JENNIFER LYNN CHRISTIE / excerpt from INSIDE THE CAVE
“Inside the Cave” appears in its entirety in Always Crashing Issue Four, now available to order via Bookshop, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and local bookstores everywhere (we particularly like Pilsen Community Books in Chicago and White Whale Books and City of Asylum Bookstore in Pittsburgh).
In the hills of this unnamed paradise (anonymous to protect our identities), every family’s child lived off an undead inheritance, until the walls around her caved in.
This was me.
School wasn’t going well. I was too smart. You could put in me a quantum mechanics class, but I’d already dreamt up all the answers in my sleep as a teen. In dreams, everything between all the realms and force fields and dimensions slicked out to a precise point on my forehead, God’s drishti, the micro to God’s macro, the place God looked to keep from falling over. So, science and art, and all that, it wasn’t working out for me, because I already knew what the professors were going to say before they said it. Everyone around me was learning, and I was bored. I was deemed a full-blown distraction by teachers and pupils alike. I would start mouthing the very words that were coming out of the lecturer’s mouth, and then I’d be saying it out loud, too, in tandem:
“…in the microworld, there are neither waves, nor particles, or so far as we know—there is only phenomena. If you think of phenomena in relation to the measurement of their contexts, we can predict wavelike distributions. But this is in appearance only. Certain apparatuses will bring wavelike affects, but others will appear particlelike. Nothing is intrinsic in the microworld, from mechanics to chromodynamics. Nothing is indistinguishable.”
That kind of thing.
They kicked me out. No one at home understood what it was all about.
“Why don’t you just be quiet when the guy’s talking?” asked my mother.
“Well, I just feel all this rage,” I said. “I feel like if he doesn’t shut up, something he doesn’t even know about might smite him down.”
“You be careful who you say this stuff to,” my mother said, “you’re going to scare someone. You’re scarin’ me!” She was always at the cutting board, cutting all these little vegetables, making snack packs for meetings.
Dad was out back, grilling up some meat. One year for Father’s Day I gave him a card that said, “You’re the rarest of them all,” and anyone in the room could have seen that his whole life had happened so that he could live to see that day.
“You’ve been in school too long,” he shouted from the back porch to where we were in the kitchen. “Graduate already!”
He was right. I had been in college for seven years, hopping around, infuriated, thinking I’d stumble upon the one thing I knew nothing about. But I knew everything.
I dropped out of all my classes and wrote a long thesis on the nature of the cosmos as seen though the lens of a microscope and addressed the finished product to the dean of the university. He read it, liked it well enough, and agreed to give me an honorary degree, as long as I managed to stay out of any graduating ceremonies, and never returned to campus. They sent my degree in the mail, a laminated piece of plastic that looked about the size of a library card. I didn’t think it would be good for anything, but, for the first time in a long time, I was wrong. My little degree got me into some of the hottest clubs and VIP scenarios (e.g. movie premieres/screenings, backstage passes to concerts, important meetings with business moguls). I didn’t think I would indulge in any of these distractions, but finally, I dolled up, and went out on the town.
Looking back, I know this is when my little incubator started to lose some of its steam.
Though it didn’t seem that way at the time. As I sat alone at the premiere to a movie called Monks Alive! the man sitting in front of me turned around and said, “Olivia Park.”
I removed my sunglasses and said, “Do I know you?” and he said, “Mark Drabble,” and I knew him immediately as the journalism student I dated for a second my first sophomore year of college (not to be confused with my second and third sophomore years, each one distinct and shattering). He was in a suit and tie and looked like a young Bob Dylan.
“Mark Drabble,” I said, so that he knew I recognized him.
“I drabble and I dabble,” he said, repeating his insane little article-writer’s catch phrase/failed flirter’s pick-up line that he had used as an undergraduate. He was tacky.
I leaned forward in my seat and said, “Don’t say that to me,” and then, “So, looks like you graduated, too.”
“I graduated three years ago, Olivia. Right on time.”
“Well, don’t rub it in. Did you follow your dreams?”
Mark shrugged. “I guess. I wanted to be a contributor to the Hills Times but instead found myself at the Star Reporter. Not investigative journalism, but not the tabloids either.”
I snickered. “Barely.” I crossed my legs and leaned back in my seat. I don’t know why it felt so good to be mean to the man. Probably because he was condescending, like all of my male college colleagues, especially the ones who got hired right away. The ones who had jobs before they even got their diplomas. Then I leaned back forward and said into his ear, “Just so you know, I don’t know anything about you, and I don’t want to.”
He reached over the back of his art house theater chair and put his hand on my bare leg. “Hey,” he said, “what are you doing later?” I put my hand on his shoulder and told him the truth: “Sleeping for sixteen hours on my scream pillow.” My scream pillow was the pillow I was allowed to scream into during fits of existential angst while stewing in my girlhood bedroom, so as not to awaken my parents.
