TIMESTOP

Copyright © 1984, 2004 by Richard S. Platz


I

My thoughts are so difficult to organize now that the wings of madness have brushed them. I must shut out all speculation on the fate of Laura and the children, forget where I am and what is happening outside. I'll begin by writing down as best I can a chronology of events leading up to the advent of Synchronized Time. After that, I don't know. My account is bound to ramble. Chronology seems to have lost all meaning after that.

It started about mid-century. There wasn't much talk of synchronization before then. I had just been hired on as a national affairs reporter for the New York Times cable information system. How I long for the bedrock certainty of those simple days!

The U.S. Presidential election of 2052, as I recall, first made "synchronicity" a political buzzword. What smoke-filled rooms and short-sighted ambition underlay that concept's ignoble emergence, I suppose it really doesn't matter. Yet I should attempt to be as thorough as possible.

By 2050, the clocks of most scientific and business computers of the industrialized world had been standardized to operate on Atomic Time. The characteristic radiation associated with the element cesium provided an amazingly uniform frequency of just over nine billion cycles per second. The less advanced computers were converted to utilize an integral fraction thereof. By comparison, the movement of celestial bodies around the sun afforded a primitive means of measuring the increasingly intricate scheme of human concerns.

Solar calendars had always been awkward at best. The Julian Calendar was adopted by Julius Caesar before the birth of Christ and was a reasonably successful attempt, by four-year cycles, to tailor the cumbersome solar year to fit into whole days. Three years were composed of 365 days, followed by a leap year of 366 days. Yet even the Julian Calendar was approximately eleven minutes out of synchronization with the mean tropical year.

By 1582 the discrepancy had grown to an egregious ten days. Pope Gregory XIII, on the advice of the astronomer Clavius, decreed that ten days be eliminated from the year 1582, and the Gregorian Calendar was adopted in countries that were then of the Catholic persuasion. The new calendar provided for leap years, except for century years, unless they can be divided by 400, and was accurate to within 26 seconds of the tropical year. Until the twenty-first century, this was adequate enough.

Twentieth-century scientists had discovered that the earth tended to speed up or slow down in its axial rotation as it waltzed with the moon unsteadily around the sun. Scientists were constantly adding "leap seconds" every year or so in order to keep the world clocks, based upon the cesium standard, in time with the wobbling rotation of the planet. Moreover, the cesium standard was not integrally divisible by the number of seconds that comprised a sidereal year, which added a sort of astrophysical insult to the perceived injury of irregularity.

Vigorous debate consumed the scientific community when Amahl Khaptse, a professor of mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley, published an elegant theoretical solution to both problems. Professor Khaptse's equations provided a hypothetical means of synchronizing the gravitational clock of the heavens with the cesium-bound earth. Khaptse's First Theorem contemplated a slight circularization and mean reduction of the magnitude of the moon's orbit around the earth. Tidal drag and orbital irregularity could be brought within calculated limits to produce an even and precise axial rotation of the earth with only two slight (by astrophysical standards) applications of thrust to the lunar body.

What was most remarkable, however, was how neatly Khaptse's Second Theorem derived from his First. The adjustment he theorized would produce more than just an orbital effect. It would also have relativistic consequences. The fabric of time itself would be altered, if only slightly. As Einstein had shown, time slows down in the vicinity of a massive object. The lunar mass would be decreased a tiny bit, converted into energy and propelled at relativistic speeds into the darkness of intergalactic space. As the combined earth-moon mass was decreased this infinitesimal fraction with respect to the gravitational constant, G, time would be minutely reduced in the region of the solar system, so that the sidereal day, month, and year would each fall within the limits of octave projections of the frequency of vibrations of the cesium atom. The decaying lunar orbit would offset the theoretical decrease in the value of G over time so that the whole system, once adjusted, would stay synchronized for the next ten million years. Like monstrous orchestral instruments, the earth and the heavens would at last be brought into permanent temporal harmony.

Initial professional criticism of Khaptse's remarkable insights was abruptly silenced when the eminent physicist Gustav Immelmann and his colleagues at the National Planetary Institute in Hamburg, Germany, not only confirmed Khaptse's equations, but suggested that the endeavor was well within the resources and technology of a world society with interplanetary thermonuclear capabilities. In a series of published lectures Immelmann described in minute detail how the adjustment might in fact be accomplished.

