CH II: Ante Bellum Longissimum
*
M.O.M.E.N.T.O.U.S.
Subtitle: The Original Eddie Motion Manuscript Unless Noted Otherwise [1]
BY
LUC GRINGO
(c) 9/11/2021
- (I’m a) Soul Man (Repeat 4x)[1]
So the long and short of it when Eddie comes clean is this:
I say to him Eddie, when you lied about your mother, I mean about everything before we met, whenever that was, it’s just—I mean how do I know now it’s not a lie, too?
Look he has his eyes lowered toward his mangled hand, which is stiff with congealed blood crusted over the tears in the flesh.
Look, I couldn’t tell you before, you weren’t on my side.
What are you talking about?
His face is cool. The whirring lenses study the wound carefully and then justify to his brain:
I know this is going to fester in the hospital if you take me there. The doctors will cut it off, but the infection from the shards of micrometric carbonfiber which went deeper up my arm will already have my lungs and heart by then. Once I die, they’ll autopsy me, and then they’ll have the glasses. The goddamned establishment will have the glasses.
I can’t fathom the origin of his urgency, even knowing how he’s described their effect.
Understand—what the glasses let you see, it’s only good for one man. One man ahead of them all, always with the upper hand. But what they will do when they come to understand them, the capitalists, they’ll do what they did with personal computers, or Jesus. All those things the glasses make so real to me will be destroyed when they are commoditized into smithereens. It will be a phase changing phenomenon. We’ll all lose track of our senses, we’ll all become enamored with the possibility of divine union, of communion of souls, of collective consciousness, but really it’s all just lies, lies for profit…
It’s only kind of convincing and mostly paranoid and I think Eddie’s done talking on it as he’s probing his hand with the silencer of the 1911. But then he adds:
Jonas Salk said he would give away penicillin for free because you couldn’t put a patent on the Sun. See the reasoning? It’s poetry. Pure idealism. Look at the present—now that you can profit off it, doctors over prescribe and bacteria are evolving into worse deadly creatures at a far more rapid rate.
He stops and points the gun at me.
If I go, the glasses go with me, got it?”
I nod.
I ran the medirithms to their asymptotes at full QRAM[2] and it’s not changing the diagnosis. I’m gonna die if I leave here tonight, and I told you it’s not going to happen that way. So—
And then he cocks the pistol and flips it in his hand so the stock is facing me.
Do me in, brother. Be my assassin, send me to my maker, cover me in DEATH baby DEATH
He’s frantic, and the blood starts to come out from his hand again, only now I can see it’s got a hue like deep blue steel.
You’re fucking crazy.
He’s thrusting the gun at me now and I back off to stop him from hitting me.
My mind left me a long time ago, Slugger. I told you how these things work. My brain’s just pictures, nothing but pictures. The parts are there but the order isn’t. I can’t put it all together, I CAN’T PUT IT ALL TOGETHER
He points the gun at me now and I duck away. He fires and nicks me in the leg. I have the sense he placed the bullet there, aiming to graze me.
Next ones at your temple.
Fuck you coward just stop FUCKING AROUND!
Listen. You need to do this. I’m not wired for suicide anymore. I told you I took those potentials out first thing when I remade the glasses. Too evil, too self-indulgent.
What about murder, then I surmise You can’t fire that thing to kill.
I’m still crouched down though I know it’ll do me no good if he can.
Fully capable of killing. Nothing wrong with killing someone in defense of the self in as far as I can tell. And that means I can kill you: but look I don’t want to.
I turn my chin up because he’s standing nearer to me now and he’s handing me the gun again. I know better than to look into the glasses but want so bad to see his expression that I do anyway, and now I’m standing there with the gun aimed at his forehead right between the lenses.
Just do it he’s cacklingand I hear in the cackle all the laughter from all the kids I ever knew who beat me up: recall all the evil acts by people with power over me who made me feel like shit.
Take me down Charlie Brown just pull that mm-mm-good trigger easy now easy now
Then his brains are on me and I’m still staring into the glasses. Between us I hear it in my head:
That wasn’t the whole of it what I told you only some—
—and there’s a lurching from his stomach. He pulls a yellow book out from his shirt and hands it to me: I swear like he’s still alive he hands it to me, and then the lights in his eyes go out,
start to sputter and spark instead as if trying to destroy themselves. I go for them barehand: grab the right frame with a firm left claw and pull back but they’re actually wired into his face so they rip off parts of his skin when they come loose. I come to and realize what I’m doing, vomit violently into the gore and all over the corpse. But when I wake up in my apartment in the morning, it’s just the book on my bed and the sense of having just dreamt, even though I can’t explain how I got to where I am, as there’s nothing there to prove any of it was real at all but the book itself anyway. It’s a yellow book: The Byzantium Diaries.
