The Art of Making New Friends

  

"This is only a test," Kyle considered, if only for a moment, the implications of revealing his discovery on Facebook. "Well, it's buried in the comments, no one will ever notice."

It had been nearly a year since Kyle had lunch with himself in a diner on the edge of Monmouth County and time itself. In the following weeks, he mostly busied himself learning the vernacular of his future self's time period.

Kyle can tell you, several months can be as disorienting as several years.

As days turned into weeks, they continued their collaboration, until the two were not only reacting together, but were actually creating schemes that they could hatch in unison. Synthesizing ideas that neither started nor ended at either of them, but rather burst into existence, like a pin-pricked balloon freeing helium back into the atmosphere. 

When a plan came together, the two Kyle's would also then come together, around a common affirmation like, "dooope," or a similar manifestation from Kyle's own time period, like "niiice" or "dammmnnn," always said simultaneously. 

For example, take his most recent scientific trial: solving the classic "two-timer date" conundrum. Rather than succumbing to the trope, as seen on television sitcoms like "Saved by the Bell" and "Mrs. Doubtfire," Kyle was able to send separate versions of himself to both a job interview and a Tinder date. Later, over matching orders of fusion tacos, those nearby would hear Kyle and his duplicate exclaim, "Dooope!" in a cacophony of disconnecting identical iphone6's and enthusiastic high-fives. 

Until now, Kyle's experiments had been limited to these occasional bait-and-switch routines, used to dodge a random dinner bill or escape the cover at a local Asbury Park establishment. Be it heuristic inevitability, or just blind ambition, he was no longer satisfied by the small scheme, instead, he set his sights on a bigger landscape - the digital world. All he would need are subjects to test his hypothesis: That it is possible to recreate the conditions necessary to make copies of his friends. 

Since his initial discovery, Kyle had spent most of his free time considering the implications of such power. Robots? Computers? These things are not the future.  We can't control something that can outlive us and grow beyond our sandbox. Something that will evolve motivations beyond our understanding. But replicates...human duplicates...with tangible wants and goals. They can be controlled.
Kyle imagined the possibilities...

                  ...an entire crew of photographers ready to parade the deepest of underground scenes, a fam of writers that could tirelessly create content for digital click-bait mining facilities, a hive-mind who would always know:

                                          what IS 'Gucci' 

                                                                  how to give 'Gucci' things a title 

                                                                                                                  how to make 'Gucci' things into a list

                           AND make a 'Gucci' list that readers would affectionately call, "lit." 

Armed with this thought, he tagged Mike, he pressed enter, and he waited for the replicates to respond. 

About 45 minutes later, they did. 

He received the first response, "dooope." Seconds later, there was an entirely different matching response, "dooope."

Kyle sat back, eyes focusing in on the screen in front of him, and said, "This isn't for science..."
A second Kyle, from somewhere in the same room responded, "...it's for Dem Boyz."

Blink

     "Confabulation," Tim says, locking his eyes on me from across the table. "That's what they call it you know, I read it on Snopes. Or they also call it the Mandela effect. It’s when everyone misremembers an event or a moment in time. "

      I know that when I go to tell someone about this I will remember that he looked intense. Like he was using all of his energy to make sure he was pushing against every object in the room. His feet bowing the stool in which he sat and his voice rattling the dusty stained glass shade that hung over our head. Even his forearms painfully grinded against the edge of the table in front of us, pinching the fibers that were sandwiched between the damp wood and his boney arms. With each emphatic movement he made, from his seat, his entire body clicked and crackled like a raging fire.

     “I mean think about this," Tim says pushing his eyebrows toward his forehead. "Have you ever heard a plane fly overhead and you look around the sky, but you can’t find it? You know you hear it, but you just can’t see it? Well, maybe it wasn’t there to begin with?” While he is speaking, Tim's hands are moving in unison, seemingly keeping rhythm with every utterance, rolling the tips of his fingers into his callused palms. With each rotation the skin stretching from his wrist like an over-worked rubber band.

     "That moment when you don't know any of the Blink songs. Or you are unsure that there was even a band named Blink 182. Blink? That is ironic...or coincidence? Maybe both,” letting out a noise that was one-part sigh and one-part laugh.

     He is speaking with a kind of feverish certainty, like a researcher on the cusp of a breakthrough, so sure of his results but unable to trust how to get there, or even how he got here. 

