If That Looking Glass Should Break

It's Not What You See That Should Scare You, But What You Can't.

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“The question goes, if time travel is ever invented, why are we not constantly visited by time travelers?”

Zachary Driscoll sat opposite me on the cafe’s open air patio. He nursed a beverage which had once been coffee before he’d added flavored cream, sugar, sea salt and a splash of whatever blinding concoction was in that flask he produced from within his coat.

“That’s hardly a show stopper”, I muttered. “They could well be all around us as we speak, wearing period appropriate clothing. How would we know? It’s not as if they stamp “time traveler” on their foreheads before setting off.”

Zach’s eyes lit up. Every conversation with him was a trip, but I went as willingly as I always did because while they rarely went anywhere coherent, the scenery along the way never failed to fascinate.

“Exactly! But the same holds true for the pataphysical. Or supernatural, to use the common parlance.” I groaned. Some months ago he’d talked me into a late night trip to an abandoned industrial building.

I later determined he must have slipped me some potent hallucinogen from his impressive collection on the way, because I’d seen and heard things in the caves under that structure that took me weeks of voluntary therapy to put behind me.

He leaned in and began to gesture. None of it helped me understand, he does it for his own sake. Helps him order his thoughts. “The argument goes, if there were really some non-local element to our reality, more people would know. It would be understood to science. But what happens when someone announces such a discovery to the world?”

“Straight to the loony bin”, I chuckled. “Where you should be now.” I received the furrowed brow of impatience for that one.“That right there is why knowledge of the pataphysical remains obscure. The modern scientific establishment is the equivalent of a single party state. Potential competitors are strangled in the crib. And because the psychological and neurological sciences are a subset of it, they define what sanity is.”

I felt a migraine coming on. This rhetoric was painfully familiar to me. As an editor for a research journal we’d get submissions all the time from self styled crazies who took any criticism as persecution and imagined themselves the next Galileo or Columbus. “It’s true that they laughed at Columbus”, a favorite professor of mine once told me, “but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown”.

I bit my tongue. Why stop the parade halfway through? I no longer owned a television and not much on Netflix could compete with this. Zach’s eyes widened. “Do you see the potential for abuse? Imprisonment without a trial by jury, if they consider you dangerous. It’s not you that decides.”

He had his keys out. I considered bolting. But it was a four day weekend, I had nothing on my plate and I’d kept a close eye on my coffee this time. If he’d slipped me anything, David Blaine would be impressed. “Is it far?” He assured me it wasn’t. Despite the coffee, I slept on the way. Following Zachary’s convoluted train of thought often exhausts me, plus his new car had heated seats. I pouted and wondered when I’d be able to replace my beat up Geo on my meager salary.

Zach woke me at the destination with an air horn. I rubbed my eyes and griped that normal people keep things like their registration and maybe a tire iron in the glovebox. “Fine” he quipped, “Next time I’ll wake you with a tire iron.”

The building sat tucked away on the outskirts of the university, surrounded by maple trees which prevented one from noticing how old fashioned the architecture was until nearly inside.

The whole of it was wooden and polished, with carvings throughout bringing to mind antique furniture. I waited next to Zach for a while and was about to ask where the doorbell was when the door opened.

“Who is that with you?” a raspy voice barked from within. Zach introduced me and added that I was his “negator”. I didn’t remember agreeing to any such thing, but silence is golden.

The door swung open and when my eyes adjusted I saw a rickety old man with an alarmingly severe Dowagers hump. He raised a small eyeglass with an ornate brass rim, peered through it at me and frowned. “Tsk tsk. Well come in then, all the colic is escaping.”

He directed us to take off our jackets and shoes in the sitting room. “Colic?” I mouthed to Zach. He whispered back that it is an invisible non-local fluid which we experience as heat. I reflexively made the “bitch please” face but quietly continued removing and stowing unnecessary layers.

The building was jaw dropping. All wood as with the exterior but the corridors were lined with meticulously carved columns, the doorknobs and fixtures were polished brass, and everywhere there was room to do so he’d placed some curious contraption for visitors to admire.

One resembled some cross between an astronomer’s telescope and a pipe organ. A cluster of polished metal tubes which widened at the business end like muskets was mounted by swiveling armature to a varnished oak chest. The open door in the side revealed a baffling mechanism within, all kinds of thin tangled tubing depositing a faintly glowing blue gas into a set of six sealed jars.

The etching in the brass plate beneath it read “Cloudbuster with Orgone storage array”. The little old man joined us and upon seeing the look on my face, beamed with pride. “That’s the only one built by Wilhelm Reich himself that the feds didn’t get their hands on when they shut him down. Do you recall when General Motors crushed all of those electric cars in the nineties, but left a few to universities? You’re looking at a real rarity.”

