The CuisinArt

We are all reincarnations, though short lived ones. When we die, our atoms will disassemble and move off to find new ones elsewhere, as part of a leaf, an animal, a swing set, the tire of a bicycle, or another human.

Atlan shifts focus from the book. He examines the chair he sits in: A dark shade of green. It’s a very peculiar chair, all of a sudden. He looks at the fibers in the carpet, the bits of dirt in his fingernails, the dust on the bookshelf across the room, the indiscriminate hairs sticking to his black turtleneck shirt. He moves to his room.

“Frankly, I couldn’t care less what she thinks of me…Who the hell is she to say anything, anyway…she’s trash…Not yet, I’ve tried it on, but I don’t want to look like slut…Are you sure?… He better, I’m sick of the games.”

Atlan’s room was more of a spacious closet (By Middle Class American standards), occupied by a twin bed (previously stored in the attic for 5 years; where he found the book he now reads), a small end table with a flat surface, which he uses for a desk, and some shelves (enough room for his wardrobe: four pairs of dark khakis, six plain white t-shirts, three hand made wool sweaters, socks, underwear, a few long sleeve tees, and two button down collared shirts for dinners).
Our moon is large in relation to us (1/4 Earth’s size). The moon’s steady gravitational influence keeps the Earth spinning at the right speed and angle to provide stability.

He takes a sip of coffee. He looks at the window, then through it: A child walks down the street, with a small sheep dog in tow. It pauses and squats.

“I’m sorry, I know not everyone is perfect, but if you’re her size, and you aren’t eating raw vegetables 24-7, then you deserve it. And she shouldn’t wear shirts that show her fat stomach. She’s asking for ridicule.”

A little further, is a small movie theatre: singles, couples, and groups walk in and out while the projector is re-threaded for the next showing.

Our planet falls in a perfectly located orbit. 5% closer to the sun or 15% further and we wouldn’t be here.

Atlan examines a camera that he received as a gift from an old man, during his sojourn in Atlan’s mountain town, three years prior to this day. Though outdated, by today’s standards, Atlan never considered updating. He took his first pictures with it- pictures that would garner an offer for a full academic scholarship in the United States.

“Do you really think I care? I have every intention of making her cry. I-do-not-giveafuck… Hold on, I’ll ask him….Hey Atlan, you want to come to a party tonight…Well, do you mind giving me and Sarah a ride? We’ll take a cab back…Thanks, we’re ready whenever you are.”

He breathes in slowly through his nose, feeling the air and the minute dust particles enter his nasal passage. He flips to a new page. He’s now moved to the bed.

An atom is mostly empty space, with a very dense nucleus. If you expanded an atom into the size of a Cathedral, the nucleus would be the size of a fly- but a fly many thousands of times heavier than the cathedral.

He takes pictures of a few pages, which he will print at the local library and mail to his best friend in Cypress, who is serving his required 6-months of Turkey’s military training.

“Ugh, I don’t know. They’ll be back afternoon tomorrow to take Atlan to the University. I will get him back here tonight, and I can’t wait to see her face when we leave together. I bet she doesn’t even show up to class tomorrow”

He examines the palms of his hands, the ceiling, the book, the wood floor (and each crack in it), the rock garden in the yard, and the steam from his coffee. She comes to the door. He examines her outfit, her hair, her makeup, her push-up bra.

“You ready?”

The Unified Field theory allows all of the fundamental forces between elementary particles to be written in terms of a single field. Every single thing, that is a thing, emerges from this field.

It’s a pleasure to present Part Deux of Shea’s harrowing tale of time travel…

As we have touched briefly upon its potential, let us pause for a moment to reflect upon Time. There are those who say Time is like casting a stone into a pond and watching the ripples circle outward. Sometimes this is the case. But mostly, Time is like a handful of pebbles strewn across a lake, with each pebble creating its own tiny ripple. The ripples scatter, directionless. Sometimes they flow into one another; sometimes they ebb into nothingness.

One pebble is a woman.

There is nothing special about her as far as appearances go. She looks as any plain faced, 20 something, might look in 1970’s Pondicherry—familiar.

Each day at 3 o’clock she would pass a small, family owned-café in the northwest section of town. Each day there would sit a man reading a book in the corner. The man was Indian, but with a foreign quality about him, and not particularly just that he was from another country, but like he was from an entirely different kind of place. At the same time he felt so familiar. It was almost as if he were pleading to tell her a story: a story that by some peculiar design featured only her.

