The Unblinking Ring
Moxy's Palace. This was the place, according to the chat room binge-loafer known as RubberDuck23. Steel bars and disrepair around the entrance made it look more like a derelict prison than a palace, but then things rarely look their best at 3am. Just ask the pair of exotic dancers sharing a smoke beneath the flickering entry light. The first looked like someone had painted a skeleton and then left it exposed to tropical humidity for forty years. The second looked like someone had left a hotdog in the microwave for too long and then tried to cover up their mistake with a glue gun and a package of coloured feathers. But I'd been in this business too long to judge this place on looks alone. My job is to search out the truth, after all, and the truth is rarely pretty.
I step into the light of the entryway and wink knowingly at the dancers. They recoil into the shadows like spiders, and I can't blame them for their caution. The scars of bad experiences cross my face like animal tracks on a late-winter field. Truth is the ugly friend I hang out with to make myself look better by comparison. But when I've yet to find it, there is no makeup that can cover my kind of ugly.
I knock on the barred gate purposefully. A plate of steel slides open and a pair of judgemental eyes ask me my business. I tell them they look pretty in the pale moonlight, and they reluctantly yield to the pass-code. Now I'm in a hallway walking towards a redish light, the embers of a dying party. I pass a pair of late-night revellers stumbling towards the exit, then a scowling bouncer carrying a bucket and a mop. The hallway ends in a tired haze of artificial mist and laser lights, both looking to clock-out and call it a night. A few tables around the perimeter have chairs stacked on them, and the staff are busy rolling up the sidewalks. A few patrons still linger here and there, but it's clear to everyone that the show is now over.
I approach the bartender, who apologizes that the bar is closed. I tell him I'm looking for someone. He tells me that patrons at this establishment aren't the type that like to be found. I drop a name and the barkeep backs down real quick, nodding towards the stairs that lead towards various balconies that surround the main dance floor. I climb.
On the topmost floor I see him. At least, I assume it's him. He's alone, which is what I expected. Sitting at a table in the corner, overlooking the whole establishment. A laptop, three tablets and a phone all open at once, table covered in coffee cups. He looked younger than I expected, although worry lines creased his face behind the sunglasses needlessly covering his eyes. The nation of Czechoslovakia might one day reunite to demand their 1980s mullet hairstyle back, but otherwise the man was nondescript. I approached.
“Candy Unicorn?” I asked, using the only name I'd been given.
“Ja,” was his only reply. He tapped three screens in quick succession and then quickly typed something into the laptop.
“Mr. Unicorn, you're a hard man to find.”
“You did not find me,” the man corrected, turning his neck to look at me for the first time. His English was impeccable, but the accent vaguely eastern European. “I do not exist,” he continued, “and one can not find something that doesn't exist.”
Another rule for conducting business at 3:15am is that things rarely make sense at first pass. Did he mean that he wasn't really there, or that none of us are really anywhere, or that his obvious pseudonym was an empty shell, or what? I'd spent too long tracking this guy down to get bogged down so quickly, so I tried changing tack.
“So you expected me?”
“Of course I expected you. You started this three and half years ago with your snooping around Hamburg. Since then we've danced the dance through our avatars in St. Petersburgh, Bangkok, Dubai, Paris, and Scranton, Pennsylvania. Every step was a choreographed rehearsal to bring you here, on this night. Your trials and tribulations mean nothing to me: just the blind steps of a sleepwalking dancer going through the motions. The question is, are you ready to finally pull back the veil and see reality for what it truly is? What is your longest run?”
“Eighteen days and change,” I told him, without missing a beat. Some people watch their steps, and some people watch their calories. I'm a consecutive waking-hours guy. I might have mentioned that at the beginning, but in 99.999% of my life's work this has no relevance whatsoever. It's just a personality quirk, a weird hobby. But then in the course of another investigation I stumbled onto whispers about The Unblinking Ring, a clique of fellow insomniacs that claimed special powers. Candy Unicorn was supposedly their gatekeeper, and this I guess was my audition for the big show.
The man known as Candy Unicorn was busy with his screens again. A waitress stopped by and dropped off two more coffees.
