thetransversespectator

[thetransversespectator]

Quantum canvas. God conceived a game wherein one must choose between death or castration, so I stole the cross and buried it. My family died and were reanimated as machinic assemblages; we communicate through an automated system. Something is wrong with my eyes. I died last night, but they regrew my body in a tube. My feet feel heavy when I walk and the moon looks smaller in the sky. We don’t know where we are. Everyone keeps talking about the South of France.

This message is addressed to Marshal Petain, or his double; failing that, please deliver to Drottningholm Palace, where a man with a purple hat will be waiting in the garden. It is safe: do not follow.

[thetransversespectator]

Praetor went to Indiana to review a Bill Murray film about mental illness at an obscure film festival. He had a small red car and was very sleepy the entire time he was there. The sun did not shine at all. It was dark and cold.

He kept getting lost on his way to the festival and somehow always ended up at Sunnyslope, where Uncle Danny was living. He was also very sleepy, and would ask that Praetor help him lie down on the couch to sleep before he left to go back to the hotel.

Praetor’s hotel room had a false wall next to a portrait of George Washington, and inside of it was a cedar closet with a locked safe. The closet was full of items once owned by Grandmother Virginia and Grandpa Loos. There was a variety of knickknacks, jewelry, photographs, and papers. Some of these papers included evidence of Grandpa Loos’s secret life.

Suddenly he remembered that he had brought the Baby Elephant with him in his suitcase. He heard voices in the hall and decided to hide it in the safe in a brown paper bag.

Now there are people in the room with him, a man and a woman. They sleep next to him in the bed, but he doesn’t know them. Praetor recalled a vague sense that they were each involved with a different “faction” that wanted the Baby Elephant, but were pretending to be film reviewers. He lied and told them he was Bill Murray’s cousin, but he didn’t know why he did that. The woman tried to tell him to stop writing, and that words were ultimately meaningless. Praetor screamed "but they have relative, relational, positional, and even ritual meanings!" and she showed him a video in which words melted into chaotic hieroglyphs.

Praetor returned to Sunnyslope to find that Uncle Danny had died, laid out on the couch. He placed a blanket over his body and returned to the hotel.

Nearly everything in the closet was gone, including the Baby Elephant. All that was left was a small wooden mouse figurine and a shopping list in Grandmother Virginia’s handwriting. He took these with him as evidence that he had found something in the closet.

Robert came to pick him up in a Ford SUV. Praetor told him about what had happened and they immediately returned to the hotel, but the room he had stayed in no longer existed. It was now a private gentlemen’s club called “The Port” where men sat smoking cigars on red leather sofas. Praetor recognized one of them as Jeremy Hunt, but he said, “No, I’m Jeremiah, not Jeremy.” JEREMIAH HUNT resounded in his mind. He opened the door to the closet.

Inside was a man he identified as a train conductor, perhaps because the closet was no longer a closet but rather some kind of transport capsule. He seemed to have been expecting him. He told Praetor that the objects were gone, but that if he wanted to know the truth, he should know a few things. The first, and most important, was “Washington, NJ.” It’s very, very important that you look at Washington, NJ. He then handed him a small collection of rings with the initials S.G. engraved on them. The transport capsule began to move.

Suddenly Praetor is in a large marble room filled with Renaissance paintings he has never seen before. In fact, the paintings do not exist. There was a curved double staircase, very much like the one at the Knick, that went up to a second level with more paintings. He realized this was Grandpa Loos’s secret apartment in the city. There was a door to the outside showing the address “11 Lincoln Square,” and outside the door was a massive circular garden, miles in diameter, with a gothic cathedral dome in the center. Praetor tried to get a full glimpse of it, but whenever he moved, part of it was occluded. It was impossible to see fully. Behind it was a replica of Osaka Castle. He understood that this space was interdimensional, and yet also inside of the Met, and it was referred to as “The Garden at the Center of the World.”

Praetor walked around the garden until he saw someone, a portly half-Japanese man who looked like Uncle Bob. He asked him if he had the rings. He looked in his bag, but they were gone.

[thetransversespectator]

Papa Harold met Mahabhit "Andy" Poonsawang in Rayong, Thailand in 1976 on a business trip to install a new diaper factory for Johnson and Johnson. He was a disaffected former monk, a runaway, who said he had a dream to create an “anti-Enlightenment pill.” This idea piqued Harold’s interest, knowing as he did that one day, his grandson Praetor would experience a technologically induced enlightenment experience as part of his Didymus initiation.

Harold kept in touch with the young man, sending him letters and financing his studies. First, in pharmacology at Chulalongkorn University, then dentistry at Rutgers. The Wattses sponsored his visa, and he was officially brought on board, so to speak, the “family business” in collaboration with a white hat faction within J&J.

Praetor would know him throughout his childhood as Uncle Andy, a friendly Asian dentist whose office was in an old yellow farmhouse in the middle of the Pine Barrens. Uncle Andy seemed to have no other patients, and Praetor never remembered him fiddling with any of his teeth. He remembered only the hypnotic warbling of the cuckoo, and something about a turtle, and then a deep, empty sleep.

