Losing Schwartz

Schwartz called me. He wanted to show me the device he'd finished. He said it took you away. I said that sounded fascinating, and agreed to join him.
When I arrived at his building, and took the stairs down to the basement, he was waiting for me in front of the door. It seemed very eager of him, which was something I had never seen Schwartz be. He was tall, thin, and decrepit. It came from spending too much time alone, hunched over little lights that shined onto motherboards, transistors and power cells. He put as much of himself into them as he could, so had little left over. I told him once that it was concerning; he shook his head and said it was promising. I asked him why. He said the outside world's days were numbered. “Very well,” I'd replied, for lack of anything better to say.
He was more cordial today than usual. There was a set to his features that I found appealing—as if he were so content with himself that the outside world meant nothing to him. But it made me uncomfortable because it was not usual for him. He was the friend who I went to see when I felt like getting the most sardonic, cynical, and nominal view of reality possible. Schwartz tattooed quotes by French writers on his arms, back, and chest, and in casual conversation often referenced “the Fascists” and “the statists.” He hated politics, religion, and vegans, as well as protests, bicycle culture, and positivism. He said they were all of only moderate importance, compared to what was, in his words, “inherent.” But he would never say what was inherent, either—whenever I asked him, he told me that it was best if we didn't discuss it. I once asked him why it was best. He'd become tense all over, squinted his eyes, and told me never to ask him that again. I hadn't.
But today he was different—grinning, and quivering. I had never seen him quiver. I asked him what was up.
“I'll just have to show you,” he said, and smiled. That was odd. I don't think I had ever seen him smile before. It wasn't a shock. I felt, actually, like it was something that I had always expected to see eventually, and now that it came, he finally seemed complete.
He had already walked inside. His apartment was fascinating. It looked so functional, yet lived in. It felt contrived—as if it were a set for a movie, as opposed to a home where someone lived day-to-day, without thinking about its appearance. Only a mediated reality would be so organic, yet so useful. It occurred to me once that I felt this way because all of the surroundings I had been in over the years were examples of disorganized thinking put in place by people with no clear sense of themselves. There were always books, articles of clothing, and ragged furniture strewn at all angles, placed in the most convenient spot, where it was the least in the way. There were stacks of magazines and newspapers, action figures, shoes, and cheap jewelry overflowing from every closet, corner, and coffee table. I was not used to rooms in which everything had its place, thought out by necessity and efficiency. That was what made Schwartz different than anyone else I knew, and why I liked him. While I felt a room such as this was beyond my abilities or proclivities, I appreciated him for having it. My room was always a lumpy mess, a challenge to navigate, a muddle of books on varying subjects and jackets, pants, and shirts of various styles, the walls crammed full of magazine clippings, posters, and whatever other odds and ends I could cram onto them. Schwartz had never been to my bedroom, but I was certain that if he ever entered it, he would look around, pace for a couple minutes, and then be forced to leave. That was just Schwartz.
He walked across the room to the wide work table that ran along two of the walls. At the corner sat a halogen lamp with a bendable arm, that shined down onto a soldering iron, a pair of needle-nose pliers, a set of small screwdrivers, and a circuit board with several components scattered around it. Mounted on the wall behind the lamp was a piece of fiberboard with holes into which were mounted metal hooks, most of which carried tools with outlines drawn around them in permanent marker and a small label written neatly in blue pen. About halfway between the lamp and the far wall was a computer, with a rolling chair in front of it. On the other side of the room was a tall metal shelf full of milk crates that were in turn full of electronic components in various states of assembly, none of which I knew anything about. To one side of the shelf, several hooks were planted into the wall, with cables of different colors and diameters were sorted by size.
