In search of deep time
As soon as I got news that the lockdown was being lifted, I started making preparations. I had to find a place to stay out and a driver who’d be willing to take me right up to the edge of the EZ. I also had to stock up on gear — a spare breather, a spare suit and boots, a portable decon tube. I ran the expenses by Sarah and she ok’ed them. I mean, obviously she ok’ed them. How could I do my investigation if I couldn’t go snoop around where her husband vanished — or at least where he said he headed when he vanished?
I was lucky to even get a seat on this train. They run once a day every two or three days and everything’s booked weeks ahead of time. Luckily my neighbor from upstairs knew a guy who knew a guy who knew the conductor who could sell me a seat for triple the price. If it weren’t for him, I would have had to wait weeks to get down there. So…here I am, sitting on what used to be a high-speed train as it moves south at no more than 60 miles per hour.
I look around the cabin. Every little spot is filled with bodies — standing, squatting, sitting cross-legged, stretched out flat in the aisle in pairs, surrounded by their bags and luggage. My car is probably double the capacity of prewar times, and the cooling units can’t keep up with so many bodies. So everyone is sweating, their faces red under their breathers. I have a window seat, but that’s not much of an extra luxury. Sitting quietly and watching the world outside as it serenely slides by…it was always one of my favorite things about taking a train. But that experience is gone now. The windows are permanently welded shut with metal plates to keep out the rads. There is a small monitor hanging above the center aisle provided as consolation. It’s supposed to give us a live video feed of the outside world, but it’s broken — just gray and red static dancing horizontally across its screen. What’s out there? Mostly empty land with patches of flimsy warehouse-type structures. Greenhouses and agricultural settlements growing corn, rice, beans, soy, oats, kale, chickens, pigs… We were on the outskirts of Gilroy, once the garlic capital of the world. Not sure if they still grew garlic, but they sure still produced a lot of produce — all under cover from the rads.
The woman next to me has been sleeping for the last hour, snoring so loudly that the vibration made her breather slip off her nose. She has a stack of papers fanned out on the foldout desk in front of her that she had been annotating — charts, drawings of buildings, and various compounds. I can’t make out the text, but they’re engineering or architectural drawings of some kind…plans for development, I’m guessing. Lots of development is happening out in the Central Valley…even out on the southern edges where I was headed. It’s where the center is now — uncontaminated underground water, food, oil, and gas…it was all here. The valley is truly central…more central than it ever was. Across the aisle is a youngish couple. The woman is also sleeping, and the man has a bubble baby carrier on his lap — all sealed up under a clear dome to keep the dust out. The father’s been tapping the plastic and wiggling his index finger, playing with the infant inside. I’ve been watching him for the half hour, imagining the baby gurgling and laughing and blowing spit bubbles inside his little dome, and wondering about the kind of deformities they might have. You don’t see too many small children these days. Most miscarry, and most of those that don’t come out wrong. With organs outside their bodies, malformed hearts and kidneys, leathery skin like a lizard, they don’t survive long with the nonexistent medical system. But maybe this is one of the lucky ones — maybe they’ve beaten the odds. Some do. Watching them, I remember how lucky I am that Eve left California before the war. I was angry and bitter when Jenny left me and took Eve away with her. I felt betrayed and robbed. No, I see it as a divine act. It’s hard not to believe in a higher power when something like that miraculous happens. It’s like sleeping past your alarm and missing your flight only by a few minutes and to find out it crashed.
I have four hours to kill until we get to Bakersfield. I might as well put my thoughts and notes in order…
The day after the raid on Richmond, the city announced that it would be lifting the lockdown in two days’ time. It was great news. Everyone thought we’d be locked down for weeks, but the storm didn’t travel as the models predicted. As it approached the coast, a high-pressure system pushed it north into Oregon and British Columbia and we got spayed with only the outer fringes of the hurricane system. A bit of elevated rads, but nothing out of the ordinary. I didn’t have much to do, being on lockdown as I was, so I was determined to get to the bottom of this 613laws.com forum mystery.
The forum was throwback to an older time — a niche destination, a place where the newly religious could hang out together, chat, interface with lifelong members of the church, get guidance on their transition to the holy life, and generally just kill time while they were sitting in some office job. Its name — 613 laws — derived from the 613 discreet laws that the rabbis of old had extracted from the Hebrew Bible, from the word of the Hebrew god as dictated to Moses on Mt. Sinai. The Bible is famously convoluted and could be difficult to parse for easy lawyerly guidance. The forum had a special page explaining the history of these laws and helpfully listed all the 613 commandments. I scanned the list, and some of them were the usual ones you’d think about — don’t murder, don’t cheat, don’t fuck your dad — but then many seemed rather dated.
