Fall or, Dodge in Hell

The F section of the index was very short, having only two entries: “Fates” and “Furies.” The latter being a mere cross-ref to the more correct “Erinyes.” The former were glossed as “three old goddesses who determined the life span of man.” Richard had merely scanned those words, since he was really interested in the Furies. Cross-reffing to “Erinyes” (“avenging spirits”), he turned to page 60, their first appearance in the book, and read of souls crossing the Styx (in a ferry no less) and drinking from the spring of Lethe under “dark poplars,” causing them to forget who they were and what they had done during their mortal lives. Fine. But then it said “great sinners” were sentenced to suffer forever under the whips of the Furies. So, that part of it matched up pretty well with Richard’s Furious Muses concept. It was troubling, however, to think that you could be whipped forever in punishment for sins that you had forgotten under the dark poplars. The sinners in the Christian version of hell could at least remember why they were burning in eternal fire, but these poor dumb Greeks could only suffer without knowing why; without, for that matter, even remembering what it was like to be alive and to not suffer. It wasn’t even really clear to Richard that a post-Lethe soul could even be considered the same being, for weren’t your memories a part of you?

And yet it all rang true on some level. He did feel sometimes that he was continuing to suffer guilt pangs for acts he had long ago forgotten—deeds done when he wasn’t the same person. And who hasn’t known a sad sack, a hard-luck case who seems to be undergoing eternal punishment for no particular reason?

The next Erinyes reference happened to occur just before a two-page spread featuring the more cheerful topic of the Muses, which was good stuff, way more Sophia-appropriate, as well as reminding Richard that his own Furious Muses were at least as creative as retributive, for some of his best work had emerged from imaginary dialogues with those estimable ladies. So “Furies” had been the text he was after, and “Fates” an accidental subtext—but this morning something about it was nagging at him.

It had to do with the threads. Lying in bed a minute ago he’d been thinking about the thread of consciousness, and how severing it—breaking the brain–body link—was the key to a proper nap. And he knew that somewhere in d’Aulaire was a picture of the Fates spinning, measuring, and cutting thread. He looked all through Greek as he drank his coffee, and found it not.

The coffee was unutterably fantastic. The machine cost more than Richard’s first car and there was nothing known to coffee technology that was not embodied in its hardware and its algorithms. The beans had come from an artisanal roaster a hundred yards away—a nimble coffee startup founded by java wizards who had been brought here to work for Starbucks and spun out the moment their stock options had vested. The taste of the coffee was not wonderful, however, merely because the machine and the roasters had done such good jobs, but in the categorical sense that Dodge was awake, he was alive, he was actually physically tasting this stuff with his body in a way that sleeping-Dodge-in-a-dream could never have done. In that sense awake Dodge was as superior to sleeping Dodge as a living person was to a ghost. Dreaming-of-coffee Dodge was to drinking-coffee Dodge as one of the shades in Hades—likened, in d’Aulaire, to dry leaves whirling about in a cold autumn wind—was to a living, flesh-and-blood person.

He exhausted the first cup while looking for the thread-cutting picture. He did find a textual description of the spinning, measuring, and cutting operations being carried out by Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, respectively, but not the illustration that he clearly remembered showing to Sophia just a couple of days ago.

On his second cup of coffee he had the idea of checking Norse. And there it was: a full-color half-pager of three blondes—here, they were called Norns—spinning the threads of life at the base of the world tree. Urd, Verdande, and Skuld. Names and hair color aside, they seemed to be a direct drop-in replacement for their Greek equivalents.

