ON THE DISESTABLISHMENT OF NOTHING: PRECURSORS AND MULTIDIMENSIONAL MODELS OF DISRUPTION

Anjelah was hiding in the storeroom. She didn’t like to think of it as hiding but Grammie’d raised her to be honest. That’s what it was. Squidged between a collection of mops and industrial sized paper towels, it could hardly be anything else.

You can’t hide forever, babygirl.

Her grandmother’s voice had been talking back to her a lot recently. If she’d stayed in grief counseling, they’d have had a lot to say about that.

She just needed a break from the children. They were great. Funny and curious. But there were so many of them. Most of the parents seemed to think their care-taking responsibilities stopped the minute they paid admission to the play center.

War had broken out in the bounce room and spread quickly. Collateral damage at the crayon table ensued, with substantial damage to the painting wall and outlying territories. A rough morning.

Chocolate helped. She reached into the pocket of her blue work apron and searched for the candy bar she’d bought earlier. Instead, her hand brushed up against something cool and smooth. A key, the same strange one she’d found this morning.

It was dark in the storeroom. One dingy window looked out onto an alley between high apartment buildings. Outside, the sky was a sputtering grey. Yet the key shone, giving off a warm sparkle that almost lit up the room. She held it up to her face, the light felt warm. Thorns encircling an eye were engraved across the key’s bow. Strange and stranger.

Pounding at the door distracted her. Sighing, she got up from her bucket to open it. Four tyrants stared back, tiny faces covered in paint.

“Miss Anjie, were you hiding?”

#

She couldn’t find her lucky pen. Her grandmother had given it to her when she’d started grad school. She couldn’t write without it.

Not that she had been able to write at all, grumbled a voice in the back of her mind.

Anjelah shuffled behind stacks of notes from her original thesis advisor and an assortment of half-empty mugs. It wasn’t there. But something else was. A plant with glossy star-shaped white flowers. She’d never seen it before in her life. Anjelah flicked a finger against the side of the clear flowerpot. It rang clear, like crystal.

She moved in closer until the tip of her brown nose touched the glass. Something small and white moved inside of the dirt: small white ants tunneling round. One stopped, turned towards the glass, and waved a wispy feathered antenna.

#

Professor Derrick McConnell riffled lazily through the papers in front of him. A year of her work. Papers he’d barely looked at.

“This is unacceptable. I don’t know what your output was like with Dr. Sheridan. Of course, you both come from urban backgrounds.” He paused to take a sip of his cappuccino.

Her hands balled into fists under the table.

“But as your new dissertation advisor, I can’t coddle you. Your work just doesn’t hold up.”

“I haven’t read all of it. No time. But if you can’t do better than this, well...” He trailed off, waving his hand vaguely. “Well, then perhaps this program isn’t for you.”

She wondered if he thought his smile was sympathetic. He looked like a cat who’d fallen into a kibble factory.

He wants me gone, she thought.

“I’ll work harder,” she said.

#

She was late.

Like your dissertation chapter.

Anjelah turned over pillows and seat covers. Blankets and towels. An entire kitchen drawer. Her USB cord was nowhere to be found.

“I’m being punished by an angry god that hates me for never folding my laundry.” She sat down on her futon, head in her hands. If she left five minutes ago she would be late.

Something was under her butt. A worrying development since she would’ve sworn that she’d sat on nothing but cushion. Nevertheless something was there. Anjelah stood up and looked behind her.

She picked up the bundle of fabric and let it hang loose to the floor. A cloak, she thought. It certainly would’ve been at home on a Ren faire actor. But the velvet was so plush her fingers felt like they were sinking into the pile. The purple dye shone both light and dark, like the setting sun over deep water.

Bathsheba batted at the jeweled hem. It flared out wrapping itself around her head. She yowled and hid. Two bright eyes gleamed from under an ottoman. Anjelah stared at her then back at the cloak.

One thing was clear. It wasn’t hers.

It was weird.

It was something she didn’t have time for.

Suddenly she noticed the small black wire of her USB cord. She quickly jammed it into her laptop case. The cloak was dropped next to the key, the plant, and four jars of coins made out of iridescent green scales. If she hurried, she would be only fifteen minutes late.

