was using a computer of his own design, nearly a supercomputer, but not quite. He began the mailing and ten thousand, one hundred thousand, one million, ten million, one hundred million emails sailed off and returned without a hitch. This was what N. expected to occur. But the computer continued shooting these textual arrows, these emails, into a vast cosmic sea of numbers and soon it was ten billion, one hundred billion, ten trillion, and so on, until a googol of these emails had been sent, and then, arguably, a googolplex of such emails, if computers could be said to "get tired" of appending zeroes to the end of a number, growing that strange abstract creature's infinitely extensible tail.

And then the first few stray emails showed up on N.'s "registry of miscounts." They went out. They did not come back. Still, N. waited. He felt the shudder of the quantum symmetry. But he realized the problems. In how many universes, did N. have the same email but still lack the comprehension to understand the deep meaningfulness of this simple communication written from himself to himself? It would be like a satellite messenger from earth sailing past a planet with a primitive life form that could not even reckon an overture from another world.

How many emails that slipped through and reached their designated N.-other (N.'s preferred term for his alternate selves, with a subscript to indicate number) were disregarded and discarded, disbelieved as pranks or cognitive flukes that came out of some altered state, believed to have been the result of having been drunk or high or having gone without enough sleep. Many emails would be seen but never opened. How many N.-others were capable of understanding the import of the email and knowing the importance of writing back. Most N.-others would be self-absorbed idiots, some even worse. And, of the infinitely small number of emails that N. estimated would "make it through," he knew the process of writing back would be equally fraught. The odds of that email returning to its true sender would be just as astronomically high. There was no guarantee that these slippages opened up a "true conduit" or isomorphic mapping of time. Indeed, N. believed this would not be the case at all. This is why he believed the odds of success in his experiment to be dauntingly slim.

It was on a rainy Thursday afternoon that N. had been writing a paper on the arrays of "slipped emails" which had never returned, which appeared to have made it through to parallel universes, when his textual scanner gave him "The Ding." The Ding was N.'s pet name for the audio signal which allowed N. to know that an email had returned from a different email address or from his "own" email address with text added or the original text altered. Since N. could not physically read these astronomically huge numbers of returning emails, and since he had every reason to suspect the "confirmatory email" would simply return with himself as sender, that it would come from the same email address from which it had been sent, he needed to add this verification procedure to his process.The text-comparison verification was designed to weed out any email text differences that merely denoted server problems and their standard verbiage, which had been authored by N. himself as controls for this experiment. The Ding was actually a sound file of the old seventies song "All by Myself."

N.'s heart was nearly stopped when he heard Eric Carmen's treacly, drawn-out delivery of the lyrics from the schmaltzy, self-pitying pop song of  radiophonic yesteryear.

He went to the target email which was highlighted, segregated from the massive body of returns, which was still growing in magnitude in nearly unimaginable leaps and bounds, still attempting to scale that impossible distance between finitude and infinitude.

He opened the email and read:

"Hello? Is this some sort of joke? I don't remember sending this email and I don't see how it is possible that I did so, and I have no idea why I am writing this "reply" (it is preposterous) but we do seem to have some mathematical interests (a faith, no?) in common, and I figured it wouldn't hurt to write you "back". Although, if I am correct, your odds of receiving this "reply" are astronomically against "us," and I don't expect to ever hear back from you. In any case, thanks for thinking of "me" (yourself?) and Farewell."

It was all N. needed to read and know.

Now began the work of convincing the world. He anticipated the odds of his going insane during this attempt were very high. He anticipated failure. Why wouldn't he? He knew the odds.