I
"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”-William Blake, the mystic
“The past and future are immanent in an object, existing as different sectors in the same flow of experiential forms.”- Patanjali, the yogi
"Thufferin' Thuccotash!"- Sylvester, the cartoon character
Meet Hornek Platter.
Genius.
Autodidact.
Recluse.
Hornek was only five years old when he first introduced his embryonic theory of time travel to a public audience. It was in Mrs. Mayko’s “show + tell” class. The class didn’t know how to take it. The gist and profound nature of it all just sailed over their daydreaming heads. When Betty McNetty pulled out her dollhouse, all the girls got uber-excited and dumped tons of adulations on her and the plastic house. When Bryan Gluts displayed his collection of superman toys, all the boys started doing the same. At the end of the class, everyone had forgotten about Hornek’s advanced theory. In their minds, it was almost as if Hornek never even spoke that day. The memory of his show and tell presentation had been tossed to the wayside by more digestible memories involving plastic houses, dolls, and superheroes.
When he was sixteen years old, Hornek was about to make a similar presentation for his physics class. He had everything prepared to his liking. He surmised he had all the quirks, kinks, and paradoxes of exotic hyperspace travel figured out. He had all his diagrams ready. His entire being was ready. But then he came down with a stifling case of laryngitis just days before he was going to shock and awe his contemporaries. He couldn’t speak for weeks. As a result, he missed out on his opportunity.
At the age of twenty-one, Hornek decided to stop worrying about presenting his advanced ideas to the public. The public was never meant to understand the depth and breadth of his knowledge. During this epoch of his life, he stayed in his mother’s basement a lot and sauntered in the conceptual terrain that enthralled history’s scientific and philosophical titans, giants, and kings. He read everything he could get his hands on about astrology, astronomy, metaphysics, theology, classical and quantum physics, and even science fiction. Every moment was dedicated to the ascetic acquisition of knowledge. Every fiber of his being was dedicated to the task at hand. From about 7am every morning to 7pm every evening, he read, and read, and read. He read until the brain-waves throbbed, convulsed, and cried out, “We’re stuffed!” Nothing else mattered. Even when he slept in a bed flanked by countless books, he dreamt of mathematical formulae trickling down the tree of knowledge like long strands of imperishable sap, the elliptical orbits of planets, the animals of the zodiac, puzzling principles, immutable and mutable laws, causality and acausality, the faces of dead geniuses, the mean radius of the world in relationship to the mean radius of the moon, and the treatises of the enlightened. Knowledge consumed him. Knowledge had become him. At the relatively tender age of twenty-four, he had cerebrally digested thousands of books on various contentious and intriguing topics.
At the age of twenty-eight, a revelation dawned upon Hornek’s knowledge-saturated mind as he sat beneath an oak tree in his backyard. After noticing an inconspicuous beehive and a random bird’s nest in his backyard, he said to himself:
“If the hive can hide the precious honeycomb, and the nest can hide a bird’s eggs, then surely space can hide dimensions within itself.”
The revelation unpacked itself in his mind over the course of months. He thought about space in new ways. Space became the focal point of his life. He saw space as a type of dynamic medium filled with hidden geometries and dimensions. The old, out-dated theory regarding the homogeneity of space didn’t hold any sway in Hornek anymore. Space, he humbly ascertained, was made of layers that were enfolded within layers that were enfolded within more layers, ad infinitum.
On December 6th, 2009, Hornek Platter wrote this down in this journal. The entry dealt with our inability to see these layers in our daily lives:
“The reason we can’t see these multivalent layers is due to the divergence of the senses and the motion of the disturbed mind. When the senses aren’t working together in a highly organized fashion (ie: when the senses aren’t focused on “one abiding thing”), they have a tendency to impart to the mind an interference pattern of grandiose ugliness. This inference pattern causes the mind to vibrate divisively. This less than optimal vibrating then creates a state of mental chaos. This mental chaos then reigns supreme in the mind, and this mind then distorts the holistic picture of the world. If the senses were to focus on one thing and impart to the mind a harmonious vibratory pattern of naked existence, the mind would then be able to see through the outer shell of space. The mind would be able to see beyond the veil of illusion.”
On December 12th, 2009, a neighborhood child involved in Scouts Canada, came to Hornek’s door selling chocolate-covered almonds. He rang once and knocked on the door three times. No answer. He rang once more. Just before he was about to walk away, Hornek answered the door wearing his morning garb: some black shorts and an anonymous colored shirt with a pocket. He wore no socks. Hornek amicably greeted the boy and asked him what he was selling. “I am doing a fundraiser for Scouts Canada,” proudly answered the boy. “If I can sell lots of chocolate-covered almonds, my friends and I will be able to go on canoe trips next summer. Would you like some?” Hornek agreed to buy some. “Yeah. Please hold on a minute while I get some change.”
