Talk Vomit

By Esther Alter

I was in my twenties, brushing my teeth before bed, when suddenly this extradimensional being appeared in the bathtub. In that moment my gut instinct was that it was five-dimensional but now I know it was closer to nine. It looked like overcooked pasta.

It told me that it would give me a prophecy about me of my choice. I said, tell me how I die. The being said, car crash. Then it blooped away.

The first thing I did was move to the city and stop driving. Not because I thought that would change the prophecy, but because I didn’t want to be the agent of my own destruction.

I tried to reduce my overall time in cars out of anxiety before realizing that I ought to be doing the opposite. It’s like this: I had to assume the prophecy was true, and it had to occur before I died a natural death approximately sixty years after the prophecy had been revealed to me. Suppose I got in a car once a year. That meant that the odds of that car ride being the fatal one would be really high, and would steadily get higher. So, I started taking lots of Ubers, often in cases where I didn’t really have the money for it or really could’ve walked.

It was in my fifties when society started to really go down the tubes. It hadn’t been great for the past few decades but I’d figured we’d turn things around. After all, I knew a car was going to kill me and you have to have industry in order to have cars. But things just got worse and worse. All the coastal cities went underwater all at the same time. There was crop failure, followed by four pandemics in a row, followed by fascism, followed by neo-fascism, followed by this third worse thing that no one bothered to name. Oh, and there were wars happening all the time. Everyone blew up each other’s remaining infrastructure and global trade pretty much stopped. I remember looking around at an absolutely blasted neighborhood that used to have a bar I really liked and thinking, that’s weird, no one is driving cars anymore, but somehow I’m still alive. 

I drank some bad water. Couldn’t stop shitting. 

Then reality ripped apart. I thought space itself was collapsing but now I know it was space as well as time. And that’s how I got into this room with all of you.

Turns out this sort of thing is really common. Whenever a prophecy becomes impossible to fulfill, it cracks open time and space and sometimes people fall through the crack. There are three main causes:

One. People who did their best, invoked fate, and prophesied something easy. Like, “there will be war in my lifetime.” And then, unexpectedly, something else kills them before there’s war, so into the space-time crack they go.

Two. Hyperdimensional beings that look like overcooked pasta. I’m still not sure what the deal is with these guys, but apparently, they love making prophecies. It’s starting to become a big problem, all these unfulfilled prophecies and resulting cracks in space-time. Did you know that the space-time continuum has structural integrity? I sure didn’t know that, until recently. I guess you can’t just punch holes in the space-time continuum willy-nilly. But in the society of the hyperdimensional pasta beings there’s a lot of short-term earnings to be made by prophesizing—don’t ask me how exactly that works—so they go around making as many prophecies as they can and so what if only one percent of them actually get fulfilled? In the meantime, the space-time continuum is starting to fall apart. Maybe this is an allegory for capitalism and climate change. Who can say?

Three. Occasionally, people deliberately invoke a false prophecy. A lot of people realized that death was permanent and bad but another anti-world was possible, so they would deliberately invoke a really improbable prophecy, like “I will turn into a duck on my thirtieth birthday” and then on their thirtieth birthday they willingly enter the resulting space-time crack. I think it’s really cool that so many people realized you could just do that whenever you want. It would’ve never occurred to me.

I still have a lot to learn about this place. I like the coffee, by the way. But, as long as you’re all here, I’d like to ask a question, if you don’t mind. A bunch of you look like you lived a long time ago but you’re not, like, dead, and I feel like some of you are probably from the future, even though I just got here. And I know what’s going on isn’t something simplistic like time having no meaning in this room or whatever because, well, here I am, conveying information sequentially rather than dumping it all at once in a zero-dimensional non-moment. So I guess my question is, what’s up with that?