Now, Richard had run off to Canada before obtaining a higher education and had not set foot in a classroom since, but he had done enough reading to understand that mythology piled up in sedimentary layers. This had to be one of those cases where there had been some early culture predating the Greeks and the Norse alike that had featured the Norns/Fates and laid it down in a base layer on which their various descendants had then added more stuff. Consequently, they always read like an add-on to the more fleshed-out mythology. Or perhaps vice versa. They were too simple to mess with. Richard, who had grown wealthy in the tech industry, saw in the Norns or Fates or whatever you called them a basic feature of the operating system. Zeus had no power over them. They knew the past and the future. They only got invoked in these stories when something had gone drastically wrong on a metaphysical/cosmological level, or else to cover plot holes. In the Greek version, Clotho was the spinner—the creator of these threads. Lachesis was the measurer. So that would be your snooze button right there—she had her nine-minute tape measure out the whole time Dodge was lying in bed. And Atropos was the cutter. The Greek version of the Grim Reaper. Though, according to the theory that Dodge was developing, the loss of consciousness when you fell asleep was basically the same as dying except that you could wake up from it.

He did not eat breakfast because the medical assistant who had scheduled him for the procedure had said something about the desirability of showing up with an empty stomach. Instead he went and took a shower. When he emerged from the shower, he was fascinated to find the bathroom illuminated by a strange light, chilly and mottled, not artificial but not the light of the sun either. The effect was surreal, like entering a dream sequence in a movie made by a director who hasn’t the wherewithal to produce anything truly dreamlike and so is faking it with simple lighting effects. The weird light was flooding in through a window that was aimed north. Was someone welding outside? Finally he worked out that the sun, rising over the Cascades in the east, was hitting him with a bank shot off the half-silvered windows of an office tower a few blocks away. Dodge had been living here for five years but was still occasionally surprised by the way sunlight would carom in from surrounding architecture. He supposed that an astronomer could have a field day calculating the angles: how they varied from hour to hour and season to season.

Because of the weird light, his reflection in the mirror took on a strange new aspect. He turned his head this way and that, checking for new moles. Richard, who was ruddy and freckle prone, had for decades been psyching himself up for a climactic battle with melanoma, which, according to dark prophecies uttered by multiple dermatologists, loomed as a near certainty in his future. Early on he had performed his monthly skin checks with anxiety bordering on clinical paranoia. But then years had flown by with no action. He was now actually beginning to feel somewhat crestfallen that this terrible foe, against whom he had so girded himself, looked to be passing him over.

Presently he fell to shaving, for he had noticed a few days’ reddish growth. Medical personnel would soon be handling his body while he was unconscious. They would be able to stare at him all they wanted, to notice all the ways he wasn’t looking after himself. He was semifamous and ought to be mindful of such things. Maybe it would affect his company’s stock price or something.

He had assumed that the strange light would be a short-lived phenomenon, so was pleasantly surprised that it was getting stronger by the minute. The weird pallor was ripening into something warmer, like fire. A shaft of it was coming in through the window and illuminating the little sink and its backsplash. Richard had shaved, as was his habit, using a bar of soap—a specific type that he bought from a company in southern France. It had a pleasant fragrance, not perfumey and not too persistent. He had just put the soap back in its dish a moment ago and so it had bubbles on it. In a few minutes these would dry out and pop, but just now they were capturing the light being bounced off the windows of the office tower after its passage through ninety-three million miles of space from the vast thermonuclear inferno at the center of the solar system. Each bubble was producing an intensely brilliant spark of light, not white, but iridescent, as some kind of prismlike phenomenon inside the soap film (he was a little weak on the details) fractured the light into pure brilliant colors. A beautiful but perfectly commonplace phenomenon that would not have given him much food for thought were it not for the fact that his video game company had put a lot of money and engineer-years into the problem of trying to more perfectly depict an imaginary world using computer code, and this was exactly one of those things that was most difficult to capture. Oh, there were various ways of faking it; e.g., by applying special computational shaders to bars of soap during the sixty seconds after they had been used and were therefore covered with lather. But they were all just hacks. Actually simulating the physics of soap, bubbles, air, water, etc., was ludicrously expensive and would never be achieved in his lifetime.

