"Norman, you look terrible! It’s only been about two minutes-" He’s perched back on my sink. He emits a belch of stentorian depth and the resonance of a Gothic church organ. What is it with this guy and pipes? Something distinctly leathery looking about the man, Good God, if man he be.
"Your time. I’ve been away for two hundred years my time."
"So you’re two hundred years older, Norman? Look man, I know all about the principle that superior technology looks like magic to a spear chucking savage like moi, but you just look like you’re suffering from a bad hangover. You ain’t no two hundred years older."
"Well, no Weasel. I’m actually more like about three thousand years older. I was away for two hundred your years, but I replayed some of them. We call it Temporal Vermiform Villification, or TVV for short. I need to trade in this skin tomorrow for a new one from ten years ago.
"But anyway, you see, let’s say I decide to watch the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots. Hey, that’s fun!! But there are all kinds of cool details. Like catching some of the moves of the local cutpurses. Oops, that’s their equivalent of pickpocket.
"And let me tell you something, most of the stuff you have going on all around something like that is much more compelling on the replays than seeing that middle aged hag get the big sharp sword.
"Although it is kind of funny when her wig falls off and they had no hair to get a grip on the tete du jour. Had to hold it up like a blood spewing bowling ball. ’Break out the ninepins, we got the head of a traitor.’"
"Norman, I think you have the advantage of superior drugs in addition to your superior technology. So, anyway, what have you really been up to, and how are we going to help me quit my day job. What the fuck are tomorrow’s lottery numbers?"
"I wrote them down next week and lost them two weeks from Thursday. Sorry, man. Forgot."
"That’s what they all say."
"Look, I can’t give you the sugar until you ask for the coffee. No riches until you participate in the medium."
"Why do you keep hammering the technology? Why can’t you trust me first?"
"Weasel, this isn’t something as trivial as a simple murder cover-up. To see through time is a compellingly soul transforming experience set."
"Sounds like the hype for a cult."
"I tell you for your own good, that this involves a whole paradigm shift and the acquisition of a significantly new complexes of skill sets and perspectives."
"Norman, are we talking time travel here or a badly phrased pointy headed job description for the politically correct and ethically challenged?"
The circular nature of eternal time means there is no travel as you know it. It’s more a matter of keeping still in a highly directed and willed manner.
"Your memory is the first clue. Ask yourself what your imagination would do with no memory. What could you imagine with no specific incidents to correlate with it?
"Now ask yourself what you would do if you were immediately filled with the entire history of humanity. How could you return to your quotidian existence among what would suddenly seem like an alien population clutching broken puppet idols?"
"Sounds boring, Norman. What ever happened to the guy who puked his guts out over a second rate dead guido? What happened to the guy who used to say a man "does what it takes" to make something happen?"
"Weasel, what I’m offering you is more like my ability to review JFK’s killing at virtually the same time that we’re talking. I can oscillate that quickly."
"And what the hell ever happened to the guy who would never psychobabble this whole dissertation after a simple request for the presentation of a winning lottery ticket?"
"Weasel, if you knew the entire truth, you’d know better than to ask for such a bauble.
"The medieval meditations on infinity are important. The center of the infinite must be everywhere. That means an infinite universe has an infinity of centers. In one instant you will have assimilated all instants Weasel-"
"Chinese Laundry time, babe. No tickee no doee. "
"-what it is like to be as a God. An instant of eternity is an eternity of eternity.
"This is where the beginning meets the end. Where the snake swallows its own tail. Where perception recognizes all it does not perceive. Where words fail and specifics are absurd."
"Blah blah blah. Norman, if this is not about how I can break loose of the day job, I can’t perceive what the hell I’m supposed to want with this shit."
"You will no longer experience your body as you know it. It will seem like a balloon that your eternal soul shoots through like a bullet. This will change the character of your character which changes the character of your soul."
"Well, Mr. Balloon, what are you doing here?"
"Well, it gets rather technical. Actually I acquire the physically perceptible structure you see here by borrowing it from its living being at the time and set the bio structure into a temporal loop. "
"Are you telling me-"
"-in brief, I borrow the skin for moment. Usually when the I that I was is sleeping. The deal of getting eternity in a moment gives you a lot of room to finagle."
"Norman, If I understand you, this is a little disgusting even for me or you. Am I looking at a dead man’s skin?"
"Weasel, that’s so harsh. Merely a borrowed nano-second’s layer derma which I support with a positron pump."
"Norman, remind me never to take you to the circus. What’s a positron pump? "
"Well, since a positron is mathematically an electron with a negative time coefficient it generates energy and work in the Spherical Temporal Arena in much the same way that the behavior of electrons generates work in the Linear Temporal Arena."
