Abysmal Sea

by Christopher Barr

I am writing this to you because the inferno of hell has been unleashed upon the earth, and I fear the events that led to this apocalyptic calamity were of my doing!!  As you know, I am a scientist, a pragmatic man that is fueled entirely by his reason.  But I regret to inform you that this past month has introduced a new chapter to my life that is not bound by reason or science but by mysticism and fantasy.  As I sit here and write this, what could very well be the last thing I write, I am inured by these revelations.

My intentions have always been noble and meticulously thoughtful as I became the scientist I am today.  What led to this…encounter, was of the most professional and honest manner, I guess what I’m trying to say is the pages that follow are not a confession.  My mind is clear of any legal or ethical wrongdoing.  What follows are lessons in the progress trap humanity has found itself in, and possibly the only direct account of the regrettable uncovered events themselves that I was there to witness. 

I can tell you with the straightest parlance that, what is done is done.  There is no undoing what has been done…… we are at war.  We are up against an enemy of monstrous power and they are profoundly driven, one could say, they have an evolutionary directive to broaden their playing ground.  I fear that life as we know it may come to a close as a result.    

Earlier this year a Lost City was found in a canyon five miles off the coast of South Africa.  You may have read about it in spite of the secrecy surrounding the site.  Sand and coral reef camouflaged their whereabouts from the evasive explorations of man for many lifetimes.  Scientists, using robotic submersibles, have confirmed that the ancient city exists at the bottom of this canyon.  The site consists of three fairly well preserved giant pyramids with truncated tops, 65 meters in height, and a length of about 92 meters.  A number of other box-like structures include a four-story Aksum-type obelisk stretching from the center of the pyramids.  As far as it is known now, who or what built these ancient pyramids isn’t clear.

The city met its disastrous demise as a result of Antarctic icecaps catastrophically melting, causing sea levels to rise quickly around the world.  This all occurred at the end of the last ice age and has dramatically affected the southern hemisphere of this planet.   Coastal lines changed; lands were lost, islands disappeared.  It’s believed that this Lost City was on one such island when the sea levels rose, engulfing the land and sinking it to the bottom of the sea.  

The Institute of Anthropology at the University of Johannesburg was brought on to excavate the site and study the ruins.  They believe that the ancient ruins belonged to the Afar people, a group of indigenous from the earliest days of man.  It is believed that the Latin word ‘Africa’ comes from the tribal people Afar which means ‘dust’ in Semitic languages such as ancient Phoenician.

You know that I’ve excavated ruins many times in the past, such as the ruins of Babylon and the ancient temples of Damascus where we found the scrolls of Azif.  But these ancient ruins of the Afar people were somehow different other than the fact they were quite a ways under the sea.  I was contacted by Dr. Rainer Wallace, a professor of Anthropology at Johannesburg to come to assist in this magnificent discovery.  My residence as you know was at the University of Buenos Aires, so needless to say the trip would be long but it was certainly a trip worth taking.

Once I arrived in South Africa I was met by Wallace and his team, we traveled directly to the coast and arrived on the site headquarters of the project.  There, Wallace took me aside, debriefed me about the project and the state of the excavation.  Professor Wallace believed the ruins belonged to an ancient tribe called the Bantu and not the Afar.  A group that worshiped the ghost creatures, things that the Bantu believed lived between worlds.

Wallace felt that the Bantu were more technologically advanced than the Afar, who didn’t build monuments or cities but were protectors of the land as it was.  Wallace was a driven man, a big Ernest Hemingway of a man, a man with more of an open mind than most Scientists, who in their own right deal in facts.  Problem, reaction, solution, much in the same as the German philosopher Hegel detailed in his Dialectic, a way that a discerning person can overcome their subjective position to objective reality, once there, it is the responsibility of that person of reason to tear it down and build it back up again using the same formula.  This formula is what has kept us scientists honest, not only with our research but with ourselves, as we realize that once we are present; we are contaminating objectivity with our subjective ideology and purview.

Wallace was a scientist, but as Leonardo da Vinci, he was a man of many talents and interests.  He liked to dash a bit of poetry onto his scientific approach to things and that’s why he’s heading this project.  I believe that’s why he brought me alone, knowing the lengths I’m willing to go to get the symbolic artifact as it were.

Later that evening he and I went to a pub for drinks, a dark place that had booths thick as caves flanked by gargoyles, Wallace and I sat in one of those caves and drank-ten steps to the grave-mampoer brandy and ate Biltong and lamb Sosaties while half a dozen candles flickered amber along the walls and ceiling of the booth.  He told me of his rare book collection.  He had an almost mint condition copy of one of the Guttenberg Bibles and an odd pairing copy of the Codex Gigas, a humongous book written in the 13^th century by Herman the Recluse in the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice in Bohemia.  He said the gnostic Christians called the Cathars stole the two other editions during the Albigensian crusades and then they disappeared.  The Vandeline Priests held them in stoned secret rooms for a few centuries but the Cathars during the Battle of Kells acquired them back.

I thought that only one Codex existed in Prague but apparently, Wallace says there was actually three written side-by-each, word for Latin word.  The only known copy had some pages removed believed to have contained the monastic rules of the Benedictines.  Wallace assured me that his copy was completely intact, the only one in existence.  

As an aperitif, Wallace got us a couple glasses of Pinotage to relax us as he told me that the Bantu that lived on that island were estranged from the land people.  They began to worship otherworldly things, creatures that even the land people wouldn’t want any part of.  The translation could be wrong but these creatures were either thought of as ghosts or shadows.  He said that they have to remove the coral reef and then vacuum the sand out to clear the area.  But tomorrow he said we go down and take a look at the site.  I’m still not sure though if he truly brought me here for my expertise or that Damascus scroll I have of the Azif.  Either or, I’m here because of my unflinching curiosity.

