Strings

The first thing you should know is there’s nothing extraordinary about the kaleidoscope that changes my life. It’s not on display at some strange toy shop that, after making my purchase and then trying to return it the next day, has mysteriously vanished. It’s not discovered in my grandfather’s attic, in an ancient dust-entombed trunk that hasn’t been opened in decades. It’s not saddled with some dark backstory like each person who’s come into possession of it has died in increasingly bizarre and improbable circumstances. It’s sitting atop a pile of other completely identical kaleidoscopes, all manufactured in China or somewhere, tossed carelessly into a bin at the dollar store. Just a cheap piece of tin and plastic. No magic spell, no dark powers. And no string connecting the kaleidoscope to me, and me to the Chatham Juvenile Detention Center. At least none that I can see yet.

The kaleidoscope is an inconsequential part of the scenery when it first enters my periphery under the too-bright fluorescent lights of the store, not calling out to me or anything like that. Mom and Darren are in the next aisle, grabbing some odds and ends, arguing about prices. I hear Darren say “Everything used to just be a dollar here. That was the whole point,” something I’ve heard him say a million times. Mom is too tired to engage after her double shift, and also probably doesn’t feel like arguing about how much stuff should cost at the dollar store again.

She suddenly appears in my aisle, which appears to have a loosely cobbled together “fun” theme involving some toys, some school supplies, and a smattering of Easter stuff.

“Three dollars,” she says to me, and I swear I don’t react in any way, no sigh or flash of disappointment on my face or anything like that -- I know better -- but she immediately relents. “Okay okay, four dollars,” she smiles. This is our little thing at the dollar store. Has been since I was a kindergartner.

I don’t really care what I get to tell the truth, and as much as I hate Darren, he’s correct that fewer and fewer items at the dollar store are less than four dollars these days, but Mom and I have a routine, and so I make a show of carefully studying everything in the aisle while Darren hunts down some bags of frozen food for dinner. At the end of the aisle, under boxes of crayons and individually packaged toy cars, I reach down and grab the first kaleidoscope my fingers find off the top of the stack, the tin cylinder cool in my hand, the colorful little plastic beads and shapes clicking in the barrel as I swing it around to show Mom.

“$3.99,” I tell her. “Practically a steal.”

Darren pulls down the aisle with our cart and sees what’s happening, probably senses I picked a toy I’m way too old for just because I knew it would piss him off.

“Seriously?” he says to Mom, not me.

“It’s his money,” Mom says back.

“Ain’t his money,” Darren is looking at me now.

“Ain’t your money,” Mom says, and Darren snaps his sharp blue eyes from me back to her, just glares at her for a few seconds. When Mom cuts Darren’s balls off like this it can go one of two ways. The way it goes this time is Darren grunts and mutters “whatever” and steers the cart to the checkout.

It’s pretty much dark by the time we’re loading up the groceries in the cab of Darren’s pick-up truck. I take my new kaleidoscope and hold it against my left eye, point it up at the sodium lights illuminating the nearly empty parking lot. The rainbow beads in the barrel spin and bounce against each other, creating alternating webs of technicolor threads, elaborate snowflakes and geometric patterns punched through with light.

In the truck on the drive home, I sit between Mom and Darren in total silence. I know that Mom’s comment at the dollar store was just the beginning of a sentence that won’t be finished until we’re back at the apartment and I’m in my bedroom, and they can pretend I can’t hear every insult they spike at each other. I keep the kaleidoscope glued to my eye as it filters the headlights speeding past us through its ever changing web of color.

Darren starts flashing his brights at an oncoming car. I can kind of make out its headlights coming at us through the kaleidoscope, with my right eye sealed shut. I hear Darren say “Turn your fucking brights off dude” and as the car zooms past us, suddenly my entire field of vision shatters. The sudden eruption of colors are like shards of glass sprinting out of the kaleidoscope’s barrel, through my left eyeball, and directly into my brain. I drop the kaleidoscope to my lap and throw my palms to my eyelids, my skull splitting open with an instantaneous and ferocious headache like I’ve never felt.

“I’m gonna puke,” I mutter, barely above a whisper.

“What?” Mom asks.

“I gotta throw up. Pull over.”

