Snakes and Ladders and the Destinies of Unborn Universes: Chapter 25
A Novel
If you’re joining us just now, follow the snake’s tail to the Prologue or climb a ladder to the Table of Contents.
Chapter 25: A Hardboiled Detour
The unborn universe had clammed up and was refusing to speak to Evan. It had moved from the chambers of his heart into his lower diaphragm; and he could hear it conferring (sotto voce) with Niyati, which was starting to piss him off since it meant they were talking about him. He knew he was still in that infinite quarter of the Astral Plane called “this Hilbert space” (a.k.a. “The Red Zone”), but he hadn’t the foggiest idea where the narrow defile he was walking through led to.
The coarse-grained monk’s habit he wore was itchy and hard to walk in, because whoever was in charge of the dream’s costume department hadn’t done their job. The robe’s length was too long and he kept having to ruck it up in the front (like Tess of the d'Urbervilles), so that he didn’t trip all over himself. For some reason he was unable to turn around and go back where he’d come from. But then, he didn’t really want to go back that way since that’s where Dante’s Inferno had been. And that place sucked.
He remembered being assigned Dante’s Inferno in his freshman Comp. Lit. class. But when he found out it was just one long-ass poem, he knew he’d never get past the first page. So he bought a used copy of the CliffsNotes for Inferno from the UCLA bookstore, but then lost it that afternoon when he went to the library between classes to take a nap. He bombed the quiz but (fortunately) Inferno wasn’t the focus of the final, which was a blue book exam with a single question that wasn’t a question at all: Compare and contrast some of the representations of nature depicted in the various literary works you have read this semester.
Since he hadn’t read any of the “literary works”, he wrote a rambling essay about hiking alone in Yosemite National Park:
When you go hiking by yourself, you see the mountains and trees like they really and truly and actually are, like in reality, because it meens <sic> more when you see nature in the actual world, in front of your face, instead of reading about them all <sic> in old books and articles, and in photocopies of pages that cost me 10 sense <sic> a pop, like what ended up being the case for this sole <sic> sucking class that I learned nothing in.
He kept adding subordinate clauses and superfluous adverbs to pad out the pages. And, at one point, he crossed out an entire paragraph and rewrote it again (almost verbatim), because he thought it would make him look like a perfectionist.
Evan suspected that the mildly attractive TA who graded the finals had a crush on him, since all throughout the semester she had blushed and looked away whenever he stretched, yawned, or executed an unpremeditated manspread. And his suspicions seemed to have been confirmed when the results came back and he got a D- instead of of an F. The accompanying feedback form contained the following remarks:
It was obvious you didn’t read any of the assigned works, but your energetic and discursive writing style—(he had to look up “discursive”)—was unique, to say the least. I wanted to give you a D+, but I had to deduct another 30 points due to your numerous speling errors. (He wondered if she had misspelled “spelling” on purpose by way of irony.)
Evan often said, “I got a broad mind, ’cause my mind’s always on broads.” But even though he sat on the john like Le Penseur, he wasn’t much of a thinker. But that was about to change. He was rackin’ his brains, tryin’ to figure out how he’d managed to wander off the beaten path and get stuck balls-deep in this hardboiled detour that cut like a jagged knife through his dream.
Evan didn’t know if “balls-deep” was hyphenated, but that’s how it was getting typed out on a beat-up Corona #3 in a smoky black-and-white office, where a rotating ceiling fan was casting an oblique shadow on the Trilby-wearing detective, who had just stubbed out a cigarette in the ashtray next to the half-empty whiskey tumbler. Painted in bold letters (inverso ordine) on the door’s frosted glass were the words PRIVATE DICK, which made Evan snicker. Then a mailroom clerk added to the hilarity by yelling, “I got a huge package for ya!”—before throwing a bundle over the transom, which landed on the other side with a meaty thunk.
This was all happening somewhere in an unplumbed part of Evan’s psyche, where an aspect of his mind had co-opted his voice and modulated it to sound dramatic, while it continued narrating—in a machine-gun staccato—what Evan’s stream of consciousness was ostensibly (but not actually) thinking. Evan knew for a fact that he didn’t sound like a 1940s radio thriller when he was awake, and he didn’t call women “broads”, not because it was disrespectful (he called them “chicks” and “hotties” all the time), but because “broads” sounded hokey to him.
But this lingo wasn’t exactly the comparatively clean-cut Raymond Chandleresque style of the early talkies, where “balls-deep” would never have made it past the censors. It was something more nasty, an argot borne out of the stews and slums of an olamic societal underbelly, the chatter of the roaches and centipedes clinging to the flat slimy bottom of the Rock of Ages.
