Dad had been better at this. Much better. He told stories like a great, unrelenting river that rips one straight along. Fluidly through every twist and turn so much so that it would leave listeners physically dizzy. Stranded in the ocean and needing to crawl back to land in order to regain their lost footing. Neither Nasir nor his sister had ever been anywhere close to adept at that last part, admittedly. They’d get lost in a tale for weeks on occasion before making any effort to cognitively resurface into reality, much to their mother’s bafflement. A ritual, dad called it. Sitting on the living room floor once a week and telling stories over candlelight, even if his own were the only ones worth hearing. They had been children after all, and their mom seemed to not grasp the concept of narration on a metaphysical level, opting instead to list facts from all corners of documented scholarship. Even biographies only ever amounting to the parts of their sum, if they could be added up at all that is. Upbringing plus time-in-exile plus academic-impact. Concatenations of lived time. Less a person and more the facts and figures which shackle them to history, though dad didn’t mind. He clung to every word of the borderline incoherent accounts like they clung to his masterpieces. Unequal standards, sure, but when this was pointed out, he’d just laugh and suggest not to worry. It wasn’t a fair competition, now was it? Wasn’t a competition at all in fact. The rest of them didn’t have experience with the Iranian oral tradition dad was enmeshed with, so how could it be? Tales were still more culturally significant in their ancestral land, yet they had never heard a proper performance of the Shahnameh. Not that their father had ever lived east of the Mediterranean either, but he used to visit every few years to soak up words and settings. Incorporating the sounds of bazaars into his vocal folds. The family had come to Europe one generation prior still. Dragged occidentally forth by a restive Persian dentist whom Nasir never met. Nasir only went to France once. That’s it. His sister hardly even left the city.
Had he been wrong before? Maybe Nasir’s stories were even more river-like than those of his late father, or just as much, simply at another stage of the life cycle. One ill-suited to narration, where information comes flowing together from different rivulets. Each only ankles-deep, but burying their own inconsequential path before unfathomably connecting. Dendritic confusion instead of overwhelming current, but it fits the man’s line of work well enough: Connecting myriad small irrelevances to find out what they’re converging towards before anyone else can see or use it. He’s good at it too. The best he’d claim, certainly up there, though despite no less rest he has been restless of late. Unsettled by just how good at it he can be sometimes. Nasir reaches for the keyboard again, not with any particular key in mind that warrants pressing, but feeling like a letter or two ought to come out if one at least gestured towards writing. He had to get this out somehow after all, not that intention ever did anything by itself. Unintentionality is much better at that. Compulsion. Reflex. Ontological necessity. So why not start there: “Hey, I know you’re reading this. You read all of them, and it’s important, so please continue. Not emergency-blare-important, don’t worry, just personally important. Important for you to be aware of in the sense that it’s important to me to have made you aware of it. I’d appreciate if you came over, wherever you are. Same address.”
Now to the content. Nasir drums his fingertips along the desk to no effect progress wise. Dips one into his coffee, just to reassure himself that it has gotten cold in the time he spent ruining his eyes within the depths of a white-blinking caret cursor bookended to both sides by nothingness. It wasn’t. not cold-cold, but that strange state of body-temp.-adjacent lukewarm, where it almost feels like you aren’t touching anything. Fuck it. He’ll simply trace out that first evening:
Maybe therapy wasn’t so bad, Nasir had mused while drinking green-flavored vodka from someone’s belly button. The thought itself being direct fallout of another cognitive misfiring, which had posited that this might actually be therapy in more than just name. Not convincingly, though he had decided to believe it anyway, at least for an evening. Sure looked like a rave though. To an uninformed bystander or a zoomed out psychonaut, of which there were plenty. The event had pitched itself with slogans like “drink your problems away” and “group counseling with DJ Rabies” within irl-threads of the Glaring’s digital diaspora, and that honestly wasn’t so far of the mark, Nasir admitted as he tumbled outside. Dionysian in nature but somber in spirit. He certainly unloaded a whole bunch of mental noise into the cocktail-sippingly patient nod/mhm-matrices of strangers. Not on a chaise, sadly, since all of those were diligently vomited upon even before he had arrived, but it ought to have counted for something either way.
In his youth, the man had been too paranoid to drink, too worried about surrendering some of his faculties to gin-buzzed delirium, but these days he was too paranoid not too. A neighbor who goes to raves occasionally is far less suspicious than one who works all day, and while all of the people in his apartment building are specifically vetted to not be meddlesome and nosy, one can never be certain enough. A paranoiac can’t, or at least wouldn’t want to. Instead, a paranoiac might own their place of residence under a different name buried behind seven layers of bureaucratic obfuscation, while paying a man on the other side of the world handsomely to play the role of being their landlord. They might claim that it all plays into the positively byzantine process: Being willing to rent a suspiciously cheap apartment from a shady individual who speaks exclusively Mandarin is the first gullibility-check but by no means the last. Believing that there is a last step is another identifying characteristic of the pathologically careless. A sufficiently cartoonish paranoiac would say and believe all of these things, though Nasir only acted on them in as far as he played the role he had assigned himself, much like their faux landlord in Guangzhou (who even the perfunctorily suspicious should realize ought to be speaking Cantonese, not Mandarin) acted his part. A paranoiac coworker is far less troubling than one who knows exactly what he should be worried about.
“Haivyou eveaheardah jasminen- jeas mem an- djaaa- jaazzmennanrouzes?”
The head-shaved individual, who would tower over (if he weren’t halfway wound around) Nasir nodded to himself in congratulation for the almost comprehensible string of sounds, leaving his standing-aid to wonder if the club was specifically named that way because “jasmine and roses” and “jazz, men and roses” sound identical when produced by the sufficiently inebriated. Nasir does know it and tells his arm candy as much.
“wesjoud gothea”
“You’re really in no condition to.”