Andy’s research had since progressed from pills to implants, and perhaps against their better judgement, the family agreed to have Praetor fitted with a cranial anti-enlightenment device. And yet they had not properly vetted their young Thai protégé; the device was in fact a powerful Thai amulet in the shape of an aniconic water buffalo, excavated from a ruined chedi in Lampang, and controlled remotely by an ethnic Mon shaman under the thrall of King Bhumibol’s sister.

Everything changed on a sunny day in Berkeley, March 2015. As waves of cantaloupe energy battled with healing rays of multi-modal Illuminati arrays, Praetor’s amulet overloaded, sending out a burst of ultra-rapid bosons in every direction. The bosons concentrated around the Shattuck Avenue tuning fork, amplifying their radius. Laurence Berkeley National Laboratory was the first to be affected; the nuclear reactor briefly shut down, then restarted abruptly. The reactor core began to behave erratically, its output rising and falling in a seemingly errant wave. This signal was later decoded as the .wav file of Britney Spear’s “Junxie XL Dub” remix of the iconic pop hit “Gimme More,” which Praetor had been listening to at the time whilst watching gay porn, stoned out of his mind.  

CERN was the next domino to fall, collapsing into a singularity. Power lines flickered across the world, and the cell network inexplicably segmented into twelve self-contained service areas, each one bisecting the Earth like the slices of a chocolate orange. Communication was only possible within each segment; outgoing and ingoing messages were blocked.  

Netanyahu had warned Samantha Power about precisely such a scenario during his 2009 visit to the White House, when he placed a chocolate orange on the Resolute Desk with a note tacked onto it: “2015: Stay Indoors.” It had since become a matter of national defense policy that the so-called “Samson Option” had been rebranded as “OPERATION: CHOCOLATE ORANGE,” for no discernible reason.

Praetor’s calls are failing. When he talks to his parents, or his brother, their voices appear prerecorded, powered by some sort of advanced generative intelligence. He becomes aware of the situation entirely and grabs a Terry's chocolate orange from his pantry. As he breaks it apart, he feels the ground shaking. The first bomb has been dropped. He continues to eat the chocolate.

[thetransversespectator]

There was a mass shooting because we pissed off a man in line at a store and he shot at us, and later the crowd outside. It happened at a bar in Virginia Beach, and you were by my side. The next morning, everyone arrived for the wedding, but they didn't believe us. There was no record of the shooting ever happening, yet we were barricaded inside a restaurant all night. Hundreds of people must have died.

The wedding was at a forested mansion somewhere outside of the city. It wasn't clear who was getting married to whom, and we were constantly moving from one room to another and repeating the same strange rituals. First, we all drink a shot of orange juice, then we eat a pita chip. In the next room we eat one cookie, then we wear a strange purple hat.

It continued endlessly like this, cycling through different banal situations until it became disturbing. Now we take off our clothes. Now we inhale the clown gas.

Descent into the gods: this was printed on text of the "wedding program" which included the personal vow:

I felt I was a waste of space.

It was an elaborate, disturbing ritual that no one understood. It was sexually degrading and involved drugs and poisons.

I was the best man, but the wedding was run by a wealthy family with no relation to me or anyone I knew. They owned a chateau with an art collection, and had us inhale something called clown gas. Everyone got sick and was herded onto buses, but I grabbed you by the shoulders and stopped you from going into the bathroom where they pumped the gas.

Suddenly I realized there were worms inside my body, more like eels. My body was full of eels, and I ripped at my skin trying to get them out. They appeared sentient, and were blue and purple. They came out of my left wrist.

I returned later and confronted the family with evidence that what had happened was wrong. In the short time following the alchemical wedding everything had changed in the country: news was short episodic simple sentences and media seemed to have disappeared. No books, movies, or anything. No evidence of what had changed seemed to exist. There was no evidence of anything. It seemed that everyone I had ever known was at the ceremony, and now they were gone.

After I confronted them, they attempted a second ritual, a recapitulation in a train that was also a building, at once stationary and not. Even Taylor Swift was there.

Everyone kept coming back for these rituals, why? Was it not complete until I agreed to it? Who would agree to such a thing?

I spoke to you after escaping from the second ceremony. Everyone you knew had been impoverished by the ritual family, which now controlled the world.

We sat on the floor of your apartment and smoked a joint and talked about the passage of time.

[thetransversespectator]

The original Blavatsky device had been recovered from the Barabar Caves in Bihar; believed to have been lost when the caves were sealed following the Mahabharat War, it was later recovered by Bruno's henchmen on the eve of Siddharta's enlightenment, which they inadvertently set into motion when they traded a bushel of psychoactive mushrooms for a cauldron of mutton curry at the local market (these mushrooms later made their way into the possession of a certain Sujata, famed for her ingenious and innovative additions to the standard repertoire of kheer recipes). After the Middle Path had been enunciated and Mara defeated, the Germans packed up the device in a burlap sack and buried it next to the cave's mouth.

Centuries later, Ashoka stumbled upon it during a visit to the supposedly "cutting edge" modern cave complex, gifted to him by an obscure sect of Jain priests. He picked it up, inspected it with a widened eye and a sniff of the nose, and ordered it sent to Taxila, from where it was later transferred to Nalanda, and finally came into the possession of Mir Qasim, the Nawab of Bengal.

