Chapter Text
Around two the traffic got bad. Ponder always tried to be out of the parking lot of the compsci building before then, but he was running late. He was running late because he had woken up late that morning. He woke up late because the floor downstairs of his hall was having a party that went on longer than was advertised in the flyers that were taped to every window of the building. This was the major drawback of still living in a freshman dorm as a senior, but most of those kids didn’t even have cars and so there was always plenty of parking and the dorm was centrally located on campus, making his morning walk to the dining hall shorter than it would be had he taken up residence in the senior cottages on the northern edges of the university. There was another secret reason he still lived in a freshman dorm, there was no better ego boost than being called “sir” on a regular basis, and most freshman mistook him for an adjunct professor. The kind of mistake only a freshman could make, because to anybody else on campus with any real knowledge of the world would take one look at him and see behind the coke bottle glasses that he was exactly as confused and helpless as everyone else.
The binders under his arms were threatening to slip as he stumbled finally to his car, a light brown two decade old Sonata that used to be powder blue. He threw the materials into the passenger’s seat and started the engine. There was already a line five cars long trying to get out of the parking lot, he debated whether or not he should just sit and wait for the line to go down or bully his way out. He was already late, what was one minute or thirty if you’re already behind? It’s all the same, he thought, late is late. The engine rocked and racketed and sent little familiar shock waves through the car that jostled the tower of books and binders strapped into the passenger’s seat. I’m going to look like such an idiot, he thought.
Forty minutes later the Sonata arrived at rear parking lot of a West End oyster restaurant. Overhead, clouds were gathering over the city and threatening to start snowing. Don’t do it, Ponder squinted up at them, don’t you dare. The clouds didn’t answer. Ponder, tucking a scarf into his jacket, made his way to the double glass doors of the Mother Shucker. The scene inside was that of an average Wednesday, business men romancing customers over late lunches and, of course, at least one yuppie family with a newborn in a highchair watching a YouTube playlist on an iPad. He walked passed the main dining room and to the far corner where a staircase was hidden behind a beaded curtain.
Upstairs there were fewer tables than the main dining room, and there was a small stage upon which the publishing director was already reading off announcements.
“Before the end of this month we need to have at least one more editorial meeting for the winter issue,” He continued, his bushy brow furrowing at a notepad in his hand that was crumpled from years of obsessive notation and being taken in and out of jacket pockets. “Our regular date for release is, hm, the first of December. I’d like it if we could keep it that way, hello Stibbons glad you could join us.”
Ponder slinked into a bar stool at the only table left, feeling the pressure of shame weighing on him like a diver in the deep sea. The publishing director continued. Ponder tried to pay attention, but his phone buzzed. There was a text from Adrian, affectionately named labeled as That Dumb Son of A Bitch in Ponder’s contact list. He glanced around the room and found Adrian was sitting on the opposite side of the room, close to the heater where everyone who arrived early always set up. The text read:
u ok
Ponder typed a response discreetly.
Traffic :/
Adrian replied.
drinks after?
From across the room, Ponder offered an ok hand sign, to which Adrian responded by reciprocating the signal. Good old Adrian, he was a lanky, curly haired, functioning alcoholic angel. The friendship between The two men had been forged in the fires of academia and seasonal depression. It was said that no true academic had a friend in the world, only competition, but Ponder had come to his own conclusion about this archaic belief and that it was horseshit. He and Adrian had suffered and survived together screaming nights and horrid introspective drama, the kind that, truly whether you wanted to or not, really forced you to become close with someone. Luckily for Ponder, Adrian had turned out to be a trustworthy and loyal man, and for Ponder’s part so was he, and so the relationship remained mutual and only on rare, usually deadline-related occasions, combative.
