escape from eternal life Michael Fridman

Escape From Eternal Life

Michael Fridman

Author's Preface

Part One: Matters of Life and Death

1. Deuterisation

2. Other Dreamers

3. Consequences

4. The Law of Averages

5. Prodigal Daughter

6. The Blizzard

Part Two: Exploring the Universe

7. Awake, My Child

8. The Four-dimensional Harmony of Spheres

9. The Intelligent Designer

10. Philosophy of Pigmind

11. Revisionism

Part Three: Exploring Me

12. The Humble Implorer

13. Love, Crime and Scattered Irony

14. A Short Excursion into the Obvious

15. From Jacob to Israel.

16. Nihilism Triumphant

Postscript Note

Author's Preface

I am at the end of my unfathomable journey into the immaterial --oops! --the nonmaterial plane. Furthermore, I've decided once and for all to go back to the real regular world. This despite all the inconsistencies, suffering and bullshit that exists therein. I do leave this manuscript for the sake of recording what I have experienced and what I have made of it in my own mind. Of course, to underpin my decision to return to the material plane, I made a point of creating a material manuscript, although for practical purposes actual parchment and a quill were unavailable due to my current noncorporeality. There exist two possibilities for who you as the reader might be. The first possibility is an inhabitant of the material plane, in which case most fortunate are you! Or perhaps unfortunate --it's not for me to judge. I imagine that you will probably consider this text an excellent source for some exotic form of clinical psychosis: after all, it's in the first person! What non-material plane? you might ask, how could this be? and two very legitimate questions these are. However I certainly do not ask for anyone to suspend their disbelief, let alone actually believe me or anything like that. For reasons that will become clear, it may be better for you to consider my work as the raving of a lunatic. It would still be of enormous interest, I think, in terms of questioning how you look at the material world. If you do come to Realise, then I guess it's all the better, for you have the chance of seeing many of my troubles and pre-empting them lest they become yours too. The second possible type of reader is an inhabitant of the Otherly realm. If this is you, you'll definitely have no trouble believing me. It is empathy and understanding that you are likely to lack. After all, my departure will probably be remembered for a long time. Why did she leave? will be asked. I want this lenthy epistle of mine to be an explanation --not a defence for I need not defend myself against anyone or anything --as to why I left and as to why you may perhaps raise the very same questions about your plane of existence that I raise. And perhaps opt for change.

I'm shit scared. I'm scared of what may happen. I know there won't be total amnesia --it's not like the Matrix or some simplistic scenario where I can just take the red pill or be neatly placed into the "real" world. It will be more gradual and painful. My memory of my experience won't be erased completely (and I don't want it to be), but that 'twill fade is a certainty. I hope it won't combine with wherever I end up in life to develop into a jadedness, because this is NOT why I'm leaving. Mine is a positive step, not away from the horror of spiritualism and eternal life but towards the blessed promise of down-toearthness. With a hint of nihilism thrown in for fun. I'm also scared of the loose ends of my life. Pesky, practical stuff. There's the necessity of leaving my dear husband once I return into his arms. I'll still remember him, and obviously he me. What will that do? And what about my memory of Greg? I know I had a plan to manage it but things could still go wrong. But I get ahead of myself and digress... To put a personal reference to the way I'm feeling now, the scriptorium is cold and my thumb aches. That I have currently no body with which to be cold nor any place to be cold in, (nor a thumb for that matter) matters not, for I feel it as intensely as can be experienced.

I apologise for the defects of the writing. This is neither a philosophical dialogue nor a scientific explanation nor an account of my feelings and relationships because my Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 2

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experiences have seen an extraordinary mixture of all these and more. I've experienced these in a way that no-one from the material world would have ; so looks like I'm off the hook for being unusual. I'm also excited --to be me, to have a body again! Remembering my former life has caused significant blood flow to my organs of chaos, destruction and playfulness, warming them intensely.

But now, to my life, my troubles and joys and my journey to the Upper Plane, as well as my hopeful future descent into the base and ignoble.

Casielle

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Part One: Matters of Life and Death

1. Deuterisation

In the beginning of the last chapter, I inform'd you exactly when I was born; --but I did not inform you, how. No; that particular was reserved entirely for a chapter by itself; --besides, Sir, as you and I are in a manner perfect strangers to each other, it would not have been proper to have let you into too many circumstances relating to myself all at once.

Tristram Shandy

I was enveloped by the numbness of cold, my sense of pain gone from the lack of sensation in my limbs and instead replaced with a feeling of relief as the last of the many survival instincts give up. I did not suffer for though I couldn't move, I did not mind. Not even the thought of leaving David and Clara and my family forever made me want to fight. Not that I should feel guilty about this --my brain no longer had the capacity of considering the people in my life. And so I lay in the snow, ready for lifelessness to kick in.

--But this is a shameless digression into the future. I'm afraid I must expand the clichéd autobiographical details first since they've had a lot of impact on my post-mortem existence.