Then I see that there’s something set between the pages, so I pull it out and it’s a drive for a PC. I plug it in and it’s got the instructions for constructing the glasses. And it’s like I made the file, because it’s all been generated from the software I use: so when I see the halfworked pair of green lenses on the desk I know it was just a nightmare from that night when it happened, everything is well again and I’m back to work.
You see amidst the muddled romantic chaos of me and Eddie’s backandforth there were moments of real, true and most vividly unmistakably for certain, clarity. As if oneness with God was coming through the pores: as if sunlight in fact carried all space and time as Einstein fathomed: as if trees and rocks and things like that were more than they were and only for their being. And it was in these moments when the glasses came to me, well came to Eddie, who then showed me the concept of their function:
Time is moving forward when we talk about it in terms of age, music, money. But when we talk of time itself we are talking of that which moves expanding out in all directions, until at last you see the miniscule segment we possess in our conscious life and by virtue of one’s nature one’s thrown into crisis. So if it can really be broken down, the whole system undermined, then life becomes what we become when we are nearest death, by which I mean it’s much easier if not something else entirely beyond all signs and signified.
So the glasses do just that which Eddie claims will free the spirit, slowing time by speeding up the brain and by now he has diverged completely from the timeframe of the normal you-and-I.
Fickler forms of time travel like those partaken by The Psychedelic Prophets simply cannot be controlled the way the glasses can be. And could an acid addled brain be worth much in the end anyway? how would even the cloud in its enormity ever calculate for those infinitely complex and contradictory synapses flashing like Zeus’s thunderbolts ad mortem, any better than beyond pretty neon pictures on an MRI? When a person is a visionary one day and suddenly snaps the next? With the glasses we’re talking about inputoutput past the zeroandone and that’s how I am here for you to see and only you, because you’re the one I chose to see me by virtue of my vision.
But Eddie really is gone now: the one I knew. He could not land the leap. His blood is on my hands, was in my nostrils. Out driving sometimes when I see a green light glow in fog I taste the bits of brain that hit my mouth agape when I put one in him. He’s gone, but I have his hardware, so no matter what else I try and do, no matter what tepid job I take and leave, I must above all things fix what I know will work so I can see again what he once showed me.
Because I saw it once, only once, when Eddie assumed I wasn’t there, when he had removed the specs which I thought he never did to rub Burt’s Bees® on the brownblack crusty craters around the inputs where his opal eyes had been. I saw them on the mant still whirring and I stood there, statuesque in the dark doorway to the room where he kept his amp and computer until in one swift motion I had them pressed against my pupils: I saw Eddie growing old and dying, being born again, then dying, while the room lit up like moonlit snow or the sunshine through an autumn canopy. And all I heard was Eddie screaming no nodamnyou no and though he grasped for me I was always three steps ahead of him: hearing his thoughts before the words had formed for him to know to say, and when I took them off I saw that Eddie was still just there aloof and rubbing. And my eyes cried bloody tears as I laid me down to sleep that night but I do not need to worry now, I know what is ahead for me, for us, for everything that was and would ever be. It is there in the glasses. I will make them work again.
[1] Chorus to Soul man (Sam & Dave: 1967)
[2] Quantum Random Access Memory
2. Ante Bellum Longissimum
Eddie walks into the office with a leather jacket slung over his shoulder. He sees the shadow of the ten gallon hat on the wall beyond: Busto the clown is conducting business.
As expected. It’s a room in the East Wing where the carpet is blood red and the walls desert yellow. Busto and his visitor are in the chamber designed to contain their conversation from bugs both hostile and friendly—China, Russia, Cuba, North Korea, South Korea, UK, Germany, the Saudis—and there’s music playing over the speakers to further disrupt recordings so Eddie taps his toe to the tune of Wake up Little Susie (Everly Brothers, The: 1957) until he recalls the security monitor hung on the wall that he would be on, if he hadn’t just sidestepped out of the cone of view as it pans on its axis. With some more fancy footwork he slips around the corner to a spot outside the reach of all surveillance, and from this vantage he sees the second shadow: the silhouette of a keffiyeh.