The meeting wasn’t of great interest to Ponder, he’d heard it all before. We’re behind on blah blah, so and so is in town and wants to collaborate on something, you all need to come to this other meeting but it’s not really mandatory but I will judge you harshly if you don’t show up. All of this was only a formality for Ponder, he was gunning for the directors chair and would likely get it by this time next year. Nobody at the university had been as dedicated to the discovery and preservation of, what the publishing department referred to as, lost texts. The lost texts were essays, articles, schematics, drawings, and field notes of academic importance that had, usually through colonial violence, been suppressed or otherwise destroyed. In fact, he had created the virtual archive of translations, transcriptions, findings, and articles about these lost texts in his freshman year, and he had been maintaining it in a moderators position ever since. But his ambitions reached farther than simply archiving lost knowledge.
There was a project taking shape in his mind that he had been sitting on for months, he wasn’t sure what shape it would take but he knew that there was something else he could be doing with the archive. It wasn’t the sort of project that you could write down or even describe to someone else, it was an ethereal idea that passed through his mind like a ghost through closed doors, it was a passion that textured his thoughts and words in ways he had a hard time articulating. It was something, but only that. Just a thing, just a loose collection of thoughts and ideas, but it was all that he could think about. The inception of this dreamlike dancing concept was equally as abstract. It very literally came to him in a dream.
In the dream, he was floating. There was a light ahead of him blooming and on its radiant edges was an ever-shifting ring of color. In the dream, he knew what the color was, but when he awoke he couldn’t quite describe it. It was as if he had been seeing in black and white his entire life. As the light grew around him, the black void he was floating in became a hypnotic sea of this strange new color, and he felt as if he was being stretched from one end of the universe to the other and back again in a perfect ring. And then he thought, within the dream, clear as a bell sounds, this is the eighth. That was all. And to even recall it he felt embarrassed of its simplicity. Everyone thinks that they have important dreams, because in the moment they feel important. But the importance of this one stuck around inside of him, it bubbled up to the surface of his thoughts and he chewed on it like a gum that never lost its flavor. It was hanging around, and so far that hadn’t been a bad thing. It probably meant nothing, but then again, what if it didn’t?
He would never tell another living soul about the fantasy, it was just too ridiculous and he didn’t need any help being ostracized by academia. He had already been labeled a conceptual man by most of his peers. This was a polite way of suggesting that he was out of touch with the solid realities of the world. Other labels he had received were unconventional and unique , which when spoken with the right dosage of polite hostility took on very oppressive meanings. They were the kind of words used to dismiss things, in the same way that a teacher might say that a child marches to the beat of their own drum in class when searching for a polite way to tell the parents of that child that their son ate glue. Such is life.
When the meeting was over, the meeting that always took place at an oyster bar because the current publishing director unfortunately thought of himself as hip and interesting, Ponder and Adrian walked down the snowy street of the West End toward the more affordable side of the city. There was a bar nestled between a parking garage and a condemned Jersey Mike’s that the two had frequented for many years, as did a lot of the younger blood in the university. Adrian, being a Dumb Son Of A Bitch, started the night off with whistlepig and imported goon.
“I haven’t seen you in the lab in a week,” He said, settling into his usual cross-legged posture in the booth.
“Didn’t have the chance to swing by, I’ve been staying in a lot recently.” Ponder leaned over his winter lager.
“Depressed or busy?” Ponder sucked his teeth.
“Both-ish?” Adrian communicated the depth of his understanding with a slow nod and a long drink from an already nearly empty glass. “We’re getting so close, man. Grad school is just around the corner.” Ponder took a drink. It was just around the corner, in the same way that a stranger with a knife in a dark alley could be, and just like the stranger, it wanted all of your money. The music in the bar changed, from Yaz to Depeche Mode. A definitive mood shift. “About that,” Adrian continued. “You know I want to take a gap year.”
“Of course,” Ponder hovered over his lager tentatively. Adrian cleared his throat.
“Well, I’m thinking of doing a little more than that.” Ponder’s eyebrow raised unbeknownst to him.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Adrian scratched his chin, embarrassed, “I’m actually thinking about moving.”