Schwartz crossed the wide rectangle of tile parting the shelf and the desk and sat down in front of the computer. He sat up straight, crossing his legs, and opened a window on the desktop. It was the web page of the local independent media center. He clicked the link to a particular article, and told me to read it. He got up, and walked through a door to the left of the computer, and asked me if I wanted a drink. I said sure, and began reading. The article—which read more like a journal entry than an article, like most of the articles at that website—talked about the peace march that I guess had happened that day. It had not been very peaceful. Several activists had been arrested, and a few beaten. The march was put together by a group that had been operating since the war started. They were funded by the largest communist party still operating in the country, which was the largest functioning remnant of the movement from a few decades before, and represented the segment that had remained aboveground. It had not changed discernably in that time. The group did not openly admit that they were funded by the communists, instead stating the communists were “partially responsible,” and then saying that who founded the group was not as important as what everyone's common goals were. The article began by stating that the oppression had happened, and denouncing the police, and then denouncing the march organizers for being complicit with the police. After that began a summary of the march. For about half of its duration, it had been routine. The police had been leading the march, lined up in front of it, with bicycle cops blocking the streets that were not on the route, as if leading a parade. At a few turns, the marchers broke from the route and the police were ordered to let them pass. But then a few blocks later a small group of younger people had broken from the pre-ordained march route. One of the police got on a bullhorn and declared the protestors that had sat down an “illegal assembly,” and that they would be forcibly removed if necessary. When they refused, the police began pepper-spraying them and shooting them with rubber bullets. Apparently, the police claimed that a protestor had swung at a police officer, although the author of the article stated that the marchers had all been at least twenty feet away from the police. There was apparently one person from the march with a bullhorn, who castigated the younger marchers for breaking away from the march, and said that the marchers were not there to “work against” the police. Another marcher, who was apparently one of the organizers affiliated with the umbrella group, was also sighted conversing with police on several different occaissions. At the rally before the march, organizers had repeatedly discouraged direct action, and some of the organizers of the march even booed a speaker that did. There was even an accusation that one of them had attacked one of the marchers that broke ranks, and told them they deserved it.
In all, ten people were arrested, though they were all released by the end of the day thanks to an activist legal defense group that was unaffiliated with the communists. The author of the article was a self-described anarchist who finished the piece with harsh words directed towards the group that put on the march, calling the group nothing more than a front for moderate liberals hoping to galvanize support for the mainstream liberal party in the upcoming election. All of the supporters and organizers of the march were bourgeois hypocrites seeking to co-opt the movement in the name of maintaining their own social and economic position. It was an argument I had heard many times on this website. The author finished by stating that nobody truly dedicated to the toppling of the state could ever ally themselves with this movement, seeing as it was hierarchical, ideological, and reformist.
Schwartz walked back in as I finished.
“Interesting,” I said.
“Yeah,” was all he said in return. Schwartz had a remarkable voice—barely above a whisper, yet measured and resonating, demanding that you come closer and hear it, as if tuned by delicate instruments. It was as if Schwartz were afraid of the affect it would have if he let it reign unchecked. I envied it. I always felt I struggled to capture peoples' attention, and could only succeed if I made it clear that I needed it badly, but then once I had it could never maintain it for very long, as if my need for attention were the only thing about me that merited any of it. But Schwartz gave the impression of containing the whole universe inside himself, and was only interested in sharing it with those who proved themselves worthy.
He motioned me to move over. I scooted the wheeled chair over, and he took the mouse, and opened another window, told me to read that as well, and walked to the other room again.
I pulled my chair up, and began reading. I tingled as I read the first line. It was an essay I had written a few months before and sent to Schwartz. I was thrilled. I had been nervous about showing it to him, because the chances of making a fool out of myself were so high any time I tried to present my own point of view on anything to him. It was safer trying to figure out what he thought, and then presenting that as my opinion, and hoping that he bought it, instead of calling me out. A lot of my interactions with Schwartz involved me trying to avoid being called out. He just seemed to possess a natural, perfect understanding of everything—or, at least, a natural, perfect understanding of what he thought about everything, which was the real secret, and was why he never chose to join me in any of those disorganized rooms where the clothes, books, and glass jars and the posters, tapestries, and figurines were. People in those rooms—including myself—usually did not know what they thought, and were in the process of attempting to develop their own thoughts, with varying levels of sophistication and success. Some would say they required patience, but people like Schwartz would say that sort of patience was nothing but disguised pity, and an insult. That was the way Schwartz always worked—taking the opposite view of what most people believed, absorbing the instant screaming and yelling that came when peoples' prejudices were challenged, and then using that to point out the prejudice. He had no time for people whose worldview was a random conglomeration of ideas. Which made me wonder why he hung out with me.
