Srotvi Speaks More

"Dipere liked to come up with highly-imaginative scenarios, give us half the details to them, and leave the rest up to us. He wanted to hear our interpretations on things, almost as if he was trying to develop his 'game board world' using us as basis.

"One of Dipere's most memorable lectures consisted of him coming to class with a glass of water. All of our desks had a glass of water at them. When we were all seated, he began:

"I want you to picture our game board universe, with all the Pieces and the Hands. I want you to picture their water. Is it like ours? What if their water wasn't like ours? What if their water was a creature of its own? What if their water was the largest parasite ever imagined? It's hard to picture, isn't it, water being a parasite? We depend on it so much, after all. What if the Pieces didn't?

"Or rather, what if most of the Pieces didn't? We'll say there are some Pieces who took the risk of the water, drank it, and.. then what? Did they die? What if they didn't, what if drinking their water made them depend on it like we do? What would that imply?

"One more train of thought to consider: What if all those who drank the water formed an emotional connection with each other? These Pieces, we shall call them Givers. Just bare with me. The Givers realize the sanctity of their bond, the sanctity of their water, so they produce an alternate source of it without the parasite. This regular-water, they then distribute among the Pieces.

"The Givers are all thinking on the same wavelength, there is no panic or disagreement. The Givers don't necessarily want more Pieces to drink their water. Call them elitist if you will. But what if the water the Givers drank was actually a Hand? Their Piece minds could only comprehend it as some sort of water-type substance, when the truth of the matter is that they were being grabbed by a Hand.

"I want you to write me a thesis, between five-to-eight paragraphs, explaining what all this would imply. Make sure to give me your interpretation on what purpose there could be to the Hand making all these Givers, and what this would look like when transferred back to the Chinese Backgammon metaphor."

 "Dipere concluded by holding his glass of water away from him and spilling its contents onto the floor. And then he silently walked out of the classroom."

Chosen Height of a Hand

I spent today thinking about Dipere's Pieces and Hands statements. I often stopped mid-lecture, just thinking about what we would see if we were the Pieces and a Hand took us off of the game board. I'd just stand there, thinking, until a student asked if I was alright and I'd laugh it off and resume my lecture.

I have my theories. If I was a Piece and a Hand switched my place with someone else's, to me it would just look like teleportation. But being taken off the game board would probably.. well. It'd be unlike anything we've ever seen, wouldn't it?

Now, one thing I have wondered is what a Hand would actually look like. I can't help but picture the Everest-sized men mentioned at the start of his lecture. A man who chooses his own height at will? I need to hear more of Dipere's lectures.

The Pieces and the Hands that move them

Today, I found someone else who had read City of Paradox. Her name is Srotvi, though I was polite enough not to ask what kind of ethnicity that would be. I found her a few doors down from the quarantined bakery, and she's quite the fan of Professor Dipere.

Srotvi explained to me that Professor Dipere was her teacher once. I consider her to be quite lucky. She said a lot, but I can paraphrase some of it.

"Julian Dipere was well ahead of his time. He never spoke about his childhood, and from what he used to say to us, he made out as if he never even had one, as if he was born an old man. Instead, every day we'd just open our notebooks and write down a very simple equation he had on the board. They were always simple, always a different one every day, and yet they always seemed to directly contradict something we had learned in our earlier education.

"He'd spend the class just endlessly lecturing, talking about things we didn't even comprehend as possible. I remember specifically one class, he told us:

I want you to visualize a parallel universe to ours. We will call its inhabitants "Pieces."

Picture a Piece man. How tall can he be? The answer is "as tall as a Redwood," and even then it's not fully accurate. We think man is limited by his own body, but a Piece's own bodies have no such limitations. Piece Men exist who are as tall as Mount Everest; they simply choose not to be.

Their universe doesn't actually have the limitations we think it does. There are set laws, but they're less of physical formulae and more of... game rules. I know our minds operate on relativity, so I'm going to inaccurately say it's like one large game of Chinese Backgammon.

The Pieces are the ones set to the game rules. They experience them as if they were set universal laws. But of course, if the Pieces are moving, there has to be a Hand moving them. These are the hands that have opened my eyes to the world of paradox.

