A Collision of Architects

A Short Story circa 2020

*Below is a short story I wrote when I was twenty-two years old and stuck in Vonnegut and DFW’s orbit, struggling to reach escape velocity. It’s imperfect, messy, and reaching—yet I think there’s something in it worth preserving. I’m letting it live here as a reference point for what’s to come.*

Bulbous and balding, though he wouldn’t admit to either, the retiree thwarted gravity with his leather seat and watched the pixels dance on his rectangle. The images he anxiously awaited were to present themselves to him at six-thirty on the dot. His living room was cavernous. The floor was made of limestone, and an ornate red Middle Eastern (rectangular) rug was perfectly aligned with the mounted rectangle (black) on the wall in front of him. Any honest man knew that there was nothing more important than symmetry. After all, if those home designs didn’t float into the visual field of the eye of his mind as a cloud might (he thought he was quite clever for referring to thoughts as clouds), if he weren’t adept enough to commit his clouds to blueprint, and if he weren’t convincing enough to sell his clouds for prices that only the most deep pocketed batch of buyers could afford, then he would not have time to sit there in that leather chair and watch his rectangle at all. It seemed so much more magical to refer to it as a rectangle, and he preferred to not know how these things worked. To exercise the thinking sack to the point of understanding was to deprive it of wonder.

His specialty, while still a working man, was designing homes with equal views of sunset and sunrise. Each room was outfitted with floor to ceiling windows in absolutely unobstructed terrain. Their main floors were usually open and girthy corridors. The communal, industrial living spaces were wide enough and long enough to fit in kitchens and all different sorts of thwarters. Bedrooms and bathrooms flanked these spaces on the north and south sides of the home, where they too had spectacular views of the risings and settings. Symmetry was paramount. His house was no different. He sat facing the north because he loved to feel the sun set on the west side of his face. The sun was there at that moment.

He braced for the impact of the highest adornments mankind bestowed upon the ego: high-resolution images strung together that held sight and sound hostage—a twisted alchemy of ideas emitted from the rectangle that seduced and rendered its viewers so passive that preconceived notions and principles alike cave and crumble before them. Everything inside the rectangle was an act of persuasion. For example, they would persuade you to think that one person is bad and another person is good and deserves a lot of money. Or that celibacy was a thing of the past and the word of God did nothing other than deprive a young woman of her agency. In between these persuasion acts there were shorter persuasion acts. Other members of his species tinkered away tirelessly and used formulas to turn anything from a box of snot wipers to fried flesh of other species into household names with a song and a strict color palette. The other members persuaded you to exchange your work paper for these items. Bodies in darkened, walled spaces around the world on padded gravity thwarters all labored under the perfect paradox that what they were seeing was for them and them alone, while maintaining they were taking part in something communal. Everyone on the floating blue orb where he lived knew that the highest form of individuality was attained through a rigorous diet of other people’s ideas. He was poised to watch other people’s ideas about him and was desperately trying to rid his mind of events of the before, which had shaken up his ability to render himself passive.

Back while the sun was behind his leather, he watched a twenty two minute session of his screensaver that showed ultra dense pixel aerial footage of Hong Kong and ogled at each light that shimmered in its mostly symmetrical buildings, marveled at this faraway nocturnal wonderland, its technical prowess and city planing ingenuity made more apparent in each second spent soaring overhead. He was nearly moved to wet eyes. The outside of him hadn’t so much as shifted in its seat and the edge of his lips would not dare to think about curling, but pangs of painful fluttering tickled his faculties nonetheless. Father to no son, though not without desire to do so, he evolved now into a productive asexuality: he was aroused only intellectually and impregnable via the symmetries of others, their symmetries in buildings that is, not of themselves. If their symmetries were symmetrical enough, made out of the right materials, the materials were nearly important as the design itself, then he might open his mind and gently receive them, if you will, allow them to penetrate his mental fortress, and bury them within long enough to create a new building, a merger of ideas of sorts.

His only movement during this period was using his grabbers at the end of his right lever to bring his liquid holder to the open place on his face where it was lapped up by his muscle that could rearrange itself into the letter “w” if it wanted to. The lever trembled on the way up to his face because of what he refused to admit was arthritis and once the cylinder’s contents were emptied, he let it rest on the expanse of protective, warm ivory mesh that kept all of his digesting tools inside of him. His left lever sometimes raised to his mouth hole of its own accord, in exact unison with the right, because of, well, symmetry. He, however, had long since given up the birthing of his ideas and aborted them before pen hit the page. Too many men kept on long after their time was finished. To push on past your prime is to run the risk of going full scorched earth on your reputation. He knew this well.