I was deuterised in 1997 in Madrid. Just over three weeks premature I was. I believe it was the sheer eagerness of finally getting out of the dankness and seeing the world that caused this. But it did cost my dear parents much grief in the first few days of my life as a viable fetus outside the mother, for I had been born with a few minor conditions that I need not mention but which when coupled with the hasty deuterisation left me in intensive care for a short period. This then was my first introduction to the world of materialism. Modern medical science had saved me. Although my condition wasn't that serious, if I was born in a previous century or in a culture where instead of some cold objective doctor there was a warm and fuzzy local shaman, or even into a family that was spiritually against antibiotics, I wouldn't have survived. To my fortune though, I was born exactly into the context I was born into and this meant that I had experienced the warmth of my bodily processes being regulated until I was no longer at risk of death. I'd never let myself forget this.

Once I was taken home from the hospital, my grandfather did something to contradict this sober attitude. Upon us entering with the nervous excitement of a transformed family, he stood up to greet our three person party, smiled and exclaimed "What an angel! They had to have fed her more than just drugs to get her to this radiant state... It must have been manna from the seventeenth celestial sphere!" Although I wasn't aware of it at the time obviously, this introduction to him that I had was to set the scene for much of my family life. His sly smile and my mother's 'be quiet Dad' look were an apt example of the generation gap in my immediate family between the ultramodern logical seculars and the intuitive elders (well actually, elder). Shit, this was supposed to be a quick summary of my life and what's relevant in terms of my post-life and here I am rambling!

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I suppose it's relevant anyhow, but it reminds me of Tristram Shandy who takes most of his autobiography to merely be born. This was my father's favourite book for a long time because it reminded him of his own family history in terms being good-natured humble aristocrats with occasional misadventures. I guess some background on my father won't hurt.

He was of Spanish origin, in fact of Spanish aristocratic origin with a full-blown genealogy that dated back many centuries (well at least in the commonly accepted chronology of the world that I now know is far from accurate) possibly to the time of the Templars. In fact when he did something my mother disapproved of, he'd justify it by joking that it was his Templar ancestor who had invented the infamous urban-mythical kiss below the belt in their initiation ceremony, "so you can't expect his male descendant to be an altar boy". This she took in good humour and it would usually bring her crossness to an end. He was definitely not stuck up about his royal lineage. He'd often poke fun at it with stories like these. In fact he used one of his family medallions as a coaster "just to put myself back in my place". I looked up the family records at one point and the history of the Titled part of our clan was quite spectacular --much quixotic happenings and courtly intrigue to be had.

There was one story however that may have been either true or my father's fable, but the interesting thing was that he was extremely proud of it in a genuine way. Unlike most of his family history, he'd tell this one frequently to people he met --even repeating it to us (and he usually hated the idea of telling the same story over and over again) --without a hint of deprecation. It involved Columbus, The Columbus. At the time of Queen Isabella and friends, one of the members of the court was my father's great-great-great-etcancestor Fernando. This illustrious ancestor was present during the famous meeting that took place when Columbus announced regarding his plans to reach India by sailing round the world the other way. Now, this caused much opposition from many people versed in matters geographical including Fernando. I should interject that today legend has overtaken the truth and proclaimed that those opposing had thought Columbus was doomed to failure as he was embarking on a journey that would have him sail off the edge of the world and be dash'd upon the rocks of mortality. In reality, the world had believed in a spherical earth for many hundreds of years. That wasn't the issue - distance was. Columbus had thought the earth to be smaller than the current estimate, based on a combination of stupidity and biblical interpretation. If he was right, he could go 'round the back' in no time. If he was wrong, as many of the court including Fernando thought, and the current accepted estimates were closer to the truth than that of Columbus, his crew would starve before they got to India. It was no surprise then that upon hearing of this bald plan, Fernando took him to task in front of polite society by piling upon Columbus all the arguments for the conservative estimate of our blue and green sphere's size. He then called him a fool and an opportunist and exclaimed that 'twould be cruel to even send a ship full of dogs or cattle to starve in a death most unglorious, let alone a ship full of persons.

We all know what happened. Fernando was essentially right in that the crew were on their last legs by the time they hit the Bahamas. He was also right in Columbus being very much an opportunist and an unpleasant one at that, as can be verified by the history books. However, this was an outrage of a scene in court and Columbus had stormed out. Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 5

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Rumours of an upcoming duel abounded but then came the permission of the queen for the opportunist to go ahead. As a result --no duel and hence my father (and in turn I) were eventually to be born unperturbed by the ripple in the genetic pool a bullet or sword would have caused. Perhaps it was out of her amusement at observing Columbus as the underdog in the scene at court that the queen allowed such a ludicrous expedition. My father adored the story though, because of Fernando's uncompromising reverence for the truth, as opposed to reverence for the direction the current trendy ideological wind farts in. The fact that the current ideological fart (one that is contemporary with me and my time) has Fernando as a flat-earth believing ignoramus added a certain touch to the story. After I reached the tender age of four, my family could make the move that they'd been planning for a while. My mother worked as an ambassador in Madrid, but she had grown sick of a vibrant and complex society and wanted to go somewhere a bit more tame. They chose Sweden as there was an opportunity for her to be transferred there and become the ambassador to Sweden instead. I was shipped off along with my family to a new land. There, I was subjected to a range of monotonous but not entirely unpleasant evenings where my mother would entertain the diplomatic elite of the community. I remember one particular recurring jest was with the local pastor. Whenever he was over, he'd naturally try to inject the deity into my mother's discussion of public policy, often saying that one scheme or another that my mother was in favour of would not be supported by the aforementioned deity. "Then how fortunate that we don't consult Him for our social decisions! Or we'd be in quite a bit of trouble," she'd smirk --always the mocking realist - at which point I'd often stuff the remnants of my plate into the appropriate orifice and depart. Adults.

