AT DEAD MANS BEANS

The horizontal line cut across the world. Below the line was the void of the land. Above the line lay sky and time, mottled and pocked like sandpaper with the stars of a million dead gods. Wind whistled lazily through the distances, sibilating through the dumb sands, while Zed stood invisible in the centre of it all. He was a free man, un-hand-cuffed to the decay near him, in front behind or beside: for Zed had maybe turned this way or that since the sun had gotten down, and he couldn't be bothered to read the constellations that solely built the directions on the flat, black, land. Nothing held him there to fix the eightfold dimensions firmly in place, and yet he was there anyhow, inevitably fixing the eightfold dimensions, in that midnight and on that land. There had become a day before, and there would become a day after, and both fell away like gravity's acceleration in approach to the singularity that was his self. Somewhere nearby lay two steel cans, one sealed hollow sphere and one hollowed spherical unsealed, set secure to represent (if only there's been any to represent to) the difference between the spool run down and the spool tight wound.

The non-fiction contains pictures to make a sense of what is to be seen: for seeing is believing. To see Zed standing there is to see nothing at all, there in the dark, at midnight with the sun directly beneath his feet ninety-three million and eight thousand miles away. There's nothing to be seen but that which can be made inaccurately so, such as the fabric of his clothes, all cold denim, and the feel of his shoes, of nappy suede. Then there's the cans which have already been mentioned, frosted steel circle- or rectangle-down and significant, and the decay of the corpse which probably isn't more than two yards away from where he stands at midnight in the centre of the universe. These are little more than measurements to be made with some certainty, and the line of the horizon which looks the same to us as to him, though we can imagine a silhouette of Zed while he cannot imagine a silhouette of us. He is still, standing, arms hanging down, hair in sweat swept over his forehead, hatless, hands still, breath held, and a thought invisible stuck inside the quiddity of his soul, though the thought, whatever it may be, could have been of anything, of anywhere, and of any time.

To leave the present for a paragraph, to magically escape the moment, impossible though that is, there is the fiction of 'tense' which can even be employed in non-fiction stories such as this one which is resolutely stuck in--what else?--the present. Come with me back twelve hours or so, to Zed walking across dirt, and hungry. The dry scrub scrunches under his feet and his shirt sticks to his blades between which beads of sweat pop from his pores and slowly find their way back into his element. In the distance he sees something. It is lying across the ground. He gets closer and confirms that it is a male person lying across the ground, with a shirt over his face, in the middle of the desert. Here, now, is the time to wonder about asking questions, such as: Where did these two characters come from, how did they happen to be in the desert, on this particular day? was fate involved? can there be a higher reason for this meeting? These questions float a million miles above the situation, since the two--Zed and the other--could not care in the least for such metaphysical or supernatural questions. (As Kurt Weill wrote: Food first, morals follow on.) Zed comes along, a figure from three seconds into the future, and notices a battered and torn yellow shopping bag through which poked not one but two manufactoried cans in their cylindrical glory. The stranger shifts and sighs like he's noticing there's something going on up the stairs. Zed stops, and is silent. The bag is there, glowing like plutonium glowed back in the fifties, radiating primal eidolons of the millions involved in its manufacture, tracing back through time back to the originary Cro-Magnon duh.

Since a great-grand-father begat a grand-father and a great-grand-mother begat a grand-mother and a grand-mother begat a father and a great-grand-father begat a grand-father and a great-grand-father begat a grand-mother and a grand-father begat a mother and a great-grand-mother begat a grand-father and a great-grand-mother begat a grand-father and a grand-mother begat a mother and a father begat Zed and a great-grand-father begat a grand-mother and a great-grand-father begat a grand-mother and a grand-father begat a father and a mother begat Zed and because Zed has begotten nothing and will beget nothing, which is all ye need to know, the birds of prey are dreaming solemnly at midnight, with the sun under their talons as two parallel lines that run off to eternity like an abandoned rail line, dreaming inauspiciously about how time devours time beyond anything even a bird of prey could dream of, at neither midnight nor noon nor at any time in between. Zed's invisible hands hang loose from his arms, maybe, and he feels the cause of his murder rumble inside of himself. Of course the matter or cause of the murder may seem trivial or even risible, and yet that's what we've got to work with; we have no choice; it happened, and there's no getting around it. It's so silly it's a tragedy. It would not qualify as believable to anyone older than eight, when appetites slowly begin to get under conscious control, when miracles of life include such enchantments as canned vegetables awash in sweet sweet tomato sauce. However, again, there's no getting around it: certain events happened before midnight, and certain events will happen after midnight--possibly at dawn--but this is mere surmise, for we have no access to anything that happens after midnight. The truth of the situation is so strong--after all, there's a dead body lying there--that though you may laugh you must still recognize the quiddity of it.

Nothing goes around the world--which has stopped turning. It's midnight and there's nothing to see and all thinking has stopped. There's a full can of beans nearby, beside closed a can opener, beside the of corpse a stranger. The can is lying on its side. It is food for the following morning, if that ever comes. (You never know!) High overhead a silent plane hangs, filled with passengers half of whom are asleep yet even so absorbed in their own souls' problems and indifferent to the melancholy tableau forty thousand feet below their bums. Heads are back against the seats, and nine shoes are off. They're going from west to east. They might wind up in Boston by dawn. (You never know!) That's all okay to Zed, though; he's not even aware there's a plane high above him. It's hard to hear things that are eight miles away anyway. The airplane and Zed have almost nothing to do with one another. One faction could be missing and the other would be doing just fine, either flying through the air or stuck both feet grounded near the body that has rendered positively inert. Maybe if we pulled our focus out, say, to seven billion light years, we would be able to see that the two factions were positively interconnected. (You never know!)

Zed, at this moment, is not in the act of killing; that's all in the past, like how he gulped down the can of beans in the past, like how he opened the can of beans in the past, like how he picked up the can of beans in the past, like how he killed the stranger in the past, like how he came across the stranger in desert in the past. But now? Now there is no past, at least none that can be verified. It's like anything else that's in the past: it's partly dreamed anyway; you never can tell what's been told. Now at midnight, in the only world that's true, there's a blackness for what seems a thousand miles. Everything is far away, too far for words, and all the sounds have stopped. They may continue again, in another true world, and this midnight will cloud over with desires, what-ifs, and etcetera hallucinations. What was my first sentence? What's the title of this?

In the end it's only Zed that this concerns. (If you are a member of the family of his victim, I will reverse my opinion. Comment in the comments.) That midnight drear and here he stands invisibly. It matters to no-one save those who are morbidly interested in parables. If you're looking for parables, pal, you'd best look elsewhere, in some storybook fictions, say. Midnight, darkness, horizontal line and horizon, unnamed stars, silence, stillness, beans, and tomato sauce, again: all ye need to know. The sliver of midnight is a liminal space, neither here nor there, nor full nor empty, in a juxtaposed space, e=0 NOR e=1 NOR e≈½. We're all two dimensional now, cutting through the real moment, peering down vertically against the horizon, secant undefined. You can't take your eyes off invisible Zed, even for a second. We are with him, undefined, in his real moment; before he shall live and die, and after he shall live and die. Though he is truly like all of us, he is not truly all of us. Look aslant and you will see a line and nothing but a line. There are infinite dimensions in four dimensions. Make of it what you will.