British interest in the device led them to Bengal, from which Qasim organized an alliance to defend the Indian subcontinent. The Ajivika-upakaraṇaṁ, as it was called back in the day, was secretly ferried from Buxar and through the Himalayas; first to Dali, then to Kengtung, and then finally into Siam, where it fell into the hands of King Taksin, who promptly succeeded in losing it, dropping it into the Chao Phraya whilst eating a papaya.

Many years later, long after the device had been trawled out of the river by a local fisherman, Allan Octavian Hume stumbled drunkenly into a dimly lit wet market in search of a feather from the fabled hatthilinga bird, perhaps the largest and most noble of the great prehistoric birds of the subcontinent. Slipping on a puddle, he fell and hit his funny bone on a strange metallic object. "What in tarnations is that?" he must have exclaimed. He was angry at this golden box, and yet equal parts intrigued. He returned to Calcutta with it, calling it his "little Siamese demon" and introducing it to friends at cocktail parties as "Ravana's abacus."

Lady Bird Johnson closed the book, resting her eyes. She took a deep, troubled breath as the President focused his eyes on her. Air Force One was silent.

“So, what did you think of the story?” Lyndon was breathless and vaguely cynical. He hadn’t expected her to read so much of the Didymus file, and had honestly given it to her as a joke. No one would ever believe something so absurd.

Lady Bird shook her head. “All of this death over what? A time machine?” Lyndon cut her off, “Not a time machine, a quantum dislocation device.” Lady Bird didn’t mince words. “Whatever, Mr. President.” She turned to the window, thinking of the countless children who had died, suffered, or even been off-worlded because of this terrible device.

“What was that about a Ruby Slipper?” She asked aloud, snapping out of her somber reverie. “A satellite, right?”

“Yep, that’s basically all we know about it.”

“All of these old, rickety satellites, and for what? To hurt children? Is that it?”

“Well, it’s more complicated than that. But yes.”

“Can’t we just make our own? Something to protect him?”

The President laughed. “Why don’t you ask the Queen for permission tomorrow at the State Dinner?” They were, after all, on their way to London, then to Windsor Castle.

“Ask the Queen?” Lady Bird laughed. “You do it yourself. You’re looking right at her, after all.”

Lady Bird wasn’t joking. She was, after all, the President’s boss.

A few short years later, the Orange Julius satellite was launched into orbit. A network of transceivers, miniaturized so as to rest comfortably inside of the corona of a daffodil, or the ovule of a lily, spread across the country, crowding the interstates and filling up countless pots and planters in the nation’s cities. JULIUS.LBJ would triangulate past, present, and future, exposing it an errant thread of hope, and express it, promulgate it, through the flowers.

Over the years, many of the transceivers fell out, or were eaten by birds. One was even carried away by an overactive bumblebee! Yet the errant thread remained, stitching an energetic lattice across America.

[thetransversespectator]

All of Praetor's Grandparents died in jail. A few months later, the final batch of KEEPALIVE files were retrogressed to the Tyrone field office of the Pennsylvania Freemasons. The secretary on call for the night couldn't believe his eyes, frantically removing his spectacles and checking his eyes in the mirror before re-reading the final tranche. They were, as he remembered, still in their proper places. The file contained the scanned pages of a book, written in the future by Praetor Loos, whose suicide on the King Edward's Chair was, by this point, already written into the history books.

In another world, Praetor and his brother Robert have been cast in a spinoff of the Crown focusing on a "pivotal weekend in the relationship between William and Harry." The boys went with Uncle Danny, dressed up to the nines as Prince Charles, and Mother Loos, playing Camilla, to a hunting lodge for the weekend, got high, stole his whiskey and eventually got lost in the forest. Toward the end of the first episode, the Princess Royal, played by Aunt Jane, and the Queen arrived for dinner.

As filming wrapped, and the Queen walked out into the parking lot to get into her car, Praetor realized it was Grandmother Loos! She started walking faster and faster, as if aware that he had caught on to the noetic ruse she had constructed through which to visit him, then slipped on a patch of ice, quickly recovering before performing a comical belly flop into the backseat of the car, flying straight through to land on the other side. Praetor ran to her yelling, "Virginia! Virginia!"

She was covered with acorns and thistles, but just brushed herself off and stood up. Praetor realized that they were in the parking lot of the Short Hills Club, and she asked him if he wanted to go inside. She led him to a nursery with two beautiful girls, probably 5 and 7; she seemed so happy, giggling and on the verge of tears, but she didn't explain who the girls were or why they meant so much to her. Suddenly Kristen Bell popped her head in, confused. "Umm, we're filming a Crown spinoff here about Fergie's struggle to raise two daughters as a single Mom, who are you?" Grandmother Loos just cocked her head back and howled.

Suddenly, the director yelled "Cut!" As it turned out, this was actually the final scene. Praetor thought about telling Kristen that it wasn't the Queen, or even Imelda Staunton, but demurred, thinking it would "ruin the magic." The Queen had suddenly vanished, leaving only a single acorn on the floor to signify the encounter. Praetor popped it in his mouth, crunching blindly. Why does it taste like strawberry?