“mmfiiiiiiiine. Djustmeibe needoo eadabite andillllbe fiiiine.”
Asked for his name, Julian slurred something which sounded vaguely like “Julian”, and Nasir followed up with inquiry about where he intends to find food at this hour. To the comparatively sober party’s genuine surprise, and with navigation less impaired than enunciation though, he actually managed to lead them to a gas station without much non-balance-related trouble.
“whadidai tellyu?”
“yea yea”
It wasn’t one of those chain-ones. The gas station. Nasir strained to remember if he’s ever seen, much less entered a non-chain gas station, or whether he had even been consciously aware that those still existed these days. If so, he couldn’t recall it. Beyond the anachronism that shrouds the concept there seemed to be a noticeable pressure inside, that or a lack of it. Some slightly uncomfortable awareness of one’s own eardrums, not intense enough to properly characterize the experience. Non-acoustic sensations akin to earplug-wearing. Heard-unheards as opposed to the usual heard-heards and unherad-unheards that litter auditive mechanosensory perception-space. The second point of interest was the guy running the establishment, a creature which lay splayed out across the counter, one leg angled and one dangling down to his side. His stretched-out arms held a thick paperback above his head in one of those poses you rotate through. Unstable equilibria where it’s comfortable for about five minutes before you have to transition to another aperiodic state. As though this image wasn’t already absurd enough, the man was wearing a rose-colored bathrobe over regular street clothes.
“Hey”, he said.
“Likewise”.
Nasir asked about the book. “A history”. ‘Of what’ the register’s occupant wasn’t quite clear on yet. Hadn’t gotten far enough despite being more than three-hundred pages deep and halfway-through. Even whether there actually was history to it was sort of still up in the air in his mind. At least in part the title was a play on words of course. You could see it in the letter-spacing. Slightly narrower than normal, hovering in the epistemologically uncomfortable ambiguity between “A history” and “Ahistory”. Like ahistorical but as a noun. Obfuscated self-negation. That’s how it goes with Kaleçek: Always some sort of puzzle which only resolves itself at the very end, if even then. The fact that he hasn’t figured out the tome’s topic yet was made more astounding still when one considers that he had been consulted for its content. Said it right there on the inside cover: “Chimeric expertise graciously provided by Oran Foley.”
“Chimeric?”
“Taxidermy. The mix-and-match of it. It’s macabre as far as hobbies go. Creepy even, not least to the practitioner, but relaxing. I’ve always found it to be at least.”
“Huh.”
There was a pleasant forthrightness in the answer, despite admission to stigma. No embarrassed verbal tiptoeing or eye aversion, which would immediately feed into subconscious processes designed to judge something strange. Nasir had always found this competence to be somewhat bimodal. It occurred in the very socially adept and in the very autistic, while leaving a terrifying chasm of self-conscious awkwardness in between.
“I’m sorry, what can I help you with.”
“Nothing, really. My… The guy who followed me out of a club is looking for snacks back there.”
“And you’re avoiding the term “date”.” He said, solidifying his assessment as socially competent.
“I’m revoking it, I think. Therapy lets one reconsider questionable decisions like that.”
“I see…” The man asked if Nasir would be okay with two requests that might skew on the side of strange.
“Depends.”
“Of course it depends. When does it ever not depend? But are you?”
“Sure”
Oran pushed himself up onto his elbows a little and drummed his fingertips as though he would have preferred a ”no” on some level.
“Can you check if my heart’s beating?”
“Whether your-“
“yea. Feels like it isn’t. Not in that I feel the way people do when their heart has just stopped. I don’t feel like I’m dying, if you were worrying. I just feel like I should be feeling it and I’m not, so if you wouldn’t mind, and I’d understand if you would… Please?”
The blue of his eyes was so pale that it might as well be gray and did a terrible job of hiding the panic of a man who fears he might be right. It’s the sort of expression Nasir’s sister used to wear constantly when she asked him if he could see a cat outside the window, the answer to which was usually no, so he did the responsible thing and pressed his ear down against the gas station clerk’s chest. Bdump bdump. Definitely a heartbeat, although muffled by the robe. Oran sighed with some relief, tough not enough to make anyone believe his fears were truly assuaged. Then he asked if his customer knew the painting Nighthawks. That’s what it felt like after a while. In here at night. Liminal in all the best and worst ways. Not even so much that one starts to doubt one’s existence and more that one starts to question what it would even mean to exist. Whether the exit is just out of frame and whether it matters. Nasir got it. All workaholics probably do. He asked what the second request was.
“Oh right. Your name. It’s just another little neurosis to tether myself to existence. Knowing names and forgetting them. It makes the world feel bigger than this counter.”
No hesitation. “Nasir Heine”, said Nasir Heine. A benefit of hiding as much as this job demanded behind artifice (or as much as a fellow neurotic would feel it did) was that one never had to worry about fake names. The correct semiotic marker already pointed to the wrong thing.
“Any relation to-?”
“Yes. My sister”
He paused.
“Your sister was a nineteenth century poet?”
“Oh, no, not that one probably.” He tried to remember dates his mother had once thrown at him about Heinrich Heine’s tragic life of hubris and serendipity. It would in retrospect have been an easy biography to think of as a cautionary tale or a warning directed at Nasir, if he didn’t know full well that mom was incapable of normative statements. The gear-shift from historical- towards social-media-age cultural awareness occurring in Oran’s mind spanned another pause. One of dawning realization instead of vague confusion this time.
“Oh. Ohhhhhh I’m-“
“I really don’t need a stranger’s condolences about her.”
“Well I guess it’s worth very little then, without demand but well in stock, because I am so sincerely sorry about your sister.”