"So you’re saying that this entire time I have been talking to a thing that’s not much more than a cosmic hybrid of a balloon and a light bulb?"
"That’s quite a perceptive remark Weasel. Although a bit of an oversimplification, the metaphors work.
"For instance, just as a light bulb requires an internal condition as close as possible to a vaccuum in order to protect the filament, the positron pump effects its work inside the derma by virtue of the absence of the soul of its original inhabitant."
"Which I thought was you."
"I’m a changed man, Weasel. "
If man you be, Norman.
"Well one thing that hasn’t changed, pal o’ mine, is your tendency to get evasive whenever my getting any money is concerned. In fact you, haven’t changed at all. Behind all of this "be like unto Gods" shit, has got to be lurking something that you need from me. You have the option of coming anytime in my life you want, now, right?"
"Theoretically, yes. But I might add that it is also theoretically possible to bicycle oneself safely to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Time travel is circumstantially dependent-"
"Norman, don’t weasel The Weasel. What happened to be "like unto Gods," huh?
"No contradictions at all, Weasel. Just as humanity’s had a long strange journey from the wheel and the spear to the fighter bomber, the development of spherical, Rhiemann Time Space has barely scratched the surface of the universe substrate.
"Why do I have to hear all this blah blah about "circumstances and dependency" from you who are "like unto God?"
"Listen, your fucking divine, eminent, balloonicity, I don’t now squat about any of this. I get the feeling there’s some kind of reality you’re blowing out here, but whatever it is, I don’t get it. But I know a hard sell when I hear it. You want me to join you, that’s for sure. But why? Wouldn’t you be happier with a couple of high end hookers?"
What can I say that will make this go away? We’re moving from gusty breezes of baffling bullshit to gale force winds of delusional pathology. Maybe if I make a deal with God…
Oh please oh please oh please God could we make all of this a bad dream? If I’m awake and seeing this, I’m fucking nuts. The real me might be obliviously thrashing on one of those gurney like beds in a filthy mental hygiene unit wearing nothing but restraints and a couple of hypodermic drips. Those places put drugs in you that make the street trade look like a de-tox facility.
"As you know, I can have them any time I want. In fact, I’ve already had them and am still up to my eyeballs with them. And so can you."
"Norman, I need to go to work. We need to stop now."
God, I tell you what. If we can make this right, there’s nothing I won’t change or do. Do you hear me God? We’re talking write your own ticket here. God, God, I swear, I’ll make Mother Theresa look like Joe Stalin. Just get me out, so I an figure it out. God? Are you listening? God?
"Look my friend, this is a ground floor opportunity. Once a genie is out of the bottle there’s no putting it back in. I know. I see the future, and it is me. Now admittedly, seeing the future does not control it, but being the future means you are it. You still have an active choice between being one of the drivers, or being one of the driven."
"Norman, I’m not listening. And if I do admit to hearing some of this, I don’t understand it. And even if I were to admit to having an inkling of understanding, I don’t see why I would want or need full blown comprehension.
"This morning all I need is to get my ass to my real job, doing real meaningless work. The important idiocies that turn wasted time into a check that clears. The only kind that’s been keeping the game together for the last four years."
"Weasel, cut the crap. You’re like a wolf that fell into a cage where they’re feeding you Alpo. You can’t stand the taste, and you loath the bowl for the accoutrement of servitude it is.
"You admit you know you’re wasting your time there. As an artist you are condemned to know with urgency how precious a thing it is that you squander with every lick of the boot.
"And speaking of time, it’s only a matter of time before the vast majority of humanity will be in the loop. Than it will be in the hands of military and governments. The past, present, and future of consciousness will conflate. The grand sphere of human time will execute the omega. Nobody’s sure what will happen them, but we’ve all got our inklings.
"The system of Dante’s Inferno is circular, and so is that of Tibet. The bigger the circle the lousier the deal, remember? And no matter how you look at it, it’s eternity. The sooner you get your feet wet, the better. It’s not going to go away.
"And, I might add, that once you have millions jumping on board, no one will be offering you anything. You’ll apply for it. And then, what you’ll need to do for a crappier deal will be a hell of a lot more than the little of action I need from you now. It‘s now, or it‘s never, forever.
"You’re making my head hurt, Norman. Right now I need to either get to work, or be independently wealthy. So how about doing a quick temporal back flip, and grabbing me a couple of suitcases full of the money that Al Sharpton laundered last month. "
"One of the more interesting circularities is that you only learn what you already knew to be true. You will become more deeply human. You’ll be a free agent. You’ll grab whatever you want."