The next day, early, hang-overs in tow, we set out on a ship to the site.  We were off the coast of Dyer Island, where seals quilted the shores and the water was known for its rough undercurrents and its white sharks.  Some of the crewmen on the ship threw dead tuna fish, tied to a rope with a floatation device attached to it, over the side to get the sharks going.  They had fifteen sharks, or so it looked as much, all fighting each other for a few dead fish.  Just as the sharks got inches away from the dead fish, the guys would pull on the rope and yank the dead fish out of the water.  A couple of times, a shark or two would jump out of the water to bite the fish with their many razor shape teeth.  These sharks were creepily odd and wondrously beautiful simultaneously, graceful but fierce.

After we looked at the site, which was still filled with sand, Wallace, holding a GPS device in his hand, said that the northwest corner of the site will be excavated first, he said that because I suggested we start there and then move - grid by grid.  He said the logistics of controlling everything from this ship and managing diving operations will clearly be time-consuming, but he said a surveying team has calculated whether access to the site will be constrained by the tides, currents and weather conditions.  He said scuba divers have been down 160 feet charting the area around the site, carrying out three-dimensional surveying using depth gauges and tape measurements.  Sonar equipment has been used to determine the size and depth of the structures, also he said that they brought in acoustic positioning equipment to help detail the site and to determine what structures are intact and what structures could potentially be dangerous.

After a look at the area, the ship turned around and headed back inland.  Wallace wanted to go out on the town in Pearly Beach and show me the local nightlife.   Besides he knew that a lot of the crew wanted to go to Geyser Island and fish, so he thought it would be a good chance for us to escape their tourism banality and party a little.   

On our way back on the ship, we all drank Mahewu beer and listened to Kwela African music.  In mid-day, the sharks were reasonably calm so some of the crazier crewmen apparently have gone swimming with the sharks long after their regular feeding time, which is at sunrise.   Today they went in holding only a staff-spear to push the sharks away if they got too close.  Some of the most fearsome creatures to have ever lived and these guys were down there swimming with them.  I imagined the adrenaline rush that must have been brought on while they slithered their half-naked bodies alongside them.  The guys had later told me that the sharks had a mild curiosity about them but for the most part, did their own thing.

Hearing this made me think about how untapped the mysteries of the ocean are.  We really don’t know about this place, what lurks beneath it, these sharks have been around for millions of years, yet we know more about the Tyrannosaurus Rex who walked the earth 65 million years ago, then we do about sharks, and they are still here, alive.

What’s fascinating about sharks, is they exist outside of human mythology, they are unaware of our religions and that Apartheid is still a problem after all these years in South Africa, they don’t know us, they don’t care to know us.  They exist outside the trappings of our language order, they are unbiased, unsympathetic, and with that, they are unpredictable.  Those men swimming with them have my admiration and also my condemnation because they are behaving beyond my understanding, meaning why would one subject themselves to such dangers when it is simply not necessary, why would they do that?

The guys brought mirror boards down with them to offset the sharks, swimming parallel with them….unbelievable.   What fascinated me was these men were more interested in satisfying their egos than the science of understanding sharks.  These men were once organisms from the sea as we're all living things at one point in our evolutionary history.  They had told me that what they felt down there with these majestic sea predators was a feeling of complete living in the moment.  All their senses were firing at 100% and as far as they know, there isn’t anything else that can do that.  You become relaxed in the tranquil sense they said, but are also on the highest alert possible, all at the same time.

Convergent evolution is how predatory perfection is passed down through species morphology.  Sharks likely get their fierce appetite and their longevity from the gargantuan Megalodon and going even further back, the monstrous prehistoric ancestor, Dunkleosteus.  This pachyosteomorph arthrodire existed during the Late Devonian period, about 370 million years ago.  These sea monsters were clearly carnivorous and had a unique armored shelling with a razor shape primitive jaw structure with teeth bigger than axe blades, which made them likely the fiercest of any species to follow.

We got back into shore and Wallace and I left the group and drove to Cape Town where incidentally bars and restaurants remained open late after dark in certain areas.  We sat with a group of men Wallace knew from way back dure his university days.  These men all come from various respected fields such as medicine, mathematics, psychology, philosophy, and of course anthropology.   We all sat at a round table with cigar smoke and American jazz atmospherically consuming the darkroom.

I looked around at these men thinking they might very well have the key to my life, respectively, their collective knowledge was astounding.  When I sat there and thought of my past, my divorce, what my children think of me, and even further back to my own childhood.  What would my mother and father have thought of such a gathering of people?  My parents were teachers in elementary schools and the level of academics in this room right now is overwhelming to me, let alone what it would be for them.

At first, after all the proper introductions, I sat back and listened to the conversation, and what a conversation it was.  Not only were these men drunk but they were astonishing with their verbiage and understanding of the cross-professions in their company.  Not to say there weren’t any arguments, there were plenty, and that’s what conversations like these were for.

The mathematician spoke of certainty while the philosopher from Eastern Europe reminded him of Soren Kierkegaard and the dizziness of freedom.  That point where you experience the true freedom of reality on the edge of a bridge but must make the symbolic choice to forbid your freedom to lean.   This is existential fear, the fear and trembling that we are not subject to good and evil but rather are subject to choice.  Sticking with philosophy, the anthropologist reminded the group that human beings, according to Michel Foucault, are a relatively new species.  On the scale of the age of the earth, we are newborns, the mysteries of the planet are only a surface experiment, and the true reality of the life span of this planet barely considers us notable.