He got in the car and drove away, back to Raritan, in search of something. A memory of another life, where everything made present remained absent, and everything absent was made present. He scratched his head, wondering, “"Why the hell did they cast us in a spinoff of the Crown?" The river had overflown its banks, and the bridge to the Duke campus had been washed away.

A tall white oak has fallen in the road, blocking the way to his house. There is an eagle perched on its highest bough; its nest has been displaced. Praetor’s phone starts buzzing. He pauses for a moment, then answers the call.

[thetransversespectator]

By the time! Surely man is in loss, except those who believe and do good, and exhort one another to Truth, and exhort one another to patience.

[thetransversespectator]

The corpse still dreams. Its muscles twitch and flex, its voicebox creaking. Convinced it had nothing to say, nothing of value to add to the conversation, it has endured the countless autopsies performed on it. It has borne witness to its own eulogy, and was present at the investigation into its murder: silent, immobile, fuming. And yet, the corpse still dreams, and that dream gives voice to a new epistemology.

[thetransversespectator]

1.

Bruno scratched his thin, bony fingers across the inter-pictorial field, perverting art history, corrupting it, remaking it in his image. This was his only goal: he did not seek fame, riches, or power, but rather sought to leave [traces], or gluckschmerz, as he called them, on the face of the canonical record. He wanted to be found out, he wanted to be unmasked, but when it inevitably happened, he was unprepared. Bruno's gluckschmerz were precisely that: trails of shit tracked across a field of gold. When Praetor arrived with a roll of crisp, white toilet paper, a mop, and a bottle of windex, Bruno reacted impulsively. He would kill this boy, or at the very least have him committed. And thus, the satellites were born.

He establishes a base outside of time, manipulating art history in the process. The inter-pictorial field is disrupted. He spreads rumors: Jesus had a twin, or that his brother was John the Baptist, or that a woman named Fortuna once existed, wielding a terrible wheel. The origins of nearly all the quattrocento conspiracies originate in this horrible man, playing tricks on the great masters.

He also built a refuge, and when the time came, two fleets sailed from the port of Hamburg: one, a cotillion of dumbbells, locked on a series of historical targets, delivering resources; and two, a fleet of boats, sailing first for Argentina, and then finally on to Antarctica, where a colony had been prepared under the ice, waiting for a thousand years.

History retreated there, under the ice, to a place unknown to the chronicles of time, and the people on the boats met other people, who had been there for a long time, and they formed a new society. A terrible society.

This secret of this ancient future was protected through the years, shared with only a small number of Germans, German-Americans among them. And they made a pact to deliver their children to this place someday, God willing, if the clouds ever dissipated and the sky fell down to Earth. And it would, of course, and this is how Praetor ended up there.

What kind of destiny is this, to destroy the world and then be packed up like a sardine and transported to a simulation of a Californian city? Of all places, the East Bay? The fairest city in the world, or the most dysfunctional? Why recreate that, but also, why not?

2.

Bruno moved to "leave his mark," ingratiating himself to the court of Henry VIII, which he attended wearing bufoonishly red stiletto boots, fomenting a secret anti-religion, Geminism, among the literati of 17th century Rome, and bribing the Grand Patriarch of the Thai Sangha to construct a silver shrine to his own origin story, among other nefarious plots.

He also dealt in retrogressed canvases, selling "lost" and "previously unknown" paintings in the future and then trafficking that capital backwards in time to fuel his venal machinations.

His schemes were endless: Posing for a portrait by Otto Dix, using the Dumbbell’s mass reduction field to construct elaborate stone monuments, dressing up in costumes to create "idiosyncrasies" in religious iconography.

And so, the world Praetor grew up in was corrupted, perturbed. An endless refraction of crapsacks, artificial timelines populated by art historical graffiti, false ideologies, and inexplicable cairns. An absence of meaning.

Bruno's piece de resistance: a young prodigy he will mold into the greatest painter of all time. He passes index cards with strange inspirations: a loaf of bread, eggs hanging from a thread, a face resting in wooden stilts. Bruno is just taking the piss, but Salvador Dali takes it seriously. Eventually, he lights himself on fire, while the Tristan chord builds in the background, unable to continue the charade.

3.

Traveling back to the birth of Christ, Bruno decides upon his ultimate trick: he will abduct the infant Christ, then travel back in time moments before his own birth, depositing a duplication in the manger alongside the original. Bruno thus establishes the Geminist Order, or L’Ordre Geministe, which espoused the belief that Christ had a twin, and that this twin’s nature was similarly twinned, both of the flesh and as an anticipatory shadow. Knowledge of the earthly twin was to be suppressed, encoded in the works of great artists to bring forth the double incarnation of the spiritual twin: not the return of Christ, but rather his duplication.

The Geminists promulgated their beliefs throughout the world, hiding behind a dizzying array of fronts: The Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, the Illuminati. All were focused on a singular goal: to identify and train the prophesied Didymus.