Sometimes, when not entranced by the patterns of the pixels, he found himself lost in reverie. His walk to the kitchen threatened to be one of those times, but he extinguished it by reaffirming his purpose at the sink. He turned both handles equally so that the temperature was balanced and he rinsed out the cylinder. He took a long drag of the invisible stuff that kept him alive and started off on the thirty two step diagonal journey to his bedroom on the south side of the house. Once at his door, he did something quite peculiar. Rather than walking in and undressing, he turned around and looked at the equally tall, brass knobbed oak door to the north and set off toward it.

Eighty eight steps later, he was there at the room unused and put his grabber on the unturned knob and gripped it tight, turned it, and pushed in. Seventeen years had gone by since this door had last been opened and that had been before it was installed. The truth was that any happening at all was fair game once one left his leather chair. Once one ceased to look the images that played in order justified by ancients, that moved along and had beginnings build off of the back of a widely accepted truth, a middle built off of the back of the beginning, and an end built off of the backs of both the middle and ending (a formula proven to be the absolute closest approximation of life to date), one would reenter the meaningless chaos of the three dimensional world. Anything could happen in three dimensions and, worst of all, you had to choose it, and even worse than that: it didn’t have to mean anything at all. However, the turning of this brass doorknob did mean something before he even knew it did. This was a room that was supposed to have been lived in by his twin brother.

Deceased for a long enough for most of the world to had forgotten that the brother existed, the room was exactly the way he remembered it seventeen years ago: the faux Picasso on the wall with a female a contortionist (there were no other explanations for the shape), the light gold bed set of the finest silk, the four poster frame that helped to erect the curtains at the bedside, blown gently by the air conditioner overhead. The sun’s rays entered through the north window above the dresser and illuminated a cloud of dust particles floating only like dust particles can float, reminding him how vacant the space was like only dust particles can remind. Full of surprises, the world outside of the leather chair was. Salt water convened at the corners of his jelly balls and rolled down the part of his outside that let him know he was him, completely unanticipated. Nor was his walk to the dresser below the window anticipated. He raised one appendage from the end of his grabber and moved his lever up and down, then pressed it, then moved it in a series of other moderately complicated patterns until a message was carved out of the dust. The top of the dresser now read “I’m sorry.”

He turned to step out but something shimmered in his periphery and his insides lurched. There was another figure in the room, a figure he assumed must be the arrival of his reckoning, but it was just him, and all the years inside of him. The years bottled up inside of the thing distort the outside of it. Each year since his emergence from the void to this three dimensional chaos rested invisibly within him, hurting more and more as they irreversibly compounded. He thought about what it was that made them hurt and came to the conclusion that it was the choices made in the vacuum that decided how hurtful lugging the years around was to the carrier. The sun did not have a lot of traveling to do before it arrived on the west side of his leather seat. He knew he had to thwart gravity again soon so that he could watch the images he had been anxiously waiting for: the show was about him. So he left the dust of the room behind and scuttled back to the south, avoiding mirrors, and entered a room and a trembling grabber turned a handle to wet the dust off of himself.

The wet that dampened his hair was two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen, and could be fixed precisely at whatever temperature he wanted. He liked a hot wet. It drizzled out and he lathered himself in perfumed bubbles that waged a microscopic war on his geology. Airstrikes of natural oils and sodium hydroxide were called on his useless jingle jangle and then to his excrement remover, on the moles opposite his front, and so on. The dust could not be washed from him no matter how vigorously his levers operated. In a fit of desperation, he unscrewed the cap and dumped its entire perfumed contents on his entire continent. It became apparent to him that the dust had made it into his core, into his thinking sack. Stepping out of the shower, he wiped himself off with a cotton flap and tossed it aside and redressed and tried hard to think of the pixels that awaited him.

Why had he made that pattern on the dust? Had he anything to be sorry for? Not to his recollection. That dust and that room could go fuck itself into oblivion if it thought he should be sorry. No dust was going to bedevil him. And what was that business with the mirror? Jumping like that? Scared of our own reflection now are we? His own reflection. His. No dust was going to make him feel like he was haunting his own home. He, a man of symmetry, a man of esteem, a man of reputation—his train of thought was interrupted by the sound of a device that dinged the sun across the sky. It dinged six times. There was no sonic happening in the universe more powerful than that ding. It dinged the show nearer and him back to his good senses.

