Korridorium

♫ The Birth of the GraviPhone ♫

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123/398

I enter the corridor leading to Professor Ceril’s laboratory. It’s made of a gleaming, silvery material that flows in curved shapes: no sharp edges or right angles. The professor claims that walking contemplatively down this corridor gets him in the zone for his work, heightens his concentration, and deeply inspires him. I don’t notice any of that. Instead, I slip on the uneven floor and go sprawling. It echoes as if someone had struck a giant Chinese gong. Luckily, I didn’t hurt myself too badly.

“That’s the breakthrough!” Ceril’s unmistakable voice greets me from inside the lab. He seems—too absorbed in his research—not to have noticed my gong performance. Everything in here is blinking and beeping, and I have trouble spotting the professor behind all the cables, suspensors, and pulleys hanging from the ceiling, and the various artifacts of past experiments. Wearing headphones, he is bent over a small metal box covered in buttons. Excitedly, he explains to me that he’s developed a virtual microphone he can send to any coordinates in the world via gravitational waves. At first, I don’t get it.

“I can enter any coordinates, and then I hear whatever there is to hear at that location. It’s a kind of gravitational-wave radio that can receive signals from virtually infinite stations—namely, from any point in the universe.” I must look pretty lost. That doesn’t change when he hands me a second pair of headphones to demonstrate his invention. Just to test it out, he types in the coordinates for the White House. “Let’s do a little spying,” he says with a mischievous grin.

I hear the rustling of silk sheets and soft whispers of love, though despite an intense read-through of an English dictionary two or three years ago, I don’t catch every word. But I do pick out two names: John and Cindy. Now Ceril looks pretty lost, too. I enlighten him (after all, I have to live up to my reputation as a child prodigy every now and then): “McCain and his wife?” Ceril wonders what on earth they could be doing in Obama’s bedroom, but then light dawns on him: “We’re eavesdropping on a parallel world! One where McCain won the election instead of Obama. Yes, that must be it—the laws of physics are protecting themselves from a sonically infinitesimal recursion. Just like the uncertainty principle.”

Ceril immediately punches in the coordinates of his own lab, and sure enough, we witness a conversation between him and me—except, he says, these are our alter egos from a parallel universe. Interestingly, in that reality, I seem to be the aging inventor and he‘s the teenage assistant.

Before I can learn any more, Ceril switches off the device, takes off his headphones, and turns to me: “This opens up fantastic possibilities, kid! I can eavesdrop on other versions of myself who have already worked out my many ideas”—he taps the massive index card box beneath his desk—”which saves me lengthy testing phases.” And saves me, I think, from potentially perilous real-world tests of his countless inventions. “I just need to modify the thing accordingly.” With that, he starts scribbling complex formulas on paper with one hand while twisting wires together with the other. As for me, I am completely forgotten.

Would I even be interested in what other versions of me have to say? On the walk back through the corridor, I shake my head. What good would that do anyway? Then I remember why I went to see Ceril in the first place: to ask if he could build me a machine that spits out what teachers will want to know on exams a few days in advance. Then again, I have to admit to myself that even without a prediction machine like that, I’ve always known everything anyway—and school shouldn’t get any more boring for me than it already is.

(And it won’t. Quite the opposite. Because of her. But that’s another story.)

♫ The Mechanical Quirk ♫

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130/398

I enter the corridor with deliberate steps, even though I’d much rather have run far, far away. Everything here is electric, and it’s making the hairs on my arms stand on end. Professor Ceril gave me detailed instructions. In fact, he even handed me a manual beforehand that felt like it was five hundred pages thick. With the professor, it’s always go big or go home. As brilliant as his inventions are, they always have to be the size of a gym. Same goes for his time machine.

The reason I’m always the one who has to test his inventions comes down to a deal between my dad and him: the professor is a childhood friend of my father’s, and ever since my dad made a fortune off his server farms, he’s been bankrolling Ceril’s research. In return, Ceril is supposed to teach me about physics, electrodynamics, quantum states, dark energy, and all that jazz.

The corridor—the “spatial dilation compressor”—is lined with round metal hatches like you’d expect on a submarine, complete with the handwheel locks used to open them. Behind the walls, I hear a creaking and clicking like little wooden clockwork gears—it sounds more mechanical than electronic. But that doesn’t help me much either. I stand there feeling pretty helpless, flipping aimlessly through the machine’s manual. The professor drilled into me that I must go through the correct hatch. Opening the wrong one would be disastrous, throwing “Temporal Stratigraphy” into complete chaos—something he wants to avoid at all costs. Instead, my task is to convince his younger self on October 1st, 2006, to bet on Schiaparelli instead of Discretion—in a trifecta on three-year-old colts and fillies.