Still, their days were spent in silence. Try as she would to engage his attention, he never once looked up from his book.

The man is another pebble. The man is Manoj Vindalu.

Though he departed from Dunville with a plan, Manoj arrived in 1970 Pondicherry without the faintest idea of how to execute it. He hadn’t a clue where to find M Knight’s future mother. Worse yet, he had no idea when the time of conception was, and could not be sure that, even if he found her, the genetic miracle of life was not already stewing within her uterus.

Manoj decided that his first plan of action would be to use the time machine as a sort of research device to uncover the moment when the two lovers first met. It should have taken months (or years depending on how you look at it) and yet he stumbled almost instantly upon a street corner where they shared their first kiss. Upon further investigation, he was fortunate enough to overhear them discussing the details of the day they first met. He went back in time again and followed her to the meeting. He found it at a small, family owned café in the northwest section of town.

Finding two specific souls in the bottomless abyss of time? Learning further the exact date of their meeting? Why Manoj never thought to reflect upon this wave of good luck is uncertain. Though it is often the tragedy of the unwise to mistake fate for fortune, as he would soon come to understand.

After ascertaining the details of their meeting, he traveled innumerably to the past of M Knight’s future mother. He made periodic appearances throughout her life, positioning himself in places where their eyes would meet, sometimes only for an instant. His eyes would become a motif that defined her life. His eyes would be the dream she unconsciously sought in her waking hours. He would become her perpetual déjà vu. Once he was certain that his eyes would never be forgotten, he traveled to the small, family owned-café in the northwest section of town. There he waited three weeks, each day feeling her gaze hot upon his neck.

Then came the day of the fated meeting. Everything played out as normal: M Knight’s future mother was on track to meet her one-time future husband. But, at the precise moment when the eyes of her one-time future husband looked forward, hers instinctively looked right—to Manoj in the café. And there, for the first time in three weeks, she met his eyes. They were the eyes of her dreams. They were eyes that reflected her past. They were eyes that had seen time. And with no greater passing than any of the other innumerable, shifting bodies, her one-time future husband continued on his way, unaware as she that their shared future had been struck from existence with the swiftness of a single quill stroke.

Manoj offered her a seat, though he could scarcely understand why. He had already averted fate. His task was finished. He had assured that M. Knight could not possibly be conceived. He had thwarted their meeting, and in a city of millions, no one gets a second chance at something like that. Perhaps it was the intoxicating power of his success, or the sweet aroma of coconut milk that swam from her pores, but he found himself wishing to pursue his advances further. He had bested his rival. Now he would taste the spoils.

Manoj never had much skill with women. But he wouldn’t need any for this. The consequences of his meddling with her past had ensured that she would never want for another as long as she lived. On a tattered, single mattress, within the walls of a small inn, they engaged in carnal congress with a passion that can only be exhibited by lovers who have seen time, and returned to write its designs upon one another in their sweat.

Later, Manoj rose in the moonlight and stared at the woman whose womb now lay dormant. He paused for a moment of reflection. He was 8,000 miles and 40 years from the only life that he knew. What was he in the future but a cranky, middle-aged video store clerk, with a now-complete vendetta against a prominent Hollywood director? In the now he was a time traveler. He was a man with knowledge of the future. Knowledge he could use to make him a very rich man. And so he fled without so much as a fare-thee well, pawned the device, and booked passage to America.

Manoj could not see the grand lake of Time. If he could he would have seen that the many ripples caused by the pebbles he had strewn were slowly merging into one. And though many interesting things happened to Manoj in America, nothing of true merit occurred until nine years later. He was on a stroll through Fairmount Park when he bumped into his Indian mistress of nine years past. It was awkward. But it was nothing compared to what he felt when she introduced a small child, scarcely older than eight: the product of their quieted lust.

How does a penguin know her child? How does a bird known the passage south only just being born? Is it in the blood? Is it in the genes? Or is it in the eyes? Manoj met the frightened gaze and he saw familiar eyes—eyes that had seen time. And when the revelation came, it did not come like surf upon a beach, but like waves upon sharp rocks.

