Eschatopolis

ESCHATOPOLIS city at the end of the world

copyright 2017 Boris D. Schleinkofer

Cover image and author photo created by Boris D. Schleinkofer, with assistance from https://deepart.io and https://deepdreamgenerator.com

Smashwords Edition

ISBN 9781370235476

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[tABLE = {oF cONTENTS}]

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

FISH OUT OF WATER

THESE ARE A FEW THINGS THAT...

IN THE BELLY OF THE WHALE

So, my friend had an implant...

THE TROJAN WIFE

My dawning suspicions were irrevocably confirmed...

LOVE WILL TEAR YOU APART AGAIN

There, I've gone and said it...

YE OLDE TIME FAMILY PLANNING

Okay, let me give you some...

FOR BETTER AND THE WORST

My own personal, obvious contact with...

DEALING WITH IT

I came to understand—on an...

ONLY FOOLS RUSH IN

And so now, as we approach...

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

Please forgive the strange format for this book; it was necessary because of our current situation.

The hands of time on our burning clock have balled into fists and now point to two seconds of midnight; like the Aztecs awaiting Quetzalcoatl's return to the beach at Huatulco, we have watched our window of opportunity slam shut and now foresee its terrible reopening with unpleasant consequences. I wish to avoid that tactic of coercive manipulation known to every beginner propagandist and advertiser, the overwhelming fear of scarcity—but it's gonna run out! and then what?—in fact, this book is dedicated to the struggle against that subtle poison. But, still, the fact remains that we must redraw our strategies if we wish to survive as a species with the level of comfort to which we've grown accustomed.[citations needed]

There is, I believe, a great darkness descending; it is both cause and effect of the dawning light that rises over us at the same time. Strange days are afoot and this is increasingly obvious. No one seems to know what's going on or what to do about it and yet, at the same time, everybody's got all the answers.

See, I say certain things in public, and I get in trouble. This is the reductionist's oversimplification, but it's basically true. I'm not saying racist things, or sexist things or homophobic things, but the vibe I catch is pretty close to the same as the reaction I could reasonably expect if I had. The room goes quiet, followed by an awkward subject change to a conversation in which I am not included. Why?

For whatever reasons, humanity seems to be socially-conditioned to react in predictable manners, and one predictable reaction is that which comes, for example, when I say that I think 9/11 was an inside job. The disapproval is mostly instant; should I, however, find myself in the company of someone similarly conspiratorially-minded, they freak out and clam up in much the same way once I say that I believe I've been dead a couple of times and met God or that I've eaten human flesh. More about that later. This right now is about my frustration with the resistance to unpopular ideas.[citations needed]

This darkness has depths both subtle and nuanced and as uncomplicated as can be, for it is a willfully-adopted blindness.

Certain ideas have strength and merit and deserve to take on lives beyond their own. Our collective body of knowledge builds sequentially, proving itself over the test of time; as we recognize the inherent possibilities in a discovery, new opportunities for advancement present themselves. Ideally, our beliefs in possibility should make accessible the solutions to all our planet's needs, and yet it is not so.

There are, I believe, specific reasons for this; those reasons are, incidentally, the subject of this book and the two others that came before it.

I chose to intersperse short stories with autobiographical material because they inform each other; I usually prefer to avoid self-reference, but the events and circumstances and phenomena in the fictional stories are (mostly) legitimate, to my belief, and I'm inclined to think so because of the bizarre events, circumstances and phenomena that I have myself experienced in my real life. I'm here inviting the Reader to compare your own analyses with what you know to be true and see whether or not you think these things could be possible.

If the Reader isn't immediately familiar with 'conspiracy theory', strap in—things are about to get odd. We're gonna need to exercise some serious possibility-thinking in order to proceed from here.

All my life I have been a 'weirdness magnet'. I have grown to accept and embrace this. It certainly makes for interesting times.

If I am to be truly accurate, I would have to say that I was first put on the path when I was four or five, when my Mom told me something about how the world really worked (we'll get to that), but it was in the early part of the summer of 1993 that things really took off.

I'd found the swinging double-doors at the saloon of perception and kicked them wide open; it was now a couple years later, and I was lurching home hung over. I was just finished with my own personal psychedelic odyssey (and I hate to mention it because of the obvious issues it will raise with my credibility, but I have to bring it up in the interests of full disclosure) and was beginning my reassimilation into 'reality' as everyone else understood it. My acid experience had come to a close with an anti-climactic non-bang.

Here's how it ended:

The second-to-last time I dropped acid, I was told by a disembodied voice that it would be my last and, in a way, it was. I had been on top of a mountain with some friends and, while wandering along a ridge-line, came across a perfectly chair-shaped outcropping on the side of the cliff-face. There was a perfect little line or trail of lighter-colored scree leading right up to it and I thought to myself, Wow, that looks like the perfect spot to sit and meditate. Maybe I will become one with the spirit of the valley, or possibly even astrally project out of my body and get to go flying around over the mountains—won't that be cool? or something similar. But then I noticed that the trail of scree was held in place only by a line of grass, the whole cliffside was ready to tumble down in an avalanche at just about any prompting, and if I tried to get out to the stone chair I could very easily slip and fall to my certain death. With this realization came the whispering in my ear, from behind my right shoulder, ...And that's acid.

I understood the metaphor immediately; the voice was telling me that yeah, acid could bring me to a place that looked very close to enlightenment , but would dump me off just shy of reaching the goal, and possibly get me killed in the trying. It looked great, but wouldn't do the job. You're done, the voice said and that was it. I climbed back down the cliff.

The last time I tried LSD, I took a full dose with some friends who got themselves all tripped out so I knew the stuff had to be good, but it didn't affect me at all. A slight pressure in my head, at best. I was indeed done. It's been over twenty-five years and I haven't bothered trying it again since. There were more than a few times doing mushrooms, but again it's been twenty or more since. I've had time for my head to clear.

