Join My Cult - Original Falcon Press

probably outcomes, using whatever methods present themselves to weigh
the odds in my favor. I have noted that the simple execution of will provides
the tipping point. I present myself with a numerical code device—a
combination lock or keypad, a rubic’s cube. And I try to watch myself
select the right answer.
Results have been mixed, yet exhilarating. I may be able to exploit
this principle without losing ego integrity. (Dying, alone and quite mad.)
There are occasional discontinuities, like this one. Reaching for the
keypad, I find myself seated in a banquet hall across an expanse of esoteric
crockery and scarlet cloth from a child with a bowl haircut in a
choirboy uniform. He is perched on a shifting mountain of paperwork. I
can hear what sounds like a steam locomotive in the background.
“More to drink, Doctor?”
“Pardon me, “ I begin calmly. “I’m getting used to this, but what were
we talking about?”
“Your glass.”
“Yes.” There is the shrill sound of an old locomotive whistle in the
background.
“You really don’t want to allow considerations of sanity to prevent
your ascension to godhood, do you, Doctor?” he asks solicitously. My
glass bubbles and fills with coca-cola. “This could be a very important
development. Imagine the freedom granted in being able to live all of
your lives to the fullest, instead of threading a hallucinatory back road
past them.”
“But without integration, what’s the point?” I gulp awkwardly and
continue. “A tide of masks. I don’t get to share any of these experiences
under one identity, they never happened to me.”
One thing is very different. No one wants to just talk about the
weather, anymore. It’s always cosmology, or psychology—usually a
disturbing mysticism blending the two. There is certainly a scientific
model for this. My training is almost entirely inappropriate to offer one.
“Grant me, for the sake of conversation, that this I of yours is a sensory
construct.”
I can’t take much more of this empty empiricism.
“Granted for the moment. The string beans are excellent, by the way.”
Deep breaths. Polite.
“Thank you, Doctor.”
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