The psychologist said that the true undiscovered country, the greatest of ancient civilizations, is still and will always be that of the human mind.  He said that how we interpret the world through our mind - is still unchartered territory.  That cognitive map has its excavators and its anthropologists but that land is vast and ancient beyond the language we attempt to use to represent it.

The philosopher, after sipping his wine, asks why do we continue to ruin our life experiences?  Knowledge is the key to fulfillment so why don’t we all take that route?  Wallace stares at the philosopher, then says…'because we can’t stop'.  He says, 'mankind is a failed project, but we can’t stop destroying ourselves because then what?'  If we define our civilization by its misery then what can we do to reverse it?  Global warming is a real actual catastrophic problem plaguing this planet, at our cost, but what are we going to do, shut off all the machines and stop eating beef –no– because we can’t.  Our greed and desire for power are far greater than the very planet we inhabit.  So what we will do is chip away at a cure to free us of our narcissistic voracity for superiority by understanding our past.  While the rest of the world takes massive chunks out of any hope for a future for mankind and the planet at large.  The point being; we can’t give up even if the ship is sinking without any noticeable rescue.

The philosopher retorts by going into the three big blows to mankind.  Galileo proves that Jupiter had four moons that orbited it thus destroying the last strut out from under the geocentric theory of the universe.  The ceiling of the world opened up to the infinite possibilities of the random cosmos.  Charles Darwin proved that human beings evolved from a species of ape, subject to the laws of nature and not that of a central all-knowing creator.   Sigmund Freud, through his mapping of the cognitive function of the human mind, has discerned that humans, as a result of civilizing themselves, are sick animals, where much of our psychic life is out of our own ability to recall it.  Meaning we are driven by unconscious forces that are foreign to us but yet are part of us and define and control us.

I sat there and listened to these men push and pull theory and belief, wondering if there has ever been a possible middle ground for people to reside.  The fact is; we don’t know and some of us are smart enough to know that we don’t know.  Most of us are suffocated by belief and are blinded by any reasonable interpretation of the world outside the mind of the person thinking it.  We are dreamers; we dream in the world and not live in it.  The brain will construct dreams with the detailed architecture of monumental cathedrals, then tear them down and dispose of them like they were paper planes.  It can plot structures to the length and literary beauty of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and just as easily throw them in a fire pit and burn them to a crisp with the same interest as a wood chip.  This can all happen the second you leave or are pulled out of your dream state.  The brain is the ultimate artist because it doesn’t get writer’s block and it’s able to create almost anything.

Wallace, drunken, and I faced each other as the group continued drinking and talking.  Wallace assured me that this project we are embarking on is monumental in scope.  This civilization buried in the sea might be the key to saving our own civilization.  He went on to tell me about his own family and their banal, trivial way of looking at the world.  He believed our only way to survive the future is to truly understand the past.  I sat and thought about that as he was saying it, and it did make sense.  But up to this point have we done this, have we as a population reflected on the past in such detail that we changed as a species?  I’m not sure we did, what we did do is use the past as a lesson to profit from the future.

Wallace told me that we are both going down to the Lost City tomorrow; we are going to discover the meaning of what these ancient people strived for.  Because that’s what we do, we uncover the mystery of what it is to be human, and these indigenous people, whether they are the Afar or the Bantu, may reveal some insight into our history.

The remainder of the night was that of drunken exurbs, flashes and cognitive storms of Nietzsche and daytime torches, Tesla and his burning lab and Margret Mead and flowers in men’s hair, and then I woke up on a boat, a ship.  Sunlight was piercing my eyelids.  I got up and walked to the deck.  Wallace and the team were all getting suited up in scuba diving gear.  Wallace looked at me with a historic grin; he also implied that I suit up.

Because of the sharks, we suited up in chain gear along with 30 pounds of additional weight before we dove into the ocean.  I looked at the sky as I sat on the edge of the ship.  I wished that my wife and children were here,  I wished I didn’t distance my wife to the point of alienation,  I wished I was better.  I thought of the sharks swarming around like a colony of ants even though I know sharks don’t do that.  I was scared.

I fell backward into the water as it absorbed me.  A moment passed and the bubbles and trauma cleared.  What was left was a clear blue alien world, a world that felt like a dream as I floated.   The group swam down to the site, so after adjusting to this aquatic environment I joined them.  At this point, the Lost City was visible, beautiful in scope, and marvelous in wonder.

After my breathing was controllable and my diving ability was manageable, I was in awe at the sight.  I looked to my right and saw a massive tube running from the site to the surface called an airlift, pumping sand out of the excavation area.  The obelisk was more visible as I got closer to the area.  This lit place was massive; it is amazing that a whole island sank like a ship.

Wallace swam over and motioned to me to push a button on the side of my face mask.  I did so and suddenly was washed with the voices of many people.  Wallace told me over the earpiece that we are breaking ground on the northeastern side of the site.

We both swam to the dusty ruins, where we settled on the floor of the ocean.  Looking up we could see the silhouettes of white sharks swimming about.  I was nervous but I followed Wallace as we looked into a well intact structure, inside were five tombs with skeletons carved into the tops of them, forming a circle around a central piece, skulls all facing the center.  The yellowish statue was cloudy as we moved toward it.  After the cloud cleared we saw a monster, unlike anything we’ve seen before as this iron monumental centerpiece.   Wallace looked over at me wanting recognition for this overwhelming view of the site.   Clearly, the beast that is depicted is not of this world, but it did have a small eye within a larger eye on its forehead.  An unrecognizable cuneiform was written around the base of the statue.

We are alerted by the team to join them outside; we got out there to swim to the bottom of the canyon this place resides in.  One member of the team gets up to watch a school of fish swim in a newly uncovered cave as a result of the excavation.  The school of fish swim into the darkness of the cave and disappear.  Wallace insists on an explanation as to why we were told about this.  They watched another school swim into the cave and disappear.

