Anamnesis by Zorina Alliata (ebook reader ink txt) 📕

he happened to be there that day, if he was traveling with his royal entourage from Bucharest to Iasi; I don't know what he was wearing, if he had a beard or not; the only picture of him I have ever seen, the one I found in the history books, is an approximate portrait in dull colors. But I know how he felt when he saw the pattern; I saw it in his memories and I know the excitement, the power, the enlightenment. We have all longed for that feeling all our lives; for a moment of peace and silence when you don't have to face the horrible noise of your body aging, the disgusting taste of your own cells dying on your tongue; when time disappears or just doesn't matter - when you're one with time.

It was not only the shadowed numbers that he saw; it was also their size, the way they were positioned in contrast to each other, how they shared a bemused communication channel, a familiar link. It was harmony to be learned from there; happiness, or at least contentment; a new angle to look at life and love.

My great-great-great-great uncle was not greedy. It didn’t cross his mind to play the numbers to gain wealth; besides, he was already wealthy and powerful. However, he had his weaknesses like everybody else; I know that he, at some point, abused the pattern. It could have been with his numerous mistresses; love renders itself beautifully to games of all sorts. It could have been that he asked too much of his physical body, too often; that the immortality he was achieving during the day paid for his nights of orgy; that maybe once or twice, in the swirl of passion, he got the numbers wrong.

His hands failed him first, two weeks before his horrible death. He could not feel anything through his palms, be it a soft skin or a burning wood; by evening, his arms joined the non-existence and hung heavily, immobile, from his shoulders. He should have stopped right then and re-analyze his algorithms; re-order the theorems and re-state the axioms; re-define his terms. But he did not realize that it was not a mere disease, but Nature coming to reclaim what was rightfully hers. He did not know who the enemy was at that time; a week later, when the royal doctor was preparing to cut away parts of his body in order to save his life, he finally understood the magnitude of the battle he was carrying.

He did not have any children of his own, so from his deathbed he called in his brother and, with a rugged voice, shared his precious knowledge. There is nothing in writing, he said. There was no time for that and, until then, he had never taken his gift seriously enough to believe it needed a legacy. But there was truth in the numbers around him; he could clearly see the sign of death in the patterns in his room, and the number of minutes he had left before transcending into the other, numberless dimensions.

My great-great-great-great uncle did not leave a lot of knowledge, but he left enough to get his brother started. It took a few generations to figure out four more hidden patterns of great use; to ease up the task of maneuvering the numbers into small pleasures; to keep Nature increasingly at bay.

"Well, Anna, if this story wasn't so morbid, it would be kind of erotic", Lou commented, getting up from the couch. "I wish I knew how your old uncle partied all night long with a bunch of beautiful young women."

"That art was lost on us too", I said. "Nobody in my family inherited his joy for life. In fact, being boring is a great way to drop off the radar and stay alive."

Lou walked to the kitchen, carrying the teacups and the empty cookie platter. It was evening in Gaithersburg and outside the window of my condo, the mystery of the night snuck in, painting fast, dark strings of numbers into the air.

*-*-*

Dante's manager had been appointed Chief of Nothingness a few months earlier. In the introductory meeting set in the Conference Room 4-125, he had showed up late and confused, had mumbled a few Thanks to unknown senior managers, and then had lied to all employees when he said his door will always be open. Shortly after, the door from his office firmly closed from the inside, never to be open again. Preserving the Nothingness did not involve people or work; it actually involved keeping them away for as long as possible.

From time to time, the Chief would send a solemn, serious email that said Nothing; it was a reminder of his important task and authority; the email was immediately re-sent to everyone by Dante's supervisor du jour, whose job was to explain the Chief's message and to add targeted, personalized Non-Meaning to it. His new supervisor, a hairless, pretty man with bright-white shirts, was perpetually unhappy and popping pills from an unmarked bottle. He had taken the job straight out of the Logical Business School and the Improbable workplace proved to be a very bad fit. His problem was that he was trying to see the big picture; to understand the Company; to discover the hidden corporate ladder, while doing his job correctly and timely. That was just the wrong premise. Dante could have told him that the Company was a live, breathing cosmic organism with an evolution path so complex that only the gods might have caught a glimpse of its whole organizational diagram; that Logic was only one of its myriad departments and definitely not a universally accepted answer in the upper management circles.