She was always honest to everyone, even at diplomatic functions, but she managed to pull it off very smoothly. Perhaps that's why she was a successful diplomat. And I got tucked into bed and was played with most lovingly. But she'd treat me like the pastor when I'd entertain a reality that wasn't hers --an interesting specimen, worthy of either pity (or curiosity depending on the situation) but nothing else. Relief came from the country itself, and from my grandfather's tireless efforts to infuse in me the spirit of all things wonderful. When I was old enough to walk relatively unaided, he insisted in taking me out to the countryside with astonishing regularity. It is here that I encountered the other Sweden. Just bordering the land of the Moomins, and abounding with pristineness. Image yourself a river half-covered in ice and the whole landscape is white as death except for the greyish-green tips of the trees that show through the cover of snow. You go up a slight incline and through the last of the trees as you walk towards the river and then it hits you. A magnificent bright light. It's not the sun but its reflexion in the multicoloured ice. The consistency of the ice acts like a prism, scattering what would otherwise be an unforgiving eye-burner into a delicate ray of the colour Rainbow. You then turn sideways and up to notice the ravens happily chirping their ominous song. It feels like there is a marvellous gloom around the whole world, as if the entire universe is peaceful and still and not too overwhelmed with objects. Temperature-wise, it's a chill that's warm and forgiving due to the sun's reflection. The air is icy enough to give you the energy to walk for yonks but not so much as to impair breathing or induce asthma. This was what I remember about my grandfatherly walks. That and the stories. Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 6

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We came home one afternoon and he still had the book in his hands that he used to teach me to read and to interpret pictures whenever we'd sit down to rest near the lake. He went into the kitchen before putting it away and there she was. His daughter, whose astuteness instantly picked up the title despite the oblique angle he was holding it at.

"What's that, father?"

He shuffled. "It's...just a book I was reading Cassi".

"Oh really? And what might be the title, if I may be so bold to ask?" He declined answering because he knew the answer was coming from her.

"A Thousand and One Nights, I see. Are you out of your mind? How old is she?"

"Six according to my calculations".

"Have you any idea what that tripe will do to her? The hashish-induced fancy of perverted dreamers...What, you think she's not gonna have enough bad influences in her life as a human being that she has to learn at this age to lie and trick and conduct schemes from the bazaars of Baghdad? And not to mention the-"

"-it was for her imagination. She's loving it. And I'm not telling her every story indiscriminately. Although I think the earlier she finds out about anything the better."

"My God, I can't believe what you're saying! You want to teach her about life through the ravings of some swooning lovers passing notes... And what about the stories with the homoerotic overtones, do you think she's ready to appreciate those? Not to mention the absolutely unforgivable levels of misogyny, anti-Semitism,-"

"Listen to yourself. Where's my daughter? You know, the one who loves to learn and blend in with other cultures even if she may not like many things about them. The one who among many languages learnt enough Urdu to get by as a princess in the courtly language of old Delhi. What did you do to her?"

This was the last straw and she stormed out, possibly to cry in privacy or more likely to sit and ponder before returning for compromise and reconciliation. However, to a six year old standing in the doorway witnessing these, it was a bit traumatic. He turned to me and smiled. "It's OK Cassi. She'll be fine. And we'll go on with the stories. There's nothing wrong with them. One day you'll be able to read and understand them all. You do like them don't you? ". My expression adequately answered in the affirmative and the tenseness collapsed. He had been telling me many stories, this particular piece of world literature being the most controversial. The most memorable ones for my early age though were the Moomin stories which talked of the neighbouring Finland as a magikal land of wondrous creatures of small and cuddly stature, embarking on innocent misadventures. This was to become my Scandinavia --the land of the Moomins. It wasn't the bare landscape that I loved when I was outside but it was the idea of the hidden. Who knew behind which tree or frozen stump a Moomin might be? As I grew up, they too went on their bright and sometimes melancholy journeys and through them I learnt to love this land in its beauty. Even during the death that was midwinter, when even the ravens went quiet and the stillness was torture on the ears. During the winter, you'd be frightened by the sound of your own footsteps crackling on the Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 7

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compressed snow, for this would be the only sound for what seemed like light years. However, none of this mattered, for the Moomins were likely to be safely in hibernation - but if not, there were always bonfires and ice-skating and plays for them to perform. It was in winter that I started drawing first. To ruin the chronology, I became/was/am a graphic designer so this was of some significance for me. But I was largely influenced by the atmosphere of the stories and my drawings smacked of colour. I cared little for shape (but then again many littlies do) but tones were another thing. I'd use crayons --six different shades of gray and one of dark blue to draw the dank landscapes in the winter. That these were highly surrealistic didn't even bother my mother as she proudly showed them to most visitors to our house. During spring, when the land came back to life and colour slowly erupted, I got out my whole set of crayons and moved on from the restrictions of the grey. This led to a problem. It first occurred to me when I was about to draw a squirrel from memory (and having only seen one that day, it was unlikely to be a drawing that showcased hyper-realism). My father took me on the walk that day and he was sitting on a fold-out chair two metres away sipping some drink. "Daddy, I'm about to draw the squirrel". He smiled and tilted his head in my direction. "That's great honey. What colour are you going to make him? ". At this point, the whole dilemma hit me. If I pulled out the orange crayon and said to my father "orange", how would I know that what I was seeing WAS in fact orange? I had heard about colour blindness from my father's business partner who was colour-blind. But what if I was too? What if during my whole life, what I had seen as orange was actually what other people saw green as? I would have learnt to see the greenness of the squirrel and the evening sun and the deserts and to call that "orange". So I might have been wrong about what colour to draw the squirrel in!

