You move through a lot of empty spaces in life. A person goes through many different forms, ways of understanding what’s happening, and everything seems to happen at once. That is to say this is a story of how one ends up in Room 34 and siphoned away from generalities that might be of interest.

  Escape clauses are wormholes and not easily found along the way. Chapters are segments of a single Bowenian wormhole. Others have yet to open or close. Many souls in the wormhole come under the heading of “that was then, this is now.” So, empty spaces are empty spaces. Some have souls and some don’t. An escape clause, like a Bowenian wormhole, is necessary in case things don’t quite work out.

  *    *    *

  Living in the first person is considerably difficult work. Zel found this out when the bullies got to him in 7th, 8th, and 9th grades. They kicked him, took his money, called him names like mouse because they said he had the face of one.

  When Zel graduated high school early at 17, the bully scars had deepened and he questioned whether he wanted to live in the first person anymore. He attended Praxis, a college for talented young physicists who don’t know they are physicists. Praxis taught people what they needed before selection and elevation.

  His Praxis degree was unofficial because Zel never turned in his final paper on the Subtle Indecisions of Mice in a T-maze. This was an experimental program, with plenty of feeder tubes and bells and lights, with long, somewhat unbearable nights of drinking sugar water that tasted like unsweetened iced tea.

  Zel chose to study the Physics of Human Relations with C. C. Loberton. It turned out to be a two-month literature review on how to ask a question. Loberton recommended him for the Genius Track upon discovering that he had great difficulty forming thoughts into the shape of questions, the mark of most geniuses. C. C. Loberton only spoke in questions; one question with a wide variety of tones.

  You would say something like, “Hey, Loberton, that’s a nice shirt today.”

  He would reply, “And why do you think that’s so?”

  “Because the color—an oxidized orange.”

  He would nod, smile, and shuffle away. Loberton never had any nice shirts. He wore only one solid yellow button-down stained in places with tomato sauce. Pizza and pasta are all anyone saw Loberton eat.

  One time Zel passed him in the narrowest artery of Praxis and heard him say, “Mmm-hmm, yes.” News spread among the rects, what they call the newbies at Praxis, that something critical to humanity preceded the yes. This was all of it. How humanity was going to survive. The stir it caused lasted one month, ten days, and two hours. “Mmm-hmm Yes” to what exactly, none of the rects could figure out, but that’s what it was to be an incomplete rectangles, as all the becoming were in Praxis.

  Some rects said that Loberton had numerous heart replacements but never seemed to feel any ill-effects. Some believed he would be 91 next month. Others thought he was 48. Some say that being in Praxis is like being inside the heart’s left ventricle without a clear exit. It is a place that one is supposed to acquire all the knowledge that is ever needed in life and the world, instantaneously, with little or no effort.

  *    *    *

  Zel had a rather uninteresting childhood filled with the usual routines. He had a mother who washed home-grown eggplants in the bathtub with a wire brush. She enjoyed neither the bulbous shape nor the dark purple skin.

  As a toddler, Zel would throw in his rubber duck and pretend it was a ship sailing toward a purple iceberg. There would be a kind of renewed life in this. Zel established an aversion to eggplants and a love for carrots and would not go near the bathtub if eggplants were in season. At age 8, he began to ignore his imaginary friend Jerry, and worse, cast him as his imaginary oak tree friend who stared at him, who could do nothing physical in the world but stare from the branches of the tree outside his window.

  The spring was a time Zel felt his senses sharpen. His friends would not play with him and called him names that rhymed with Zelly. He could not stand the sight of an eggplant, the smell of it cooked, the sound of the word, or what he claims was its cousin, the zuchini. He mildly enjoyed cucumbers.

  Unsure how all this happened, Zel guesses someone threatened him as he walked to the bus after school. Each night, he arrived at the threshold of his dreams knowing the exact color of his fear: forest green. But it is different in the morning. This morning it was hunter green. When fear comes, it conveniently lacks the correct proportions or color palette. Zel did not know what he was afraid of from such an early age, only that it came from above, somewhere from the stars.