#

Bathsheba was a creature of habit. Every night, she rose from her rightful place curled into her human’s side to patrol. Jumping down from the bed, more delicately than expected from a cat of her majestic stature, she surveilled her domain.

Mine. Rub. Mine. She marked the length of chair legs and the table-corners with her scent. She moved from the small bedroom, across to the bathroom, then down the short hallway to the living room. Pausing only to sharpen her crescent moon claws in the carpet.

On her way to the kitchen, there was a new smell. An unfriendly one. Bath sniffed across the hardwood floors, moving around fallen shoes and half chewed charger cords. The scent brought her to the door of the living room closet.

It was closed, but air moved through the gap between the door and floor. A miasma that smelled of salt, whispers, and dead words. Bathsheba sat down in front of the closet, her eyes mere slashes of gold in the darkness. Things were getting quite out of hand.

#

From: Jeanine Ferraro [mailto:j.ferraro@ucollege.edu]

Sent: Wednesday, February 01, 2019 12:28 PM

To: Anjelah Jones

Subject: Re: Fellowship position

Ms. Jones,

Unfortunately, Dr. McConnell has confirmed there’s no more fellowship funding this year. I’m sorry but we have to cut your position.

Jeanine Ferraro

Coordinator, University Scholars Program

#

The bench by the door was full. Bathsheba grumpily monitored its tumbling pile. There was: a trio of rabbit’s feet each as big as a hand. Seven golden hedgehogs. A pile of clothes topped by the jeweled cloak and glass flowerpot. A bucket full of keys as small as a baby’s fingernail and as long as a man’s forearm sat next to a geode as big as a labrador. Fist-sized bite marks ringed its edges. In its shadow: a chalk astrolabe; glass tablets, and a row of twelve pairs of tiny golden slippers, worn down at the soles.

#

Today was Grammie’s birthday.

"Your mama was the best gift I ever got," Grammie would say, punctuated with kisses like warm butter on toast. "And then I got you too, babygirl."

It was eight in the morning. Anjelah could hear the creaking sighs of the old apartment building coming awake. She should get up and write. Really, she should.

#

The eldritch horror in closet wasn't making any moves for the moment. They'd come to an agreement, she and it. The apartment belonged to Bathsheba, but she was willing to give it space in the closet so long as it didn't try anything fresh. She’d made her boundaries clear but found the whole process unpleasant. The tar-thick blood took forever to get out of her fur and tasted awful. So oily.

The horror, while annoying, was a physical problem she could tackle. The other, not so much. Bathsheba flicked an ear towards the wall she was deliberately ignoring.

The cracks had no right to be there. In her home. Threatening her human and her food bowl with interdimensional...things.

She hunkered down and plotted.

#

Casimir was falling through space. He had no lifeline. Nothing to pull him back to the light and heat of life. He would fall until starvation or debris finished him off. What really annoyed him though, was that he was that he’d lost his tie-pin.

#

A letter was in her sink. Between a blink and switching her toothbrush from the left to the right, a white envelope just appeared. It looked like every other envelope she’d ever received. Except it was underneath the running tap. Anjelah dropped her toothbrush and rescued it.

Soggy and melting, the postmark had washed away to a faded blur of red. On the front, her address. On the back, a smudged return address. The Department of...something or the other.

She turned the letter again to look at the address. "Anjelah Jones and Bathsheba Felinus". She blinked owlishly, her mouth still filled with toothpaste. Either ConEd had discovered a previously unknown sense of humor, or she was being pranked.

Dropping it off on the mail table as she went to the kitchen, she found that she couldn't ignore it. Her eyes kept going back to the whiter than white paper.

She'd barely gotten through half of her leftover ackee and saltfish when she gave in and opened it.


Dear Madam and Cat,

This is to inform you that an inquiry has been opened on your behalf. An investigation in your area has found a Class 3 vectoral breach (Chancre). Per Acton D-Standards (Issue 21, Galaxies 63B- 100A, Blue Wave) said breach is a threat to localised existences (All).

Do not respond. An Agent is imminent. Please keep this notice for your records, except in case of complete dis-existence.