He clearly assumed I knew more about it than I did, but that was much less irritating than the inverse. “I see. And what’s this over here?” I asked. The device sat at the focal point of a curved bay window. The plate read “Lawsonomic flow equalizer”. He hobbled over and fiddled with dials on it. For the most part it appeared pneumatic. A mass of air compressors fed transparent silicone tubing which terminated in a sort of helmet and mask with little flexible silicone spigots.

“Those go in your nose, mouth and ears. The one on the seat, well, you can imagine where that goes.” I hadn’t noticed it until now. I briefly wondered if this was some elaborate fetish device. As if sensing my confusion, he continued. “Technically this one’s on loan, although there’s nobody to give it back to anymore. Alfred Lawson, father of Lawsonomy, discovered the modern principles underlying the ancient Greek medicinal model of humors. The balance or imbalance of said humors being responsible for ones health or illness, respectively. All down to pressure, suction and flows.”

I’d sooner sit in an electric chair. “And this?” Far from annoyed by my relentless curiosity, the old man leapt at the chance to explain each mechanism. I got the impression that sincerely interested visitors did not come by often. “Ah, yes! This is a model of the cosmos.”

I couldn’t see how. It was a cutaway of a hollow sphere. On the inner surface there were texturized mountains, blue plastic rivers and oceans and so on. Then within that, concentric spheres of transparent acrylic. “Ice!” he exclaimed. “The celestial spheres and all they contain. All of it made of ice. We owe Hans Horbiger for that discovery. Of course the partially erudite already knew of the closest sphere, which Biblical scholars call the firmament. The melting of that nearest sphere, when it fell to Earth as water, caused the terrible flood recorded by every ancient culture.”

Just like that, he lost me. Long before I’d walked in the door even, but now doubly so. I thought better of challenging him on the Biblical aspects out of sensitivity to the faith of others, but the larger problem was that all of it appeared inside out. I said so.“Ah yes!” he grinned. “The great misunderstanding of modern cosmology, that we dwell on the outside of a solid sphere and the heavens surround us. A trick of the light, my boy! Optical shenanigans! Those celestial bodies which you doubtless believe to be immense and far away are in fact relatively small and close! With yet smaller bodies closer to the center.”

I never thought I’d meet someone as fundamentally backwards as Zach. This fellow was the arch-Zach. Zachary Prime. I leveraged my knowledge of how futile it was to argue with Zach and declined to go down that rabbit hole with this new fellow. If they were as similar as I thought, to do so would be to embark down a fractally infinite set of blind alleys from which there is no exit.

“I never got your name.” He handed me a small gilded card with swirling designs embellishing the corners. Fitting, from what I’d seen. It read “Heironimus Travigan”. Of course. I did not for a moment believe it was his birth name, but someone willing to devote their life to smoke and mirrors must be a performance artist at heart. That necessitated a stage name.

I never noticed Zach leave us, but suddenly he offered us each a beer. I turned him down as it was yet another possible vector for drugs. “Not this time you sneaky motherfucker” I thought. On our way down the hall I peered into an open door and saw a metal chair welded to a round platform fashioned from the same alloy. Stacked up against the wall lay two clunky obsolete robot arms of some kind, and next to them, a pair of hollow glass hoops with some unfamiliar metallic liquid inside.

“Oh, best not get into that. Don’t yet have the funds to assemble it, and the fellow who claims to have the wrist mounted accoutrement it requires still hasn’t responded to my offer. If he imagines I can afford much more than that, he doesn’t understand my position at this university.” That begged the question.

“Just what is your position, Mr. Travigan?” He looked wounded. “I am a professor, you know. Officially, of the history of natural science. Unofficially I study the various aborted alternatives. My lifelong search has been for the diamond in the dungheap. It seemed impossible to me as a young man that there should be so many attempts to discover hidden truths without any of them resulting in success.”

He opened the heavy oak door at the end of the hallway. Dust billowed out and I covered my mouth and nose. I neglected my eyes and spent the next minute or so tearing up as I tried to wipe it out. “Finally, the curiosities. Little trinkets from all over the globe. Some sent in by genuine crackpots asking that I independently verify their purported magical properties. Others incomplete pieces of something larger, a puzzle waiting to be solved by young Zachary here when he takes my place.”

Zachary flashed his signature maniacal grin. Everybody has their niche I suppose. Professor Travigan stared wistfully at the shelves upon shelves of mystery objects. “I’m here because this is where they stash the black sheep. My connections prevent me from being institutionalized, my tenure ensures that I continue to draw a salary. But I cannot lecture, nor publish, nor use university funds in any way to promote my findings. They worry I could embarrass the university’s good name.”