From the way he said it, it was immediately obvious that this man had actually suffered loss in a similar way, unlike Nasir, whose sister was merely dead on paper as well as AWOL for the past few months. Not like he couldn’t find out where she was if he tried, he had the means and skill to find just about anyone, but there was a certain trust that would be violated in doing so. She didn’t have any obligation to stay in contact after all. Whatever the situation, Nasir always felt like he could have made a phenomenal actor if he weren’t so dead set on being meddlesome and influential. All of the artifice his life entailed bordered on method, so there were more than enough moments in which he actually felt himself believing that his sister was dead or that he had to pay rent to a man in China. The necessary pain was easy to summon to his brows, although he did feel slightly gross about it. Her continued freedom from public attention was worth all the lies in the world.
“who?” Nasir asked about the death so clearly carved into Oran’s gaze.
“A childhood friend of mine up to our mid-twenties. He was the son of… of a man I briefly hoped could become my father, though he never did in the ways I wanted him to…”
The dad had been part of the German government proper, back before formal Rastinian independence when it was still just a special economic zone. A quite special special economic zone, to be sure, but at the very least pretending to be externally governed. He was firmly opposed to independence, one of those. When his son, Oran’s friend, died, the old politician understandably retired, but with cases like this the habitual paranoiac was always quick to assume the guilt of his employer. With any such convenient vacancy proximal to the levers of power. Any aspiring conspirator is wise to first become a conspiracy theorist, or at the very least a journalist, should money be a concern. Nasir was close to apologizing for it even, on Kalpa’s behalf, which would have been phenomenally awkward, but no. The son had died of a heroin overdose. Utterly mundane. Could have happened to anyone, though these are the occupational risks one encounters after sufficient time spent with the second division: To always be surprised when you weren’t involved in something.
The two men talked some more about dead friends and relatives, then about work, since that was more comfortable for both of them. Nasir never had to explicitly say that he worked for KCDI, since Oran had apparently already gathered as much from his facial expression when the topic of their former government was brought up. He had thoughts on the matter. Everyone did.
“So, which one are you? True believer, opportunistic cynic or one of those tragic reformers?”
“Oh there’s nothing to believe in. Truly or otherwise. Look at the history of it; from some Finnish hackers to white collar conspiracy to industrialized social engineering. Excuse me: Infrastructure. There’s no dogma there. Dogma is whoever’s pulling the strings at any given moment, but there is a consistent method. And the method is tragic reformism. Except it’s not tragic and it isn’t reform. It’s internal revolutions branding themselves as reform after the fact. You look at ghouls like Liam Strauss or Manfred Laurent and you see people who won the game, deserved or not. That’s what I‘m a true believer in. I believe in winning. In beating those fucks. For anything you could accuse Kalpa of: it is a game of skill at the end of the day. The hacker spirit has prevailed there. If anyone wants to change the world and they aren’t playing, I really ought to question the sad little thing they call conviction.”
“So essentially what you’re saying is you’re running ops?”
Obviously Nasir gave him the whole spiel that he’s always running ops. Never does anything except run ops. Neck deep in the shit like a megalomaniacal child in an ops-factory. “Know this,” he said. “When it comes to ops I am the president, the king and the Messiah all in one. Package deal. Fucking Oops! All Ops, but instead of cereal it’s the subtle art of social engineering. Put that on my gravestone” Oran laughed at this enough as to be forced to wipe a tear from the corner of his eye. Cute laugh. Exceptionally sincere. As the man in the rose-dyed bathrobe wound down, he stared deeply into Nasir’s eyes again.
“You actually mean that. I mean you’re joking, of course, but you do mean it… wild.”
He said that he could never quite believe the lives of people whose existence entails so much change. That he had an acquaintance who’s similar. It’s difficult to fathom from within crepuscular liminality. Like his taxidermy, every day was just a composite of other days. Different sort of change. Static iteration, though he felt like he needed this for a while. It’s nice to know that the sun will rise all the same, and that he was free to remember and forget all the names he pleased in the meantime. They were different shapes of neurotic, but formed from the same material, he thought, not that this should mean much, since they’re just the words of a man who frequently forgot that his own heart was beating.
“Want me to check again?”
Oran chuckled briefly. “I know that’s a joke, but… yeah. If you’re fine with it.”
His heart did still beat. The robe smelled of lavender. Eventually Oran raised the topic of the bald guy, Julian, who had by that point not been seen for what was rapidly approaching two hours, though it had seemed to neither of them even half that long. His sleeping body was discovered someplace back between haphazardly organized shelves which stocked chips and magazines respectively. Orbits shy of sober, but otherwise fine. Julian reluctantly accepted some water although only after rambling for a bit about having heard a “reeelweirrd sound” which he was attempting to locate until “welllll, wenyouroul- oulreddyjonthe floar… then-, yuuknou, midaswell. Isss vericlean. Theflour. Goodjob.” Noncommittal thumbs up before he threatened to fall asleep again.
“Well, it’s getting late, and I’m not, soo… wanna go for a walk?”, Nasir said and Oran chuckled, before they had to drag-carry Julian towards the next bus stop, which was as good a bookend to the night as any, and ways were parted temporarily. The promise to come over again though was honored not too long thereafter. Dropping by the gas station became a regular part of Nasir’s weekly routine surprisingly quickly, even for one so accustomed to volant schedule realignment.
Oran had finished “A( )history” by the time a week had passed, and he had thoughts on the matter which he wanted Nasir to parse through. It was essentially about telomagnetics in some circularly-obfuscated way; about how history writes itself with people as its ink, but also, importantly, about how it overrides itself. How false narratives can shape the future more than events which really happened, and how that possibly made them more potent ontologically: The fact that they can shape reality from outside itself. Sort of a tie in to the “tale of two demons” in that way. Nasir had more than enough stories from KCDI’s second division to lend a more pragmatic angle to Dr. Kaleçek’s almost occultic lens. What she’d call telodynamic conjuring, was to his vocabulary no more than skillful bread-crumbing, but there were enough people even within Kalpa who believed to be dealing with supernatural-adjacent forces, so the esoteric framing wasn’t completely unwarranted.