There’s the sound of a door behind him and Eddie hovers. The pair of shadows jolt. With impossible thinness Eddie slides beside a mahogany pilaster. It’s the Vice who’s entered in a hurry and doesn’t notice Eddie who kneels when he’s past to get a better angle on the trio.
Everything is on schedule. Now he just needs to witness the handshake.
The conversation unfolds with the usual formalities. For a moment the Vice grimaces and Busto looks uneasy so Eddie positions himself for the maneuver: the Vice and the prince grasp at the wrist and Busto follows suit.
Sure I know ol’Sammy. Plays some raquetball don’ee?
That’s his cue: he turns on the glasses.
ahem Not ol’sammy, sir…
The room is filled with an explosion of light. The walls have lost their material and the surfaces are delineated only by the vibrating strands of their corners, so that even the bullet-proof silence chamber has become nothing more than intersecting sets of the lines required to form each prism. When Eddie moves through space in this phase it is exponential so that every action is accelerated and time is aberrated to allow his easy navigation in a dimension that has the handy effect of also rendering him invisible insomuchas he is beyond the realm of vision. He sneaks snakelike through the distorted bluewhite miasma all around him up to the atoms of the chamber’s glassplate walls and a cascade of electrons erupts where Eddie’s knee first breaks the plane, so that he can slip through and get what he’s come for.
With perfect stillness now he is in the chamber beside the three parties interlocked in their circular grasp. He removes the scalpel and the syringe: in a flurry of swift articulations of the wrists he has secured the substance and is backstepping through the gouge in the chamber wall that spurts frenetic electrons until he zips it shut with an outstretched index finger zzzzzz-zuttt.
Time is returning to its normal state of flux and Eddie has only seconds to exit the office and cross the hall to cruise through the kitchen and split out the wall along the west court so that he can escape by way of the rose garden. He sidesteps pressed against the West Wing out onto the parking lot and places the payload in the front chest pocket. He swings his leg over the black Honda with bright whitewalls leaning on its kickstand at the curb beside the fence. The guards who had just noticed the bike’s presence have begun to approach but with a tap on the temple Eddie enters a different mode and vanishes to leave the guards there scratching their heads.
It’s an hour to IAD but with the glasses back on he can cut it down to 5 minutes. Just long enough to listen to Power of Soul (Hendrix, Jimi) which is queued up on the gyrostabilized tape deck. He drops the clutch and gases it from 17th to get onto Constitution ‘til he’s blazing down the dashed lane dividers on route 66 past the traffic that has slowed to a dim flickering crawl: the headlights projecting foggy beams whose photons whirl out in perfect spirals from the centerpoint of the lens and recede like vapor into darkness that is periodically permeated with the wave particles dancing as they emit from the highway lights towering above the asphalt. Eddie sails by with an eerie grin perceiving the liquidy forms reality takes when travelling this close to the speed of light. The distorted guitar solo screams on his speakers: Buddy hits the first chorus when he sees the exit for 267: with the power of soul\anything is possible\with the power of soul\anything is possible and it’s a straight shot the rest of the way.
The bike dives and dips through the gaps around orange Toyotas and black limousines, commissioned SUVs, the fleet of middleclass vehicles that congest the four lanes approaching the terminal which Eddie navigates with magnetic buoyancy. He’s got a spot reserved offsite so he drops the bike with the valet, tells him tell your boss it’s Eddie’s and turns his heel toward the terminal rising its suspended concrete roof on great leaned posts that beckon the travelers toward curtains of glazing hung in between.
Eddie’s through the door and past the counters and kiosks when the glasses dull to a bleary gray which indicates they’re low on juice. He slips in front of the security line with some delicate choreography and flashes his ID to the TSA who raises an eyebrow: it’s a state license indicating he’s blind. While he studies the document Eddie takes the opportunity to fling a telescopic white cane out in front of him for full effect.
Finally the officer signals to a man in a vest. This way sir he says and directs him to the front of the xray belt to take him through the metal detector and he doesn’t even have to disclose the loot which he’s sleighted up his shirtsleeve with the savvy of a card magician. When he gets to the other side he slides it back into the jacket pocket sitting in the gray plastic bin, whips it over his shoulders and slips his wrists through the cuffs. Eddie thanks the attendant with a palmed hundo. I can take it from here.