What astrophysics had to do with politics, I was never really certain, but in 2051 the Neo-Republicans adopted the Khaptse-Immelmann time synchronization program as a major platform plank. The elegance of Khaptse's equations and the beautiful simplicity of Immelmann's applications held a grip on the human spirit far beyond their supposed utility. Why, the Neo-Republicans asked, should we allow the cosmos to be out of tune with man's finest technological achievements when it would be so simple to do something about it? Why, indeed. No one could have begun to imagine the frightful consequences of that innocent political rhetoric.

Following his landslide election, the President moved quickly to solicit the cooperation of the former members of the Soviet Union under the new spirit of international detente that then prevailed. The Russians agreed that the project could be carried out as a part of the recently negotiated Nuclear Arms Reduction Treaty of 2050. Both nations would contribute equally from their stockpiles of thermonuclear weapons to provide the explosive force necessary for the project. Many hoped that a synchronization of the spheres might engender increased sympathetic harmony in the affairs of mankind.

Yet no issue of the twenty-first century so divided the peoples of the world. Sychronizationists saw universal harmony as an expression of God's will and a mandate of man's holy mission. Billions of people, however, mostly in the Third and Fourth World countries, decried as blasphemous the proposed tampering with the workings of the divine celestial clock. The peasant riots which beset England when Parliament adopted the Gregorian Calendar and dropped 11 days from the year 1752 were as nothing compared to the religious conflagration that engulfed the planet, culminating in the bombing of the United Nations General Assembly in 2055 by the suicidal minions of the Ayatollah Abdulbonzoh.

But the industrialized world was not to be deterred. Doomsayers were dismissed as ignorant fanatics, which, for the most part, they were. Businessmen convinced themselves that synchronization would facilitate a global interchange of information and set the stage for true international marketing. Scientists demanded to know if Khaptse's equations would prove correct. Technocrats accepted Immelmann's plan as a challenge worthy of their greatest skills, and the shareholders of technology stocks urged them on. Once the gauntlet had been cast down, the leaders of the world's superpowers feared that breaking off the undertaking might be construed as an act against the interests of world peace. In short, those who wielded the temporal power were committed to the attempt at synchronization.

Curiously, no one suspected the real danger. It was an almost universally accepted scientific postulate that time travel was impossible. The concept reeked of logical inconsistency. Causality was perceived to be embedded essentially in a one-way arrow of time. What became of future effects if someone were to travel back in time and altered their causes? What, for example, if a man killed his own father before the man had met his mother? Besides, if time travel were truly possible, where were the time travelers from the future who should be haunting our lives? No one spoke of timestops as pork-barrel politics shifted into high gear and eroded the remaining islands of resistance to the project.

Preliminary feasibility studies were completed by the spring of 2056. Design and construction contracts were awarded in great haste to take advantage of the favorable positioning of the earth and moon during late November and early December, 2059. The Russian Space Agency, NASA, ESA, and TWSA cooperated to meet a complex time schedule on a global scale never before undertaken. Nuclear devices were shuttled aloft and assembled in earth orbit, then ferried into lunar orbit and carefully lowered to the moon's surface in an intricate pattern along its leading edge as it circled the earth. Lest the moon itself be blown apart, the devices were programed to go off sequentially over a period of ninety minutes during the apogee firing, and for fifteen minutes in the second, more abrupt, perigee burn scheduled for two weeks later. Calculations were checked and rechecked, equipment tested and the results analyzed, a firing sequencer with triple redundancy deployed, and all International Lunar Outposts evacuated as an additional safety precaution against major moonquakes. A massive information campaign bombarded the earth's population with warnings against watching the blasts without protective glasses. Winter solstice of the year 2059 was to mark the end of the Gregorian Calendar and the beginning of Synchronized Time, or S.T., from which all future events would be measured.

I covered much of the background preparation for the Times and was on call during the first firing. I watched it from the airport in Washington, D.C., as the moon hung low in a clear and crisp eastern twilight. The nuclear explosions themselves were hidden below the moon's lower lim, but I saw with my own eyes the incredibly beautiful, brilliant spectral beams of ionized fire flashing below the horizon like a cosmic beacon in the interstellar night.

Two weeks later I was fighting a bout with the flu, so I couldn't join the Times staff on its flight to Fiji to watch the second firing, which would not be visible from the continental United States. I was cold and achy and went to bed early that night in the spare bedroom so Laura, my wife, wouldn't be kept awake by my feverish tossing. I was so exhausted I intentionally neglected to set the alarm to watch the early-morning television coverage of the event.


