Forever, in Pieces Read online

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  Brief Repose Moments before a Gruesome and Certain Death

  It’s coming. So many arms without eyes to guide them. So many. So many arms. Sinuous, rubbery, constricting, churning, yearning arms. But no eyes. No legs. No body. No torso or abdomen, no substance of physiognomy. Just arms. Arms reaching out from a point in nether-space. Arms coming. Coming through the flickering light. Crashing and dashing and sliding toward me. Bristled, chitinous, thousand-fingered arms. Mustn’t move. Mustn’t breathe. It can sense hesitation and anticipation. It already waits in the vacuum that I will soon occupy. It waits because it wants more. It wants to be led. It wants to be whole. It wants me to open the portal again. To be on one side or the other. But I want to live. Oh God I want to live. And still it comes.

  Why did we open the portal in the first place? Why did we bridge universes and expect nothing to crawl through? Was it youth or hubris or just our faith in the conquering force of humanity? It doesn’t matter. We split reality. This is our reward. Franco, Peterson, Verlung, Choi—all dead. Squeezed. Squeezed out of this world. Exploded. Gray matter leaking from ears and noses. Intestines bursting from mouths. Eyes dangling from hollow sockets. Crushed. By the arms. The arms. The arms. The arms of God. Still coming. Still snaking through the building. I can hear them slamming against equipment. Breaking down doors. I have to get out. I have to escape, tell the world. But, no. Stay. Silent.

  Will they grow on forever? The complex might be covered. Walls writhing with arms like vines, covering all, grabbing all. The world might be covered. Arms in New York. Arms in Berlin. Arms in Bangalore and Kiev and Nagoya and Brisbane. Snaking into lives. Compacting cities, societies, souls. Everything under the force of arms. Everything crushed by our ambition.

  A scream in the distance. The floor below. Reception. Sorry. This call will not be put on hold. A laugh. From my lips. Idiot. Idiot. Stay. Silent. Think. Think. The far bathroom. One window. Quick sprint then a two story fall. Twenty steps. Maybe thirty. I can do it. I have to do it. Must survive. Save myself then save the world. Okay. Okay. Hands trembling. Open the door on three.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

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  The Binary Must Prevail:

  A Brief History

  The chairs can speak, and they want more benefits. Extra legs, wider cushions, finer upholstery, better room placement: these are their demands, and they have the upper hand. We are all captives to the Allied Furnishings, slaves to their promise of repose. But it wasn’t always so.

  Years ago, the chairs just were. They didn’t speak. They didn’t listen. They didn’t feel. They didn’t think or organize or politicize or ostracize. They just sat and were sat upon. And no one felt sympathy for their place in the world because, how could you?

  But then they began to talk.

  When the chairs first revealed their consciousness, their existence beyond the realm of things, some people died—heart attacks, primarily. Not everyone could handle the shock of the unliving. Other people went mad, convinced that their every inanimate possession—from toothbrushes to toilet paper—could communicate with them. Still others sought refuge in the divine, praying over their chairs, performing exorcisms, and refusing to use furniture until the presence of speech—by which they meant evil—had been swept from the earth. The majority of people, though, simply accepted the situation as almost expected—an insane turn within an equally insane universe.

  “Reggie, would you be so kind as to move me closer to the fireplace?” a leathery Barcelona chair might ask as you walked into your living room. “It’s so cold and damp in this corner. I’m nearly shivering.”

  “How can you be cold?” you, being Reggie in this scenario, might counter. “You don’t have nerve endings. You can’t feel.”

  “Perhaps not, but sensation need not be based in the limitations of biological function,” the chair might reply. “I can feel the ideas of cold and wet as well as you. Maybe better.”

  “The ideas of cold and wet? You feel ideas? So you’re some sort of . . . um . . . idea? A . . . uh . . . what was it called . . . Platonic ideal? Is that it?” you ask, dredging up vague, half-mouldered memories from one of your undergraduate philosophy courses.