He hops on the aerotrain that’s sparsely populated with yuppies in jeans and sports coats, a few jittery families, the standard cast of foreigners. No one notices Eddie but he notices them each in the complexity of their minutiae. Sure he’s fulfilled his directive, but still he can’t help sizing them up. It’s an instinct he likes to maintain and the setting makes for good practice. All it takes is some well placed glances—if you can determine the ratio of pupil to retina and the depth of the furrows in the forehead, then cross-multiply the max circumference of the cranium to the width of the mandible, it’s just a couple more conversions to get your classic rough estimate.
Of course you can’t know if you guessed it right until you perform the operation but Eddie with his aptitude can do the full assessment in a wink and he’s never been wrong. He can’t sense any whoppers in this tram car so he doesn’t waste a syringe. Instead he turns on the glasses and takes the prop cane in both hands. As time slows to a near halt he lances the rubber gasket between the doors and pries them apart. Stepping through the gap and pulling himself to the roof of the car he splays out on his stomach then lifts his hands to grab hold of the maintenance ladder above him as the doors slide shut in slomo below. He gets up a couple rungs before the aerotrain bursts ahead through the tube with a sonic boom just missing the mahogany soles of his black leather boots. The glasses hum to a stop: dead.
No matter. From here he can get the rest of the way without the privilege of warpspeed: the steam tunnels that he’s entered lead to the corporate jets. Now that the glasses have gone defunct Eddie really is blind but he’s memorized the map and it’s not long before he emerges from the manhole on the concrete pathway adjacent the tarmac. He projects the white cane but only to whack unconscious the curious ramper who’s approaching him. He can see the plane ahead of him in his mind as he traces the contours with his other senses. It’s a Learjet 60. Cheap.
There’s a thick cable on the ground that junctions with a transformer on a utility cart. It can reboot the spectacles so he puts one hand on his temple and grabs the cable with a crushing grip. Crackling bolts arc across his knuckles and shoot glittering over gritted teeth as the green glow grows on the lenses, til there’s a POP when the fuse blows out and the singed cable snaps like a whip out of Eddie’s hand. He adjusts his jacket by the lapels and takes a look toward the limo that’s driving toward him on the tarmac. Late as usual.
The Cadillac pulls up and parks next to Eddie who’s got his hands in the pockets of his jacket. With his left he’s sending the canister back and forth around the tips of his fingers. The driver steps out and opens the door for Eddie to seat himself next to the man with gray hair cropped close to his scalp. He smiles through a stiff straight beard that comes to a blunt white point on his chin.
You made it here without any altercations I trust?
Eddie raises the corner of his mouth to half a smile. Not a one.
Given your record I’d expect no less his anticipation is starting to brim across his upper lip in spite of the decades of discipline, practiced composure and the substance?
Secured as promised.
Excellent m’boy.
Sure thing, Pops.
Eddie pulls out his hand in a fist, knuckles up. He flexes his thumb and the canister pops up between his pointer and middle fingers. The man with gray hair eyes it with visible hunger.
You’re certain it will deliver?
It always does.
He takes a slender needle from the rose on his lapel and inserts it into the latex seal of the vial. With a delicate jab he nibs the surface of the fluid inside and retracts the needle then pulls down his eyelid and taps a vessel on the ball.
Ah—
Eddie knows he’s made the sell so he examines the briefcase for its contents and offers the grayhaired man a handshake. He’s smiling ear to ear, clutching the canister in one hand and the pricker in the other so he can hardly notice Eddie’s outstretched hand, but when he does he sticks the pin back in its place and grips Eddie with gloved fingers. Great work. Worth every penny.
Eddie gets out and heads for his bike. The limo continues to the aircraft and the man with gray hair exits to climb up to the cabin door. Eddie straps the cash behind his saddle and swings his leg over. He kicks the asphalt and slings toward the runway. The plane has begun to taxi in the same direction as Eddie who is far enough down that he whips a 180 and revs. The turbines kick on and the plane starts its takeoff despite Eddie who drops the clutch and burns a thick black line behind him. He is about to collide with the fuselage as he rears back to pop a wheelie and manages to catch his front tire onto the surface of the plane’s underside and it sticks to it like glue. With a drop of the wrist he gets the right gear and crawls along the body of the jet upside down until he dismounts with a tug right before the landing gear.