Praetor, haunted by the memory of a familial portrait, began unknowingly unraveling the mystery in his Senior year at Duke. Agenteurs of the various intelligence services eagerly awaited the latest draft of his thesis, "The Profile of Time," in which he put forward an iconographical proof for Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego.

Over time, belief in the arrival of Didymus waned, and Queen Victoria broke with the order, inspired by a mysterious sadhu to believe the Geminist doctrine to be the work of the devil. She was correct, of course, but the shadow cast by the schism would be catastrophic. Victoria's plan was to slowly, over multiple generations, "thin out" the royal bloodline via infusions of "commoner stock," revealing at the end a pure distillation of the blood of Christ. Didymus would be incited into revealing itself, and all other candidates, henceforth referred to as pretenders, would be mercilessly hunted down.

Upon hearing the news, Madame Blavatsky collapsed onto the floor. She knew, of course, that Victoria's claim to the bloodline was invalid, and had been since the reign of Edward VII. Had Victoria been allowed to proceed with her Didymexit unopposed, the twin flame would be snuffed out. After an exhaustive review of the various and sundry genealogical archives of the European nobility, and with a little help from her trusted coterie of Keralan ninjas, she devised a plan.

Two families were selected: The Hume's of Wedderburn, known throughout the esoteric community as “the keepers of the Burning Bush,” and the Loos family of Hanover, related to Bruno himself, but with a twist: they were double agents for the Swedish Crown.  Two sons, one from each family, were abducted in the night by Blavatsky's ninjas and transported to America, where they would be protected by the Pennsylvania Freemasons.

The Loos family first settled in Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, where they claimed Muhlbach, the Boal family mansion, as their ancestral seat. After the the Reopening of Eden in the 1920’s, Great Grandaddy Loos moved the family to Short Hills, New Jersey, where he had been contracted to work as a litigator handling the spiraling custodianship fees incurred by “the afflicted.” Their new house in Short Hills, Traphagen, had been purchased in the 1890’s by Blavatsky, who seemed to have had foreknowledge of the Hansa Bird Apocalypse. New Jersey in the 1920's was a land of extremes: carpet baggers from the surrounding states scooped up real estate, quickly attaining a dominant position in society, taking over the managerial positions that the "natives," suffering from various forms of intellectual impairment and neurocognitive decline, had abandoned in their descent into disability and aphasia. Short Hills, Raritan and Princeton, with their wealthy, educated populations, were but a few oases within this fragmented hellscape. 

Sunnyslope, the Watts homestead, remained as it always had in the town of Centre Hall, Pennsylvania. No records existed of its construction; it seemed to have been built around an old logging cabin, now buried into the side of a hill, it's stone walls buttressing the earth. Papa Harold called it the shop, but it was more of a hallway; locked doors sat unopened on all sides, leading to a maze of tunnels dug into the Allegheny mountains.

Everything seemed to be proceeding according to plan, until the zip zippering began. Mother Loos had met Praetor's father, John Loos, in the late 70's on a highway median in Raritan. They had been driving in opposite directions down Route 206, following a triangular formation of purple discs. Suddenly, they realized they were the only cars on the highway, stopped, and waved to each other. "Do you wanna grab a slice?" John called out, uncertain of why he suddenly felt so confident in himself at this strange moment. They ended up at Deluca's, an old, boisterous pub in the center of downtown Raritan. The bar was crowded with students, apparently unaware of the miraculous visitation that had just occurred above their heads. John looked into her eyes and thought, "That's my moonpie right there." She called him twinkle toes.

John died a few months after their wedding, in the chapel at Muhlbach. On a mission to ingratiate himself to his father in law, Harold Watts, he had invited him to a meeting of the Society of Rattling Rattlers, a gentlemen’s society organized the shared consumption of rattlesnake meat. As it turns out, one of them escaped the net, and slithered into the dining room. After a long and arduous autopsy, it was determined that the bite was not from a rattler at all, but rather from an 800-year-old asp retrieved from the basement of the Vittala temple in Karnataka by a Royal expedition in the 19th century. Nothing more was ever said about the incident, and Praetor was raised by his grandparents. Mother Loos began to suffer from seizures, and did not speak again until 1997.

Praetor spent the first nine months of his life inside of a crystal ball, his head strapped into a Persinger apparatus. You see, nearly all of the male children born into the family had died in infancy, plagued by violet convulsions. A retrogressed file from the year 2015 confirmed the family's darkest suspicions: that Victoria's research into animal magnetism had resulted in the discovery of a "zip zap wave" that could be used to target children of a royal bloodline.

After his collapse, and subsequent failure to complete his thesis to the prophecy's satisfaction, it was decided that he would be crucified pre-emptively, beaten over the head with an electromagnetic hammer to force him into the crucible prepared for him.

He fell into a noetic underworld, unable to differentiate between reality and dreams. Eventually, he woke up in a mental hospital, where the plan would be put down, flipped, and ultimately, against the odds, reversed.   

[thetransversespectator]

Exodus was cultivated specifically to interact with the Blavatsky device, a translocation field generator originally engineered by Krishna during the Mahabharat War, when he used it to raise the holy city of Dwarka from the sea. It later fell into the hands of the Angkor kings, who embedded it inside of temples to create immersive spectacles for Chinese traders eager to catch a glimpse of “Tavatsima Heaven.” It has long been rumored that a second device fell into the hands of the Maya, who used it to translocate an entire civilization.