None of what Nasir shared was technically confidential, he regularly reassured: The company’s policy with regard to sensitive information was primarily a sort of strategic oversharing, where everything someone might seek to hide was just made fully publicly available from the get-go. The issue was that it came mixed in with so many exabytes upon exabytes of day-to-day accounting that no slave to Maslow-hierarchical need-structures would ever have the time necessary to find the worthwhile bits. Even if a probabilistic outlier did stumble upon something spicy by freak accident; there isn’t much of a story in unearthing secrets that were never secret to begin with. All of the actual mysteries were in the internal power struggles, he said, in Nasir’s little arena of corporate backstabbing and byzantine ops. The Kalpa employee still cautioned silence whenever Oran’s eyes lit up a little too much. Technically these things were on the books, sure, but that didn’t mean sharing highlights wasn’t frowned upon, especially sharing them with folks who were in contact with Dr. Naomi Kaleçek. Still, the whole talk of what got dangerously close on occasions to a newly minted “fate”-synonym reminded Oran of a prolonged experience he had had just after high school, almost ten years ago by that point. He didn’t like talking about it, but it seemed prescient.
It was the story of how he had come to pay an unusual amount of attention to people with distinctive character-designs (a feature which Nasir allegedly shared, something that unnerved him): Complete strangers you see in the streets one day and remember. Not from some place relevant, not from any of the significant fixtures that one’s life wound around. Just from having seen them before and gone “huh. That sure is a person”. Living on this scale of city, going out a normal amount, and fitting some other ballparking-parameters one will likely have the experience twice or so a year on average.
“Feels like a lot, doesn’t it? Feels too meaningful each time to be so relatively expected, but then again maybe two hyper-significant encounters a year are a reasonable amount”, he tries to believe. A college friend of his figured that out. Made some guesses, slotted some numbers, calculated a bit. Not for any deeper reason than the desire to dilute unease with statistics. Very human. Very him, according to Oran. But probability wasn’t the issue with this story. Its absence was.
Falk Lagermann was one of those people. To him at least. Design strength was at least partially subjective after all, though he never got around to testing that. Never had a sociology-friend who could. But it felt like this ought to be true. The lines which traced Falk’s contours seemed weightier than normal. Properly heavy. Like he had a perceivable drop-shadow against the background of reality. Like he had real depth and texture while the rest of the world was nothing but painted cardboard. Someone once told Oran you can get effects like that through posture, and he understood what they meant, but none of the demonstrations ever had nearly that same “pop”, so either his acquaintance wasn’t very skilled in their field of proclaimed expertise, or there’s more to it. One had to merely look at Falk and instinctively knew that this middle-aged sailor-looking guy with his weird-ass beard and his way-too-sharp features was the main character of something, no idea of what but of something.
For two years the man with the drop-shadow had been Oran’s landlord. He owned an apartment building up by the dockyard. Probably still does. Not the actual dockyard, the bar “the dockyard”. The one with the exposed pipes. People always got that wrong when they weren’t from the area. No way a student could afford housing that close to the water, not that Oran’s place wasn’t unexpectedly cheap too. Not suspiciously cheap (Nasir had felt a compulsion to ask that), just cheap. Falk showed prospective tenants around himself, which is how one was able to recognize him from no place in particular, and Oran wanted to say that this had an impact on how quickly he took the place, though it probably didn’t. The thing that left far more of an impression was how honest he was: He pointed out every single fault and blemish in the apartment. Things no one ever would have noticed, and he gave backstories for all of them: How a tiny little dent in the kitchen’s work surface was incurred when a woman dropped her mug as her water broke, or how the blinds no longer go all the way up in one spot because of a former inhabitant attempt to demonstrate how they sounded similar to a bit from a song. Broke the shutter box in the process.
This particular prospective tenant was never a suspicious sort of person, so all he took from the anecdotes was that the man actually spoke to his renters. Naïve, possibly, but Falk was having coffee with him for god’s sake. How many landlords do that? A contract was signed before they even finished their tour, and the stage was set. Finally, just about to leave, Falk pointed to a bit of wall near the door, claiming that there was a stain, which he would get rid of. “there’s nothing there” Oran had said, and the man replied in what almost seemed like a chuckle in retrospect that there was “still time”. When asked what he meant Falk leant against the wall, assuming a posture that made clear this would be a long talk and a facial expression that made clear he had hoped to avoid it, but it was too late for that now, to the regret of all parties. A man, on his first of seven hundred and thirty days of living here would throw a cup at him, he explained. The man would do this after hearing a story about his time in this building. A very funny one, though he would not laugh at it for many years to come: Via an app he would start dating someone in this very same complex, a fact which he would hide from her for over a year. Never really intentionally, but also never overcoming the inertia to do it until the decision was taken out of his hands. Two months later the man would move out, abandoning his studies and most everything else too. He wouldn’t really have anywhere to go exactly, but the father of a close friend they had lost together would eventually take him in. Falk hadn’t even finished the last sentence before the mug, still laden with some lukewarm coffee exploded beside him. The man with the drop shadow did not flinch. He simply stated that he would see himself out and that the trash collection came on Monday. It did.
Eventually winter rolled around much like the trash collection and Oran had gotten into online dating. He had given up on trying to avoid his fate rather quickly. Same reason why he barely went to uni and filled his time with various hobbies instead: it wouldn’t matter. Two years. He had two years he knew he’d survive. Two years which would leave no impact beyond the mental. There was a thought that he could attempt to resist of course, but what if he tried and some force pulled him towards the predestined outcome anyway? He couldn’t deal with that. He didn’t want to believe in that. And the only way he knew how to avoid believing in it was playing along of his own accord.
Her name was Emily. And they had only been a day or so of playful flirting into casual acquaintance when the snowstorm hit.