I had written the essay shortly after choosing to quit volunteering at a collectively-run bookstore on the other side of town. I had been excited when I got the job, believing that I was involving myself in a growing movement towards finding an alternative approach to the problem of reality. That was how I saw everything going on in the world—as all a manifestation of the problem of reality not living up to our expectations of it. When I first got involved with the bookstore, I believed it was an example of the way reality should and could be, and that if I were to immerse myself in it, and somehow force it to fill me up, I would be able to go about solving the problem. It was non-hierarchical—there were meetings once every two weeks, and all decisions were made by consensus. If we all sat down and talked everything out, it would work smoothly. It didn't. The year and a half I'd spent there had been frustrating, demoralizing, and disappointing. What I had discovered was that the bookstore was based only upon an abstract model for a different reality, as opposed to an awareness of reality's inherent state, so that instead of seeking a solution to the problem, it just tried to enforce that abstract, nonexistent reality outwards, and was therefore just another factor working towards the muddying of any genuine state there may have been.
My essay dealt with those issues, as I saw them. I began by stating that I did not believe in politics, but was not apolitical, but was instead anti-political. The rest of the essay was a series of loosely connected statements on what being “anti-political” meant.
In my mind, there could be no solutions to the world's problem through the use of politics. Politics was an attempt to create an abstract model of what reality should be, and to force oneself to see reality only through that lens, as certain people would like it to be, and not as it was. It took just as much faith as any religion, which was why, over the centuries, people had been willing to resort to deception, manipulation, repression, and violence to enforce whatever political reality they had selected as their unassailable truth. They believed that whatever illusory order they wanted could be maintained if they could just eliminate chaos. But, in my mind, chaos was as much a part of reality as anything else, and any attempt at eliminating it was doomed to create oppression, and eventually to fail. All politics was a form of oppression, because all politics existed strictly in the minds of its adherents, in the realm of the rational, and demanded that those adherents suppressed the irrational at any cost. Those who bought into such notions did all they could to dress themselves in the way they felt was in line with their political beliefs, and consesquently helped create a world made up entirely of surfaces, a table beneath a spotlight to which they came in the daytime to show themselves off, to speak dishonest words, to decide the fate of people who didn't look as good as them, only to leave at the end of the day, tear their clothing off, and run screaming through the darkness in total contradiction to everything they'd said. Eventually, the irrational would demand manifestation, and the constant attempt to repress did nothing more than frustrate it, and guarantee that when its expression came, it would be more violent, destructive, and merciless than anyone imagined. Ignoring it only made it stronger.
Schwartz had come back in and stood next to me as I read.
“I didn't know you even read it,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, “I did. I like it. Very inspiring.”
“Really? Why? I thought it was depressing.”
“Have you read the end again?”
“No.”
“Read it first.”
I read the rest of it. I couldn't help feeling a tingle all over me due to the fact that Schwartz had found something that came from me “inspiring.” As I read my description of what I felt constituted anti-political writing, I couldn't help but feel proud of my own words, considering the fact that they'd held up through Schwartz's eyes.
In my opinion, politics was a result of the Western intellectual tradition, and was one of the purest distillations of the pros and cons of this entire manner of perceiving the world. From the days of Athens onwards—the first city with a genuine privileged class that was cut off from the necessity of taking care of their own day-to-day needs—society had been run based on the belief that thinking was the most important thing a human could do, because it got people closer to a perfect state of reality that the physical world was a shallow reflection of, each and every person and object being a knock-off of the one perfect version that sat complacently somewhere we were doomed to only approximate. The only hope for reality was a combined effort by all the members of society to conform to those perfect ideals. What was needed in this case was, of course, the select few who could see those ideals the most clearly, and create expressions of them that everyone else could work from. Therefore, of course, those select few were the most important people on the planet, and had to be made as comfortable as possible, because what came from their hands, mouths, and pens would be the thread that held our world together. Hence an authoritarian, hierarchical structure to society, all of us trained to wait for that perfect leader to come along and tell us what to do and be.
This was the communal delusion we'd been living from for the last five thousand years or so, and was what we needed to separate ourselves from, and the only way to separate ourselves from it was to destroy those mental constructs, so that we wouldn't even expect them to manifest anymore, and would instead be willing to accept what we see with our eyes. I purposely did not offer any hints as to what form what we saw would take, because to provide even the slightest hint would be an act of hypocrisy. It had to be discovered.