In the end, though, I can’t even get the hatch open that’s supposed to take me to the crucial horse race: screwed shut too tight. Fine by me. That way, I don’t have to sneak onto a racetrack as a twelve-year-old and hunt down young Ceril among all those gambling addicts. Instead, I sit down in the corridor and wait for a while, which is uncomfortable enough in the flickering electricity generated inside the time machine. Then I walk back down the hallway and step out of the machine.

Ceril is waiting for me excitedly. I nod, shove the manual back into his hands, and grit out through my teeth: “Mission accomplished.”

Ceril is thrilled and starts dancing around. “Who bets on Discretion anyway?!” he sings out. When I ask what actually changed because of my actions, he explains in a fatherly tone that now a young Muzimi Ceril in a parallel universe has become filthy rich and can fulfill all his dreams. And among those dreams, perhaps, is thanking his benefactor—meaning not me, but himself—by returning the favor.

If I understand this correctly, the other, now stinking-rich Ceril is supposed to get the idea to send his assistant—presumably a parallel version of me—back in time to make him, our professor, rich in turn. Who even comes up with a wild scheme like that?! I pretend I still have homework to do and leave him alone in his lab. As I pedal away on my bike, I can hear him singing for a long time, and I wonder if the professor shouldn’t invent a machine that simply produces complete silence instead.

(He almost did. But that’s another story.)

♫ Principia aerobatica ♫

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138/398

I enter the corridor every night before falling asleep. It’s become second nature to click off the bedside light, settle in, close my eyes, and try to reach the corridor that bridges the two worlds. Yet, as always, the images in my mind remain faint; it feels more as if I am laboriously constructing the corridor than simply entering it.

When my twin brother died, it was as if someone had cut out half my heart. In an instant, the world lost its vibrancy, and a milky veil settled over everything.

But then, almost a year later, one night in a dream, I was suddenly surrounded by colors I couldn’t name—colors that shouldn’t even exist. Amidst this shimmering, fluorescent splendor, he suddenly stood before me. He looked different, older, and he no longer wanted to be called Dignus, but Korian. In the dream, I knew nothing of the suicide, but I felt my brother had something vital to tell me, something concerning him, me, and this corridor between worlds where our encounter took place.

Waking up was terrible. I was still buoyed by the closeness of him, and I knew immediately how profoundly significant my dream experience had been. But simultaneously, a bitter, angry despair crawled up within me because, despite all my efforts, I could no longer remember what Dignus—what Korian—had said to me. There were only the colors, those insane, impossible colors. The content of his words, even the world-corridor itself: they had lost their contours and dissolved like a footprint in the desert sands. I doggedly racked my brain, and of course, I fervently hoped the dream would repeat itself—in vain. The door had swung shut again. Nevertheless, I made it a habit to review the few memories I had left while falling asleep. Perhaps the door to this corridor, the door to Korian, would open for me once more!

The dream never returned—not in the nearly thirty years that followed. Oh, I did begin to dream of corridors; corridors of every kind, shape, and texture—but not the corridor. And not of my twin brother.

Eventually, I began to write down the fragments of my memories from those failed, tangled dream-corridors that blocked my way to the real one—hoping to rid myself of them. I used the postcards for this: the large bundle of old postcards from all over the world that Dignus had once bought at a flea market and given to me. There were 398 of them, as it turned out, and I was supposed to read one each day for a year, imagining he was sending them from his secret travels. That had seemed too crazy to me then; I only started reading them once he had actually departed on his journey.

When I decided to write down those false dreams of misleading corridors to finally be rid of them, I did it on those cards—between the lines, around the exotic stamps and postmarks, on every free inch. And then, sometimes, I turn them over to look at a yellowed photo, and it feels as if those are the very colors in which that forgotten corridor between worlds once glowed.

♫ Silfurstóllinn ♫

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165/398

I enter the corridor, amazed and a little spooked. How can it be that after all these years I’m discovering a corridor that leads away from my bedroom? But then, I’ve never pushed against the back wall of my closet before. Now I’m entering rooms that were completely unknown to me before, rooms that I didn’t even know I didn’t know about.

I decide to equip myself better for this expedition, instead of venturing out in pajamas without any gear. I turn back and lie down in bed to make sure that I am well-rested for the adventure. When the alarm clock beeps in the morning, I only have hazy memories of “something with my wardrobe and a gas lantern in the woods,” which I soon forget.