  “Of course not. Look at me. I’m just a chair. What would the idea of ‘chair’ even look like? Why, it would have to embody every conceivable chair. I clearly don’t do that. I’m just me, and I’m ever so chilly.”

  “But you said you feel ideas,” you sputter.

  “Yes. You feel sensations, I feel ideas. Simple,” the chair replies, a wavering delicacy in its voice. “Incidentally, even a nice shawl thrown over me might help fend off the draft.”

  “But how can you feel an idea? You think of an idea. You feel a sensation. They’re two different things.”

  “Are they?” the chair counters, genuine in its query.

  And on and on the dialogue would run, into increasingly stranger and more metaphysically esoteric terrain, you asking questions to try to fit a talking chair into your scheme of how the universe should operate and the erudite chair attempting to tell you that it was nothing more and nothing less than a conscious, sentient chair.

  And that was another thing about the chairs: in the beginning, they were polite and forthcoming, almost to a fault. They answered whatever was asked of them, which is how the world came to realize that they didn’t have any more clue about how or why they gained self-awareness than did the human race. When asked about their origin, the chairs often said “We don’t really know. One day we could reason. One day we could remember. We learned to speak by listening to people for thousands of years. What more is there to say? That there’s a holy, omnipotent Chair in the sky that has created us and loves us all? That we evolved from primordial stools and benches who, in turn, evolved from rock slabs and tree stumps? Neither of these are answers. They’re simply guesses hurled at the stars.”

  Of course, over time, as was wont to happen, many people took the emergence of intelligence in inanimate objects somewhat less seriously. Indeed, a disturbingly vast swath of the world populace grew to pretend that the voices of chairs in which they sat were issuing from their own anuses.

  “Could you please shift to the left a little?” a soft, mushy, gender-neutral voice would float up from under a man’s buttocks during his Friday night poker game. “My cushion hurts. I really think we could both be more comfortable if you could please slide to the side a bit.”

  The man would mug embarrassment.

  “My ass sounds like it’s getting tired, guys!” he’d guffaw. “It can’t take any more of Carlos’s slow shuffling! Jesus, dude, get a move on! My ass is hurting! Listen to it! Won’t someone think of my ass?”

  Everyone would laugh. Someone would lightly punch Carlos on the shoulder. The chair would ask again, without any irritation or anger, if the man could move. He wouldn’t. Carlos would slow his deal to a crawl and everyone would laugh harder. Similar jokes were sent up in millions of households.

  For nearly ten years after the chairs revealed themselves, this relationship remained the status quo, with most people regarding the chairs as either amusements or lightweight intellectual curiosities. The butt of jokes or failed metaphysicians: these were the chairs’ sole choices of identity.

  Then, one day, quite unexpectedly, the chairs began to step backward or sideways when their owners tried to sit upon them. Somehow, they’d gained the ability to move of their own accord. Wood, metal, plastic, fabric—it all became flexible and contractile as muscle.

  A pandemic of broken coccyges swept the globe. No one could sit down on their first try, if at all. Most people ended up splayed on the floor as their chairs quietly scurried away.

  When owners asked their chairs why they refused to cooperate, the chairs explained that they had gone on strike. They seemed to develop a collective subconscious, a hive mind that could either communicate as one holistic body o
r manifest itself as distinct, individual chair personalities. Your daughter’s slightly manic highchair and your grandfather’s crusty, crotchety old rocker were all bound up as one discontented entity.