  *    *    *

  There was a day when thinking spread in Praxis about the origin of TBEs. Transient Background Events coil and swell under the surface of rect-awareness and seem to indicate large dispersions, like the world ending, tectonic disarray, sadness spreading across time. Most decided the mind’s tiredness and disfluency caused TBEs, although some suspected blurred vision was a sign of worse fractures to come.

  Most rects who gather between the nondescript white-gray walls of Praxis find themselves trembling and sweating. Some say it is a side effect of the rootfear, and that it does not deserve the least bit of worry. Others claim the rootfear will emerge and vanish once a true threat (exposure, spotlighting) is established. It will go under just to make waves—go out, as it often does, without anyone noticing. Some say it would drown itself, if only it could figure out how. Others refer to it as a ridiculous misinterpretation of common moods.

  In Praxis, rects kept their feet spinning on stationary bikes in large auditoriums, as they were instructed to do. This helped them come up with the correct equations to elevate properly and time travel. Rects were hopeful about instructions, although sitting in a chair for hours was exhausting. Standing was exhausting. Thinking was exhausting, but highly encouraged in Praxis. Any kind of thinking.

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  What if we started a brass fastener business?

  How about selling rainbow-colored yarn?

  What about having them ask us the questions?

  Rhetorical therapy. Exactly what Loberton was getting at. The idea had merit. Before Zel decided to go after the get-beneath, he wanted to design and manufacture a new size of brass fastener, as a kind of under-meaning. This had never been thought of before, and its under-meaning promised stability, intimacy. It would have pushed the fastener industry beyond its current stagnant state. It was a product that could hold more together—paper or people. It almost didn’t matter. The idea with its under-meaning could bring the uncommon to life.

  One morning at 9 am in the Praxis, a rect shouted out, “Of course!” He said nothing for weeks after that. Two months had passed. The unshared revelation had dissolved, replaced by other nuances, 1 am impressions, idle misgivings, other out-loud what-if-tomorrow-was-an-if amusements. Another rect brought the “Of course” revelation to the central sulcus. They discussed it at length, but it didn’t lead anywhere.

  Practice sessions in Praxis were loops, circular talk-forwards. There was the idea that in becoming a rect one would want to listen to the heart all the time, just to see if the beats and latencies matched. Rhetorical therapy as it was being constructed in Praxis, as so imagined, would become a numbers game based on any detectable arrhythmias, which could open the elevation parameter and send someone up to live with the Prions and work on their universe issues.

  Zel was terrible at talk-forwards, but wonderful at math. Abysmal at connecting with people, but wonderful balancing inputs and outputs, algebra, essential banking. For that reason, he forced himself to speak to another young Praxis neophyte, Sandra Vazquez, a beautiful young woman from Barcelona who looked Zel’s age. She seemed like she did not want to speak to him.

  They eventually struck up a conversation in the cafeteria line about adding fractions with exponents in ways that could open a hole in the upper frequencies of the Schumann Domain and call forth the Prions. In the same conversation, Sandra denied knowing anything about the temperature of the earth’s crust or composition of the chronosphere. One detail that Zel did learn about Sandra was that she could not stand the sight or smell of vanilla ice cream.

  *    *    *

  Zel had never ridden a motorcycle, but thought about what it must be like to be so close to the wind, to lack a sail. He almost fell off a bicycle when he was 6 years old and that, as they say, was that.

  “Never walk with your hand in a stranger’s hand,” his grandmother said, who had witnessed the event at 3 Bellevue with her arms crossed. “You are never poor at something unless you try.”

  He thought long and hard about these axioms at Praxis. After five months of neglecting his checkpoints, he came to two conclusions—the first a warning, a secular behaviorism, the second encouragement. He responded better to the warning: the self does not have long to become what it must be.