There, in a park in Philadelphia, were the eyes of the man who would go on to create the greatest atrocities known to modern cinema. The very man Manoj had set out to destroy so long ago had been born from the fruits of his own lust. Was it always destined to be like this? We do not know. All we know is that Time is pebbles strewn across a lake. And no matter how many ripples circle outward in untold directions, they all settle in the end.

Manoj fled. He felt the hands of madness begin to claw at him, and he knew it was only a matter of time before they would pull him asunder. Unless…

Unless Milo! If Milo knew the truth perhaps he could avert such an undeserved fate. But how would he contact a man 30 years in the future? Something came to him, an idea he had seen in Back to the Future Part II. He would send a letter to Milo. He would recount every vivid detail of his journey. Milo would learn from his mistakes and then, only then, could he save Manoj.
He ran to the nearest pharmacy and bought paper, envelops, a pen, and Sitcky’s Quick Bonding Glue: guaranteed to last 30 years. He scribbled furiously, penning letters barely more legible than Sanskrit. He closed the letter and applied a glob of glue to the back. He ran to the nearest mailbox, opened it, and glued it beneath the lid. With any luck the envelope would survive the 30 advertised years before falling in the appropriate time period. It was a long shot. All he could do was wait.

Against all odds, the plan worked. The letter fell a little more than a week or so after the day Manoj had first begun his journey through time. It fell among similar parcels, differentiated only by the tawny coloring it had accumulated over the years. It was retrieved by the mailman and delivered to the home of the intended recipient. And yet, not all went according to plan.

Manoj had peeked so far into his own past that he had forgotten entirely about the future—more specifically, Milo’s future. He and Manoj may have shared drastically different geography, but they still inhabited the same timeline.

So on that fateful day as the credits began to roll and Manoj activated the device, Milo had turned right to offer him some popcorn. As he extended a handful, he saw Manoj disappear into nothingness. Milo screamed inconsolably. He made such a ruckus that he was arrested. He continued to scream all the way to the police department. He screamed past his holding cell and into the office of a psychiatric evaluator. He screamed at every turn in the brief, albeit windy, road that led him to be confined within The Montgomery County Psychiatric Hospital. Perhaps he screamed out of horror from seeing his friend vanish. Perhaps because he could not stomach the fact that time travel was nothing more elaborate than the liberal application of glue to circuitry.

The incident aroused the attention of many. Bad popcorn some said. Too much pornography said others. It also attracted the attention of a 40 something movie director with a strong affinity for such mysteries. The man spent his evenings trolling various newspapers in search of critics who reviewed his movies favorably. He never found any. But what he did find while browsing through a supermarket tabloid he had purchased in the hopes of finding a favorable review, was a story about an individual who claimed his best friend disappeared into thin air during a recent screening of The Happening. He decided it was a story worth investigating.

So he went to the man’s home and talked to his mother. She told him her son had been committed and was not allowed visitors for the first 50 days. When the man inquired further about the incident she left the room. She returned with a tawny colored envelope. The envelope had arrived a week after the incident. It was addressed from the man who Milo claimed disappeared. Stranger yet was that no one had seen that man since. She had kept the letter out of fear. She gave it to the man at her doorstep for the same reason.

He bid farewell and hailed a taxi. In the backseat he opened the letter and read its contents. He became entranced in a story that both explored and transcended Time. It was a Greek tragedy; it was an exploration in science fiction. Its protagonist was raw. He even saw the potential for a subplot of redemption in the rewrite. As the cab pulled into his driveway, he produced a twenty for the driver and a cell phone for himself. Dialing a number he dialed once a year, he heard a voice click on the other end; and he spoke.

“Hello Mike, its me, M Knight. I’ve just had the best idea for my next film.”

So comes to rest another tragic tale about a man who thought himself the better of Time. But Time is not a foe to be conquered, or a trial to be endured. Time is pebbles strewn across a lake. And whether Time really is a thing, an abstraction, or a cosmic seamstress weaving tapestries of fate by celestial candlelight, one thing is certain: it sure can spin a good yarn.

We’ve got contributor #2, folks. The leather-foot, scatterbrained, and immensely clever- Shea O’Neill. He is single, bearded, and author of the kerouacian (care-OH-whack-ee-n) blog ‘Northwest Excursion.’