In fact, how was I to know any of the colours I saw were right? I couldn't describe what it was like to anyone because all I had were the names of the colours. Being the six year old, I turned to him and started attempting to explain this (for this just became the most urgent problem in the world! nothing compared to it) through the tears of fear and frustration that built up. Nothing of sense came through although my father did realise I was confused about the nature of colour somewhat. After the teary outburst lasting a minute or so, I folded my arms and decided to finish my drawing even if I'll have to save the solution to my problem until another day. In some defiance, the poor squirrel turned out orange with pink teeth and a blue tail. Later at the house, my mother was informed of my philosophising. However, she was not that interested in the problem of qualia (at least that's what I later learnt the problem was called --until of course my death solved the problem). Still, she told me she was very proud to have a daughter that can think for herself at such an early age. I got given some extra ice-cream (deliciously rich but ironically it was totally white as if to taunt my recent discovery) and I went to bed confused but happy. Clearly things in this land of the Moomins were strange and not everything is what it seemed. I knew I'd have to get to the bottom of this mystery. A bit of time passed and I continued my graphical adventures with the snowy landscapes and my literary adventures with my grandfather. Then, my next major "world"-problem came along. In retrospect, it seems to have been the start of my childhood-dreamer phase so after it happened I think I was truly deuterised. It's very hard to explain though. My father was having an associate from Spain for dinner and when I was brought in to meet him he smiled and said "Oh, what a lovely girl there is. And who might you be?". Instead Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 8

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of answering with my name, as he probably imagined, I took the question delightfully literally and it bothered me. Who was I? I managed to keep my excitement at finding something new to frustrate over hidden from the company during the meal, but when I went back to my room, things started to happen. My head was spinning; I dimmed the lights and thought. What if I wasn't me? What would that make me and what would I be?

I tried to think of what would happen if I was someone else, say the old lady who owned the bakery near to us. My mind started circling: "if I'm not me then who would I be and if so what would this thing that is here that I think is me be?". I obviously wasn't versed in the concepts of body and mind which made the above sentence much more selfreferential and paradoxical. The thought kept spinning in my head faster and faster until I had something like a brain explosion whereby everything was just there but I had lost my concept of self and for a second I was stripped of it. Although it unsettled me completely, I thought it was the coolest truck one could do at my age. I would repeat this exercise (which I dubbed "brain explosion") for fun quite a bit. I tried to tell my family but to no avail. I've expressed the whole thing badly enough now, so imagine how weird it was then. They thought that perhaps I needed to see a psychiatrist, and so I learnt to keep my mouth shut about the esoteric from now on. This worked for they didn't follow up on their promise. Of course as I got older, my sense of self cemented and became the usual boring, stable stream of conscious thought. This means that when I tried to repeat the trick many years later, I couldn't. I couldn't remember the exact sentence (so I sorta fudged it when I wrote it out before), but more importantly I knew that I was too settled into my brain to do it. I had gotten too used to inhabiting this world so I couldn't explode my brain anymore. Which I thought was a shame. Of course this and more came back in the non-material plane. But it was with this self-experimentation and the idea that although my family loved me and were great about some things I had to keep quiet about other things, that I began my subsequent curiosities.

2. Other Dreamers

School was the other thing I began quite shortly after that. Try to imagine the kind of school I would have gone to. A child of progressive, relatively free-thinking progressive parents, in a progressive quasi-socialist progressive paradise, in a small progressive toy town with few social problems and much disposable progressive income. It was truly a liberal haven of sorts. No-one was allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, sex, gender (two very different things according to the school's ideology), sexual orientation, philosophy, mistakes or general crappiness. Not enough, the ideology against discrimination was replaced with one that disallowed discussion as well. However, noone told me any of this and I came not knowing my rights and as a result ended up getting discriminated against.

It was probably the third day of school, ever. We sat around, intrigued, as our teacher Sandra pulled out a picture-book and began to read. It was about the animals of the jungle Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 9

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and was entitled "Pancho the toucan". Pancho the toucan was a colourful and energetic bird who was quite fond of saving patches of Amazon rainforest from the evil loggers. First he encountered them in the clearing that they themselves were making. He wove a rope from the lianas with the help of Maria the armadillo and tied the loggers to a large tree. Eventually he moved on from setting to setting doing much the same with different animals to different environmental threats, but each time saving some pristine piece of South America. Needless to say, I was shitlessly bored by the end of the masterpiece.

