God wants me to go to church.

Somewhere in 1990. 

When you know where the cameras are, you can bend and twist in your sexy catsuit, slink in the vid-shadows with your pants full of paper. Sometimes you have to walk backwards. But this is what you do when you’re a ramen-chested college student and your partner in crime has a card key to the Supercomputer Center with all the sweet sweet photocopiers and paper cutters. We walk in with a single sheet. We walk out like lifers taped with Nat Geos in the chow line. 

But this was only Phase One of the op. Phase Two hit the library. Here it isn’t about being sly but about being fast. We have a lot of paper to distribute—pull a book, finger-slide a deep page, set the trap, snap it shut. Back on the shelf and then some permutation of Fibonacci down and again. And again. And—like any new repetition the brain resists with initial clumsiness—You want me to what now?—before giving in with a sigh and allocating stupid amounts of processing to a stupid task. Loop it like a head bob. We roam the stacks, stairs of floors, and end up with empty hands and sore fingers. Birthing the unseen, we give the world the things we cannot find. 

30 years later. 

A lucky, COVID-inflected meeting with my college mentor professor, retired now, but still writing as all writers must, and for some reason still interested in whatever it is that I’m up to. We say all the usual things leftists say to each other, how the taking of guns and eating of babies gives us painful erections, the kind that can only be dispelled with gay Satanic rituals. We make sure our antifa tattoos line up, clubhouse rings turned to ready the poison needles in case one of us is a doppelgänger. Books are paraded like children, some destined to be doctors, others as opium den mattress weights. Coded papers are exchanged. But you know this if you vote in God’s blindspot. Then finally, this: “I was doing some research on Tolkien for a paper, when I came across something... interesting,” he says as he slides a perfectly-pressed half-sheet across to me.

“I’m pretty sure it’s not from 1946—but it made me think of you and I thought you’d appreciate it.”

Dolly-zoom.  Dolly-zoom again.  Dolly-zoom with a Batman angle.  This is what happens when the universe bends back on itself and ouroboroses into a timey-wimey Spaghetti-O™.  I taste the tomato-y sauce, the catfood meatballs.  I hear the jingle through a tinny, creeping van speaker.  Bugs burst from chrysalides.  Mushrooms waggle and curl at dusty edges.  Cherry trees blow like fireworks.

And I know in that moment the split-second of the unlucky bomb maker.