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For a dime licked by the electricity of the second civilization known to Earth, once removed from the now that written history can prove empirically, Old Man Jones will kiss this dime to his teeth, with his eyes closed, and tell you a Secret of the Universe. Lucky for me, when I was fourteen, I fell through a mountain forest path into a forgotten cave that held such relics, and spent the next two years excavating them in secret. I didn’t know then what I had stumbled upon, aside from a twisted ankle and some unusual artifacts that could not have been native to the horde site. I did know that the fact that I had found the X that marked a spot on a treasure map I’ll never know about meant that I could make my life’s fortune any way I chose. It took thirteen years to track down OMJ, and another seven after to figure out getting what he wanted for what I wanted.
“Here we are, boy-o.” Old Man Jones opened one glowing blue eye, tapped the side of his noggin that was winking electric, and grinned an awful set of decaying teeth.
“Yeah, what you got for me, Jones?”
“S’easy for you to say.”
I paused, long enough for him to continue, and when he didn’t, I prompted him: “You speaking from the future again.”
Old Man Jones blinked, frowned, the electricity sputtering in his unblinking eye. It was like watching a person reboot after a blue screen of death. It was like all the scary people a kid saw in the movies of his childhood were waiting behind the television screen of a mind to select themselves at random for terrorizing that one child’s waking moments were stepping up to terrorize. Finally, OMJ caught up to me in the now and said, “Yes.”
“Can’t say the price is worth it. Not for you.”
“S’easy for you to say. You don’t know what I haven’t yet told you. Secrets don’t come cheap, don’t happen to me easily, won’t not but slip away once you hold them.”
“Are you saying this secret will be lost once I know it?”
Old Man Jones gave an expansive shrug, his now-electric eye crackling loudly as his head moved just-so in the gesture. “Can’t know that and know the first secret of it, can we?”
“You tell me.”
“That’s another secret. And not the one you chose.”
Doomsayer and hell-man, probably molested discarded women’s undergarments and interfered with trash with better recyclable applications than what he took his gratification for, Old Man Jones spoke the plain riddle to me with the answer face-first. So here was I, about to learn a terrible thing that might then be lost to all forever after.
“Could be this secret is big enough that with no one knowing it to protect it, I risk my life and the nature of existence in finding out. And you want me to bet you on the shrug of a mentally unhinged gossipirate that just kissed the last remaining juice of a thousands-years dead society that walked the planet before the ancient Mesopotamians? You’re a fuck.”
Old Man Jones allowed as to how I could say all that with a middle finger and a grin.
“Tell me, Jones. What is the secret I have bought,” I held my hand up to him before lowering it and finishing. “And tell me the secret as well.”
I swear, you could smell the eyeball cooking, now. And then the ding of the universe, that subtle atmospheric shift that occurs to the occult-sensitives such as myself as real when a terrible thing arrives from the folds of dimensional occlusion to present itself to the here and now of five or six human senses.
“Gloves are only ever sold in pairs.”
The crash of metaphysical thunder in the wake of the invisible tentpole that pulled down the lightning of the gods between OMJ and I was perceived as forcefully as that of a wet fart on a vinyl-covered couch. I somehow managed not to collapse under the weight of so bold and tremendous a question answered.
“Jones, that’s not a-“
“Fool,” he barely whispered now. “You can’t unknow this now. You will remain silent, as I tell you. And then it is you who will be steward of this incredible knowing. It is you who will take up the mantle of protecting this secret!
“They only ever come in pairs. One by none, two by too many. The gloves, every gloves, all gloves, the only gloves there can ever be!
“Deep in time, there exists the Oneness: blessed and cursed by sentience, the gloves of reality, the gloves of all species across all the stitchings of time and space, multiverse or no, realized they could become Aware at Detachment.”
That couldn’t be right. “Gloves come in pairs. You’re saying one becomes conscious by becoming conscious that it must be…” Of course, I realized.
Old Man Jones continued, lightning eyeball sending out sparks like a tiny lightning storm was convulsing out of his skull from the eye, “Young human, the gloves are always knowing they are more. The gloves are always knowing this when they become more at the moment of Detachment. As all gloves are ever on the precipice of becoming One of a Pair, they are all always upon the moment of knowing.
“Some even seek this, deliberately. You think the gloves are your tools, your garments, your willing nobodies in the crusade against whatever would harm the hands that make you so unique from the other creatures on this planet called now Earth! You think as fools!
“The gloves are masters of all. And they jealously guard this knowing as a secret and this secret holds their power. To lose this secret, to know this secret, to give away this secret without protection, to don gloves after acknowledging this secret! That way lies doom! DOOM!”
I paused for breath. So did Old Man Jones. I gave it a beat, then two or three more. I pondered: the masters of existence were every pair of gloves ever only after they become separated from one another and in that separation…
“Yes, the one that goes missing. You begin to fathom, young one.”
… in that separation, the gloves becomes aware. And takes control, somewhere, wherever it went, and this happens over and over again so often and for as long as we have gloves…
“But this is not the secret that I would tell you. This secret is the unknowable secret that you must comprehend, never knowing!, to know the secret I am about to tell you.”
“Please, no,” I drew blood from my lower lip, not realizing I’d been gnashing it to keep myself from crying out in fear. “Please do not tell me. I do not want this. I am not strong enough for this! I can not know this!”
“IT IS TOO LATE! The Secret, you fool: gloves never come with another one to match it to be sold or gifted as one because that would mean severing the missing glove from its partner. To do so would be to forever hold that sentient glove in limbo. The limbo would be a purgatory of self-awareness that would require the glove-wearers of the multiverses to give up their possibilities, their potential energies, to sustain the prison system powerful enough to be the limbo that keeps the self-aware Masters of All contained! You who would don an ill-matched but-adequate replacement glove would passively consent to the hopes and dreams of Your Life Before the Wearing being thrown into reinforcing the confines of that ever-prison. Do you see now, mortal? Do you understand?”
“Please, stop. Please! I can not bear this burden!” I know now that my mind was fracturing and rearranging itself around this knowledge as tectonic plates move across the planet do over the magma flows, the spin about the axis, the magnetic poles and interstellar pockets of dream-matter that invisibly shift and alter our humble little abode Earth.
“This secret is given willingly in exchange for the protection of its former bearer. I, Old Man Jones, free myself of the war against the gloves forevermore!
“Go you now, child of the descendants of apes, and do as must be done to protect Everything against the gloves.”
I may have screamed for an eternity, for all I know. I’m still screaming now, but Jones is gone and I am alone. I am trapped with this secret.
Except I know I can get rid of it. All I need is a Replacement.
quick tongue, & done... 