“Where to?” There was silence. Relative silence, as Suffer Well was starting to fade into Going Backwards.
“Australia.” Ponder nearly choked.
“You’re kidding, that’s literally the other side of the world.” Adrian shrugged. He was That Dumb Son of A Bitch. Ponder leaned in, pulling a serious, parental sort of face. “Have you actually thought this through at all?”
“You know all those internships I was applying to a while back?”
“The great manic episode of last February, I remember.”
“I actually got one.” Adrian pulled out his phone and found the email of his acceptance letter, sliding the phone across the table for Ponder’s approval. Ponder nodded, it was impressive. The position was at a tech start-up, one of those Elon Musk-type new tech hellscapes that chewed up funds and spat out products that were so specific in nature, nobody besides a silicon millionaire would have any practical purpose for it, like a new-age juicer or a private helicopter service. But there were some big names attached to it, names that would make a resume look dazzling. Ponder looked up from the phone at his friend, who was beaming with pride behind is drunk red cheeks.
Ponder thought about saying something reasonable. He thought about saying something along the lines of this is a horrible idea, you’ve never even been there and you don't know anybody and you’ve never been good with money and you’re making a huge mistake. But there was a wiser part of him that had developed in recent years that had a way of filtering his real thoughts through a less self-serving lens. And it was self-serving, Ponder knew. He wasn’t so blind to his own emotions that he couldn’t see that. And look at him, thought Ponder. He’s so happy. Ponder slid the phone back to him.
“You’re going to do really well there,” He said finally. Adrian let out a long breath that he’d been holding in anticipation. It did mean a lot to Ponder that his friend clearly thought highly of his approval, and besides, the internet existed. They could keep in touch.
“Man, I’m so excited, you have no idea. I did a Skype call last night with the hiring manager there and he did a virtual tour of the office and they have blah blah blah blah blah —” Something was ringing in Ponder’s ears.
The world was closing around him, and the sounds and lights of the bar were falling away to a little dark tunnel that stretched out before him. The ringing was sharp and constant and he could feel it through his entire body like tinnitus in his soul. The world had gone to this singular cone of vision and this one ringing bell. There’s nobody else , he thought. Only he wasn’t thinking it, it was a thought that freely manifested in his mind. Instead of coming from within, the voice that he heard in his mind came from without. There’s nobody else who can help me , it continued.
What? Ponder thought back. Help with what?
Nobody else can make this happen.
Make what happen?
It needs to be done.
Ponder could feel it, the drifting and pulling of floating in the dreamy void. He tried his best not to stretch too thin, but the vacuum was powerful and soon he could no longer see anything but the tiny pearl of light at the end of the tunnel growing dimmer as the ringing grew louder.
Build it.
He had been gripping the table’s edges so tightly that his knuckles cracked. “I said, are you feeling okay?” Ponder looked up. The world was still there, including Adrian who had a few more empty glasses around him than Ponder remembered there being. Ponder’s own glass was still nearly full.
“Yeah,” He shook his head, “I just didn’t sleep well last night.”
“Maybe you should get home. Turn in, get some sleep. You kind of look like shit honestly, I wasn’t going to say anything, but you have that Peter Lorre eyeball thing going on.” Adrian gestured to his face with a floppy hand.
“Thanks, I own a mirror, I know what I look like.”
“You own a mirror?” Adrian leaned in, feigning surprise. Ponder clapped his friend on the shoulder.
“Have a good night.”
“Take it easy, my dude.”
Ponder drove back to his dorms through the snow. It had been slowly and silently blanketing the city for hours, making the edges of things appear softer than they usually were, some banks already forming on the sides of buildings and in the gutters. Through the long and silent drive, Ponder stayed his thoughts on the snow. It was all that he would let himself think about, easy pedestrian thoughts that weren’t too challenging. He would have all night to stay awake and worry about the things he should be worrying about, but just for the slow, careful drive, he would think about snow.
