Wisps

‘Innu njan nale ni, innu njan nale ni’

                                                                                        -   G Shankarakurup

            As he descended the steps of the library he could feel the weight of his jute bag, now full with books he had just got issued, on his shoulder blades. Its strap like his shirt was slowly getting soaked by his uncontrollable sweating. The books for him never felt this heavy, they were always light, even the biggest tomes, anticipation of an encounter always made them feel weightless. But then were they heavier when he brought them back here to return them? Yes, always, books to be returned weighed like bricks, a cruel trick of the mind. But things were different now, things were older.

Even when he walked out of the library gates, his old mind was still thinking about what happened at the issuing counter. He had kept the books on the counter with his library card on top. The girl at the counter took the books and started entering their details into her computer at her own government-official leisure. And he, as he had been doing since they opened this library, began looking at the books people who were behind him in the line had chosen from the library stacks. Immediately behind him were two young chaps. The sight of young men at the library made him happy, fresh blood for his club of letters, a club that had in it every man and women who loved a good book. He tried to read the cover of a book one of them had kept on the counter. A blue dust jacket with big letters in white. But for him the letters were white wisps on a blue lake, as they had been for some time now. He was reminded once more by his weak eyes that his ability to read had left him, and once more, in half arrogance and half hope, he took from the library books he could no longer read. He had been ‘growing old’ for some years now, but it had really hit him the last few weeks. His eyes, his memory, his knees, his manhood, were being eroded away like an ancient temple caught in a slow yet unstoppable current.

He reached the bus stop and got on a bus that would take him home. He had to ask the passengers through the window before he got in, because the board on the bus no longer made sense to him. He got in, there were no empty seats and little place to stand. He got himself to a little clearing in between the dangling, swaying crowd and held on firmly to the steel bar attached to the top of a seat. The little girl sitting there took notice of him, she turned around and looked intently at his wrinkled fingers gripping the top of her seat and then, as if convinced of his ancientness, she got up and offered him her seat. He wanted to tell her to sit back down, that he was fine standing up, but his creaky knees were faster and he was seated before he could tell her that. He just smiled at the little girl and over the hum of the engine, in a barely audible voice, said ‘Thank you’.

By the time he reached home he was tired down to his every bone. Even the short walk from the front gate to the veranda felt like a grueling ordeal. Sweat had completely drenched his clothes and its stickiness added to his feeling of exhaustion, his shortness of breath. I need a glass of water and a cool bath, he thought. His wife, her hair not fully white like his but with streaks of vanishing black, was standing at the veranda. She him a towel to wipe his sweat. He gratefully plunged his face into the white fabric and handed it back to her. He was about to undo his shoes and get in when he noticed three pairs of smaller footwear scattered in the most careless way near the steps. He looked up at his wife with a question in his eyes.

‘Maya and Vinod went for a movie. They left the kids here. Vinod will pick them up  in the evening’ she answered him and continued with a question of her own ‘Did you buy the medicines I told you to get?’

He had forgotten, he wanted to smack his own head in reproach but was tired even for that. He sat down on one of the chairs in the veranda and shook his head.

His wife smiled, ‘I knew you would forget, so I asked Maya to get them when she comes back’

He felt a melancholic anger in him, the kind of feeling you get when you see your team lose a football match. More than his forgetting it was the certainty with which his wife knew that he would forget that irritated him. He let out a long sigh and asked her something to get his mind off it, ‘Where are the kids?’

‘Inside watching TV’

‘Hmm….those kids are always watching the damn TV’

‘They have nothing better to do here. But the first thing they asked when they got here was where there appupan* went’ she said

He smiled at her, at the sweetness of his grandchildren.

‘Water’ he said, motioning his thumb towards his dry lips

His wife went inside. He removed his bag from his shoulder and took a book from it. As he opened a random page he heard a familiar voice, a familiar cry of joy.

‘Appupa!’ the small boy ran towards him and without hesitation jumped on his lap. His knees creaked in pain, but he didn’t mind. The joy he got from seeing the boy run towards him was still ringing in his head, all pain was trivial.