"I’m putting on my socks, Norman."
"Remember your great Carl Jung, and how he agonized over what instinct is and its role in relation to the human animal? Freud’s student who wanted to look more closely at the triad of instinct, will, and culture. Can one have any component without all the others as each other’s defining axioms of existence?"
"I got a triad for you, Norman. Weasel needs money. Weasel works. Weasel gets money. Here’s another one. Norman speaks bullshit. Norman seeks lunacy. Norman finds nuthouse."
"How it led him to speculations regarding the role of instinct regarding temporal synchronicity?"
"Here come the work boots, Norman."
"The unique characteristic of species is that it a priori creates its completed knowledge as a matter of self-definition. That’s what instinct was in the first place. Nothing happens to the species as a whole that you did not know before, beause you are also the species. Increasing knowledge only adds more details whose interconnection is obvious.
"Norman, just to give you the benefit of the doubt, let’s rewind the tape for a minute. You said I have to somehow participate in this whole whatever it is, and that will have an impact on my soul. How can anything change the character of my soul? If I have one, and it means anything at all, isn’t it transcendent?
"HOw can it make sense to say you change the transcendent? By definition the soul is basically a core structure that is undefined in relation to the chimera of the senses. You’re contradicting yourself right and left.
"So, why are we talking this second rate Grad School lecture in crackpot philosophy? Lotto me up, and to hell with the for instances, or let me get to fucking work! And yes, I have my jacket on."
"If the soul were transcendent in the romantic way you express it, there would be no impulsion for it to drive through matter. Your life process, all your memories, all your accomplishments, all your ambitions would go unpassed."
"You’re following me to the door, Norman. I’m not liking this."
"Consider that if everyone lived forever there would be no artists. Everyone could be anything, given world enough and time. It agreed to live through your theatre, or karma, or whatever you will, because it found a challenge in the game."
"What’d you do with my alarm clock, Norman? Why is it a half hour earlier?"
I stop with my hand on the door knob. There’s no stopping him. And that’s stopping me.
What kind of excuse will I have when I face the manager, Rodney Cracker, who’s been cheerfully terminating about an employee a day during the traditional retail thinning of the post Christmas herd?
I’d be a prize pair of antlers over the fireplace in the hunting lodge of horrors that is his pointy corporate manager head. Eliminated a vested, non-management employee without a buy out. I think they give awards for that.
Better use the time for some fast thinking. Dead relative? Sudden dental emergency? Slip and fall? Bad Chinese food? An entity talking through a dead man’s skin in my apartment? Couldn’t find a polite way to end the onversation?
"Constrictions create yearnings. This bright and shiny chimera of self consumption we have imposed upon ourselves; this pavlovian chaos, shot full of petty getting and spending and driven by synthetic needs, this desperate race to fill our lives with ever emptier toys of greater technological complexity while the greater population of the globe lives cast adrift at the mercy of war, famine, pestilence, and catastrophe:"
"It’s too late for me to call in sick, Norman, and I need the sales today. Please Norman. Do you need me to beg? "
"Let me ask you Weasel, is that what you are willing to settle for? To watch it all from the illusory safety of anesthesia disguised as wealth? And finally wake up one day and see that all you valued was little more than fetid squalor?
"You can make yourself so macroscopic in perspective that any riches you may acquire from Power Ball ,or such, will be absurd. Nothing more than a potential source of misery to yourself and anyone foolish enough to care about you.
"The wise magician abandons self interest. It’s not that you will not be able to do it. It will be more like you will be able to will not to learn it. Idle curiosity will repel you. "
"What’s so idle about six numbers that will be worth 600 million bucks tomorrow? Cut the shit Norman. And, what the Hell, I’ll give half of it to the Mother Teresa Society.
"I’ll even get some more next week, if you’d simply get your leathery ass back to two weeks Thursday in the future and write down those fucking numbers you say you lost.
"Unless you’re fucking shitting me in the first place and just some low life demon bunko artist trying to shill me into your appointed place in hell."
"Weasel, in the moment when you see your entire existence from cradle to grave, when you remember both womb and coffin as nothing more than epitomizing enclosures punctuating a life of yearnings imprisoned by your rib cage, what difference do you think you will see between cashing in a 250 million dollar lottery ticket and bending over to pick up a bright shiny quarter on the sidewalk? Squalid trinkets, signifying nothing but opportunities for your demons within to sate themselves on garbage."
"Fine words, indeed, Norman. By the way, no insult intended, but how come you seem uglier every time I look at you, even minute to minute?"
