The Ripples Change Their Size but Never Leave the Stream
“When I drew close studies of her face, you couldn't tell her sex. Sometimes a very pretty boy, sometimes a very dashing girl. A canvas you could fill with anything.”
Raeder, Leah. (2015). Cam Girl. Simon and Schuster.
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It took what felt like forever, but somehow Kaitlyn finally finished slogging her way through her stack of polynomial functions. What ensued after that was a second eternity of presenting the pile of homework to Argus-eyed mom who evidently seemed quite intent on vigilantly enforcing Kaitlyn's home arrest situation and had practically ambushed the girl the moment she creaked open her bedroom door.
“All right,” sighed mom eventually. “This looks good … for now! But we're going through this same routine each and every night from on, young lady. You're too smart for your own good, and up until now you've been using your intelligence to find ways of weaseling out of work and being lazy. That stops now, you hear me?”
“Yes, ma'am,” replied a chagrined Kaitlyn, eyes cast down at the floor penitently.
Inside though, it was all charade for Kaitlyn. She knew this was what mom wanted to see and hear. And at the moment, it was far more expedient to play along with the old lady: put on a show until she relented. And right now, it seemed to be working.
In no time at all, Kaitlyn was outside in the now-darkened yard searching in vain once more for the mythical Toroid of Transformation that had, of late, been haunting her dreams.
It would be hard for her to explain to anyone: even to her sister Emily. But out of all of Kaitlyn's daydreams and flights of fantasy, the Toroid was something different. She'd only recently begun receiving nocturnal visitations regarding the Toroid. They took the form of disjointed dreams where an incongruous cast of random ghosts and spectres traipsed through Kaitlyn's mind delivering incoherent speeches in a desultory, stream of consciousness style that seemed to make no sense. But when they happened to slip in a mention of the “Toroid of Transformation,” it made Kaitlyn's heart quiver and keenly whetted her curiosity. Something about this mythical artifact excited her and kindled an inner fire, awakening a keen desire to learn more about this relic she had no rational reason to believe even existed. But night after night, the apparitions in her dreams remained nothing but incomprehensible shadows, speaking without purpose and rambling haphazardly – sometimes not even in English. Tongues Kaitlyn didn't speak, sometimes even symbolic imagery or mathematical equations that had no audible language to voice would, nevertheless, be “spoken” by the motley crowd of disparate dreamscape phantoms. A noctivagant parade of achondroplasics, hirsute hyperandrogenic women, microcephalics, ectrodactyls, conjoined twins, steatopygian women, dipygi, psuedo-mermaids, hermaphrodites, and other Wise Fools. The dreamy sleepwalkers dance swimmingly through the desolation row of Kaitlyn's mind each evening: one after the other, taking turns prognosticating or uttering sage proclamations of nonsensical wisdom. But in this aphotic, oneiric realm of surreal absurdity, sense and nonsense blurred into one, as did fact and fiction, rhyme and reason, light and dark, man and woman, yin and yang, Fuxi and Nüwa … all becoming one.
They spoke of: the Akashic records of the Multiverse, the androgynous Lady Šauška of the Hurrian nation, the composite oneness of Vaikuntha Kamalaja, the cosmic energy of Ometeotl, the duality of Ardhanarishvara, Gleason's theorem of quantum measurement, the glorious goddess Agdistis, Gottfried Leibniz and the dilemma of future contingent propositions, Hilbert's Hotel, La biblioteca de Babel, the orthonormal basis of Everett-worlds, the primeval power of uroboric Φάνητος, the ritual possessions of passionate Erzulie Fréda, Schrödinger's cat and the unique Verschränkung inherent in the unknown טומטום (i.e., “Tumtum” or hidden) state of gender doubt acknowledged in the Babylonian Talmud, St. Tiresias of Mount Cyllene, the transgendered power of Pomba Gira, Ts'ui Pên's forked garden, the Venus Barbata and Venus Castina both, and the Weinberg model of string theory landscape and the magnitude of many, multi-layered D-branes of reality.
None of it really made sense. But night after night, they kept coming to Kaitlyn – familiar yet confusing, unfrightening yet bizarre creatures of the night. Only when they mentioned the Toroid of Transformation did Kaitlyn feel a strong, biting connection to her own reality emerge out of what was an otherwise garbled mess of hypnagogic gibberish. It came from another reality: a sleek, copper and chrome world of Victorian cogs and gears … a dimension of alchemy and physics, witchcraft and steam power, wizardry and mathematics. It was a world of fine art and high culture; an egalitarian utopia where man, woman, man/woman, and woman/man lived and worked, sang and danced, built and composed, side-by-side without prejudice. It was a universe of variegated epicene that left Kaitlyn with … with … with what? An intuitive sense of indistinct fingerspitzengefühl that she simply could not define as anything more or less than nostalgic homesickness. She knew this brave new world which the sagacious cavalcade of freaks spoke of nightly, in between the everything-else they babbled. Kaitlyn somehow had intimate, personal, first-hand knowledge of this mighty Otherworld … and the Toroid? … it was … it was … it was something she understood, but only vaguely. She had to find it and learn more. She was a scientist, a philosopher, an engineer, an explorer, an alchemist, the most brilliant adult mind in the Empire … if only … if only … if …. no.
… and then like clockwork, each and every morning, Kaitlyn would to paraphrase Hedwig and the Angry Inch, wake up and turn back to herself.
Kaitlyn wasn't really who she was. No one here was! Emily wasn't. Their parents weren't. That nice lady who'd just been visiting next-door … what was her name? Mrs. Hutchinson now, but they just called her … oh, what was it … Jamie! Yes, they called her “Miss Jamie” back when she used to babysit for Kaitlyn and Emily.
There was something terribly, terribly wrong with Miss Jamie. Kaitlyn hadn't seen her in years, but that brief glimpse earlier in the evening had convinced her – “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” No, my dear Shakespeare. It's bigger than that. The entire universe has been compromised, multiple times over even. The latest transmogrification of reality was just the icing on the cake. Kaitlyn wasn't really “Kaitlyn,” Emily wasn't really “Emily,” and poor “Miss Jamie” had been horribly morphed beyond all recognition.
It was the Toroid.
But if there had been recent changes, the Toroid must have been recently re-discovered? Kaitlyn redoubled her efforts in the front lawn. It just had to be here, somewhere. If she couldn't find it before someone else did, who knows what sort of doom could be in store for the universe she presently inhabited.
Damnit, why was she currently a thirteen-year old girl? No one took her remotely seriously in this body, this life-role, this particularly backwoods rendition of a hate-filled, universe of misery, apathy, and ignorance.
She had to find the Toroid before … before … before she inevitably sank back into the comforting lie (as she always did) and began, as usual, to believe she really was thirteen-year old nerd girl Kaitlyn Johnson.
“ … but if I'm not me, who am I?” she said to the night air.
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