I’m sitting at my desk. I’ve been alone for nearly a week now. My head is foggy with carrots, wool, and the unknown. A travel agent gets married to a church inside a marble anthill.
(Implying the geometric, fantastic, delusional. Red, yellow, silver. Geometric growth. Triangles and lines, connections.)
He squeezes his eyes tightly shut and visions burst forth, simultaneously abstract and concrete. Thread–yellow, and red–stretched between needles and woven around wood, seen from up close. Fibers spill off of taut lines as the scene swirls and changes, like a slide deck projected on a pulsating wall of organic flesh. Wire wrapped around an incomplete hexagonal structure, aluminum girdled with copper and held up by mesh. Wooden dowels dance over a blurry scene, an out-of-focus field of grass supporting a bright blue sky. A festival of sorts, it seems. A spinning motor, a forgotten future. Tightly-wound coils of yellow thread have returned, slowly diverging from cotton warp.
(Implying brightness, unfamiliarity, clean lines. White, red, gold, grey, and brown. Circles and lines. Simple rotation and translation.)
He opens his eyes. Bile rises in his throat, his stomach uneasy. In front of him: the fierce glare of sunlight pouring in from the top of the conical chapel, reflecting off polished white marble. The bright light makes it difficult to see, painful to concentrate. Rows upon rows of guests sit on wooden benches that stretch from wall to wall, their faces obscured by stiff cloth and cardboard. He wonders if “wall-to-wall” is an appropriate phrase to use in a circular room.
He has never been to a wedding before, and for that, he is unsure how the affair should be structured. Still, he presses on—leaning left, he sees a long burgundy carpet with golden trim dividing the room in two. At one end of the carpet: a smooth, shining marble wall with no visible openings. At the other: Rizette, the bride. She was a travel agent, he recalls, though not a very good one. How he knew this—or how he knew her, for that matter—he is not sure. To her left: a faceless priest stands, draped in a veil of layered aluminum mesh tied tightly shut with a woven copper belt. Flanking the pair are tall candlesticks of brass, neither holding a candle.
(Implying transition. A strong, reverberating hum, an inversion of space. Black and white points oscillating and changing. Strong interplay between positive and negative space.)
As he is examining the scenery, all the guests stand abruptly and without warning. He struggles to react in time, clumsily rising to his feet. As quickly as they rose, the guests sit back down, once again without perceptible warning. From the direction of the priest comes a low reverberating hum laced with rich overtones and spiked with knots of dissonance. Rizette coughs. Slowly, space within the marble anthill begins a laborious and deliberate inversion, bringing the two ends of the carpet to a single point while wrapping the space on either side around itself. As this occurs, he experiences a series of strange sensations: for a brief, tantalizingly-infinitesimal moment, he kisses the place where parallel lines meet—the fabled Riemannian point-at-infinity. Then, as soon as he had arrived, he is through to the other side, He feels distinctly that, if so inclined, he would be able to see around corners, and that his insides have swapped places with his outsides in a gentle non-Euclidean waltz. Not that it really matters to him. These paradoxical experiences don’t concern him in the slightest; instead, it is his apparent lack of concern that troubles him the most.
(Implying a finality, left with more questions than answers. New beginnings. Blues, greens, some browns and whites. Floating and dispersing, horizontal lines shifting and moving.)
As unexpectedly as it had begun, the otherworldly hum ceases, signaling the inversion complete. He looks around and sees that he and his fellow attendees now sit in a field of grass. Like him, the other guests appear unfazed by recent events, transformed in position but not in spirit. The priest shuffles and clicks, shaking him out of thought. He looks adjacent, expecting to see the bride, but witnesses something else instead: a small acorn falling from the sky, noticed just in time before it hit the earth, buried by the force of the impact. Satisfied with a job apparently well done, the priest turns and walks away toward the midday sun. The guests, now a mixture of perplexed, angry, apologetic, and joyful, slowly disperse. As they depart, each pulls a plank off from the benches they had sat in, carrying it away with them. By the time they are all gone, no trace of the event remains, save for a slight depression in the earth where the acorn had landed, and a lone chestnut armrest by his feet. Somewhat begrudgingly, he picks up the piece of lacquered wood, closes his eyes, and walks away.
