The Transitions

By Raymond Liu

We are looking. The stars shatter. Perhaps it happens before or after something else, or perhaps the light emanating from one was a bastion for the others, or even still that their sentience was progenitor of a phalanx. Of course, lacking mid temporal lobes, it matters very little to them. They must know as much about themselves as Hoag’s object knows about Giotto and his circle. This latter paid too early his visit to Earth to have known Hoag, although one would like to believe that, had they inhabited the same century, they would’ve met over a communional beverage of some sort— the type that, living on American soil, Robin would be 9 years too young for. Although the figure would be closer to 6, should he choose to bypass the dicier legalities, which is to say, all of them. It’s his birthday— the day Robin Haas crosses the precipice between 11 and 12. Not a single one of the onlookers realizes that he’s now at approximately an equidistant temporal length from the inception of Cuneiform and the invention of a chimeric pseudo-perpetual motion machine. He has been there for his entire life.

“—too many...”

“It’s not.”

“Well, then, where’s the cut-off? It’s got to stop eventually doesn’t it? I mean, when the hell would you stop, if not twelve? The numbered ones exist for a reason, don’t they?”

“Depends on the size of the cake, which we clearly bought first. For Christ’s sake, it’s a ten-inch cake. God forbid I couldn’t place twelve candles on it.”

Benno Haas is the one armed with an almost mistakeable-for-belligerent staccato of rhetorical. His wife Diane has been at his side long enough to understand a subtextual non-aggression; his habit spawns from an unbridled, almost childish curiosity, only manifesting itself under a cloak of masculine stand-offishness. The two have spent the past 7 and a half minutes arguing about whether numerical or traditionally cylindrical candles should be used for a 12th birthday. It has devolved into a linguistic tennis match, the metric of victory being who can continue the longest.

Robin himself is deeply entranced. His candles, the now forsaken subjects of conversation, have now dwindled to mere 2 centimeter stubs, bottom halves, mere remnants of their once regal numerical selves. The collision of wax dripping down the sides and cake frosting is dangerously imminent. He’s listening in on the debate, trying not to hear what either side is saying. This is a needlessly Herculean task; any sort of binary recognition nullifies his attention. He’d subconsciously like to believe that there are three distinct entities in front of him, not just a mother and father but whatever is between them, a drunkenly amorphous and airborne third thing. The snippets that he does unintentionally catch remind him of the fourth: his cake. This, in turn, has the sort of bizarre domino effect exclusive to human beings long past the primordial need for survival— that allows everything to recirculate back to themselves, but not before passing by some cosmic figures, large things relevant by virtue of their large-ness alone. For Robin, these are the stars. He’s old enough to know the concept of a universe, and to know that it shares the first three letters with ‘unite’. He will perhaps never be old enough to understand it. Everything is not a thing; and if it were, what would be the point of the prefix? This is the sort of mental excursion that earns him a congratulatory interjection from the nearest adult, while always seeming to elude their memories upon second mention, as well as—

“Well, why don’t we just ask him then?”

Equipped with an uncannily honed ability of recognizing when the conversation has set its sights on him, Robin speaks for the first time in eight minutes.

“I like them both.”

He’s met with two simultaneous glassy stares, and then a dual acquiescence. The situation is almost amusingly comparable to Mozart and Salieri’s attempts to impress Joseph II, a thought that none of the present figures have as of yet entertained.

The rest of the celebrations continue so procedurally one could mistake them for industrial; and perhaps they are. The idea that whatever redemptive power is found in shooting stars might also be present in a birthday cake, the most universal of praying apparatuses, struck its yearly chord in Robin’s head. Then the reverberations follow him throughout the evening. Safely tucked into bed after completion of his nightly rituals(serene sleep somehow always found itself affiliated with the enjoyment of a pop-up book), he stares upward at his cot mobile, a miniaturized solar system never displaced since toddlerhood. Slumber seeping in, he’s content to watch and remark upon the grace of smooth elliptical orbits, the leisurely spinning without stutter of planets overhead. Then silence, interrupted only by soft snores, synonymous with the inception of whatever world he’s decamped to.

—

It’s an illusory precipice to be standing at. The connection’s medium is there. Of course it is; it’s Robin himself. But the numbers— how one can be moving forward for 365.25 days and never fall off until the very last moment... shrouded in whatever vapor makes up the numbers in the first place. Whether the day is important because a rotation around the sun marks his numerical ascension, or whether he marks, as others do, the spot where the tellurian desire to pass by the same space again can be fulfilled— Anticipation has robbed this day of its grandeur. It is somewhat akin to being lost in the belly of the beast, realizing that its cavernous and absurdly unacidic interior is, in actuality, quite languorous.