“Hey, I realize this is a bit sudden maybe, but my plans for the evening just fell through. You wanna meet up?”
“Uhh yeah. Actually totally, but would you think it’s weird to just come over? It’s essentially a blizzard outside and I appreciate the warmth atm.”
“Not if you don’t, no. What’s your address?”
And that was it. Over their time dating Oran would learn that this was a thing she liked doing: asking favors of people to make sure they cared about her: Walking through blizzards, lending her money, accommodating her tardiness, that sort of stuff. Not maliciously, but her confidence needed direct reassurance to sustain itself. All the other character flaws aside though; she was too careful for this sort of maneuver, he’d come to learn, so the only reason why she would invite a stranger to her apartment was that she too knew how her life would go for the foreseeable future. This wasn’t just him. He wasn’t insane. Oran continued to not be insane as he briefly went outside an hour later to dump snow into his hair before coming back in for the date with his neighbor. They watched a time travel movie and cracked barely veiled sardonic jokes about determinism.
In retrospect one of the strangest things to Oran was how little effort they put into their perspective ruses. It was so perfunctory that they never tried to hide it. They just didn’t say it out loud. Maybe the two of them really did click. It’s certainly one explanation for how they were reading each other with such ease, but Oran could never bring himself to think about that while dating either. What if he decided that they didn’t fit? He might have to feel the unacceptable hand of fate then. Acting was easier especially since they both seemed to enjoy it despite their lack of talent. She was fascinated by his taxidermy. He received an ebullient introduction into esoteric philosophy. Never once did Emily ask where he lived. Never once did he ask her whether she had once tried to resist.
A bit more than a year passed before they dropped out of metaphysical suspension. Oran had left his keys in a jacket and the jacket in a bar from which he had just stumbled home. Round about nine a.m., so he was in no mood to return and get them. Instead he tried twice to halfheartedly throw himself against his door in hopes it might just sort of open, but the lock was far less flimsy than it looked. Half drunk, he had lain down on the staircase’s mud-green carpet floor and waited for nothing in particular. Since crashing side first into a door isn’t exactly quiet, it was only a matter of time until a mix of curious and annoyed co-tenants emerged from their respective habitats, and as Nasir saw coming by this point, Emily had been among them. Oran put a strange amount of emphasis on how the resulting fight was by far the best he had had in his life, what with how they had both spent a year preparing for it mentally. They knew their arguments, their insults, the entire Lichtenberg-cascade of paths to go down. In that moment, their two separate screen-plays interlinked like cosmic clockwork. A precision tuned instrument of verbal assault. It was a martial art competition from the feel of it, and when he looked up into the faces of his doorframe-leaning neighbors, he saw understanding there. Commiseration for some, excitement for others, but he was certain that at least some of them knew what this was; this thing they were spectating. What had almost thrown Oran off his game though was that some didn’t seem to. Some eyes telegraphed nothing but confusion at their overly theatrical break up. He still didn’t know whether to be comforted or unnerved by that but either way, he tried to get a new place soon thereafter. Failing again and again until asking the father of that dead friend of his for shelter. He was happy to let him stay. Incredibly happy, the way old, lonely people sometimes are, and he got Oran this job. Then, three years later the old politician died. Heart attack. Perfectly ordinary. Could have happened to anyone.
The man behind the counter looked distantly out of the window before snapping back into the present. Nasir wondered if he might have accidentally made a sound to cause this, since he would have been happy to let him linger for a while longer.
“So what do you think?”
“Professionally or personally?”
“There’s a difference?”
“Yes. In the professional assessment I berate you for a bit about your obvious lack of scientific curiosity. Really hard to gauge how seriously a prediction is to be taken when the predictee goes out of their way to do exactly what was prophesized out of some adamant refusal to update Bayesian priors. Unreasonable doesn’t even begin to describe it. After that rant I would diligently cover my ass with “probably”-s and “from the sound of it”-s before coming to the same conclusion that the personal response starts with: “Yeah, that sounds like a run-in with a cybernetic actuator”. Professionally it would obviously have to stop there, with barely useful diagnostics, but the other one goes on. The personal version ends with me asking if I can kiss you.”
He was startled, but not startled enough it felt like, and then Oran shrugged. This bathrobe-wearing weirdo just shrugged like “sure, do what you want” and Nasir obviously could not help but interpret that as a challenge. His lips were sort of dry, but soft. An expression flashed across the freckled face: that of people who’ve never been punched in the face before when their turn finally comes. Utter bewilderment before any other emotion or sensation even has a chance to register, but it only lasted an instance. Practice, possibly, since Oran had been punched in the face before. He had nodded then, thought something along the lines of “that makes sense, I guess” and handed over his cash. Except for the money it was a similar situation here. It also made sense, and he also nodded.
By the time April had settled in, the kissing had already become habitual. The emergent green in between rain-slick cobblestone spoke to something, if only since they were both the sorts of people who interpreted an unhealthy amount of everyday occurrences as metaphors directed at them specifically. Nasir couldn’t tell anymore if this was occupational conditioning or simple disposition in his case, but still; he was strangely relieved to see it occur naturally. Atop the man’s shoulder sat a friend he sought to introduce; a pigeon called eighty-six. Oran didn’t like the numbered identification, in part because he liked the bird quite a bit an felt it deserved a real name, something “unique”, which Nasir refuted. To his mind ordinals were an exceptionally good way of safeguarding uniqueness. Surely if he tried to christen every pigeon he befriended more conventionally, he would eventually double over by accident, while there could never be another 86 unless he suffered brain damage of some sort. It was the kind of lesson people learn after spending some time in a house with entirely too many cats, so lacking such an experience, his boyfriend naturally remained unconvinced and had to eventually be placated with the offer to choose a nickname. Eighty-six became Tchu, a moniker about which Oran didn’t offer much detail, apart from it being another occultism. A demon of “unnamable things”, which he thought would be quite funny with regard to a heretofore unnamed bird. “he had a name though” Nasir complained. Oran disagreed. Tchu picked at some cereal bars.