II

I must have awakened in the first moments of the new Synchronized Time, probably in the very first second. I discovered that the scientific community was dead wrong about time travel, although there is no way I could have understood then what was happening.

In profound terror and confusion I awoke to a hell more terrible than all the circles of Dante's Inferno, to a landscape more bizarre than the paintings of Hieronymus Bosche stroboscopically superimposed upon one another, to a chaos more paralyzing than Jkeirt's Schizoid. The only thing I knew was that I had surely gone raving mad, the fever had burned out my brain. Sledgehammer vivacity decreed it was no dream, yet there could be no reality to what I was experiencing.

No words can describe what was happening. Yet I must try, if only to relate the flavor of the madness. Such is my charge.

Reality pulsed and fluttered wildly, vividly, horribly, nauseatingly. At first the whirl was so fast as to be impenetrable, a mad roaring fulsomeness of sound and sight and feeling. In time I began to distinguish individual split-seconds flailing past as radically reconfigured versions of each other. It was as if a drunken God had cut each single frame from the motion picture of his Creation, had reassembled the severed frames randomly, and was now projecting the results at twice the proper speed. The experience sated every sense. To say I sat up in bed or got to my feet is a gross oversimplification. I sat up, stood up, lay back, rolled over, shook my head, fought to regain my balance, screamed, and did and felt hundreds of acts all as a part of the same fragmented instant. Each action was interwoven with all the others, but in no comprehensible order.

The time travelers were there from the first instant, of course. When the flux had slowed enough for me to perceive them, I thought at first they were my own twisted hallucinations. As if the insane imagination of an illustrator of horror comic books had been given free rein to reconstruct reality, in great metamorphosing hordes his creatures overran everything, sampling, tearing apart, inspecting, tasting, rearranging, coming and going, wielding strange instruments, fighting among themselves, appearing and disappearing with the rest of the chaos. Some looked human, some did not. Faceless humanoids argued with furry little apes, while tentacled anemones exchanged tools with a white-shawled lizard. They might have come from other planets, or been the future inheritors of this earth, or maybe they were simply evolutionary alternatives to ourselves. I didn't know who or what they were, why they were there, or what they wanted, though I began to suspect that they, and not my fever, were the cause of the madness.

As the pace of the pulses slackened, the degree of alteration grew ever more drastic and bizarre. I remember one early impression more vividly than the rest. For an instant I saw Laura standing in the doorway of my room, and I cried out to her. She came and went, leaning against the door frame one instant, kneeling the next, then writhing in the grip of a slimy green horror, she fluttered into and out of existence. I reached out to her. A huge alligator-like beast appeared next to me and ripped off my right arm. I could feel its teeth puncture my flesh and the horrible pain as my shoulder socket gave way. An instant later my arm was restored and healthy, the pain had vanished, and Laura was gone.

I stared at my arm, and before my eyes hundreds of jolts of change darkened it, covered it with sores, healed it, made it swell, grew hair as thick as a gorilla's, slashed it off painfully just below the elbow, restored it, and created and revised nuances I can't begin to remember or describe. At the same time I felt the incompatible sensations from inside, the pressure, the pain, the numbness, the itch, the warmth and cold, the stiffness and tone of each alteration. And it wasn't just my arm. Everything was changing, pulsing into and out of being, lengthening, shortening, changing color and shape, my body, the house, the bushes, trees, hills and sky outside the window, when the window was there at all. I can remember only a tiny fraction of the visions and revisions, the pains, the elations, the horrors, and I can describe them only inadequately. For that I am grateful.

I was terrified. It seemed as though strange creatures were surrounding me and wanted to slice me open. I tried to run, but had no coordination. I grew dizzy and vomited, and at the same time I did not vomit. I tried closing my eyes and covering my ears. But still I felt and smelled and tasted the raw chaos all about me. And there was always accompanying me a flickering counterpoint of myself who did shut my eyes or cover my ears as I sat, stood, ran, recoiled, and tumbled through space in kaleidoscopic confusion.

I tried to look for Laura and the children, but the task was impossible. The terrain through which I had to search was alien to me and in constant flux. I stumbled over everything. My own body was unreliable. I reached for a doorknob and the door disappeared, stepped onto the front porch, and I was kneeling in a desert. I was as helpless as a newborn baby.