I remembered all of this coming to me very soon after I stopped working at the bookstore. It had been after one of our bi-weekly meetings. The realization that I would no longer be able to work there came suddenly, just after one of the older collective members had stormed out. She was not one of the founding members, but had been involved for quite some time. Over the months I had been there, I had come to see her as combative and controlling without seeming to realize it, her actions having gone unchecked for so long that by now they were taken for granted by everyone, including her. She suffered from this lack of being challenged, I could tell—she seemed detached from the world, disorganized inside, unaware of her affect on people and struggling to understand why she was middle aged, poor, and alone. I had always sensed a desire on her part for closeness, to feel that she was accepted and cared for, and had given her latitude based on that, doing my best to forgive her less appealing tendencies, trying to consider that her life had obviously never worked out the way she'd been waiting for it to. She was in her fifties, overweight, working a drudgerous job, and had become, without realizing it, bitter and abrasive, which are the last desperate measures of someone who has found no other way to connect with people. She had tried many other methods over the years. She came from a different era, when it had been widely accepted that the sorts of change that those protestors had been demanding earlier that day was on its way, when indeed such a change had been depended on with an almost religious fervor, despite the sketchy vision of what that change would entail. As sketchy as that vision was, she had latched onto it wholeheartedly, and had apparently never let go, to the detriment of every other aspect of her life, which was either sad or inspiring depending on the level to which you'd latched onto the same vision. She'd been part of that small, select group that was supposed to seize control from outside the system and somehow cause a complete change in the structure of society, even though no one knew what form it would take, and whether or not it would work. Needless to say, their efforts failed on every level, and accomplished nothing more than one long reaction that had worsened until it became a movement of its own. The communist party that had put on the march was a direct descendent of one of the groups that had been instrumental in that era, but was a faction that had resisted the movement towards an underground, clandestine approach, and instead focused on maintaining the party apparatus and attempting to affect change through legitimate means. They had a headquarters in a wealthy bohemian neighborhood, a newspaper, and a leader who had fled to France years before and now ran the revolution from exile. He had not been photographed in twenty-five years, and communicated with the outside world only through his monthly essays in the party's newspaper, which few people read. We carried four issues each week at the bookstore. They were brought in by a haggard, elderly bald and bespectacled man who hardly spoke. Nobody ever bought them.
But this woman had read their literature, and had believed it, despite the decades of evidence to the contrary. There was a revitalization of the movement in the works, that would come to fruition any time now. It was important to “build coalitions,” and to “hold on,” and to not “sell out.” She did not tolerate anyone whose rhetoric broke from the standard message, and if you argued with her, you were usually yelled out of the room. I was intimidated and uncomfortable around her, and spoke to her as little as possible. I considered it necessary.
Her outburst came while we were discussing the magazine ordering situation. Everything at this store was always a “situation”—constantly somewhere between moderate and pitched crisis. In order to do anything, these people required the feeling that the fate of the world hung in the balance. There was always a primary “situation” that everyone was dealing with—one or a few—and everyone's energy went into dealing with these situations, and therefore had no time left over for evaluating what was causing the crises, and perhaps doing something about it. It was an opiate—for many of them, the only one available anymore. They had all led a series of hard, broken lives, and were at varying levels of disappointment with where they had ended up, and the final high left for them was holding...it...all...together until the movement asserted itself, and everything was fixed, forever. The cleavage from reality was almost as complete as that offered by drugs, and the high was shared by multiple other people as well, adding to its legitimacy.
The agenda, written sloppily on a dry-erase board, came to “Magazines” and she immediately took out a catalog she had of various progressive publications, and said that she wanted people in the collective to choose which ones they wanted ordered. There were questions—mostly from a young dreadlocked woman who did the accounting—about who we were ordering the magazines from. The woman had found a new provider, and the question was who this new provider was, and whether they were somebody that we wanted to go through. Finally, the dreadlocked woman said that she didn't feel there was enough information available on the new distributor in order to get behind using them.
At which point, from out of the blue, she threw the catalog she was holding down on the floor, and proclaimed that she quit, that she was sick and tired of “all this,” and she grabbed her bag, and stormed out. One of the collective members followed her out, another who had heart problems had to go to the sink and splash water on his face. For a few minutes, the meeting broke down. Everyone expressed different levels of agitation or regret. Some thought it was a good thing, that it was best that everything got put on the table. Nobody exactly criticized what happened, choosing instead to find their own individual ways of casting it in a positive light.
