Falling and Feedback Read online

  Table of Contents

  Falling and Feedback

  Book Details

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  FALLING AND FEEDBACK

  FRANCIS GIDEON

  When a new patron at the library catches Tyler's sights, she doesn't expect the encounter to turn into much. But when she realizes that Josh Dubsky, a PhD student at the local university, is translating a poem from a prior civilization, she's even more intrigued.

  As Tyler works with Josh to translate the poem and find references for a lost world, she also excavates her own history through her grandmother's stories about society, painting with black market materials, and her own synesthesia.

  As the two start a romance, Tyler finds her world changing even more. When Josh's academic friends, his work schedule, and the weight of history becomes too much, Tyler closes her eyes and imagines a future that she pulls from the dark.

  Falling and Feedback

  By Francis Gideon

  Published by Less Than Three Press LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher, except for the purpose of reviews.

  Edited by Keith Kaczmarek

  Cover designed by Aisha Akeju

  This book is a work of fiction and all names, characters, places, and incidents are fictional or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is coincidental.

  First Edition September 2017

  Copyright © 2017 by Francis Gideon

  Printed in the United States of America

  Digital ISBN 9781684310968

  CHAPTER ONE

  He was in the library again. At the back, with yet another book in front of him, completely absorbed by its pages. His personal music machine was on, but Tyler traced the headphones from his ears down to the disconnected jack by the player. The noise spilled out, uncontained, into the library. The other patrons walked by and looked at him as if their aggravation could be communicated through their sneered lips and eyes alone, that together, their faces of disappointment could transmit into a noise.

  The man didn't look up. As far as he was concerned, the music was inside his head and not all around.

  So Tyler walked over to him.

  "You're leaking," she said, pointing to the device. She saw the music in a wash of blue and green, a hue brighter than his eyes when he looked up.

  "Oh. Sorry." He reached down to hook up his jack again, then turned the music off. "I didn't notice it."

  "No worries. Do you need help with anything?"

  He leaned back and took his ear buds out. His expression said, Oh boy do I ever, but he remained silent. Tyler surveyed the poems on the page in front him. One poem was complete, but in another language she couldn't comprehend, while the second one was only in bits and pieces. It was made of nothing but small words taped together and rearranged like a broken haiku or an ideograph painting.

  "Do you need more paper?" Tyler asked. It was a rare resource, only given out to the professors at the school. But Tyler liked him. She knew he was a PhD student, sometimes lecturing in the large glass halls on the other side of the campus. She had seen him in his various collections of blue sweaters through the glass, light fracturing through the corners and creating rainbows as he spoke. The colours always made sounds to Tyler's ears, so she half expected the strange man in her library to be a musician. She hoped the poem was secretly a song.

  "That would be nice, actually." He smiled. A soft dimple appeared and it reminded her of the caves on Pluto.

  "Sure, I'll be right back. What's your name?" she asked, hoping to slip it in without him noticing. "So I can make sure you're logged into our system and have free reign for resources?"

  His eyebrows lifted. Pure joy―like being given the key to the city. The Tristero Library was hardly a labyrinth like Borges' perfect vision, but it was clearly more than he had been expected to receive. Most grad students at the university were doing more work anyway, so Tyler figured he'd need the books far more than anyone who was teleconferencing their lesson plans.

  "Josh. Josh Dubsky."

  His name appeared in front of her vision like the crackle of fire. Orangey red, but still nice. She smiled. "I'm Tyler. I'll be back."

  *~*~*

  He showed her the poem when she returned.

  "Krish-Krish De Loxzo"

  Moonblah savagala shish.

  Kribright leigh, ahayel von

  samyeki twizur, lashikrish.

  battarla krish-krish:

  shish-see wong pur krish-krish.

  Ihault emafaurlt; see-swongleigh vonnal.

  Savagala consequiki lima pong-zo

  see pur brilima consequini shishi ― sea-von

  Y lara krish-krish: imea dime choral.

  Harult fou. Lox.

  "The Waves of "

  our people sang.

  mermaids black skies

  clockwork heart dancing legs.

  fighting with waves:

  so we began to sing with the waves.

  Our people dance over strange land,

  we can't meet in the night to sing ―

  but the waves still go on:

  She furrowed her brows. Mermaids. Clockwork parts. None of it made sense to her head.

  "What's happening here?" she asked, pointing to a section that seemed to match up via the translation. "What's krish-krish?"

  "Water. Waves. The poem's about The Flood."

  She paused, shifting on her flat shoes. "But I thought the Flood was made of people? Everyone leaving their houses as the water dried up and tried to find a new place to live?"

  "For a time, yeah, but water means different things depending on where you are. That's how metaphors and jokes work, you know? We evolve our culture around our language. For us, water is…" He struggled to find the right synonym.