Terror is an exhausting emotion. It can only last so long before it burns itself out. Deep inside I grew aware of a kernel of myself which alone seemed to be untouched by the whirling chaos, a center which perceived, remembered imperfectly, and tried to compare one facet with another. I recognized it as the same place of calmness I had found practicing the bio-feedback techniques my doctor had prescribed to lower my blood pressure. I fled there for refuge. One version of myself after another sought that tranquility, which spread outward from the center into all my fragmented versions like ripples across a pond. I sat down and listened to my breathing as it slowed. A thousand fragmented times I sat down. A thousand times I began to follow my breathing. Gradually my mind stopped paying so much attention to the mad sensations assaulting me, and the pond within grew still. I fell into a waking torpor.

I don't know how much time passed. It could have been minutes, days, or even weeks, if those quaint concepts have relevant meaning any longer. I ate, I slept, I passed my bodily wastes as a part of the splintered pattern of doing and not doing, but whether on a thousand different occasions, or only once with a thousand revisions, I have no way of judging. Memory itself had become shattered and unreliable. I felt as if I had died and been reborn ten thousand times. Now I know it was truly so.

Gradually curiosity overcame my fear of the time travelers. With a few I held brief conversations, until they would vanish before my eyes. I learned that they had come from the distant future. I asked what it was like there, but their answers were as confusing and inconsistent as the chaos in which we held our chat.

I don't know when I first saw the Ringmaster. I call him that because he looked exactly like the drawing of the Ringmaster in an antique Ringling Brothers Circus poster Laura had hung in the family room. I grasped immediately that there was something different about him. His appearance was bizarre, more like an animated wax manikin with artificial skin and unsighted eyes, than like a real human being. But it wasn't his curiously familiar appearance, nor the absurd swallow-tailed tuxedo and top hat he wore that distinguished him. Far too many creatures more incredible than he were coming and going for his looks to have mattered much. But he didn't change. The chaotic flux did not touch his constant presence. My gaze lay upon him as the eyes of a seasick sailor might languish on the unmoving shore.

When he knew he had my attention, he beckoned me to follow him. He brought me to this cavern. How we got here, through what territory we traveled, I haven't any clue. I don't know whether we're still on the planet earth. But my very own bed sits miraculously in a little stony alcove, and nearby fresh groceries are neatly arranged on the familiar blue gingham surface of our kitchen table. Here the walls of rock don't change, the light that emanates from nowhere glows constant, and sleep is possible. Only the sporadic pulsing, the flickering of being itself distinguishes this from more pleasant times gone by.


III

I fell into a deep sleep, woke up, and found myself alone. I ate, explored the small chamber, and slept again.

When I awoke the second time, the Ringmaster was seated upon a three-legged stool beside my bed. He looked more like a parody of a circus ringmaster than the real thing. His jacket was threadbare, his shirt yellowing from age, his taxidermic eyes glazed and staring, and his tiny mustachio was penciled onto his upper lip. When he spoke, his words were out of sync with his mouth movements like a poorly manipulated ventriloquist's dummy. He was obviously a robot or a puppet, but what was animating him I couldn't determine.

We held a conversation of sorts. Actually, I'm not really sure he spoke at all. It seemed as if his words simply appeared in my mind in response to my spoken inquiries while his jaw flapped an inept percussion accompaniment. Much of what he said to me I never did comprehend, but he assured me that it was of no great importance. What follows is not literally accurate, but an approximation of what he said, or what I understood of what he said.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"We are a colony," was his reply.

"You mean you represent a colony?"

"No, we are a colony of all the surviving humans. ‘Souls,' is the word that might apply, approximately. This appearance was created just for you alone to help you feel more at ease."

"Are you the only ones who survive?"

"We are one alternative of those who survive."

I wasn't sure what that meant. "Where is this place?"

"Deep inside a mountain, in a cave."

"Do you know my wife Laura?"

"We know who she is, yes."

"Can you bring her here?"

"We are sorry, but that is not to be."

"My children?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"There is no way you can be made to comprehend that. There are no sufficient words to explain."

I was frustrated, and the presumption of his reply angered me. "What do you want from me?"

"We want you to write an account of what has happened."

"But I don't know what's happened."

"What you do not know, we will explain."