“Thanks,” I muttered as she walked off without so much as a word.
“They are both for me,” Candy Unicorn muttered, reaching absently for the first cup.
“I thought the bar was closed?” I asked, trying to find a chink in this guy's armour.
“Only to mortals,” Candy Unicorn replied. He turned his attention back to me. “Tell me, why do we sleep?”
I shrugged. “Doctors tell us it is to regenerate. The brain reprocesses inputs, growing neural pathways. The immune system fights off germs. In younger people minerals are consolidated to affect growth....”
“And what do you think?” he asked. His expression was emotionless behind the sunglasses.
“I'm not sure I'm getting the whole story,” I said evasively. “Doctors says stuff, but I'm starting to notice that things aren't adding up. Thus my attempts to contact The Ring. That's why I'm here. I'm looking for real answers.”
“And you will find them, I assure you. Do you know what sleep really is?”
“Enlighten me.”
A faint smile traced its way over Candy Unicorn's lips. “It is a failing. A daily defeat, for most of nature's creations. A cat spends two-thirds of its life in slumber and rarely lives past twenty years. A typical human sleeps about a quarter of his life away. Resulting life span: approximately eighty years. Turtles barely sleep at all, and they can live hundreds of years. And then there is the lowly jellyfish....”
“Wait. You're telling me that lifespan is inversely related to sleep?”
“The facts are telling you this. I am just trying to open your eyes. If you never let your guard down, there is no degeneration. If there is no degeneration, there is no ageing. No forgetting. No illness. Billions of dollars are spent annually on self-improvement fads, all while the aspirational spend six hours daily tearing themselves apart from within. The only true way to maximize the self is to minimize your losses. Waste no asset. Waste no time. To be Unblinking is to the closest thing there is to becoming a god.”
“How old are you, then?”
“Ah! Finally a question worth answering! I do not know for sure, as birthdays were not so important back when I was younger, but I am approximately two-hundred years old.”
“There's no way you are two hundred years old.”
“I am. I was raised in what was once referred to as Dalmatia, part of the Astro-Hungarian empire. Fun fact: I once taught Adolf Hitler back in middle school. He had the beginnings of that terrible moustache even back then. Of course, back then we were allowed to beat the children for arbitrary reasons. I got many a Fuhrerschpanken in back then, let me tell you.”
“What? That's not even a word. I've been to Germany, and that's not even a word.”
“Not any more. But there was a day when it was the height of fashion, I can assure you. Excuse me for a moment: Shanghai is closing.”
Candy Unicorn turned back to his screens while I was left to process what I had just heard. If what he said was true, then a sleepless cabal of quasi-immortals was stalking the chat rooms of Earth, micromanaging their assets on foreign stock-markets and shaping the rage of future dictators. They probably all had weird invented identities like Candy Unicorn or Mega Smurf or Latex Hobgoblin69, just to keep society from figuring out that all those crummy middle-school teachers over the centuries were actually the same crummy middle-school teachers with recycled names. I thought back to the ancient battle-axe that had taught me and gasped in horror at the realization.
Or maybe Candy Unicorn was just a kook, and he was playing me for a fool. I had been awake for a long time, and the bounds of reality were getting a little blurry around the edges. Was it really possible to will yourself beyond illness? Beyond ageing? How would you even disprove the claim? Stay awake for a year? If you got sick they might tell you that you hadn't stayed awake long enough. If you blinked for too long, they'd tell you all bets were off. Maybe they were in old pictures? Or maybe they were savvy enough to photoshop themselves into old-looking pictures? What is truth, anyway? Maybe I should have spent more time getting a philosophy degree and less time getting into bar fights back in my youth. Maybe if I had had better middle-school teachers to channel my interests I wouldn't be in this mess right now.
“Day-trading?” I asked “Don't immortals have better things to do with their time?”
“On the contrary, time is money,” Candy Unicorn replied, not turning from his work. “Even marginal sums can be spun into great fortunes with long-enough time horizons. An unfailing attention to newsfeeds and stock-tickers helps. We all do it, to various degrees. The liquidity of the whole financial system as you know it actually depends on the good graces of The Unblinking Ring. Do you remember any financial crashes?”
