By the time we got around to talking about the vortexes the three of us had walked far away from Ashley’s house. MJ had gone inside and grabbed the bowl of jello shots. She had gotten her shoes. Jules had taken hers off. I had smoked most of my spliff. And the three of us were sitting on the second floor of an unfinished house, in the dark.
Jello shots are dangerous, precisely because you don’t know how much you’ve had.
I wished I could see outside.
Jules was standing in a corner, talking to us about the vortexes, but looking at the wall. MJ occasionally gave me a jello shot but she was eating most of them. Then it was just me sitting with the bowl of jello shots, and MJ was lying on the floor, and looking at the ceiling, and Jules was standing feet away from us telling us the story.
They knew it started in 1982. They had figured that out. They knew for sure about this one in Africa.
“I thought it was in Brazil, or Argentina, or something.”
“There are!” She takes my arm. “There are! You knew! I knew you knew! They’re minor. There are some in Argentina, I knew you knew. You know.” Jules is stroking my arm.
“And there are some here, too, right?”
Jules has a way of beaming into you when she looks at you. She doesn’t have to tell me. I know. There are some here, minor ones. They’re all over the planet. There are some in Hawaii. There are some in Arizona. There are some in places in Asia. There are some in Europe, where the druids were. There are some in Argentina. Some are in the ocean, underwater. But the major, major one—the one we know most about—is in Africa.
“It’s in Zaire. It’s in a river basin.”
“And this is the big one?”
“Listen. Yes. Listen. Are you listening?”
Me and MJ are quiet.
“The most they know about it is that it’s been there since 1982. But they didn’t know that until recently. Because—before you ask—because: they found a direction of time that goes—“ she uses her arms to show how it goes “—crossways with the rest of the development of change.”
“What’s ’the development of change’?”
“It’s..you know how things change? Through time? We think of it as time but it’s not just time, they’ve discovered. There are other developments of change, that aren’t time, but that change things..like time does. Got me?”
We were trying, but we didn’t really get her yet.
“When time happens, things change.”
“Like getting older.”
“Right. You get older. You stop being a kid. You die. Time is the metaphor we use to understand how that happens. It’s just a metaphor, though. There isn’t really a timeline where time is a line or a dimension that’s straight, that only goes one direction—“
“Is she high?”
“She’s always like this,” MJ says.
And Jules says: “Shut up. Shut up. I’m trying to tell you something here. About the development of change. Do you want to hear about the development of change?” Jules puts her hands on my lap.
I say “yes.”
“He wants to hear about it. So shut up.”
“Tell him about the vortex.”
“I’m telling him why they didn’t discover it until recently.”
MJ holds up her finger. “It’s too complicated.” She’s shaking her hand. “Just—“ she’s looking at me—she’s shaking her hand at me! “Just—give me a jello shot. Tell him about the vortex. Thank you. Assume—for now—“ she swallows the shot “—assume for now that it makes sense that it’s been there since 1982 but they just discovered it recently. It all comes together, but—Jules, it’s too complicated when you explain it with the cross-dimensional time thing. Just tell him about the vortex.” And MJ lies down again.