Tall Tales a Magician Hears
by Anj Baker
A long, long time ago, a thousand years in the future, a magician creeps down a hallway made of flickering lightbulbs.
The magician never has seen lightbulbs but it knows what they are—hears about them from the varying trespassers, those bricolages of universe made flesh and sentience, who traipse the corridor like ghouls, all of all exploring all the time. The magician has heard so much from trespassers—it had been trespassers who taught the magician to speak. Once, before there was, it had no words, and the corridor took neither shape nor color.
The lightbulbs appear as spheres—a sphere an inscription of universe where every point of a surface is equidistant from a center—all throughout all, the magician learns geometry from Archimedes himself and from the math teachers the corridor swallows whole. Math teachers dissolve in the corridor—a place made as if for them, a place they cannot, will not leave, and so they dissolve, their fleshforms dissipating into nothing at all, their souls becoming hard facts, truly atomic facts, as those named Bertrand and Ludwig say somewhere out there in the worlds.
Now, the magician experiments with inscribing reality on the liminal, as the trespassers do by thought. By the magician's interstitial nature, it cannot be anywhere. It can see nothing, but it hears tall tales of what may be.
The magician hears of the Fates—a trio of persons who have always been ancient, who weave an immutable future. It cannot help but understand, and when it hears of someone named Mrs Who, who speaks only in the things others say, it cannot help but understand this too. A person named Antonin speaks of “bodies without organs,” and the magician is grateful it is solid all the way through—you cannot psychoanalyze that which lacks a brain. Like the Scarecrow of Oz, someone said once. Someone named Frank. It knows these are fictions, the trespassers say so—but it cannot understand a hypothetical of a hypothetical.
It hears that realities—which are composed of the hypotheticals, the endless hypotheticals that branch off the hallway—are made of tiny, fractured ideas. Brief, angry waves of particles just still enough to be something else, to make connections. Each iteration of reality that the magician walks past is an instantaneous, fleeting set of connections between these manifold tiny ideas. Then the ideas fall apart. Ripped away in an instant by their reality's inevitable expansion. Then the link is gone, a gap in the corridor, but it is always there.
Each reality is a tall tale. Something made of all those little ideas.
The corridor is solid. It is not quantized. It is not digital. It is a wave if a wave were not an angry little idea, a particle with a mission. It is the only that is—that really is—it is perpetual, and continuous. A curve whose area inscribed cannot be divined by Gottfried’s dark magic—calculus does not work here. (That is why the math teachers love it so—a world that cannot be mapped—how interminably interesting.)
The corridor is always full of refugees from all these hypotheticals, these places that are not, that are only what may be. Souls now made solid and perpetual, souls who were in their world broken down into the firings of neurons, or if you go even further—souls composed of the proteins whose work fires the neur—
No, thinks the magician, universes are far too complicated. With all that quantization. Better a hallway where all is solid. Where a thing called the magician creeps along what it would call lightbulbs.
The magician has heard all these things and others. It has heard everything that has ever been uttered in the hallway. It is everything that has been uttered in the hallway, always and continually adding pale new phrases to its memory, distillations, quantizations, assignations of what may be.
That is why the magician imagines it walks on lightbulbs—its perennial fascination with the hypothetical. Fun to imagine an arbitrary assignation like the hallway lined with lightbulbs. As a detail, the bulbs flicker every time the magician takes a step, then catch light again.
There is time when the magician is tired, a pale, expansive kind of tired. When the hallway is dim all throughout itself and there is a young man who believes so earnestly in divinity.
He walks into a mine in one of those long screwed-over places—any of them, in any of the realities. He takes a wrong turn and then he’s dead as far as he is concerned.
The magician waits on him, because the magician sees that the young man enters the corridor and waits, as gentle as can be. To the young man, it looks like Cesare Borgia, but the young man had never learned that name.
“Lord,” begs the little boy.
“I’m not your Lord,” says the magician. “I’m not a thing—not any thing.” The magician is grateful that it learned to speak. “What does it look like to you?” the magician asks in its slow, methodical manner of speaking to trespassers, gesturing around its hallway of lightbulbs.
The little boy wraps his arms around himself and says, “It looks like the hallway in the foreman’s house.”
The magician nods, thinking through these words. “And what does that look like?”
The young man glances around, startled that Cesare Borgia cannot see the lace doilies or the flower-print wallpaper. He reaches out and touches the canvas of the couch the Pope’s son sits upon. It is physical. It is solid. He does not know why, but this is the most solid thing he has ever touched. His world was made of the empty space inside atoms and now he is in a place of pure objects, wrought by his psyche out of raw universe.
This boy currently cannot transcribe his hallucination into words. His thoughts are no longer held down by the soft white flesh in which they dwelt in reality. They run rampant, colliding with each other, with the inside of his skull, like a closed system of a gas. His thoughts become as instantaneous as peoples always dreamt they were.
The young man had been to his brother’s wedding. Weddings were the only time people were happy where he was from. A child was loved, but it was something to be fed, and deaths were all glossed over.
The little boy had known happiness once in his life and it was when he danced with his brother’s wife’s sister, a girl with a shocking red bob and dark brown eyes, two years his senior. She was nineteen and she kissed him outside the church. Her name was Jessamarie. That was two days ago; it was a universe and a half ago.
The little boy thinks he might be happy again. He believes so earnestly in divinity, and he thinks Heaven looks like the foreman’s house, because that was the nicest place he’d ever seen. He thinks the Lord his God looks like Machiavelli’s Prince because that was all he ever knew.
