Ogranisms

My name is Gladys Fellowes. My kid brother’s name is Titus. I’m aware of the lexical fondness our parents had for names which sound like medical conditions, and I always tell folks they are allowed one joke. I used to always say that to a fresh class of seminarians, at the beginning of each academic year-one.

  Just prior to his unexplainable passing in autumn, Titus had won an auction on a property in Asheville, North Carolina. See, my brother was given to an addictive personality, one which, you could say, rewarded high-stakes gambling with the penultimate dopamine fix. His real estate flipping was, I always knew, never a display of ethics. The Beaucatcher Observatory was his firm’s last acquisition. The Beaucatcher Observatory in Asheville; situated atop a prized piece of Blue Ridge mountain real estate, this-observatory, was mired in controversy almost from its construction in 1912. 

It was built by the business magnate and philanthropist Edwin Grove. The stone house stands reminiscent more of a lone castle tower than a house proper. Grove had it built for his friend and former business partner, Frank Sayles. Both men were widowers. Grove’s wife-and daughter-had tragically succumbed to malaria, while Sayles lost his young spouse to tuberculosis. Regardless of Grove’s motives for building the stone home, it would not stay in his friend’s possession for long. Grove had remarried; but Sayles never did. If Grove had hoped to renew a bond of business venturing with his widower friend, it would never happen. In 1924, Sayles sold the home, hardly lived in, to a prominent newspaper man named Addison Aylestock. 

This was the character who had the 72 inch telescope built and mounted atop the slender stone house. The merlons surrounding the home became the elbow-props for stargazing on the Aylestock refractory. It was on a winter night in 1925, I think it was; that two guests threw themselves to their deaths. From the 63 foot tall tip of the merlons, to the banks of Beaucatcher Mountain the man and woman fell. They went silently; without incident, simply- jumping. Of the eighteen-odd party goers present, ten were atop by the telescope to witness the apparent double suicide. Doubtlessly these get-togethers hosted by Aylestock were cocktail parties, and it’s quite fair to assume that if not drunk, many of the guests had been drinking. Aylestock himself was in the billiard room down below, with two others, when screams began erupting.

  The explanation that most amuses me, I think, was one offered by the Asheville Citizen shortly after the bizarre tragedy. It posited that the girl, a young mother in fact, had been stricken with a ‘postpartum melancholy’ and that a bout of drunkenness was ultimately responsible. She was the daughter of a furniture tycoon from the town of Hickory. The man, who worked as editor-in-chief at the Citizen, was close to the same age as the young woman. And so, without too thorough of an investigation, it was deduced that the suicides were planned in tandem. The editor certainly could’ve been having a filthy affair behind his family’s back. Both were in their early 30’s. This was the most widely circulated explanation. Addison Aylestock never hosted anything else atop his stone home. Later that year, in 1925, he sold the home to the city of Asheville. 

From the time of its municipal ownership, the building would change hands multiple times, through multiple owners. The city had always hoped it could be utilized: either as an observatory-though Aylestock had had his famous telescope dispositioned and such a grand instrument would’ve never been in the city’s budget-a hotel or bed and breakfast; a museum, or even a private residence of a reputable family. Instead, the city would have to pay for security measures marking the 13 acres in “no trespassing” signage, fencing and a gate at the bottom of the driveway. It wasn’t until 1967 that the old Beaucatcher Observatory was bought. This time it was a real estate mogul, Hamil Freidman. Like Asheville, his firm planned on nothing more than keeping the place well-cordoned off and vacant of human life. 

Freidman died in 1989; at which point his two sons, Mark and Jeffrey, took over the Friedman firm-and acquired the real estate. It would be thirty years until a dejected Jeffrey would move with his young mistress into the Beaucatcher Observatory. This was late in 2020, and there were bigger proverbial fish to fry. No one took notice of the forgotten landmark until February of 2022, when Jeffery, who’d been alone in the home, died in an…extraordinary way. A “colossal cardiac arrest,” the Asheville Citizen had described it. Local and national news echoed the verbiage. But Freidman had commissioned his own, 78 inch refractory lens; and the telescope was riveted to the top of the overlooking manor. He’d died in his chair, looking through the telescope. 

And yet, he’d died in such uncanny, insidious means. “Extraordinary;” as worded for the delicately sensitive consumers of our age, is insulting in its crassly understated designs. See, I’m next of kin to the most recent owner, my brother Titus. I was privy to the police photographs. The face, if one could call it that, of Jeffery Freidman’s corpse, was not extraordinary. It was evil. His dying breath, whether caused by abrupt cardiac arrest or not, was from features wholly contorted by the visage of sheer evil-whether in the seen or unseen realm. 