For instance, laws like this:
Don’t let Moabite and Ammonite males marry into the Jewish people—Deuteronomy 23:4
Don’t keep a third generation Egyptian convert from marrying into the Jewish people—Deuteronomy 23:8-9
Don’t refrain from marrying a third generation Edomite convert—Deuteronomy 23:8-9
Don’t let a eunuch marry into the Jewish people—Deuteronomy 23:2
The High Priest must not have sexual relations with a widow even outside of marriage—Leviticus 21:14
The High Priest must marry a virgin maiden—Leviticus 21:13
etc, etc, etc…
I tried finding it online, but 613laws.com is no longer active. I’m guessing no one bothered to bring it back after the war. Why would they? Being Jewish on the internet with strangers wasn’t something you did anymore. Being openly Jewish was a liability now. The very last thing you wanted was for people to connect you to a bunch of your Jewish fanatics and the Beards. In fact, some of the laws on that list were explicitly about messiahs and the to wage an eternal crusade against Israel’s eternal enemies: the Amalek, the seven Canaanite nations…
I must say that extracting anything useful on user j__curious2011 out of that mass of threads and comments was not pleasant. Back in the day, I would’ve fed the entire site into my computer and told it to comb through the comments to extract and synthesize whatever info I needed: the user’s biography, their tastes, their political opinions, basic facts about their life… I could’ve had it compare their posts with samples of Misha’s writing to see if there was a match. It would’ve been nice to let a computer automate that for me, but that’s all gone now. Funny to think that all those AI gurus thought they were summoning into being a new god — a super machine intelligence that would operate on such a high level that we mere humans would be left in the dirt. They really thought if their AI machines, living in their massive data centers with their cooling units and their backup gas turbines, were run just right, if they were given all the data humanity had ever produced, then all those exabytes of code, whole mountains of silicon wafers running 1s and 0s, would produce an incantation…a powerful spell that would bring into being a real Machine God…or a series of Machine Gods into being. They, with their fantasies of theurgy, thinking they were working in the realm of magic and angels and demons, didn’t realize how fragile it all was. How their god was a dependent, fragile system. Cheap energy, global supply chains, complex manufacturing — if any one of those links broke down, their god would wink out of existence…their entire corpus of spells would turn into mist. So I had to go through the forum by hand — searching, reading, looking for anything useful and dumping it in a document.
What did I find? Well, I’m now convinced that j__curious2011 is Misha. It’s basically 100 percent. The bits of personal information he divulged, scattered across thousands of his comments, overlapped with his real biography. j__curious2011 identified as male. Check. He said he had three daughters, one of whom became a man. Check. He lived in somewhere in the East Bay. Check. He worked as a programmer. Check. At some point in his career, he made enough money to retire if he wanted. Check. He was born in Azerbaijan. Check. He moved to California with his parents as a child. Check. I could go on and on, but why? This was my man.
As I waded through his output, it quickly became obvious that Misha was very active on the forum. He was there at all hours — sometimes leaving dozens of comments in a single day. The stuff he wrote had a wide range — he’d discuss movies and books, trade kosher recipes, seek advice on various family issues. “My wife’s not taking this seriously. She says I’m into it because I’m bored and have nothing better to do and that I need to come out of my semi-retirement and go back to work. She just thinks this is yet another of my hobbies — like kitesurfing and paragliding,” he wrote shortly after joining the forum. He was anonymous on the forum, but he was surprisingly candid about his life, dropping information about himself and his family that would, to a careful observer, make it easy to reverse engineer his real-world identity. But Misha clearly needed the outlet. He was going through a crisis, and his fellow forum members were his crutch…his support group. He himself understood that he was going through a transformation — “a reorientation in my moral universe,” he called it — and wrote about it often.
“I have a wife and three children. I’ve done everything a father, a husband and a son should do. I have always had an unwavering commitment to providing for my family. I’ve always wanted to ensure their well-being and to secure a prosperous future for my children, and I have. My children don’t have to worry about making a living. They can do whatever they want to pursue their passions. I love my wife and have many friends. We travelled all the time. I’ve long been passionate about sports. I sail, run marathons, and I’ve summited Everest… By all external measures, I should have been content and happy,” he wrote about two years before the war. “And I was happy, or at least I thought I was happy. Everything changed for me when I took my early retirement. I was burned out and just wanted to spend time with my family — to be at home, to cook breakfast, to drive my youngest daughter to school, to read her bedtime stories. You know, just simple things. But something didn’t click…something wasn’t right. I don’t know how to describe it. My family felt like strangers to me. I felt no connection to them. None of my daughters thought that I had anything to say of value. My wife had her own life, her own business, her own girlfriends, her exercise routine, and her personal trainers. I loved them and still do, but there was this gradual realization of emptiness.”