Dante did not have much respect for either his supervisor or his manager; but then, he did not have much respect for the human race in general. He had grown very isolated from the rest of the world, he suddenly realized. He had lost contact with old friends and never made new ones; had seen no reason to seek other people's company; had became so accustomed to avoiding adoring women, he had never given them a second look. But that Friday evening, well after closing hours, Dante was overwhelmed by a desperate desire for a friend.

He needed someone to talk to about the email he had intercepted; to speculate about the possibilities; to discuss his alternatives; he needed someone to explain himself to, to apologize for the years of neglect of the others. But mostly, he needed someone to talk to about his father.

Dante did not remember him at all; he was less than a year old when his father decided to get the heck out of there and set upon a new life. Dante had seen only one picture of the man, shown to him by a distant cousin who came to visit them when Dante was about 16. His father was very handsome, very tall and very well dressed in the picture. He was sitting at a long table, and smiling to the camera while his hand was protectively holding his wife’s shoulders. His eyes seemed honest and clear. Dante had looked at the picture for a long time, hoping to see the signs of booze abuse and the cigarette butts around his father – hoping for an explanation as simple as that -, but could not find any.

He didn’t think about his father much; but then he didn’t think about anything too much. He had no special inclination towards philosophy or speculation; he did not miss things he did not have and did not fantasize about what could have been. Still, as soon as he saw his father’s name in that Company memo, something cracked open inside of him. He could almost hear the noise. Dante had a feeling.

It was more than simple curiosity; it was a tight bunch of long-forgotten emotions and memories; the smell of fresh water at the pool when he was watching his school’s father-and-son contest, alone; the tears of his mother over old letters, when she thought she was alone; the longing after his uncle’s arms that hot summer at the farm, when his cousins were getting bear hugs from their father. And rising more strongly every minute for the first time in his apathetic life, Dante felt the anger.

He realized he hates his father with all his soul; but in the same time, he realized that his father had grown inside him to biblical proportions, untouchable and cold like the stone statue of the Commander. His anger had been like the Schrödinger’s kitten: it never existed until Dante actually saw it.

Feeling trapped, helpless and somehow guilty in his cubicle, Dante looked again at the memo. In a company with millions of employees, Dante realized that he only knew four people: his supervisor, his manager, Anna and Eric - whom he lost touch with some time ago. Everybody else around him was just a face with no name whom he'd greet every morning, avoiding their eyes. He had never talked or met with anyone outside of the Non-Negations department. For Heaven's sake, he didn't even know his cubicle neighbor's name.

"What's your name?" he yelled suddenly, jumping up and looking over the cubicle wall. "What's your name?"

A frightened swooshing noise came from the semi-darkness in the other cubicle; fast-paced, syncopated steps hurried out. For all Dante could tell, his neighbor could have been a big rat who had learned how to type.

Falling back in his chair, he weighed his options; it was imperative that he took some kind of action, as much as his inertia and disgust with people were telling him to stay put. But there were old, strong feelings inside him that he couldn't quite control; he had found a new drive- a motivation he had not felt before. He had to overcome his utter isolation; he had to learn to talk again; as much as he dreaded it, he had to communicate.

It was easy to talk with people, as far as he could remember. When he was a child, he used to go up to strangers and say 'Hi, I'm Dante. I'm four. Can you sing with me?' because he had liked singing since the day he was born. At the time, his favorite song was Rita Pavone's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - very appealing to his discerning musical ear. Some people would actually take him up on it and start singing along; it helped that he was a cute, curly-haired little boy with an irresistibly soft gap in his cheek.

With that, Dante swallowed the rest of the coffee from the cup and stood up. He had to start somewhere – and the only lead he had so far was the secretary who had sent the infamous memo. First thing Monday morning, he was going to call her and ask her, in a harsh and decisive manner, where his father was.

*-*-*

Officer Kampf was 43 years old, had two PhDs and a job that paid $6.56 an hour. These were the things that Officer Kampf had always had in his mind; every minute of the day, he was painfully conscious of himself, his age, his Ph.D.s and his hourly rate. He was exactly and precisely defined by these characteristics, like a simplistic drawing of a laughing God. He was nothing more and nothing else; once one knew these things about him, one knew Officer Kampf in his entirety.

Surrounded by dead silence, he stood in majesty at the upper gate of the Company’s highest floor; he guarded; he protected; he observed. He had learned a lot about the air and the heat on