The Watchers

The nascent epidemiology of the constant assumes that there are many things in between and no endings and no beginnings as no one wants to accept the responsibility for being the end and no one wants to assume control of the sort that is allotted to beginnings. I was working on precisely these principles, my job as Chief Scientist for The Arribo Group was to establish where there was complete disruption in continuity, by implication where beginnings collapse to allow other beginnings and how endings manifest themselves so as to evidence point to point structures.

It is an arcane physics, dealing with such plausible things as the geometry of space-time within such esotericism as the quantification of dimensional border crossings and metaphysical causality; these latter encompassed the quintessence of my research: at what point does reality merge with the universe? where does the border of genuine manifestations accomplish a release from the ether-ephemeral into material realities that embody cause and effect realities?

To simplify all that in more legal framework, I think it was Hegel that noted that reality was rational and what was rational was real. Which of course implies that anything that you can explain is real and my concern is why would something bother to cascade into real, that is into the known and explainable? At the very least it seemed boring, still there was a complication: You could not easily explain, much less understand, humans, and thus the premise of my research: If we are real what border had we crossed to become so, and why were we so incomprehensible? That is of course if we dare to assume that Hegel was right and you extend the obvious assumption that we are the only rational animal, in essence the most real and thus the one that must understand things so as to make them real…a.k.a. The Watchers!

The extreme of my research was bordered by where the soul enters the essence of self, character structures and, last, the cumbersome body. While my wife Anthelene thought I was rather brilliant for tackling such research, the truth was that studying the border interactions of existence did not match having to understand the essence of anything; I was merely dealing with the interactions between dimensional energies that stirred each other into varying alchemies. Perhaps because I didn't think it so difficult, I thought I could approach the problem with some reasonable axioms, and thus I was able to acquire the necessary grants to pass my days thinking of such matters. In the end the evidence would fall on the lap of the less theoretical physicists the experimenters, a task that I found as mundane as it is unnecessary. Once I worked out a theory I moved on to the next thing; it wasn't that I was lazy it was that I understood that once I thought something it was immediately in the collective memory.

Dr. Randall was my associate. I was now waiting for him to miraculously recover from a severe injury he acquired while mountain climbing some iced pinnacle. Don't know what it is about theoretical physicists but they love nature so much that they like to go here and there in expensive climbing boots and a little rope and handhold rocks. Dr Randall, we called him Rand, saved the all from being pronounced and that in itself was part of my study, why Rand and Randall had an unnatural border against their natural borders. Randall was a whole name, Rand had unnatural borders; thought it could in itself also be a whole and complete name, but for some reason, at least for Dr Randall, the acquisition of a Rand became a subcategory, an alias. The beginning, that is origin, priori, preposition were left untouched but the finale had been collapsed. Why would the latter be allowed by our way of thinking about language and not the collapse of beginnings? Why was the border on the side of beginnings harder to collapse than the collapsing of border endings?

Even in heads and tails the evidence was substantial, a lizard can easily lose its tail and survive the experience but not its head. Further evidence pointed to some interesting conjectures, the sum distortions and breakups of last names throughout history pointed to a breakage pattern that anointed a sort of rigidity towards the beginnings of first, middle and last names. This as if beginnings naturally were the controlling center of gravity for names and even words in general. You could see the phonics of names surviving, anchored only by their capital first letter. Randall could dissolve into an extreme such as Rhealdal and still be held together through an arcane conjecture held dismissively through the ages by just the letter "R". This because in some origin of lexicons you could find everything that ever commenced with the letter "R"; or we could dilute it further and still get the same from everything that sounded like an AHR and how it once, for the sake of contriteness, collapsed to rapid R.

Suppositions such as those above have a natural tendency to extend themselves into sub-categorical suppositions but there is a border to that as well; for some reason beginnings define endings and thus conclude borders. AHR or R is limited by the supposition of its very existence. Thus the reason, outside of linearity, why the letters Q and L exist is some mindful border crossing that the letter R or the sound AHR cannot and will not violate. In other words, an alphabet is a sign that the vocal universe has not a single letter that encompasses and collapses all. A monk humming the cosmic ohm is always missing something; perhaps ohm stretches as far as vocalistics may stretch but one may conclude that the breadth of ohm cannot define a universal entity or infinity. At best one could suppose, from the phonics of ohm, that its border, at least at one end away from the uttering monk, is slippery but yet finite.