I didn't share anything. I sat silently, and took notice as the realization that I wouldn't be able to work there anymore grew from my chest into each limb of my body. Each person at the meeting shared their personal feelings on the situation—the new situation that had grown out of the previous situation—and I sat there, and my head began making shapes.
Because it was clear that the processes, the etiquette, that the collective believed in meant nothing to this woman, who believed she had the inherent right to do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. And she had been here longer than almost everyone else, and was supposedly more accustomed to being a member of a collective than anyone else. The entire notion of non-hierarchical control was a mirage. It disappeared the moment someone felt cornered, felt as if they did not have as much control as they wanted, at which point they fell back on their aggression, and used it to take as much as they could get away with taking, without questioning whether it was good for the bookstore—the higher cause—the Movement—the glue that was supposed to be holding us all together. Power didn't go away just because you chose to ignore it—it just became more difficult to check.
To me this was more than just a simple decision to change a small facet of my private life. I was realizing that the world worked differently than I'd thought—that a change in the structure of our institutions would not matter in the slightest if the human nature itself didn't change. I'd believed that once an individual entered a collectively-run institution, and absorbed the atmosphere, the individual would adjust to that mode of existence, and that all of the tendencies I found distasteful in my fellow human beings—aggression, competitiveness, violence, authoritarianism—would vanish once we accustomed ourselves to this environment. But I had been slowly realizing, up until just now, that there were tendencies in human nature that were ingrained, and, despite their detrimental nature, could not be destroyed simply by wishing them away.
I felt like a spring twisted in the wrong direction for the rest of the meeting. I spoke very little, and then went home, and wrote the essay, realizing I'd been dying to say all these things for quite some time. Despite how wrong it seemed on the surface, it was a relief to get it off my chest. I'd given it to Schwartz because there was something I felt in those words that seemed to belong more to him than to me. I had always gotten the impression that Schwartz was onto something, though I had no idea what. Whenever I would share the problems going on at the bookstore, he would shake his head, and give a bland, vaguely condescending response, signalling that he was holding something back. I was always looking for ways to capture his interest, but had never seemed able to succeed—he was always a few steps ahead of me, seeming to skip to the end of every observation I made. I was left wondering when I would ever finally manage to ascend to his level, and once I got there, how it would feel. He'd never mentioned the essay to me again, and I'd never dared to ask, because I was frightened of showing that level of vulnerability to Schwartz.
But now Schwartz had prepared two shots of whiskey, and placed one in front of me. I didn't like whiskey very much, but tried my best to pretend I did whenever I hung out with Schwartz. I had once taken a shot with him, and grinned, thanked him, shook hands, excused myself, walked down the street half a block, and puked. It had been worth it to avoid embarrassment.
But he'd always been at that same place on my involvement with the bookstore—just on the verge of disdainful. I'd accepted it, but kept on because I was convinced it could work if I stayed with it. I believed in the idea of people learning to work together. It had not occurred to me that the creation of an abstract model for non-hierarchical control and the attempt to implement it onto reality was in itself an aggressive act, based on irrational illusion, and was doomed to do nothing but create aggressive tendencies in those who took part. When I'd told him I'd quit, Schwartz had not seemed very surprised. We drank the shots together in silence. My mind was racing, wondering why he'd waited until now to show me the essay. I felt mildly ill after the shot went down, but forced myself to swallow a few times, and hold it in. Schwartz put his glass down, sat back, crossed his legs, and spoke.
“People are always talking about taking somebody down. Every time. It's always pointing a finger at who needs to be taken care of. If we can just find those people, those few who are doing it, and get them out of the way, then everything is solved. As if there are these few deviants who are steering all of us in the wrong direction, and once they're gone, we'll all be fine, because they have the problems, not us. But everything isn't solved then. Everything is definitely not solved. Because there are always more, always more just around the corner all set to take their turn. But are they just more aversions, more unique flukes that must be dealt with, or is there more going on here, more than what they want to believe? It almost as if there's something that moves on, something that is utilizing resources as they come along, then abandoning them once they stop yielding results. They're exhausting the resistence. And they'll manage to wait us out.”
“Who is 'they'?”