It was hard even if you simplified matters by treating each bubble not as a small miracle of fluid dynamics, but as a simple reflecting sphere. At one point, some years previously, one of the engineers at Corporation 9592—a classic liberal-arts-major-turned-coder-so-he-could-make-a-decent-living—had identified this as the Hand met Spiegelende Bol Problem, and had discomfited many of the more hard-core engineers, during a meeting, by flashing up a graphic of the Escher lithograph of the same name. It was a self-portrait depicting the artist reflected in a mirrored sphere supported in his left hand. Escher’s face was in the middle, but a geometrically distorted rendering of his office could be seen around it. In the background of that was a window. This, of course, was gathering in light from at least ninety-three million miles away. The point being that in order to make a faithful 3-D computer graphics rendering of an object as simple as a shiny ball, you would, in theory, have to take into account every object in the universe. The engineer—a new hire named Corvallis Kawasaki—had footnoted his own remarks by mentioning that the mirrored-ball problem reached at least as far back as the German genius and polymath G. W. Leibniz, who had written of it as a way of thinking about monads. At this point in the meeting, the more well-established engineers had shouted him down and Dodge had made a mental note to yank the boy out of whatever branch of the org chart he’d landed in and employ him in Weird Stuff, which was Dodge’s personal department. In any case, the point, in this instance, was that every single bubble on the surface of the bar of soap was at least as complicated as Escher’s ball. Rendering such a scene realistically was completely out of the question. Far from being a source of frustration, this comforted him, and made him happy—perhaps even a little smug—that he lived in a universe whose complexity defied algorithmic simulation.

He closed his eyes while splashing water on his face and then looked back up at the mirror. Now there was a little spot in the middle where he had been dazzled by the brilliant sparks of light from the bubbles. Soon enough the dazzled patch would shrink and be replaced by a correct view of what was really there.

Except that it did not in this case. When Richard closed his eyes again to towel his face, he could still see a little patch of nothing in his visual field. This was a different sort of nothing from the field of red-tinged black that his eyes were seeing simply by virtue of the fact that his lids had closed over them. He knew what this was. The flash of reflected sun, a minute ago, had triggered a thing in his brain called an optical migraine. It was painless and harmless. He got them a few times a year. It was a visual display—“Aura”—caused by a temporary disruption of blood flow to the visual cortex. It always started thus, with a tiny dazzled region that refused to go away. Over the next half hour it would get bigger, making it impossible for him to read. Then it would gradually migrate rightward and mess with his peripheral vision on that side for a little while before disappearing without a trace.

The affected region—the spot where he was absolutely blind—was not black, as you might imagine. This could be proved simply by closing his eyes so that he actually was seeing just black. The blind spot then showed up as a region of vaguely defined yellow and black stripes, like the patterns painted on factory floors to limn danger zones, except that these flashed and fluctuated like an old-time television with its vertical hold out of whack.

Even as he drew these connections he was erecting defenses against a likely flanking attack from Polycultia, one of the Furious Muses, who was always pointing out that everything Richard could possibly think of was culturally relative. In this instance she might expect tactical support from Cerebra, an unintentionally offensive FM who had a knack for pointing out that any idea Richard came up with that he thought was clever was, in fact, but an imperfect rendering of a smarter idea that had occurred to her a long time ago. The projected line of attack from the Polycultia–Cerebra axis went something like this: Okay, because part of Richard’s visual cortex was on the blink, he was seeing “nothing” in that region. His brain was in the business of constructing, from moment to moment, the sort of three-dimensional model of the universe that, for example, enabled him to grab his phone from his bedside table without opening his eyes. As such, it couldn’t tolerate seeing a patch of “nothing” in the middle of an otherwise coherent reality. So it tried to fill in the nothing with something. It was simply the visual equivalent of tinnitus.

But why this particular something? He construed it as black and yellow danger stripes, on-the-fritz TV sets, etc., but that was only because he was a white guy of a certain age from Iowa. A Maori midwife or a gay Roman centurion or an eleventh-century Shinto Buddhist, in the grip of the same underlying neurological phenomenon, would fill in the “nothing” with some other kind of hobgoblin derived from their own set of cultural referents—e.g., the wall of cold magical flames surrounding Gymir’s realm in Jotunheim (according to Norse).