His eyes were covered in burst vessels that looked to be from deoxygenated blood; sunken and insect-like in their black forwardness. His lower jaw was affixed; first in fatal fright, and preserved in rigormortis such that it never retracted to normalcy. I saw all of the police’s photographs before the corpse was cremated. The features, judging on what had become of his face, were lost between what I can only reckon to be a hateful bark and a horrifed grin. Freidman died from being terrified to death. “Cardiac arrest event” is such a feckless display of the materialism of our times. Titus knew this. When he moved into the Beaucatcher house in December of 2022, he was looking for fear; that sensation is at least something to feel.

I was given a peculiar document by the detectives, upon learning about Titus. I ought to explain to you what happened to Titus, so you’ll understand my urgency in moving into the observatory. My brother was found naked atop the I-240 overpass on a brutally frigid January morning in 2023. He was comatose-unwilling to speak. Unable. He died en route to the hospital, unshaken from his silence. He’d glimpsed at what mortal eyes have never been allowed to see. I know this now. Just as the “suicide duo;” just like Jeffery Freidman. But my brother…we’re so strong.

A sort of instruction manual-that’s the best way I know to describe this document my brother had lodged into his throat, while naked above the overpass; it’s covered end to end in finely articulated drawings. Directly in the center of this 36 inch long blueprint paper are black-inked anatomical figures of a human male and female. Just next to them on the left is a lion and lioness and to their right is a male and female elephant. Descending in these finely black-inked sketches leftward, the male and female couples get smaller and smaller. From dogs, to domestic house cats; to rodents, and then-an odd blotchy sketch of a magnifying glass. A dotted line about an inch long reveals a cockroach couple. Next to the left of the cockroach drawing is a male black widow. Beside him is his much larger mate; the recognizably bulbuous black widow proper. Then were sketched a pair of common houseflies, then carpenter ants, and lastly, a couple of fruit flies. Each drawing was finely inked, just as the larger animals; all drawn to about the size of the small rodents. 

Another dotted line from the fruit flies led to a microscope. Following this, another dotted line led to a cleverly sketched blob of what I could discern was a bacterial lifeform. I’m not overly familiarized with microscopic lifeforms, but I recalled my basic biology textbook drawings to understand that the hands which sketched on this manual were very learned in the field. From these cellular forms and amoebas, there was eventually another dotted line, to a drawing of a much more powerful electron microscope. Again there were expertly drawn life-things, single-celled, cells within cells. All of these cells were maintained about the same small size as the rodent sketches. Eventually, these cell sketches ended next to a dotted line, leading to a symbol of which I was completely unfamiliar. I snapped a picture of the image on my phone. What I’ve come to deduce is, this symbol was archaic; used only in alchemy. To describe it, I could say it looked at first glance somewhat like a question mark which had been drawn sideways. But, there were loops, similar to an infinity symbol; several of them-I can’t remember how many, drawn over top of the question mark-looking symbol. 

From what I could discern in my hastily conducted research, this alchemical symbol represents a sort of unknown portal. That is, the proper elements, or keys if you like, aren’t available to see further, or know better. The symbol is, I”m convinced, an ellipses relating that more must be discovered.  

Now to the right on this long list of black sketches, past the elephant couple, larger mammals were inked. A polar bear couple, a giraffe couple, a walrus couple, and then the marine mammoths: great whites, killer whales, and lastly, a gray whale couple. The ink sketched animals to the right of the humans were far fewer, ostensibly, than the smaller creatures and critters to the left. And then a dotted line from the gray whales led to a marvelously sketched massive reflector telescope. It could’ve been a sketch of the Hubble. What I spent the bulk of my time looking at was what followed the dotted line from this cosmic scope: concisely drawn shapes. They were shapes with too many angles and arcs to reasonably name. I deduced-I knew what this manual was conveying. Past these incredibly drawn shapes; all drawn to about the size of the gray whales, was a final dotted line. It ended in the same alchemical symbol of an unknown ellipses. At the top of this grand line of sketched lifeforms was a weirdly scrawled writing. I couldn’t be certain at my first appraisal of it, but it could’ve been Armenian, or Georgian; perhaps Aramaic. There was a certain sloppiness to the scrawlings, and I knew I’d have to seek some scholastic, professional consultation. I showed them to a colleague who teaches Arabic. She recognized a much more kindred script-Gregg Shorthand.

