The Book of Nine Worlds a novel By Matthew Arthur Talamini B.A., St. John's College, 2005 Thesis Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts in the Department of Literary Arts at Brown University PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2017 Talamini / Nine Worlds / ii This thesis by Matthew Arthur Talamini is accepted in its present form by the Department of Literary Arts as satisfying the thesis requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts Date ________ __________________________________ Colin Channer, Advisor Approved by the Graduate Council Date ________ __________________________________ Andrew G. Campbell, Dean of the Graduate School Talamini / Nine Worlds / 1 Chapter 1 ❧ North Carolina Alongside this book you will find another, called the Textbook, in which I've written down all the principles of physics, mathematics and engineering I can remember. This will not be useful for several generations; keep it safe until then. There are also a number of electronic devices. These are very delicate, and contain a great deal more information than either this book or the Textbook. That information will be lost forever unless you refrain from tinkering with these devices until after you've mastered the craft described in Chapter 39 of the Textbook, on computers. I intend this as a serious prohibition: even though they look just like the kind of plastic-and-circuit-board trash you plow up in the fields, these objects are not trash. There's so much you don't know, so much I never had time to teach you. So much I couldn't figure out how to talk about. This book is at least an attempt at that. If you're a child of mine, it's to help you understand how I came to be the woman you Talamini / Nine Worlds / 2 know. If you're from a generation further in the future, it's to show you a picture of the world outside of ours, of which I've seen more than most. And if you're a philosopher, mystic or saint: I have reason to believe that every vanished world will, in some other time or place, reappear. Because I've seen it happen. I've seen worlds being born, so don't lose hope. But more than that I've seen worlds come to an end, and I've had to dodge the big falling chunks when one of them —terrifying, luminous, huge, ancient—decides to just explode all over the place. In fact it was a series of exploding worlds, one after another like dominoes, chasing me back like I was riding some cataclysmic avalanche. And you would think that would be loud, and sometimes it is, but I can tell you that most worlds end quietly, they just dissolve peacefully into a final, freezing sea; and when that sea of destruction ebbed I was home again, but it was unrecognizable, stranger than any foreign place. And that's where I am now, at a crude wooden table near a window watching a cold spring reappear and trying to write it all down. I suppose that all seems pretty muddled so far, but I'll try to sort it out as we go. ❧ One of the devices I've left to you is a small black metal box with four little glass circles on one edge. These are called light emitting diodes, or LEDs; see the Textbook, chapter 34, for a list of electronic components. This device is an important tool for measuring the shape of the universe, the use of which even now I don't fully understand. When I first obtained it, I understood it even less. It was manufactured by a company called LLMI, which was my employer for half a year or so. They referred to it as a 'collector', although they wouldn't tell anybody what kind of data it Talamini / Nine Worlds / 3 collected. At that time I lived by myself in a small one-room apartment that I had filled with toys and entertainment devices, mostly associated with 'anime', the Japanese adventure cartoons I was obsessed with—even the ceiling above my bed had a poster of the three vastly different-sized giant robots from the 2007 mecha anime Gurren Lagann. Almost all of my money went to purchase video games or DVD box sets, and almost none of my time went to enjoying them. I'm sorry for telling you so much about these things that mean so little to you. But our lives at that time were organized by these machines, cell phones and laptops, e-mails and DVDs, so that it's just as impossible to explain our lives without mentioning them as it would be to explain to you exactly what they were—and my life was more involved with these things than most. I've done my best in the pages of the Textbook; but it won't be enough, even for the few things I just mentioned. In any case, I still don't know which parts of my education were true and which were official lies; so if the things I try to explain in the Textbook can help you, use them, but if not, they may never have been right. It's also possible that they only work under local conditions—I've thought about it a lot, and I'm convinced that what we call physics and mathematics are not nearly as universal as our scientists believed. The collector was delivered to my doorstep one bright morning during a warm October. Its predecessor had broken and this was a replacement. While it was charging I e-mailed my boss, whose name it was difficult to believe was really Lance Peckert, to tell him that it had arrived and I would start work shortly. While I was doing that, another e-mail appeared, this one from my college friend Katie, inviting me along on a group trip to the State Fair that evening. I detected hints that it was to Talamini / Nine Worlds / 4 be mostly Katie's husband's friends, but accepted anyway. It is important to have a social life, I told myself, and not sit at home, surrounded by delightful, fascinating entertainment options that I supposedly love, clicking compulsively instead on Wikipedia's 'Random article' link while trying to memorize the original-language lyrics to anime theme songs. Which is what I'd been doing all morning. I showered, dressed, shoved the new collector into my backpack next to the old one, and went out the door. My target area was in north Durham, south of the Eno River, about ten minutes from my apartment. I drove up there with the collector off, because it didn't record at car speeds, while studying the neighborhood's layout in quick glances at the LLMI app on my phone. The app had a bad UI: it always started zoomed in way too far. I had to zoom out three times, drag over to the pin, then zoom in three times to get to the target. ❧ In April, in Durham, you could see the loblolly pines all on the same day cough out an aerodynamic river of yellow pollen into the sky; if there was half an inch of snow in January you could see overconfident men fishtailing their pickup trucks into roadside ditches by the half-dozen. In that city the trees, standing in rows with the streets between them, were forked like slingshots, and there was a giant sculpture of a brontosaurus by the bike trail and a room-size camera obscura by the art museum in which you could see the sky outside projected onto the floor beneath your feet. This had been a fun place to grow up. Quite humid, even this late into fall. Great vinegary barbeque. Lots of Baptist churches. Ridiculous sports rivalry. I could see the kudzu-covered, partly-tumbled-down remains of railroad Talamini / Nine Worlds / 5 trestles between houses, rusted tracks drooping over their edges. These were some of the last vestiges of the infrastructure that had once been the heart of the South's tobacco economy. Downtown Durham featured enormous warehouses from which giant bales of the stuff had been auctioned off daily; the very labs where it had been proven scientifically just how healthy smoking was for the lungs; and marvelous fifty- year-old paintings of bulls on the sides of buildings, advertisements for the local brand. One venerable railroad bridge was only eleven feet eight inches tall and had acquired the nickname 'can opener bridge' because of the way it curled the tops off rental trucks like they were sardine tins, scattering twinkling metal shards and popping front tires like balloons. Anyone who cared to had seen it happen dozens of times through the eyes of the webcam some tech workers in a facing office building had put in their window. Durham was pine forests and railroad tracks, block-and-tackle freight lifts and iron boilers and wooden folding chairs, sweet tea and biscuits and fried chicken and barbecue. It was homemade fireworks and homemade bluegrass and homemade pork shoulder and homemade hiking trails and a whole homemade city, no longer quite as good to live in as one of those photocopied exurban zones—and if I could with words somehow enclose that world in a kind of glass shell, preserved against apocalypse, then someday some explorer might find it again, its bricks and glowing rivers lifted up against the purple sweep of some distant shore, and identify it, and know from reading this that it had been mine and that I had loved it.