No one on board noticed the whitewall tire that burst through the floor of the fuselage as its rider decompressed the subatomic particles of the aircraft and swung in twisting his trunk above the bike that swung around, down, and around again in what’s commonly referred to as a backflip indian air to avoid the passengers who had also become like trillions of tiny dots that hover in a fluidic postatomic plasma only Eddie can see. He was aiming for the bearded man’s chest with his right hand when he jolted the bike above him, then below him, fully inverted, and pinched the canister from his lapel. He steers through a gap in the membrane of the portholes that seemed to splice his being with theirs[1] and the bike emerges, but does not return to its normal form until Eddie hits the button on his temple and the objects in space are restored. He’s careening back towards the tarmac at a severe angle but his palm meets his temple and time slows just enough to give him the space to bring his acceleration up to speed with the ground below. He lets go of his glasses to grab the handlebar and hunches his shoulders as he hits the ground full-throttle, painting another black line on the pavement as he steers toward the access road.
Behind him there’s a roar and a crash: that’s number one. The jet’s dived into the rough around Route 50.
He sticks one hand in his pocket to confirm he’s got the loot: and so the tally has begun. In sixteen years he’ll be looking back to this as the night it all began. He’s got a lot of work to do before then: about one every two days. To restore the balance and achieve the jump.
[1]as if in the flatness of the skull in The Ambassadors (Holbein: 1533)
[1] In some versions (esp. those circulated by internet ca. 2020): Subject: The Original Eddie Motion Manuscript (Unless Otherwise Noted) along with this introduction:
[my_friend],
I’m writing on behalf of youknowwho regarding youknowwhat.
Take this as the full account of what transpired as far as it can be reassembled.
You’ve been initiated to the origin. You know why it’s got to be kept underground. I reiterate: don’t let this out to anyone unless you’d trust them to lie to the society on your behalf. You likewise should understand the granting of this MS as a sign of my confidence in a person like you to do the same. They will find you if they haven’t already: your loyalty will be tested.
You have questions: What is the terror of Eddie? What is the nature of his spectacles? The nature of his real work?
The answers will fall in place as you prove your readiness. The point is: don’t let the unknown scare you. None can be surer than I that Eddie in fact exists to save you.
I’ve done my best to show you that his scheme is for your benefit by every imaginable calculation of utility both individual and total. If you do the right thing by Eddie you will gain special powers in measurable quantities and you will know the truest nature of his being.
But don’t cross him. Then he’ll double back his offer twice before he takes ya ferallyerwerth. Consider this fair warning.
These are the documents relating the encounters along with the context as time would allow. In the probable case of an encounter with Eddie in the future take note: make record.
Let these and all other possible future moments be dubbed the panscene and the each one individually a futurescene in the lexicon of the canon. In these terms the solution resides in the procurement of the proper scenes in the intended order by the manipulation of free will. Since all scenes exist in the panscene it is only by the belief in the knowledge of everything that a direct line of fate can be discerned to one who has reached Eddie’s plateau. If you attribute it to any other then you’ll never be beheld as a most honorable believer beyond all simulacrum.
Among us it is taught certain things must be felt for themselves. This is Eddie’s promise if you let him in. Apply yourself to the text: there are secrets that affect each person in a different manner. If you begin to lose the path remember and repeat the constant question in the sacred shorthand so that you may recenter your being on the inexorable truth of the conflict deep in each of us: the reprehensible question that holds us from immortal union with the godhead: terrific and daunting enigma: Y, Eddie Motion?
I. (I’m a) Soul Man (Repeat 4x).. 5
II. Ante Bellum Longissimum…. 11
VI. Everyman is Underground.. 35
XII. Complete Your Complex.. 101
XIII. Do You See What I See?. 119
XVII. Pick A Mantra, Any Mantra.. 129
XVIII. A Poor Trait of the Artist. 131
XXI.Browse Free or Die Trying.. 208
XXII.Rob, Peter, “Toupee” Paul 219
XXIII. ‘Nother Nursery Rhyme.. 225
XXIV. Need a Hand with That?. 235
XXVII. Don’t Mar My Log, O Captain! Or, Ante Bellum Maximum…. 273
Apocrypha
THE_BYZANTIUM_DIARIES 
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