“What the hell?” Darren says. “Do not puke in my truck, dude,” and he brakes hard, swerves onto the shoulder. Mom throws open the passenger door and hops out in one smooth motion so I can escape, barely squinting, into the grass where I immediately start vomiting, thanking my lucky stars I kept the mess out of Darren’s truck.

“Jesus,” I overhear Darren say to Mom. “Migraine?”

“He’s never gotten a migraine before,” Mom says, walking over to me. “I don’t get migraines either.”

I stand on the side of the road like that for a few minutes buckled over with my hands on my knees, breathing hard, Mom right next to me, gently rubbing my back until the nausea begins to subside. I slowly stand back up and realize I’ve kept my eyes closed the entire time. When I open them again, the world suddenly explodes in a towering wall of light. I stagger backwards, shutting my eyelids again and rubbing them with my fists. When I’m finally ready, I slowly open them once more, and that’s when I see everything for the first time.

The highway, Darren’s truck, the trees, Mom, Darren, everything I can see is now electrified in a staggering display of pure light, in constant motion, and endlessly changing colors -- blue, green, red, yellow, purple, white, and other colors I’ve never seen before, colors I can’t even name. I can make out the figure that was Mom -- is Mom -- by my side, asking if I’m okay, but I’m too dazzled to answer. I close and open my eyes, over and over, hoping my vision will reset, but it never does.

At some point, Mom and Darren gather me back into the truck, and we drive home. When my stomach has settled, I eat some reheated chicken tenders and fries for dinner, and shuffle off to bed, keeping my eyes barely open the entire time, struggling to describe to Mom what’s happened to me, patiently listening to her explain what a migraine is, before she says goodnight, and I lay awake in bed listening to Mom and Darren call each other horrible names, while above me my bedroom ceiling shifts and morphs in an ever-changing small ocean of brilliant waves, knowing all the while that this isn’t a migraine. Understanding that, for the first time in my life, I’m seeing the world as it actually is.

***

I first notice the strings the next day. Shrugging aside another wave of nausea, I stumble out of bed, watching my feet shake the floor of my bedroom like puddles, rippling out in shades of orange and green and yellow with each step. In the den, Darren is watching baseball on the television. Mom is already at work. Through squinting eyes I notice that the screen of the TV and the real world of our apartment surrounding it is all the same vibrancy, a sort of multi-dimensional display with no solidity, no distinction between objects as I previously understood them, just colors moving without substance.

I see Darren sprawled out on the sofa, a beer bottle in his hand already, and his face is momentarily distorted, briefly monstrous, then beautiful, then back to how it normally is, approximating the Darren as I know him. It’s not that he isn’t human; it’s that humans aren’t what I thought they were. I realize he’s looking at me.

“Can I help you with something?” he asks.

“No…” I start, and then have to ask. “Does everything look normal to you?”

He gives me a look. “Like, what, on the TV?” Intermittently he’s folded into the sofa, flickering on and off, so it all appears as one object, no separation between Darren and furniture. “Looks fine to me.”

“Forget it,” I mutter, and in the new daylight of our apartment I can see that the shapes making up this new old world are not solid at all but made up of very thin strings. Almost imperceptible in their individuality, but more substantial as they tie together to make up all the objects in our apartment -- coffee table, garbage can, television, Darren -- and also the space between the objects. For a while I just stand there, watching them sway and collaborate and change of their own volition, combining and separating, combining and separating, to define the existence of everything around me.

I watch a network of strings wrap themselves around each other, forming a rope that leads from Darren to the refrigerator in the kitchenette just past the TV, and then seconds later I watch Darren follow that rope to the fridge, open it, grab another beer. The strings dissolve and then reform, leading his way back to the sofa, which Darren then follows, assuming his position once more, laid out in front of the TV.

“I’m going outside,” I say, overwhelmed by it all, quickly throwing on my boots and hoodie, and fleeing through the door, down the four flights of stairs to the street below.

Outside the colors are so intense, the living patchwork of strings making up the shapes and movement all around me so bright and elaborate and dizzying, I have to shield my eyes at first. It’s as though a giant kaleidoscopic filter has been grafted onto the neighborhood, revealing the stunning luminescence behind the drab “reality” as I used to understand it. It strikes me that this living tapestry of light must be what a newborn sees upon opening its eyes for the first time, how it understands the world before it learns how to name and classify everything, before the monotony of routine dulls the edges and dampens the colors over the years.