Hornek entered the kitchen and opened a drawer where his mother kept loose change, phone numbers, recipes, and all the other knickknacks hidden from plain sight. He sifted through the papers until he reached a little change container. He pulled out $3.00. Just as he pulled his hand out of the drawer, a little piece of paper gently fell down onto the recently polished hardwood floor. When Hornek bent down to investigate the queer piece of paper, he noticed the following sentence hastily imprinted upon it:
“DON’T TRUST THE BOY!”
Hornek thought nothing of it. He went back to the door, gave the patient child the $3.00, thanked him for the highly palatable box of chocolate-covered almonds, and then closed the door. The rest of Hornek’s day was dedicated to savoring the confectionary delight, the ascetic acquisition of knowledge, and a movie about zombies and physics (a movie no doubt constructed around an inane idea).
On the 14th of December, the boy came back to Hornek’s door with a tupperware container filled with chicken noodle soup. When the exhausted Hornek answered the door, the friendly neighborhood boy said, “Here, take this soup. My mom made it for you. You were the only one on this street who helped me out with my cause. My mom and I would like to thank you with this delicious soup.” Hornek looked at the frozen tupperware container and then looked at the resplendent boy standing before him. “I appreciate this kind gesture,” said Hornek. “I will eat this tonight.” Hornek then gently shut the door and went straight to the freezer. As he placed the tupperware container in the freezer, he noticed another queer piece of paper pasted to a box of frozen pasta shells. The piece of paper said:
“THE GIFT IS TAINTED WITH DECEPTION. THE BOY WANTS THE GLASSES.”
Puzzlingly, Hornek perused the queer piece of paper and the strange words on it. He didn’t understand where the words could have come from. It was just his mother and himself, and an apathetic cat who could only speak to Hornek in rudimentary meows and mewls. There was no one else. Hornek thought about the possibility of being a victim of an elaborate joke. But who would orchestrate such a joke and why? Who would warn Hornek about a boy who seemed as innocuous and amiable as the Dalai Lama?
Befuddled by it all, Hornek left the kitchen, ensconced himself on a living room couch, and went to sleep thinking about the role of the irrational in his life. He dreamt of being an explorer who was sailing in a viscous sea of chicken noodle soup. Paper was falling from the gloomy sky of narration onto a ship made from thought-wood. The boy was watching the horizon from the prow. He was talking to no one in particular. He was saying:
“Space within space within space within space within space within space within space within.”
The repetitious words eventually became a song. The song eventually became the sound of a distant bell. The distant bell eventually became the sound of his mother’s voice talking to the apathetic cat. She was upset. The cat had puked all over the rug. Hornek then realized he had awoken from the shit storm of protean symbols he called his dreaming mind. The endless and viscous chicken sea had vanished. The boy had too.
On December 16th, as a blizzard besieged his town, as the glacial drift of time moved against the landmasses in his mind, Hornek Platter thought about inventing something spectacular. A summer-time thought crept into the cerebral attic and started stirring up the neural dust:
“If the hive can hide the precious honeycomb, and the nest can hide a bird’s eggs, then surely space can hide dimensions within itself.”
He quickly pulled out his journal and jotted down some embryonic ideas regarding hidden space and, more importantly, the perception and apprehension of its occult nature:
“There needs to be a device that locates the non-local. There needs to be a device that perceives the imperceptible. The hidden dimensions of space must come to light with the help of some type of extrasensory visual apparatus. Imagine 3-D binocular glasses turned into 4-D glasses. 3-D glasses give us the illusion of depth. 4-D glasses would impart to us a panoramic view of the space/time continuum. The continuum would be perceived as a meta-process of collective ingenuity, where the words of the thinker have as much bearing on reality as the acts of the doer. Thinking and doing would be indistinguishable with the help of 4-D glasses. Time and space, fiction and non-fiction would be indistinguishable as well. I know this sounds unnerving and frightening, but it needs to be done. The prototype for the revolutionary glasses needs to be made. It needs to be done now.”
Hornek Platter then heard a knock at the door upstairs. Who could it have been? There was a tempestuous blizzard raging on out there. Who would have even dared to step outside for even a nanosecond? Only a fool would have ventured out to face the powerful and virile nature of Rudra The Howler. Intuition told him it was the boy. Intuition also tried to convince him not to open the door.
Sometimes messages are prophetic. Sometimes they are absurd. Hornek, at his current stage of development, couldn’t tell the difference. Most of us can’t.
II
“Education is vastly important for ripe minds. Children have ripe minds that are unblemished and special. Children are the future. This is why we must give them the best education possible. We must steer them away from wayward ideas. Wayward ideas poison the mind with heretical nonsense. This has been my position for decades, and it will be my position decades from now.”- Mrs. Mayko at the Summit For Steadfast Education.