The boy looked intently at the book and asked him ‘What book is this?’

‘A collection of stories my child’

‘Can you read a story for me? Please!... please! Like you used to before’

He nodded and held the boy close to chest and kept his forefinger at the beginning lines of a story. He tried as he had never tried before to read. To make sense of those damned letters, black wisps now on the yellow page. But he couldn’t, what little his eyes could make out his head refused to string together into words and sentences. The tears that were welling up in his eyes made the page look even cloudier. He failed once more to read.

He gave up, closed his eyes and let a tear roll down. He hugged his grandson closer and said in a dry, cracking voice, ‘I can’t read anymore son, I just can’t read anymore. I wish I could read for you, but I can’t read anymore’

The boy, oblivious to the turbulence abound in his grandfather’s weak heart, was still engrossed in the book. Without looking up he replied ‘Oh that’s ok. I can read for you. I read best in my class. I can read stories for you just like you used to read for me’

The old man brushed his cheeks, moist with tears, with the tender cheeks of his grandson ‘Really? Would you do that for me?’

‘Yes, yes. Listen to this’, the boy put his tiny finger on the same place his grandfather had failed and started reading slowly, in breaks at first, steady and surer as he went on.

The old man leaned back on his chair, closed his eyes and listened. Each word filled him with joy, there was a smile of content on his lips. And then from the depths of his waning memory, a poem recollected itself and reminded him that what he hears was the circular symphony of life. ‘Innu njan nale ni, innu njan nale ni’**.

* Grandpa

** ‘Today it’s me, tomorrow it will be you’

AJ

The Death Note of an Immortal

The day I met Francisco Paolini I was too terrified by his fearful appearance, his extraordinarily large frame, and his head- which was of a lion, to realize that I had known him and in a sense met him before. Perhaps everyone has a demon, a monstrosity they believe to be lurking under their beds, hiding behind their stairways and following them in the shadows when they are alone in strange alleys. I can only speak for myself but I think that these imaginary phantoms are unique to each person’s psyche. The man that haunted my dreams, daydreams and fears was Francisco Paolini, his 8 feet tall lion headed body, his ferocious looking claws, his impeccable tweed blazer and linen shirt, his black leather shoes, his roar like baritone.

I asked him, after the initial turbulence of our encounter subsided, whether he knew about this curious connection he had with me. He laughed and explained in his typical fantastic tone that it was because the choices he made in his life brought his destiny infinitesimally close to mine many times and it was at these times that I would dream about him and fear him. But now, after many a close passing, our destinies have finally entangled. I found this explanation of his quite hard to believe and I told him that. He assured me then that it was normal for me to find it hard, the space of choices and destinies could only be visualized by 5-dimensional beings like him and I will be able to comprehend his explanation better when I acquire the ability, to exist in 5-dimensions, from him.

It was just the beginning. The one week between our first meeting and his suicide Paolini told me a great many things that I had trouble believing. He told me how his ability works, how it made him superior to other men, how it made him rich, and how, if I wish so, he can transfer these powers to me before he died. I didn’t refuse his offer and in retrospect it was not a bad choice after all. It is one of the few choices I do not regret. But what he did not tell me, or perhaps he did when his baritone subsided into brooding silences, was how his powers were also a burden. A burden that drove him to his death as it is driving me to mine now.   

    

Perhaps I should explain a bit more about the unique and terrible nature of my abilities. A man is a 4-dimensional being. He can move freely in space barring a few practical constraints. As for time, his abilities are limited. He can move only in one direction at an almost fixed rate. Even his life is constrained temporally, after moving a certain distance in time he dies. I am no different from a normal man when it comes to travelling in space, the ability has no observable bearing on my speed or stamina. If anything the opulence it has brought has made me sluggish. In the dimension of time I have much more freedom than other men. My abilities let me see a day or so into the future and past, which is more than enough to make a killing in the stock market. There are no restrictions to these visions but seeing beyond a day is beyond my mental stamina. A more remarkable and not wholly obvious facet of my ability is that there is no limitation to how long I may live.  Paolini never told me about this. I guess then it would have made me suspicious. The ability makes time a lot like the directions of space; just like how a man doesn’t die because he has travelled a certain distance, death does not seek me just because so much time has elapsed for me. My 124 year old body, which looks just the same as it did on the day Paolini killed himself is the proof of this extraordinary feature.