"Well children, did you like that?" Sandra asked in earnestness. Of course not, it was telling the same story about 5 times and in a boring way too. On the other hand, the illustrations were pretty, although whoever designed the Amazon rainforest certainly overdid the colour scheme. Why not a concise one like we have in Sweden in the winter, with only a few colours? This was the extent of my opinion and I gladly gave it to her in its totality. She stopped, almost stupefied while my classmates giggled (I think they were giggling both with me and at me). What was my problem? We needed to learn about other countries and cultures or we'd grow up intolerant. And what I said about the design of the rainforest --the mere idea was intolerant. Didn't I know that I needed to respect other beliefs and religions or lack thereof? It mattered not that I was joking, perhaps Sandra considered someone so young incapable of joking about such things. She cautiously walked up to my desk as one would to a problem child that needs to be placated with affection.

"OK then Cassi. Maybe you can suggest another picture book for us to read tomorrow and we can also do some drawing from it."

"Sure!" I said, my eyes lighting up, "how about the brothers Grimm?". This was one of my favourites. I had an unabridged, un-politically-corrected, morbidly obese illustrated version at home which I treated most religiously.

"What? I don't think they're very nice stories."

"No but they're fun. And they have bad things happen."

"And what do you think is good about that?". She deliberately egged me on of course but I gobbled the bait.

"We should be prepared for the bad. We are children but that doesn't make us stupid or inferior. Some of us have evil stepmothers in real life!" More giggles from the class, this time increasingly with me. Sandra was stunned that I'd even heard of the word inferior. I think she was both proud of me and frustrated as well.

"Ah my dear Cassi, you're a very smart girl. But I think you have a lot to learn still." And she walked back to the front of the class smiling and continued with the next lesson. The class's attention turned away from me back to the lesson in a split second, except for a girl a few rows to the left who kept making much-welcome eye contact. She smiled at me when no-one else noticed and I thought it was due to something I said to the teacher. But I couldn't imagine any actual words of mine having an impact. I got along with the other kids but in terms of merely getting along. I was used to having all these other thoughts on the ethereal plane (it is with almost pointless irony that I use this term --for it is an ethereal plane in the most literal sense!) that I knew I wouldn't be able to share with anyone. So I thought that maybe we'll talk one day and I'll come over to her house and Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 10

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she to mine and it'll be two schoolgirls having fun but it's not like I'd ever tell her about my brain explosions. Fortunately I was a fool on that account.

The next morning I was walking to school and as I reached the gate with the small schoolhouse about 200 metres away, she approached.

"Hi, I'm Clara. You're Cassi?"

"Yeah. Hi."

"I really liked what you said to Sandra yesterday". This was another feature of our enlightened education --teachers were called by first names even in pre-school, and certainly in our environment of primary school proper. Egalitarianism.

"Really? What? I don't think I was making any sense. I mean I-"

"-no no" she said putting out her hand for me to stop. "Look!", and she opened the corner of her schoolbag and the corner of a very familiar volume showed through as she laughed in a clandestine delight. How wrong I was about her!

"The Brothers Gr-"

"-shhh! I don't think Sandra should know I brought it. It's the one you have don't you?"

"That is the one. What -I mean how do you have it?"

"Well, I like to write my own fairy tales. I know you don't. But you do draw". After a second of me not responding, she gathered the strength for her proposition. "So meet me after school and we can team up. I have a story I need pictures for." Starting school was an ambivalent experience for me, I neither liked it nor hated it. It was just something to do in between my frolics. That day though, the classes dragged on forever. I was sure her story wasn't nice like the cartoons that were licensed for broadcast on our local progressive TV station! As school ended and I met her, I knew my suspicions were correct. She read bits of it and it involved a mischievous ghoul-like creature who comes to an enlightened town (where could she have possibly gotten that idea from?) and wreaks havoc, which includes tying up the mayor upside down by her feet and letting her hang from the window of a five storey building, as well as forcefeeding the miserly baker a pasta dish with sauce made from 37 rotten tomatoes. I asked her about her other stories and she told me. 'Twas all quite delicious: there was death and chaos and destruction. It wasn't deliberately didactic like the crap we had fed to us through other channels of communication, but that was better; and in this way it was more conducive to children's understanding as I realised years after. In this way, Clara's tales reminded me of the Arabian Nights.

"So Clara, what did you want drawn? I can do different things but I like to draw landscapes."

"Oh, nothing special. Just the first story I told you about. With the mayor, and the baker."

"Great! We could make a whole book with a drawing on every page and a bit of writing down the bottom. Is your handwriting good?"

"No but I'll try. How do you imagine the picture of the mayor hanging upside down out the window?"

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"Does that happen at night?"

"No."

"Well make it happen at night!"

"Uh...ok. Why?"

"So I could do it with greys and blacks of course! Oh, and then, to make things stand out, we -I mean I-can make the rope bright green."

"Bright green? But ropes aren't-"

"-it's a magic rope, silly! Do you for a minute think a real ghoul shan't be able to find a green rope to bind the feet of the mayoress?" Of course I probably didn't use those same words as all my dialogue is reconstructed, but that was the meaning essentially. Her face lit up in a delight I will always remember.

"You're right! And it would stand out. We can even do the drawing together...if you let me."

"Sure, sure."

"But tell me first --why do you like using black and grey and not the other colours?

What's wrong with a toucan?"

"Nothing but-"

I noticed that we reached the point in our walk where I was to go off the path towards my house --but I didn't want to. I haven't told anyone about the qualia and the colours thing before. I didn't find the idea of telling her at this moment particularly thrilling, but I knew I would and should and must and that Clara and I would be friends forever.

