Tabs

Austin Adams

The revealed and ultimate truth began, as all things do, on the internet.

James, who’s changing his name to Rick, read that neuroscientists at Cal-Tech— “Western,” Pam corrects. “In St. Louis?” “No.” “DC?” “No, that’s the other one.”

Neuroscientists at Cal-Tech discovered that consciousness is the substrate of quanta, meaning that minds are—

“Entanglement,” Pasha pronounces.

“I don’t think so. I think that’s different. Minds are,” he searches, with his eyes, for a way to accurately summarize what minds are and finds his answer, evidently, in the parking lot of a fried chicken restaurant across the street where everything tired in him comes to rest, “are the instantiation of possibility and the scaffolding that buttresses all being.”

“I heard different?” muses Lu, who believes it a gross impropriety to phrase any statement as such.

I read the news. Everyone does, one way or another, if you’re generous enough with those words. I knew once, something true. But it was a song, and it wasn’t catchy. Who can remember now how it goes?

That paper was debunked, it’s argued. It was proven, it’s argued, with more or less the same flair.

“Wasn’t a paper. Was an essay, more. Something unprovable. Like all things right or wrong.” A statement said by one, but a sentiment echoed by others as evidenced by the razoring of their eyes.

“Everything is provable!” outraged, confused, ready to order, it is editorialized.

“Prove it,” she already ate.

“This place is crowded.” “It’s usually much more crowded.”

James dates Pam, who doesn’t. Pasha is the best among us, a terrible conversationalist. Lu the tautology, great when great, ok if ok, always, fatally Lu. There is a Richard, but not the right one. It isn’t clear to mother or God which of the others is which or which, but surely someone loves them each, though more surely still no one loves them all.

I, too, am among them, but as the observer, am absented from the insult of summary description. My name rhymes with the crudest word of an ancient language each of us was obliged to study from the cradle, and ever since, some have addressed me by an inexhaustible litany of foulnesses and imprecations. In the mornings, I cannot remember my name, but that’s why I invest in heavy-stock paper.

“Did you,” Lu, “read about the new mRNA vaccine? Cured cancer.” “In mice.” “In twelve mice.” “Sure, in twelve mice.” “Pancreatic cancer.” “You mean multiple myeloma.” “Do not.” “Do too.” “Doesn’t work,” Pam knows, “There was a follow-up flop. Every mouse is dead.” This coffee taste odd to you? is what Pam doesn’t know. Pasha thinks the coffee is wonderful. Pasha wishes she had ordered exactly Pam’s coffee.

We harbored mixed opinions about the café, and only some could stand the summer. Still, the past and all. Friendship, its colloquies, pleasures. Its terrible responsibilities.

“Did you see—?”

“Yes,” says everyone, who each knows instantly, unmistakably, what it is that they all saw.

On any day, this one even, a person, that arid average, capitulates to sixty thousand thoughts, a paraphrastic, unsubstantiated number, but a hamlet no longer cozy at a quarter the population. I want to tell them so many things, but settling on a topic seems the work of a lifetime. Besides, I’m more a runner of ideas than a salesman. But I come, today, to this café with purpose. Tantalizing as the half-remembered hook of a song you loved as a boy, there is something I must say.

“It struck me,” James says of the film, “with the stupefying force of truth. I’m at a loss. It was so beautiful. What can I say about it?”

“Poets can say plenty but don’t.” “There aren’t any poets here, are there? We all have mortgages.” “Beauty is not truth, truth not beauty. They aren’t neighbors, and they are enemies. They only speak through mathematics. It’s their arbitration.”

When we were younger, we feigned distinct, as if sharply outlined against the drab backdrop of the world. Noise among noise, within it, about it, they clamor on, and I wait my turn to trumpet.

“Minds cry, ‘Truth is not true, is false, either, or a lie!’ This has been thought, and the thought sustained.” I’m not sure I follow, but I know myself to be less than a leader. “Proof applies to other problems, other thoughts. I will here attempt not to explain but to invite. There are many possible meanings. Take a moment to tour mine.”

