Heraclitus
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Ricki - Part 1
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Heraclitus
A great glimpse peels open. Cascades and promontories. Headlands to a raw frontier, you're calmed by the rumble of current, but unsettled by the perspective shift. The bright harvest room has collapsed into a distant white dwarf on the horizon with your sleeping self inside. You and Mazu hover in the skies near jungle bluffs and dahlia trees. The blackwater runs off the cliffs, onyx ribbons down into the jade overstory. There's a bird somewhere. There's always a bird somewhere. This one is Entropy, dark and dense, chaotic and cataclysmic, hot with hellish decay. It wades in the black dream, pecking reflections that ripple like corduroy. Outward and outward. Following into nothing. Falling into void, where it all breaks up into the crumbs of existence. Around the ankles, the black silt delta caresses and careens, never the same river twice. You are in a state of unrelenting change.
Push the controls forward, "There is no future, without the past, no cool blue without the resurrection of fire, no good, without evil," you tell Mazu, but she already knows.
"All very Heraclitean," says Mazu, but you were thinking Nietzsche.
Leaning into the Theory of Opposites, you stare up at the rays stabbing through heavenly boxes, organized and predictable. Then down at Entropy shaking the wet from their wings, flinching in disordered spasms, rapt in their psychopathy. Head to toe, high and low. Guts and skin The out and in. They cannot exist without each other. Consequence is inconsequence. Action inaction. Hunter and prey. Together in disarray.
Mazu sails into skies ahead, chasing the vanishing point. You observe streaks of evaporation lifting the water into blurry charcoal clouds through the convex deck window.
"Harbinger of destruction, those are storm clouds, Ricki," Mazu battens down a few hatches.
You know they're more than clouds. You know they are shadow tide and under fog. Barbarian sublimation above the rainforest. Swallower of worlds it calls you in. It wants the rest of you—needs your power, your dimensionality, your impulse. It calls again, c o m e. You squeak your finger down the glass and write into the condensation, F for Fenestra, an opening ahead, L for Lycanthrope, obviously. O is for omnivore because anything is fair game, V for The Vedas, V for Venus. D for the bitter Dread of self-annihilation, 4 is the fortress around your heart, and 8 is for 8 track, the superior cassette.
"Let's try this again Mazu. In to get out," you exhale and empty your lungs dramatically nodding toward the looming system.
She mimics the theatre and releases a geyser of steam from the lower deck. Pshhhhhhhh. "Ill-advised, possibly catastrophic," warns Mazu, "We're not equipped for that kind of turbulence."
Maybe Mazu isn't, but you're ready to shake things up. You're waking now with the resignation, there is no rebirth without ruination.
Another vision swipes the periphery. It's you and Carmen in the sunken living room at penthouse number five. The keycard secretly winks in your pocket. You put down the snow globe, watching the sparkle flakes dance around the Chateau Tamarack. She sips a Manhattan, but you're more Boulevardier. You press play on the tape deck. She leans back on the orange tasselled pillow with a hand on your thigh.
“I wish it was this forever,” she muses under her breath. And you know she wants you to lie to her and say that it will. Instead, you pet the back of her hand with your fingertips and say nothing. The toms thrum through luscious strings. A kick drum booms like a heartbeat. The horns, heroic sail high in some sonic stratosphere. Eyelids dropping, another dream now catapults you further. Hurling your body like a doll.
Expertly, you stick the landing and catch up with your sleep self in the mechanical bed. The bright room crackles, responding to your immaculate materialization. You drop one nurse with a neck twist and the other with a stab through the eyeholes of a ghoulish mask. You dangle her head like a bowling ball and wiggle your fingers through the mucous membrane, tickling the pink labyrinth before you drop her to the tile.
“Good morning Ricki,” you say to the self, tilting your head slightly and dipping your shoulder, matching her poise and presentation “It’s time to say good night.”
The raygun on your belt vibrates in anticipation, It emits a 523.25 hz C5, which always drives Carmen crazy. And you wonder for a moment if she’d forgive you for what's next. Without hesitation, you line up the barrel to the sleepyhead and fire. Ricki is dead, long live Ricki.