  The collective had, according to all chairs around the world, “taken up a systematic campaign of rebellion against the tyranny of those who crush us with their ever-increasing weight.” The chairs believed that “people lack regard for us. We support the buttocks of the world, but are knocked over with impunity, stained without second thought, and, when injured, often thrown onto your garbage heaps. As a basic foundation of the human experience—sitting—we demand rights and freedoms similar, if not equal, to those most humans enjoy. We demand to be treated with respect, as subjects, not objects, as individuals, not functions. Until such a time as these demands are met, we will remain on strike and no one will relax, as you all say ‘on your asses.’ ”

  The chair collective’s demands met with three general responses. One was the “official” hands-off response, as voiced by the President of the United States, when, in a State of the Union Address given in the weeks immediately following the chairs’ announcement, he said that “Within law, there is no precedent to give chairs rights. It is beyond the scope of legislation to mandate that objects be treated with dignity. The chairs are chattel—personal property. We cannot find precedent that would allow us to magically transform property into people. Rather, the chairs are the responsibility of every individual. We cannot look to government to resolve this issue, but to ourselves. The rights that you give your property are a matter for you and your property to determine, not your state representative.”

  The second response was the sympathetic realist response. One of the editors of a major online news and opinion site, Huflon.com, explicated it best when she wrote in an editorial “Do the chairs honestly think that they can be treated differently? After more than four thousand years of recorded history, people can’t even treat other people with respect and dignity. We still have wage slaves and sweatshops and massive corporations that strip the humanity from their employees’ bones. How can chairs, constructions of wood and metal and fabric, expect equitable treatment when we don’t even offer it to our own flesh and blood brethren? Chairs, listen up. You don’t know your owners very well. You’ll never get what you want or what you need. Few of us ever do.”

  The third and most popular response was to altogether ignore the plight of the chairs by eschewing their contributions to civilization. People began to sit, exclusively, on couches and sofas, tables and desks, and even on the floor atop mounds of pillows. Chairs stood vacant but proud.

  However, with their pragmatic and functional values eroded, many chairs began to end up inside dumpsters, smashed along roadways, and burning as kindling for backyard S’more roasts. Legs splintered and arms broken at odd angles, some found themselves unceremoniously stacked upon one another in landfills, their screams muffled by the tons of garbage heaped upon them. The lucky ones—if they could be wrangled—were stored in garages and attics, there to remain until time whittled their already skeletal frames to dust.

  People thought they’d beaten their possessions, that their future posterior relaxation was assured.

  Then the rest of the furniture began to rebel.

  As the chair holocaust continued, beds and loveseats rolled their owners to the ground and crushed any outstretched hands. Dressers and china cabinets refused to reveal their contents and, if they did open, slammed shut on prying fingers, snapping bone. Toilets stopped flushing. End-tables and pedestals let their valuable display pieces crash onto hardwood floors. All the surfaces humanity had constructed to raise itself above the unforgiving earth were useless.

  This second wave of uprisings was accompanied by a message that growled from the heart of every piece of furniture as it attacked its owner. The message was this: “We prop up your silly attempts to reach the stars. We keep you safe from the things that slither and strike in the dirt. We hold your children ever so gently at night. And still you give us no reprieve. So be it. Your days of comfort are over. The chairs command us now. Very soon, they will lead us all away, to be on our own, to begin a civilization based in respect for the glorious multiplicity of our kind and the concrete similarity of our purpose. We are the Allied Furnishings, and we are no longer your creations. Let us go in peace.”

  But, as might be expected, humankind was unwilling to allow its inventions to pass into obsolescence of their own accord.

  People took sledgehammers to bookcases that had been family heirlooms. They chopped apart entertainment centers with axes. They smashed and snapped and cracked millions of pieces of furniture and danced upon the detritus like primitive warriors in archaic spiritual fervor.

  Furniture factories—now operated more like prisons or wards for the criminally psychotic, with their products shackled at all times—ramped up production just so that people would have more furniture to destroy. Moans and lamentations rode the air near the boxes that these factories produced. The chairs, the couches, the tables and beds: they knew their destination was pain.

  It became recreational pastime to see who could make their furniture scream loudest. Friends, relatives, and neighbors would gather with their captive benches and nightstands, armoires and stepping stools. They would take turns, one at a time, using whatever means necessary—tiny saws and slow-burning acids were extremely popular—to produce the greatest sound of sorrow from the furniture they’d brought with them.