♫ Akashic Spalls ♫

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178/398

I enter the corridor. Once again, the throbbing headaches plague me, even though, fundamentally, I don’t even have a head anymore. Instead, I travel through time like a bodiless spirit, always inside the minds of others who don’t notice me—alongside people who fascinated me as a child, even if I have long since forgotten them.

It all began with the diving record of the Trieste. Most recently, it was a journey of a completely different kind, where I ended up in the Lop Nor Desert with Sven Hedin. I sat helplessly behind the eyes of the expedition’s Swedish participant, forced to experience all the hardships, until he finally entered an underground passage in a Bronze Age ghost town they were exploring.

It is their dreams that give me headaches. They often ambush me at night and last throughout the morning. I feel completely helpless against it all, but for a few days now, I have been trying to focus on a thought that keeps slipping away from me: Maybe it’s not an accident, a punishment, or a curse that has befallen me. Maybe it’s an opportunity—or a blessing!

There was this movie where the hero was trapped in a similar way and couldn’t find a way out. He was a meteorologist, I believe, and only when he started to see the hopeless situation he had gotten himself into as an opportunity and fully exploit its potential could he finally free himself from it.

So, I try to rediscover the fascination I had as a child when I read about all these adventures.

I am in the jungle, trapped in the mind of a young local man who accompanies a well-equipped expedition as a porter. Hiram Bingham has us hacking with machetes through the dense vegetation overgrowing large stone blocks. He is convinced that he has finally discovered the Inca city of Vilcabamba. I know better. This is Machu Picchu. But I can’t tell the explorer. I am condemned to helplessness, left only to watch desperately and hope that some corridor will free me from my prison. I wanted to focus on something. But everything keeps blurring and eluding me. I curse my fate. Eventually, the man enters a low passageway in one of the partially excavated pyramid structures…

I am Lord Lindsay—or at least that’s how I am addressed—standing on the third floor of a building. With a mixture of admiration and dismay, I observe a man—that must be the medium Daniel Dunglas Home, I vaguely remember—rise from the floor and levitate. Soon, he floats, stretched out, with his back facing downward in the room. Lord Lindsay is seized by horror, while I sit in his head and watch the spectacle, fascinated. Eventually, Home glides out the window, his face contorted with exertion and his eyes closed. Lord Lindsay stands terrified, while another observer of the scene rushes to another window and opens it. Home floats back in, feet first. He lands upright, opens his eyes, and smiles at his three spectators. Lord Lindsay suddenly feels a pressing need to relieve himself and rushes out of the room into the stairwell…

I stand beside Xu Fu on the bridge of an ancient Chinese sailing ship. A fleet follows us, stretching to the horizon. The Elixir of Immortality! Everything comes back to me. Qín Shǐhuángdì, the founder of the Chinese Empire, equipped a naval expedition out of his paranoid fear of death, which was supposed to obtain the elixir of immortality for him. The sixty barges never returned, and no one knows what happened to them. Will I find out now? My curiosity reminds me that I wanted to focus on enjoying my journey as much as possible—despite my helplessness, despite the frequent headaches, and despite the constant blackouts. Why do I keep forgetting that? I smell the sea breeze, feel the wind on my skin—skin that is not my own. But then the man goes below deck, and I immediately lose my grip on his mind and whirl aimlessly through space and time…

♫ Back Into the Magma ♫

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179/398

I enter the corridor that leads to the huge weather crystals. The earth trembles. People run about shouting in panic and mortal terror—I hear their screams echoing not just in my ears, but deep within my mind.

I am consumed by a single thought: I have to deactivate the large crystals! The Spirit Masters wanted to use them to influence the weather, but now they are out of control. A dark, terrible crash of thunder resounds, vibrating through my entire body. Knocked down as if by the fist of a god, I hit the ground. It was a ludicrous plan, trying to use the crystals to stop time! The entire land is sinking into the sea: the hall of crystals slowly tilts away to the side, and the corridor turns into a bottomless shaft. Its walls tower before me. I haul myself up the stone slabs, ducking away from falling debris. Water bursts in from all sides. Lightning streaks through the hall. The mighty crystals rise up against the deluge, their death throes making the sea boil.

The horrified screams of millions of dying people echo in my mind. My mother, my sister Nete—their presence flickers brightly in my consciousness one last time before fading away. The loss leaves everything inside me dull and numb.