  "Currency?" she suggested. She thought of the dry spells from where her grandmother had once lived, where she said people spoke their names through cracked lips. The drought had caused the exodus―or The Flood―of people that left their homes and moved to the centre of the country in an attempt to hedge the dryness. But Tyler had also learned about the other sections of the planet that had gone underwater and were never to be seen again. "A threat?" she added, still thinking of the meaning of water. When Josh pulled out the chair next to him, she didn't have to think twice before sitting down.

  "Exactly. Water's currency and a threat. It’s double-sided to us now. But before then, people used to love the water. The ocean. All of it. That's what I think this poem is about. There are too many happy words like dance. This is a celebration. See?"

  His fingers went over the words battarla and brilima, but she was still focused on krish-krish. This was water―or waves, as he put it in his translation. Sea, rivers, oceans. The synonyms piled up like the Tower of Babel in her mind.

  "I like it," she said. "Tell me more, if you can."

  "Well, these people loved the water. The poem is about a lost civilization."

  "How do you know they're lost? They could have moved."

  "No. Impossible." He pointed to krish-krish again. "This poem was found underwater in a glass case. That's how I know they're a lost civilization. The way they speak about water is different, but also with enough foresight, if that makes sense. They probably watched the whole disaster happen. They had enough time to write this down and preserve it. You only preserve what you think you're going to lose, and you only dwell on happy times―the dancing―if you're worried i
t won't last."

  Tyler nodded, considering this. Her grandmother had been her only link to the world outside her own mind, and even then, her grandmother had clearly survived. She made it into the centre of the city, where life was restructured after the disaster. The solar panels were put in, vertical farming happened, and places like the Tristero Library's rare book collection were established, and kept under lock and key. Her grandmother had survived, so she could tell her story and change the details if she wanted to. They had never been written down, so they weren't history―not like this poem was.

  Tyler's eyes focused in on another word and the long blank space in the translated poems. "What's this mean?"

  "That's the section I'm trying to figure out." He picked up a book from the several in his pile and held the cover up to her. "This is a novel from about the same time period. I translated the word clockwork from this book, since clockwork pieces need steam. But no one has made this connection before, so my supervisor wants more information. More context."

  "How do you know it's connected?"

  "It has to be," he said, sincere and adamant. "You can't have steam without water. They go together. So I'm looking through the old language and seeing if I can piece together the evolution of a word. Seeing if I can fill in the missing blanks through the ending."

  "How do you do that?"

  He smiled, then turned around the chart he had been drawing and redrawing. The word Kribright was at the centre of the page with several lines drawn off of it to form several new derivatives. Then, on the other half of the page was the term Mermaid. Sirens, harpies, brownies and sprites followed. Tyler watched as sirens and sprites soon formed into something similar to kribright on the page after many, many transitions.

  "There is never a quick and easy swap," Josh explained. "Translating is always a creative process, where I'm basically rewriting the poem to make sense for our language, using the idioms and expressions these people used. It's harder this way, rather than dumping it into a translation bot online, but this is what I'm paid for."

  "To write poetry?"

  "To rewrite poetry, translate it from one experience to the next. All words have history, you know? Even his library―the Tristero. That sounds like its French word triste, meaning sadness, but it's also Welsh for noise and clatter. Like these books are full of sound, rather than sadness, when left alone."

  "I think I like the second meaning more," Tyler said. Her supervisor at work, Crispin, had always joked about this being The Sad Library. She thought he had meant the students and professors who wandered the stacks, but now she saw the other meaning.

  "Yeah me too," Josh said before his cheeks were tinged with red. "And then there's your name."

  "My name?" She smiled. "Tell me more."

  "Years ago, it used to be a boy's name meaning door keeper. But time changes the meaning of names as much as words. Culture always deviates towards women taking men's names, and not the other way around. In a way, it shows how being a man is getting harder and harder to define by one word alone."

  "You're doing well," she said, then realized how it sounded out of her mouth. Black and blue, a bruise. When he looked away, she wondered if she had completely broken the conversation in two, and it was no longer like the symmetry in her mind.

  "I'm sorry. I didn't mean anything by that. Sometimes―"

  "No, it's fine. I think I'm just used to talking about poems, not about me. Even all the authors are lost."

  "You seem interesting, though."

  "I'm not an author. I'm an archivist."

  "That's still something," she said. "It has to be."

  He glanced up at her, his dark brows knitted suspiciously. She could see a faint scar under his lip from where a piercing had been, or perhaps an augmented reality placement. He opened his mouth, but didn't get to say anything aloud before the intercom crackled in purple.

  "Hello Patrons. The Tristero Library will be closing in another fifteen minutes. Please bring all items you are not done with to the front, where we will keep them on reserve for you until tomorrow morning. Thank you."

  From the corner of her eye, Tyler saw Crispin wander out from the desk, in search of her. "I have to go."

  "Oh, of course. I understand." Josh smiled and pulled his notebook back. "Thanks, by the way. For the paper."