Navigating my way down the sidewalk, opening my eyelids a little bit at a time, I begin to piece together how the infinite strings connect everything, how their careful and intricate dance creates the visible world, its movement and flux, all of what we see and feel. It’s all just strings.

And soon I realize something else: These strings not only form the objects but also determine them. The ropes guiding people through their daily routines, as they revealed Darren’s path to the fridge, are not revealing anything at all, but pulling, gently but firmly forcing. I watch a young girl pulled by me on a scooter, a cop car pulled down the street, a crew of construction workers pulled in a complex tangle around the slowly erected walls of a new building. All busy and blind, lost in their worlds, certain of their autonomy. Convinced of their free will and dominion over this world, when they’re really just being pulled along through it.

For hours I meander aimlessly through town, watching this colorful display, this elaborate ruse that we call existence play itself out, as if walking inside a giant kaleidoscope, patterns and shapes forming and dissolving, dissipating into seemingly nothing and then reconstituting from seemingly nothing. It isn’t until later that evening, after I’ve finally made my way back to our apartment, hungry and exhausted, that I begin to wonder where all these strings originate.

***

A couple weeks later, Mom surprises me by picking me up from school in Darren’s truck. I’ve spent the day as I have most days since the kaleidoscope showed me what the world is: Floating through it, observing, not really engaging. Getting by with the bare minimum schoolwork and bullshitting with friends while I watch the classrooms and hallways and people I thought I understood in a constant flux of exploding light, strings tangling around each other and pulling everybody through their meaningless lives like dogs on leashes.

Mom clears her throat at a stop light. “I want to tell you, if it’s alright with you, Darren’s moving in with us.”

I’m not shocked, but surprised at my indifference. A few weeks ago this news would’ve landed like a bomb. After the kaleidoscope, I understand it not as any real choice Mom’s making but a string pulling a string pulling a string.

“What do you think about that?” Mom asks.

“I mean, Darren’s basically already living with us,” I shrug. “You’re not really asking if it’s alright with me anyway, right? It seems like the decision’s made. So I’ll just… follow along.”

Mom turns to me, the strings that make up her face forming a concerned expression. “What’s up with you lately?”

“Nothing,” I say. “It’s cool. Darren’s… cool.”

Mom laughs at that, and that makes me smile too in spite of myself.

“I love you, kiddo.”

“Love you too, Mom. It’s just--”

Someone cuts Mom off, and she brakes hard, laying on the horn. The kaleidoscope rolls out from under the seat against my feet. I’d thought for sure it was lost along the side of the road where I’d puked, long gone. Not that it mattered. Whatever the kaleidoscope had done to my brain, to my vision, some part of me understood it was irreversible. There was no going back to how things were.

Later that night, Mom leaves for her late shift and it’s just me and Darren in the apartment -- me in my bedroom, Darren watching some sitcom I don’t think I’ve ever heard him laugh at. I take the kaleidoscope to my window, and up here above the street lights on our road I have a clearer view of the night sky, blanketed with a spotty and fast-moving layer of clouds. I hold the kaleidoscope up to my left eye, but there’s little distinction between the world through the kaleidoscope’s lens, and how everything looks to me all the time now. It’s all the same. All shapes and strings falling apart and coming together, over and over.

I’m about to chuck the kaleidoscope into the closet when I notice something for the first time, open my window, put the kaleidoscope back to my eye and point it into the sky like a telescope. The view from my window is limited -- spanning from our street to a couple streets over -- but I can faintly see all of the strings winding their way around corners and buildings and empty lots and leading up into the night sky, into a single point in the distance. I lower the kaleidoscope and it’s gone, put it back up to my face and there it is, hardly, I have to squint, but there it is.

As I focus on this point in the sky, my brain begins filling in blanks that I can’t see with my eye alone, but I know it’s there. The way I know what’s around every corner on the walk to the corner shop, because I’ve done it a million times. I can’t see it exactly, but I know. My brain knows.

At the end of the strings is a man. I can see his silhouette, seated on a type of complicated throne somewhere, not above the Earth directionally, but way beyond it. Someplace else. He’s an entire universe away, but also right here. Right at the end of my kaleidoscope. The man isn’t God, or the other thing. We don’t have a name for what this man is. In my mind I can see that he looks partly human, but his face and head are arranged differently, as though he has horns, and a regal expression. But the thing that most stands out about him is that he is solid and permanent, in a way that our world is not, and never has been. He is not strings or color or light. He is, mostly, a shadow that lives forever. A shape that never changes.