Sincerely,

Julio Advocat

Operations Sub-Clark (Regional)

P.S. Consumption is not considered adequate records keeping, with exception of Betaguerra 6-B and territories per Aliferan Treaty of Denera.


After reading, Anjelah had two reactions. Gratitude that it wasn’t a bill. And the sudden realization that a pile of junk had sprouted up next to the console table, tall enough that its collapse would crush anything under it.

A strange sound startled her into dropping her fork to the floor.

At her feet, Bath screamed. She was usually such a quiet cat, but this was a howl. In the direction of the refrigerator. Had she forgotten to feed her?

Bath made a sound like the screams of clown on fire.

"Well damn." One can of tuna coming right up for the cat.

Anjelah opened her fridge and a man tumbled out. A tangle of limbs falling towards her with a blast of arctic wind and a flash of night arcing between her Trader Joe's Greek yogurt and the last withered stalks of CSA rhubarb.

His head landed between her feet, almost on top of her dinosaur slippers. He looked at the fuzzy T-rex, then up at her. His eyes were blue. White blue like a glacier, or the heart of a fire.

She screamed. It billowed up her stomach, from around the quavering pit where her heart once lay, up through her throat where it blistered its way through into the world. A scream so loud, she clapped her hands over her mouth to jam it back in.

She looked down. He looked back. And waved.

"Hullo. Any chance of a spot of tea?"

#

He ended up making tea for both of them.

Anjelah—pretty name for a human, he thought—was a bit on the panicked side. And if his mother had taught him anything, it was a responsibility towards those in distress. He left his hostess in her eccentrically decorated living room—where had she managed to find an Eruvian cloak and why was it being used as a cat bed?—and searched through her cupboards.

There was crumpled box of Lipton's with sad looking tea bags hidden behind expired spices. He shrugged and set the kettle to boil. Casimir was perfectly capable of using the microwavething, he'd a thorough knowledge of primitive technologies of this sector, but proper tea required fire. The kettle on the stove was the method least likely to make the woman scream again. He didn't think his head could survive another one.

Falling through vacuum always gave him the damndest headache.

At least she had good taste in mugs. He picked an owl shaped one for her. For himself, one in the shape of an octopus. Octopi were excellent creatures. Ace conversationalists and shocking bridge players.

He brought the steaming out to the other room. She was sitting on her couch, bent over with her head between her knees. The very large orange cat was draped across her feet.

Maybe they prayed to cats on this planet. It would make sense, cats and gods were equally as powerful and capricious. He eyed the ginger kitty respectfully as he took a sip of his still boiling hot beverage. Just the way he liked it.

“Are you going to be praying all day?” He asked, after a few respectful minutes.

“I’m not praying.” The voice came from somewhere around the floorboards and sounded extremely distraught.

Casimir looked down at the cat. It stared back, one eye yellow, one eye blue. He blinked first. Hmmm. Comfort. He wasn’t even sure what planet he was on. Emotional support seemed like a bit of a stretch for his capabilities.

He looked at the assortment of items nearby. There was a bowl full of what looked like ancient Vangalan priest currency. A short glass of water with tiny blue goldfish swimming in it. And underneath a couch pillow, something long and ivory. He picked it up, staring at the swirling characters carved along its length. At one end it had been worked into a claw.

He squinted. Who in the void hunted down an acid-spitting cetacean to make a back-scratcher from its penis bone?

The woman chose that moment to look up at him, and recoiled down to the far end of the couch. He dropped the back-scratcher between them sheepishly.

“I feel like we got off on the wrong foot. Casimir Makepeace, at your service, ma’am.” He said with a short bow.

She looked at him, her soft brown eyes on the verge of tears. “I’m having a psychotic break.”

“Eh?”

“It’s been too much. I’ve lost my grandma, my new thesis advisor is a cardboard cutout jackass and now white men are falling out of my household appliances. My life is over.”

He decided to continue as gamely as possible.

“I’m an Agent with the Department” She made face a confusion at that but he went on. “You may have heard of us? Or not. Depending on your culture’s specific relational aspect to central reality.”

Both woman and cat were staring at him. Yes, that had gone less than well.

Something he said must have connected though, she jumped up and ran to the kitchen. She came back waving a creased piece of paper in her hand, pushing it towards him.

