79. It is the shared space of suspended disbelief (from Virtualis)

Then he waited for a more intimate intimation of the role he was to play in this ceremony. He had perhaps half a dozen meet-ups with George before the subject arose, and the ceremony came up because it was now March, and his face and throat were clogged with pollen, so it was spring, and there was still no sign of a date. They were sitting on George’s balcony. Jesse had asked for a date, again, and George had again fobbed him off.

“Are we waiting for a special tree to bloom?” Jesse asked in annoyance. Water had wick’d into the ass of his chinos from his chair and he was cold from lack of sleep.

“There are tides to be considered. We need a relatively flat location with no oversight by humans, and Michel’s come up empty so far.”

“Maybe he doesn’t want it to happen.”

“You don’t know him as well as you think. The chance to partner with Kima in the production of a light show designed to blow the minds of everyone watching is quite an inducement. They’re working their asses off, or would do if they had same,” George said.

“A light show.”

“We’re Sixers.  Michel and Kima and I have shown you a fraction of what we can do when we wish to play with light and colour.”

“I figured you could do pretty much anything inside whatever your personal light bubble is.”

“Is that what you call it?” George said.

Jesse shrugged. “You can make light stop in its tracks and run in circles. I can only visualize this by thinking of the works being inside a bubble, maybe not a perfect circle but as close to one as the ground lets you be.”

George nodded slowly. “We can make the bubble larger by coordinating and linking.  Under some circumstances, one Sixer can ‘manage’ another’s light bubble, and in the process widen the scope of the display to almost terrifying lengths.”

“That actually sounds kinda cool.”

“I’m warning you. I was terrified, personally terrified, when they did the earthquake segment. I’m having trouble imagining how most humans would perceive it.  I’m afraid many people would think it was really happening and blow an aneurysm.”

“They put on a light show that scared you,” Jesse said, finding this unwelcome and thought-provoking news.

“My hair woke up and stilt-legged me into Indian Arm, and me with my chubby legs hanging in the breeze. How it thought that running us into the ocean during a violent earthquake was the embodiment of ‘Safety First’ my imagination and rhetoric cannot unravel.”

“What were you expecting?”

“For it to stay asleep, as it mostly does.”

“So it woke up in a panic and fell over backward when it thought the earth was opening up and swallowing it?” Jesse permitted himself a giggle as he tried to picture it.

“It came up with a somewhat more elegant solution than dragging me along the ground like a tiresome afterthought, as it has done several times in the past when it perceived a threat,” George said mildly.

“Go go George’s hair,” Jesse said.

“It isn’t funny. My hair could ruin everything,” George said. “I keep trying to maneuver us into a situation of mutual assistance and trust. I fail. I hope that a solution can be found.  I don’t know what to believe.”

“How is it, with all of your smarts, that you keep filing Pep Talks under Suicide Notes,” Jesse said.

“So I can hear you chide me about my mental health problems,” George said.

“Ayoille!” Jesse said, performing a creditable Michel, and then returning to his normal tone. “You have to tell me when I’m in friend mode, otherwise I just ignore you until you issue a direct order,” Jesse said. “It’s the Canadian way.”

“I’m having a little trouble with —“ but Jesse was inexorable.

“And I’ll tell you something else for free – Canadians never work harder than when it’s at something they weren’t actually supposed to be doing.”

“That is supported by my observation, so I’ll let the impudence pass.”

Jesse found himself silent, eyebrows raised, mouth pursed.

“Ah, you’ve gone all quiet,” George said in condolence. “Jesse, I don’t know when the ceremony’s going to be. I’m not dismissing your right to ask. I find humans are crazy for calendars, and it’s not really the way Sixers work, or not the way we’ve worked for the past few millennia. Who knows what our true state is? — we came into being a long way from here. Our attitude is: We get there when we get there.  It’s the first thing that gets beaten out of conquered peoples, their language and their ways of dealing with time; humans are going to have trouble beating it out of Sixers, because you won’t be able to conquer us.”

“You sleep in four hour blocks,” Jesse said, looking skeptical. “I’d say you’re fully invested in how we manage time on Earth.”

“There’s a difference between a daily practicality and the great mass of time,” George said. “Especially when you’re juggling nested rings of variables muddled with flaming torches of egotism and bathtubs full of the lime green Jell-o of special interest.”

Jesse continued to be politely disbelieving. “You’re juggling bathtubs full of lime-green Jell-o.”

“I was told it’s a science fiction fandom reference which will please the discerning.”

“It would, if you weren’t missing the most important part,” Jesse said.  Raven, of course, had told him the story.

“The naked underaged redheaded twins, yes, I understand that. I thought it would be implied once I mentioned the bathtub and the Jell-o, which would allow me to not have to say anything about the redheaded twins.”

“I s’pose that’s most of the fun of being a hipster. Saying something douchey that only your friends will understand,” Jesse said.  He drained the beer he’d had the self-care to bring, and finished the bag of nachos.

“I forgot to tell you,” George said. “I got real food.”

“What?  WAWWWWWT?” Jesse bellowed.

“Mind the neighbours!” He said something in Greek that sounded like what Michel had translated once as ‘you great ox’. “There’s beef and broccoli and garlic prawns in the fridge.”

“You’re fucking kidding me!” Jesse cried in joyful tones.

“Shh! No! There are chopsticks too,” George said, smiling.

“Did you put a bag in the kitchen trash?” Jesse asked in a more subdued tone.

“I knew I forgot something else,” George said. “I’ll use the bag the food came in.”

“That’s the ticket,” Jesse said sliding open the balcony door as fast as was safe.

“How is it that you forget anything, when your memory is so good?” Jesse said, as he stood by the microwave. He stayed inside to eat; the wind was too rude to be a dining companion.

“The memory is still there in a sequence, but sometimes I can’t find my way back to the memory I want. Sometimes it feels like something in my thought processes is actively blocking me.”

“Must be weird not to be able to trust your memories.”

“Must be weird for you not to understand how fragile human memory is and therefore be able to produce such a beautiful assumption without irony.”