Robert Wilson - Vortex

I didn’t participate in these debates. My own consciousness, though now totally incorporeal, was too limited to fully comprehend them. In any case the arguments could never have been rendered in words—the preamble to a single thought would have required thousands of volumes, a legion of interpreters, a vocabulary that had never existed.

The three-dimensional macrostructure of the universe began its ultimate collapse. Collapsing, it revealed new horizons. Hidden dimensions of space-time unfurled as new particles and forces crystallized from quantum foam. The ultimate darkness I had hoped for never arrived. The entity that had been the Hypothetical network—to which I was inextricably bound—expanded suddenly and exponentially.

But I can’t describe the realm we entered. We were forced to invent new senses to perceive it, new modes of thought to comprehend it.

We emerged into a vast fractal space of many dimensions and discovered we were not alone there. Multidimensional structures hosted entities that had subsumed the four-dimensional space-time that once contained us. As old as we were, these entities were older. As large as we had become, they were larger. We passed among them unnoticed or ignored.

From this new point of view, the universe I had inhabited became an object I could perceive in its entirety. It was a hypersphere embedded in a cloud of alternative states—the sum of all possible quantum trajectories from the big bang to the decay of matter. “Reality”—history as we had known or inferred it—was only the most likely of these possible trajectories. There were countless others, real in a different sense: a vast but finite set of paths not taken, a ghostly forest of quantum alternatives, the shores of an unknown sea.

Putting a message in a bottle and setting it adrift is a quixotic act, sublimely human. What would you write, if you wanted to write such a message? An equation? A confession? A poem?

This is my confession. This is my poem.

Deep in that cloud of unlived histories were unlived lives, infinitesimally small, buried in eons of time and light-centuries of space, unreal only because they had never been enacted or observed. I understood that it was within my power to touch them and thus to realize them. What followed, if I made such an intervention, would be a new and unpredictable tributary of time: not obliterating the old history but lying alongside it. The price would be my own awareness.

I could never enter that four-dimensional space-time. Any intervention I made would create a new history from that point forward… at the expense of my continued existence.

What is inevitable is not death but change. Change is the only abiding reality. The metaverse evolves, fractally and forever. Saints become sinners, sinners become saints. Dust becomes men, men become gods, gods become dust.

I wished I could say these things to Turk Findley.

I could have intervened in my own potential history, but I felt no urge or need to do so. I wanted my last act to be a gift, even if I couldn’t calculate its ultimate consequences.

Deep in the mirrored corridor of unenacted events, in a motel room on the outskirts of Raleigh, North Carolina, a woman performs a sexual act in exchange for a brown plastic vial containing what she believes to be a gram of methamphetamine. Her partner is an unemployed pneumatic drill operator on his way to California, where he has been offered a job in his cousin’s construction business. He doesn’t wear a condom when he penetrates the woman, and he drives away shortly after the act is consummated. The taste of meth he gave her when he rented the room was authentic, but the vial he leaves on the dresser contains only powdered sugar.

Orrin Mather’s existence is compromised from the moment of his inglorious conception. His anorexic mother delivers him prematurely. His infant body suffers the agonies of drug withdrawal. He survives, but his mother’s malnutrition and multiple addictions have taken a toll. Orrin will never be able to make and enact plans as easily as others do. He will often be surprised—usually unpleasantly—by the consequences of his actions.

I cannot make him a more perfect human being. That isn’t within my power. All I can give him are words. And by writing these words into the cerebellum of a child, I dissolve myself and make a shadow world real.

He lies sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a rented trailer home. His sister Ariel sits on a plastic chair a few feet away, eating cereal without milk from a chipped bowl, watching television with the sound turned down. Orrin dreams he is walking on a beach, though he has only seen beaches in movies. In his dream he sees something rolling in the surf—a bottle, its green glass faded by years of sunlight and salt water. He picks it up. The bottle is tightly sealed, but it opens, somehow, at his touch.

Papers tumble out and unfold themselves in his hand. Orrin hasn’t yet learned to read, but, magically, he can read these words. He reads them all, page after page. What he reads here, he will never forget.

My name is Turk Findley, he reads.

And: My name is Allison Pearl.

And: My name is Isaac Dvali.

My name is Isaac Dvali and

I can’t write this anymore.

My name is Orrin Mather. That’s what my name is.

My name is Orrin Mather, and I work in a greenhouse in Laramie, Wyoming.

In the greenhouse at this nursery where I work, there are paths between the plants and the seedling tables. That’s so you can get from one place to another. Also so you can work on the plants without stepping on them. Those paths all connect with one another. You can go this way or you can go that. It all has the same beginning and the same ending. Though you can only ever stand in one place at once.

I believe I was born with these dreams or memories about Turk Findley and Allison Pearl and Isaac Dvali. They troubled me much when I was younger. They came to me like visions. They blew through me like a wind, as my sister Ariel liked to say.

That’s why I went to Houston on the bus so suddenly. That’s why I wrote down my dreams in my notebooks.

Things in Houston didn’t happen the way I expected. (As you know, Dr. Cole, and I expect you’ll be the only one to read these pages… unless you show them to Officer Bose, which is all right with me if you do so.) I suppose I took a different path from how I dreamed it. I never robbed any stores, for instance. I guess I could have. God knows I was hungry and angry enough from time to time. But whenever I felt like hurting someone I thought about Turk Findley and the burning man (which was me!), and how terrible it would be to carry around the weight of another man’s death.

I work in the greenhouse mainly at night but they keep the big lights on all the time. It’s like a house where it’s always noon on a sunny day. I like the wetness in the air and the smell of growing things, even the sharp smell of the chemical fertilizer. Do you remember those flowers outside my room at State Care, Dr. Cole? Bird of paradise you said they were called. They look like one thing but they’re really another. But they didn’t choose to look like that. They’re just what time and nature made of them.

We don’t grow that kind of flower in the greenhouse where I work. But I remember how pretty they were. They really do look like birds, don’t they?

I don’t believe I will write to you again, Dr. Cole. Please don’t take that the wrong way. It’s only that I want to put these troublesome things behind me.