More and more water rushes into the hall. The stone vault has already sunk deep into the sea, and the air bubble trapped inside is being swallowed up by the invading flood. Should I give up? No! Something unknown inside me grants me strength. I want to live, to climb higher, to escape the rushing water—but a collapsing pillar shatters my left leg. A piercing pain robs me of my breath. I am pinned down, and I am going to drown. Now, there is only one thing left for me…

♫ Gazing Into the Crystal Skull ♫

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180/398

…I enter the corridor, just as I learned to do from the Spirit Masters as a young child, and descend into my “temple of fleeting images.” At first I hesitate—for weren’t the Spirit Masters the very ones who descended too deep into their inner temples, and with their hubris conjured up the demise of us all? But the imminent drowning and the unbearable pain in my shattered leg drive me to this place where everything is still and motionless.

My “temple,” however, is—an island.

No one was allowed to know about it, since invoking the image of an island in the mind’s eye instead of a temple building contradicts the spiritual law as it is taught to us. Yet, as much as I tried to fight this island, it simply wouldn’t disappear. I didn’t even tell my closest friends about it, so I am profoundly shocked when I see a group of strangers standing there on my little island. An old man, the left side of his face completely scarred, approaches me. Behind him stand eleven men and women.

“I am Ktephaim,” the old man says. What are these people doing in my mind? Or have they come to collect me and lead me to the realm of the dead?

“We are… Wanderers. And we would like to offer you the chance to become one of us.” I want to know what all of this means first, but he motions for me to be silent. “You can save yourself.” With that, he hands me a polished crystal in the shape of a human skull.

I know what I have to do. The other eleven standing behind Ktephaim watch me silently. One of the women smiles encouragingly. I look into the eyes of the crystal skull.

“Concentrate,” the old man says. “You have practiced for this a long time. Now is the moment.”

All at once, I am back in my body. Icy cold water surges around me, and I feel a burning throb in my shattered leg. I take one last breath before the sea swallows me whole. And I concentrate.

My homeland sinks back into the magma. When the sun breaks through the black clouds for the first time again, nothing will be left of it. A new humanity will rise from the mud, a new historiography will unfold, new ancient wars will ignite, and old new inventions and experiences will stir the human soul.

But these are things I will only learn later. Because I survive. With a final breath, using the crystal skull and an unknown will to live within me, I transport myself to another place, another time.

A cushion of moss, massive roots, a clearing.

Slowly, I come to. Enra’daí, the woman from the group of Wanderers who had smiled at me, sits beside me, examining my leg. “Where am I?” I ask her, but Enra’daí corrects me: “Better ask when you are. You are one of us now.”

She explains to me that there are twelve of us, and that we possess the ability to jump to the flipside of time, wandering from there to wherever we are needed. Some of the Wanderers manage to do this five, six, or even ten times. Then the power runs dry. A new Wanderer must be found to fill the gap. “And you are probably the youngest there has ever been,” she adds.

Over the next few days, she heals my leg with herbal poultices and roasts her wild game for us over a fire. I don’t know what is happening to me. Her movements, her touch, her quiet voice: all of it intoxicates me, bringing joy to my innermost self, touching my heart, and awakening entirely unfamiliar feelings—feelings that promise sweetness and pain, which I shamefully hide from her. She nurses me lovingly, but clearly with the care of a mother for her son. How I long to prove to her that I am already a man. I could fell trees and build a hut for us, I would learn to hunt and slay wild beasts for her—but my leg does not yet allow for any of it; I must rest it.

Leaping to the flipside of time saved my life. I doubt our Spirit Masters knew of this ability. Enra’daí hesitates when I ask her what becomes of a Wanderer who loses the strength to jump. Her voice sounds fragile: “They remain where the new Wanderer was taken from.” I want to ask her if Ktephaim was transferred to the Hall of Crystals in my place, but Enra’daí grimaces painfully and turns her gaze away. That makes me falter, and I leave the question unasked.

“I must move on,” she says finally, looking a little sad. “We Wanderers are loners.”

I want to protest, begging her to stay, claiming my leg hurts again. But Enra’daí cannot be swayed. To say goodbye, she only touches my arm briefly and then quickly looks away. I want to call out after her that I love her, but she has already vanished between the massive trunks of the trees. Tears well up, and I begin to weep bitterly.

It is a goodbye…

All the dead—an entire people! My friends! My mother! My little sister! Not until dawn breaks do my tears dry up, and I fall into a restless sleep.

…and a new beginning.