From my bedroom I watch him pulling all the strings that make up our reality, as a conductor directs an orchestra. His arms reach everywhere, and as he looks out upon his creation, his face remains stoic, unchanging. Everything I see happening outside on our street unfolds directly from his will, his strange machinations. All the cars and people moving through their evening, all of it is an expression of his desire, and nothing else. The man pulls the strings and always has.

And then I see, for the first time, through the kaleidoscope, my own string leading up into the sky. How one string separates into millions upon millions of miniscule threads that form my legs, my arms, my torso, and all of the space between me and Darren, still watching whatever strings are being broadcast through the television into his own eyes, and his strings keep him bound to our sofa, while my strings pull me from my bedroom, pull me helplessly to the kitchen, to the drawer which holds a tool that will sever Darren’s strings forever. The only way out of this ceaseless, bizarre mirage we call life. In my mind I swear I see the man smile at me, and then he pulls my strings once more.

***

For a long time after that my life is just rooms. Rooms with bars, rooms with guards, rooms with a judge, rooms with just me and Mom, twenty minutes at a time, and she cries, pleads, begs to understand. I look into the tiny balls of strings that make up her eyes, watch her face reassemble over and over again in a constant fusion of light and color. What can I say to her? How can I explain how Darren, after I’d done what I did, was just a pile of strings spilling out over our sofa, inert and dimming, fading into nothing a little bit at a time?

I’m in a room where a woman is asking me all the usual questions. About Darren. About Mom. If either of them ever hurt me, and so on and so forth. Asking me why I’d taken a kaleidoscope apart into dozens of pieces and placed them in a circle around where Darren’s strings had been, how my Mom found us at sunrise like that. I tell her the same thing I tell everyone else: I didn’t do anything. None of it was up to me.

I watch the woman’s strings pull her hands down into a leather bag and come back out with a stack of big cards. She tells me they’re ink blots, something called a Rorschach test, and she starts showing them to me one at a time. I tell her the shapes are closer to reality than she knows. The real reality. She writes that down. Every shape she shows me, she asks me to describe it. My answer is the same for every card: Strings. It’s all strings.

She quickly tires of this but the last card she shows me is something else. It’s a face, a completely solid unmoving shadow against a cold white background. His horns reach up and up, all majestic-like, curling in on themselves for infinity.

“That’s him,” I tell her.

“Who?” she asks.

“That’s him.”

That was years ago. Since then I’ve been shuffled around from one box of strings to another, and it’s all the same. Over time my vision has adjusted, and I’ve been able to see the strings a little more clearly, the rhythm of it, how the man up there pulls them, how you can actually start predicting days, months, years in advance if you pay close attention. Until time doesn’t really exist anymore. Or not as most people understand it. I see my strings pulling me out of here for good soon. I don’t think I’ll hurt anyone else -- that’s the question I get asked the most now -- but I know it’s not up to me. Not really.

What I said at the beginning is true. When I took that kaleidoscope apart, there was nothing unusual about it. No secret compartment or totem or ancient scroll containing an explanation for all of this. Just the same cheap plastic and tin you can find at any given dollar store.

I used to think there were only a handful of us alive who can see this world for what it really is, but now I think everybody does. At least a little bit. At least a sneaking suspicion. Because I think every brain has a small dormant section deep inside of its flesh waiting to be activated by just the right light, just the right combination of colors and wattage, at the exact right time, in the exact right pattern. That dormant part of my brain is completely turned on now, but everybody’s flickers every now and then. At the grocery store, brushing your teeth, driving to work, you know what’s really happening here, you know you’re not in control, not really. A little glimpse is visited upon you, from seemingly out of nowhere, for seemingly no reason at all, and suddenly you see it. You really see it. The reality under the safe illusion, this drab, dull surface, the lies we tell ourselves to make all of this a little more tolerable. And I think you know the colorful strings that divine your days, your every thought and movement -- I think you know that it’s nothing to be afraid of. That, in fact, it’s really quite beautiful. If you look at it the right way.