Heterogeneous World - Chapter 1

“For those who understand us enslave something in us”

Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

1

Lilly lay naked on the bed watching as her husband’s colleague popped the cork on the champagne bottle. As the froth spilled over onto the floor, the man danced his way over to her, salsa playing in the background.

“Te vas a arrepentir, pero nadie te perdonará…” Gil sang with more confidence than his poor pitch should have allowed.

She giggled as he stepped and gyrated in front of her, spilling more fluid onto the bed and splashing her with it. He took two cups from the side table and filled them, passing her one when he finished. They toasted and drank the liquid down, before he jumped on the bed and embraced her.

“When will Langston be back?” he asked.

“Not until Saturday or Sunday, so we’ve got the whole week to ourselves,” she said with a wicked smile. “He hates Christmas for some reason, probably some trauma from when he was a kid.”

“Not me,” Gil said. “We Dominicans love Christmas—pernil, espagueti, telera—oof!”

“Yea, me too,” she said. “His loss.”

“Out in the desert looking at stars, while I’m fucking his wife. Pobrecito pendejo,” he said with a sigh. “By the way, did he mention anything to you about some new data he collected? Anything having to do with the signal? He mentioned something to me about some spectroscopy results…”

“No,” Lilly said laughing. Then, taking his face in her hands, looked at him seriously. “Hey, listen, I want to try something tonight if you’re game.”

“Anything you want, mi vida,” Gil said, purposefully allowing his Spanish accent to come out.

“Okay, cool. Check this out,” she said, stretching out on her stomach and grabbing a book from her side of the bed. She flipped to one of the pages she had bookmarked and turned it towards him.

“Lemme see,” he said gesturing for her to hand him the book.

Taking the book in his hands, Gil began to scan what she had marked out with a highlighter. A frown slowly slid over his face as he read.

“What’s this, Lilly?” he asked, then began to read aloud. “The physical bodies of men and women are alchemical laboratories that routinely transform light and energy into tangible flesh, blood, nerves, and brain tissue. On the material plane when the male and female elements are combined they are capable of passing our coded essence to a new generation.”

As he read, she crawled on top of him and, with a sharpie, began to draw on his chest and shoulders.

“Blah, blah, blah…on the material plane…blah, blah, blah,” he said, scanning the page. “Used with skill and full magical intent, the magician employs these magical laboratories of flesh and blood, blah, blah, to create the incarnating soul of whatever object, concept, or level of consciousness he or she might intend to manifest in his or her life.”

He fell silent as he continued to read, brow furrowed and lips pursed. Lilly watched his face as he read. She had suspected that it might take a little convincing to get him to go through with what she wanted to do. After another moment, Gil dropped his hands and looked at her.

“Madre de Dios, what the fuck is all this, Lilly?”

Without looking up from her work, Lilly replied, “Sex magic.”

“Esta mujer—yes, mi amor, I understand that part,” he said, then looking at the drawings on his body. “Coño, what’re you drawing on me?”

“Sigils…for the ritual,” she said, continuing with her drawing, the tip of her tongue poking out of the side of her mouth.

“And what exactly are you trying to accomplish with this, this—¿como se llama?”

“Ritual,” she said.

“Yes, ritual, Lilly,” he said, all of the joking was absent from his voice now. Gil was not a religious man, but he had been raised Catholic and still held the prohibitions against witchcraft deep in his subconscious. He did not mind a little light-hearted sacrilege, but this was a whole other level of blasphemy.

“We…” she said, turning her eyes to him, “are going to summon the great spirit of balance and bind its power to me”

“Summoning?” he asked.

“Yes—think of it as me summoning my muse.”

Dragging his palms down over his face, he shook his head. “Ay, Dios mio.”

“And I’m just using your for your body,” she said laughing. “What’s wrong, Gil? You’re not scared, are you?” Lilly knew how to manipulate men, she enjoyed doing it, and Gil was easy prey. He would go along with her plan—she could see this already—his ego wouldn’t let him say no.