I lean forward in my seat, positioning myself to interject—this joke about feuding families loiters in the doorway of my mind—when “mind” and the metaphor I’ve made of it suddenly seem the more interesting subjects to comment on, only someone said something about that before, and now it was so long ago, I can’t remember whether I agreed.

“Truth as it’s conceived of in the humanities is a forceful sense of all-knowingness, a state of deathless enlightenment; as conceived in the sciences, a process of negation. Which truth struck you?”

Not that conciliation is my aim, just that it’s easy to lose the thread, an expression, come to think of it, I’ve never understood. What am I supposed to do with the thread once I have it? Stitch it into something, or simply hold tight?

“Like I’m saying, I don’t know what to say.”

“Eavesdrop. Let us know when you learn something about yourself.”

A garbage truck barrels by more fact than opinion. Its smell fetid, acidifying metal, questions no one wants to ask. They sip their coffee until it passes. Pam doesn’t know about this taste, but Pasha’s the best of them. If there were pastis in this city, I wouldn’t suffer the indignity of club soda at noon.

One Richard or another read, he believed, the most interesting thing he had ever, you know, hmm. “Seems moon is hollow. The moon. Or something about it.” “Rang like a bell when the astronauts landed.” “We used to call these myths; now we call them theories.” “I read it in a—I watched it on a—it was a credible whatever. As far as I, you know.” “The most successful conspiracy theory is that we exist.” “Who are the agents in this plot, Descartes and his merry men?” “There were only ever two conspirators: mom and dad.”

“All I can say is that I’ve never seen a work of art where every element at the creator’s disposal was as intelligently subverted.” “I thought it was patronizing.” “To whom!” “The people watching.”

People watching, sure, and it’s a good spot for that, but it’s so hard to find the time to get together, then we try and fail, try and fail to focus on the conversation. Everyone looks so strange nowadays, or else they don’t, which is its own decision. One of them had had a kid, and it grew or it died. Something significant had happened, which we don’t say about the ferocious enigma of time’s simple passing.

“You don’t think they cured cancer?” “They didn’t, and they never will.”

Plenty happens with me, too. Some people want to make themselves the conversation. I had a wife once, twice. Gave them up like smoking. I had a job. I have another, and another, coterminous and stacked one on top of the other, objects whose atoms feel no comradery and so let any challenger slip through their slack Red Rovering arms. I love my friends, but I keep having to look up that word. If for no other reason, this explains why I always find myself failing to sustain eye contact with them, my gaze shying away to the closest available screen.

“Bagtel’s closed.” “It just reopened.” “I mean, it closed again.” “I know: it re-reopened.” “You aren’t hearing me.”

I would like to say the thing plainly, say the right thing straight. But just as a curved line cuts the quickest route around the world, launch a toy boat into a fast-moving stream and trace the shaky diagonal it cuts. What grows on the other shore, anyway? Weeds are cultivated so that people can complain that they have to weed.

“Now that we have science, with its precise measurements, there’s no longer the need for opinion, only forbearance and patience.” “It is your opinion that truth is beauty, beauty truth.” If it were any sunnier, everybody would be worried. “I said the opposite.” “Well, why say something you don’t even believe?”

We talk about sex, which is like talking about sex. It brooks no metaphors, only stenches. There’s no education in the taxonomy of scents, no lexicon but circular—groins smell groiny—a wheel that spins in place. Nobody asks about the kid, ostensibly the goal of all this human foolishness.

“Art is an invention by the ruling class to keep intellectuals out of politics.”

Might as well posit red is red, who’s going to argue that gem but a philosopher or some other breed of bore?

“I saw a clinic,” the older one, “by my house. They were dispensing,” mesmerized by the memory he here recounts, “a cure to HIV!”