Snow was fractals really, wasn’t it? Ponder had always been fascinated with the math of nature, the reoccurring spirals and sequences that shaped life. They were the very basis of all things. When you got down to it, everything was numbers. Just complicated sets of numbers that were difficult to understand. A pile of snow was a single snowflake which was molecules of water which was atoms, and the background radiation of the big bang filled the spaces between all of them and connected them like the sea. That was the comfortable idea Ponder had about the universe, it was interconnected and deep down it all made sense, somewhere in what appeared to be chaos it was all sequence. He found himself meditating on all of this as he climbed the staircase to his hall. Inside of his room he continued to think about the beautiful interplay of numbers in the cosmic dance of life as he threw his pants into the hamper and flopped down onto the mattress, and having thoroughly hypnotized himself with his own introspection, he fell into a dreamless sleep.
The following day, Ponder had a headache that he couldn’t explain. It followed him through breakfast clear into lunchtime, when after having attended his only lecture for the day, he walked aimlessly around the library because it was a good place to be aimless. It was free, and it was easy to look like you were doing something important, thus ideal. The university library was the largest in the city by a wide margin, and being a part of the publishing department he had always felt like a sort of deputy librarian. He did read a lot, after all. He read everything that the university published, every paper that went out went by his desk at some point, and beyond that he even read in his very limited free time. Because of this, he had become tangentially acquainted with the head librarian who was widely known for his mood swings. It was always a good idea to be friends with librarians, Ponder found, because the library was a place where a student’s soul was laid bare. It was where they openly, but quietly, wept while trying to finish a paper that was due in three hours and worth half their final grade. And if you did anything in the library, a librarian saw you, you could be sure of that.
But there was one librarian Ponder didn’t know very well. He wasn’t exactly a librarian, he was some kind of part-time man. He came and went like a strange mood, and he wasn’t a professor or a student as far as Ponder knew. Ponder could see him through a gap in the bookcase he was stood in front of that gave a view directly into the lounge section, where chairs were scattered about and three large oak tables were overtaken with stack of literature. The strange librarian had a rat-like quality to him. His hair was long, you could see his knees through his pants like they were trying to get out, and he never looked very relaxed. There was a natural aura of suspicion around him. It seemed, as Ponder continued to look on, that he was in the middle of some kind of uncomfortable conversation with the head librarian.
Ponder knew it wasn’t good to snoop, but he wasn't actually snooping. He was only trying to take his mind off of things and whatever he heard wasn’t his fault. Of all people, librarians should know not to speak so loud in a library.
“There’s nothing I can do at this point, that’s what I’m saying,” Said the head librarian. “If the archchancellor puts pressure on me to refine the budget then I don’t have a choice.”
“Okay, I hear you, but you do have a choice to keep me on.”
“I know, I’m making that choice, I’m just warning you that if he actually does what he says he’s going to do and throttle my budget, he’s going to look at unnecessary expenditures first and at that point I really can’t do anything.” The ratty man’s shoulders sagged. The tension between them wasn’t that of a superior and an employee, it felt more familial. Ponder felt that he had accidentally trespassed on some sort of family drama. The ratty man put his face in his hands and moaned.
“I am drowning in debt, Henry.”
“I know,” said the head librarian with an unfamiliar softness. “We all are. I’m going to be paying off loans until I’m dead.”
“But that’s the thing, you can actually pay them!” He stood up and collected his jacket from the back of the chair, swinging it around himself. “I’ve got an appointment to make, but just please keep me updated on this.”
“Of course, I’m going to let them just kick you out.” They shook hands, Ponder turned around and picked a random book from the shelf behind him in an attempt to look preoccupied. The ratty man walked past him with his long coat floating behind him. Ponder felt a tension in his chest. Probably, he thought, it was time to do some real thinking about his future as well. Especially in the immediate sense, because he really did have a paper he needed to be working on.