“When the senses aren’t working together in a highly organized fashion (ie: when the senses aren’t focused on ‘one abiding thing’), they have a tendency to impart to the mind an interference pattern of grandiose ugliness.”- Hornek Platter
The boy was shivering uncontrollably on the welcome mat when Hornek answered the door. His lips were partially blue. There was a vacant expression in the boy’s eyes. “What’s the problem here?” Hornek asked. “How come you’re trying to navigate the storm?” Before the boy could answer Hornek’s pertinent questions, he collapsed in Hornek’s arms like some kind of floppy, desperate fish that had escaped from the sanctum of his watery home. Hornek, with exquisite care, carried the unconscious boy to the couch and called out to his mother for help. “Mother! The boy who lives next door just fainted or something. I think we may need to call the ambulance over here, pronto.”
Before his mother reached for the phone, the boy suddenly woke up from his transient battle with the sorcerers of unconsciousness, and started to whisper soft words to Hornek. Hornek moved closer to the supine form that rested on his couch. Color was returning to his lips. The shivering had partially subsided. Softly, ever so softly, the boy told Hornek about his battle with the storm:
“I was attending to my Scouts Canada work when the wind suddenly picked up. It was fierce and unholy. It steered me this way and that like a rag doll. I started looking for shelter. I was a block or two away from home. Suddenly, the wind came from behind me and pushed me towards this house. I think some kind of destiny brought me here. Say…do you mind if I stay over? I will ask my mom first.”
Before Hornek could answer the boy, Hornek’s mother came in the room and surveyed the situation with droopy eyes. She didn’t call the ambulance. Seeing as she heard a muted conversation taking place in the next room, she figured everything was somewhat okay in the marvelous land of her decorous home. “Is everything okay?” she asked. Hornek nodded. “Yeah, everything is okay now. The boy just got lost in the storm for a smidgen of time. He wants to stay over. I see no harm in that.” Neither did Hornek’s mom. While the congenial boy phoned his mom, Hornek’s mother made some hot chocolate and Hornek went to the washroom.
As Hornek urinated, cognitions besieged his yawning mind like an armada of pins attacking a pincushion. He thought about the messages he had received from the future, or from some kind of parallel universe that desperately tried to warn him about his neighbor. He got lost in these cognitions as urine mingled with the motionless water of the toilet. He couldn’t make sense of them. His own thoughts seemed beyond him. They were out-of-reach, and yet of him. Maybe he was just too tired to deal with the possibility of interdimensional communication between his flesh-bound self and some type of tutelary doppelganger. In a valiant act of cognitive destruction, Hornek shook his head, cleared his thoughts, and returned to the reality at hand: urine, toilet, relief.
When Hornek stumbled out of the bathroom, a little disoriented for some reason, the cute little boy playfully punched Hornek in the stomach. “I am staying over, friend,” exultantly said the boy. “Now we can watch cartoons and play video games all night!” Hornek’s mother handed them hot chocolate and smiled.
Hornek made it twenty minutes into “Fantasia” and then passed on into the realm of conflicted dreams.
When Hornek woke up the next morning, he was whispering a repetitive string of simple words to himself: “Space within space within space within space within space.” Some drool had collected on his shirt. His hands felt numb. His spirit felt wobbly. Hornek then heard papers rustling behind him. It was the boy. The boy was going through Hornek’s extensive collection of books, papers, epistles, and manuscripts like a wild dog searching for an invisible bone. Before Hornek had the opportunity or even the will to get up, the restless boy approached Hornek from behind and asked:
“What are 4-D glasses?”
Hornek’s spirit suddenly felt wobblier. He didn’t know what to say or do. He was conflicted. If he told the boy about the invention he was working on, the boy was either going to be a) bedazzled and baffled by the explanation or b) even more curious about the invention itself. This curiosity would then engender more probing questions; questions that Hornek rather not answer. On the other hand, if Hornek did not answer the question, the boy would have felt mortified that he tried to pry open a taboo box he had no business prying open. Hornek decided, after some internal deliberation, to give the boy an answer not too sugary and not too bland.
“It’s complicated.”
“Why is it complicated?”
“It just is.”
“Oh.”
“Well, I am just starting to wrap my head around it myself.”
“Can these glasses see into other times, other places, other dimensions?”
“In theory, this is all possible.”
“Well, let’s get started.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean let’s start making them.”
“It’s not that simple.”
Thankfully, at least for Hornek, the conversation was cut short when the boy’s mother beckoned for him from the kitchen. “Come on, sweetie,” she said with a mellifluous voice that reverberated down the stairs like a tuneful echo would in Chartres Cathedral. “Time to go for swimming lessons. The storm is gone.” The boy quickly said goodbye to Hornek and then ran upstairs. Without regret, Hornek decided to crawl into bed in order to nurture his wobbly spirit. Before he knew it, Hornek was kayaking down the Niagara Falls of descending dreams.
