Letters from the Inaccessible.

10 MP3 Songs
ELECTRONIC: Virtual Orchestra, ELECTRONIC: Industrial



Details:
Throughout my childhood I recall an awareness, my mind tapping into a divergent stream from history, one which withered or faded for reasons I cannot fathom. This generally consisted of remembering that I'd walked surely and also tripped on a stair, simultaneously having been struck by and dodging a punch from a playmate. I always, always knew when someone lied to me. But at the time, I could only experience another stream before it died, for just a handful of seconds. Later in adolescence, I began to make deeper connections to the environment, sometimes watching a car crash nearby and a near-miss simultaneously, watching the near-miss fade quickly into the sounds of bleating horns and drivers inspecting their fenders for dents. Eventually I began, when relaxing, or when tired, or when depressed, to see more distant presents, more of them at once, fainter echoes of stronger dreams. Unpeopled, I saw empty streets, vast fields and overgrown orchards at once, vacant stretches of office plazas and tract homes, an overwhelming chimaera of chance and probability.

"Did you hear me?" she asked. I replied yes, now certain which six billion people, and which me, just winked from existence. Possessed by a flash of insight, I turned to her and gazed carefully at her: she saw it, too. It was a distant reverberation, a shadow, the merest hint at the memory, but she somehow had access to it just as I had, if only to a much lesser extent. I suspect everyone does. Indecision is the connection with all of these potential futures; a decision kills all but one. Of course, people often regret decisions, just as she did then, because they can barely see them until they die, seconds at most down the road. For some reason, though, it seems that I'm the only one who watches them die, the only one visited by their ghosts. Beyond that, imagination writes the outcome.

The oil platforms started to split again. As my companion was continuing her story, I caught fragments of speech from her. I didn't know which she actually said, and which she didn't. The refinery tower glittering a half-mile high, and the lonely fisherman's lantern bobbing and swaying on the halyard were ghosts, the stronger afterimages of worlds that divided. I don't know why some places and things were charged asthey were, why some threaten to cleave from reality at a moment's notice into dueling superpositions.

I just let her talk, and when I focused, staring at the oil platforms on the horizon, the towers and lantern gracefully gave way to sparkling halogens and a winking red eye designed to ward off airplanes and evil spirits.