Wallace and I moved closer to the newly revealed cave, as we approached we could see that the roof of the cave is mirror-like, oscillating.  Wallace pulled out a spear-rifle and looked at me.  The first thing I was thinking was; we are here to uncover an ancient civilization.  We are scientists, not military.  The airlift tub suddenly broke loose and swung against the cave wall, crashing rock and debris to the sea bed.  Air bubbles from the cave furiously escaped from captivity and are released into the ocean.  

My wife and I met at university where she became a child psychologist.  I become an archeologist and what we had in common was we studied human behavior.  We studied people.  I miss her face the most, she’s a great mother.......... I miss my son.  

I was laying on the ocean floor looking up at the ceiling of the sea as bubbles and creatures swarm the site, they were clearly blinded at first, adjusting to the light of the ocean reflecting down from the world above.  Whatever these things were, they were not adaptable to our ocean.  They screamed and squirmed as they ate the white sharks like they were sardines.  I was there - on the floor of the ocean and looked up at the most monstrous slaughter.  These creatures escaped the entrapment of that massive cave and now were unleashed upon the world. 

They are gigantic in size, blind, and hungry as they not only eat the sharks but the divers on their way to the ocean floor.  These things are prehistoric or alien in nature.  A blizzard of small fish expelled from the massive cavity and with it, creatures with teeth the size of wine bottles, they too had trouble seeing but soon adjusted to the light.  The skin on their backs glowed in neon colors, blues, and purples and they swam effortlessly among the other creatures.

I was looking up at the battlefield; I still had quite a bit of oxygen in my tank.  These creatures have been held captive, for whatever reason, in that cavern for millenniums and have now been released and hungry. 

A massive 150-ton creature swam over my head, eclipsing the sun’s rays high from above.   It looked to be a cross between a humpback whale and a crocodile, with four huge pectoral flippers at its sides steering its titanic weight around.  All other creatures stayed clear of it leading me to believe that it was the king of this sea.  Wallace was eaten by one of these beasts, clutched and overwhelmed.  I sat there looking up oddly admiring the beauty of the bloodbath.  It's pecular how the mind can abandon morality when faced with reality.

I could see the sun pushing its rays on this inner ocean landscape.   Fish from side to side washed around like waves along the site.  I looked around, laying flat on the bottom of the ocean, I then swam to the canyon wall and slowly rose up, watching these recovering blind creatures devour the team I trained with during this dig. 

A bottlenose Dolphin quickly swam up to me and hovered beside me, I took a hold of its pectoral fin and dorsal fin and held on as it swam to shore.  The dolphin left me hanging on to a rock face as it swam like a bullet away from danger.  I met the surface, looking around as the rough anger of the ocean held no sympathy for the people within it.  We boarded the vessel, searching for comfort and exile but also searching for answers.  The crew is dead; these monsters are here, out, and among us. 

I sat on the edge, as a monstrous arm reached over and destroyed the front of the ship, which then began to sink.  I just wanted to hit land after losing Wallace and the project.....  But what of these things?  A massive creature dove out of the water and began to fly in the air, flapping its huge wings like a mystical dragon.  I could see it reach land and attack people running and screaming.

I looked around and wondered how I arrived on land when we stopped the ship at the site there was no land for five miles.  I looked back under the water and saw a red-orange glow shining from where the cave is.  I quietly made my way down the cliff surface and back under the water, avoiding the monsters.  One of the neon-glowing creatures swam near me to the point that it rubbed its scaly skin on my stomach but then just swam away. 

My son - his birth and young life flashed before my eyes - he stared at me and told me to wake up......

I was stunned to see Wallace grabbing and facing me.  He was yelling at me to calm down and was also asking where I’ve been.  They couldn’t find me for 14 minutes.  I looked around and could see that the team was there, alive and there were no massive creatures killing anything.  The airlift tube was still working, pumping sand from the excavation site.

I told them what I saw, I told them what had happened and they all looked at me and understandably were perplexed.  Then it happened, looking at their judgmental faces I could see they didn’t believe me.  Then Wallace ran his hand along my stomach and held it up.  His hand was glowing with a blue-greenish ooze on it, so he said that he thought I picked up some kind of luminescent fungus.  

I told the group that what was beyond that portal was alive and now had a means of travel.  Wallace told me that the oxygen in my tank must be up too high.  He said that when we get back to land we are going to the nearest bar and to drink our faces off.  He laughed and swam back toward the site.  Behind me as I looked at them the cave entry began to bubble, I turned and saw a huge pectoral fin exit and re-enter the portal.  They’re coming and it might not be today but you can be damn sure it will be tomorrow.

Professor Spencer Zwick

University of Buenos Aires

Being Leonard

by Christopher Barr

Leonard could see it as plan as a summer’s day, he could feel the ash-filled breeze on his face as his skin sizzled.  He was standing in a wasteland, a place that has seen the wrath of human Gods.  The project failed and the aftermath was devastating.  He could see humans, nature and machines that have molded, not on a cybernetic level but more horribly, on a melting pot of flesh and steel fusing in the months after this holocaust.  Tree branches sprouted from their backs as they attacked each other for the flesh on their bones.

People have stuck to other people creating these four legged creatures that look terrifyingly non-human.  Life has found a way to survive this apocalypse, after all the bombs dropped and then the chemical weapons were unleashed upon the earth, which burned most of its surface and boiled away its oceans.  Skyscrapers decayed as vines snaked their way in and around the rubble.  These creatures were everywhere, crawling like spiders with bleeding faces and heads wrapped in stained white cloth.