I’ll keep publishing bits of RADIANCE as the novel progresses.
Read previous chapters here.
“I started wondering why and thought about my parents and my grandparents and their grandparents and the kinds of lives they led and the kind of values they had,” he wrote in another comment. “Most of my family is from what’s known as Ukraine today. My ancestors had lived in their little shtetls in the region for centuries or even possibly a thousand years, depending on what history you believe. For most of that history, they lived, as they no doubt saw it, with timeless traditions. My great-grandfather lived much the same way that his great-grandfather lived and that his great-grandfather’s grandfather lived. And their values and daily rituals went back even deeper than that, back to right after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem. That’s what? Almost 2,000 years? Now that’s something. My own way of life? This modern way of life that I live as a corporate professional in the Bay Area? For my own family, it began about a hundred years ago, when the Bolsheviks did their revolution and started industrializing and did their anti-religion/anti-tradition thing. We Jews moved to the cities, and because Jews, unlike Russian or Polish or Ukrainian peasants, could read and write, Jews immediately rose through the ranks into various white-collar professions: teachers, engineers, civil servants. Like everyone else in the world, we got torn out of our tradition and into modernity. Most Jews supported it, too. They supported joining modernity. They supported integrating into the undifferentiated modernist mass of humanity. They were tired of being discriminated against. They were tired of being the other. They wanted to be just like everyone else. It happened here and in Europe, too. It happened everywhere. But what did it really mean? What were our new values? What are my values? I’m not sure anymore. I’m an engineer, and I’ve always believed in science and rationality and in efficiency and technological progress. But why did I believe in these things, and what did they really mean? To extend our lifespans by a few years? To make ourselves look younger than we really are? To have cars that drive you around? For what? So I can flatter myself looking in the mirror? So I can be more effortlessly entertained? So that I can spend more time kitesurfing and perfecting my tail flip? ”
He was stuck on this bit — that he had been ripped away from his true identity…that modernity had robbed him of something vital. “I began to think about the kinds of lives that my ancestors led,” Misha continued in another comment. “Their beliefs and their connection to the past and things like that and I realized how much power that gave them. They had these deep roots while mine were barely there. It was like they were an old oak tree in a forest, their roots intermingling with other plants and trees. And I? I felt like I was some tiny potted plant, forever isolated from the world. I realized that I’m the aberration. This secular life of mine is the aberration. My great-grandfather lived like a pious Jew as did his father and his father and his father and his father before him. They were all connected to each other. Their lives had meaning…it was rooted in something bigger than them. And what was I doing? What did I believe? Creating an efficient world managed by computer algorithms? Making sure my daughters went to Harvard so they could work for a Fortune 500 company and make even more money? These aren’t real values. No wonder my daughters didn’t respect me or think I had anything to offer.”
A corporate guy in his late forties with a midlife crisis alienated from his work and family, wondering what it was all about, turning to religion — it was all rather mundane. A lot of people were doing it back then, before the war, especially the rich. People like Misha were living at the pinnacle of everything modernity had to offer. Every pleasure and convenience was available. Perfect teeth, the best concierge medical care, the best chefs cooking for you in your own kitchen. They could go anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice. They could take up any hobby and hire any instructor. They could go yachting or helicopter skiing on pristine mountains inaccessible to all but 0.00001 percent of humanity. Pretty much every whim could be satisfied at the press of a button. The nicest cars, the most beautiful prostitutes, the best hormones and plastic surgery to make over the hill types feel like young bucks or nubile girls. If you were bored with being a man, you could swap out your genitals and become a woman. If you were a woman, you could become a man. New tits. New dicks. All was available. It was like having a real magic wand. And yet, more and more people were miserable. People needed something more. So Misha wasn’t some aberration. His attraction to religious fundamentalism wasn’t just some Jewish thing, either. In the years leading up to the war, it was almost universal. You could sense people groping for something beyond this boring hedonism, something beyond the self, for something authentic and timeless. Protestants became Catholics, thinking that Catholicism offered a deeper, more real Christianity. Catholics became Eastern Orthodox, thinking that it offered an older, truer faith. Atheists became Muslims. Sunni became Shia. Shia became Zoroastrians. Urban dwellers became small farmers. Career women became stay-at-home moms. And secular Jews raised in a multicultural urban environment became the most die-hard religious zionists, dreaming they were part of a nation that stretched back into the mists of time…back to Moses and Abraham.
