| he was always messing around with stuff he found around the
house and coming up with the most incredible devices, i mean
one time he made a skateboard out of a bunch of empty cereal
boxes, some varnish, and a bunch of aluminium cans; and it
was a good skateboard, too, a smooth ride.
and then he made a
surgical laser using just a shotglass, a battery-powered
pocket torch, and one of those little rings with the crappy
red plastic jewels set in them which you buy from those fifty-
cent vending machines they have outside of supermarkets. we
all thought he was nuts, you know, totally crazy -- until he
turned the laser on, and it worked, and he even removed
grandma's brain tumour with it, and grandma was fine, and so
proud of him!
we asked him how he did it, and he only said
`there's more to those toy-vending-machines than you think,'
in this mysterious kind of way.
he was a pretty mysterious
guy.
when we asked him how he knew to put all this stuff
together his eyes would go all distant and he would say
strange things that we couldn't understand about `non-local
possibility matrices' and `the heterarchical nature of
subquantum interactions' and `nonassociable, nonoverlappingly-
considerable, nonsimultaneously-transforming events of
nonsynchronizable disparate wave frequency rate ranges', and
`the singing colours' and `the knowers outside of time', and
some other things that weren't even in english, or even in
any human language, grandpa said.
and if we asked him too
many more questions, he'd start to emit this weird high-
pitched insect buzzing, this kind of chittering-whining that
varied in frequency and seemed to be outside the range of
humanly-producible sounds -- 'stridulation,' grandpa called it -- and then this strange light would start to flood out from his
eyes, this light that seemed to simultaneously contain all
the colours of the visible spectrum, and the light flashed in
time to his chirping, which would get more and more complex and louder and higher until it seemed to absorb us and the
only thing left was the light-noise, and then we'd all kind
of pass out, and we'd wake up four days later -- it was always
four days -- and he'd be gone and we wouldn't see him again for
a long time, sometimes as long as two months, and when he
suddenly turned up again he'd be like `how are y'all?' and
acting all casual like nothing had happened, like he'd just
been down at the store for twenty minutes, and none of us
wanted to ask him any questions about where he'd been for so
long in case, y'know, he started doing that chirping stuff
again. but what really surprised us was when, entirely out of
office supplies, he built what he called `the gateway'...
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