The warrior-king had strayed into a nuked-out wasteland, a garden of death between the canyon’s walls, where seediness was the only seed to bear fruit, a place perfumed by petrol, an unholy den of leather-clad bodies, wild-eyed creatures that saw no point in living, but continued to pullulate nevertheless. Huddled in cliques, alcoves, caves, they sucked face, lemon wedges, candy canes, cocks, anything to keep the lips unchapped and ward off the boredom. A Church of Gomorrah, whose sermons were the commands issuing from those crackling intercoms perpetually drowned out by the ear-splitting din of revved engines, tuneless metal music, and the shouting of merchants, hustlers, and unpainted whores. The men and women busked their wares, too expensive for the destitute to afford, too cheap for the pirates and pimps in their gaudy tricked-out palanquins to covet.
Evan was glad he was wearing his monk’s habit now, since everyone in this place was dressed like a character out of a graphic novel. But the people were staring at him suspiciously. He drew his hood down low, and kept his eyes to the ground, hoping the exhaust from the idling up-armored vehicles would screen him from hostile observers.
He entered an area that looked like a cross between a town square and parade ground. In the middle was a broad dais on which a skinny hairless albino, wearing torn slacks and no shirt, did an interpretive dance as the crowds circumambulated him, praying and making gestures suggestive of ancient Thessalian rites. The figure danced to a beat that was never in sync with the cacophonous tempo hammered out by the iron-masked drummers in the cage close by.
The worshipers left offerings: candles, severed fingers, wampum, headless dolls, mummified lizards. This done, they withdrew to make room for the others. Meanwhile, men and women in red tunics removed the offerings and put them in burlap bags to keep the stage free of clutter. And then they sold the junk back to the worshipers to make ends meet.
But Evan’s attention had been drawn to the far end of the square, where it was less crowded, and where two stages stood apart from each other. He walked over to check them out.
The first stage—the main one—had a Wild West cowcatcher bolted to the front of it. It was lifted up off the ground because it was a vehicle of some sort. Massive wheels could be seen on either side of it. A clunky 1940s microphone stood onstage amid a swirling cloud of dust. Curtains were unnecessary, since it was impossible to see more than 15 feet back, where the fumes rolled out of the garage where the stage was being “serviced”. The sharp flames of acetylene torches could be discerned through the haze. The banging of metal against metal mingled with the noise of air compressors and power tools.
The ancillary stage was much smaller. A red neon bullseye mounted to the scrim formed the backdrop. It was situated at an angle, so that it partially faced the main stage. It had a microphone, too, but a sleek modern looking one.
Evan assumed a show was about to start, since the worshipers began to migrate from the albino’s dais to where he was standing.
And then the whole world went silent, as the opening bars of Nina Simone’s 1964 song “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” filled the Astral Plane. Evan felt the distilled essence of passion walk behind him, accompanied by the smell of jasmine, as the film-noir voice resumed its narrative and the crowds made way for her.
She wore a pair of “fuck me” pumps and ascended the bullseye stage in an irritable slow-rolling fashion, like the Angel City’s rush-hour traffic. Her name was “Lovely Assistant”, but everyone called her L.A.
Her lustrous ebony skin was clad in a jumpsuit of maroon pleather. A gorgeous Afro framed a deceptively innocent face, dolled-up with makeup and streaks of cyan eyeshadow. Her lashes were heavy with mascara; and she batted them shrewdly when she chose to be perceived in half-profile by adolescent wet-dreamers or the occasional slumbering scrub, who woke in disgust to find the pillows he’d been raw dogging no longer resembled her. Large 24 carat gold hoop earrings dangled in pairs from each ear, tinkling like the opening number of a televised Christmas special.
When she had taken up her position on the stage, she began to squirm and sway, as if the clothes encasing her were too confining. She ran her hands up and down her abdomen, before cupping those bodacious tatas with slender fingers whose cheap press-on nails were coated with acrylic the color of dragon’s blood. Suddenly, she threw back her neck, clenched her teeth and whimpered out the words “Oh, shit!” as her fingers closed around the microphone’s stem like a Venus flytrap devouring its prey. To the casual observer, it might’ve seemed like L.A. was signaling something sexual. But the truth of the matter was, that’s just how the lady warmed up to a mic.
After he’d put his tongue back into his mouth and reeled his eyeballs back into their sockets, it dawned on the dipshit college kid that the reason his subconscious had been speaking to him in this hardboiled manner was that the unborn universe was priming him to play the role of a private eye, because there was something about himself, about his true nature (his Atman, his Purusha, his ego, his soul) that Evan was supposed to figure out in the course of this apparent “detour” through the Astral Plane, a detour that was starting to look more and more like just another square on the Snakes and Ladders game board.
I had to laugh to myself about Evan and his Cliffs Notes. The first book in my life that I DNF was the Grapes of Wrath, so I bought the CN thinking it would get me through the exam, but I barely made it through those. Something about that book just rubbed me the wrong way... Maybe that would be my astral Inferno, haha :-)
I also just wanted to say I'm so impressed with your writing throughout. You've taken on a monumental project here, philosophically and stylistically, and continue to deliver with every chapter.