Realizing the more exclusive components of his outside were compromised, he gathered covering materials from the dresser. Each of his two erectors tunneled into denim and emerged on hard wood and his grabbers buttoned up something stained but special around his expanse that fought valiantly against bursting from the pressure built up over compounding time. Something special would have to wait for another day to burst. A glance in the mirror before exiting his sleeping chamber was forgone in an attempt to preserve the sense of gleeful anticipation that circulated in every part of him that made up his whole. To the leather again at last.

Sun on the western side of the how he knew that he was himself, he grabbed a thin rectangular prism and pressed a sphere on its top left and once again willfully submitted himself to the tyranny of meaning. A cornerstone of the nation’s ideological nutrition was to air his pixels: it dealt with all things home and garden. It also happened to be his favorite terrestrial frequency. One had to look no further than number two-hundred-thirty-seven to watch people always manage to find blissful unions of aesthetic and budget, homes in the knick of time. Other times people sent others on long vacations and, while the homeowners were away, broke into their homes, gutted them, and replaced the old and dated with individualized chic. Never once were the homeowners not so touched that they were moved to wetness, but the prospect of disappointment reigning instead of gratitude kept viewers fixated on all of the program’s happenings.

Now two men who loved one another stumbled through their garage door from Malta and wandered into their kitchen to find, to their satisfaction, the horrid mid-20th century floral wallpaper, that assaulted the senses of any who passed through the kitchen and gave one the vague impression he were living in a dollhouse, gone and replaced with a cool blue ceramic tile and new appliances. This happened each time they came back from Malta.

The man on leather found the ceramic appalling every time the affair aired; hardware store homes had no place on his rectangle, asymmetrical was what they were, reproduced hundreds of times over… but that ceased to matter. Fortune herself prearranged the impending meeting with glory and he was about to bear witness to the immortalization of the fruits of his labor. Millions of others, too.

And sure enough, there he was, astride a male with a fuchsia t-shirt and black jeans who conducted each syllable with a refined gesticulation, introduced as genius of design—builder of homes of totemic power, finder of delicate symbioses between structure and nature, notorious recluse whose creativity is fostered in incumbent solitude. On the chopping block: a tour of the personal home of the architect himself—an exclusive infringement of privacy sure to titillate even the most hardened viewers. Opening credits rolled, a short biography showed a not so bulbous, not yet balding architect who rose from the chasm of nonexistence and grew to shave the tops of mountains off, supplanting their peaks with seven figure protective enclosures for the worthy hairless bipedal. They arrived at the very compound and toured the north and west gardens, each full of plants imported from far away. Then it was a journey around the circular blue paver walkway flanked with small pines. From above, the house looked something like a developmental challenged crucifix—its height fine but the arms suffered from that which plagued the tyrannosaurus. Its symmetry was unquestionable. On the front steps the man in fuchsia muttered things to build suspense before the program cut away to a series of short persuasion acts. Susceptible to the slow-motion potato rain, the blue liquid crashing down on gum rocks (ending with a twinkle), and the capsule sent down the gullet so that you could dispel feces with a smile rather than a wince, he made a mental note to go to the paper for object complex tomorrow. Again, he saw himself on his front steps and heard himself say that no one can do what he does. Imitators serve as hosts to the worst kinds of parasite

They opened the door and, for a brief second, it sounded as though the door behind him opened. A chandelier glimmered in the rectangle. Hanging a few meters behind him was by far the most curious object within the walls: small silver chains tautened themselves at six points on the back of Ouroboros, too busy with his feast to bother with protecting the crystals that dangled through and below the inner part of his circumference. An odd echoing effect crescendoed in the living room. Upward gazes glanced off screen and the architect excused himself.

The him inside the rectangle walked toward the leather chair with something in his grabber. He looked at his own grabber and found it empty. Fibonacci cartilage vibrated above spacial vacancies reserved for aural interpretation on both sides of the how he knew he was himself. The soft clopping of rubber on limestone encroached and he turned slowly to meet the blinding light of the western sky, and, through the slits of his appendages, a pair of eyes, inevitable eyes.