There had been a number of rather good reasons for me to have to spend that year and a half lost in an hallucinogenic haze, which I won't go into here, and at the end of it I came out a person changed for the better.

If you haven't tried it, you likely wouldn't understand; if you have, then I wouldn't need to explain—you'd know. Psychedelics are like that.

But anyways...

At the end of this extended LSD-trip, I found myself asking God why I was still required to go on with physical existence. I'll admit, I had a lot of thoughts back then about getting out of my body...

"Why, God, if this life is all about suffering, am I still required to let it run out? If I've 'gotten the idea', then why am I still here? What do you need me for? Can't I just get this cycle of birth and death over with and get right to the enlightenment already?" I was going through an impatient existential crisis, seeking nothingness.

The reply came very soon after, only a couple days later.

I'll tell you and you probably won't believe me, but I was used to having these open conversations with God. I would ask a question, and I would get an answer in the form of outstandingly coincidental circumstance, right away. I would ask for things or opportunities and I would get them. It just worked that way. I had discovered my phoneline to Deity (and it didn't require chemicals, just rigorous self-honesty) and had one of the most basic, most often and fervently-asked questions: why?

What the hell was I supposed to be doing here? Why was I alive?

My answer came in book form. Twenty-five odd years later ('odd years' is an understatement, lemme tell you) and I'm still struggling with it. I understand much more of the context now than I did then, but am still just as confused about its nature. Let's see if you can guess why.

I woke up that day and had the urge to go walking downtown to the bookstore that used to put out boxes of 'free books' on the front sidewalk. It was a great thing, I went there frequently and read a lot. That day, I found a book that marked the beginning of a surreal transformative period that has yet to conclude.

It was an odd size, approximately 6 x 7, the pages made of thick cardboard like a child's book, and spiral bound with a bright blue plastic coil. Usually a spiral binding marks a home-made, self-published book, but this one had legit production with professional type-setting and full color pages. This wouldn't be all that peculiar now with all the groovy technology we experience as commonplace, but back then it was a thing that stood out as atypical. The cover had a spiral galaxy on it and the title was something like The New Arrival's Handbook or similar—I don't remember any more. I swear to you, it was a real book and not a remnant hallucination, because there were others there in the box with it that I took home and read and have since seen out and about in the real world, on various best-seller lists and the like.

I read the book once, and then put it back where I'd found it. I don't know why I felt prompted to return it, it seemed important that I do so for some vague reason. I kinda wish now that I hadn't; I've never seen it or its like since.

It contained essentially one message, repeated several times over and illustrated with slick graphics. It said, paraphrased here more or less: You have agreed ahead of time to come to this planet on an important mission. There have been very few volunteers because it's a dangerous mission with lots of guaranteed suffering, so you are to be commended. You are a specialized infiltrator. It was necessary for you to forget your mission before coming here, because this planet's tyrannical rulers have means to discover our kind. Normal physical-dimension entrance wasn't possible because they would have immediately captured and tortured you to death and worse, so it was necessary to sneak you in the hard way, by incarnating you into a developing host body vacated by another soul willing to let you take their place in the womb. You will remember your instructions gradually, as they become important to the mission, so don't worry and take comfort in the knowledge that you are doing good works, and we all appreciate you for it. There was more, but that was basically it.

It was a hell of a thing.

The day after returning the book, I had second thoughts about the decision and wanted to get it back. I went back to the free box, but it was gone.

I would later go on to learn all about the 'Manchurian Candidate' and how that nonsense works, but at the time I wasn't remotely familiar with it. The movie had been out since 1962, so there must have been some awareness that I had of it, lurking in the hidden subconscious appropriately enough, but I didn't make the immediate connection to hypno-programming amnesia blocks—though I'd already experienced that myself, as I will tell about later.[citations needed]

Suffice it to say that I still don't know what to make of it.

I've started this here book with the expanded story of the little alien HfX7qe2179A9 from the other two volumes in this series. It seemed appropriate, and it's good to give the little guy some form of closure.

FISH OUT OF WATER

And the world said: Child, you will not be missed.

You are cheaper than a wrench, your back is a road;

Your death is a table in a book.

You had our wit, our heart was sealed to you:

Man is the judgment of the world.

Randall Jarrell, from Variations, part IV

It had been a will to exist, and was no more.

William turned away from the overwhelming light, turned away from its hook-rays and the wheeling suns and drifting isolation, turned away and away and away again, until all those burning emanations had taken away everything that was not the original being and dissipated themselves to ribbon-like trickles of radiation, twisting strings humming outside of time and space that neither touched nor tamed him. In death, he'd chosen to anchor to the nothing itself, and in his unwinding would find the pattern of the greater whole, his lattice upon the gates of infinity. If there were some meaning to be found to this existence and all the sacrifice it demanded, it would be found in the reducibility of its basic functions. The matrix of the god-body would be filled with infinitesimally smaller bodies of God, as it was itself a smaller whole of the infinite God, and bent across this juncture was William.

≠

It had at last made its way to the tower, to the holy sacred singing spire that lit up the world with healing, cleansing fire. HfX7qe2179A9 was being destroyed by this flame, and every step cost it another handful of scales, another toenail, another bundle of tissue. The radiations from the tower were dissolving its mobile, speeding up its disintegration. Enrapt in the beauty of the light, HfX7qe2179A9 did not care. It knew it was dying, and was ready to let go; it had had enough of the struggle. Even as it stretched forth a claw to embrace the light, the radiations pulled it apart, exposing its organs and stopping them.

HfX7qe2179A9 died.

And it saw the true nature of existence, of forms nesting within forms, the layering of possibilities upon each other to form