Singularity

Ok, I’ve got you wondering. Am I writing about the pre-Big-Bang, dimensionless speck of concentrated matter, comprising everything that is now the universe? I know, I know, I go off at tangents. Explore all avenues of meaning instead of just stick to the point and get on with the story. I’m sure it’s my OCD. It runs in the family. OCD, that is, not exploring all avenues. Although that’s what got me into the events I have to write about now.

This isn’t about Professor Stephen Hawking’s singularity. It’s about my singularity of habit, which I thought I picked up from my father, when I first went exploring. I picked up quite a lot of my emotional baggage from my father. I’m trying to deal with that.

I’m not supposed to talk about it, let alone write, and especially not to outsiders, but it doesn’t really matter now. I’m so near the end of my time that no-one who hears me rambling will take such a crazy old woman seriously, and anyone reading this will think it’s just fiction, a short story on an amateur writers’ website.

All of us followed the Ritual, and we were all Guardians of the Moment. Few stopped to consider the dark, perverse nature of their Guardianship. Unless, of course, they were Activated. But that happened to only a vanishingly tiny few of us. So few that no two who chanced to meet, even if both were, like me, intimately familiar with the esoterica of our shared predicament, could possibly have both experienced the empty, damning finality of Activation and its consequences.

It happened to me. I was Activated. After dozens of uneventful iterations, I was activated; I fulfilled the last part of the Ritual, and that is how I came to know. Now, I long for nothing save the oblivion of death, which cannot come too soon. I do not think I shall have to wait for long.

Late in the eleventh of my ninety-seven summers on this Earth, I followed my father down to the folly. I live in quite a large house. There’s just me, now, and my faithful, small staff, who have kept me going so far and I can surely count on until I’m gone. Seventy-nine of Harthwaite Hall’s eighty-five rooms are mothballed; the other six are home to my carers and me. I have memories of those mothballed rooms. The memories are dim, and unwelcome. In a big house like ours, with so many lonely, isolated rooms, anything can happen. The house dates from the sixteenth century. Queen Elizabeth the First used to visit quite often.

The folly is a pretty, ornamental outbuilding with a portico and faux Greek columns, angled to catch the first rays of the midsummer sunrise. Before dawn on Wednesday 21st June, 1939, my father, the fourteenth Earl of Harthwaite, rose from his bed and trod the dewy lawn, down toward the folly. Until I saw him, striding purposefully over the ground, I had not known why I had awoken so early. I had felt an irresistible compulsion to leave the warmth and comfort of my bed and go over to the tall, curtained window. My room faced the long lawn and, when I parted the heavy drapes and gazed outward, my eye was instantly drawn to his tall, lean, receding frame, strikingly familiar, even in the grey half-light.

I am not a conspiracy theorist. I consider such people narcissistic crackpots, who are convinced the world not only knows about them but has a dastardly plan against them that only the conspirators and their intended victim know about. Yet, as I held back that heavy, carpet-scented curtain and watched my father’s progress, I knew that my waking and my presence here were not accidental.

I found the folly empty. I thought at first that he had simply walked straight through and out the other side, until I saw the door standing open in the corner. The door to the stairs, that led down to the folly’s lower level. It was usually locked.

He must be down there.

Holding my breath, I started down the stairs, blinking to get my eyes accustomed to the gloom. I knew there was only a small space down there. Reaching the lower floor, I knew two things. My father was not here. The warmth of his presence was absent. But he had been here, very recently. There was an intangible trace of him on the air, just like the familiar smell of his jacket hanging on the hall peg back at the house, or the smell he so often left on the sheets of my little bed.

As my eyes adapted, the next thing I saw was the book, lying open on the floor. I moved closer. Even in that impossibly dim light, I could see the symbols on the page were no alphabet that I had ever seen. Yet, I had a strong sense that those letters were saying, “This is not for you to read. Not yet.” I don’t know how I knew that, but I did.

The next thing I remember is the wave of fatigue. My eyelids were suddenly heavy weights. A child alone in a dark, isolated place might have been expected to be wide awake, drowsiness banished by trepidation and fear of the shadows. Perhaps it was the smell of dad, so familiar from bed sheets and laundry, or maybe my early start had caught up with me. I must have curled myself into a ball and dozed off, for my next recollection was of being lowered into the cool sheets of my own bed by my father’s strong arms, like so many times before, murmuring my oft-repeated thanks, sinking back into the sanctuary of my interrupted sleep.

I never mentioned that morning adventure, and neither did my father, until many years later. He had grown old by then, as I have now, and those midsummer jaunts down to the folly, recorded in my patchy, troubled memories of my dad as a good and constant man, were growing harder and harder for him, as were his other activities, that I don’t care so much to recall. That’s not something I have to worry about, for I am released now, having been Activated and carried out my duty. But as my father lay back in his chair and fixed my young adult self with his clear, grey eyes, he said something I shall never forget.