Despite my impression of him as so far over the cuckoo’s nest as to have achieved orbit around it, I found it difficult not to empathize. However meaningless, all of this was nonetheless interesting and much could be gleaned from it about our past mistaken notions of how the universe operates.

“Meeting young Zachary was a shot in the arm, let me tell you” he waxed on. “I have long said that if I could get just one other person to see as I see, my life’s pursuit will not have been pointless.” I studied the successive rows of artifacts, some under glass covers, some in display cases, others sealed in plastic bags with adhesive labels describing the contents. “I’d be happy to. See what you see, I mean. If you could actually show it to me. The problem people in my line of work have with all of this is that it’s so much talk with nothing to show for it.”

He again looked offended, but his expression then slowly changed to one of intrigue. “What journal is it that you edit for?” he plied. I saw no reason to conceal it. “Rejuvenation Research. Perhaps you’ve heard it mentioned in the news? We’re on the forefront of senescence studies. That is to say human aging and how to slow, halt or reverse it.”

The last part registered, at least. He stood there lost in thought until I motioned as if to leave. “Not so fast, young man. They won’t listen to me. My name is mud, they’ve made sure of that. But they might listen to you. You have a history of conventional scientific contribution. Even if you’re not equipped to understand any of this you might put it into the hands of someone who is. And if my name is not connected to it, there’s a chance they’ll take it seriously.”

I meant to object when he said I wasn’t equipped to understand these devices. I felt sure I understood them, the problem was they were all products of catastrophically mistaken beliefs concerning cosmology, biology, just about every scientific discipline. But when he pulled a small, worn leather case from one of the shelves and handed it to me, I elected to let it slide. I’m a sucker for souvenirs.

On the way home I tried and failed to open the case. Turning it over in my hands, on the underside was some sort of inset metal stencil. On the top, Professor Travigan had fixed a folded note sealed in a ziplock bag, tied to the case with blue thread. When did he have time to write it? I cut the thread with my pocket knife, opened the baggie, and unfolded the note.

It was blank. I don’t know what I expected. When we arrived at my apartment, Zach proposed we throw down in Mario Kart and as the rest of the day was wide open I obliged. For him, Mario Kart also meant vaping. He always picked Wario and drove far better than should be possible in such a condition.

“In every game, always pick the fattest jew” he explained. I soundly scolded him for it. “The shit you say! This is why I can’t have other friends over when you’re around.” It rolled off of his back as my complaints usually did. Best out of three became best out of five, then best out of seven. Certain items in the game routinely allowed him to come from last place and win during the final lap. He was giggling, quietly but continuously with a demented melody to it. I dropped the controller in disgust.

When I came back from the bathroom, he was hunched over the leather case. Somehow he’d removed the metal stencil from the bottom. “There were little turney things at the corners with notches in them. With all four positioned right, I could just pull this out.” I might’ve figured that out if I’d studied it more seriously. He had a knack for games and puzzles of all kinds.

Underneath the stencil was a grid of seemingly random characters in an unfamiliar language, also metal, protruding slightly. The stencil had apertures in a few places so that specific characters could show through. It was unclear why. I gave up on it for the night, drove Zach home, then called it an evening.

The next day on a whim, I picked up some graph paper and copied down all the characters in the order they appeared on the bottom of the case. I then circled in red the characters which showed through. A colleague of mine in the computer science department specialized in cryptography. With only one lead there was no uncertainty about what I was going to do with my day.

“It’s sanskrit.” Emilio didn’t volunteer more than that until badgered. “It was an Indo-European language common to some of the very first agrarian cultures in the fertile crescent. That narrows the search considerably.” It wasn’t obvious which search he meant until he proudly showcased his thesis project, an artificial intelligence specializing in language.

“Google’s already doing cutting edge stuff with translation but this goes way beyond that. I call this Parvu. It exceeds what Google’s doing in that it understands linguistic conventions central to wordplay, flirting, humor and so on. So it can not only identify what a string of text is from but what sort of social interaction is occurring in it, if any. That’s just the tip of the iceberg too.”

I cut him short as his tendency was to make an explanation as long as his audience would endure before stopping him.“Supposing there’s a book out there someplace in which the sanskrit letters I circled appear on some page in that exact arrangement relative to one another. Could it figure out which book and which page?”

He stroked his chin stubble and squinted. “With a little work. You’ll owe me though. I dunno what yet, but coding isn’t easy so it’s not free.” Sounded fair to me. “Put it on my tab. Email me when you’ve got something”. With that, I went out for more coffee and some light reading. I never expected he’d be done so quickly.