The fifth dimension, which no man can sense is the dimension of destiny. It is the hidden memory of the universe that archives the endless possibilities it could have taken but did not. In the dimension of destiny there are an infinite number of bifurcations that give rise infinite number of universes, each hinging of the single choice that gave birth to it. I see this complex web clearly, just like how I see the books on my desk or the words I just wrote. But there are certain restrictions. I can see only the countless possibilities curbed by choices of the past. The many universes that may arise from my future decisions are hidden from me. But even with this minor inconvenience the ability is still very potent. For instance, I have carefully examined the choice I made to accept these abilities from Paolini and the way the universe behaved at this point. From my observations I can see now that I would have died poor in a few years had I rejected him. So great was the bearing of that decision (I know this now), that had I made the wrong choice nothing I did after that would have corrected my fate to a better path.

I asked Paolini if he knew anyone else who had these powers. He told me that he got his abilities from a Minotaur named Umberto. Who gave them to Umberto? He didn’t know. At that time I did not find my rather short lineage worrying, but 30 years later I began to understand that my body was no longer aging, that I was immortal. Then the question of my immortal ancestors began to torment me. Why did Paolini, Umberto, and whoever it was before them, all of them immortals, chose to end their lives and pass on their ability? I became obsessed with the history of my kind. I set out to find answers using the considerable resources I had at my disposal to explore libraries, dig up ancient archives and descent into the dark under belly of many cities around the world which held promises of rare crumbling manuscripts. I couldn’t find anything concrete. Any mention of my kind in antiquity was sparse and obscure, smudged out by the mundane torrent of normal human history. Unaware to me, the answer I was searching for was slowly building inside of me. I understood this gestation only of late and things make a lot of sense now.

Perhaps (I have no evidence of this) eons ago, there might have been many of us. Immortals who could see clearly the intricate labyrinths their every choice tore in the fabric of cosmos. Entire civilizations, cities of men and women who at every instance saw in their minds how better their lives would have been had they chosen differently in the past. Time couldn’t kill them, but another powerful force would have brought about their extinction, as it is trying to kill me now. The force of regret.

As I get older, the space where the possibilities of my life reside become more and more complex. And every time I look back on this chaotic web, I see some instance I could have chosen better. Men use their ignorance to hide from regret, I have no such luxury, I know with certainty what could have been. In my youth these choices were few and my destiny itself was more sensitive to corrections. As I get older these points get numerous, they have accumulated so much over the years that there is nothing I can do to change the path of destiny significantly. My fate is fixed, my destiny stagnant, any decision I make now can only perturb it slightly and such perturbations are not sufficient to amount to any meaningful change. In the language of the theory of non-linear dynamics, my destiny has become insensitive to initial conditions. The stagnation does not hurt me, what hurts is that I can see in my mind what I could have done differently to avoid this trap. Those decisions, to marry my third wife, to invest in weapons technology, to try cocaine on that cold, rainy night, they haunt me, the ghosts of many lives I could have lived had I acted differently haunt me.

I am sure this is how Paolini, Umberto and others before them died. The ever increasing web of regrets devoured them, the millions of apparent paradises they had unsuspectingly relinquished drove them mad. I feel, like how Paolini would have felt on his last days, the need to pass on these abilities to someone else. It is now a small, nagging feeling inside my head, perhaps an evolutionary trick to ensure that our ability (We are not a species, I got it checked) does not die out. I will not do to another man what Paolini did to me. Nobody deserves to be trapped in the arachnid house of promises and regrets. I must end my life before that feeling inside my head gets the better of me, before my evolutionary drive overpowers my good judgment.

AJ

Schrödinger's Cat

The following is a written statement found under possession of ex-Det. Ryan Bertrand on the 24^th of April, 2014

This is a confession; the testament of my deeds.