“That's just what I'm saying,” Schwartz said, “that is just what I'm saying—I don't think I know. Who are we talking about here?”
“I don't know,” I said, a fresh wave of nausea running up my windpipe, demanding a few swallows. I was nervous whenever conversation with Schwartz went in this direction. I always got nervous when I felt like I couldn't predict what people were going to say next.
“Exactly,” he said. Always the same—a very intense whisper. I was never sure whether or not he was playing with me. I always half-expected it. I read a lot of books, and considered myself well-versed in most everything, or at least tried to, but Schwartz often managed to make a fool out of me. It was as if my head emptied out whenever I started interacting with him, like I'd never known anything at all at any time previous in my life, yet had somehow managed to fool everyone but Schwartz. I would instantly be embarrassed at ever having thought what I'd been convinced of moments before, instantaneously transformed. The change was a work of art, and I was the media. Schwartz worked that way.
There was a pause. I swallowed a couple more times, keeping the whiskey down. Schwartz stood up. We were at one of those junctures where I knew there was something he expected of me, some threshold he expected me to be at, and I could feel in waves his disappointment at the apparent fact that I wasn't there, and his disappointment in me created a renewed disappointment in myself. There was a part of me that was afraid that Schwartz would eventually get tired of me, and stop bothering with me, at which point I would finally have to admit that I had reached my limits. A horrifying possibility—mediocrity—but one I had felt creeping up on me my entire life, waiting patiently as I exhausted every possible tactic. Moments like this one always made me feel like its wait was finally ending.
“You're not getting it, are you?” Schwartz asked.
“I don't know what you're talking about,” I said, hoping that if I sounded incredulous enough, it would suggest that I had my own logic that Schwartz understood no better than I did his. And if I suggested it, it might mean that it actually did exist, if I could get to it before Schwartz caught up to me.
Schwartz exhaled slowly, and the lines on his forhead got darker beneath the bright light. But he was unphased, at least on the surface. I sometimes had the suspicion, when I was talking to him, that he wanted something from me, that he believed that somewhere in my head I had something he wanted, and was trying to coax me into giving it to him. Despite his frustration, he was still tantalized. Moments like this kept me alive.
“You need to see it, then,” he said.
“What you called me about?”
“Yeah. You need to see it.”
“Alright. Show me.”
Schwartz picked up the empty shot glasses, and indicated the other room.
“Alright,” he said, “it's in there.”
“Great.”
He walked into the room, and I followed him. His hunched, bony shoulders arched to avoid a bushel of cables hanging from the sealing, held together with electrical tape.
I was a bit surprised by the device. It was more than I'd expected. I ducked to avoid the cables, but only found more waiting for me once I got by. It didn't look like anything I had seen before, so judging by its appearance, it was revolutionary. More cables hung down from the ceiling, bushels connected with duct tape.
“Yeah, watch your head,” Schwartz said. He was a few inches taller than me, but of course navigated through them without a problem. He had of course spent hours in here, hunched over, placing each set of cables, arranging them to allow himself the greatest possible level of mobility. I had a picture of him like that in my head, totally absorbed, forgetting the passage of time completely, that I envied. Whenever I spent too much time at my house, I became restless, feeling the need to go out, to find people to help me forget how little I had to do. I sometimes thought of what Schwartz was doing at those times, but tried not to, because it made me feel bad about myself. I would never manage to withdraw so completely from myself, and wrap all my attention around something separate. It was a sensation I could only imagine.
Schwartz indicated a chair for me to sit in, which I sat in, then he lowered a headpiece onto me.
I felt nervous. Naturally, he could tell.
“You have nothing to worry about,” he said.
“I hope not,” I said.
I was not sure, though. This felt dangerous.
“Are you sure about this?” I asked.
“Yes, completely,” Schwartz said. “I've tried it myself. It is harmless.”
“Are you sure you're not just unaware of its effects?” I asked.
“Yes—Christ, yes—don't you trust me?”
I trusted Schwartz more than I trusted anyone else, I supposed, but ultimately I did not completely trust anybody, or at least believed I did not trust anyody.
“I'm not sure,” I said, because I wasn't.
“It does no harm. There is no actual contact between you and the device.”
“Then what is there?”
Schwartz didn't answer. He was seated at a console, and put his head in his hands.