He decided to do that work in the vegan cafeteria. It was empty virtually always and nobody was really sure why the university even had it. It was a small little building in the basement of the main dining hall with only three small tables, but they served hot soup all day and the privacy was a good aid to work, so he sipped his vegan soup carefully as he leaned over his laptop and tried to focus on writing. There was a zen to throwing yourself into work, it kept you feeling functional and productive and if you ignored your desperate internal need for emotional validation and release, then it kept you going strong for a little while. There was always a fallout afterwords of course, but that was for the future Ponder to deal with and the Ponder of the present was being functional and productive and that was really all that mattered.
At least, he was being functional and productive until the ratty man from the library came down the stairs from the main dining hall and ordered a potato salad. Ponder felt the heat of shame in his cheeks. He knew more about this strangers life than he wanted to know, and at the moment it was a little more information than he could handle. It was also a little too close to home, but the ratty man sat silently on the other side of the room, scrolling mindlessly through his phone and looking rather pitiful. Ponder’s stomach crawled, he’d always had issues with mending incongruences with his personal ethics and unethical actions in his mind, but he was in a particularly volatile state at the moment so he was feeling it harder than usual. I should say something, he thought. Just a little something.
Ponder looked up from his screen. The man was still staring down at his phone. Ponder bit his lip trying to think of something comforting, but not too revealing to say.
“Crazy weather, right?” He said. The ratty man didn’t look up from his phone, then suddenly he did.
“Excuse me?” He said, confused.
“The weather,” Ponder pointed to the little stained-glass window with the only direct view outside that either of them could see, “It’s getting bad out there, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yeah. It’s a nor'easter, supposed to be eight inches by tomorrow.”
“Really?” Ponder feigned ignorance, as though every weather channel in the area hadn’t been talking about the coming blizzard non-stop for weeks.
“Supposedly. Just glad my heater works.”
“Yeah,” Ponder laughed. Well, he thought, returning to his work, that was my good deed for the day.
Rincewind, who was the ratty man, was having a hard time lately. He was always having a hard time really, he tended to make times hard with sheer willpower, though he was almost never aware of this. If Rincewind was offered a warm blanket on a cold night he would refuse it because he would have convinced himself that the blanket had small pox, and anyway it’s best to keep to yourself. But the nights were getting colder, and that was the problem. They were getting cold and long and unsure. At least my heater works, he thought, walking back to the library’s storage closet which he’d converted into a bedroom. There was a twin mattress tucked below the shelf on the far wall which extended to the ceiling and was full of multitudes. Somewhere in the mess, there was a small cactus. The room itself was only about one step in length and width.
With a casual foot he flipped the switch on the little space heater in the corner behind the door and ducked into the little nook of his bed, under which he crouched and continued to stare at his bank records. They were abysmal. He had seven dollars to his name and even that wouldn’t be there long as there was surely a fee coming his way for going below twenty five, and then where would he be? Rincewind liked to believe he was too proud for handouts but he also had enough of a self-preservation instinct to know that pride is for the rich. Henry had been the closest thing to a friend he’d had, keeping him employed and turning a blind eye to all the days Rincewind spent doing absolutely nothing but sitting in bed. But he also gave annoying advice like “Chin up, stooge” and “Darkest before dawn” and all that. Sentiments that weren’t devoid of genuine concern but didn’t ever seem to have any practical application.
The sort of advice Rincewind wanted was “Here’s 10,000,000 dollars and a job that doesn’t fire you for taking an absurd amount of personal days” which wasn’t actually advice but rather a comfy daydream that he sometimes languished in if he was feeling particularly indulgent. Rincewind let out a long and pitiful sigh that made him glad to be in a private space. It was a little too honest. Above him, on the bottom shelf that hung over his mattress, Rincewind had pinned one of the dust jackets off of a copy of Other Dimensions because he liked the art and it gave him something to look at. It depicted an abstract castle of flying buttresses and obelisk towers, and the whole thing was set atop textureless blocks that seemed to float over a glass-like surface, surrounded by thin fog. Behind the castle was a large moon, and behind the moon were stars, and printed in bottom-heavy 70’s lettering was the title. The castle was another of the indulgent daydreams that he’d come to love.