“First I narrowed it to works originally published in sanskrit for obvious reasons. Then I searched for just those letters in that order, which further narrowed the results. I was really hoping it’d come back with just one. Since it didn’t, I then had to integrate the grid system and analyze each page for the correct spatial relationship between those characters.”

The real satisfaction he got out of such a project was making me understand the difficulty of it and how smart he must be to have achieved such a thing. I did not deny him. I remembered him launching into a tirade once when walking through a mall with me because he saw a nine year old play some first person shooter on whatever the new console was at the time and grow bored in under a minute.

“Do you think that little shit has any idea how many man hours went into programming just the physics engine? Or modeling every asset, painting textures and mapping which bits should be reflective because they’re wet, or using parallax mapping to make little details stick out?” He settled down when I provided the much needed perspective that kids that age have the attention span of a goldfish.

The program singled out a particular page in the Mesopotamian epic ‘Gilgamesh’. I downloaded a copy from Project Gutenberg and got to reading. It told the story of a king whose closest friend died, inspiring him to devote his life to questing for a means to restore him to life and to prevent his own death.

The moral seemed to be that death is inescapable, and that for humans, immortality is achieved through great works. Very defeatist, but a familiar line. The journal I edit for constantly receives emails from people we call “death apologists” who provide what they think are compelling reasons that death is necessary, dignified, and that living forever would be an insufferable nightmare.

We have our own ideas as to why people do this. The terrible moral weight of those already lost to mortality compels the living to rationalize why it ‘had to occur’. Perhaps some dare not hope for an escape from death, for fear that it will not arrive in time. Then there are the religious types. What need is there of salvation if nobody dies?

Emilio’s printout lay in the passenger seat as I drove home. The characters appeared in that configuration only on the page where Gilgamesh abandons his quest. Each character appeared in a word which, when they were strung together, formed the phrase “Neither is life”.

Once home I sat down with the case, bent a lamp over it so I could see it more clearly and scrutinized the protruding metal letters on the underside. With a little effort I found each one could be pushed in like a button. I wrote down the sentence in sanskrit characters spaced apart, then punched it in one letter at a time.

Nothing happened. To hell with this. Why was I wasting my time on an old fruitcake’s puzzle? What could be inside? A note that says “Gotcha” most likely. I set it aside, watched some Netflix and fell asleep on the couch. Another day went by. It was strange to have this much leisure time. What I like to call my responsibility gland was hyperactive. Was I forgetting some appointment? Was today the deadline for some paper I was writing?

I don’t like to drink alone, so silencing it with booze was off the table. Instead I returned my attention to the puzzle. Shit like that always sucks me back in. “No, it couldn’t be that easy” I thought. “That would be stupid.” But placing the stencil on upside down did appear to highlight a different set of characters. I copied them down, carefully took a pic with my phone and sent it to Emilio promising I would owe him twice over for it.

He got back to me around four with a new phrase: “Death is not certain”. It made no sense until I flipped it. “Death is not certain. Neither is life.” Part two of the gag, it had to be. To make me sit down and punch in those letters like a fool for the second time only to drill in how gullible I am. I did it anyway.

A sharp pop sounded and the two halves of the case felt loose. Sure enough I could now open the damn thing. I was mostly curious to see the mechanism by which it understood which letters had to be pressed and in which sequence but it was hidden behind a red velvet lining which, when peeled away, revealed a layer of metal. Not intended to be tampered with I suppose.

The lining gently held in place a lens which, judging by the coloration, had been carved from a solid piece of rose quartz. It was breathtakingly pure. I almost didn’t want to handle it with my bare hands lest I leave fingerprints, but when I looked at it closely there were already some on it from the last owner.

I held it up to the light. One half of the proverbial rose tinted glasses? I spotted motion through it. For just a split second. Like a blurred shadow flitting past. Looking through the lens more directly, I saw nothing out of the ordinary until I spotted the blue thread clinging to my pants. I’d not changed them since my trip with Zach.

The thread glowed and pulsated gently. I studied the lens, looking for hidden electronics. But there was no place to hide anything, it was wholly transparent. I looked through again, with the same result. It brought out blues like you wouldn’t believe. Then I had the idea of looking at the note with it.

The crafty old professor must’ve used invisible ink of some kind. It faintly glowed like the thread. “Congratulations to the new owner of this Orgonometric optical detector. I apologized for including only one, but I keep the other close to me at all times for reasons you will soon discover. Without exaggeration, the correct application of this device can greatly extend your lifespan. But once you gaze through it, there is no returning to your life as it was before. Regards, Professor Heironimus P. Travigan.”