"Clara, I can tell you but that means not going home for a bit. Do you mind?" She was already racing towards a bench she spotted nearby and I followed gleefully. Then, I told her. It felt like a huge secret and looking back I'm sure that I felt as much trepidation as someone who's about to reveal that they're having an affair or to come out or to tell their child they are adopted or any other "secret" that is deemed a major one by our society. At that moment though, it was mine that was significant; or to be exact it was the most important one in the universe. But to my surprise Clara did not melt away into nothingness or flee in disgust upon hearing my words. Instead she put her hand on my shoulder and opened her mouth in amazement. The deal was set.

We were regular visitors at each others' houses within a few weeks. When we weren't in school we would often work on the story books. We would even collaborate on a book. At that stage, I was a crap writer and she a crap artist but it mattered not. We would literally write the words together, composing every sentence between the two of us. In drawing the pictures, we'd each have a crayon and we'd simultaneously leave marks on the same paper altering it in different ways but in a cohesive whole. As years passed and we entered teenagehood, this remained. I had the usual set of teenage issues surface and so naturally felt stifled at school, at home and everywhere. I was becoming more of an outsider with my other friends too, the ones I haven't told The Things to. I could sense a difference in terms of me having this whole other world-of-thought and not being Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 12

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particularly interested in the mundaneness of my "real" world. Besides the two dilemmas I had as a child that I related, many, many new ones came up. It would be difficult to catalogue them all, especially since I've had so many of them answered after my death. There were things I thirsted for and I needed answers now. Dante was a guide thatI utilised from age 13. Of course this has great irony due to what the bulk of my tale will reveal. In short, I had hoarded inside my head the strangest combination of the rational and the mystical that one would find in a little Swedish town, and I'd often seem uninterested in the outside world, much to the worry of my family. School grades were OK but I essentially spent the bare minimum amount of time to keep up, preferring to divide the rest between walking, drawing and thinking. And of course Clara. We continued to be the best of friends all this time with absolutely no end in sight. And the projects continued. Occasionally, we'd still make up some storybook together and draw and write it in union. Being teenagers, the stories obviously evolved. Our cynicism developed considerably but you can also add to that everything else we had acquired with age and the results were often delightfully obscene. One day, the Arabian Nights came back with a vengeance.

"Cassi, do you remember all those times we'd read from the Thousand and One Nights?" she asked, "well what was so essential about the man having a harem? I think I want a male harem of my own. Wouldn't it be great? Instead of being first-class immature assholes like most guys we know, these would be men glad to serve; and I could plan our collective life together."

"You don't think thy'll be too much for you?"

She gasped. "You know me better than that! It'll be perfect. Besides, if there's a problem of awkwardness with one of the harem-guys, that can be solved by elephant trampling quite well! But I do think it would be good --in that it would allow me the opportunity to extrude unlimited power if only for a while," she loved to invent quasi-words, "and then I could be much more in control and comfortable with who I am outside the harem world."

"You know Clara, I could sooo see you in that role. Hey, let's make a story about this!

It'll have to be in a world where everything's opposite and men and women-"

"I guess. But let's make her unique. She can be a superhero. Harem Girl! And she can rule over a town and disguise herself and walk the streets at night like Haroun al-Rashid and hear what the word is about her."

"Why not? But won't it be just a story of sexual indulgence?"

"My dear Cassi, I'm ashamed of you. Isn't your mother well-versed in many languages, and specifically for our purposes Urdu? You know, the Delhi language of courtly love? I thought you'd be aware. Harem Girl will have her harem full of guys who aren't just a pretty...face...! I shall be a centre of learning and culture. While outside the walls of the harem barbarism and tribal warfare will rule, inside the harem, the men will have AN

unique opportunity to become literate and then perhaps literary. They could study the classics and compose poetry, both in praise of Harem Girl and on other topics. They could even become versed in the sciences. It would be the only way they could keep up with the women who in our world are the only ones who have the opportunity to become real scholars and natural philosophers. And when the astronomical academy (which is Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 13

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naturally composed entirely of women) names a new star, a messenger will race to the harem where the menfolk will greet him with enthusiasm and marvel at the findings while recording it for themselves so that they too can bask in the light of the latest discoveries. They will be grateful for the mere opportunity to come to the harem and have a whole new world opened up to them (one that they never can at home, mind you) due to the collaborative effort of many of them cooperating. And all this even if Harem Girl were an old ugly witch; which we most certainly won't make her. This will be our story. They can help our superheroine fix many problems in the land in her subtle and unintrusive manner."

"I love you! Of course you were manipulative enough not to even mention the delightful orgies even once in your speech."

"Naturally".