  "Anytime." She lingered, even as Crispin wandered the aisle closer to her. Josh picked up his bag, leaving the top undone so the security guards at the front could make sure he wasn't taking anything out. They protected the libraries better than the banks now, Tyler knew. At the end of the day, all the books were gathered and locked up tightly. As much of a hassle as it was, she could understand a little better now why it was so important.

  When Tyler was a girl, she thought the reason people locked the books up at night was because the letters could walk off the page. That the letters had their own life. When she told her grandmother this, her grandmother had told her the story of The Tower of Babel.

  "The word fell at the same time the world fell. When we get too proud of our progress, someone needs to remind us to stop and listen to one another," she had said, rocking in her chair. "It's why people speak different languages. It's why we need translation. The Tower of Babel falling was a punishment, but it's a good thing, really."

  "Why?"

  "Because unity is boring. I like the difference, even if it takes a while to understand."

  "But what if you can't find yourself?" Tyler asked. "If everyone can't understand each other, how can you know your own name?"

  "You think a lot, Ty."

  She nodded. This had not been the first time as a child she had been told this. As her grandmother shifted in the rocking chair, a casual blue tick-tick-tick of the wood against the floor appeared in Tyler's line of vision.

  "You think a lot, and that's good. But so is forgetting. I know you can't have one without the other though. Eventually, the people after Babel recovered. They learned to understand one another. You can only forget something you already know, right? You have to learn to listen before you can forget."

  Tyler tilted her head. For her, listening involved seeing as much as anything else, and she was at a loss of how to ignore that. But she had curled up near her grandmother and nodded that she was right.

  When Tyler grew up, she realized she wasn't the only person who saw letters the way she did. Not as walking entities, but different colours. Music, sounds, and voices were also coloured to her―sometimes like a rainbow or a firework, but sometimes like a black fog that followed her. Synaesthesia. She had found the word while visiting the library, and she read about herself the rest of the night.

  After that, she knew where she wanted to work.

  Tyler wondered what the word synaesthesia meant as she walked home from The Tristero Library. What was its history and its cultural weight? When she learned about it, she applied the word to herself. But words had lives just as much as she did, and she was curious about synaesthesia's biography as she walked home.

  Maybe I'll ask Josh. Maybe.

  Past the water reserve, Tyler walked up the green Day-Glo coloured stairs of her apartment building. Everything was dry here, so dry that all paper had to be locked away in glass cases, and everything else had to be covered in cement. After gulping down her sanction water allotment, Tyler found her old record player and plugged it in. The sounds from vinyl had more texture, and she wanted to lose herself in them tonight. As she sat in the centre of the floor, the music around her like a cloud, and she kept thinking of Josh. Of the sea, and the krish-krish of the waves.

  When she finally fell asleep, she dreamed.

  CHAPTER TWO

  In her dreams, a man and a woman sat across from one another at a table. They both wore loose clothing, a little better than rags and brighter in colour. His hair was dark and curly; she was a blonde. Maybe twenty years old, maybe thirty. It was hard to tell, especially when these people were not recognizable to Tyler. She knew them―they were fami
liar, in the same way old photos of her grandmother before she was married were―without actually being able to place their faces. The home looked different as well. The furniture more rustic, the paint on the wall peeling, and the outlets three-pronged, not like the simple jacks they had now.

  A dark pot of tea sat between them. The room was empty other than their table and bodies facing one another. They didn't speak for a long, long time―but they understood one another. Tyler, though not present inside her dream, could feel these people's thoughts in the same way she heard sounds. Pressing. Urgent. And visible before her eyes. Each time these people met gazes, each time their hands brushed as they gripped the teacups, the redness of those pressing thoughts was diluted to a pink calm in Tyler's field of vision.

  They loved one another, Tyler understood. It was as simple then as it could be now.

  Rain pelted against a tin roof, making small purple pricks of light appear next to the diluted pink. As the man got up and looked out the window, the colour palette changed. Tyler felt like she was watching TV again, and the sounds' colours were external to the sounds themselves. When she was younger, she thought everyone had synaesthesia because they could all watch TV or movies in theatres without a problem. In theatres, the sound came from speakers, not from the film, but people assumed it came from the actor's mouth. The film reel given to projectionists was actually a silent movie; only if the speakers were on at the same time did everything go as it was supposed to. Even if it isn't perfect, Tyler realized, our brains and minds try their best to force-sync what we've been given. Our brains will always fill in the blanks of what we miss, until things are completely beyond repair.

  The same force-sync happened in Tyler's dreams. Only now the sounds she saw were caused by her synaesthesia and her brain's determination to have the world make sense. Flattened like on a TV screen, the world became an abstract painting. Sometimes, when she was younger, she'd mute the TV (when they had a TV) to see what kind of painting she had in the negative space. While watching superheroes―they were her favourite, because of all the colours―she could see the neon palette by cartoonists over her menagerie of sensations. Pause, un-mute, pause and mute again. She would sit there for hours, watching the same film, but coming up with new compositions.