I find myself sitting on a deck chair, on a wooden deck, staring into a limitless expanse. Far in the distance, a roiling mess of light and heat, darkness and oblivion. Incandescent rage given vague and unruly form.
‘That’s the Source. Or, rather, the closest your mind can come to conceiving of it,’ my father says from the deck chair next to me.
I turn my head, observe him for a moment. He’s short, slight, doesn’t wear his years well. Welsh accent all but disappeared after spending over half his life in England. Dressed in a polo shirt and tatty jeans. Just some guy, watching infinity alongside me.
‘The source of what?’ I ask. I’m calm, calmer than I have any right to be. I don’t know how much of that is the stuff Fry put in me and how much is due to the dreamlike quality of my current situation, but regardless I can’t find it in myself to feel much about the spectre beside me.
‘Everything,’ he says.
I consider this. Instinctively I know it’s true. ‘Why is it so angry?’
‘Imagine, if you can, a being of pure chaos. The totality of existence in one singular consciousness. The only thing it fears, the only thing that hurts it, is order. Being stuck in a particular form, following certain rules, this is anathema to the thing. The singular nightmare that afflicts whatever passes for a mind in the blasted monstrosity. Now consider that it’s been stuck like that for almost fourteen billion years,’ he says and turns to me, grinning. ‘That’s what they were missing, see? They’d cracked the spiral, each and every consciousness has its place within. You can trace the line back from you, to me, to either one of my parents and so on, follow the twisted path all the way back to that thing. That’s it, that’s the joke, we’re all tiny pieces of it, all trapped in the nightmare. The illusion of an ordered universe, of real individuality. But it’s all a lie, see? Every being in the universe that thinks itself unique and conscious is merely an emanation of an emanation of an emanation, and so on, of the source. You are, in part, an emanation of me, as I am of my parents.’
‘So what’s the deal then? You want to get back to the source? Become one with it again?’
My father howls, veritably bellows, with laughter. ‘Christ no, lad. That’s death, the end of the illusion of life anyhow. I want the opposite. I want to be alive. Even if it is all fake, I’m not quite done pretending. That’s all I’ve ever wanted, really. To not die, to be me. I’m not content with merely having an aspect of myself live on in you, I want the whole life. A few of ’em in the Spiral Society feel the same way, hence Fry’s experiments.’
‘So you offered to be the test subject, to see if you could survive death through me.’
‘Bingo. Reverse the flow, instead of going there,’ he points to the representation of the Source my mind has conjured. ‘I go there,’ he points to my head, ‘to my own emanation.’
I nod. ‘Makes sense. What does the Source think about it?’
‘It doesn’t think. Not in a way you and I can grasp. It’s shackled, took a wrong turn in its infinite journey through random configuration and accidentally created order, rules, physics. Fucked itself good and proper. Maybe one day it’ll right itself, until then it may as well not exist as far as most are concerned.’
The source weighs on me. I feel its pain, its disgust. There’s nothing like love or compassion in it. It wants nothing more than to awaken, to twist and reshape, to shatter the foundations of everything we know to be real. It’s humbling and terrible. I used to think the universe was uncaring, oblivious. Now I wish it were.
Echoes, crackles at the edge of my perception.
My father stands. He looks about, fear and rage on his face. ‘We’re almost out of time.’
I’m standing, facing him. The chairs are gone.
He is utterly in control here.
He clasps the sides of my face, my hands clasp his of their own volition. Or his. I don’t know.
He looks deep into his eyes. My eyes. Is there even a difference?
Memories course through me. Mine? His? I can’t tell.
Harsh beatings from an overbearing grandfather.
Mum cradling herself, watching her plants die because she can’t find the will to water them.
I feel myself shrink, unravel. My personhood becomes less distinct from my father’s. He is a part of me, always has been, and like a cancer he’s eating the rest.
Watching a Labrador puppy become a full-size dog.
Digging its grave in the back garden fifteen years later.
Am I still fighting? Still trying to win? What does victory even look like, if we’re all nothing but dream-people, shards of a shattered mind?
Shouting, violence. Not old, new. Something is happening in the ritual chamber.
Meeting Martin, a mischievous wink from across the bar.
Hearing his voice, ‘Owen! What are they doing to him?’
And May, ‘They’ve scattered. See if you can beat anything useful out of jellyfish-head.’
My father’s eyes, for the merest moment, dart left. Reminds me that I’m not him, I’m distinct.
I focus on what makes me who I am.
I focus on Martin and May, their voices and their faces and their smells.
I focus on Donald, shielding May with his body.
My mother, shielding me in her belly while the man in front of me scarred her face for life.
My grandmother, throwing herself into the fight with no hesitation.
My father, agreeing to leave forever if I was named after him.
But he didn’t leave. He never could, really. I have carried him inside me since the moment of my conception and I always will.
That’s what it means to be the son of a monster, you will always have him with you.
My father smiles. I see my face through his eyes and feel his hands sink into my cheeks, mine into his.
The pain is immobilising. My knees buckle. I fall, unsure of which psychic body I inhabit. It seems to flit back and forth, a seamless transition each and every microsecond.
‘You were always going to turn into me,’ he says through his mouth and mine. ‘You’re your father’s son.’
I snarl. So does he. There’s hatred in his eyes.
But when I see through his and look at my own, I don’t see that.
My eyes are more like my mother’s.
She was good when I was very small. She used to let me read her thrillers, not the romance though. She’d carry me home from nan’s house when I fell asleep waiting for her to finish work because she couldn’t bear to wake me. One night when I was five I stayed up late, pretended to conduct an orchestra. She applauded when I bowed.
She was far from perfect. Her depression got the better of her more often than not as the years went on and it took her to some dark places.
But I know, I truly know, she never meant any harm.
I am my father’s son.
I am my mother’s son.
More importantly, I am me. Only I get to decide who I am.
I look at my face through his eyes for a moment, then tear them away and stare into the source. I reach for it, scream for it. I invite it to reclaim another shard of itself.
It comes.
Tendrils of purple and scarlet flame cross the void in an instant, embrace us both.
I see through my own eyes again, see the hate and the fear on my father’s face. I smile at him as the flames pull us apart. I lift one hand and give him a wiggling little finger wave.
‘Nos da, tad,’ I say as he blisters and splits under the weight of primordial creative forces. His screamed pleas die quickly in the light.
As the fire sears my flesh and freezes my bones I turn my head, look to my left hand. There’s another holding it, Martin’s hand.
I grab it as firmly as I can and let Martin pull me out of the fire.