Cesare Borgia extends a hand and the young man takes it. He is no longer in the foreman’s house, but in a mineshaft stacked with iridescent bulbs of the concept of light—
Because there are neither waves nor particles here—
The young man is afraid as he feels his brain being searched past and present and he says, “Are you taking me back?”
“Yes,” says the magician. “Don’t tell anyone about this place.”
“Yes, Lord,” says the little boy, and the magician does not correct him this time. It will be easier that way, when the boy emerges back into the mine and his headlamp works again—
The magician cannot enter a world made of meat, but it walks the boy to the threshold, and wraps its too long arms around him, and says, “Be good. Be good for me. Be good for Jessamarie.”
And the boy leaves and he enters his world, and for a brief moment, the magician can feel air on its skin.
Elsewhere down the corridor, it encounters a nameless child. A thing angry to be made real, banging against the walls, scratching until its fingers would split.
“What happens, child?” says the magician.
The child stares up at a tall woman in a black dress that ends at her knees. She wears hose—with the stripes on the side—and low-heeled pumps. The child does not know the word “pumps,” but the magician does, and it learns momentarily what it looks like. The child gazes up at a woman with a severe bun and thick glasses, this woman who ran an orphanage and died so unexpectedly, leaving the kids to whatever happened. That woman was the last person who had been kind to the child. And so the child throws their arms around the legs of this woman, the point at which the magician understands the child, gleaning knowledge that will ripple forward and back and across the corridor, and the magician picks them up, because it does not know what to do—it has never known what to do—and it holds the child so tightly and the child holds on just as tightly.
Somewhere, there is a doorway that leads into another orphanage—the magician knows that about that door. The walk there takes a minute; it takes the death of a universe. This was the only real peace the child knew and what happens to the child after the magician points them through the doorway is anyone’s guess. The person who is the child does not return to the hallway, the magician does know this.
There are trespassers who do not see the magician as Jesus Christ or as a kindly severe woman, but as an object of fear. A creature so far removed from the dark red flesh of a hypothetical as to be run from. Some move to hit the magician, but the hallway bends around it and the blows do not connect. Then they run. They do not know why they run, because they can comprehend the magician could too easily give chase, but they are souls and they lust for life and flesh and air.
These beings eventually dissolve in the corridor, dust-to-dust, or they don’t. They slip out into a reality, where they are safe from the ravages of true existence.
The magician keeps on going, as it always will. It encounters a spelunker, a trespasser with a purpose, a man who chainsmokes, who flits through all the hypotheticals, and they slip off his skin like so much dust.
“Whaddaya see?” says the magician.
“Some guy,” says the spelunker, and extends his hand.
The magician takes it, and sees the man’s whole life, as it always has, but this is the point at which it does. The man is two-thirds a blank slate, so pained as to be nonchalant, so chill as to ache.
The spelunker blinks and pulls back his hand.
“Too late,” says the magician, forcing that tone called nonchalance into its voice.
“Goddamn,” says the spelunker. “You scoured my mind. That was awful?”
“Yeah,” says the magician. “What are you doing here?”
“Just having a smoke.”
“You know those signs about not smoking indoors?”
“Yeah,” and the spelunker takes a drag. “I don’t even get how I can smoke in here. Doesn’t make any sense. Everyone else I know fades away in here, but my lighter still works, and my cigs do too, so,” and he stubs out the light of the wrung-out cigarette against a patchwork papered wall and tucks the butt in his pack.
“Thanks for not littering, I guess,” says the magician.
“Leave no trace, et cetera,” says the spelunker and lights up another cig. “Want one?”
The magician shrugs and extends an open palm; the spelunker passes it the lit cigarette, interlacing it with the magician’s imagined fingers, and lights another for himself.
“Ya gotta breathe in,” says the spelunker.
“You know there’s no air here, right,” says the magician.
“I know. I just don’t care—I just breathe. I like the world. Always have. Always will. It’s all garbage and light in here. I want to go home, I guess. It’s just so goddamn far.”
“I could take you there,” says the magician. “It wouldn’t be that far, not with me.”
The spelunker wrinkles his nose and smiles. “Nah. I know where my new home is. That’s what matters.”
“You consider that place your new home?” asks the magician.
“Yeah. It is what it is. Et cetera,” and the spelunker yawns.
The magician takes a drag of the cigarette, and feels smoke down in lungs it doesn’t have. “You’re a miracle worker,” says the magician.
“How so?” asks the spelunker, his eyes turning leary.
“I can breathe,” says the magician.
“Just gotta believe you can, dear magician,” says the spelunker. And this flesh being passes the magician the smoking half of his own cigarette, and disappears down a doorway into a world, where the magician cannot follow. This is the moment it has been waiting for—the moment it is given the name it’s always had. It spends the duration of always and forever searching for the spelunker. It sees him sometimes, bright points in eternity, but mostly it doesn’t. The spelunker lives a life and it does not involve a magician in a hallway between the hypotheticals.
The hallway is as bright and shining as the magician can make it, but nobody lives in a hallway, least of all a creature called a magician.
Ideas abandon their quantum entanglement and become smooth as river rocks, and the magician is alone again. It closes the eyes it doesn’t have and breathes in a faint whiff of smoke it shouldn’t smell.
Anj Baker's short fiction can be found in Dark Matter Magazine and 34 Orchard. They also write and direct the audiodrama Missives from a New Ghost Town.