I thought about the offer for a moment. At least it was a beginning. I settled myself more comfortably on the bed. "What went wrong? Did Professor Khaptse make a miscalculation somewhere?"

"No, Professor Khaptse's equations were impeccable. The earth and the heavens were brought into precise harmony, just as he had predicted. However, the relativistic consequences of twisting the fabric of time, if we may use that metaphor, had implications he never dreamed of."

"Like what?"

"It created a timestop."

"A timestop?"

"By altering time just slightly, your civilization created a kink in the flow of time that could not be crossed by the time travelers. If you would permit us an analogy that might be helpful, it is as if time were a growing tree, and the trunk was severed through by your synchronization project. Above the cut, the trunk has been twisted, only slightly, but enough so that the phloem and xylem tubes no longer line up. Nothing can pass through."

"But I passed through."

"Yes, you and your entire world grew through once, at the time the cut was made, but only once, and never again."

"But . . . I still don't understand. That doesn't explain anything. Why is everything so chaotic now?"

"Because you are now beyond the timestop and thus live in a universe that contains time travel. The time travelers have caused all the confusion."

"How are they to blame?"

"They have gone back and reshaped events by altering their causes. Each one has attempted to remake the world the way he wishes it to be." He paused to let the words sink in. "And whenever a cause is changed, time is bifurcated. Both the original and altered versions subsist completely. Consider it this way: the first time traveler went back and made the first tiny change, and suddenly there were two equally valid alternative realities, and two time travelers existed where there had only been one. Ten changes produced ten alternatives and ten time travelers, each with the power to change causes and create alternative realities."

"My God! I had no idea! How many realities are there on this side of the timestop?"

"They are without limit. Time has exploded into infinity, not lineally, but laterally. The number of alternatives expands sideways in a geometrical progression."

"Who invented time travel? When was it devised?"

"That's impossible to determine now, so many alternatives have been overlaid. Nor is it important. The dynamics are rather simple. Someone was bound to discover it some day, and as soon as he began to alter causes, the proliferation of alternatives was inevitable."

"Couldn't it be controlled?"

"Oh, it has been controlled quite effectively in some alternative universes. But someone from one reality or another always goes back and undermines the controls by altering their causes."

"Are there no timestops in the future?"

"Yes, plenty of them. But their causes are always accessible, so they are inevitably undone. Yours was the last timestop before the discovery of time travel and consequently the earliest limit whose causes cannot be undone."

"Who are the time travelers? Are they our descendants?"

"Yes, most of them are."

"That means some of those alive on earth at the time of the Synchronization survive, doesn't it? And their children survive."

"The time travelers are quite fond of manipulating genetic causes. Every possible combination of human DNA which existed at the time of the timestop has undoubtedly been tried in one world or another, its product brought to term, given birth, and nurtured to maturity. The descendants of those experimental unions now people the uncountable alternative realities."

"What about Laura? What about the boys? Christ! What's happened to the six billion people on earth?"

His response was slow in coming, as if he would have preferred not to discuss such things. "In infinite time," he finally replied, "everything is not only possible or likely, but inevitable."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"As a rough approximation, it is probably fair to say that everything has happened to them."

The response so upset me I was unable to continue for quite a while. I tried to press the Ringmaster for what he meant by "everything." Admittedly it was an absurd request. I asked him for examples, but he refused to give me any, and certainly that was for the best. I believe I'm in more danger of losing my mind trying to comprehend what's happened to Laura and the children than in recalling the brief madness I experienced for myself.

We adjourned our conversation until the next "day", as I like to think of my periods between sleep. By that time I was again relatively composed and had innumerable questions for him.

"So that's what I've been experiencing? The flurry of alternative realities rushing past?"

"Yes."

"Why is it so confusing to me? Why am I unable to cope?"

"You were designed by a half-billion years of evolution to live in one particular sort of world. There was nothing to prepare you for this."

"Could I learn? Could I . . . adjust?"

"For the most part, no, not by yourself."

"And the six billion others?"

"No. You that were conceived and born before the timestop experience each change as it occurs. But like the timestop itself, your parentage is immune from alteration. You cannot be erased. In a sense, you are the canvass upon which the changes are painted. You hold the fragmented universe together."

"For how long?"

"That question has no meaning, unless you specify which alternative you are talking about."

"But some manage to survive and produce offspring. You said that yourself. How are they able to cope?"

"In some alternative universes their descendants come back to help them."