I never thought one day I would sit here writing this and yet here I am. Though I take full responsibility for my actions I must say that I wouldn’t be here now if it weren’t for Prof. Mathews and I have to thank him for that.

After almost a year off duty with psychiatric evaluations and therapy the first case I was handed on my return was a missing person’s case. Start me off with the small stuff they might have thought.

Liona Mathews, 36, Caucasian, wife of James P. Mathews, 50, Professor Emeritus of theoretical physics, University of Lanwin was reported missing by her husband 24 hours before on the 14^th of march. She had apparently left her husband’s office after having lunch with him to go home. She never got there. Her husband was the last person to see her alive as far as we could tell and naturally the suspicion shifted to him.

A background check and some house calls around the neighborhood of the victim yielded nothing to confirm our suspicions: perfect couple; the occasional spat; nothing of note.

But as the investigation dwelled deeper into the life of Leona, I found a number of interesting credit card payments made by her to certain seedy motels; the kind of place that rents by the hour and forgets your face as soon as you leave.

Further probing and a thorough questioning of her closest friends revealed that she was having an affair with one Tobu Higonabi, an assistant professor of theoretical physics in the same university as her husband.

Our attempts to apprehend the man and bring him in for questioning proved to be in vain as the constables sent to bring him in, found his dead body and Prof. James Mathews near it with a written confession in his hands.

Many would say that the professor’s reason for committing the murder was lunatic but I would disagree. I have seen lunatic and this wasn’t it. And after all, it was backed by scientific facts after all.

His reason for killing Tobu Higonabi was simple and given in full detail in his written confession. His motive was simple; in fact it was the thing he had taught to students for years.

His wife had apparently told him about the affair and had promised to break it off on the day that she went missing. She was in fact not heading home after lunch but rather to Toru Higonabi’s home, to apparently meet with him and put an end to the affair. And of course she was never seen again. By process of elimination and certain blood patches he had found in Toru Higonabi’s car, the Professor arrived at the conclusion that his wife had come to some harm under the man. He in fact suspected that she had been killed.

The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics states that a quantum particle exists at a particular place in space only under observation, without which it has the probability of existing everywhere. The Professor theorized that since ideas are flows of electrons through the brain they also must obey the Copenhagen rule. Electrons being quantum particles fall under the theories jurisdiction and so in effect for any idea to exist it must be observed. The ideas expression might exist in a macroscopic system but the seeds are in the microscopic system. It was a case where the macroscopic and the microscopic are linked like the thought experiment of Schrödinger.

And since the Professor believed that harm had befallen his wife than not he decide to make the information as to her fate disappear by eliminating Toru Higonabi whose actions without observation is as if they had never happened at all. This would suspend her in a kind of limbo, which to him was more satisfactory than his worst nightmare.

Before going off to prison I asked the professor why he hadn’t just hidden the fact that he had killed the man. Why he had given himself up? He was certainly clever enough to hide it and get away with it.

The idea of ideas being a microscopic system subject to quantum rules and its execution a connected system was formed by the Professor. He said that for even this idea to exist it must be observed and the information of its existence given out into the universe. So to ground his theory in reality he had confessed and given himself up.

The idea appeared ludicrous to me at first, I must admit. But as I read up on the principles he had based his theory upon I became a firm believer. It all made sense, it was all there.

And that is the reason why I am here, sitting next to the corpse of Decan Mclroy, suspected pedophile and killer. Also the number one suspect in the missing case of Julian Bertrand, my son. The state never had any evidence to punish this man; so I did. Now his actions are lost as well.

This professor is more than a theory now. I believe it and so soon will others. All those kids are safe; they are not dead as the police suspect. Those 16 missing children along with my son, they are all safe: all in a limbo; all safe our worst nightmares.

I can finally sleep in peace.

End of transcript. Find attached below the statement of Prof. James Mathews which has been made reference off. Both ex-Det. Ryan Bertrand and Prof. James Mathews are under treatment in the Lanwin Center for the Criminally Insane, after which they will serve out life sentences in the Lanwin State Penitentiary.

- Rohith