“What's wrong?”
“I can't believe you're doing this,” he said. “I can't believe you want to pull back at the last moment.”
“Well, I mean...is this safe?”
“Yes...I just told you it was...why don't you trust me?”
“I don't know. I mean, what does this thing do, anyway?”
“Well, I was trying to tell you, but you wouldn't listen to me, so I gave up.”
“Why don't you just tell me?”
Schwartz exhaled quietly. It sounded louder than it was.
“I was hoping that you'd understand by now,” he said.
“Understand what?”
“Christ,” Schwartz said, standing, stalking past a bushel of cables, then leaning up against the wall.
I felt the shame running throughout my body. I wondered if it came from the device on my head—if this feeling were an execution of some sort, a fate worse than death, a page turning.
“What?” I finally said, as Schwartz continued to glare at me.
“What do you mean 'what'?” Schwartz said, incredulous.
I had no idea what the right thing to say was. I felt this way often—most of the time, really. But this time felt worse. I could feel the few remaining iotae of Schwartz's faith in me floating away. I was losing him. I was filled with the awareness of my own mediocrity, so plain and clear. I was embarrassed I had never seen it before, that I had allowed myself to believe there was more to me all this time. But then I felt that I had seen it—had seen it all along, and had been avoiding accepting it, and that finally I had been reduced to this moment, the moment I had been avoiding my entire life. Finally, I had run out of steam—finally, I would have to admit my limitations, starting...now.
But then I realized that I always felt that way before something new came along, when something I'd always felt but had never managed to verbalize came along and finally hardened into words. Or sometimes, it wouldn't even become words, but a feeling, a feeling that an adjustment had just taken place, one that I couldn't share, but still knew in a way I hadn't known it before.
And it came. I couldn't say it, but had made my decision. For some reason, I was staring at my hands, and moving my fingers back and forth, as if I were building something.
“Okay,” I said, closing my eyes, but keeping the picture of my fingers moving back and forth in my head. “Do it.”
I heard Schwartz walk over to the console and sit. I heard a few buttons compress.
I knew it when it started working. I let it happen. I tried to watch everything as closely as possible. But it wasn't necessary—they were everwhere, inescapable, and I didn't have to take note of them because they simply were, so real, unmistakable, concise, and graceful.
There was a looseness in me that seemed to press from inside out. I felt like I could generate it at will, and that it grew out from me and mingled perfectly with all the colors and objects. I had never felt it before, but knew I had imagined it.
I don't know how long it lasted. I was there, and then I wasn't. That looseness vanished, as did the colors and objects, and what had come from them.
I felt the headpiece being taken off.
“There. Not so bad, right?” she said.
I squinted some, and rubbed my eyes. She had walked over to the console, and was now seated, watching me, her long legs crossed and her arms folded. Her long hair fell over her shoulders, and she held a piece of it in her hand, twirling it back and forth like she always did when she was nervous. I knew I had seen that gesture in there, which meant I had seen her, or at least her hair, but it was already hard to remember. How was that any different than a thousand dreams I'd had?
Her tone had been sardonic, as usual. I wanted to answer her in turn, in a way that would impress her, and force her to respect me. No matter how long I knew her, I couldn't give up trying to impress her. I kept believing it would work, this time, that I would finally start living one of the movies I used to watch as a child.
“No,” was all I said, though. My head ached slightly, and I suddenly wanted to leave. But I didn't want to be rude.
“So maybe you didn't need to piss and moan like that,” she said in that sharp tone she took when she wanted to make me feel small. The way the fluorescent light from the ceiling hit her at that moment created one of those pictures of her that I lived for—her long, slender body placed perfectly, her long legs in their form-fitting pants crossed, her back arched, yet concealed slightly by the loose hooded sweatshirt she wore—somehow making it far more noticeable—her arms crossed on the console, her hair falling down over her shoulders, and her wide forehead throwing the light back at me, and drawing attention to her piercing eyes, and her lips that were tightly pursed, as if she were holding in something dangerous. She may as well have been carved in bas relief—her image seemed so intricate, with so much hidden. I felt flat and insubstantial, and hated myself for that, and pretending, as always, that I was annoyed with her, and not myself. I always believed that being near her would finally make me exist, but all it did was annihilate me over and over. Like now.