Hornek woke up in the early afternoon. Some dappled sunlight was dancing on the basement wall. There wasn’t much going on within. The conflicted and wobbly feeling had flown south for the winter. Calm. Quiescence. Hornek attributed this lack of tension and disorientation to the absence of the boy. He was beginning to feel sick around him. He didn’t know why. He was beginning to see a glimmer of truth in the mysterious notes he had enigmatically located in his house. Maybe the boy was after something he wasn’t willing to part with? Maybe the boy was the devil in disguise? Suppositions…yes. But every theory does carry a kernel of truth, after all.
In the evening, as Hornek’s mother was intensely watching the show, “Dancing With The Stars,” a knock startled Hornek from a contemplative moment of inner clarity. The knock was administered to the basement window. As Hornek opened the blinds and peered out into the winter twilight, he was wholly disappointed to see the boy smiling back at him from the other side of the window. The boy motioned for him to meet him outside. A nauseous feeling formed in Hornek’s gut. He didn’t want to go. He didn’t want to face the affable exterior—body—that housed the devious interior of the boy’s porous soul. He just wanted to attend to his studies. That’s all he wanted in this world, and the boy was taking it away from him one evening at a time.
Reluctantly, Hornek smiled back. He then agreed to meet the boy outside. The nauseous feeling escalated and exacerbated.
As Hornek stepped outside, he could hear a distant train coming to a halt, the constant thrum of the city’s electric heartbeat, Rudra The Howler playing the flute like Krishna, and the creaking trees moving in accord with the mythical flute. He moved past the gate to the western side of the house. The boy ambushed him with snowballs when he stepped passed the carport. One hit his left cheek, and the other hit his belly. The boy started laughing like a hyena on nitrous oxide. The laughter made Hornek feel worse. The boy sensed the queasy feeling assailing Hornek, stopped laughing, and then said:
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am sure.”
“Good. I got a proposal for you.”
“What kind of proposal?”
“Well, Mrs. Mayko wants us to bring something to show and tell.”
“What does this have to do with me?”
“I want to bring in the 4-D glasses.”
“But that’s an invention I am working on.”
“I know, but maybe we could work on it together.”
“Why?”
“So I can present the best thing possible.”
Hornek thought back to his presentation, and how his embryonic theory of time travel did nothing to further his budding career as a quantum maestro. He mentally went back through the painful and lonely years as though he was studying a text of himself. He riffled through those yellowed pages of missed opportunities. He analyzed the footnotes, the metaphors, the self-references, and the citations. He then came to a page with bold letters on it:
“DON’T ACCEPT HIS PROPOSAL. DON’T ACCEPT HIS PROPOSAL.”
Hornek gently smiled to the boy and responded:
“I rather not accept this proposal. My ideas and inventions are mine, and I own them. I don’t want you using them for some classroom presentation. You can present something meaningful to you, but you can’t present something that is meaningful to me. That would be stealing. Now, please excuse me. I must attend to my studies in solitude.”
While fuming underneath the calm façade of neighborly congeniality, Hornek turned around to enter the house that sheltered his bed and ideas from the world of thieves, curious children, and the unpredictable mixture of the two. Just as he was about to enter the house, Hornek heard the boy clear his throat in a manner that demanded his attention. When Hornek turned around, he saw the boy holding crumbled sheets of paper. “While you were sleeping, I jotted down some notes on the 4-D glasses,” the boy confidently said. “Even though I am young, naïve, and uneducated, I still know a good idea when I see one. I was willing to learn from you, but now I am just going to take what is yours. Seeing as you aren’t willing to play with me, I am simply going to take the prototype for the 4-D glasses and profit from it. If you try to take these pages back from me, I am going to tell my mom that you were abusive. Do you understand?” Hornek was speechless, shocked, and obviously fuming. He couldn’t move. The nauseous feeling in his gut was growing like an evil flower from an evil seed. He managed to nod. “Good,” said the boy. And then he ran off to his house with the papers.
Hornek fell to his knees and puked up remnants of dinner. He couldn’t believe he was deceived and duped by a child who seemed so innocuous and playful. He couldn’t believe he didn’t see it coming from a mile away. Surely the warning signs were there for him to see. The ink had touched the paper of the future, and had been sent back through the wormhole of time to unequivocally warn him of the boy’s true nature: deceit. More remnants came up. Hornek cried. He wished he had invented the glasses sooner. Then the boy wouldn’t have been able to purloin nothing from him. Then he would have had the upper hand in a precarious friendship that was destined to enter the wasteland of time.
The train was still coming to a halt. The flute was still ringing.
Meet Hornek Platter.
Genius.
Autodidact.
Recluse.
Fool.
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