As the man behind the counter stretched in unison with the air conditioning’s faint mechanical hum, it was already clear what he was going to ask: “So, eighty six of them at least, huh? What do you like so much about pigeons?”. He would have surely accepted an answer like “I don’t know, they’re cute” and moved on. In fact he might have even preferred it, what with how it left certain lines of speculation available. Oran had once called himself an “enthusiastic sceptic of next to everything” and Nasir had then been tempted to join in on the label. Deep suspicion was one of his defining characteristics after all, and scarcely was he more elated than when reality proved his heterodox assumptions correct, though he soon learned that this sort of skepticism wasn’t meant with the statement. To Oran disbelief was enough. Questions no more than the path towards a greater, more profound unknowing and the potentialities that lay therein. Saying they’re cute would have been true, for what it’s worth, but unable to produce the cosmic uncertainty his boyfriend found so soothing for some reason, he could at least tell a story of sorts. He explained that they all loved pigeons. Humans did. Most simply failed to notice. Why else would we build cities for them? Folks often assume that pigeons were bred for these conditions in some way, since we used to employ them for various function and since they now clog our subway stations. Sounds like a similar tale to that of dogs or cats in some places, but in truth the modern sky rat is pretty much indistinguishable from a wild rock-dove. We didn’t eugenically mangle them to thrive among concrete. Urban sprawl was the dove’s ideal habitat since long before we actually got around to building cities. They’re better suited to the needs of rock doves than they are to the needs of humans which makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Maybe birds just have lower standards than people, though that seems a strange thing to presume, or maybe we secretly wanted to optimize for pigeons all along, which is one of the few truly insane conspiracy theories, but the lesson Nasir always took from it was that intention is not a very good way of assuring a result. Perhaps the best way of creating the perfect habitat for humans would be to aim for something different altogether. It sounds a lot like coincidence-engineering, to him at least, and it is nice to have proof of its effectiveness squatting on every streetlamp, thanking its unwitting benefactor in gentle coo-s.
As he was talking, Tchu had unearthed a chips package from a heap of its equals and was staring at it quizzically. His owner could have gone with the pigeon’s anthropological origin as an information vector too and spun from there, or their ability to perceive film as a slideshow of individual images. A certain safeguard against sensory deception, a certain attunement to disjointedness, but urban serendipity seemed like the path Oran would have found most interesting. Tchu was still staring at that bag, apparently having had its fun, so Nasir went about reorienting the now disordered polypropylene. There was something off-putting to him about the crinkling sound they made. Soon Oran insisted that there was no need to clean up, he’d handle it later once he wrapped up petting 86, but Nasir was already on the floor, he said, and he felt he should tidy up for his pigeon. The gesture was tolerated at least. A bit more unpleasant crinkling, though not for the last one.
Something was deeply wrong though with the specific bag Tchu had unearthed. No wonder the bird hadn’t moved it like the others. It couldn’t have. the thing was heavy and cool to the touch, its content a firm, fist-sized mass submerged in liquid. Syncing and un-syncing with the clock’s tick, the mass pulsed its unsettling rhythm against Nasir’s palm. By now Oran too was looking at it. A lesser man might have dropped the thing then. Said lesser man would have regretted it in a way that might mandate more conventional therapy than what Nasir had experience with.
“I’m assuming this isn’t yours?”
“Yeah, I feel like I’d remember that. Knowing about the eldritch quasi-organic pulse of common snacks around me would have resulted in far more sane hypotheses on why my own heartbeat-perception was off.”
Nasir hadn’t even considered that link, but it seemed like a plausible enough explanation. Constantly hearing a faint heartbeat while completely alone would presumably mess with people.
“Well let’s find out what the fuck this is.”
He was fully prepared to rip the thing open, but Oran interjected, saying that it was more interesting not to know, for a while longer at least, and rather suggested to simply put it in the storage room where it would have less of an influence on his cardioception. Convincing Nasir to even conceive of this as more than a joke took almost half an hour of talking and once that was accomplished, the incredulity by no means gave way to acceptance. He called it “a horrifying lack of the basic human impulse that is curiosity” at one point and “genuine misosophy”, a hatred of knowledge, at another. Oran had meanwhile bootstrapped himself to the absurd idea that mystique held inherent value until he was standing on the counter making sweeping hand gestures and explaining how questions were far more resonant than answers. Far more artful and complex; how it was a shame to essentially destroy their magic by slapping on a fatuous little “solved”-sticker which was nothing more than short term gratification before the horror of loss over a beautiful puzzle set in. Somehow they had both gotten beers without noticing, somehow had talked their way well into sunrise, and somehow they eventually agreed that they loved each other, while the rest wasn’t so much resolved as terminated by Oran’s claim of ownership.
Tchu had precious few thoughts on the matter, despite the fact that Nasir had in some last-ditch effort (which then turned out to not be so much “last” as “mid-way”) suggested that the pigeon could cast the deciding vote. He hadn’t much thought about it before, but in retrospect it seemed very obvious that this sort of friction was vital for relationships. One needed attraction, sure, but then one needed a hook to not slip off an all too perfect surface and lose interest. Something needed to get under your skin and keep you. Something to obsess over. Whether a certain hatred was a prerequisite or a necessary consequence of love he wasn’t sure on, but it definitely seemed to exist in all the couples that came to mind, with one notable exception, at whose wedding he had been man of honor, best man and only guest, a confluence of positions that he imagined must be rather prestigious.