“Nothing happened,” I said, trying my best to sound like I was rebutting her.
“You saw things.”
“Yeah—that was it, though.”
“You saw things you can't see here.”
“No,” I said, “I saw everything I see here, I just saw it in a different way.”
“How?” she asked.
“Haven't you used it?”
She paused, and looked down, her eyes shadowed by the light.
“No,” she said.
I had something. I sat up straight.
“So you used me to experiment on,” I said.
“Well—no—but”—
“But what? You experimented on me, huh? You were too afraid to use it on yourself, so you thought you'd call your favorite dumbass, and use it on him, huh?”
Her face crinkled, and her body tensed, and her eyes narrowed.
“I don't think you need to be this sensitive”—
“Fuck you.”
I was winning. But then I stood up, and bumped my head, ruining it. I swore. I wanted to pull that bushel of cables from the wall. I felt tears beginning, and hated them. She could make me angry in a way that nobody else in the world could. I lost all of the patience and control I prided myself on when I was around her, as if my emotions entered a quantum state, occuring with a depth and richness I'd never thought possible.
She stood up, walked to me, and put her hand on my shoulder.
“Get off me,” I snapped.
“But you just”—
“”Yes, but I'm fine.”
“You bumped”—
“Yes, I know, but I said I was fine, didn't I?”
I walked past her, into the other room where I could stand up straight, making sure not to trip on anything else and make it all worse. I sat at the desk. I closed my eyes, but when I did, I saw her the way I'd seen her in the machine—naked, being touched by me, being made love to by me, everything I'd wanted to do with her but had never been able to—so I forced my eyes open. They were some of the same visions I'd had of her before, but they had never felt so close, so real. My empty shot glass was still on the counter, by the computer. I stared at it, and rubbed the spot on my head.
She followed me out a few moments later, and sat next to me. I got up, and moved across the room.
“What a fucking waste of time,” I said.
“What did you see?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said, “nothing at all.”
“Do you want to know what I saw?” she asked.
“I thought you said you never used it.”
“No. I wanted you to tell me what you saw with no expectations, as if you were the only one who'd ever used it,” she said.
I was still rubbing the spot on my head.
“What did you see, then?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
“What?”
“I'm not going to tell you.”
“You're not?”
“No.”
“You just said you were going to.”
“No,” she said.
“What?”
“I didn't use it,” she said, turning from me.
“What?”
“I was lying.”
I was shaking all over for some reason. I breathed a few times.
“Which time?” I asked.
“The second time. When I said I'd used it. I thought I could make something up, but then it occurred to me that if you'd actually been inside it, you would know I was lying.”
“Why?”
“Because you'd seen it for real.”
“No—I mean, why did you lie?”
“I—don't know—I—just—thought—uh—you wanted me to,” she said.
“Why did you think that?”
“I—don't—know,” she said, not making eye contact with me.
“Well, it didn't work,” I said.
“What?”
“It didn't do anything,” I said. “I didn't see anything I hadn't seen before.”
It was true. Sort of.
“I mean,” I continued, “what's it supposed to do?”
“I—don't know,” she said. “It was based off some ideas I had when I read that thing you wrote...I thought it might—I don't know—make things clearer or something.”
“Well—it did—kind of,” I said, “but not in the way that you thought.”
There were two of her, really—one inside me, and one outside. Sometimes the one inside me would grow so large that I felt it pressing against my skin, about to break through, so desperate was she to complete herself. And I felt like she must feel the same way—must understand what I felt, how powerful yet fragile and fleeting this moment was—and that she must be lying to me in the same way as I was lying to her, but the thing was—always—that I didn't know for sure—and so I had to settle for some sort of imagined agreement—the possibility that we'd both agreed to lie to one another, and were at least together on that.
“Really?” she replied.
“Yeah,” I said, “the problem is it doesn't change anything. It just makes it more intense. It's ultimately useless.”
She didn't like that, but seemed ready to accept it.
“I don't know,” she said, “I think the idea has merit.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah—it's like—well—there's this gap that needs to be bridged.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah—it's like—getting it to happen, here—like getting what we see to manifest”—
“Yeah, I get it. I think I see it. Like, making what we see happen, making it come out”—
“Yeah”—
“There are just—like well, translating it—making it happen”—
“Yeah,” she said. “It creates problems.”