These junctions are easily observable in letters as they form words but would be more difficult to observe in Randall's soul and body connection. Yet we could assume that the very same thing that occurred in the happenstance of a name could be transposed and observed in the essence and personification of Dr Randall.

My job was not only to establish the link in the gravity that existed starting with the R in Randall and the maximum allowed discombobulation of its phonetics so as to determine the maximum strength of its possessive R, but equally to determine what held Randall the scientist tied to reality even as he has suffered a severe accident, where he was held together by cast body irons and bolts, where he might be wishing himself dead, and yet he was holding himself together, talking to friends, relatives and his wife Nancy through a series of absences of noise and a presence of blinks that amounted to a blinking dependant Morse code.

There was also the border that once existed between Nancy and Randall that was now being held and violated by an obviously strong attractive force, which allowed for her to sit next to him for hours on end taking dictation from his ever blinking eyes; where he even mastered independent asynchronous blinking and could dictate two letters at the same time by dislocating the synchronicity of both eyelids. Nancy had learned to interpret and count both unsynchronized blinks simultaneously to deduce letter counts. And so now there had been a new borderless relationship between husband and wife and so possessively nondescript that they had reinvented their form of communication rather than let go of each other, proving how insurmountable their pairing pairs had become.

As you might well imagine upon hearing of Dr Randall's unfortunate fall into quadriplegics I panicked thinking that his contribution to our research would be held off indefinitely, and thus pounced us a major set back; we had after all done good work together and I considered him a valuable contributor. But then, in a most miraculous of fashions, it turned out that he was indeed performing a greater contribution now as a quadriplegic; from his ambulatory helplessness I began to realize the order of borders.

Nancy was what I would consider an incredibly strong willed woman; she was very active in her own career, an astronomer by trade. I never truly bothered to understand what she did but apparently she was always trying in this or that way to prove that the big bang didn't happen, and rather that the universe as a whole could not be pigeonholed into a singularity of space and time so absolute that it weighed crushing gravities of matter into irreparable insignificance; only to one day cause a vomiting of space-time now called the big bang. Nancy would feistily argue that this singularity was too optimal, too organized, too well thought out and thus too rational to explain the universe. In a sense Nancy thought, and she was also an expert on Quantum, that the universe was irrational, i.e. singularly borderless and using Hegel's inflexible ruler, mostly not real or worse realizable.

The problem that I had with Nancy's dinner party chimes was that if she was correct then our reality was merely some coincidental happening and thus it could not be described in any coherent manner. The implications were, to summarize it, that knowledge could not be known, that the epistemology of being was dead from the get go, in short, and it did offer some form of comfort for a researcher in my plight, in short the thing that had the shortest length, the lowest possible density, the quickest beginning and an ending not even plank length was the understanding of being. The understanding of being was inherently so unstable that it would collapse as soon as it was possible to know it, which of course it implied that you could not very much experiment with it. And if these things were true it would certainly explain why in scientific endeavors we scientists always seem to succeed at the expense of our ancestors, where killing off Newtonian and Alchemistic theories bring about new beginnings each with a shorter lifespan than the previous one; this latter for as we understand things a lot faster now they can perish faster still.

This indefatigable premise of the rapid extinction of ideas does not in any way explain why ideas continue to be born at such a feverish rate, perhaps it is because they aren't able to mature so they keep on reproducing themselves like viruses. Thus, being unable to understand is an endemic fertile nutrient for ideas. Of course I never paid much attention to Nancy at our dinner gatherings; I laughed a lot at her solemn deconstruction project of neutering the big bang. Why Anthelene and I would ponder that Nancy was actually thinking herself out of existence, nullifying herself with her premise and thus we thought it a bit unhealthy and disproportionately unnatural. As Anthelene put it, "We should be glad she is one of a kind."

