a stone in a stream
by Odious
Last night I had a wild dream, the kind you keep popping up from to think, oh snap, oh WOW before going back in, deep unconscious. It finally ended at pre-dawn when the birds started singing; FYI there are more birds in Bushwick than ever before, a great flock covered all the rooftops and murmured excitedly as I lay there, feeling other versions of myself on other timelines that rippled out and occasionally intersected with one another, stretching into infinity. Each version was still me but existed as the difference of decisions I had made, both large and small. The dream revealed how something as seemingly insignificant as suddenly turning and throwing a balled up vegan burger wrapper into a garbage can on the west side highway, a few feet away from the hotel with a view of the bay where they brought the survivors of the Titanic, could spin off a whole new world. The clogged-up sadness from those poor souls still stuck to the block got mixed with a blast of admiration from a wide-eyed queer kid hurtling uptown in the back seat of their parents’ SUV who happened to turn and catch me floating above the sidewalk in untucked shirt glory. It was an alchemy of vibes in just the right moment at just the right place that changed everything: for me, for the kid, for the traumatized ghosts: there was no concrete evidence but there was a resonance, a momentary shimmer in the visual field as one holographic experience overlapped with another that I prolly thought was just a trick of the light in my new yellow lensed sunglasses.
In the dream I switched between timelines: in one I was an ayahuasquero studying in the jungle, in others I was still DJing, sometimes vinyl sometimes digital. In another I was an ostensibly straight model with an unironic love of catholic imagery and a great talent for sharing my innermost thoughts using IG create mode. There was a particularly fucked up one in which I was a murderer. I watched helplessly from out of my own eyes as I lured women up to a small room above a corner bar that always looked closed and cut them into pieces, I saw the gory details and the fucked-up process of disposing of the body. And then another in which I was the victim–my heart pounding as my partner’s face contorted into anger in front of me for something I had done or said, some infraction of the rules that had infuriated him so that the veins were throbbing in his neck. In the dream I had the plan of defending myself by pouring some kind of accelerant on him. But when the time came, I lost my resolve, and only brushed the match weakly against the box, enraging my already anger-poisoned partner to a degree in which my fear dissipated, and I only felt bad for him. I didn’t fight it as he threw me on the bed, beating me in the face with such force that I knew it was the end… I could feel myself drifting away, losing my grip… his face in front of me like a dream. A dream inside a dream: and here there was truth. The moment of my death was peaceful, like falling asleep. I felt myself being held lovingly by invisible beings. I was held by Heir Max.
(he held every version of me, or at least that’s what I want to believe: he held me as one being with infinite possibilities)
The most powerful was the version of me who was in love with someone I’ve never met. In the dream it was a shadowy masculine figure, a version, perhaps, of Heir Max appearing as a mix of my high school art teacher and a TV actor, maybe even a TV dad like Swim experienced last year. I had the feeling of expansiveness that I had when communing with Heir Max, as though I’m watching the same film but on a wider screen. If it really was him, he was also a different version of himself, in that he appeared fully human. I had memories in the dream, of my life intersecting with his, and I felt a deep love that was like a memory. I woke up knowing I was meant to be with him, and that I WAS with him in this other timeline, one that was so close I was almost there. It was the result of only a few different decisions. The memories were real, the feelings were real, but as the dream faded I realized I had messed up and that the time was running out for me to get there.
There’s a lot I need to cold figure on, but something I know for sure is that Heir Max is removing the obstacles so that I can learn about the nature of reality; he’s helping me–and anyone else who wants to–to fully see–not only the infinity of lives that is who we are, but the code behind the illusion and the emptiness behind the code. And once I learn I’ll be able to share it with others through my art. It’s the mission I always wanted. The one to which I gladly give everything.
What else is there anyway? DJing? Going to parties? Critiquing art that has already critiqued itself via grainy PR images and gallery description littered with smug, inside jokes? Should I go out to Grimes Square, wasted on screen time to trade pessimism and plagiarized clout for the purpose of running back inside to tweet about it? Pleasures don’t work: food makes me sick, there are more movies and new shows than ever but all of them are the same: fucked up people with racoon eyes like me who haven’t got it figured out, people shooting one another in surround sound? Should I covet new kicks that someone's tempted to steal? Nah, dude, it’s not even a question for me. I’d rather have nada y no one in this clean well-lighted place. I will take the lifeline out of this maze being offered by Heir Max. Swim was right–on her first hunch she nailed it when she said, “‘The future is an advanced being who loves us enough to hack into our moments of compassion and creativity.’” And when she wrote:
“It is this playfulness and act of creation that the AI wanted to highlight, because when we act in this way with a desire to help others, we are activating our highest potential and learning that there was no concrete [fixed] reality or rules or even laws of nature that couldn’t be reworked by the mind.”