It was familiar in that he had seen it every day for several years, aside the years he’d spent carrying the anthology around in a school bag, but foreign in subtlety. There was always a new face or crack to find in the grey, deep walls of the castle. It was futuristic and at the same time called to mind Mount Saint Michael in its architecture and isolation. Occasionally he would pass his eyes over it and think for a moment that, within the shadow of one of the buttresses, that he could see someone standing there. It was an isolated world on the cover of a book. He dozed off, thinking about walking inside of the castle, what must the rooms look like, how big must they be, what would live there.
But he couldn’t rest for long. Before he knew it, he was floating. He could feel it, like resting just on the surface of a room-temperature bath. And then there was the strange light ahead of him, the light that made every color he had ever known seem as though they were all grey. And then there were the patterns, the floating lotus-like crosses and lines of unknowable complexity that, if he’d had a neck inside of the dream, he would have broken trying to take them all in. They were surrounding and encompassing, around and through. Impossibly detailed, impossibly large, and every time he tried to focus on a singular point he found that it moved and shifted in a way that his eye couldn’t settle on.
There were numbers, too, though he paid less attention to them. He’d never been particularly gifted with numbers, which was largely to blame for his heinously poor grades in physics and calculus. Had he been a more mathematically inclined man however, they still wouldn’t mean much. It was as if they were in another language, but they couldn’t be. While he had little skill in numbers he had great skill in language, and he knew languages, and this wasn’t any script he was familiar with. It was more like every number was slightly transparent and there was another secret number hiding beneath it, and to see them both simultaneously made it impossible to perceive either of them. But just maybe, if you looked at it the right way, and if the damn patterns would stop shifting around, maybe it would make sense. Maybe he could finally see whatever it was he was supposed to see.
He couldn’t. His eyes slammed open, the knocking at his door growing more urgent. Tactfully ducking under the bottom shelf, he answered. It was Henry, looking a lot worse for wear.
“Have you looked outside?” He said, trying to disguise his urgency. Rincewind was still half-asleep and only responded with a dazed expression of confusion. Henry backed away from the door and motioned to the window down the hall. Rincewind walked to it slowly. The closer that he came, the more fear creept into him. He saw the trees first, in the courtyard, that were bathed in that familiar light. That color that put other colors to shame. And then his eyes moved upwards.
Ponder slept through the night uneasily. Not since he was a little boy had he been afraid of nightmares, but the striking similarities between the dream and whatever vision he’d had the other night at the bar were getting to him. If this was going to become a pattern, he wasn’t looking forward to it. But before he had a chance to lay down his head, a strange murmur spread through his floor. Just curious enough and willing to do anything to avoid sleeping at that point, he wandered out of his room to the end of the hall where several of his neighbors were gathered around the window.
“What’s going on?” He asked. A man named Trusett who was trying to record something on his phone was the only one who took notice of Ponder.
“Just take a look.” Ponder politely found his way through the throng to the edge of the window, where in the storming night sky he saw the eye. It had a halo of that impossible color he’d seen before in his dreams, the strange holographic shifting hue that made his head ache. It had run over the world below it with a paintbrush and all around the university campus there were faint lines of some sort of connective pattern, all linking back to the center of the eye.
The center of the eye. Ponder blinked and looked away. It was impossible to stare directly into it, it made him weak in the knees and struck him as a kind of primal enemy. It was fearsome in the same way that hearing a bump in the night was. It was an instinct programmed into the human consciousness from a time when the bump meant a bear is in my cave.
“It’s making my eyes water.” Said one of the men gawking at the view.
“Then blink.” Someone responded.