Being temporarily blind gave him an excuse to not expose himself to the Din. In an earlier decade he’d have said “not check his email,” but of course email was actually the least intrusive of all the ways the Miasma—as Richard referred to the Internet—had devised to bay for your attention. Richard lumped all of them together under the general heading of the Din. He deemed it unlikely that there would be much that was important in this morning’s Din, since he had caused his administrative assistant to weave a system of spells and wards: robotic “out of office” messages and whatnot.

He had, in consequence, time to kill before his appointment. He put the d’Aulaires back into their sack. As best as he could while half-blind, he made a sweep through the joint looking for any more of Sophia’s stuff. Then he took the elevator down to the lobby of the building. There was a café and bakery between it and the sidewalk. He had it in mind to buy a copy of the New York Times and, once his vision had cleared, to do the crossword puzzle. Not that he was even really all that fond of crossword puzzles as such, but the mere fact of having time to spend on it was an indicator of being a free man, in a certain sense.

Vo, the proprietor of the bakery, came out to greet him by name. He was a Vietnamese man in his sixties or seventies who, Dodge inferred, had acquired world-class baking skills as some consequence of the French colonial presence in his home country. This operation was serious business: not just a toaster oven under a counter but a whole complex of expansive kneading boards and marble slabs, Evinrude-sized stand mixers, and walk-in ovens reaching deep into the building. Senior Asians and hairnetted hipsters could be viewed rolling out pastry dough and hand-shaping croissants. Vo would not deem the business to have succeeded until he had everyone in a half-kilometer radius walking home every evening with a baguette under his or her arm.

The front of the house sported half a dozen small tables and, where it fronted on the sidewalk, a window counter. A secondary entrance connected to the building’s lobby. Richard came in that way and picked up another cup of coffee and a New York Times. Vo wanted him to understand that he had yesterday acquired a bushel of ripe Yakima Valley apples from a personal connection at the Pike Place Market—just enough to make a few tartes tatin, which he was keeping in reserve for special customers. Not that it was much of a secret, since the apple-y aroma had permeated the whole ground floor. He was wont to back up his verbal communications with physical demonstrations, perhaps a habit acquired during the decades when he had been learning English the hard way. Gently cupping one of Richard’s elbows in the palm of his hand, he led him around behind the counter to display a cardboard box stashed there, half-full of apples. He bent down and pawed through them until he had found a worthy specimen, then pulled it out and held it up in front of Richard’s face, perching it atop his fingertips in a pose that strongly called to mind Escher’s Hand met Spiegelende Bol, save that in this case, of course, it was an apple. It was an apple from which earlier generations of American grocery shoppers would have recoiled in dismay, had they seen it in the produce section at their local Safeway. It was half the size of the brawny, cottony Red Delicious apples usually seen in such places, its color ranged from an almost purple shade of red to an almost yellow shade of green, it had a few minor spots and dimples, and a couple of actual leaves were still attached to its stem. But it was so round and taut that it looked ready to explode. Vo kept thrusting it higher and higher into the air, looking back and forth between it and Richard.

“Now, that is a real apple!” Richard finally said. It was not a particularly clever thing to say but he knew it was the only thing that would calm Vo down. Vo rewarded him by insisting that he take the apple “for lunch.” Richard received it with due ceremony, like a Japanese businessman accepting a business card, running his fingers over its curves and turning it this way and that to admire its color, then placed it carefully into the bag slung over his shoulder. He soon found himself at his customary table with his coffee, his crossword puzzle, and his slice of tarte.

He was at least two-thirds finished with it when he remembered with a start that he was under doctor’s orders not to eat any food before the medical procedure. He had obeyed earlier but forgot himself when confronted with the opportunity of tarte tatin fresh from the oven.