When she was done drawing sigils on his body, she instructed him to do the same to her. Lilly had been practicing various forms of magic for a few years now, but this was the most significant ritual she had ever attempted. Once Gil had finished scrawling the designs on her body, she jumped up and grabbed a few things from the closet. He watched as she carefully assembled a footlocker-sized altar, then covered it with a series of purple, red, and black cloths, and finally, placed candles on each side of it. Once she was done, she laid out a blood-red blanket on the floor, then tossed him a few printed pages that had been stapled together.

“Okay, this is how it’s gonna go,” she said, leafing through the pages. “I read the parts that say priestess, you read the ones marked consort.”

“Listen, Lilly, I don’t know about all this…” Gil said, looking at the printouts.

“C’mon baby, do it for me,” Lilly said, crawling over on her hands and knees and rubbing her cheek up his inner thigh. “Pleeaaase.”

Gil said nothing, still reading though the bizarre liturgy.

“Well, I suppose, if you’re too scared, we don’t have to,” she said matter-of-factly and made as if she was going to start putting things back in the closet.

Gil pursed his lips and shook his head. “I see what you’re doing,” he said. “But it won’t work on me—you…Jezebel.”

Lilly laughed. “I just…didn’t think such an accomplished scientist would be so…superstitious,” she said, shooting her bottom lip out and shrugging her shoulders. “Like I said, if you’re too scared…”

He watched her as she slowly began to pick up the things she had pulled from the closet. “Alright, alright, está bien—I suppose it can’t hurt anything. I mean, it’s not like you’re summoning the devil, right?” he said with a nervous laugh.

“Exactly!” she chirped, slapping her legs with her palms. “Oh, thank you, thank you. Langston would never do anything like this for me. He’s not a real man, like you.”

Gil poured himself another glass of champagne and swallowed it down in a single draught. She popped a pill and swallowed it down with the rest of her champagne, then lit a joint and passed it to him. After they had finished smoking, she lit the candles and dimmed the lights.

Naked, except for her priestess robe, Lilly began the ceremony. The atmosphere was dreamlike as they progressed, alternating between sexual positions and liturgical dialogue. Gil began to sway under her control, the intoxicants mixing with their brief periods of passion, dramatic readings, and her otherworldly chanting. They kissed and he tasted blood, she had cut her lip. When he tried to stop and see if she was alright, she waved him off, continuing in the rhythm that the ritual had taken on. There was something extremely gratifying about the on and off again cadence of ritual sex for Lilly, holding back then giving in. As they burst into their final crescendo of penetration, Lilly, reaching down between her legs, cut herself and the blood mixed with his semen as he gushed forth, emptying all of himself into her cup.

“Langston…” she moaned as she climaxed, feeling the warmth of Gil’s fluids bursting inside her.

The two of them lay exhausted on the floor unable to move, a static charge palpable in the air. The room had taken on a vignette-like appearance, impossibly dark in the corners, vivid and bright at the center. Something stalked around the edges, in the space between space, and it scared Lilly. Staring up at the ceiling she sensed it watching, peering in through the fissure she had just opened into her world. She turned her head back and forth, trying to catch a glimpse of the thing she knew was there, but was unable to find it. Gil lay on his back, eyes closed, still breathing deeply from exertion. Her eyes scanned his face, looking for any indication that he sensed the presence as well, but there was nothing there. Sensing her gaze, he opened his eyes and watched her as she began to shoot looks around the room again, her eyes jerking back and forth as if watching a dragonfly in flight.

“What is it?” he asked, voice dry and cracked. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Lilly, you okay?” His voice was barely a whisper.

Turning, she stared at him as if unable to tell if it had been him who had spoken. Her eyes were wide and red, and seemed to bulge from their sockets. She spun around as if to catch the entity sneaking up on her, but there was nothing there. Cocking her head, she listened and then pointed her finger at the ceiling, near one of the corners of the room, and then looked at him as if he should hear whatever noise she believed she was hearing.

“Hey, what’s going on?” he asked her forcefully, eyes widening in anxiety.

Lowering one of her hands, she gently placed it over his mouth, then touching her ear, pointed towards the same corner. Taking her hand away gently, he sat up. His thighs were covered in blood.

“Ay, no—asquerosa,” he said standing up and inspecting himself.

“Can’t you hear it?” Lilly said, looking up at him from the floor, the crazed look still veiling her face.