“Janie, you know that overwhelming feeling of relief that you get, when you wake up from a dreadful nightmare and realise it didn’t really happen, or when you’ve just got through a dangerous moment, like nearly falling off your bike, and you’re thanking your stars that you’re safe? That’s a completely false sense of security, Janie. The second one, anyway.”

I must have looked puzzled. He continued. “I mean, when you have a near miss and you realise you’re safe after all, you’re actually not. So, so not. I’m sorry to have to tell you that. But I must. And there’s more. There’s something else I have to share with you. Something I am duty bound to pass on. I think now is the right time. You look afraid. Don’t be. It’s OK. You can do it, as I have, for all these years, since my mother passed it on to me.”

My father told me of the night his mother, on her death bed, had given him the Book - the one I had seen in the folly - and had explained to him the Ritual: the responsibility he must bear for almost the remainder of his life, until the time would come to pass on the baton to another. This time, the present, now. To me.

Those solstice walks to the folly were part of the Ritual. My father had duly inherited, from his mother, the Guardianship of the Moment, and as he explained it to me, my whole view of the world changed. Just about all I had thought I knew of the world crumbled around and beneath me, as I learned of the universe’s grand plan for my future, from the lips of a man I would always love with all my heart, but whom I now realised I had never really known.

You see, those scary moments we all have in our lives - those times when we might have died, or been horribly injured - are not safely locked in the past. We think those dangers have lost their power, and are harmless once the moment has passed. They are not. They are real, and present, and horribly dangerous.

Every one of those life-or-death Moments has a Guardian. More accurately, a series of Guardians, each handing over the vigil to their successor at the appointed time. The Guardian is bound to give an hour or so of his or her time, once in every one of those time periods they perceive as a year, to visit the Moment in case they are Activated. Visiting the Moment is accomplished by following the Ritual, as outlined in the Book. The Book, my father explained, was written in an ancient language that only a Guardian can read. Outsiders who gaze upon the book see only meaningless symbols, while Guardians in Waiting see shapes and patterns they believe are unintelligible, but they receive a strong subliminal message that the Book is not meant for them, until some future time.

The role of an Unactivated Guardian is to preserve and maintain the outcome of their Moment, at each annual iteration of the Ritual. Should a Guardian be Activated - the Book will make clear if that is the case - then the role of the Guardian is reversed, and that becomes their final involvement, releasing them and their descendants forever from the burden of Guardianship. An Activated Guardian must intervene, and change the outcome of the Moment.

With horror, I realised, before my father had finished explaining, exactly what he had meant about ongoing, horrible danger. Those narrow escapes - the ones we think we got away with, and lie buried safely in the past - are not escapes at all. Our deliverance is merely temporary, and can be taken away at any time. I had a glimpse of Schrödinger’s poor cat, in its closed box next to a phial of cyanide and a quantum outcome generator, existing in a superposition of living and dead states. So hung the fate of everyone who had ever come through a close shave and thought themselves lucky.

I felt numb as I realised I had no choice but to take on the Moment that my father had Guarded until this night. Every midsummer, he had gone down to the folly, opened the Book and been transported to his special Guarded Moment, where he had ensured the subject came to no harm, year after year, until now, my time to take over.

My father died that night. He fell asleep in his chair, and never awoke. At the time, I was surprised at myself, that I didn’t cry, nor grieve more. I took on my inherited duty with, I hope, stoical acceptance. Summer after summer, I rose early on midsummer’s morning and walked down to the folly, where I opened the Book and read the words whose meaning was now so very clear. Roughly translated, they say, “Guard well this Moment, Constancy be well preserved, till time shall end, while Activation pend.” Reading those words aloud took me, every 21st June, back to my Moment.

Until I was Activated, I never saw the face of the man whom I must now think of as my Victim. The Book told me, that day, that his Outcome must change, or he would go on to do terrible things that would destroy the lives of many. The location was the fantail of a navy frigate, in choppy waters. I have no way to know the location, nor the ship’s flag or port of origin. She was a grey-painted war vessel, I am sure. She didn’t look modern. I had the impression from the comments of the crew (references to Commies and Japs) that she was a 1940s boat, and her crew were on manoeuvres as part of the Cold War. Every iteration, I stood by and watched him ride the wave that hit, grab for the sea-slippery rail, lose his grip, almost fall into the foaming waves, saving himself by jamming his fingers into the bars of the fantail. It would take just one well-placed boot on those wandering hands to condemn him to the sea.

Steeling myself, feeling as grey as the waves and the ship’s paint, I brought my foot down on the man’s groping fingers. In that Moment, I felt every one of those Gropes from my suppressed past, right through to the core of my being. The man’s eyes met mine, and I recognised him. He was a twenty-something image of my Father.

I guess I have been allowed to persist this long as a form of compensation. I mean, I should not exist at all, since I killed my own father, through his and my Ritual, at a time before he had married my mother and they had produced me. I guess someone, somewhere decided that I deserved a long post-abuse life of safe serenity, which I have most certainly had. They made an exception for me and I am grateful for that.

The next time you have a near miss, please say a prayer for me.