About an hour at the library, trying to decode the Shorthand only stirred in me a desperation. What was scrawled didn’t make any sense-essentially what was written were just nouns. I translated “organisms” over ten times. No places, no names-just things. Beneath the line of black-inked animal sketches were other drawings, grand in size, consisting mostly of concisely drawn shapes. I recognized them quickly to be bodies of constellations. And there was a certain sensibility which overtook me when I saw this. It was because, then I knew, that whatever had happened; whether to the adulterous couple a century ago, or to my brother-I knew this wasn’t a thing of chaos. There was a structure to the Beaucatcher Observatory. I walked out of the library and heard distant thunder, as I looked up into a blue sky.

I had no reservations, no qualms in the least, about taking over the grounds of this place. A bachelorette in her forties with a th.D; there was nothing which could hamstring the progress I’d make here. See, commissioning a glassblower to craft a 78 inch lens is strikingly cheap. It’s almost criminally too easy. I found my way down on the French Broad River, into the River Arts district, and acquired the contents of my ellipses. There was a tanner who made for me an exquisite, sumptuous cover for the pipe of the telescope. Nothing the Tatars or Turks ever embroidered could’ve matched such swirling and juxtaposing designs. 

The scope proper, crafted from iron, was built to specifications for under $3,000-I’d used blueprints I found on an online forum of a 180 year old sixty inch diameter telescope. For less than $500, the artists had installed the thing on the top of the tower, bolting it in place. I felt like a robber-baron, watching the two young men anchor and bolt the telescope into the cement of the roof. Of course none of them even asked to peer through the scope. Yet, I recognized the thirst on their faces; in their gestures. And a side of me presumes that they knew the grave gravity of what they were doing up here. They at least sensed it, in some distant nod to their being up atop a historical, inaccessible, cordoned-off place in the folds of Asheville’s hem-they sensed it by not asking me to look. I sipped my pinot grigio liberally that morning of the installation. Perhaps they knew not to ask.

And now, the list of disappointments: looking through the scope, I saw nothing that I hadn’t seen before. There was the dark blue tapestry of the night sky, and the pinholes of stars and planets, to be sure. I don’t know, really, what I expected to see through that little clear circle. I hated myself, suddenly, for the money and the expectation of this thing on top of the stone house-into which I’d rapidly moved my life. I took many looks through the eyelet. I don’t know if I expected to view some ancient godling or storied deity, or whether I sought to see a message in the stars, explaining my brother’s cause of death.

Heart attack! Heart attacks come for us earlier and earlier! Still, I couldn’t accept such an explanation for Titus. We are a hearty, red-blooded stock of Americans. Being terrified to death? Scared, to the point of dying? That’s complete bunk. Even in cases of cardiac arrest, when someone is shocked to the point of heart failure; pre-existing conditions were present. Titus was nothing if not an athlete. I spent many days up there, on the top of what had historically been called the Beaucatcher Observatory. But my disappointments would lead to understanding; to true knowledge, as disappointments so often do.

See, I understand Titus’s will to remain as he was. In his form. He saw the grander bodies. They come-they do-after you seek them long enough, with enough fierceness of determination. Peering long hours into the eye of this art, I have come to see the shapes-that’s what they appear as-impossible shapes. They are as large as the galaxies; some even larger! They are the lifeforms among us, and we’ve never even realized it! It was much the same at the discovery of microscopic cells, germs, and bacteria. A world unknownst to the waking lives of mortal, has preceded us, and will outlast us all. It’s that realization, I think, which overcomes so many of us-even my brother, stout as he was in life. It’s terrifying, at first, to let them-to whom we are like single-celled dots, begin to change us. We do this to cellular life all the time. We genetically engineer animals to better sustain us. Cottage industries of processed vitamins, elements-living things-we use it all to our advantage. And, for the advantage of all things in existence. 

Why should it be so different when the things up in the skies-things we can hardly begin to comprehend-why should we resist letting them tinker? It’s cowardly, in a way, to resist being changed because of your own will. There is a true gauntlet of courage required, I’ve come to see, in letting yourself become modified by the forces beyond you. Oh, but when you surrender…

I’ve become, I sense in a way, something akin to nightmare fodder for the feeble-minded: the Jeffery Friedma-the flapper and dapper from a cocktail party. If you looked at pictures of me, from my life, and compared them to me now? Well now, right now, I can drag my fingers down from my smile to the ends of my dimpled chin. This task, it takes a while. I can bring up my hand, to where my eyes formerly were; all the way to the line of my hair at my forehead. I am still, unfortunately, a person. I haven’t yet been modified to anything higher. I’m a-human-and there is no deviating from this truth. But, seeing myself in the light of the divine scope, I can see my own transformation for the grand purpose required by the divine. Even now, hearing the screams of these untouched, unaffected souls; I know that I present to them the fulness of humankind. In my face, appropriately three feet long, at least; eyeless. All of the human race will be made flawless like me in my tapering, far-reaching fingers.