“Hear what?” he replied, losing patience with her. “No, Lilly, I don’t hear anything.”

“Strange,” she said, eyes still fixed on the ceiling.

“Hey, who knows, maybe you got what you wanted,” he said walking towards the bathroom. “Maybe, it’s the sound your muse makes.”

Gil turned on the shower and then walked back out into the room and looked at her as she sat staring up at the ceiling.

“You sure you’re okay?” he asked again, his voice back to normal.

She smiled and nodded, “You know, I think you’re right. I think it’s what you said. I think it’s my muse.”

Steam began to billow out into the bedroom from the hot shower. With a dubious look on his face, Gil turned and walked back into the bathroom, closing the door behind himself.

As Lilly sat meditating, still naked and waiting for Gil to be done with the shower, she heard his pager begin to buzz. Ignoring it, she let her mind sink back into itself, retreating further and further with each errant thought. The presence was here too, she noted, hiding somewhere, everywhere, in plain sight. It was like the Dao or Zen, that space that exists between two things, not in a physical place, but in the potentiality that precedes action, that thing that exists apart from certainty.

She could sense its gaze as if someone was staring at the back of her head. There was a clarity to this sensation she had never experienced before, something universal and imminent. The terror she had felt in the beginning had evaporated into a sensation of awe. As if she could now fully grasp the Bible verse that said “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of understanding”. It was fear without the urge to run away. Not because there was no danger, for there certainly was, but because the majesty and unseen beauty of it was so powerful that it could not be resisted.

The buzz of Gil’s pager pulled her back into the room. The shower was off and she could hear him bumping around in the bathroom. She liked him, he was fun, but the best part was always the conquest, and now that was done. Plus, she loved Langston. The pager began to buzz again.

“Gil! Your pager’s going crazy out here,” she yelled, annoyed at the interruption.

The door opened and Gil stuck his head out. “What’s that?”

“Your beeper, it keeps going off,” she said. “It’s been going crazy since you got in the shower.”

Strutting out of the bathroom with the towel flung over his shoulder, he picked up the small device and studied it. She watched as his head jerked back in surprise at what he read.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It’s the guys from the lab,” he said, squinting as he read the text on the device’s tiny display. “Something’s going on with the signal. Do you mind if I use your phone?”

“Be my guest,” she replied, pointing towards the front of the house.

Throwing on a robe she followed him out and down the hall and into the living room. Gil picked up the whole phone and, lifting it up to ensure there was enough cord to reach, set it next to himself on the couch. He raised the receiver and punched the number into the keypad then waited, smiling at her as he did.

“I’m gonna take a shower,” she said and he nodded.

When she got out of the shower Gil was fully dressed and waiting for her, a worried look on his face.

“I’ve got to go to the lab, sorry baby,” he said.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“I’m not sure exactly. They said there was some kind of powerful transmission burst and then the signal just quit,” he told her. “I guess, right before it happened, the frequency started moving down the spectrum. You know, like a glissando down piano keys, anyway, it went from the frequency we’ve been monitoring, 1.44 GHz, all the way down to 14.4 MHz, and then, just, stayed there—very strange behavior.”

“1.4 and 14.4? Why would the numbers be so similar?” she asked, mildly interested.

“Coño, I’ve got no idea,” he added, tapping his chin. “And they said that the signal isn’t coming from Albemuth anymore.”

“How can that happen?” she asked, now very interested. “So, where’s it coming from now?”

Gil shook his head and looked off in thought. “They said…they think somewhere…on Earth.”

***

In the vibrant heat of the afternoon, the orchestra of sounds from around the jungle swelled towards an inevitable crescendo. The natural noises that had first mutated into dissonance were now gently self-organizing into a unified harmonic, causing the surrounding area to tremble in anticipation. Like a woman in childbirth, the area pulsed in magnificent, generative travail. When the perfect harmonic finally converged, all sound withdrew out of the universe. The unreal silence was quickly followed by a brief flash and a deafening crack, like a lightning strike nearby. Plasma converged into a z-pinch, a hole opened, and all things returned to the beginning; a foreign salvation had been birthed into a newly heterogeneous world.

Heterogeneous World - Chapter 2