"Who are the others, the non-human time travelers?"

"Some alternatives go very far into the future and link up with other civilizations which may or may not be associated with yours, and they also participate."

"From other stars?"

"Yes, some."

"Can't you get behind the timestop by going back at some other place, some other star, and traveling here?"

"No. Space and time are not fundamentally different. Some places, like some times, are inaccessible to the time travelers."

"Why do I experience none of the changes here in this cave?"

"Because we have painstakingly collected all of your alternatives and brought them here."

"How do you remain constant? How do you keep from fluctuating like everything else?"

"There is no way that you can be made to comprehend that. There are no words to suffice."

"But you have mastered the flux, the change. Are you in control of it all?"

"No. No one is in control. We are but one of an infinite number of solutions, no better or worse than any other."

"What do you really look like?"

"That concept has no meaning. We do not radiate or reflect electromagnetic impulses of a frequency which your retina or your science could perceive."

"You're invisible."

"Yes."

"How large are you?"

"That concept has no meaning. We are infinite and nonexistent. There is no way that you can be made to comprehend that. There are no words to suffice."

"You travel through time?"

"Yes."

"How long is time?"

"Infinitely long and infinitely short. There is no way that you can be made to comprehend that. There are no words to suffice."

"Try me."

"That is impossible."

"How many . . . ‘souls' are you?"

"An infinite number, and none."

"You answer my questions the same way, with no answer at all."

"Yes, many of your questions require the same response. It is very difficult for us to try to reduce such complex matters into thoughts, let alone to mere words. We are very sorry."


IV

Our conversations went on for days, and the Ringmaster took great pains to answer every question I could think of. Many of his responses were so strange I find them difficult to believe. But I have no alternative explanation for what has befallen me, so I just have to trust him. What difference does it make anyway?

He offered an explanation for why reality is always flickering, even here in this cave. In the infinite onslaught of possibilities, of personalities, countless suicidal desperadoes with unimaginable destructive capabilities return to annihilate the universe itself. They are frequently successful. There are also, however, an unlimited number of do-gooders who do not want the universe ended and who inevitably return to thwart the schemes of the nihilists. Null universes are thus intermixed throughout the deck of possibilities.

The Ringmaster tells me that my account will be sent back through the timestop somehow, as a warning. I couldn't understand how, and he didn't try very hard to explain it to me. I suspect it has something to do with what we used to call "telepathy." Physical matter cannot pass through the timestop, but something else can. Something else will influence the "imagination," as the Ringmaster calls it, of a person living before the timestop.

It sounds to me like he's trying to change the causes on the other side of the timestop. Either it won't work, or it will lead to the same insane chaos there that has damned the world on this side of the timestop.

The Ringmaster says, no, I don't understand. He has insisted that I compose this account for the world just prior to the Great Synchronization.

I asked him why he doesn't do it himself. He says that only someone who has come from the past can make himself comprehensible to those still living then. He has trouble limiting his thinking to mere concepts, his concepts to words. Besides, he assures me I will do an excellent job, since he has already seen my message and has selected it from among hundreds of other candidates to be the one he will actually send.

How can I argue with that?

I have no advice to give those who come before, for I can see no solution to the dilemma. If the timestop is never created, then the time travelers will always be there, and the world I knew will never have existed. Perhaps they can postpone its creation for a little while, but heaven help them if they wait too long.

I've though about it quite a bit, and I really have nothing to add. I hope the Ringmaster knows what he's doing. And if this account somehow manages to get through . . . good luck.


Author's Note

Man, this's nutty. I was on m'way t'work at the Carwash, mindin' m'own business, don'cha know, when this jive riff starts t'runnin' through m'head so bad I can' think straight. I make it straight t'Eddie's, ‘cause he's usually hip to this kinda weird shit.

Well, when I gets there, Eddie ain't home, see, but he's got this hot typewriter he's been figurin'ta unload forever, man, an' I axes his ol' lady if I can see it, an' she says, sure, an' I don' even know how t'type fer Chrissake!

Well she drags the motha' out, sticks some paper in't, an' I sits down an' starts typin' out this jive shit I don' ev'n unnerstan' like I was her friggin' welfare worker. This keeps up fer a coupla hours an' Eddie's ol' lady's really freakin', don'cha know, an' then I'm done, an' that's wha' this here is.

Wha'da'ya make of it, man?