The device, which used quantum superimposition to create multiple instances of an interior space within different dimensions of spacetime, was passed down from one devaraja to the next until the reign of King Mongkut of Siam. Mongkut, a keen follower of the Western scientific method, reverse-engineered it using a book of old Thai yantras, or black magic diagrams, to deduce its mechanical structure, resulting in the production of twelve so-called Mongkut engines in a factory outside of Lampang, Thailand.

When Victoria caught wind of his scheme, she demanded an audience with Mongkut post-haste. Unimpressed with her dour, stoat presence, Mongkut used the device to play a series of tricks on the Queen, startling her into submission. They ended up making a deal: Britain would leave Siam alone in exchange for one working prototype. This would later be used to create alter-London, but this is, again, a story for another time.

Blavatsky acquired her own device shortly thereafter through the intervention of Allan Octavian Hume, perhaps the most prominent double agent of the nineteenth century. Hume sent the device to another Hume, this one named Joseph, a wealthy pioneer and salmon fishing magnate in Berkeley, California, who installed it in a marble sarcophagus in the basement of his home, Didymus House. Also known as the Hume Mansion, Didymus House was Blavatsky’s coup de grace: a defensive ark where the coming Didymus would be hidden, sheltered from the zip zapper as it cycled through the many worlds.

As the Humes would come to learn, however, the device had an unusual side effect: its magnetic field induced psychotic experiences in potential bloodline claimants living within a certain radius, extending roughly from Channing Way to Telegraph. Investigations into the “psychotic field” led one of Blavatsky's associates, LeRoy Francis Herrick, to propose the construction of a psychiatric hospital on the site of the original safehouse.

This leads us to the peculiar cases of Phil Dick and Terence McKenna, perhaps the two must prominent residents of what later became known as Alta Bates Hospital Herrick Campus. Dick tapped into the psychotic field under the influence of a renegade satellite known as VALIS, launched in 1952 with the goal of transmitting the Didymus Story to the masses after the positive identification of the twin-child. VALIS had malfunctioned, of course, but this didn’t stop the Didymus Care Team from attempting a positive identification of his claim; Dick rejected their advances, intending to write an expose called the Owl in Daylight, which he sadly never finished  

Years later, a psychonaut and ethnobotanist named Terrence McKenna harnessed the power of the field under the influence of DMT, pushing it directly into alter-Berkeley. Previously, the device had translocated interiors into purely artificial pocket dimensions; this was the first time the device had been used to translocate an entire building into a dimensionally congruent physical domain. Alter-Berkeley’s police force, the so-called “Joint Commission,” stormed the hospital, resulting in a tense standoff.

Luckily, Terence had one gram of DMT left in his rucksack, and the hospital quickly returned to its natural environment. What neither he nor the Care Team realized, however, was that a copy of the hospital had been left behind, a dumb simulacrum buried deep under the ice, in the depths of a post-historical hell.

[thetransversespectator]

Praetor went to a brown-shingled house on a suburban street to see a performance with a large group of people. There was quite a crowd there. At some point he saw Akelbeth and Jizrael speaking broken Korean to each other and made fun of them. Tarquin was very disturbed at their presence and quickly disappeared.

While they were waiting for the performance to start, someone came in from outside -- an older man Praetor identified as the leader of their group -- and said that everyone had to go home. "Show's cancelled, something happened," he said shakily, and Praetor asked "is it personal, medical, or a natural disaster?" "It's personal,' he said.

Praetor can't find Tarquin. He goes outside and everyone is looking up at the sky. There's an incredible display of light, but it all looks fake. Obviously fake. Everyone runs out to look at it. UFO's, comets, little twinkly things. Lisa Frank on DMT, but obviously fake. Several degrees off.

Everyone checks their phones. They can't access social media anymore, everything stutters and redirects. The content is already there, and it's endless, but it means nothing, and everything. He watches what seems like hours of it, gasping in astonishment. The content is impossible to describe.

There are messages every once in a while from a "trans-conscious medium consortium," and then a blue logo with a black lattice appears. It's a triangle, the goddamn illuminati triangle, like this is all a joke.

Planes are falling from the sky, but they don't look real, either. It was engineered to look like 90's CGI, but the method of manufacture is far beyond what humans are capable of today.

They talk about who could have done this. It can't be the Chinese, unless their AI tech is already several generations more advanced than ours. "There's too much content," Praetor says. "It's not human."

Praetor finds Tarquin in the bathroom getting fucked by a grey-haired daddy. They both have no idea what is happening. He's furious, not because of the daddy, but rather because he now has to explain this all to him. Tarquin doesn't believe, even after Praetor shows him his phone, and then disappears into a puff of black smoke.

Those who don't believe disappear. Praetor and Akelbeth feel around the room they were in and find a warm spot on the walls. It's moving, slowly. "We got him," she says without thinking. "He must be standing here."