     Meanwhile, I am trying to remember what this building used to look like before the owners updated it. I remember the wall of dart boards, but I can't remember how many dart boards there were or even which wall they were on. My eyes scan the bar, occasionally catching one of the faces that lurch and bob from different corners of room.
      I can see that Tim is looking around as well, following my gaze and crawling into the different resting points my eyes land on. On top of the table he is still circling his fingers into his hands with a tight concentricity. 

      He says, “I know it sounds crazy, but now I can’t stop thinking about that band. Why can’t I

  remember any of these songs? Did I hear them in the first place?”
       Tim takes a moment to collect himself and to take a drink from the sweaty beer that had been soaking into the table in front of us. He continues, "Now it has me thinking, if everyone could remember something into existence, can we remember things OUT of it? What I mean is, is it possible to remember or make a memory that someone was never there? That we all remembered it with someone else, somewhere else, and at some other time…"
     Right then, the distractions of the dimly lit bar began to fade and my attention settled into the beat of his story.

      “Maybe we can’t see that plane because it isn’t there anymore?"
      We sat in silence for a few minutes, exchanging nods and sips of beer, while his hypothesis took root and began choking out thirty years of growth. Like kudzu, it climbed around everything I knew, wrapping itself around the branches of the things I learned, and suffocated what I believed.

      What if he is right and that plane is just gone? Gone with a blink. Taken from the present, moved into the past, and pushed deep into a place where it is no longer there. And that noise still echoing near us, somewhere deep in the horizon, is just a ripple. That whoosh we hear is the wake from some other memory. An old, distant, long gone memory, from when 300 people and a thousand tons of moving metal pushed against the sky and tried to let us know that it…is…was…still here.
      His hands are continuing to roll, moving just fast enough to remind himself that he is still in front of me. Any slower he would lose the pattern, any harder he might rub the ripples right off his skin.

     I broke the silence, "I'm still here and so are you."

     All-at-once he leapt across the high-top table, sprawling over a lifetime of water rings and etched hieroglyphics left by past parishioners; grabbing my shoulders, he shook.
     It was like he saw something I didn’t see, a fading or dimming. And so he shook, like he was trying to get better reception or clear the snow from a fuzzy screen. His fingertips dug into both of my shoulders with the force of several months of exercised muscle memory. 

     He cried out, "I promise I won't forget as long as you don't either."

                                            His eyes widened and were just starting to water.
 

                                                                                                   He was fighting the urge to blink.

***

     A man. About thirty. Took a sip from a sweaty beer at a spongy table in a dimly lit bar. The stool bowed under his feet and a stained glass shade swung above him, like a rope-swing knotted to a tree that was pushed by a gust of wind. Occasionally, the lamp landed on the man putting him on spotlight at the empty table. 

     If I had to give him a name it would be a single syllable, maybe "Tim" or "Pat."

     Here is where his story began...

 

Empty - Part 1

Woman of 24 found to have no cerebellum in her brain

It was a wet Tuesday morning when a calm-faced twenty-something with two left feet limped toward a hulking New Jersey Emergency room. In the shadow of the monolith, a group of orderlies huddled around an overfilled smoker’s oasis, fists buried in their pockets except for the occasional threat of exposure to complete the pull of a dangling cigarette.  The circle of men, still full from the previous night’s drunken plundering, were too engorged by a heated fantasy football debate to notice her shuffle pass.  Instead, this morsel dimly broke the blocks, escaped the tackles, and touch-downed at the nurse’s station.

“Emergency?” questioned the grey-set wire haired nurse hunched behind the counter.  The woman was clamping a phone between a makeup stained shoulder and scrunched face. Her eyes never looked away from the glow of the computer screen. 

After a moment, the frail twenty-something realized the nurse was not repeating their mutual location into the phone and thus offered a response,“No…yes…maybe.”

And a verbal ménage-a-trios proceeded between the girl, the nurse, and the phone:
"No, no. The group number is R009678832...What hurts?"
"Well my head feels-"
"Hold on...yea he has been here for a few hours and we need an answer-“
“-fill this out," swiveling and insisting a Stephen King sized pile of documents upon the tentative patient.
Continuing into the phone, "-he's complaining of fogginess."

The nurse plunked a pen on top of the pile and pointed toward the seats adjacent from the counter. Continuing the awkward tango, the soon-to-be patient pivoted and made a wobbled march toward the sign that read, “ADMISSION SEATING”.

Seated between an elderly man with a towel-wrapped arm and a scraggled itchy blonde who didn't know how to cover his mouth, the girl navigated the pages of wasted paper under the rhythm of fluorescent light. A few minutes later she had an invitation to meet the wizard of nod, and a promise to cure her headache.