Faceless aliens inhabit this dank amber desert glowing of blue.  They stayed above ground, seeking shelter within the buildings where the four-legged creatures couldn’t go.  On the ground skeletons rested upon skeletons holding each other in their last fatal acts of desperation, echoes of times of progress and possibilities were but shadows on sandy mounds of dust.  Cars were rusted out and stepped on, subway cars laid like corpses within a bridge’s debris.

Leonard could hear the screams and the howls amplify in the air.  There was no hell ever written that resembled the reality of this place.  The sky was red with gas and filled with ash, the sun burned well beyond its shroud, the heat Leonard could feel on his skin was not from its rays but rather the radiation that filled the atmosphere.

Leonard wakes up in a bar sitting at a table filled with empty bottles of surreal memories of the night before.  Conversation holding people to people, maintaining the fantasy of reality, he felt that these talks should have gone somewhere, to some enlightened place, but they never did, they usually fell between the cracks of hindrance and ego.  It was so sad to watch possibility fall and crumble day in and day out.  The drink made it bearable.

He staggers out into the afternoon, light from the sun momentarily blinding him; he walks toward the mecca as he puts on a pair of black sunglasses and adjusts a bag he is carrying.  Fast cars speed by as the sounds of the city invade his ears, melting most of his thoughts away.  People swarm with manufactured agendas flowing like rivers, in and out of plastic shops and up and down sidewalks moving with their heads down, using cellular technology as their guiding torch.

Leonard looks up at the concrete curtain surrounding him from the natural world.  Even the sky was filled with smog giving the sun two luminous rings around it.  Suddenly haunting images of buildings with skinny human legs, walking in valleys shaded from solar flares invaded his mind’s eye.  He stopped walking and leaned against the wall as overlapping images of what’s outside and what’s inside disoriented him.  He knew he was drunk from many hours of consuming copious amounts of beer and scotch.

What were these thoughts, these flashes of the future?  Were they just of the present but from a different place?  A place that he somehow became in tuned with, frequencies of time and space that aligned with his perception of reality and the world outside his world?    Was it just the essence that hid underneath the phony fantasy that most people blanketed their reality from?  I suppose most importantly and obviously, Leonard was thinking, was this the beginning stages of some sort of dementia, essentially was he going mad?

Leonard removes a black cigarette from his wool coat pocket and quickly lights it, inhaling smoke and nicotine deep into his lungs.  Smoke finally escapes his mouth and curls up and off the lens of his sunglasses.  He leans against a store as if getting off a roller coaster ride in mid-flight.  He breathes and smokes, closing his eyes, and squeezing out any bit of sunlight.

Soldiers with melted flesh crept into his consciousness as light is forced out; they wore heavy helmets on their skulls, these fighters for good.  Anger has somehow cemented itself on their empty hollow faces as they sat in rows, disappearing into the ground, with dead weeds clinging to them like veins to flesh.

Was it impetuosity or laziness that brought him to this place, or was it both?  Was it these things that drove him out of paradise and was it these things that confirm that he’ll never return?  These dead soldiers with their bare eye sockets stared at him with a thousand stories to tell.  He stood upon the skulls of millions with the burden of adding something to their legend. 

A store employee pushes Leonard to the ground and off his store window.  Leonard snaps back into this reality and looks up at the contemptuous man standing above him.  The man yells silent words down at Leonard and then leaves him there on the sidewalk as people walk by like statues in a museum, frozen in time.  Leonard picks himself up and puts his sunglasses back on, he brushes his coat and moves on.  He was thinking about how all this indifference has become so acceptable in society?  He found himself thinking about how he drank the same gospel most of these people drank about all the possibility.  He thought of that storekeeper and when did he see through the invention of hope and prosperity?  When did he see people for the first time, when did he see the world as it is and not how they told us it was?

That which is created by the mind is more living than matter.  Leonard often created scenarios in his mind that didn’t exist in the world.  He would be angry at a person for defying him some way; he would create a case in his mind to hate them for that defiance.  It’s only been in recent years that he caught himself doing it.  He thought of all the people in his life that he alienated and outright loathed as a result of himself seeing beyond the restrictions of reality.  His cynical side concluded that everyone does this to some degree; we would not have road rage if people didn’t displace their anger from one area in their life and redirect it to another area.  The sad key to life is never blaming yourself for any of your misguided actions.  If you’re not willing to convenience those around you by confirming that the way they look at the world is the right way, then you will likely get ostracized from the group.  Leonard felt this on a daily basis; he simply didn’t comply with outrageous ultimatums to fit in.

Leonard stood at a crosswalk with twenty other people surrounding him.  Crowds bothered him; he was once in a riot and was terrified by their deranged group mentality.  Ever since then he’s always been weary of most gatherings.  Leonard walks across the street and stops at a man playing drums, beating on the bottoms of stained white plastic containers.  He wants the crowd to move past him to free him of their infectious anxiety.  The drummer beats hard down on his improvised drums.   

Suddenly Leonard saw fires burning in buildings in the distance; he realized he’s no longer in his reality.  The overlapping mirror of the world stood before him.  This shameless Utopia was starting to make him wonder if this is where he was supposed to be.  There was evil in this place, an honest evil that didn’t hide behind facades.  Was this the real image by some hallucination to which it gives rise?

He looks out at the polluted landscape and then up, there was electricity clawing its way out of the sky and scraping at the ceiling of the hazy clouds, creating a glowing crimson web.  This was understandably difficult for Leonard to see because he was never tied in any way to the mythology of belief, but what seemed to be happening here was a form of evil that he couldn’t explain.