“Listen,” he continued, as if I were flirting back, “would you like to get together after this? Maybe not tonight, but, maybe tomorrow?”
“No,” I said. After a good sleep ‘n scream, I was going to curl up into a ball and listen to Einstein On the Beach for the next two days, and I knew it. I could feel the urge, the mudslide of depression descending on my bones as I sat by this reporter-at-large human husk. It made me angry that he was almost innocent in his blind privilege.
“No, no, hear me out. You ever been to the Compassion Institute before? It’s right down the road from here, and I’d like to take you.”
“For what? Old time’s sake?” The lights were lowering, and a hush was coming over the crowd. I had all these little absurdly meaningless memories of Mark Drabble: making him toast in the morning before class and him saying wow, thank you, you’re the best, and how awful that made me feel because no one who makes toast is ever the best, they are no one’s hero. Maybe I could make up for how disappointing I know I was, and am. I also wanted him to shut up and relinquish me from the nauseating feeling of remembering how ill-equipped at caring and loving I was as a teenager.
“OK, I’ll go.”
“Lovely!” He pinched my knee with his little claw and turned back around. Then the show began.
***
We met the next day under the awning of a refurbished 1930’s theater building, because everything in the valley was made to remind us that show business was one of the few interesting shapes reality could take. Mark Drabble took up my fingers and brushed his lips against them, not a kiss, but a light swipe. I recoiled, and he didn’t notice.
“I’m so excited you decided to join me here,” he said. His face was round and smiley.
I was excited, too—I had fought the unsurmountable weight of life and rage to arrive at this location, far away from my girlhood bedroom. I was surprised and proud. Mark Drabble aside.
“I’m intrigued, I suppose,” I shot back. “I feel strangely optimistic.”
“You look stunning, my old flame,” he said. I could tell that by my using the word optimistic, I had essentially agreed to have sex with him, at least by his calculations. But I was never going to have sex with Mark Drabble, and, honestly, most likely not anyone else ever again. I fished around in the pocket of my coat and handed him a one-hundred-dollar bill.
“That’s for keeping your paws off me,” I ordered.
“I love that,” Mark said, pocketing the money. “I just do.”
But when we walked up to the ticket booth, I had to ask for my money right back because it cost exactly one-hundred-dollars per session at the Compassion Institute. I refused to allow Mark to pay my way, but without the personal payoff the whole date was now open for Mark to interpret in any twisted, erotic way he chose. My shield had been revoked, and I grew wary again.
Through the doorway and into the dim hall, we walked past lotus flower displays and Buddha figurines. Then we entered a waiting room of sorts and sat down in seats. In a few minutes a woman in an assortment of robes delicately walked up to us and asked if we would be having private sessions, or a couples’ package.
“Private,” I said, just as Mark said, “Couples.” She heard “couples” because Mark was a man and therefore louder and more commandeering.
The woman bowed and whispered, “Thank you for choosing the divine way,” and shuffled out of the room.
I turned to Mark and said, “I’d prefer to be alone, if we are really doing this kind of transcendental mind game thing.”
“Oh, but it’s not that, not that at all! We are going to be in a theater and watch movies together. A bonding experience! It will be wonderful,” he assured. Before I could protest, or question, the woman came back and guided us to the small theater we would be sharing.
There we watched countless footage reels of human suffering: one humanitarian disaster after another. Flooding; refugee displacement; prison wards; torture victims. We sat together, in that dark and horrible space, for three hours. I would have gotten up and left, except it was fascinating, the pain and horrible suffering. I felt myself become smaller and smaller, a blip, a speck on a mountain, a little bit of dust. What started out in life, then entered the cycle of death, which was relentless, and all enduring. What I had only fathomed as my own fate, became absorbed into the fate of all. The pain on the screen became my own pain, and, joyously, I felt myself feel. No amount of scientific knowledge, nothing I had dreamed about as a genius, could compare to this level of intimacy, the simpatico transfusion of all humanity’s entropy into the decay of the whole of me. Their pain was mine. I took it on as my own. I was greedy for it.
But then the lights came on, and there Mark Drabble and I sat, tears streaming down our faces, and the woman in robes entered the room. She held up one hand to gain our attention.
“Now you are feeling pain. You think it is your own. Erroneously, you want it to be yours. But it is not. Picture a rock. Picture a boulder. Picture a flower. Picture a tapestry. These things are you. Put yourself into them. The rock. The boulder. The flower. The tapestry. You absorb all as these objects. You yourself are an object. Absorb. Absorb. Absorb. Now—breathe! Exhale! Exhale all you have inhaled and absorbed. It is love. You are love. All you took in, the pain, was love. You are always love, you are never truly pain. Pain is merely a false option, though unavoidable, because you are, while an object, also human, a fire spirit. You crave pain. You want it. But it gets you nowhere. Humanity is moving forward, one grain of sand at a time. A new era is coming. The era of sand, and rocks, and water: love. You are these elements: love. Give your mind to these elements: love. Offer yourself up. You are nothing more, and nothing less.”
