“What’s his deal, anyway? He makes this big ol world; he makes me as a part of it, and then he’s gotta keep me down here: chained to a bike, keeping the pool running. The last of the Kairos. Kept here, in this leaky friggin dungeon so he can come back and steal my ideas from time to time. You’d think that a creator just might take stock of what’s to be found in his creation. All of you kids—his glorious children—all you do is come up with these crazy ideas, and he should be taking notes. I seen you around Michael. I know how you work. You’re here because of that wonderlust in you.”
“Wanderlust?”
“What? You think I got a speech impediment? Or you just going deaf? No, numbnuts. Not Wanderlust. Any schmoe can catch a case of Wanderlust. You got something way more terminal: WONDERlust. You wander around swearing to yourself that all the crap down here could be real: dragons and giant trees and worlds behind the world. Christ, He could have just pulled it all from your brain to dress up what’s really down here. You’re searching for all of these unbelievable wonders when the rest of your race out there is a freakin’ wonder generation engine.
“You keep coming across them and forgetting them: the bimini road. The mad trapper. The disembodied feet washing up on the shores of British Columbia with the shoes still on. Friggin Atlantis! God, I can’t count the number of times that I’ve wandered in on one of your wet dreams about the forgotten continent. All of this stuff is out there, waiting for you to wonder about it, but you’re chasing dragons in the basement of an apartment building.
“Fine. You want to know what this place is all about? I’ll give ya a little run-down.
“There is a guy on the twelfth floor who thinks he can control light but is actually in the process of becoming a star. But alls he’s ever wanted was to be a man. He’s got these eyes…Christ. You should see those eyes. One day somebody’s gonna describe them as like looking at the North star through a…through a nimbus of snow clouds, those eyes. And that one will be one of mine. It’s probably those eyes that got him into all of this: they let him see more parts of this world than you and me we could ever imagine. Spectrums, eh? He sees ‘em all wit’ dose eyes. That guy could probably see clear across time if he thought he needed to. It’s gonna be dose same eyes that end him. He’s a gonna look up at a star, and…poof. Gone. Man no more.
“Jeez. Lookit me. Smartest guy on the planet; all these big ideas, and I can’t keep a lick of it for myself. I gotta give ‘em all to shmoes like you who wind up wasting half of them because you’re no better than me at keepin’ them all in your goddamn heads. Gotta write it all down or type it all up or it just goes out the window. I remember the good ol days, I tell ya. Back then, ya had some story tellers. Homer’d hold whole epics between his ears, and even when he forgot a bit, he still kept the most important part of it all sandwiched in there: the bit that birthed all the rest of it, the bit that let him make up for the forgotten parts on the fly. You wise guys, always chasin’ after dames, you called it a Muse, and you dressed it up in something sexy and slinky, and you put it on a pedestal, and when you did all that you made sure you’d never have it back where it was supposed to be all along: sandwiched in your brains.
“Lemme drop some wisdom on you: there’s a little thing out there called ‘true names.’ They’re tied in wit’ the souls or the essence or the animating gas of everything on this planet. You happen to stumble onto something’s true name, you get power over it. Simple as dat: done. It’s yours. Do with it as you will. And so long as you don’t know something’s true name, you can’t ever really get a hold of it. Sure, you can chain it to a bike, in a leaky basement, and you can make it run your waterworks, but so long as you haven’t got its true name, it’s still going to have a part of it, squirreled away in its brain somewhere, that you can never touch.
“But there’s a problem, see, because when you start calling something by other than its true name, and you do it for long enough, that something can lose its name and start believing in the one you gave it. And, when that happens, the thing that you’ve chained: the thing that you’ve tied up on the back step of your house, it starts forgetting what it was meant to be—what it’s true name was indicative of. Its brain gets empty of everything but what you fill it up with. It stops being what it’s meant to be, and it starts being what you think it should be.
“This happened with stories: with inspiration. You started calling it Muse, and you started dressing it up in flowy, see-through robes, and you started saying that it was a lady, and it hung out with all its lady friends in the woods, and if you were cunning enough, you could capture it. Chain it. Make it YOUR inspiration. If you’d a done it these days, you’d a copyrighted the friggin thing and turned it out to your friends for a tidy profit. You’d a pimped out something that naturally existed in your brains and only ever wanted to take care of you. Only ever wanted to expand your world with ideas you can no longer fathom.
“There’s things that ain’t never meant to be owned: ain’t never meant to be copyrighted or protected or limited. You leave them alone in the world to do what they’re doing, and you might be surprised with what they come up with. But you guys. You guys with your big ‘ol brains full of logic and reason, and what have they got ya? All they’ve ever succeeded in doing is limiting a world that is, by nature, limitless. You and that Luc guy sit back and you moan and moan and moan about “oh, there are only nine stories to tell! Oh woe is we!’”
He stopped pedaling, leaned back and squinted at me, shaking his head.
“Well what if you’re wrong.
“Sure, Babylon only ever had nine branches, but those nutjobs at Babylon were already so very far gone from what you all once were. They’d started writing things down; putting them into books and making it all so solid: so defined.
“But back before Homer, it was all in your head. It was all living stories that walked out of those big ol thought boxes of yours from time to time, toured around a bit, gave some people some ideas, then went back in there to grow some more, to change, to evolve. There never was a definite number of stories. Sure, now there is, but back then…everyone was inspiration. Everyone had one of me living inside their brain buckets, riding my little bicycle and whispering in their ear about how this world was all that you could make of it. You start talking this shit about nine stories, and you tell your friends, and they start talkin’ it, and eventually enough people have heard you flapping your gums that they assume you must have proof, and something that was a shady matter of opinion becomes fact, and you do that for long enough and you’ll never be able to go back.
“I’ll leave you with this little nugget.
“You.
“You humans.
“You brilliant friggin monkeys. You made me. You made all of this.”
He took the cigar from his mouth and gestured at the ceiling with it.
“You made Him, and you made the Other One, too. You made them so long ago that even They can’t remember it, and you did it all with those brains of yours: through will without thought. Through emotion without logic. You were picking ticks off each other and scratching your asses, and all you ever wanted was for someone to love and protect you. To watch over you and to make sure every little thing was going to be just swell. You thought it, and enough of you thought it together, and eventually you made it happen: the prodigal immaculate conception.”
“You get these smart friggin’ guys in white coats telling you that you only use 10% of your brains, and yet no one really cares, and no one ever asks where the other 90% went. What that other 90% was capable of. You keep asking all these stupid friggin questions about ‘what’s so special about the Building’ and ‘how can these people do these things in the Building.’ Well, Einstein, welcome to that other 90%. They ain’t psychic, and they ain’t superheroes, they’re just the living breathing presence of what you’ve all been missing for so long. They’re the filler to the absence that makes the rest of you so common.”
He leered at me from atop the stationary bike, his face flushed red and his legs spinning around so fast that they were almost a blur. Sweat soaked the white tank top that was stretched across his pot belly. He looked back into the distance and started muttering to himself.
And then he stopped.
He kept staring off into the distance, and his eyes began to scan idly as if he were listening to distant music. His face pulled up into a grimace, and he snorted out a laugh.
“Huh. How do ya like that? Apparently I’ve displeased the figment of your collective imaginations.”
And with that, he kind of popped—like a water balloon in the shape of a small man, except when the water of it fell to the floor and sluiced into a drain, there was no longer any trace of a water balloon or a man, just a disembodied grumbling that faded away down the long corridors of pipes.
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