The elliptical path has been traced once more. Eons of submission to gravity’s oppression have ironed out the kinks in the system, aided by those who dwell on Earth’s body, who faithfully and happily accept their subjugation at the hands of centripetal force, going as far as to immortalize its power in numbers and candles and cakes and holidays and all sorts of things contiguous with the advent of a rotation.

The Haas family is content to linger once more around a cake. This is a patisserie for which none of them share a particular enthusiasm. But its loss is unthinkable; what else would bind together the years aside from Robin himself, who is far too human and fleshy and less-than-divine? At his newfound age of 13, he can remark the whole process’ congruence with the darning of holes in fabric, an act often pursued by his late grandmother.

Robin has entered an age where he’s just about beginning to truly grasp concepts like irony, and symbols, but is struggling to differentiate between adjectives and adverbs at school. Lately he’s been pressured by his parents to read, which has led him down a rabbit hole of searching for the quote-on-quote “best books”, and has put a copy of Mann’s The Magic Mountain in his hands. His perambulation through the Swiss sanatorium and the Zauberberg itself has yielded about as much as one would expect a 12/13-year old to glean. But the notion of decaying men arguing about time, sickness and love retains an elusive allure, even when many of the words are far too polysyllabic for a little boy to devote himself to. He can’t help but think(although he certainly wouldn’t phrase it this way) that the book is just a proxy for those grand, “humongous topics”, and that even the literary devices and technical terms that his teacher prattles on about are but mere acolytes of some grander truth. And truth itself, to his understanding naturally being “good” and sought after, makes people run about in a frenzy trying to chain down any vessels to it.

As wisps of thought chisel their way through his brain, he blows out this year’s candles, who find themselves awkwardly arranged in the haphazard way in which one arranges any 13 objects on a circular surface.

—

Cacophony illuminates the room. Perhaps its very act of bequeathing life to the air allows it to escape itself, forever nearing but never attaining the asymptotic status of polyphony. Robin would like to imagine that sounds could be jealous of each other. That they could experience an interaction beyond the horizon of simplistic constructive or destructive, which was all he understands at the moment.

Robin is less than ensnared by the physics principles behind sound waves, moreso in their interconnectivity. In the same way that the miniature solar system of his first decade on Earth was irrevocably connected; the same way that the 14 candles on his cake seem to breathe in unison. This is his first birthday amongst peers, which asserts in him an indeterminate feeling that the event has lost its intimacy, like a private ritual sacrosanct for its seclusion which has been broadcast on live television. His skills of observation have been sharpened to no end, having entered the age wherein one commits incessant acts of voyeurism behind sullen facades. Each of his acquaintances(a scarce few could be referred to as friends) are proving to be impossibly disparate. Try as he might, Robin is having monumental difficulty in weaving together a canvas with only ever-oscillating linens at his disposal. This in turn gives way to an unreasonably abstruse anguish, cut short by the occasional “Happy birthday, man”, or any one of the more memorable and unlikely interruptions.

These interjections, analogous to a slightly unreliable, arthritic clockwork, remind him of the solemn ticking of lives, the lone candlesticks, one after another, paying their taxes and servitudes, then making their dejected departure. And there it is again, this skillful act of inattention to each and every child, allowing the locus of attention to evaporate and uniformly project itself every which way. That the intimacy could’ve been subconsciously misplaced rather than lost was not an apparition of his mind. That one could avoid being soft and fleshy and all the things he unavoidably was, that the fleeting seconds were his sanctuary rather than a celestial sin; that he could bear neither the tension of chords vibrating in unison with others nor the solitude of singularity. What was it...? A quote about connections missing by trillions of dark miles, by years of frozen silence? Or perhaps another about shattered stars, the primordial essence of which would never escape their unfortunate modality? Candles, cornflower in color, living and breathing their little lives away, an ultimate climax unbeknownst to them in the imminent fata morgana. Wispy thoughts inhabiting the minds of little children, yet to condensate into permanent residence.

And yet here they were, coalesced into little sticks of wax, imbued with the power of myopia, bearing their sanctified history from time immemorial. We had begun with fire, and at the great foot of every year, each epoch, it is with fire that we end. He watches the smoke dissipate. It is languishing and contorting, but so is everything else. The transitions of years themselves are lost in grander revolutions, and, for just a moment, he is struck with trepidation, filled with dismay at the lack of vacant seats in eternity, at the absence of chords strung on one instrument, save aboard motion itself.