"Weasel, I could leave it at ugly is as ugly projects, but it is more complicated. Across each of your "moments," I am still experiencing the completed circularity of your time. It takes a lot out of me to maintain a "continuous" presence for you. That’s another reason I want you to get on board for this. There are places beyond any words that-"
."Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaking of the stink of Beelzebub in this jibber jabber instead of delivering a simple set of goods, what’s with this ’It’s not that you will not be able to do it. It will be more like you will be able to will not to learn it’ garbage? Who wrote that for you, Goebbels?"
"One question at a time, one answer at a time, Weasel."
"Hurry up with a straight one. Every one of what you’re calling answers seems to breed five new questions."
"Ah, Weasel. The greatest problem with the development of this kind of perspective is that it’s based on an experience we have yet to share. Would you try to explain orgasm with someone you love to a seven year old?
"I can’t explain the lassitude and indifference towards your very idea of wealth that is part and parcel of me and mine, unless you become one of us who have cut to the higher side.
"It is only by needing no wealth that you can attract it at all, unless you are somehow to the proverbial manor born."
"Sure, Norman. You want to tell that to Madonna, or Donald Trump?"
"Weasel, you already know perfectly well that they are a case of riches without wealth. You are incapable of settling for that and you already know it. Don’t be specious with me. Remember, I already know your whole life story. Better than even you do. Don’t your greatest saints and mystics all refer to a wealth beyond riches? And does not that reside in an enhanced experience of the present?
"Let me try it a different way. The minute, no pun intended, you see through time it’s all gonna be nothing more than a fucking instant perpetual present. The future is nothing other than a redaction of the past.
"Do you really want a glimpse at the future, without the technology and the second sight?"
"Bring it on, asshole."
"It’s what you already know it’s going to be. Can you imagine the development of a secondary overclass of humanity which will be genetically weaker but living in a condition of much greater environmental protection?.
"These people will be like the soft goo you find when you crush the body of an insect. Outside the gleaming chitinous metal environmens reared by their superior and sophisticated techno culture. , they can barely survive at all.
"Their physical weakness is more than compensated for by their contempt for natural strength and their delight in its destruction. They will conceal their bad conscience from themselves by romanticizing the very thing they destroy.
"They will cover the earth like termites, felling forests in their wake to feed nothing but their self hatred.
"Humanity itself will be incapable of rebellion at this point because humanity will already be extinct. So I suppose you will have nothing to worry about."
"Fuck you Norman. That sounds like nothing more than the relationship between the classes in any third world country."
"And it is also a description of the Antichrist and Whore of Babylon in Revelations. ‘and there will come a time when they will live underground.’ Said interpretation impelling the Hundred Years War back in the Seventeenth Century.
"Perhaps old John, when he went for the ride in the cosmic express bus, mistook skyscrapers for great mountains. I’ll check with him if you’d like, or you can do the same. All you have to do is step on board."
"On board what? My fucking kitchen sink?"
"On board the prophet express. What do you think was the deal with old Elijah and his chariot of fire, or John’s visions of the apocalypse. Each came on board the same thing I’m offering you, Weasel. To see the future as the past perfection of the present. All one vast cosmic moment of the eternal continuum of the divine con artist.
"When they saw the future they interpreted it in the vocabulary of their time. The percipient’s language constricts the account. What equivalents do you think they had for a jet fighter? It would look like a flying insect with the head of a man inside.
"And what do you think you would think, if you saw the whole second half of the twentieth century go by in the course of a minute or two? Your mind would be hopelessly scrambled. There would be all these insect like things flying all over the place dropping bombs.
"The bombs would look like egg clusters. A century of slaughter looking like the last judgement of God itself, visited by a plague of gigantic locusts with pin like men behind their eyes.
"And there you are, in the catbird seat of any historian, and you could close your eyes and click your heels together to your heart’s content, and you still would never get back to Kansas.
"The so called mystics and prophets were nothing more than a "beta" group. They broke and regurgitated their memories as "inspired word of God." This led to abominable results as any survey of history indicates. After several more notable failures, we came to an understanding that this kind of technology required a certain kind of preparation for the perceptor."
"And what preparation might that be?"
"It’s a mere technicality, but one has to be biologically transcendant. One cannot leave written records behind in one’s original language, because the vocabulary is too non specific in its referents. The ambiguities leave nothing but misunderstanding in their wake."
"You mean dead, don’t you?"
"Dead is such a limited word. Do I look dead to you?"