He looked at the remaining part—the best part, since it comprised the edge crust, and he had been raised to save the best for last—with a mixture of guilt and embarrassment. In the end he decided to eat it. He doubted that having food in the stomach was really a significant danger. It was just one of those general recommendations, like turning off your cell phone while pumping gas, that had been promoted to a hysterical warning by lawyers. And to the extent it might actually be dangerous, the die was already cast. Having three-thirds of a slice in his stomach couldn’t be much worse than having two-thirds. And if he left the remainder on his plate, Vo would notice it and take it the wrong way and perhaps demote him from special-customer status.

More important than the possible medical complication was the question, which came quickly to mind, of whether this lapse was an early indicator of senility. The speed with which he had demolished the crossword puzzle seemed to argue against it. But that was all long-term memory, right? He wasn’t sure. As a boy he had been oblivious to the existence of this thing called senility until an older cousin had clued him in to it during a family reunion and supplied a brief (and in retrospect hilariously imprecise) rundown of its symptoms while casting significant glances at Grandma. After that, young Richard had overcompensated for his earlier naivete by becoming hypervigilant to its onset in family members of even modest decrepitude.

2

The doctor’s staff had been very firm on the point that, following the procedure, he would be unfit to drive because of the powerful drugs they were going to give him—that he would, for all practical purposes, be an ambulatory basket case, and that they wouldn’t even begin the procedure unless he had a designated minder who would sign him out afterward and take responsibility for keeping him away from heavy machinery. Accordingly, Richard now walked two blocks to a transit stop, boarded a city bus that would take him to the medical complex on the hill above downtown, and made himself comfortable in a seat amidships.

He woke up his phone. Its home screen was chicken-poxed with little red dots with accusatory numbers in them, the consequences of having turned a deaf ear to the Din for twelve whole hours. He willed himself not to see those and instead brought up his address book. He scrolled to the K section and found five different entries for Corvallis Kawasaki. Some of them had little pictures attached to them, which helped Richard guess how out-of-date they were. Most had accumulated during the years that Corvallis had worked hand-in-glove with Richard at Corporation 9592, the game company that had made Richard a billionaire and Corvallis, in the lexicon of the tech business world, a decimillionaire. The pictures on those tended to show him hoisting pints in bars or in various funny/celebratory poses connected with the company’s rise to prominence in the online gaming industry. One of them, however, was a very straight, formal head shot of Corvallis with his hair neatly trimmed and gelled, wearing a suit and tie. This card—which was only a few months old—identified him as the CTO of Nubilant Industries, a company that did cloud computing. It had been formed last year as part of a “roll-up,” which was tech biz parlance for acquiring and combining several companies that were all operating in the same “space.” Corvallis had been induced, by means of a hefty stock option grant, to leave his position at Corporation 9592 and join the new company. Richard had been sorry to see him go, but he had to admit that it was an excellent fit—Corvallis had overseen the shift of all Corporation 9592’s operations from old-fashioned server racks to the cloud, and he hadn’t been as lavishly compensated as others who had been luckier in their timing. Since Corvallis’s departure to Nubilant—which was headquartered near downtown Seattle—he and Richard had exchanged texts on several occasions, trying to find time to meet up for a drink. So far, it had not come together. But when Dodge pulled up his Corvallis text message stream, he found, at its tail, a flurry of messages from over the preceding weekend, in which Corvallis agreed to take the afternoon off and serve as Richard’s designated minder, collecting him from the clinic in his narcotic haze and taking him to lunch or something as he returned to his senses.

omw to clinic, Richard thumbed. Then he fetched a substantial pair of headphones from his bag and placed them over his ears. The sounds of the bus were muted. He plugged the cord into the phone and turned the headphones on. For these were electronic noise-canceling headphones. Directly they began to feed anti-noise into his ears, making everything quieter yet.

Corvallis texted back, K. The phone displayed the ellipsis indicating that he was still typing.