“The Department? Are you some kind of weirdo prank or something? So help me god if you start yelling ‘World Star’ I’m going to throw you out a window.”

Casimir gently took the paper out of her hands, avoiding any sharp movements that might make her angrier.

The letter was in a rare old code. He pulled out a delicate quizzing glass from his inside pocket and brought it to his eye. The characters on the page rearranged themselves into something he could read.

An agent is imminent...

Well. That was one way of describing it. He scanned back up to the beginning. His brain catching up to his eyes.

Class 3 vectoral breach (Chancre)...

Mother of stars. Falling through the void began to sound appealing.

He looked up at Anjelah. “Did you, uh, did you understand any of this?”

“I’ve gone from psychotic break to internet prank, what part of my behavior screams ‘has a complete hand on the current situation’ to you?” She sat back down with a sigh.

“Well the long and the short of it is that part of your reality is tearing.”

Mid sip-of-tea, she raised two dark eyebrows at him.

Casimir coughed nervously. “Reality can do that you know. Never really been what a chap could call sturdy stuff. Terribly unreliable.”

She blinked twice. As if her brain were rapidly resetting.

“Sure.” She said.

“Sure? That’s all? No more screaming?”

“No.” She pressed the bridge of her nose between delicate fingers. “You fell out of my fridge.”

Well, she had him there.

“There is no room for you in my fridge. With or without the box of rosé. I’ll admit that strange things have been showing up in my apartment. For, um...a while, maybe?.”

“You mean you don’t have a penis-bone backscratcher on purpose?” He said, pointing towards it.

She recoiled, eyes wide. “Is that what that is?”

He nodded, almost apologetic.

“So you haven’t noticed that you’ve become surrounded by...well, weird stuff?”

“This is New York City! I ignore at least five weird things a minute.” she crossed her arms across her chest defensively, “I’ve been preoccupied.”

Cas turned to look at the cat. A trick of the light made it seem like she rolled her eyes at him.

“Yes, well. Who hasn’t been so busy they don’t notice several tons of miscellania some of which are classified as weapons of mass destruction?”

“Weapons! Which ones?”

“Don’t worry, your cat‘s sleeping on it.”

She made a sound like a whimper.

“I’m an Agent of The Department, tasked with repairing this breach and keeping your planet safe.”

“Hunh.”

“You don’t seem convinced. I thought you were going to go along with this?”

“Well, how do I know you’re not the reason all of this is happening? How do I know that you’re not the bad guy.”

“I could have killed you at least three times by now, but I made you tea.”

She blinked rapidly. He wondered if it was some sort of code.

But she surprised him by replying, “That’s reasonable, actually.”

Draining the last dregs in her cup, she slammed it on the table and stood.

“Well, what do we do about this now? I would like to get my apartment back to normal and not die.”

“Two reasonable goals! What we need to do first is find the thing that is causing the rip.”

“That’s all?”

He thought quickly through the range of horrible things that could cause a rip in the very fabric of the multiverse. Gods older than time itself, arcane relics from long-extinct civilizations, his eldest sister in egg laying season…

“Well, there’s a little more to it than that. But we’ve got to go.” As he ushered her out of the door by her elbow, he reached for the pile, pulled three iridescent green coins from a jar and put them in his pocket.

Casimir glanced over his shoulder. Bathsheba sat on the cloak, front paws delicately crossed, eyes darkened slits of gold. He nodded to her. She returned it and closed her eyes.

#

Anjelah felt a headache coming on. She was following a strange man across the city and had no idea why. Well, there was the threat of imminent death and the destruction of everything she knew. But it was hard to believe in it consistently.

Grammie would never have believed it. Although, she reconsidered, Grammie’d had an unwavering belief that there was more to the world than what most folks could see. And a backhand with a cast iron skillet to deal with anything. She would’ve been much more useful.
Suddenly she felt that same tiredness wash over her. She couldn’t follow this madman around. This was a waste of time. Everything was.

The man who called himself Casimir Makepeace stopped suddenly in front of her and she crashed nose first into his back.

“This is it!” He yelled.

Anjelah rubbed her nose, scowling.

“What, is it?” They were standing at the Grand Army Plaza traffic circle.