“I know of them, yeah.”
The Ring always meets in the autumn. Every member. September 2008 someone mistakenly brews decaf. We all woke up three months later with the world's biggest collective hangover. I'm still wearing the wrinkles from that down-time.”
“What about 1929?”
“Hash-brownies. It wasn't pretty. We should really have like a royal taster at the annual gatherings. I'll make a note to put in on the agenda.” The waitress came by and dropped off two more cups of coffee.
“So.... Mr. Unicorn, sir? What does one have to do to become a member of The Unblinking Ring?”
“Well, not blinking is a good start. I use homemade eyedrops of my own design. The secret ingredient is a dash of cream-of-tartar. It's like your eyeballs are wearing satin gowns, you really must try it. Oh, and there's this initiation trial. Just a little obstacle course really, full of mantraps and lateral thinking puzzles. There's an opening next Wednesday, if you want me to slot you in.”
“Next Wednesday?”
“Yeah it's, uh... well, technical difficulties. Old kit, you know. I thought we'd be able to do it tonight, but.... Tell you what, we can start the paperwork, yeah? Fill in the webforms. Get the whole application process moving. It'll save time later on. You know, if you're not gored to death down in the dungeon level. Can I have your full name, for starters?”
What can I tell you? Truth is often stranger than fiction. Maybe I'm not into the whole truth thing, after all. Maybe I'm just in it for the strangeness? For that gut-wrenching feeling when you stick your head through the mirror and see everything batshit backwards, with your evil twin cackling in the background and a swarm of wind-up chatter-teeth hunting you down like prey. I'm not saying I'm buying what Mr. Candy Unicorn is selling. I'm just saying I want to take it for a test-drive and see how she holds up. First I needed something fitting to put on the dotted line.
“Goldfish,” I told him. “Colonel Goldfish.”
“Okay. Social security number? We don't pay taxes, it's for the pension plan. You don't have to provide one, if you are fussy about privacy. We change them anyway every thirty years. Do you self-identify as a minority for our affirmative action initiative? Recent sex-change? It doesn't count after twenty years, unfortunately, but you can always switch back and forth to keep your status up. Animal limb implants? Substance addictions? We're open minded. I once disclosed that I was hooked on snorting gerbil food. HR didn't even bat an eye. Well, of course they don't blink. None of us do. But they didn't care. Hendersen married his dog back in '59 and she's still listed as a dependent. Do you have any idea of the logistical challenges involved in keeping a dog awake for seventy years? Oh wait, I'm getting an update about the initiation gauntlet. Apparently it's a go after all. Are you ready? If the mechanical dinosaur jaws do seize up just give the flywheel on the back a good kick. Best of luck, Mr. Goldfish.”
The chair I am sitting in begins to lurch sideways. I realize it is very slowly following a track in the floor. Where it is taking me I don't know, but I feel I can wake up from the impending nightmare any time I want to by just standing up. I am in control. I am the executive function in this crazy, mixed-up dream world we call life.
“Oh shit, I forgot the bloody restraints,” Candy Unicorn called out, banging away at his keyboard. “Ah, they don't seem to be working anyway. Just hold on to the armrests, ok? We wouldn't want you falling off on your way down. Apparently we're not insured for that bit. Wait, I'm getting another message. No, I'm afraid you'll have to get off and walk. Here, I'll illuminate the in-flight arrows to guide you to the chute. Sorry about that. It really is quite impressive when it all works.”
I nod understandingly and stand up. I begin to pace the path of the tiny arrows illuminated beneath my feet. If only life had little light-up arrows to guide us through all of our darkest moments. Or maybe it does, and we just don't have the sense to open our eyes to their presence. There's that artificial night-club mist again, obscuring the arrows slightly. And now the arrows stop, but I keep going. The future is forward. Only now I'm falling blindly through the darkness. But aren't we all falling blindly, in a metaphorical sense? The only trick is to cope with your blindness with your eyes open.