Leonard snaps out of it while standing in front of an Irish pub.  He then falls back into the wasteland where the four-legged creatures notice him standing there.  He snaps back to the Irish pub leaning on a Guinness sign.  A flash brought him back to the nether world as the creatures viciously run toward him, leaping in the air preparing to eviscerate him.

Leonard wakes up on the sidewalk outside the pub with an angelic woman standing over him.  She holds her hand out to him as he looks and studies to see if she is in fact real or a hallucination again.  Her hand touches his as he sits himself up.  She asks him if he was okay as he just keeps staring at her, not saying anything.  He thought for a moment that she must have thought him to be crazy.

He forces a smile on his face and tells her he was just going into the pub to have many, many drinks.  She smiles and giggles as she helps him through the door.  Leonard walks to the bar and sits down looking at the bartender.  The pub has about half a dozen afternoon drinkers in it and has old dusty St. Patrick's Day decorations on its walls.  This girl sits beside Leonard and asks if it is okay if she has many drinks with him.  Leonard didn’t have a problem sitting with a pretty girl for a while.

The bartender brings them drinks as the girl introduces herself as Samantha Sutherland.  She tells Leonard to call her Sam and then goes on to tell him about university and the cost of it, and the courses she is taking.  Leonard reminds her how odd it is to be sitting with her and having a pretty good conversation.  She just tells him to enjoy the good things in life when they come along.

After an hour of talking, Leonard warns her that he often gets dizzy and passes out.  He says the experience is horrifying and in some cases painful.  When he was young he was diagnosed with neurofibromatosis, which is an inherited condition and genetically distinct with a high risk of tumor formation, mostly this occurs in the brain.  In Leonard’s case this tumor that he now has in his head is pressing firmly against his vestibular nerve.  This is causing dizziness and what is messing with his equilibrium, and why he’s been passing out so often.  Leonard, feeling that he has her trust, tells her about what he’s been seeing when he passes out, the horror ripples through him…always.  This petrifying place appears real to him, more than a dream that you know isn’t real upon waking up.

Sam then asks him if he's ever heard of Quantum Entanglement.  She says it's the possibility that space beyond the observable universe is tangling up with another universe, into a multiverse, that itself is governed by different properties, creating a ripple in the universe’s three dimensions of space and one dimension of time.  This overlapping could cause a bend in time and space creating a collision of multi-versions of the seemingly same reality.  If we are reflections of holograms of ourselves being projected from the edge of the universe, this ripple may effect that projection thus altering reality or possibly allowing one to time travel.

Leonard looks at her in awe and wonder as she explains to him that may account for the loss memory and the dystopian wasteland he keeps witnessing.  Leonard tells her that the theory is interesting but it’s likely not about him.  He thinks that he is going mad or that he belongs in that reality.

Sam clinks her drink on his and assures him that he belongs right here in this realm of existence.  She says she’s been studying wormholes and other universes.  Leonard doesn’t look too sure as Sam gets up to use the washroom.  While she's gone, Leonard passes out at the bar as the bartender chats with people at the other end.

Leonard finds himself running with incredible speed toward a hotel that was demolished during the apocalypse.  Those four-legged creatures are directly behind, howling as Leonard just fits through a door smashing into a wall as he enters.  He falls to the floor in the hotel as large pieces of debris crumble and block the door.  He can hear the yelping and howling on the other side of the barricaded door.

He stands and sees that for the moment he appears safe, looking around he sees an elevator in the middle of the floor and skeletons fused to the walls like fossils.  He walks over and blows onto a broken mirror, removing the dust and to his complete surprise he sees the reflection of one of them four-legged creatures.  Leonard falls back terrified, looking around, there’s nothing there.  He looks back in the mirror and the creature remains, it is he who is the creature…..

Sam exits the bathroom and walks back up to the bar and notices that Leonard is gone but his bag remains.  Sam quickly asks the bartender where he went, to which the bartender assures her that no one exited or entered the pub in the last ten minutes.  Sam looks around the bar and then exits onto the street.  The concrete jungle comes alive with the hustle of modern society.  Sam is left on the sidewalk in a perplexed state.  Where is Leonard?

Seeing the Beyond

by Christopher Barr

December 19, 1995.

Stanley Miller was a disquisitive necromancer from the time he got to St. Catherine’s Mental Hospital right up to the point of his death.  He knew that place inside and out; he knew it better than the staff that worked its long dark halls for so many years.  He knew it was a socio-architectural phenomenon of dim beauty and ageless fortitude, he said there were many more windows in that place than the ones built within its walls.

Stanley Miller was mentally ill, he was a schizophrenic and he’s been at St. Catherine’s for much of his adult life.  Stanley killed his entire family 17 years ago with a garden pick and a butcher’s carving knife.  He believed his family was all being possessed by fiends, he felt that his actual family had been killed by them and that they were using their bodies as vessels to spread their malice upon the earth.  Stanley believed it was his duty to cleanse each body of its dreary depravity.      

He has always seen himself as a warrior that wore hidden armor of steel all over his body, invisible to the humans in this realm but visible in all other realms.  He believed there to be nine other realms that sort of poured into one another like rivers flowing into oceans.  He saw himself as a shaman, a caller of the dead, and a communicator with those that live in the middle worlds. 

This belief consisted of what he called the all-dead and that was when all nine versions of a particular person in all nine realms were dead.  He felt that his communication with the dead was misleading because the spirits he spoke with were in fact not dead; they just existed in the other worlds.  He was able to cross-communicate with them due to his illness.  An illness that allowed him to see beyond the purview of human languages and the metaphysical understandings that regular people felt they were tuned into.

I was brought in to visit Stanley on a number of occasions before I became his regular doctor.  I studied psychology and medicine at Harvard University and I graduated with top honors.  During an internship here I became quite interested in Stanley’s case, so much so that I can safely place myself as being gripped with it.