Whatever your particular faith or total lack of faith — that wasn’t the issue. It didn’t matter if you were Jewish, Christian, Muslim, secular, agnostic — that superficial identity carried little meaning. The unifying identity was whether you lived in a fully industrialized society. And if you were…you were in the grips of the same atavistic crisis. Whether you admitted it to yourself or not, you were in the search of a timeless tradition. It was like having gone as far as it could go; modernity found itself in retreat on all fronts. It had conquered too much too fast, blitzkreiged across the globe, destroying all that had come before without anyone really realizing what it was doing…that when this progress began to sputter and stall, people looked around and realized they stood in a barren wasteland devoid of meaning or purpose or any connection to the past. And so we all began to desire a regression to a primitive formation, using whatever mix of ideas and ideologies we had at hand. Blood and soil nationalism, religion, the way that our parents lived, paganism — people flocked to whatever promised to fill the void…whatever promised to tap into these fantasies of deep time. So Misha’s religious turn wasn’t so surprising. He was normal that way. Still, though, his posts on the forum revealed some patterns that deviated from the norm. He didn’t just join a synagogue for the sociality of it..for the connection to an institution older than himself. He had mystical visions. He was, he thought, beginning to pierce the veil of reality.
A year or so after he joined the forum, he started writing frequently about his vivid dreams — dreams that took him into the past. He was studying intensely with his rabbi now, learning Hebrew, pouring over the Talmud, keeping kosher, doing the daily prayers…and all this triggered something in him.
“I had a variation of the same dream again,” he wrote. “I’m looking through the eyes of a man, like I usually do. This time I found myself looking at a muddy village. The man is walking through a street, although it’s hard to call it a street. More like a muddy path with a field on one side and shacks and hovels on the other. There are chickens running everywhere and several cows out in the distance. A group of boys ran past me, barefoot, laughing, playing some sort of game with a wooden stick. A group of women in long dresses huddling together, walking the other direction. I’m just walking somewhere. It feels like summer. The sun is bright and I can feel the sweat on my brow. It’s very similar to the dream I had just a few days ago with the same first-person POV. In that one, I was inside a home that was really no more than a hovel with a single room with a crude bed and table. It was dark. But I could see a woman in a long skirt and shawl in the corner cooking and holding a newborn and I could hear a foreign language being spoken. I think it was this woman, who I guess was my wife, talking to me. I think it was Yiddish.”
I found other posts where he talks about these dreams. At first, he thinks this is maybe just his imagination being fired up by his intense Jewish study. But he also begins to wonder if in fact what he’s seeing is something more. The dreams aren’t recurrent but they are similar and he keeps saying how in his dreams he’s inhabiting the same body, looking out through the same eyes, interacting with the same characters in the same little village. “It’s like I’m being teleported into the past. I feel like I’m looking in on a real life, one that had either happened in the past or was happening right with us,” he wrote in one thread.
Some of his forum dwellers criticized him for hubris, told him to discuss it with his rabbi because it is a sin to make yourself a false prophet.
“These kinds of mystical visions are only reserved for the sages…for the wise men who have spent their entire lives studying the hidden knowledge. You only started going to shul a year ago!” one user chastised him.
“I know,” Misha replied. “I don’t know what to say. I’m just being honest here, describing my experiences. Maybe I’m going crazy. I don’t know. ”
With time, though, his dreamscape changes. And he begins to go deeper into Jewish history. About a week before the war and before his postings stop, he describes a series of dreams in which he sees through the eyes of a man living in ancient hilltop village. “In one dream, I saw through the eyes of someone trekking along a stony path surrounded by pines and limestone cliffs. He’s holding a staff, and in front and to the left and right of him are little groups of sheep, bleating and kicking up dust. In another, I was again on a narrow stony path walking but now among a group of people in these long flowing garments. We crossed a stream and then a hill opened up in front of us and it was a big yellow structure. It was all snatched and bits. A pageant of priests with their flowing robes and strange headdress and jewels and dusty crowds pulling their animals along and clutching birds to their chests. I’m guessing this was the Temple. I’m sure you guys are going to pile on here but I’m convinced these are no ordinary dreams. I don’t know how to describe it. I think they are closer to visions. I’m convinced I’m seeing…I don’t know. Am I seeing parallel historical time? Or am I seeing the past? Is this some kind of genetic memory that I’ve been unlocking with my study? Or what the sages termed kefitzat haderech, a bending of space-time? I know it sounds crazy. But I feel more connected to the world than I have ever been.”
Ten days after he wrote these words, the Beards launched their nukes and poisoned the world. They too existed in deep time, convinced they were on the cusp of a new eternal age.