One of the Hands to this game of Backgammon.. we'll say it cheats. It takes the Pieces and.. switches their places. Or it might place the Pieces outside of the game board. To a game Piece, either one of these would appear as a lifechanging phenomenon, as a paradox. This is because all the game Piece knows is its own perception, its own rules.

 I want you to think about the Pieces and the Hands, and I want you to write a thesis on what a Piece would experience if a Hand switched it with another, or flat-out moved the Piece off the board. You have until the end of the week.

"Dipere was the kind of teacher who told us to consider physics as if we were in a parallel universe, as if our own universe was 'the area outside the game board.' He pushed us to think on levels that don't even sound practical when you're in the classroom.

"But as soon as you exit, as soon as you take a look at the world around you and think of what Dipere taught you, you start to see everything differently. He changes your life."

I'm going back tomorrow to talk more, and hopefully Srotvi will tell me about where Dipere is now.

"I am over there"

City of Paradox's messages from the author ceased abruptly eight chapters before the end. The last message from Dipere's studies:

Seven sinners ago, I dropped dead. The selkie, speaking through The Camper Who Gave, provided the score for a doorful of the city of yore. The selkie spoke through the reternal voice as if it were her fur perfect, though abandoned were they who gave and plentiful were that which clothed.

This message was particularly notable, seeming almost to have been written by a different author entirely; I've never known Dipere to use such wordplay. This is the first mention of any being known as "the selkie," as well as the last mention of "The Camper Who Gave," including in the fiction, itself.

The last page of the novel is blank, save for four words in small print at the page's center:

I am over there.

I would be lying if I said I wasn't the least bit intrigued, if not a little uneasy.

Must These Days

City of Paradox isn't quite like The Perfect Paradox before it; while Perfect was more of a scientific essay in book format, City is a lot more like a proper novel. It's about a fictional city where every kind of paradox is the norm: there are identical snowflakes, up and down are identical terms and directions, an unstoppable force and an unmovable object collide frequently, and there's a box containing something called "The Camper Who Gave."

Every chapter begins with Professor Dipere discussing his own studies. So far, it sounds like the public shunned Dipere before he even had a chance to prove his theories. He mentions retreating to "the City" every now and then, which is surely a metaphor. I just need to find someone else who has read this novel to help me decipher Dipere's riddles. In the meantime, I will finish reading this compelling narrative.

Another odd phenomenon to note is that, since having began reading City of Paradox, I haven't felt alone. Whatever bizarre spectres that decided to leave me arbitrarily in the last week seems to have forgiven me.

Quarantine

When I got to class today, Edward's parents were waiting for me. Interesting pair, the mother smelling vaguely like alcohol and gasoline and the father appearing to have gone without shaving for the past month.

The father was the first to speak up, his voice bellowing in the architectural heights of my classroom. "We're looking for our son."

"I don't understand." I was honest.

"Edward," quietly spake the mother.

A bit of cold horror seeped into my mind. "Edward hasn't been to class for a few days," though I was the last person to see him. I saw what happened to him. I didn't want to let even a hint of this out.

The father explained to me how Edward hasn't been home since Monday morning, when he left for class. The mother, low enough to be mistaken for silent, muttered that "he looked off before he left," but the father ignored this, keeping his anger fixated on me.

I wanted very little to do with this, though my concern was rising, so I offered the suggestion of filing a police report. This satisfied the mother, who urged the father to do as I suggested.

I spent the rest of the class in a bit of a stupor.

On the way home, I noticed the bakery door was boarded up and quarantined. Men in hazard suits labelled "Genera" were carrying a large crate of sorts away from the area.

I also noticed a new bookstore that was never there before. In the front window, right where I could see it, was a book covered with the picture of a door in space, numbers flying out of it in a mobius strip shape. The book was titled City of Paradox, by Julian Dipere.

I figured I deserved a treat like that.