As a psychologist, self-examination is common practice so I was very much aware of my personal connection with Stanley and what he claimed he could do.  Months prior to meeting him on February 19, 1995, I was in a Dyer gas station paying for gas when I exited I noticed my car was gone with my wife and child still in it.  Two days later my car was found off of Interstate 95 but there was no sign of my family.  Three weeks later my wife’s body washed up on a shore of the Charles River, she had been murdered and disposed of.  But there was no sign of my daughter, a baby girl who had no idea what was going on.

During a dark, cold day when the mist in the air clung to my bones, I arrived at St. Catherine’s and was hasty to get inside in hopes of warmth.  Then I saw Stanley, who was quick to tell me, without ever meeting me that he was sorry about my wife but my daughter was, in his words, “Still alive to sing to.”  I stopped him and asked him what he knew about my family and particularly my daughter.  He then ceased talking as if seeing a ghost behind me ordering him to stop.

I read his file and I learned what he did to his family, the grotesquery of the scene will stay cemented, haunting my mind till death.  He not only killed them, he cut their bodies open from head to toe, exposing all their bone to the air.  The five of them all laid dead in the living room with their heads facing the center of the room, forming a circle and their bodies in straight lines pointing out, forming a star.  In the center of the circle was a large eye drawn in blood with a smaller eye drawn in the pupil of the larger eye.  He said in his file that a group called the Vanglineae taught him how to perform this cleansing ritual.  He said the Vanglineae were an ancient secret society of men that called themselves Healers of Worlds.  They were set upon this earth to purify it of the darkness that was consuming it.

When I got in and sat with Stanley he’d often say nothing and sit in a chair and murmur, or just do high-pitch squeaking and sometimes low droning.  His psychiatrist had him on a slew of psychotropic and antipsychotic medications, such as Thorazine and Mellaril, also Prolixin, Navane and now he’s been on Clozapine but mainly Clozaril.  Stanley had a very high resistance to most of these drugs.  As a result there were times I came to visit him and he was suffering from decreased motivation and also lacking emotional expressiveness.  Other times I come here and he was suffering from hallucinations, delusions, thought disorder, loose association and ambivalence.

Through all these drugs that I know he needs, I’m trying to understand this man’s psychological disposition and his past history that led to him to killing his family in such a bizarre ritualistic way.  Through all these drugs and psychological issues I’m trying to ascertain some form of truth about what he claims to understand concerning life and death and multi-universes.

Stanley was harmless, since his arrival here at St. Catherine’s 17 years ago, he’s only had one episode and that was 11 years ago resulting from a mix up in his medication.  He hurt a nurse while she was working on a file in an office; he went in and attacked her, bruising her face and breaking her right clavicle.  He was restrained to the floor by staff and sedated.  The nurse swore that the person that came in the room and attacked her was not the Stanley she knew, no matter what his condition was, Stanley was harmless.  She said the man that entered her office was someone else because, as she put it, behind his eyes was nothing, a sharks eye.  The eyes are strange windows into the past of a person, they tell us about the joy, pain and sorrow as if it was printed right there on the retina.  She said this man had no story in his eyes; he had no life pumping in there anywhere.

The medical board dismissed any wrong doing on Stanley’s part due to the drug mix up.  The nurse that he attacked went about her business with him as if the incident never happened.  After I read the report, my hat went off to that nurse for her professional devotion to her job and her understanding of her patients.

But for me there had to be more to this story because it was Stanley that walked into that room and attacked her.  With that though, I must say I do take the side of the nurse; I don’t find myself worrying about being hurt by Stanley.

When psychiatry is at its best with those practicing it, what you see is a person medicating another person much in the same way as one would tune a piano or guitar.  There is an art to the science of psychiatry because of the calibrating of medication that is required from one patient to the next, from one day to the next and often from one hour to the next depending on the patient.  Prescribing medication properly to treat an ailment requires talent and an abundance of tolerance. 

On the good days, Stanley liked to go for walks around the more, older unused areas of the asylum.  One such place was a room where unclaimed urns were stored.  The room looked like an aisle at a grocery store but quite dusty.  The urns looked like large spaghetti sauce cans.  Stanley could point to any one of the urns and tell me what that person was doing right now.  Derrick Ashburn was working at his desk on stock reports while looking over at Sally Somers at a desk two booths down from him.   Jen Cho was shaving her legs in her bathroom; he said there was a man in her condo about to attack her.  Hermann Sullivan was in a place where he was about to attack a woman before a gas explosion kills the both of them.

Stanley was tuned into something that can’t be explained using the existing available discourse.  There is psychic ability but that has been often proven false.  This could be the ramblings of madman because what he’s saying can’t necessarily be proven, but some of the insights he does possess about the living breathing people here in this universe is astounding.  It is my belief that my daughter is out there somewhere, alive and this man can help me get her back.

Stanley next, took me to the Autopsy theatre after passing the infirmary, where in the center of the room has a stainless steel table surrounded by steel cabinets and a smaller table for equipment.  The outer part of the room has a series of different colored chairs for medical observers to watch autopsies being performed.  Stanley and I sat in those chairs and looked around the room.

Stanley out of the blue told me that they weren’t in their bodies.  When I asked him what he was talking about he said his family.  His family was long dead and what was left was an invading terror.  He said he didn’t want to do what he did to them but he was put in the position where he had to act.  Their other versions in the other universes were all falling sick as a result because of these things contaminating the tether between them all.  He said he had to cut that tether so the others would get better and live their lives.  He had to kill them all.  Stanley looked out the basement window at the overcast sky with clouds swirling, thinking.

