I think it was about 5 years ago when I first met him. Strange fellow. He wouldn’t even talk to me at first, but eventually opened up and we shared a great deal together. After seeing him a couple of times, I finally grew curious enough to approach and try to break his concentrated silence.
Back then he just waved me away without a word, but that’s when I first saw them. Only a glimpse before he swept them away into the little box he kept them in. He called them his “artifacts”. I don’t know where they came from originally. I think he discovered them in some kind of larval state, and then somehow got involved in their making and remaking. By the time I came along they were already like tiny, twisted reflections of him. Whatever they were, they seemed to be alive in some strange way, as if they were growing or evolving over time as he worked. That’s what he called it: “working on them”.
His wife told me that before the artifacts he used to go out and engage with others more often. She said he was polite back then, but had been filled with a deep malaise and constant discontent. He had always seemed restless. Once he had the artifacts, though, he became absorbed and would spend most waking hours sitting at his desk studying them. While she admitted that this was very curious and unusual behavior, she also noticed that he seemed happier and was no longer restless, and so permitted it. I think she just saw them as a cute hobby.
Others seemed to feel the same. He was eccentric, antisocial, surely not brilliant, maybe even half-mad. A quaint man in his quaint little life, living a simple and quiet existence, occupying his time in trivial ways. He never made any attempt to show them otherwise.
As far as I know, I was the only one who noticed his genius. The artifacts he had fit no description of any other object I knew of. From a distance they looked like only stones, but upon closer inspection one began to notice tiny intricate patterns, multifaceted textures, and iridescent colors beyond description. What’s more, they moved as if they were breathing. They constantly reorganized and rearranged themselves in unbelievably sophisticated ways.
I didn’t press any further that day and just left him there, all hunched over and entranced, but my mind returned again and again to those curious objects in the following weeks.
There were several more interactions like this, I don’t remember how many. His wife and I had a few shared acquaintances. He was always sitting at his desk or tucked away in some corner with those artifacts, and I had stolen several more quick glances at them.
One day I finally broke through to him. I had made an excuse to walk by and peek in as I was by then in the habit of doing, and I noticed that two of the shapes looked like they might fit together somehow. I pointed this out to him and he was startled out of his reverie. He looked at me for a moment and blinked, but then his eyes became sharp and bright and he returned his focus to the artifacts. We began discussing which might fit together and how, and he grew more excited, almost giddy. Then in a moment I will never forget, it happened. Two shapes, clearly separate, intensely complicated, both undulating, and then suddenly: Click!
This was to be the first of many moments like this that we shared together. For me it was entirely unexpected, but he had grown to anticipate it. It was what he lived for. I can’t deny that it was the most satisfying experience I have ever known, and it was through the shared love of moments like this that we formed our bond.
I now see the ways in which what we were doing then was unhealthy. We would get together and just begin working on the artifacts, often without a word. Sometimes we’d go an entire day like that in silence, but occasionally one of us would grow excited, and the day’s (or week’s) work would culminate with that all-satisfying Click!
We were alike in many ways, but unlike him, I still maintained some semblance of a normal life. I went to work, attended social gatherings, and maintained other interests, though these all had a faint hollow quality now that they hadn’t had before.
We went on like that, more or less, for over three years. When we first met he kept all the artifacts in a small jewelry box, but by then they filled two large suitcases. He had grown quite frail by then. His health was failing, and he was losing his capacity for speech. I was also starting to see negative effects in my own life, though to a much lesser degree. I told him we should stop; that the artifacts didn’t need us anymore; that I sensed some terrible impending event if we continued. He always grew irritated at comments like this and would send me away.
It was about this time that his wife left, and I also started distancing myself from him and the artifacts. I was weaning myself off. I saw something in him that I feared seeing in myself, and I lacked his unwavering commitment and dedication to the project.
I think he saw this tapering off as a sort of betrayal. It didn’t really matter, he could barely communicate by then anyway. He was so desensitized to The Click that he wouldn’t even take a break anymore to enjoy what had happened, and would just keep working at that same frantic pace, searching for the next connection.
It may have just continued like that. He may have ended up just one more friend from the past with whom I once shared a common interest, but then grew apart from over time. Unfortunately, that is not what happened. He was never a man of half-measures.
He did eventually manage to combine them all. The last time I saw him he had cut open his shoulder and “installed” the result as a new hideous appendage, weaponized and aimed against me. It (not he) spoke directly into my mind, using images and impressions rather than words. Its message was completely unintelligible, like a disorganized whirlwind dream. In it everything was connected, but this connectedness obscured all categories and differentiations. As it penetrated deeper and deeper into my mind, I felt the conceptual ground dissolving beneath my feet. Such raw, pure, creative power! Soon no thing was distinguishable from any other thing, and there was only an endless creation of new variations, all equal in significance. Its message (if one could call it that) was the obliteration of what a message even is.
I saw then that the artifact was formlessness itself, that thought and language are the act of giving form, and without form, we have neither. The intoxication I got from The Click needed to be tempered with the grounding sense of organization one finds in more discrete forms of thinking.
Before seeing the artifacts I only knew discrete thought, and had no soul. The artifacts showed me what I had been missing, and I fell in love. I foolishly believed that they and they alone were the answer. But now, after seeing the monster he had become, I knew that both were vital to our continued survival. My half-assed, divided approach had been right all along! I flew from the house in terror and never saw him again.
After he disappeared, they searched his house and found almost nothing. He had devoted everything to the service of the artifacts, and in so doing had lost it all. The only thing left in the house was that old desk where I first saw him hunched over and concentrating, with a note placed upon it:
It’s like there is a new light inside me
It shines differently on everything I see
I still recognize what I see. It is all familiar
But in this light it is changed
I notice new details now
I stumble across unexpected connections
Once hidden, now screaming
Unmistakable relationships between
Where before I only saw the separation
Suddenly I am changed
And I will never be the same