Kos, Nasir’s assistant-turned-colleague and her part-time-hermit of a husband certainly had enough incongruency in the pathological obsessions they were respectively plugged into, but those same idiosyncrasies likely made them too inhuman to experience anything as boiler-plate as hatred. Frequently Heine had to contend with the idea that his brain probably didn’t have words, much less neurotransmitters, for the emotions that Miriam Koskinen felt, and rather was relying on coarse “ballparking-parameters” for their observable consequences. Perhaps the two simply appreciated the stability that another thoroughly inhuman being could provide without any need for antagonism. Oran reminded Nasir that his definition of human is overly narrow. Nasir reminding Oran that that was a simple claim to make if one placed no importance on a capability to understand anything, at which he threw a hand in front of his own chest in acted incredulity.
The strange sensation of pressure within the gas station was gone, the Kalpa-employee noticed as he left for work and Oran for his little apartment upstairs. Breaking in to look inside that bag would have been an easy feat, and schemes were briefly considered in earnest before deciding against any flagrant breaches of trust. It turned out he would only have to wait another two weeks anyway to get answers from someone, not to mention the “short term gratification before the horror set in”. The witch considered herself an exceptionally competent purveyor of truth and disquiet. More often than not in unequal measure.
A dilapidated digital clock above the counter traversed the vicinity of four a.m. when the purple haired girl entered, slightly out of breath and with a bag swung over her shoulder.
“Shit, you actually got new magazines? Whatever happened to my time-capsule?”
“Oh it was starting to unnerve me. Gradual set-in of pile-up, you know?”
Upon questioning glance, Oran elaborated that he used to just keep the newspapers which didn’t sell on the shelf, instead of replacing them with the new edition. The girl ignored it as she rummaged through merchandise.
“Haven’t seen you in a while Cinn, what’ve you been up to?”
“Networking, mostly. You hear of the soul-chain?”
“Only the name”
“Well it’s these kids, right? Some time end of last year they started organizing empaths on the web, but not in a scene-way, you know? We’ve seen that plenty, that’s boring as it gets. But in, like, a movement-way. And thing is: I didn’t smell any ozone about it. None of the trappings that come with astro-turf, right? Shit felt organic, which of course meant that I had to check it out.”
“Naturally”
“But it also meant I had to lay low for a bit. Guarantee that the waves I make stay at a subliminal ripple while I scooped out whether their little club is actually grass-roots. Eventually, that turned into full blown high-rank membership, which -I get it- is my own damn fault. That’s the natural consequence when you go out of your way to care while such a movement is self-assembling, but you know me: I’m private-practice by nature, I absolutely cannot start being their mom all of a sudden. That is so not my speed, so as soon as I figured out that that’s where things were headed, I pulled back hard. They should be able to handle their own matters for a…” She had finally looked up from behind the snack shelf and spotted the Kalpa employee, causing a mid-sentence freeze, which he then promptly reciprocated.
“Uhh, Cinn, this is Nasir. Nasir: Cinnabar. She’s a friend.”
“Holy shit, you’re the witch.”
Nadine Svobodova. She had been a figure of interest to Nasir for a while by this point, though he had never expected to see her in the flesh. A kind of rogue operator generated by the enclave much like Oran’s Lagermann, but noticeably proactive. A lot of actuators carry themselves more like forces of nature or network-glitches than as people, but with Nadine there were clear human intentions, which fascinated to no end. For a twenty-year-old she held a surprisingly good poker-face, and Nasir felt a rare degree of uncertainty in his assessment that there were gears turning behind it. What they were processing he could only guess at. Across the young woman’s collarbones ran the Glaring’s symbol, an eye with stylized wings that people often described as capital “F”s, but which to Nasir were more akin to monkey-wrenches. He suspected she felt similarly. Some creative liberty was taken with the iris, which was rendered neither in its canonical transparency, nor in the pale green which Jessica likely had in mind for it, but rather reflected the witch’s own eye-color, a muddy blue.
“Nice tattoo.”
“Thank you”. She said it had been useful and felt no need to further elaborate. “I’d have asked for permission and possibly disregarded a rejection, but you know how it is. Your sister speaks in mains-hum and I wouldn’t want to flatter myself her disciple... You are the Heine brother, are you not?”
“Spoke. And yes.”
When a blink-and-you-miss-it smile broke through her lips it was decidedly deliberate. The woman with the tattoos held his gaze just long enough to check Nasir’s face for a reaction before ducking back down to dive through more packaging.
“Of course. “spoke”. I am terribly sorry for your loss. But still; nice catch, Oran I mean, he’s a good guy. Reliable. Obviously he looks sketchy as fuck, but really; that’s a pretty trustworthy trait when you think about it. The people who really are sketchy as fuck: they’d try to hide it, right? Speaking of hiding, you wouldn’t happen to have seen a bag of chips somewhere? ‘Bout yay big, vinegar flavored, made this rhythmic sort of sound and, you know, maybe moved a little if you looked at it just right?”
Oran gave a glance that could only be interpreted as “see, I told you it would be more interesting to wait” and Nasir sighed a little, since some part of his agreed. How or why that part was making its voice heard against the general mix of panic, curiosity and excitement brought about by the witch knowing about Jessica, he could only guess. It wasn’t even that she had known; there were always some conspiracy theorists who were right by accident. A confident and baseless assertion he could have dealt with, but this wasn’t that. She had fished for the answer, and he had bitten like a chump. Somehow Nadine must have gotten a hunch (which, again, wasn’t remarkable). The remarkable part was that she acted on it as soon as she spotted him. Some acquired reflex clicking into gear; making an incredibly blunt statement and waiting for his reaction. To someone who actually knew, Nasir’s reply would have been a secret handshake, an elegant swearing-to-secrecy, but to someone who was just guessing, it was an admission. He’d been careless. In retrospect all the clumsy little flaws in her act became obvious. He just hadn’t been expecting it. The man was used to precision engineering, not blunt force, though putting it that way was doing Nadine Svobodova a disservice. What was clumsy in Nasir’s league was still brilliant in a hobbyist and besides; she’d won. That was all that mattered in this game, so he wasn’t planning to be a sore loser about it. In that moment Nasir Heine was deeply relieved to have a bargaining chip on his side, as well as the knowledge that Oran considered this woman a friend. The smile too eased his mind a little. Someone with really troubling intentions wouldn’t have let him know what had happened.
