O l i v e r B e n j a m i n
he chose to pay attention to. If he fixed his gaze on one point, that
point would stop while everything else danced frenetically around it,
only to shoot off again when he shifted his attention away. It was as
if he was controlling the events just by observing them, despite the
fact that he didn’t have any idea what he was looking at. In fact, he
wasn’t even looking, exactly, as closing his eyes had no effect on the
scene. The perception was coming from deep inside his own
consciousness. He wanted to say “close the door,” but found himself
unable to formulate words of any kind. Impulses, ideas, feelings,
strange sensations bombarded him in random patterns, but he was
unable to identify any of them. It was as if he was being beset by
information so pure that though he understood much of it intuitively,
he could never hope to explain any of it with mere words. It was a
familiar sensation, however, one whose outline he believed he had
glimpsed before. It was as if—dare he say—he was experiencing a
giant cosmic joke, or rather, untold billions of them, at the same
time. That feeling you get after hearing a pun—the recognition of
something you had never seen before, multiplied to an infinite
power. Gareth laughed in joy and horror with every fiber of his being,
yet his larynx could emit no sound.
Noticing his abstracted state, Moses closed the door tightly and
shook the overwhelmed media mogul slowly back to sentience.
“Earth to smart-ass! Earth to smart-ass! Is anybody in there?”
yelled Moses, determined to lower himself to Gareth’s level in the
hope of making himself understood.
“Holy shit,” said Gareth, grinning despite himself, “What the
fucking fuck was that?”
Moses laughed solemnly. “That was the face of God. Or at least
just a little more of that face than you are accustomed to regarding.
Standing stationary as we are, at a crossroads in what you call the
space/time matrix, it’s possible to observe things both coming and
going instead of just those things that happen to be keeping time with
us. There’s a hell of a lot of stuff that you aren’t privy to, let me tell
you. This house we’re keeping you in right now is just a metaphorical
construction to shield you from what’s really going on around us. You
can see how without it, we’d never get any work done.”
“I’ll say,” Gareth replied weakly.
“There’s no point in blowing your minds before we’ve had a
chance to pick them, you see.”
“And what exactly are you looking to pick?” said Gareth. He was
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