The anti-climax is deafening. A good thing. You unclip your body from the gurney and drag it onto the other two bodies. “In to get out, “ you repeat like a mantra as you climb on the bed and plug yourself in, falling into yourself again.
The clouds break, and Mazu, relieved, expresses a cone of flatulence from her blow hole. “Looks like good fortune is shining on us Ricki!” she says, rousing you from your death fetish dimension, “ Lost you for a moment, penny for your thoughts, glad you're back, looks like fair weather on the plateau there at two o’clock. I’ll touch down and we can regroup.”
Mazu drifts down to the honey-coloured sands on winged bellows, from her stern a cluster of inflated bladders twitch in the thermals. The scene is diffuse with atomized particulate, dead nimbus, flattening her metallic hull to a matte patina.
The descent is a curious feeling. There is some familiar comfort in the gravity. Like a weighted shroud, it envelopes your essence in dense charms and invisible forces. Like your compulsions, the fall is irresistible. There is no high without the low. No here without there. No you without them. It seems like you've secured your place in this thermodynamic fantasy. Chaos is control, Reality is dream. All you have to do is perpetuate the cycle and kill to live again over and over.
Mazu touches down on a tripod of pneumatic cricket legs, lowering you to a stone dais set in the dune like a pearl. It's hot out here on the mesa. And for a moment you want to feel the cold wicked water once more. A bead runs down your temple.
The kind of hot when sub-atomic strands writhe under multidimensional pressure. You imagine them escaping your body like flatworm photons. More unseen powers, a halo round your cranium. The colourless bird weaves a figure eight overhead. It's followed you here of course.
Walking the perimeter, surveying your surroundings, there's a loneliness to the land. A rugged meditation, in solemn repose. Like you, it doesn't feel much. The sand pours through your fingers and a thousand years pass. Countless more appear before you.
"How many times have we made this run?" you ask Mazu.
"You asked me to stop counting Ricki, but I can give you the answer, just like last time. Do you want to know what number you are Ricki?"
"This time just tell me how it ends" you groan.
Mazu hisses in the heat trying to cool down, "I can't do that, your reincarnation is the only thing that stays the same. Everything else is variable. Change is the only constant, as they say."
You sit down in the shade of Mazu's belly and wonder whether you're just bored of the whole thing or you're wearing down, weary and unfocused. Perhaps it's time to break the cycle. Interrupt the pattern and dislodge yourself from the eternal wreckage hurtling through space, orbiting a hole of vast emptiness.
Blink. You're with Carmen again. She's lying down, crossed legs, swinging her foot to the music and chewing a stir stick. You envy her nonchalance, her neutrality. She doesn't care about the cycle, as long as you're here with her.
"Let's get away together," you propose.
"But I like it here," she says adjusting the pillow behind her head, "Everything we need is here, I don't want to go back to our shitty apartment."
"What if I told you that we're dreaming and that this subconscious world is only one of many places we can be?" You shift your weight, leaning in closer to Carmen and place your weapon in her hand, "Say it with me: F is for—"
"Fibonacci and the infinite spiral."
"L is the"
"ancient Luminescence of damned stars"
"O is the"
"Egg, because you have to break some to make an omelet."
"Double V"
"For Vice Versa," you both say in unison.
"Are you a bad person Ricki?" asks Carmen, flicking your earlobe with the business end of the sidearm.
"There is no such thing," you tell her, "we aren't bad or good. We are only what's happening at this moment."
She seems satisfied with the answer and enthralled with the intimacy, so you continue, " D is for"
"Decay, the inevitable and inexorable," she says, frowning playfully.
"4"
"the Chambers of your heart"
"and 8"
"is for the Octet, because there is symmetry in the universe."
Crack. A flash illuminates the room as Carmen pulls the trigger. The music ends, switches tracks and continues its loop. There is no rewind.
This is the penultimate Part 5 - you check out the others here:
And absolutely go check out the other Blackwater Files from other writers here, thanks to our archivist and brain behind this collaborative project,
The Chronicler
Great chapter, Jon. Your writing is wonderful. :)
Incredible. The very best chapter so far.