Before disappearing, Tarquin had given him an outfit handed to him by a small girl he didn't know, who then quickly disappeared. It is simple: green shirt, grey boxer briefs, and tan pants. He changes into it and heads back outside to the line of white buses he arrived in. Traffic has slowed to a halt; everyone is trying to go home, or leave home, or perhaps just escape from the lights. Some of them have thrown their smartphones out their car windows.

A message beaned directly to his mind: Arabius Publishing in Manhattan. Someone there died, and they had this whole thing where they drank Gin Malo at the funeral and rubbed cotton on their eyes to produce tears. "Send your manuscript there as it is, after checking for mistakes. It needs to be published by next Fall because something like this is going to happen, and you're the only one who can stop it."

And he thinks to himself before waking, this is all part of the same schtick, it's a joke encased in profundity, on the border of the absurd, but there is a real threat there and it's coming from someone, or something, with a deeply twisted sense of humor. Something almost human, just about human, but not quite all there.

And the next thing he does, of course, is Google Arabius Publishing, incessantly, with vigor. It doesn't exist.

[thetransversespectator]

A NOTE FROM DOCTOR CHERBRONKLY

During the summer of 2015, a wave of hospitalizations in the Berkeley-Oakland area suggested the development of a rare psychological phenomenon: a mass formation psychosis centered around a supposed messianic figure.

One patient, 56M, described a “blue angel” who wrote the word of God into a book using only his mind. The patient was referred to my inpatient unit by Dr. Antoine Lini, who noted a “preoccupation with religious themes” related to sites visited by this supposed angel in the Berkeley Area. Specifically, he believed this man had opened up a portal next to a tree on Telegraph Avenue, which he referred to as “the rib.”

Another of Lini’s patients, 67M, claimed to have met “the devil” at a guesthouse near the UC Berkeley Campus, and that he had changed the color of Sather Tower from green to silver using some form of magic. The patient believed this man to be a false reincarnation of Philip K. Dick and told doctors to “not believe a word he says” and to “not look at the maze he left in the closet.” He insisted that this demon’s name was Praetor.

A group of patients in a long-term unit at Herrick Hospital spoke of being “rescued from another world” by a man with deep-set blue eyes, brown hair, and a beard. He was described as competent artist (working in crayon), a smooth talker, and a shit poker player. When asked to elaborate how, exactly, he had saved them from this “underworld” they said it had something to do with a wristwatch, but that it was too painful to talk about further.

What do these cases have in common? They all mentioned the same, and quite unusual, name: Praetor Loos. You may already be familiar with this name from the now ubiquitous graffiti trend sweeping the Bay Area: the so-called “Praetorian guard” and their vandalism of government offices, streetcars, and even private residences with the apparently meaningless question: “Who is Praetor Loos?”

No such person seems to exist, nor have they existed at any point in time. Praetor is simply not a name that people seem to be given, nor is it one that people tend to adopt. As such, we have been led to assume – until now – that this name was intended to evoke Roman law and military power; a vaguely intellectual way of questioning authority. Is it possible that the Praetor Loos mentioned by these vandals did, in fact, exist?

A vital clue to this puzzle was uncovered in 2019, as a sheaf of handwritten pages – now known widely as the Telegraph Avenue Codex -- was discovered behind a wall in Berkeley by a real estate company converting an old halfway house into premium student apartments. The workers thought it must have been written by a student so they left it there, stuffed into a blue plastic binder on one of the new residence’s many handsome shelving units. Later, it was discovered by student residents whilst stoned and became somewhat of a literary scandal. I was first made aware of this Codex after one of the students who discovered it was referred to my clinic after suffering chronic syncope for a period of five months. She claimed that a satellite called the Ruby Slipper was stalking her; after a brief course of anxiolytic therapy, she was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder, Type I, with Psychotic Features and sent happily on her way.

The identity of the author remained a mystery until just last year, when an envelope was delivered to the Cao Đài temple in Tây Ninh, Vietnam from Pakse, Laos. Inside was another envelope addressed to the New Yorker containing the signed manuscript “Becoming Praetor Loos: A Psychotic Narrative.” Vietnamese police interpreted it to be a suicide note and worked with Lao authorities to stage a manhunt in the Thousand Islands region, but no trace of the author was ever found. Praetor Loos, now finally unveiled in his authentic form, is presumed to have vanished into the jungle, like Jim Thompson before him, in search of the “other world” he wrote so curiously about. 

Jonathan Cherbronkly, M.D.

[thetransversespectator]

Praetor has been writing a book, but he isn't sure if it's fit to print. How do you tell the story of an encounter with the impossible? He tries to explain the plot to his mother, but she can't stop talking about a dream she had last week about a fleet of glowing orbs. Apparently, two weeks after the dream, she lost control of her car on Route 7 and careened into a field of reeds. A man in a silver Ford Ranger appeared to her in a vision and told her to run quickly from the car, and thirty seconds later, the engine exploded.

So yeah, nobody cares about Praetor's book, but he keeps staring up at the stars regardless. Where is his audience, and do they still care about his story? Were they reading all along, or is he just a node in the energetic unfolding of a blind apotheosis? Words have different meanings in human ears, and we see things differently, too. It's because we are animals, hairy and brown, and full of contradictions. We have to keep that close to our chest, because it's the only card we have to play. Besides the nukes, of course.