The woman, after her speech, bowed as she had when she first met us, and walked silently out of the room.
I was a genius; in youth, I had learned this lesson fast. I looked at Mark, and instead of a man—some distant prick of pain—I saw a rock, I saw a boulder, I saw something that couldn’t touch me at all because I had already absorbed all of him, become all of him, and shot out the other side, clean, new, bereft and yet complete—beyond pain and into a world of compassion, which was all love, which was nothing, some version of silence. In merely my first lesson, I had already eaten him with the world. I was powerful.
“That was amazing,” I said.
“I thought you would like it.” He took my boulder hand. “Come with me to dinner!”
I said no, and then I said, yes, because he couldn’t touch me. No one could ever touch me again.
***
We dined at a fancy Chinese restaurant down the road, a place reminiscent of the Zoot Suit era and opium dens. We shared dim sum, a sea of what seemed like a thousand steamed dumplings as far as the eye could see. We were all alone and sat opposite one another at a large table, family style.
“I’m a feminist,” Mark said. “I find women equal and bewildering. Look at you, you are perfect, my little doll,” he said. I had simply stuffed a whole dumpling into my mouth and was chewing ponderously. “Olivia, I found you, and I think I can help you. My heart is large.”
I swallowed the dumpling and reached for another. “You already have,” I said. “What more could you do?”
Mark leaned forward, elbows on the table, chopsticks poking out of his fingers. “I know a woman, an extreme woman, a major donor of the Compassion Institute. I interviewed her for the Star last week. She is a phenome. I know she’s looking for some help with her modeling crew. My heart is so large. Did I say that already?” Mark was patting his chest, as though to make sure it was still there.
I put five dumplings on my small plate and then reached for another and placed it in my mouth, doing the complicated math of calculating how to guarantee that I, not Mark, received the last and best bite of food, which was like playing chess.
“Mark, I am uninterested in joining the shallow and tedious game of the mainstream beauty economy, especially for money.”
Mark waved his hands. “Don’t worry about that, it’s not for money.”
I sighed and said, “Listen, Mark, I just graduated, I’ve got to slow down, and learn how to get by in my life. The Compassion Institute was a good start. It really helped me unfeel all my wretched, unwanted feelings of abject futility.” I stretched a smile across my face; it was hard, I was tuckered from the cosmic lesson from the day: that nothingness and love were indistinguishable states of being to the universe, and anything but bold neutrality was a cheap lie.
He pushed all the dumplings toward me and said, “Let me help you get your feet on the ground. You need a kick start, someone to lift you up. I have the connection, and I’ll make it, because I love you, Olivia, I really do.” His eyes were two spinning saucers, black orbs, empty pits. All I saw was a sycophant, a leech, a loser, a blank space. He was mellowing my high of total illumination—I could feel just a bit of it crackling at my edges.
“Who is she?” I asked, “What’s her name?”
“You would know her if you saw her. She’s at all the charity events in town.” I shrugged my shoulders, I hadn’t been to any of those, I’d barely left my bedroom.
Mark smiled. “Divya Sasuni,” he said. “An actress, a model, a woman currently on several beauty campaigns.” He leaned over the table, trying to get closer to me, though we were so far away from each other, and whispered, “Nobody knows which parts of her are real. You’ll see what I mean when you meet her.”
Divya Sasuni: a name of lore, the name of someone you should know and befriend in this kind of town. And I agreed to meet her because, though I had just seen through the nature of pain and into the root of human existence (a path towards the absence of everyday earthly worries), I knew I was still hampered by my rage and my intellect, my distain for people who just wanted to help me, Mark, professors, all men, the girls I’d gossiped with, centuries of humans, millions of years of our collective waste; I wanted to feel love and nothing, to soulfully know once and for all that the two were one and the same, and when I heard her name, that is what I felt: nothing. I was drawn to that. I was free of care and obstacles. There was me, and there was the abyss.
Jennifer Lynn Christie's short stories have appeared in PANK, Memorious, Atticus Review, and elsewhere. In 2013 she received her MFA from Oregon State University, where her master's thesis (a short story collection) won Oregon State University's Outstanding Thesis Award; she also received a 2017 "Best of the Net" prize for her short story "Alien Love." Born and raised in southern Illinois, she now resides in Bloomington, Indiana, where she is currently pursuing dual degrees in Library and Information Science. She lives with her husband, musician David Brown, and their cat Galileo James Brown.