TagPile: Laminate, Timbals

"Please find her,"Letterman said.

"Who?" I said.

"I don't know," Letterman said. The one that I will never see again. Hagia Sophia."

Hagia Sophia spoke in the argot of the seismograph: She said, In current times, I am well equipped to track my own earth delivered orgasmic temblorings, wired as I am with meters and devices designed by boys who once studied with JPL scientists, then crawled through my crevices and ceilings, de=lighted, except for that spelunker's helmet.

There're a lot of them in that category, I said to myself. Sorry, Letterman; your answer is too vague.

Sophia had spoke, but I heard not, or not then, but perhaps later, when I realized only my wishes had dreams. Was I awakening? Or was it too late, now, for insight?

"I should go over to World-Wide Travel," Letterman said, half to himself, "and talk to the lady there some more. About India. I have a feeling India is the place."

"Place for what?"

"Where she'll be," Letterman said.

A long slow dissolve, a place to be, a place to forget what it is to know the signs and symbols around you. A place where one can watch and not know what is seen, because referents have not been laid down in an earlier time, when one knew not that referents were laid down. So now: the this is the that, the possible is the who knows, the one is the other, the other is something else altogether. Yet: no threat.

I did not respond; there was no point to it. Letterman's madness had returned.

"She's somewhere...I know he is, right now; somewhere in the world. Zebra told me. 'St. Sophia is going to be born again; she wasn't-' "

"You want me to tell you the truth?" I interrupted.

Letterman blinked. "Sure, Rich."

In a theatrically harsh voice, I said, "There is no Savior. St. Sophia will not be born again, the Buddha is not in the park, the Head Apollo is not about to return. The universe is a way of tricking itself. Got it?"

Silence.

"The fifth Savior in the crystal Pyramid-" Letterman began.

"Forget it," I said. "You're as crazy as Frampton. Give up and let go. Okay?"

Letterman said finally, in a low voice, "Then you agree with Doug."

"Yes," I said, in the same theatrically harsh tones, "I agree with Doug."

"Zebra wouldn't have lied to me. The light beings and the yurt."

"Yikes! There is no 'Zebra,' " I said. " It's yourself. Don't you recognize your own self from another point of view?"

Now everything began to slow down for Letterman, with him.

"You don't think I should look for her?"

"You have no idea, no idea in the world, where she might be. She could be in Ire­land. She could be in Corvalis. He could be in Anaheim at Disneyland; yeah-maybe she's working at Disneyland, pushing a broom. How are you going to recognize her? We had all the evidence; we had all the signs. We had the flick Valis. We had the two-word cypher. We had "yellow". We had the Framptons and Mini. Their story fit your story; Everything Fits. Focus on that and stop searching, you have already found her...

And then we searched onward, for in searching not for what we searched for, we found the Way. The waves came across the Pacific, across the solar system, coming in, breaking, returning back whence, in various forms, waves generative, proliferative, replicative, reverentially referential. And so we go, our desires driving past themselves into the break, because already heading back into what will be.

KingFelix