All that changed in me when the honorable Dr Diana Folleck, a radical feminist and, unfortunately for me, the head of our university, gave a speech about Dr Brodeck's struggle against the male-dominated Big Bang community. According to the undistinguished Diana, a lover of all things masculine except men, Dr Nancy Brodeck was formulating a theory that would single-handedly redefine the universe into a mostly girls school diatribe where the expletive man-logic could be spliced into a cognitive feminine.

I would like to tell you that Randal and I listened to her speech but we didn't really, we were merely in attendance to assure that our grants were granted favorable sapphire eyes; but Rand then noted something piquant, "It is possible to see here how Folleck is pinching the ends of male and female divides, if she at once sees no need for man, it has to be because, as it is evident, she has incorporated maleness into herself; in fact she is a Unitarian of singularities, if all men were dead they would be dead outside of her but not within."

And perhaps due to my disdain for all feminists, when Rand put it that way it hit me that Nancy was dead on right, the singularity was not self-sustainable, but because it was a singularity it could not acknowledge anything outside of itself. That was the defining factor in border crossings. Sustainability had a mandated, an inward-looking reality, inwardness could be rational and individualistic. Eureka.

Bow to that; now that I didn't have Rand around to explain the Nancy logics I had it in me to realize that I had to eliminate the border of humor that I had created between Nancy and I.

I spent many days at the hospital. I didn't have the patience to communicate with Rand through his incessant blinking process, so our intermediary was always Nancy, she had pretty much abandoned her research, she had cancelled all her conferences, and with that I started to see the receding borders of her existence. She had to entrench in order to repeal what was happening in her innermost life, her social and professional borders were largely constructs of her relationship to herself and to Randall, and now she had not the energies to overextend her orbits. Anthelene attempted to take her away on weekend trips to our house on the lake, the lake and the nature trails that she adored had no longer the tug to pull her towards them, in a sense Anthelene and I were watching Dr Nancy Brodeck implode into a singularity that her entire science denied. I as the observer could see the definition of borders through entire scales of civilization; gradually Nancy and Anthelene became distant from one another, Nancy's dedication was now to blink with her husband.

I walked into the Randalls’ room, the machines keeping his reality alive pronouncing border crossing violations, nurses and doctors pumping their knowledge to sustain a reality called Randall, a reality that would not surrender, that kept dictating insights into our research, a reality that would pause when Randall would finally flicker off and end the cross border association with the machines that even depended on him to keep themselves plugged in.

I have worked in my endeavors with many brilliant researchers, Rand was a good researcher but he was not brilliant, he was warm and human and a man of verse, he would tell me what it was like to climb those mountains, to burn his toes with grafting ice, he would see the occasional eagle space itself through thin skies while determining him inadmissible prey; there was a cross-less border, though Randall hypothesized that if he fell to his death, the eagle could cross that border before the snow would cross it and harden him.

I think the only mountains that he hadn't trounced were the highest mountains, he climbed only to touch the earth. In some ways, I always felt that Rand was helping me cross the borders from the theoretical towards the real, and I enjoyed him very much, perhaps I even loved him as one might a brother one never had, and now that brother, Randall, was in this sterilized hospital room, watching his wife from some inner corner somewhere far away, longing perhaps to kiss her thin impregnable lips.

I sat next to Nancy and did what any good brother might have done, I breached the gap between her lips and mine, it must have lasted less than did the big bang. And the machines and diodes fluttered hyperactive heart and brain activity from Dr Randall's breath and blood, alarms went off.

Nancy's faced blushed with anger and incomprehension, nurses and doctors rushing in, "pulse too rapid, blood pressure too high, patient spastic,…" the room fully alive and everyone wondering what was happening to the patient that had been relatively stable for the past four months, except for two people that were outside the room even as they were inside; Nancy and I, she staring furiously at me, I simply looking at her in some form of outside community with Randall, we were inside the three of us, only seconds later, Randall escaped definition.

Head nurse shouts, "doctor, I have no pulse."

A long flat line after a brother's last mountain climb.


Ricardo