Below is part one of his quirky time travel saga. Enjoy:

It did not surprise Milo Stampton, repudiated best friend of Manoj Vindalu, when Manoj burst into his apartment one Friday afternoon with a solution to the “M Knight problem.” Nor did it confound his sensibilities that the “solution” appeared to be a shoebox, wherein wires and circuits co-mingled in a pool of Elmer’s Glue. It fazed him little when Manoj called the box a time machine; less when he explained the mechanics: it would encapsulate him within a pan-dimensional, time-neutral bubble, allowing him to transport instantaneously while time continued as normal outside. His plan was easily deducible: use the machine to fast-forward to the twist endings in M. Knight’s movies.

Considering Manoj’s zealotry, single mindedness, and weekend propensity for glue huffing, it all made perfect sense. Except for the fact that Manoj, an often solitary man, invited Milo to the device’s inauguration. This was truly surprising.

They traveled together to the movie theatre, though Milo, admittedly, went only to ridicule. At the concession stand Milo bought a large tub of popcorn. Manoj refused concessions, reminding Milo that “he won’t need snacks where he’s going.” They filed into their seats, nodding or sneering accordingly throughout the previews. The credits silenced the crowd. Taking his cue, Manoj closed his eyes and activated the device.

He awoke to find himself staring once again at the opening credits. Defeated, he tossed the device among fallen popcorn kernels and half chewed bubblegum. It appeared Milo had been right all along and that one cannot deconstruct the mysteries of time travel using wires and glue. Perhaps next time he would use rubber cement instead. He turned to congratulate Milo. In his place he found an older gentlemen, ashen white, waving his hands and stuttering “G-G-Ghost.”

It would be far too convenient to construe the man’s outburst as just another “senior moment.” The man is, or rather was—as these events would surely precipitate a downfall in his sanity—a rather competent and upstanding citizen. But what other conclusion could he possibly draw? He had, after all, been minding his own businesses, palming a rather ambitious handful of popcorn, when an Indian man appeared out of the Ether and plopped into the seat beside him.

While hovering beyond the earth in his pan-dimensional, time neutral bubble, Manoj forgot the fact that the Earth would continue to turn on its normal 24-hour rotation, spinning at an impressive 800 mph below. And so, two hours later, the geographic location from which he had originated was no longer the geographic location in which he re-emerged. He resurfaced two hours West in a small midwestern town called Dunville. The true miracle was that he had somehow managed to reappear inside another movie theatre showing the same film he had attempted to avert two hours and 1,600 miles earlier.

Manoj fled the escalating awkwardness in search of a bus station. Nearing the depot he heard a whisper from an adjacent alleyway. Curiosity piqued, he slinked into the darkness. There he found a man cloaked in black.

“Looking for some time?” the man asked.

Manoj, confused and still distraught over his failed experiment, decided to inquire further into what the man meant by time. Most likely he was some black market clock salesman. Though Manoj clung to hope that just maybe he was selling some thyme, which would go nicely with the stew Manoj planned to cook later that evening.

“Time,” the man repeated. “The Great Journey. Miss Scary Plane. The Relevancy Factor. The STC. Time Travel.”

“You mean to tell me,” Manoj replied skeptically, “that you are peddling time travel in the back alley of a small midwestern town? How do I know this is not a hoax?”

“You’ll just have to trust me the same way you trusted Marty Coopersmith to sell you an official early release copy of Cloverfield, instead of some cheap bootleg,” he answered, checking over each shoulder for whatever authorities might police against illegal time dealing.

Manoj then concluded that no stranger could possibly know such personal information unless they had traveled back in time to obtain it.

And so perhaps it was the curious name drop. Or perhaps it is because a bootleg time travel device turned out to be much cheaper than a bus ticket back to Philadelphia. But Manoj decided to make a deal.

“So where will you be going, forward or backward?” the man asked, opening his coat to reveal a colorful assortment of trinkets and mechanical devices, all of which hummed at a deep and unsettling frequency. Manoj’s instincts told him to say forward, but he caught his tongue. Why continue to go forward when there would always be another movie theatre just beyond the horizon? Why run a race he could not win? Why not just go back to the beginning and rig the race in his favor?

He would travel backward to the curry swept bazaars of 1970’s Pondicherry, India. He would find the parents of M Knight. He would thwart their love. And once and for all he would avert the ill-fated conception of the man responsible for cinematic holocaust.

“I’ll take an order of the past,” Manoj said, smiling wryly. “And make it to go.” End Part I.