"Norman, I’m not sure I know what you look like, because with each passing appearance this morning, I’m seeing subtle and progressive changes, bro, and not a single one of them is for the better."
"Do you really think things are getting worse or that you’re observing more?"
"How about all of the above?"
"To the temporally unrestrained your humanness is something that preceded your current technology and will post cede it as well, because it supersedes it."
"What do you mean, ‘my humanness?’ Is that as opposed to your loss or lack of same?
"See, I ended up with the capacity to review the whole history of the kind from cave to sky, in the twinkling of the proverbial ‘I.’"
"But conveniently sitting here trying to persuade me to ’join’ you. How come you don’t already know the outcome of this conversation, from the convenience of you r flesh balloon? "
"What a Presbyterian question, Weasel! I thought you were brought up Catholic. What ever happened to free will?"
"Listen, Norman, if you can predestine me to a winning lottery ticket, which I think you can, I’ll worry about free will later.
"Unlike yourselves, whose culture renders the ego stupefied and incognizant of its own ever mutable nature by chaining it to ever smaller temporal increments.
"We are the unchained, and believe me, there‘s no looking backwards on a sphere.
"Haven’t you noticed notice how old the children look now, and how each passing generation accelerates this aging process?
"You ever discount the possibility of reincarnation because how could the number of people have undergone such a catastrophic increase since the industrial revolution?
"But have you ever noticed th increase in mutation and deformity? Perhaps the Spiritus Mundi is adulterating itself in it process of interaction with matter.
"Of course maybe counts in a lot of possibilities.
"You ever wonder how the concept of evolution could possibly include putting technology into the hands of man at such a rate that we have become the equivalent of the monkey cage of the Bronx zoo getting unleashed in the chainsaw section of the Home Despot? You’re not down on the farm anymore and you’re cut off from the nature inside as well as outside yourself."
"Norman! Head out of the hookah, please! Six fucking numbers is all I ask! Tomorrow’s mega-millions could float an entire corrupt third world dictatorship for at least five years. I swear to God I’ll do anything within my power in exchange "
"Anything, Weasel?"
For a bleary moment Norman’s head seems to expand by about ten percent, and then shriveled to normalcy. I could swear there is a momentary smoky orange glint in his eye.
"Well, yeah."
"Let me hear you say that again. Would you be willing to do anything in your power for the correct mega millions number tomorrow?"
"Yeah but no tricks, asshole of planets known and uncharted. I need tomorrow’s millions numbers later today in the correct form of the winning numbers, under circumstances in which I am able to enter them in the lottery and collect the reward. Don’t even think about turning this into some bad Twilight Zone rerun where I’m caught in some temporal loop like some eternal puppy and its tail."
"Flattery is a virtuous thing, and I appreciate the compliment, Weeze. But as sure as I can get us a Teal Mercedes, you’ll have your winnings, free and clear. Straight, no tail chaser."
"But you still need to do that which is in your power."
"Okay. Throw the other shoe. Just what do you need, Master plumber of the Cosmic sphincter?"
"Simple. Your temporal initiation will require that you kill the asshole who killed me, dismember his body beyond spatial temporal reconstruction, and steal my corpse. "
"What?"
"It’s the easiest money you could ever dream of making. Maybe thirty six hours in perceived time, be back here in three minutes chronological linear time, and bingo-bango, it’s surf and turf with a harem of high class hookers for the rest of eternity.
Do you see why I was so excited about what I’m offering you here? This is not the chance of a lifetime, this is the chance of an eternity of lifetimes. All of them exquisitely pleasurable.
"Hmmm."
"So listen, Weasel, let me give you a quick recap of what we’ll be doing, and get you moving towards your very own island in the South Pacific. But hey! Why stop there? You’ll have enough money for a Weasel Archipelago!"
"Why don’t you just kill him yourself Norman?"
"Ectoplasmic technicality, Weeze. Can’t manipulate tools with a mere dermic projection. A DNA pump can only do so much, and it does not include what I need you to do with the pipe wrench that you will find at hand in the circumstance.
You know Norman, I’ve never quite gotten the lingo or done the math here. How does this shit work? "
"The same way it’s always worked. Has it ever occurred to you that at occasional points humanity saw and felt their Gods? Remember how the Gospels were so concerned to bearing witness to the miracles performed by the carpenter from Nazareth. He’s the final linear time non-technological DNA pumper. This had not been mass hallucination. He was not even very anxious for his activities to be known. Scripture suggests quite the opposite.
Just when you think that you absolutely must be an idiot, on comes the news with information to the diametric contrary.
"Shall we take a trip down mammary lane?"
"For the love of God, Norman, not right now-"