“Oh that? It seemed kind of ominous, so we threw it out.” Nasir declared and Oran decided to allow his little game. If anything, he seemed excited by the prospect.
“You didn’t.”
She paused, flicking between their faces. Too theatrical. Too deliberate. It was clear as day once he was paying attention.
“You didn’t!”
“No. We didn’t.” Whatever the witch was expecting, this wasn’t it. “You’ve got a good linger, you know that? That pause you leave for yourself. It’s not very natural, far too dramatic, but that makes it a lot more believable to the average person. Folks always expect a certain degree of hyperreality, especially from someone with your branding. Maybe you’re overshooting a little, but not by much.”
Balance restored. Of course the idea that someone would have just thrown the bag away because it was spooky was ridiculous, so the feigned outrage was merely a pretense to probe their reactions; see if both of them are in on it, see if it’s likely to still be somewhere in the gas station. Oran paced over to the storage room and took out the item in question.
“You’re gonna give it back to me, right? I just needed to have it some place safe while I was with the chain.”
If this was an act, it was an incongruous one. The woman who had so far carried herself with all the self-assuredness befitting of her reputation had suddenly turned into a sixteen-year-old girl and there was a nagging thought that that must have been the last time she had gotten any real practice at pleading. Nasir couldn’t decide whether that was incredibly relieving or incredibly sad, so he settled on “both”.
“Remember how I helped you with your program? You wouldn’t do this to me, right O?”
Apparently the two of them had met via a short-lived podcast called “dissection dissection” in which Oran would guide newcomers through the ins and outs of animal-anatomy and preparation. A show which only found niche success for obvious reasons. The man behind the counter seemed slightly hurt by the idea that Nadine thought he might extort her.
“Of course not, Cinn. But I would appreciate if you told me next time. The sound of it had some… interesting effects, though they are probably partially responsible for my boyfriend, so I won’t complain too much. Still, I fear he might suffer spontaneous combustion if you don’t tell him what’s in there. Please?”
The thing in the bag unsurprisingly turned out to be a heart (sheep, according to Nadine), though she refused to explain how it was beating.
“Would you believe me if I told you it were magic?”
“No. I wouldn’t.” With what he saw from time to time, Nasir found it hard to commit to an absolute disbelief in the supernatural. If its existence were ever unambiguously demonstrated to him, he would change his mind, though that only applied to the subtler things. If there was anything he would bet his life on being definitively non-magical; it would be magic tricks.
“Well,” Cinnabar passed the organ between her hands. “In that case it is insufficiently advanced technology.”
“Like a pump.”
She smiled.
“No comment.”
Before she could wonder back out into the night, Nasir stopped the witch. She already had the relevant bit of info, so he might as well win her trust by giving her the rest.
“About my sister…”
There was no point doing it in private, since he wanted to eventually tell his boyfriend anyway. Only letting an acquaintance of his but not him in on how Nasir had faked his sister’s death wouldn’t just feel wrong but it also left room for blackmail in the future. As to the fact of Jessica being alive, Oran was already in the know and slightly insulted by the idea that he hadn’t inferred as much from the “spoke”-correction. (“That was enough?” Nasir asked. Oran said that from the “king, president and messiah of ops” it was). Nadine on the other hand seemed genuinely relieved, which in turn put the KCDI employee in a similar mood.
“You won’t tell anyone.”
“Of course not. You have my word. Doesn’t mean I won’t try to seek her out, mind you, but my intentions are pure as can be. Just a fan who’s glad she’s well and who needs some help decoding mains hum.” He wasn’t gonna get anything better and he would have been an idiot to try, though that didn’t entirely dissipate the unease. Especially not with what Oran said later about the way Nasir and Cinnabar resembled each other: “she too believes in winning.”. He’d probably have to tell Kos to keep an eye out, but the honesty wasn’t entirely without its benefits. After all, it did allow him to introduce Jessica to his boyfriend.
And so, Nasir Heine types the last line of a message to his sister, posted to an alternative message board of her design. The first in half a year. He’d left out details of course, so to any stranger it would simply read like one of those auto-bio love stories that the Glaring was graced with somewhat frequently. Kos would make fun of him for being sappy. Day would congratulate him on managing to be sappy. Jessica would get the memo. Dipping his fingers into the coffee again, it is definitively cold now, and he turns around to find Oran asleep on his couch. He had spectated maybe half of the writing process while occasionally complaining about how meandering it was. He wouldn’t like the other half much better on that count, but then again, it was unlikely that he actually took issue. The monitor’s light flickers away as Nasir slowly stretches in his chair. One deep breath before beginning to speak into the comforting darkness. Even as a child it had made him feel silly, and he felt sort of bad about feeling silly about it.
“Hey dad, it’s been a while. Sorry, I… I guess I talk to the actually-dead about as little as to the pretend-dead. I could say I’ve been busy, and that would be true, but truth was always mom’s thing, so I won’t use it as an excuse. Hopefully you already heard the rest. My eyelids are starting to ache, and I don’t think I’d manage another full run through, but I didn’t want to spoil everything for Jessie...”
Another quick glance to check if Oran was really sleeping.
“We’re getting married, dad. You would have liked him. No, you would have loved him. I know that. You loved us after all; me and Jessica and mom. You always had a soft spot for oddballs, and you hated how obvious that was. You would have loved him, and I love him, and we’re getting married. I think everything is going to be fine.”
There is no way Nasir Heine could come into possession of any more reasons to make this city his.