Chapter 2. Déjà verra

Abélard came at length to Paris,
where the art of dialectics was flourishing,
and he,
presuming on his gifts.

From this small inception
his fame began to spread abroad
No long time thereafter he was smitten
! Grevious !
brought upon him by his immoderate zeal for...


study.

•••••

Brad was heavy in the throes of a bout of déjà verra. The baggage claim with its overlapping snakescale plates silent and unmoving, that particular beer-gutted skycap flirting with that particular Hertz agent, the angle of his eyesight to his patched up backpack at this moment: He’d see it all again, to be sure.

Déjà verra.

Brad’s bleary-eyed theory about airports is that they are a maelstrom of déjà verra, a veritable critical mass of I-will-do-this-again.

Because you will.

Standing still, life was happening to Brad, all around Brad. A glance at his cell phone display for the time was useless. The colon between hour and minute readings wasn’t blinking to indicate seconds passing – Wasn’t it supposed to? Or was it?

•••••

The stream of consciousness washes him up on the shores of some stuff he’d gotten from spring semester’s Astronomy 101; not that he was particularly fond of science, astronomy or anything related. He’d merely employed the actor’s old short cut in prepping for an exam: Straight memory dump of key information lifted from the text, set to a thespiary tone and acted out in your head if it helps.

(Clyde, the junior who taught Brad this trick, claimed he could automatically reframe his textbook into the rhythms of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter as he read it. Clyde, it was generally reckoned around the department, was often full of shit.)

Ultimately, all the memorization he’d done of key passages in the texts hadn’t mattered at all. The quiz was multiple choice.

No matter. From Bertrand Russell’s ABC of Relativity – “Good choice,” enthused Jasper. “That book is mean. Simple, but mean.” – inwardly Brad recited.

“The objective time of a physical occurrence can be inferred from the time we perceive it by allowing for the velocity of transmission...”

And if we don’t perceive it?

This interruption from some other section of the mind, a peanut gallery to Brad’s player. Hey, you gotta practice the improv, right?

“There are now a number of different ways of fixing position in time, which do not differ merely as to the unit and the starting-point. Indeed, as we have seen, if one event is simultaneous with another in one reckoning, it will precede it in another, and follow it in a third...”

•••••

Events in spacetime, simultaneous. A young man in 2009 awaiting his possessions after a journey. The day before a brilliant mind first enters the great university as though to own it in the 12th century. A young woman approaching Iceland through the air, another behind nine centuries without companionship in her education – both with life-changing lovers rapidly approaching. Millions of bedrooms across history hosting a great flow of sex and orgasm. A sinning Christian clergyman reincarnated as fox. A raft ride down the Mississippi or a rowboat turn down the Hudson. Blood spilling. Corpses buried and exhumed and reburied. Babies born.

•••••

...and drifting between ABC and BWI, Brad concludes that Baltimore / Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport is just not proper space at all, but rather a mere way station for the body.

Into his eighteenth minute awaiting his luggage, Brad was taken with the certain knowledge that he would be here again, doing this again, waiting for this luggage again. Déjà verra.

Airports are created and recreated, moment to moment, by possible futures bottled up the minds of passengers. Brad thought of his past, of Jasper in his fixed point in spacetime back in New Hampshire, mutual home to their upbringings. Brad thought of his future, of seeing Helena again – jesus, he missed her – and of studying with Jefferson “What the Fuck” Jones. Nostalgic times gone and tantalizing times to come were both mere hours away on either side of his existence. Or would be if time mattered here in BWI.

•••••

The rising sun seeps early red into the August sky over Corbeil, which is hard by the city of Paris. Abélard is awake and about before most of God’s diurnal creatures save the poorest of manservants, filled as he is with confident excitement.

If anyone were to see him, he might be taken for an angel. If anyone were to meet him, the very glow of Abélard’s stoked charisma would warm like a second sun.

And set over the rising sun, Abélard’s red hair burns with the radiance of heaven itself.

Damn straight he’s good.

•••••

Déjà verra isn’t Brad’s concept, dropped on him instead by Jasper: “I was sitting in class in September. I looked out the window and I didn’t actually see myself, but I knew that in April, I’d be able to go outside and see myself at that September moment. Through time. Like déjà vu in the future. Dude, man, it was mean.”

Nineteen minutes. Brad wonders vaguely if he’s old enough to truly feel nostalgic.

But he rapidly downshifts from sentiment, recalling departing on a five o’clock at Logan after alternatingly playing game after game of basketball throughout the night and smoking up Jasper’s brothers’ homegrown, followed by continuing to blast jays all the way to the New Hampshire border. (Talk about your redeye flights.) Like it matters that he’s got most of the day ahead of him, in this no-place no-time.

Twenty minutes.

•••••

Declassé enough to walk about like common folk, Abélard thinks smugly as the dawn sunbeams caress his cheekbones and trickle down his neck. He stops on the roadside and closes his eyes to feel the warmth. He knows that the essence of warmth on the skin, beauty of the scene, the pleasant feel of fine garments are defined by katholou which have first – only! – basis in the mind. His mind. On this morning, on the outskirts of Paris proper, Abélard feels very close to a loving God.

In his perception, reckons Abélard, sits comfortably the very warmth of warm, the beautifulness of beauty, the pleasantitude of pleasant. And his own perception is but one of millions of interpretations of an Earthly non-existent form of perfection.

At least that’s what he’d argued to dispatch William of Champeaux in debate. He could well argue the opposite tomorrow and triumph just as easily, Abélard realizes while allowing a smirk’s trace to curve one side of his mouth. Near-heresy yesterday becomes fashionable rhetorical spice today and divine dogma tomorrow.

At the height of his dialectical powers, Abélard is presuming on his gifts far beyond the warranty of his youth. He is awash in the vanity of false humility.

God chooses this point to disturb the ruminations of his scholarly servant: A strange sensation overcomes Abélard, an overwhelming feeling that he will visit this same space, but the other ‘way round, in egress from the great city. Surely shall it be a triumphant exit, almost certainly to Rome. For one brief moment, Abélard’s ungraspable future is within reach. Déjà verra.

•••••

Forget discovering signs of civilization: When those automatic doors swoosh open and the airport spits you out, you’re thrown into sprawling metropolic society. Brad cringes at the tsunami of natural light, his pupils contracting violently. Squinting to a point in the morning light, he fumbles about in his baggage for his sunglasses; his consciousness is at odds with his autonomic functions, as he attempts to calculate Paulie Knapp’s arrival time with all variables unknown. He’s also trying to remember where in the hell he picks up the bus to Blue Rock.

It will be some time before Brad remembers the sunglasses are in his jacket pocket.

•••••

The early August morn is passing warm, each particle sings with the Holy Spirit, and God is good. Abélard dons his shades and is ready to rush headlong into a wonderful, assured future.