  He noticed his get-going/get-beneath tendency. At Praxis, he studied Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and the Reconceptualization of All Being. He did these things while maintaining separation. He did not participate in the dialogues that were started and sustained by the most earnest of rects. He appeared interested though. Zel suspected it could make up for his averageness and excessive concern about the temperatures of cold places. Rects had 4 moments of reckoning distributed throughout the year, evaluations for optimal humanity and occasional humility:

  The first was: PEAS TASTE BETTER

  Something else seems relevant. Zel’s grandmother Bubishka who allowed him to cry on the concrete driveway for as long as he needed, who he heard say “see what you can make of it,” came to West Philadelphia from the old Soviet Union in 1923 to practice an inversion of spirit.

  “None of the Gods up there will bless me,” she often said, looking at the ceiling.

  Zel could not tell if by “up there” she meant her mind. Either way, that was her feeling. None of the existing dogmas proved durable or deep enough. One day she went ahead and built her own vestibule, what she called an every-hope. She prayed to her new every-hope by opening and closing the oven door three times.

  “Be suspicious of anything that is both invisible and all-knowing.”

  She could not overcome the belief that the two were mutually exclusive. Bubishka could not pronounce the v in “never.” She thought v’s were bad luck.

  “There are letters that ask for trouble,” she said. “It is perennial.”

  *    *    *

  When Zel thinks of himself in the third person, it usually means an event has occurred that has eroded his confidence in the presence of being, although not every being. It is revealing too much of the overt self to someone he hardly knew at 4:07 am as he lay awake in bed, thinking about how there were no stars visible from that vantage. “Holding your own hand” so-to-speak.

  Zel drank a tablespoon of raspberry vinegar every morning because he read somewhere that it promoted good circulation. Such a course of self-separation, yo-yoing, has its surprises. On July 4th of the 16th year of Zel’s life, a bottle rocket exploded outside his window on Woodland Avenue. Other teenagers lit them on the street and aimed them at his window every year, testing his lack of responsiveness. After the explosion, Zel found himself jolted into the fourth person.

  There he discovered another “he,” this one lowercase, watching the capital “He” who was busy watching Zel fret about the get-beneath. Little “he” began studying big “He’s” behaviors, peering into his thoughts like a bird-watcher.

  Very little is missed in the fourth person. Just another layer to comfort, protect, warm, like clear insulation. Zel saves it for special occasions and true emergencies such as the time he realized he had conceived. Five months after looking at a fashion magazine in his dermatologist’s office, he swore that he felt a baby’s foot pressing against his ribs.

  “This appears to be a bad case of acid reflux,” the dermatologist said. “And you do know that childbirth is a sacred and responsible act.”

  Zel did not tell him about the vinegar shots or the fourth person. This doctor was an expert in mole removal and dermatitis, not reproductive health, distancing, or the art of introspection. The fourth person almost feels like every-hope or being observed quietly from a habitable dimension or travelling on a submarine to the bottom of the Atlantic while the first, second, and third selves paddle in kayaks on the surface.

  Zel wondered if it might be his Bubishka’s every-hope as she looked to introspective acolytes. This made him more suspicious about the rhymes and See-In pamphlets she wrote herself, what they had to say about inner versus outer creation.

  Zel felt the baby’s foot primarily during rect dialogues and happenstances, and later post-Praxis in the discovery zone of an Exchanged Language of Borrowed Emotion. The kicks grew stronger each week and judging by the National Parks in Autumn tear-off calendar he kept by his bed, he was 85 weeks along.

  Zel refused to talk to his dermatologist anymore about it, who, though friendly enough, knew too much about skin conditions and not enough about reproductive anomalies and the fourth person. This is all to say that Zel very much looked forward to the day when he would finally graduate Praxis, degree or no degree, and ascend to the place Prions were desperately trying to repair the universe before it was too late and everything fell in on itself.