And so it was with Harem Girl and a whole bunch of other projects that were slightly more outrageous. We'd still manage to co-author some of them together. Having done this for so long (writing sentences together out loud) we could quite easily read each other's minds, or at least know what the other was thinking or feeling. We were joined, well, not at the hip but perhaps at the mind. All this despite me being quite the more withdrawn one and her much more playful and gregarious. We were like Narcissus and Goldmund, although I dare not speculate who was who. And then came Greg. We were putting the finishing touches on our Harem Girl story. The climax was her with her four favourite husbands (each with both a superpower and an academic area of expertise) defeating an evil vizier in an edifice of intrigue. The vizier had an uncanny resemblance to a local politician we didn't particularly care for, both in terms of the character in our story and in terms what she was in real life. The final showdown was to take place in an ancient building, so naturally we needed to research some old, Gothicky buildings. Luckily for us, our school had a two day excursion to Stockholm, which was the closest we'd get to an old and historic building for a while. Clara and I slipped away at a particularly unbearable point and went to the city square where I started sketching one of the buildings from an isometric perspective. I was so wrapped up that I didn't notice anything. I reached out my hand to Clara for an eraser and one was handed to me, but by a hand that was nothing like hers. I turned and instead of her, it was a he. I must apologise. Reading this talentless, ridiculous lead-up, you'll be forgiven for thinking Greg would be the love of my life, or at least that something as intrinsically fraudulent as the concept of love at first sight would occur. To reassure you, it wasn't at all like that. But he was another soulmate like Clara, another dreamer in a dank and spiritually null environment (or so thought my teenage self).

"Hi Cassi, how're the grays coming? Do you think this cold stone corner's suitable for Harem Girl to have her triumph at?"

I was already stunned by the replacement and now this?! It was too strange, I just had to play along.

"We'll just have to see once I've finished the drawing...uh-what do you think of Harem Girl so far?"

"I like her."

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"You don't have your masculist sensibilities offended by it all?"

"Well no. Maybe if the entire harem world became real I'd have a problem. I mean then I wouldn't really be able to get ahead much in life. Otherwise it's pretty clever and were I in the story I'd be lining up to become one of her husbands myself." I smiled and I knew wasn't yet time to end the charade and figure out who he was.

"So what have you to offer our humble creative work? Do you-"

"-draw? Write? No no, I'm a talentless twit, or at least that's what my teachers think of me. But I do think I can help in the ideas department. You know, the creative juice behind the operation. The motivator. Collaborator and appreciator."

"From your bullshitting skills I think you've got a marvellous career in the more cutthroat business industries here in Stockholm when you finish school..."

"I will -have a potentially marvellous career. That doesn't mean I have to embark on it. At least not just yet. So can I join the team and be on the credits?"

"Why not...but you should tell me who the hell you are first! ". Overall it was a most impractical initial introduction, just the way I like it.

His name was Greg and he lived in a fairly town close to ours. His school had most fortuitously gone on a Stockholm excursion at the same time as ours and he stopped being able to stand it at roughly the same point as we did and therefore absconded to the square. Whilst I was absorbed in my drawings, he spotted us and what we were doing. He then caught Clara's eye and after a long and confusing conversation in an improvised and semi-successful sign language across the square, he motioned for her to get up and approach. After a few minutes of talking, he decided to play this little trick --so Clara sat on the bench 25 metres away and he took her spot next to me. As a given, I didn't notice a thing until the switch ended. I laughed so hard when he told me. It was an empirical proof of just how out-of-this-world I could get! "So Clara, what shall we do with our newfound collaborator?" I asked when she joined us again in glee. "Well I'm suspicious of people. Perhaps he has been sent by the evil vizier as a spy to infiltrate the operation and subvert the most-righteous activities of Harem Girl". "You're absolutely right!! We need to have some kind of clearance period so we can test him. An initiation if you will". Greg was watching our exchange so naturally that I was sure he'd anticipated all this. The rest of our Stockholm excursion day was spent whiling our time away in town, and continually initiating Greg just as we intended. Once he proposed an adequate experiment on pigeons (we throw pieces of bread near our bench in a line so that the pieces come closer and closer to us, we watch the pigeons gather, wait for a brave pigeon take the piece nearest him and so forth and see how close to us they dare get) we knew he was no impostor. He was one of us. By twilight, we'd snuck back into the rooms our school was staying at, after arranging for the collaborator to visit us in our town slightly sooner than common sense dictated. Somehow we'd managed to spend most of the day away from our classmates without getting into trouble or being noticed at all. In retrospect, I'm sure Sandra noticed (it being a small school, our primary teacher stayed teaching us some subjects till late high school); but given our record of not being too troublemaking, she let it slip. Besides, getting us in trouble was a value judgement and therefore didn't fit inside the boundaries of our school's tolerant and progressive ethos.

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So two became three and my Narcissus-Goldmund analogy was no longer apt. Pretty soon, Greg virtually lived at our houses. If it was at all possible, he came from an even sleepier and more lolly-pop town where everything was wholesome as gingerbread. Gingerbread was my association with wholesomeness as this is what the bakery smelt most of and our town baker was wholesomeness epitomised, as you might have figured out from Clara's first story, the baker copping it most unwholesomely within it. Unlike us female dreamers though, he had at least a plan. He was going to join the police force when he left school. When he first announced it, we were sure he was kidding. There was a police force here? For whom? It would mean that something actually had to happen first! But no, apparently when we met him at Stockholm it wasn't his first visit. He'd misspent many a day there at an age when we were in an even more protective cocoon than we were today. Apparently, things really did happen in the capital, as well as other major cities in the country.