Absences and the Purple Paradox

I finished reading The Perfect Paradox. It was the perfect book for me, spending many chapters discussing the peculiarities of the purple paradox. It labelled a purple paradox as something that looks impossible but is actually closer to "following a different set of laws than we're used to," while a regular paradox is the theoretical phenomenon which is considered to be impossible.

The student in question who left the book was absent today. I admit, by this point, I'm getting a little bit on the paranoid side. There have been a lot of absences lately; Edward still hasn't shown up. But, I tell myself, it's winter. There's a flu going around; teachers haven't been showing up, either. So I just taught the class their lessons for today, trying my hardest to resist the urge to introduce the theoretical equations I had been reading about.

On the way home, I noticed the bakery was closed up and surrounded with police tape. The door was open by just a crack, and I'm sure I saw someone wearing some kind of mask inside.

Professor Dipere

The same student who asked me of Edward's whereabouts yesterday left a book on his desk today. Now, this happens quite frequently; ordinarily I would have just stored it in my desk until tomorrow. But today, the book cover caught my eye: It was of a two-seated bicycle on a mobius strip. The book, itself, was titled The Perfect Paradox, written by author Julian Dipere.

Dipere is apparently a professor said to be "ahead of his time." I skimmed through some of the pages, and he described his lifelong desire to experience "the perfect paradox." What I had read were a couple of mathematical equations that claimed to make certain paradoxes possible. Naturally, at first they sounded like some amateur mathematician claiming to have spoken to God and trying to prove unformulaic rules. But as I read further, as I pondered on his steps, I realized this man had a patient imagination unrivaled by anyone I had ever heard of. He seemed to have a better grasp on Euclidean space than Euclid, himself.

I took The Perfect Paradox home with me to read. I'll return it to the student tomorrow, of course, but for now I have to find out what Professor Dipere said.

Deterior Design

A student today asked me where young Edward was. This was a most interesting question, as Mister Johns was absent today (though considering his record, I find it more odd that someone was actually concerned). I honestly didn't know what to tell them, so I simply said "What Mister Johns does in his own time is none of my concern, and I don't see how it's any of yours."

I'm growing less and less pleasant as the days continue. I feel as if my life is draining away faster than it should, and.. I feel as if whatever spectres that have kept me company all my life are beginning to lose interest in me. I'm not sure why they would suddenly choose now, of all times, to decide to wander off into the rest of their daily spectral lives and leave my uninteresting one, but then again, I'm hardly one to understand the spectral, am I? I hardly even understand how to work the Sky Plus.

Isn't the spectral a bit of a paradox of its own? The paranormal is, by definition, something we cannot explain by our 'normal' definitions and universal methods. To attempt to explain it would come across as sounding mentally insane. Insanity, itself, is also rather paradoxical. One cannot convince someone else that he or she is not insane; being insane rather destroys one's own arguments.

..I can't remember how I got on this topic. I'm either tired or maybe I'm developing a benign case of "Mind Down the Rabbit Hole." ..come to think of it, didn't Through the Looking Glass contain more than its fair share of impossible events, as well?

The paradox is all around us, yet when I try to experience one, it's always just out of my grasp.

Loss

I followed Edward out of the building today, keeping a safe distance. I didn't expect him to turn and see me; I was more worried about everyone else in the building. As Edward left, he picked something up off the ground-- it looked like some kind of doll. I watched him exit the door, but when I followed him out, he was nowhere in sight.

On the way home, I remembered the door in the bakery that I felt an odd compulsion to avoid. Here, we had one of my own students entering a door and disappearing. Maybe my subconscious is developing a fear of doors?

The phobia is an interesting mental device. Usually, some earlier event, traumatic or not, sparks them within us, causing our minds to beg us to avoid a certain object or phenomenon at all costs. Even as we grow older, knowing deep within that this fear is completely irrational, even as we get over the actual fear itself, we can't let ourselves near that phenomenon. The cognitive dissonance gives us more problems in the end than we even remotely had in the beginning. The mind knows all this, yet the phobia persists, resulting in an interesting paradox speaking volumes for the stubbornness of the human mind.

Or maybe the paradox speaks volumes for our mind's attempts to prepare us for the beast it expects around the corner.