“Thought it still killed people.” “It does.” “By the millions, I thought.” “In places.”

I don’t know whether someone tells him.

Another friend arrives, pulls up an iron outdoor chair to our too small iron outdoor table, and someone remarks that metal can’t be ethically produced, and Pam says it can be, but not in the States. No one likes it when an American calls the homeland the States. Leaves gleam green this season, red later, finally aquamarine. It isn’t that they can’t turn that color, only that nature gets distracted too. Cumulous clouds ponderous with thought float off, so we’re left with wisps, anemic and desiccated like a good idea you once had. Should’ve written down the name of every lover. How she tasted. Why call it knowledge when it’s forgettable as someone else’s story?

“The simplest way to say a thing nowadays—” “We don’t have things nowadays.” “You look at the wrong art. They sell movies at the grocery store.”

Some of them laughed, and that one frowned.

“I would prefer to exist discretely—only here, never there, always sometimes but never always.”

This is why Pasha is best loved: she knows what to say. Coffee, nostalgia, computers: they make me twitch; they give me cataracts; they make me sick. In this group, I playact old reliable. I pick up the phone. Complain on cue. It’s hard to agree on anything, like—

“The sky is blue.” “I don’t think so.” “I know it isn’t really blue, but—” “No, I mean, look at the sky right now. It isn’t any color at all.”

All things revealed and ultimate blaze pellucid, so best, I figure, to be exactly what they expect. I’ve grown and I’ve changed, but that’s no excuse.

“Are you afraid of death?” “No.” “Do you think there’s life after death?” “No.” “Then how can you be satisfied with this life?” “Can’t.” “No man would be satisfied unless he’d sired every atom and then devoured them all.” “I can’t do that.” “What about women?”

Really, the sky isn’t blue, not today. It’s the color of plastic: efficient and transportable.

“Here is what is meant most graciously and with the greatest measure of rightness by the modern: transition from unity to discretion. So be modern. Be only one. And clean up after yourself.” “I only use all-natural cleaners now. Because of the baby.” “Baby.” “Those things don’t work. You need something more powerful.” “Do you mean bleach or an adult?”

The garbage truck is back again. Reversing its way down the street, lumbering like a witticism trotted out long after the conversation has moved on. No one laughs. No one here remembers what topic the truck is attempting to revisit.

“Nick,” I’m addressed. It could be a curse I’m unfamiliar with. Warily, I test, “Me?” and am relieved when it’s revealed, “I don’t think so.”

“I want to get back to something.” “California’s gone.” “Or it will be soon.” “It’s the seat of civilization. We’ll all be living in California. Even Mumbai.” “Listen.” “No.” “Listen, often it is remarked that man has conquered nature, or else that nature forever ignobles man, outpaces him a step in cleverness or rude brutality. Never once have I heard it suggested that” I can’t tell which of them is speaking. I haven’t taken my eyes off their mouths all afternoon. The truck took off. Up, I mean. “Man, like all things, is nature—child, mirror, vessel—nature being not a force but the fact of all the things that are. Well, let me suggest it here—” OK “—man is no more an adversary of nature than the stars are pitted against the sky.”

Later, on the ride home, I thought: Lu’s sick. Someone, I thought, told me that she’s dying. Not a word today. Or did we talk all about it differently? Then oh yeah: I am in love with her. I was going to say. I’ve been meaning to tell her for fifteen years. But the conversation always gets away from me.

“How can truth be important outside its consequences? Already what’s irrational is sanctioned because it’s useful. What higher value can there be than what is useful?” “Sentience doesn’t mean overcoming lack and inability, it means inhabiting them.”

Empowering to see yourself reflected in media, but I switch it over to jazz because what’s breath you can’t smell?

Here’s how I would have told her—

Would you believe we’re each immortal but that the condition of the gods is more fallen than mortality: constant sunder, we suffer, blanketing forgetfulness. Every fact reigns absolute, even its opposite. You will live forever, like this.