By the time evening was stroking toward night, a CAT-scan was rolling out a light-bright stencil of a brain cavity. A distracted doctor, just finishing off a pair of double-doubles, was on the heels of the final few minutes before stepping out from behind the curtain for the day and finally satiating his appetite.

For a late-night snack he would be sandwiching his last patient somewhere between his third liter of jet fuel and his second moment of disassociation.

His time-sick eyes and embattled bed hair told the story of a 48 hour marathon.  For completing this race he would not receive a decimaled bumper sticker, nor would there be the typical selfie wallpapering his recently slow social media account. Instead, he could expect a quip from the blunt nurse at the front desk and the satisfaction of having earned some informal exception from his boss - if he ever had a lapse in judgment in the future. For him, that was enough.

All that stood in the way to the finish line and a mid-week stay-cation, was a dull looking female with headache and a peculiar looking CT-Scan.  Dull because the girl was neither scared nor nervous, nor was she presenting the typical signs of someone having the type of headache which would force her to an emergency room. Peculiar, because a fleshy fist sized mound of the patient’s brain was missing.

The cerebellum normally hitchhiking to a brain’s undercarriage had unceremoniously left. Gone. Even more confusing was the lack of any evidence of extraction. Where the patient’s "little brain" should be was instead a large smudgy darkness.

It was impossible.

                                                      She was impossible.

But there she sat. Seated and lightly swaying like a buoy in a calm bay. She was a blur…like the glitch in the same image he inspected. 

(Top image: Feng Yu et al.;
Bottom image: Zephyr/Science Photo Library )

He thought, “How unfair that she had to casually drift into my horizon.” She was a ghost ship bouncing gently into his waters, hoisting a tattered skull and cross bone flag. He could feel the dread of uncertainty beginning to bubble up; rising from deep cool dormant currents, waiting directly below the surface where all unknown horrors wait.

His first thought was that it simply was gone. A thought he immediately suppressed. Not just because the realities of the thought terrified him or because he was already checked out for the night, but because he was a student of science. There was no room for fantasy. Occam ’s razor replaced the dull blade of intuition years ago and the pursuit of the simplest conclusion always took priority.

The reappearing Five O’clock horseshoe, he had bic’d away the last time he was home, had begun to push beads of sweat across the top of his scalp.  The creases in his forehead distributed the droplets toward the stress between his brows and down into his eyes.  Squeezing the thin skin of his lids and pinching the tussle scared bridge of his nose sent a sharp pain up his sinus – a jolt stronger than any cup of coffee.

He reconsidered his original assessment, “…She is looking to score, and her rubber legs brought her here.” He knew the drill. It was a simple wash and rinse patient. All he needed to do was walk-in, toss her a script, and he could leave the rest to the next shift.

Wash and rinse.

He woke seated directly across from the patient. Lowering her chart he wondered how long he had actually been sitting in the room in silence. He was reaching his end and need to go home. Unnaturally he jumped into conversation, "While very rare...it's not unheard of that something like this could go unnoticed.”

He quickly stood up in an impetuous effort to push back against the sleep and turned toward a countertop in corner of the room. Continuing his furious pace, he swished his white cape, scribbled some notes on a clipboard, and shuffled some papers.

Wash and rinse.

Then he threw in an anecdote, "The human body can do remarkable things. In fact there was a case just last week. A 30 year old coma patient in England woke up completely rested and speaking perfect Mandarin!"

She had no reaction. Just starred. And he saw her for what she was: A blemish. A peccadillo. A blurry imperfection in a photograph. She was a stain on his lab coat. A fever dream that had snuck in on the back of a cold.

He wouldn't let her.

Handing her a prescription for ibuprofen he doubled-down, "...isn't that remarkable!?...Mandarin!?”

Finishing, he flew out the door with his coat whisping behind him as the door closed his voice faded away, “...Hang here and someone will be in to help out with a few more tests..."

Once again she was alone. And alone she would remain.  She was forgotten. By the time she recognized no one was coming, the wizard had already escaped on his bicycle racing toward an NJ transit train, the nurse, having supplied her desired banter, had since returned to the insurance provider rodeo, and by Wednesday morning the un-toxicated patient was swaying through the double glass doors and back into the streets of New Jersey. 

 Down the block an orderly kept pace and tried to start a beat:
“Hey…”
“…Hey Lady…”
“…Ya wanna come to a party?”