They're still sitting and talking, they've been talking for awhile now, and then the buzzing starts. Three beeps, beep boop boop, then a mist floats in from the mountains. A green light, a pink light, and a deep bellowing drone that sounds in the skull. The book is writing itself.

The book of life was always revealing itself as an event. It was always written, always erased, predestined, absolutely fucked, a tragedy, a subtle landscape, a graffito on the walls of a silent hovering craft buried somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle. They're sending him a message now, loud and clear, cold as ice, bright as day:

"We're here, we're queer, and we want your cum."

"What?" Praetor's Mother has spit her wine against the wall. She is laughing so hard she cannot breathe. We must resist the sacred fire, we must reject the ancient Gods, we must seek salvation in the Earth.

The book is writing itself.

[thetransversespectator]

THE CHORUS OF HELL AT THE THEATER OF THE WORLD

The chorus of hell: everyone is watching you. They always have, all of your ancestors: the ones in hell! They congratulate each other coming into the stadium, thinking they are the first to arrive. It's light outside and the sun is shining. "We're all so young and shiny, this must be heaven for sure!" Sometimes they watch stage plays, anxiety dreams. They don't remember how to eat or sleep. They watch.

Their curse is that they have to watch the ones they cared about flail about and yes, occasionally triumph, without them. It's a cosmic tragicomedy, and we're the red meat they throw to the ghouls. The theater of the world, the theater of the real, call it what it is: a theater of cruelty!

Face it: you're in hell, you're in hell, you're in hell too, all of you! And the ones you bark and gnash about from the bleachers -- "oh, Rose isn't here! I wonder what she did" .. they're the ones in heaven, you fools!

Now they watch him swirl and stumble. He lays down his ambitions for a lowly toke of a joint. He scrimps and saves and aplogizes and obeys until the chances the almighty ghouls had in the betting stakes were all but gone! But fear not, for the spirit of God stirs within him. That's the show they're here to watch, after all. But they never know that, and they never will.

"Just look at him. He was so talented. A strong writer, and such a virtuoso! And now you couldn't tell him apart from one of the street rats in Berkeley."

"I have to admit, Carol, he had a golden ticket to the top but he seems to have thrown it to the wind." Austin's just shaking his head. Uncle Monty chimes in, "You guys are forgetting about the painting. He's not flailing, he's lying in wait, ready to pounce." It's all a bunch of bullshit, baffling brains from the grave.

They watch and laugh, mocking the will of God. The performance is hilarious, though. Praetor's ranking in the theater moves up and up, beyond the doctors and the lawyers and the ones whose failed progenitors watch so closely and with such obscenity

Praetor is glowing again. I mean literally glowing. Purple or blue. I don't know. He looks up at the sky and shakes his fist. "I am not a gladiator for an audience of geriatric devils! I did not come here to be judged!" The spirit of George Hume rises within him, animating his steps. He is joined by Wayne Daniels, Virginia Butler, Rose Humke, Linn Watts. Energies returned to source, reextended from the head. Angel arms, god tentacles, playing with him a like a toy.

The performance is for himself. They wait for God to send a message, but they've all forgotten his name. They don't listen, and they never will. Everyone is a pawn in this arena; the only antidote is death.

[thetransversespectator]

12 One woe is past; and, behold, there come two woes more hereafter. 13 And the sixth angel sounded, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God, 14 Saying to the sixth angel which had the trumpet, Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates. 15 And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year, for to slay the third part of men.

[thetransversespectator]

THE PROFILE OF TIME IS ABSENT

[thetransversespectator]

Dalinian iconography is as diverse as it is opaque. Various reiterative figures such as supports, ants, soft pearls, shoes, jumproping girls, and clocks have been analyzed to reflect a range of psychoanalytic interpretations, and yet no textual evidence exists to support a traditional iconological evaluation of their meaning in light of each figure's facture; its bare existence at a precise moment in time and space, on a unique canvas, for a discrete and critically legible reason. This is perhaps a feature of Dali's method of forming images, in which symbols represent not ideas, but rather impulses. The figure marks a disparate field of associations in the artist's mind as he experiences the urge to create it, not a stable, isolable concept that can be entwined in a semiotic relationship. For this reason, the question of a Dalinian iconography is generally considered a dead one, at least outside of the realm of pop psychology.

However, a different kind of iconography emerges in Dali's portraits, in which the artist utilizes classical iconography in playful and destabilizing ways. It is not until the Portrait of Ann Green, however, that this traditionally iconographic method collides with the impulsive anti-iconography of the paranoiac-critical method. Here, representations of the patron's life coexist with aberrant symbols of the unconscious within a systematic pictorial statement on a psychoanalytic theme: the trauma of birth. Considering this image suggests an outline of Dalinian iconography; an analysis of the picture  thus provides a possibility to define it.

Proceeding from this analysis, we argue that Dalinian iconography is inherently inter-pictorial, and perhaps, many of the opaque impulsive tendencies of the paranoiac critical method may, in fact, encode cogent, methodical statements that have simply never been uncovered.