“A gateway nest!” He pulled something from his jacket and began juggling them from hand to hand.

Her eyes widened as they began to emit a low hum of music. She took a panicked step back.

“We need to find the gateway that is infected, pulling in matter from other dimensions.”
Between his hands the coins had begun to glow. She could recognize the song. But how would alien currency know Danny Boy?

“To find one specific gateway,” he continued, “You can use another gateway to resonate to it. Yacob’s Theory of Relatives.”

Honestly, she thought her right eye was beginning to twitch.

“Relatives? Don’t you mean relativity?”

He looked at her quizzically. “No. Relatives. All gateways are related, children of the God of Ways. They all know each other.”

“Uh huh.”

“Awfully chatty, gateways. Can’t keep a secret, most of them. And the ones that do! It costs a tail and a heart to get it back!”

“There’s a gateway here?” She waved at the bedraggled park still grey with the last bits of winter.

“Oh yes! You have an arch, and a circle bisected by avenues. Perfect gateway nest.”

Between his hands the coins were now floating in the air, their song increasing with what felt like the pulsing of some large, distant heartbeat.

She looked around, no one was paying any attention to them. As if neither of them were visible at all, wrapped in that green sparking halo.

The coins shot out of Casimir’s hands rising above their heads. In the light an image shimmered: a bone white tower of stone fretwork.

The song of the coins rose to block out all other sound, then stopped in a moment of crushing silence. A stench filled the air.

Casimir spoke softly. “Oh. Oh no.”

The world went black.

#

“Remember when I said I believed you? I take it back. This is a dream. A very bad dream.”

Anjelah struggled in a hot fetid prison, ooze sliming its way up her legs. It smelled like Times Square on garbage day in July.

“I got lost in a dream once. A void-demon had infectious narcolepsy. Hell of a mess.” Casimir replied. “It still smelled a damn sight better.”

“How do we get out of here?”

He pulled her closer as the drag from the fetid muck increased. “We’re going to have to go further in before we go out.”

Sucked down into the squishy darkness the gateway had dropped them into, they were spat out into a cell whose walls were more rotting flesh. The surface in front of them was transparent, like the oily side of a bubble. Through it they could see other cells, rising like a cavern of boils on the surface of the thing whose body had taken over the underground expanse. Rising from shadowed depths in the center, a column of gleaming eyes.

She gagged at the sight. Disgust turning to panic as she realized that the walls were closing in on them.

“God, what is this?” She yelled, pulling her arms away from the sludge walls that were grappling at her.

“It’s a sentient fatberg.”

Anjelah stared at him while fending off the clinging pseudopods.

“I hate you,” she said. Feeling it in her bones.

“Yeah, I get that a lot.”

“Why my apartment? Why me!” She was slowly being wrapped in the sticky embrace of what she was trying not to think of as a tentacle.

Somehow a pseudopod had managed to pull the agent’s feet out from under him. Casimir was being held upside down, struggling to cut at the monster with what might have been the back-scratcher from her apartment. He was having a modest amount of success.

“Well you know how some people are foci? It seems like things are always happening to them? Well, you’re the opposite. Nothing ever happens to you.”

“That was a rhetorical question!” She yelled between trying to struggle free.

He continued anyway.“The infected gateway is drawing bits and pieces from other realities towards it. Your reality is defending itself by throwing off those pieces of other worlds into places that are less worn, places where nothing happens. Like around you.”

If she wasn’t being slowly eaten, Najaleh might have started to cry. She’d felt like her life was nothing and going nowhere for the past year since her grandmother’s death of cancer-related pneumonia. Her dissertation advisor moving across the country was another blow. But it felt rude for the universe to confirm it by making her the inter-dimensional lost and found.

Now she was being digested by something that smelled like the death of diarrhea. The stench made her head pound.

The horror pulled at her mind. Sinking. Is that how Grammie had felt? At the last? The familiar void of grief blossomed in her chest.

Outside their cell, the multitude of eyes flickered and a sound of pain echoed through the cave. For a moment, she felt the thing squeezing her slacken and let go.

But when it came back, the feeling of sinking increased tenfold.

“What did you do? What did you do!” Casimir yelled as some fluid began to bubble up out of the floor.