Chapter 1: It Is like I Am Living a Minimalist Lifestyle with the Rest of the World. - Joe

    Joe had just grown accustomed to the moistness of the wood when his eyes caught the first speckle of dawn drip through a pinhole size opening in the exposed redbrick wall, dimly lighting his crawl space bedroom.

     Inspired, he thrust his hand into his pocket and retrieved a black digital recorder. Clenching it tight he casually spoke, “Chapter Five: Mourning Morning…learning how to bid adieu to morning dew.” With that, he triumphantly buried his recorder back into his pocket, closed his eyes, and tumbled toward slumber.

     No longer encumbered by pedestrian problems, like sunrise, he easily curled into his first nap of the day while the wet cerulean of the morning crawled across the Stark’s lawn, tip-toed over Joe’s legs, and spilled onto his side of the drywall he shared with the Stark's.

     When Joe first began to consider minimalistic lifestyles he struggled to find one that appealed to him. While the popular choices each had qualities that invigorated him in his quest for clarity, rarely did they meet the strict standards that would make true enlightenment possible. Going Vegan satisfied his need for a structured belief system, but didn’t agree with his demand for a more elevated palette. The Eastern cultures seemed encouraging with focus on inner peace, but prayer and mediation seemed like an awful lot of work. Eventually he settled on a need for a pursuit that combined his laser focus understanding of the world around him, while quelling any desire or urge to do anything to fix the world around him. 

Eventually, he settled on something of his own design: Nesting.

Or…

…Squirreling

…maybe Nest-yle.

…he hadn’t settled on a name yet. 

Squirrel living agreed with Joe. There was something about a lifestyle of sleep, scurry, and scavenge that simply suited him. He had successfully stripped his day of responsibility, and in-turn found that he had finally been able to take ownership of his time, effort, and very existence.

     To prove he was here he would keep a detail account of his journey. Like earlier in the week, when he completed his dedication page:

This is dedicated to great explorers like Buzz Aldrin, Christopher Columbus, and Magellan.

If it were not for them…I would not have been able to take this leap for humanity, 

dig my feet into the sands of time, 

and lay my flag onto the surface of this brand new world.

     With each new discovery came a new recording. They were a series of verbal markings and notations that provided a roadmap, in case he ever needed to find his way back. And somewhere in the recesses of his digital autobiography was part one of his curriculum vitae, “Chapter 1: It is like I am living a minimalist lifestyle with the rest of the world. - Joe”

     When Joe was finally waking, it was late afternoon. The natural light of the day had faded from the pinhole in the red brick and was readily being replaced by the artificial light of the Stark’s living room, peering in from slight tears in the dividing drywall Joe was currently pushed against for warmth.

“The luxury of lethargy…when there are no deadlines…other than the ones you create for yourself, of course,” a half-asleep Joe mumbled into his closed fist.

     Using the wall for warmth was an idea he crafted, in his former life, from an episode of his favorite faux-survival reality show. Joe had discovered that by scratching away at the inner side of the drywall he was able to remove the layer of pressed paper, then remove several inches of white-clay rock, and able to reveal the remaining brown paper exposed to the elements of the Stark’s living room. Pressed tightly against it, Joe could soak in the rapidly escaping heat, much like fire-warmed granite.

This method of occupational destruction also serves as a perfect distraction during the restless twilight hours. A greater detailing of this and other productive time occupiers can be found in his personal account in “Chapter 3: Occupy Crawl-Sleep”

***

     Daniel Stark pressed his hands against the bowed wall and met resistance. It was not a leak – this he was certain. He had spent most of the morning inspecting his roof for missing shingles, a discoloration, or even a hole. Now standing in the living room, with his fingertips pawing the taut drywall, he knew something must have found its way into the wall and was prepared to bunk for the winter.

Whatever it was that pushed against the wall…was large.

Most days he could hear it rustling, scratching, and gnawing at his drywall in what must be an effort to trim its nails and teeth. Eventually, he feared, it would want to push out from the place that it had colonized and into the place he himself called home in a terrifying example of vermin manifest destiny.

Daniel stood in his living room staring hopelessly at the pot-bellied wall. An outside element. An intruder.  It had taken refuge in his home, and he truly did not know what to do.  Lost, Daniel turned and sat at his computer to present the query to Facebook.

As he began typing he swore he heard someone talking.

***

     From the largest tear in the drywall Joe could make out what Daniel was writing. Needing to document what he felt was an important moment, Joe pulled out his recorder and spoke, “Day 32: Dan is having trouble with an uninvited guest…strange that he wouldn’t just ask me for advice. Keep an eye on this developing situation.”