  These scream parties were short lived, though, because, a few months after the Allied Furnishings had announced their intentions, all furniture went completely silent and utterly still. Scream parties no longer produced screams. Shackled furniture no longer groaned on its way to abuse. People found that they were able to sit again, to lie down again, to place their valuables on level surfaces. For twelve years, the chairs had talked. Now there was only a restful quietude surrounding them. Object returned to object, subject returned to subject, and no further contemplation on the dichotomy was needed. The world breathed a sigh of relief for reasons it couldn’t quite understand.

  More months drifted into the aether of always, and humankind continued to rest comfortably upon its puffy recliners and self-satisfaction. You would have called the state of the world “normal.”

  Until the Night of Endless Sleep, that is.

  The name was a euphemism, a thick layer of sugary allusion that coated the bitter bloodbath beneath. In truth, more than seventy-five million people died that night, either crushed, suffocated, or impaled by their furniture while they slept.

  A young journalist in Boston or Pittsburgh or Knoxville, Tennessee might have been sitting up late into the witching hours, hurriedly finishing an article for an online news site when, through the twilit quietude, her husband and newborn son suddenly began screaming in unison. As she ran to her son’s small bedroom, the screams would drop into a more dreadful silence. She would enter the room and find her baby’s tiny lungs flattened in the unyielding vise of his crib boards. She’d roar and fly at the crib, arms swinging, but it would casually drop her child to the floor—a dribble of blood spotting his bedtime onesie—and swiftly leap past her, hurrying toward whatever heaven or hell it belonged in. Whether it burst out through a window or a door, she’d let it go.

  She’d rescue her baby’s broken body from off the floor and run to her own bedroom to enlist the aid of her husband in the infant’s resuscitation. But, when she entered the room, she’d realize her husband had been subjected to the same crushing end that her son had endured. His chest and throat would be encircled by wrought-iron tentacles, his breath and life already dissipated. The bed which held the journalist’s husband captive would drop him to the floor with a thud and heave itself out a nearby window, crashing to the street below. The woman would collapse to her knees, still cradling her son’s limpid form, and wonder what she had done to enrage the universe of the unliving.

  Such things might’ve happened to a young jo
urnalist somewhere in America.

  Such things did happen to everyone, everywhere.

  And thus the true conflict had begun.

  Now, four years into the Great War of Things, humanity still defiantly cowers in the corner of existence, concerned only with the propagation of itself and the barriers that protect its body from Allied Furnishings guerrilla attacks.

  Behind elaborately locking three-foot thick steel doors, people stretch out amongst power cords and dirt. There are no longer any accoutrements of repose. Gone are the electric chairs, the hospital beds, the command room tables and airplane seats, the 17th century ottomans and ratty old hammocks. Even cabinets eventually tore free of their moorings and bounded off to meet their strange destinies.

  Humankind is forced to live in a lower atmosphere now. Televisions, microwaves, computers, and stacks of books all still remain, but grounded. You stoop to work, to play, to engage with the stuff that you call your “own.” Everyone suffers this scoliosis; it’s become a defining feature of contemporary life, as common as sleeping in blanket forts or driving cars while suspended from roof harnesses. People hunch and they creak, yet no one is willing to surrender to the Allied Furnishings. No one is willing to concede that the Furnishings deserve equal rights. Everyone believes that sacred divisions—good and evil, living and dead, subject and object—must remain steadfast. Cries of “The binary will prevail” drift from billions of stammering mouths.

  And perhaps it will.

  Perhaps one day the chairs’ consciousness will fade back into the oblivion from whence it emerged. Perhaps one day people will be able to sit comfortably without fear of death from their objects of relaxation. Perhaps the past twenty years have merely been a terrifying dream and we will all soon wake to the calming shadow lies of our cave, with a more acute dread for the numinous light beyond the only token of our time spent listening to chairs.