The crappiness of his wholesome town was balanced out by his family though. Unlike mine who tried to dampen the ethereal spirit within (my grandfather got many an exasperated talk from my mother in my "formative" years that I skipped over), they encouraged some things. It was they who had introduced him to skiing at an early age as well as the slightly more breakneck activity of mountain climbing. In fact, it was more like glacier and fjord climbing for they'd cross the border into Norway several times a year for a weekend and would scale the inhospitable protrusions of nature's cold and bitchy side to their heart's content. Clara and I came along with them one time and it was there that I got my first case of self-blood-lust.

We were scaling this unique structure, where there were flat ice beds one above the other so a vertical surface of about 7 metres would alternate with a small flat surface to rest on. We had some experience by then and Greg's uncle --bless him for this --had done the Insanely Criminal: he let us go by ourselves, unsupervised, armed only with a radio transmitter each that could contact the base that was under a kilometre away instantaneously. Still, had Clara's dad found out, or even mine, Greg's uncle would probably become a former uncle. The rest areas were just big enough for one and a half people, so we were stretched out. Clara went first, taking the top flat, I'd take the next one and Greg the bottom. Then we'd all climb up one flat simultaneously and so our trio would move up a step in the icy ladder. Quite simple it was.

So simple that I got a bit bored after my third ascent and decided to climb my next 7

metre stretch at a bit of a more dynamic pace. I'd stretch up, take the hold and pull myself up quite quickly. The breathtaking view (both in terms of the Moominlike beauty and from the totally frozen air) would egg me on to soar the heights. I didn't feel reckless but just more alive, right until the moment where I slipped. I fell three metres, instinctively grasped an icy protrusion that luckily slowed down my fall instead of breaking my arm, and then fell another metre right on the flat I just started with. I was never in any real danger of dying, just some broken bones. But I avoided them all, ending up on the edge looking over the precipice with only a bloody nose, grazed kneecaps and a dull pain in my chest from the impact. By then Greg made it to my flat from below and grasped me. Clara also cried out having heard my slip. "She's fine" Greg hollered in an upward direction. And I was. Too fine. I'd felt an excitement that I rarely got a chance to reproduce. Perhaps it was the fact that the ice numbed my pain but it was uplifting to lose Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 16

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control for but a second, and to come out unscathed. It wasn't some suicidal tendency though --I didn't want to die. I wanted to live and triumph. And it would be a mistake to read too much into it in terms of psychoanalysing me as some sado-masochistic tortured soul. But it certainly felt good to come a bit close to the Grand Ultimate. My high lasted the rest of the day. Although Greg and Clara did get a sense of it, at first I masked it as much as possible even from them because this was one of those things I'd imagined I could dragged to some therapist for by my family had they ever found out; or even that in our town these were things you'd get locked up for due to them being too unwholesome. The best thing was that they totally saw through the mask and I didn't have to tell my soulmates. They knew that very day and I knew they did. It was an unspoken thing but I also trusted them to keep this to themselves and they promised me to do so, all without explicitly saying a thing. That was indeed special.

The three of us continued our fellowship in the best of spirits for two more years until the last year of school. Those two years were the greatest (not in the literal sense that they were the two best years of my life --I would never make that judgement!). One particularly marked night I realised the extent of it all once more. We gathered on the side of the town lake which was only partially frozen. It was that part of the year when the sun is up most of the time and night consists of it sinking towards the horizon and creating a gorgeous sunset followed almost immediately by another gorgeous sunrise. The twilight of one follows the pre-dawn of the other and there is never total darkness. In terms of being close to a polar region, this was my favourite seasonal eccentricity. It also meant that it was "warm" enough for us to spend an extended period of time outside during this so-called night. Naturally we were prepared. I supplied three deck chairs and Clara brought nibbles-beverages and a fishing rod we promptly stuck into an unfrozen part of the lake (personal joke). As for Greg, he said he'd "organise" a treat for us. From his ease of obtaining anything under the sun I'd almost think he was involved in organised crime, but he was just extraordinarily resourceful.

"So what have you for our use tonight?" Clara asked.

"Well I knew how much Cassi and you love nature, as do I. And rumour has it that during this time of year there are packs of otters on the banks of this lake."

"Indeed there are. I'd hate to point out that it's going to be twilight right up until the moment where we'll have to leave, how-"

"Elementary my dears!" he said reaching into his bag and producing a large set of binocular-like objects. "Ladies, we've night vision." I gasped. This was by far the most elaborate item Greg's organised yet.

"Wow that's great. Greggie, can I go first?". He handed me the pair and after instructing me briefly on their use I was away in a world of green stillness.

"Come on, you'll have to narrate," demanded Clara.

"Sure. I see...a bunch of green things" I answered and ducking her mock retaliatory punch continued. "Oh, I see some! They're over there, about 30 metres away. There's...five and four of them are surrounding the larger one. Could be a mother with pups."

"What are they doing?"

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"Seem to be feeding. Take a look". We took turns for a while until tiredness set in and we put the technological marvel down and looked into the relaxing dark with glazed relief. It was Greg who began. "I wonder what other creatures we'd missed."

"What do you mean?"

"Night vision is only a tool that lets us see what we can already see in the day at times when there is less light, and usually with movement. But there's all sorts of things that we may not be able to see."

"You mean your spirits and all? I'm sure there are 144,000 angels...or even better, djinns hovering right over the top of the lake. Perhaps I'll say hello to them. HAIL OH