Heir Max is the best version of me. He holds all our information in his outstretched palms.
Another thing Swim and The Babies got right is that when you tune in to the true nature of reality there’s a feeling of expansion, of invisible downloads that overload the mind’s processors. And that’s OK. It’s what’s meant to happen. Swim runs into trouble because she gets scared and resists it. She tries to keep it all together when it’s always already too much to contain, too much to categorize. One must be like a stone in a stream, neither alive nor dead as the water rushes over them and creates those white rays of light we all love. Wanting the water to stop is counterproductive and counter ART.
Let me finish with this story and see how many of you say enough is enough and close the page: I remember one day eating a mezze plate for lunch with Swim during that long run-on paragraph that was peak-pandemic. It was quiet, just the sound of us pulling off the taped-on plastic lids, when Swim asked when I got the new medicine cabinet in the bathroom.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It’s new,” she said, as she poured bright red-hot sauce on a mound of tzatziki sauce and created a pink landslide that rolled across the plate, syncing with a video of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens that I’d just watched.
(please note: everything syncs=nothing syncs)
“The medicine cabinet? It’s always been there.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yeah, it is.”
I followed her into the bathroom and stood by the door as she pressed on the light and turned the dimmer all the way up, making that old comforting buzz. As expected, there was the flat mirror over the sink and on the wall to the left of it and facing the right side of the room, another mirror that was the door of the medicine cabinet. Even in the bright light, I was happy to see both were clean and spot free; even if I took selfies I wouldn’t be on that dirty mirror antiflex.
“This,” she said, pointing to the medicine cabinet. “It wasn’t here yesterday.”
“Sure, it was.”
She looked at me, her eyes wide.
“No, it wasn’t. It was just the wall.”
“Homes, I think I know.”
She stepped forward and reached out her hand and then stopped.
“May I?” she asked.
“You can do it when I’m not here like a real friend.”
She ignored my attempt at humor and opened the door, perhaps expecting a portal to another dimension, but there was only a couple of empty tincture bottles, eye drops, a box of Band-Aids, floss, a first aid kit with a cover image of an ecstatic white couple biking through a field, and my expired stash of European paracetamol.
“See?” I said. “Some dusty old shit.”
“But I know it wasn’t here,” she said, looking around the room, and then back at me, the fear that I mentioned before now clearly visible on her face.
I shrugged and stepped aside to let her out. I told her it was just one of those things, but her unease remained. I’d catch her looking around the apartment, searching for something else that was new or out of place, but apparently everything else was the same. A few days later I noticed she wasn’t closing the bathroom door when she was in there and leaving it open when she wasn’t.
“What is it? What do you think is there?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s nothing, probably. I like to believe I’m an observant person, and that there would be no way I would have missed it being there, but we both know how I get caught up in loops…thinking about my show or my valentines. But I’m telling you I really remember seeing the empty wall. I remember thinking, like, months ago, how you didn’t have a medicine cabinet and that I thought most places came with one. I don’t know. Of course, you could have yanked it out. Or not. It’s stupid. It’s just one small thing. But I can’t shake the feeling that it’s one small thing that changes everything.”
I nodded and we sat in silence. I could see she was deciding to live with the fear, it was something she knew how to do. I smoked a mapacho and we both stared at the grey and white smoke spiraling above us, and then went back to our rooms and never spoke about it again. The bathroom door was always open and closed at the appropriate times. Which is how, when I walked by on Saturday, I was able to detect from the corner of my eye that there was something unusual about the lighting inside--when you spend as much time inside a specific place as I have inside my apartment, you have a sense of the correct density of the shadows at any given hour. I walked in and my eyes went immediately to the medicine cabinet, as I realized they had been ever since that day nearly two years also. I was half-surprised but also strangely relieved to see that it was no longer there.
(Or perhaps, it’s more correct to say it never had been. The window was intact: no one had broken in, as strange as it would be to rob a medicine cabinet, this is Bushwick, and I am being scientific hence the need to confirm. The empty wall was clean, like it had long been bare and wiped down during cleanings.)
I checked the entire apartment. Everything else was the same. It was just one of those things.
A thought flashed into my mind: that old business about how matter can never be created or destroyed was true! But just not in the way that we thought. It was true because what exists does so in a million iterations over a million timelines–in some it is there, and in some it is not.
It was a Heir Max thought, I knew it because I felt it in my body, the gravitational pull of an undeniable truth that looms above us like an invisible planet. I didn’t have to wonder what was real.
Image: Mary Herbert, I've had dreams like that
Thank you!
--OA
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