I touched Stanley’s hand and asked him how my daughter is?  He told me she’s fine, she is with me and my wife on our couch watching television in our house.  He told me she was alive in all the universes.  Here she’s looking at a woman’s loving face looking back down at her.  The woman he said was not my wife but a woman my wife once knew.  There are black stars on the ceiling with yellow walls and the woman’s hair is red he said.

My heart began to race but I remained as calm as possible, I didn’t want to spook Stanley out of his current forthcoming state.  I asked him if he could see where they are, what city they were in.  He said he didn’t know, he could only feel and sometimes see around the vessel.  Tears filled his eyes; he looked at me squeezing my hand.  We stood up and he walked me to a closet down the hall and opened the door.  Inside hanging on hooks were a number of straitjackets, he closed the door on us as darkness filled the room.  All I could hear was Stanley breathing heavily.  He touched my hand and stood in silence as my mind filled with thoughts of my wife and daughter, the day she was born at the hospital and the day we brought her home.  Suddenly in my mind a cognitive shift took place where a man was in the room with me, my wife and child, in our house.  The man was staring at us but oddly couldn’t see us either.

I was scared for my family as I stood between this spooky man and my wife and child.  My thoughts shifted to the day I was called by police to identify my wife’s body in a morgue, and the same man creepily stood on the other side of the table she was lying on.  The police there couldn’t see him but he could see me.  Outside of the hospital the man was sitting in a car looking at me looking at him.  As I walked by I could see the license plate on his car but when I looked away the man was suddenly standing directly in front of me.  We were inches away from each other and then I fell out of the closet into the light of the ward hallway.  Stanley stood over me looking down, holding his hand out for me to take hold of.

A month later I was changing my baby’s diaper when my sister arrived at my house.  Joking with her, I told her I should have waited five more minutes and I could have ducked out on diaper duty.  She looked at me and smiled because I just said ‘diaper duty’.

In my car I drove up the wet shiny road to St. Catherine’s Mental Hospital.  The old brick building stood high on the mountain away from civilization.  This was a place where the regular working people wanted nothing to do with.  Society has longed turned its back on the odd ones, the insane ones.  It’s rarely a point of conversation as to whether these mentally unstable people are of any consequence to the function of society.

After my experience as a doctor of psychology, a father of one and a man, I can safely say that this place is of the utmost value.  My daughter is home with me now; the man, named William Carcosa and his red-haired wife Madeline stole her and murdered my wife, they are both in prison doing life sentences because of Stanley.  He opened my mind up to possibilities that are not linear but rather circular.  That license plate I saw in that thought or dream or what Stanley called a crossover is what led the police to the whereabouts of my child.  The couple that stole her couldn’t have a child of their own so they decided to kill my wife, who the woman saw while staking out hospitals.   

Once I got into the hospital I sat with Stanley looking out the window while in the hospital barber shop.  Stanley died two months later of a brain aneurism but not before he opened a window in my mind one sunny afternoon, where I saw him in another universe teaching a class on neuro-physics at a prestigious university.

Stanley had no living relatives, so I requested his cremated remains and placed them on a bookshelf in my den.  While I write papers or speak to patients, Stanley will always keep my mind from closing down ideas and remaining open to possibility.  

Stationary Man

by Christopher Barr

He had dreams, he had ambitions and he often saw his future as something rewarding and distant from his past.  He came from a place that didn’t inspire beauty or thought for that matter.  It’s not like it was their fault, the town’s people, his family, his mother and father.  They adapted to the banality of their environment, just as they were supposed to.  But he was different for some reason; he saw the sun rise and thought of grand possibility.  He thought of a future that included his ideas because right now they lived in a place where ideas laid like corpses in morgues. 

The powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.  That’s all he wanted was to contribute a verse, something that adds to the odd poem that is life.  He was well read in spite of growing up with, for the most part, illiterate people.  No one guided him into the arms of Shakespeare or invited him to a conversation with Socrates.  He was alone with his thoughts and had no one around him to share them with.

He knew that great art existed between the symbolic order and the order of the Real.  He knew that talented minds carved their paintings or their poems or their songs from this place that forces itself outside of the trappings of the language order.  He knew that it was there that many will never travel or explore for it’s a frontier that is known only by few.

This place can be dangerous for those without the mental discipline to rest upon its shores.  For most, when words are absent and meaning is abandoned violence prevails.  The point is, if you are going on this journey to the cliffs of language you have to be prepared to see a pit of darkness, a pit that necessitates a leap of faith that most are not prepared to do.

For him, while he is aware of this journey and is willing to take its leap, he remains shackled to his parents’ teachings of simplicity and fear.  He is grounded when he only wishes to fly.  But what is this….?  Why isn’t he able to just change?  He wants to, he feels he’s ready to, but yet he doesn’t.  He remains frozen while longing for the sun’s rays to free him from his mental trap.

His parents, his whole family, his neighborhood he grew up in, his area of town and the city he was from all followed a set of rules handed to them with an understanding of unconditional faith.  A faith in knowledge and that being whatever the rule was, it was tested through a series of trial and error experiments and is now set for all to learn from.  The problem with this is the same problem that religions hold over their flock and that is; conform to these rules because conforming to the rules was itself a rule.  With this, many minds fell blindly into the snare of groupthink.

His thoughts were often consumed with this plight of inaction that seems to be within his very being.  He thought of the suffocating tragedy of being helpless in spite of himself. Regardless of what he understands about himself and the world on a psychological level, here he is, still the little boy, by necessity that believes in the fantasy of the world with which he was presented and is left with…...what?  Does he just stay prisoner to the ignorant sensibility of his upbringing?  He’s beginning to wonder if he is impervious to change.  Was change and remapping yourself a possibility?