“I don’t know!”

Do it again!” He begged, the floor slime reaching up to his nose, intent on drowning him.

Anjelah struggled against a scream and tried to remember.

The soft bleep of machines. Bleach. Antiseptic.

Confused tears.

Where is Shelly?

No grammie. Mummie isn’t here...

The very air screamed. She dropped to the floor but barely felt it. A void was unfurling inside her chest, washing away everything else.

Strong arms wrapped around her shoulders, felt only distantly. The space opening within her overwhelmed sensation.

In its center: a pearl, layers of shining pain. Strata of whispered cries, and the calcified moments after waking when you realize that it was not a dream.

At the edges of her awareness she felt a sound. Words that would have burned if she wasn’t cocooned in the booming wave of her long-suppressed grief.

Something feral and alien screamed a withering death.

Still she lived in the pulsing center of loss. Finally released, its riptide threatened to pull her under.

Babygirl, enough.

The darkness warmed. Anjelah swam up from it towards the world.

#

She woke up in her own bed. Clean, tucked into warm sheets, with a familiar purring rumbling along her side.

“How did I get clean?” She asked a spotless Casimir as he walked through her bedroom door.

He nodded towards Bathsheba. “It was her.”

Anjelah laughed, petting Bath’s much-loved softness.

“The Department owes you a great debt, you know.” He folded himself into her old recliner. A cup of tea balanced on his knee.

She was too tired to do more than raise and eyebrow.

“You went into danger even though you didn’t have to,” he countered. “And were quick enough to destabilized the infection, giving me a chance to remove it in a way that didn’t endanger anyone else.”

“In short, you were extraordinary.”

His eyes grew shadowed. “I’d not have had you use your own sadness like that, if I’d known beforehand.”

Anjelah’s head fell back on her pillow, tears leaking from her eyes.

“I guess the counselor was right.” She laughed grimly. “Emotions are useful.”
They sat in silence, neither one in a hurry to speak.

She turned to him as he stared out at the rainy city. His profile was carved with refracted fire from the setting sun. He looked not at all human.

“What can I ask for?”

Casimir put his cup and saucer down on the table beside him, leaning in towards her.

“Anything we can give, is yours.”

#

Anjelah walked out of the School of Sociology with a light step. The day still young, she walked over to a nearby park and claimed a bench.

She’d passed her dissertation defense with acclaim from the head of her department. She was officially Dr. Jones. A strange feeling.

So much of her life had led directly to this point.

Holding her finished dissertation in her hands, Anjelah felt on the brink of the unknown. On the Disestablishment of Nothing: Precursors and Multidimensional Models of Disruption to Gentrification. Six years of work that should lead her into the post-doctoral world and beyond, to what she’d thought she was supposed to do.

Babygirl.

A hot tear fell down her face, splashing onto the cover page. Strange how happiness could be as sharp as grief.

From her pocket, she pulled out a silver pin. The relics had disappeared from her apartment along with her sudden visitor, except this. In the morning light, it glowed.

#

Anjelah sat in the sun and arranged her few things around her. It was a beautiful day. The wind grabbed spray from an enthusiastic fountain, arcing a rainbow above a crowd of playing children.

To her right Casimir Makepeace stood where a second before there’d been no one. He was wearing an emerald green jacket, and snugly tailored grey trousers. His copper hair turned gilt in the sun shining behind him. He looked, she thought, like a cross between a banker and predatory leprechaun.

"Our debt to you is cancelled, you know," he said as he folded himself onto the park bench.

Anjelah looked at him, the way the light seemed to bend slightly around him, then back towards the children playing.

"I know it is."

She opened her palm to show the silver pin shining cooly.

"Why here?" He asked.

"It’s a place where roads and circles meet. The pin..."

"Yes?" He grinned.

Her heart beat faster. "I thought the gateway would let you know. What with them being huge gossips."

Cas smiled. "Huge. Incorrigible tell-tales."

There was a flicker in his eyes. Deeper than night, colder than winter. "What else would you like to learn?" He asked.

"Everything," she said.

He stood up, dusting imagining dust from his trousers.

"Well, then. Are you ready to begin?"

She took his outstretched hand in hers. "Absolutely."

#