Oglethorpe Bigby: a sketch
by David Herman
[ fiction - march 09 ]
1
Oglethorpe Bigby stared in the mirror. He was three years older, but only probabilistically wiser. He knew now that sports utility vehicles and minivans were to be avoided at all costs; that pizza had its dangers; and that time had zones of indeterminacy, in which events could not be assigned a definite location. But he still moved crabwise across the streets, shuttling from lightpole to lightpole as if each had irresistible powers of magnetic attraction. Further, he dreamed of indistinguishable shapes clustering and massing at the borders of his mind. They were not insects, but neither were they lifeless machines. They were to be feared.
2
Bigby's father had been stern, very stern. Bigby remembered punishments that far exceeded those allowed by current legal statutes. For example, he had been compelled to truncate every other sentence for a period of sixty months; to slap at the empty air with his flattened-out palms; to turn his body sideways when greeted by others; to consume coarse cereals without liquid refreshment. And to fix his restless eyes on a television screen littered with images. Society was fortunate that these experiences did not transform Bigby into a full-blown sociopath. They had, rather, made him stronger - though admittedly more brittle and crystalline in form.
3
Into smoky cafes, bars, and restaurants Bigby often crept, book and note pad in hand. He sat in these places with his head bent over his books, his thin face ashen after brutal shifts at the factory, where he worked at stamping and pressing metallic artifacts whose functions he had not been trained to apprehend. As college students and information specialists conversed in expensive casual clothes, Bigby muddled through dense philosophic texts written in languages he did not know. It was better than other avenues of effort. He often rubbed a grease-stained hand across his weary eyes, struggling to keep them in focus. When he later stumbled homeward, snatches of conversation intermingled with the incomprehensible phrases he had tried to read. His work ethic produced strange twitchings in his face and passersby steered well clear of his hunched-over form. His build was thin and inelegant, his clothes shabby. People thought it best to avert their eyes when he got too close.
4
An incident from his dreams, years past, still rankled Bigby. He dreamed he had entered a turbulent forest region at stormtime, the branches whipping at his face, the wind-driven leaves choking him, the particulate whirling about and blinding him, the rain lashing his hair into a sodden tangle. Then, as the storm slackened for a moment, an eerie, even preternatural light illuminated the trees in front of him, making them glow greenly in Bigby's brain. Bigby sprinted away from the light, his heart pounding in terror. He heard a caterwauling behind him, gaining on him as he ran, impossible to outrace. “Cripes!” he shouted, stumbling and falling face first on the muddy ground. He rose to his knees and looked back towards the source of the sound.
It was, believe it or not, another version of Bigby himself, blubbering onward through the woods. This other Oglethorpe occupied slightly different spacetime coordinates than his counterpart, the identity-version that had fallen to the ground. The Bigby behind was even thinner, even more inelegant, than the Bigby before. Furthermore, he was green, and glowing with spectral illumination. Bigby, yet not-Bigby, the glowing Oglethorpe radiated not just light but poison, waves of pain penetrating into the non-glowing, muddy Oglethorpe's very soul. It was the unease that comes from catching a fleeting glimpse of oneself in an ill-positioned mirror; such a glimpse can prove deadly in a task that requires concentration, complete immersion in the activity at hand. Bigby saw his green alter ego and upchucked with sickness of self.
Forever after, even in his waking life, Bigby had the sense of being stalked by an evil counterpart. It was this as much as anything that dictated the furtive, crablike shuttling that marked his subsequent progress through space.
5
Later on, while still working at the factory, Bigby took to architectural and topological fantasizing. He imagined designing and living within vortices, cubicles, striations, obloids, perturbations, interstices, and finite agglomerations of string. His mind became obsessed with geometric properties, axial structures, directions of movement, and the like. He began to crack, fractally. He no longer differentiated between containing and contained spaces, pouring liquids upon his forearms and crusts of bread. His was a world in which small jostled with large, thin with fat, round with square, parallel with converging. He was fired from his job at the factory, on grounds of gross cognitive failure.
That was when Bigby decided to become an academic.
6
Bigby's readings in abstruse philosophy served him well. He excelled where others lost interest, pursuing lines of inquiry that his peers thought futile and therefore abandoned. His courseload was impressive, spanning medieval languages, situational ethics, methods in statistical analysis, connexivities of passion, and varieties of fuzzy or multivalent logics. It was in this last area that Bigby demonstrated real ability. Extending Lofti Zadeh's pioneering research in the field, Bigby developed formalisms for describing several hitherto unnoticed types of fuzzy sets, including the set containing the temporally bounded and psychologically autonomous selves - or identity-versions - embodied by a given human individual over the course of his or her lifespan.
Formalization of this set proved surprisingly intractable. For one thing, it was difficult to determine what constituted a temporally bounded self, since the human mind is so notoriously mecurial, so flighty. Some analysts argued that each new thought spawned a new self. For another thing, the condition of psychological autonomy was difficult to specify in any exact or even agreed-upon way. Several of Bigby's instructors made the point that at any given moment the self was in fact a stratificational complex; it consisted of a welter of modes and degrees of sentience.
Although they had potential ramifications for psychiatrists as well as mathematicians, Bigby's ideas were not widely bruited about. He began to despair. Had he made the right choice in embarking on such a rigorous academic program? Was he cut out to be a scholar? Did he even have enough candlepower to puzzle through the problems that obsessed him? Should he have continued working at the factory, or pursued a similar job elsewhere? Who was he, anyway?
7
Bigby roamed the streets, afraid. Identity-versions clustered at the periphery of his field of vision, shadowy, slightly out-of-phase, but no less threatening for their flickering and inconstant presence. They induced powerful feelings of nausea in a Bigby no longer certain of his true life history, now that it had begun to ramify into possible paths he might have taken, should have taken, or could be taking. The ground moved beneath his feet, its actual contours no longer clearly distinguishable from the halo of virtual shapes and topographies on which it verged. During this terrible period, Bigby often listened for echoes of his own footsteps reverberating on the darkening streets.
He heard the lonely whistling of a train in the distance, then its muted clatter along the tracks. As the breeze blew through his window, it kept altering the frequency of the train’s whistle ever so slightly. He was not sure of its true pitch, nor of the exact location from which it issued. But the train bore its cargo onward into a future that enveloped it. Despite the burgeoning plenitude of other versions of himself, Bigby had never felt more alone.
8
At dusk, at summer’s end, a multitude of starlings would gather in the grove of bamboo trees behind Bigby’s childhood home. A dense constellation of reiterated forms, a mobile cloud of chirping, crying birds, each its own powerful center of consciousness and will, settled en masse every evening just as the light failed. A handclap could send them hurtling upwards through the darkening sky, along thousands of parallel trajectories that would bring them back again to the bamboo grove, once the sudden sound had died away and its human source had retreated.
But Bigby had never clapped. He felt far too small, with his father there beside him. Instead, he stood motionless, wondering. The birds massed noisily but without chaos, dominating the grove with their winged multiplicity, their dark totality. Bigby’s mind echoed with the sound of the starlings settling onto their tentative perches, the green bamboo stalks fading to grey in the gathering dusk.
