The Interdimensional Lost and Found Agency
Welcome to the ILFA where you can root around in the bin and find far more than you lost.
You can’t argue with Maude. She’ll stare at you like you’re an aardvark with a space helmet on backwards and won’t speak, her way of making time elastic so you eventually decide enough is enough and leave. There’s a standing lamp on one side of her desk and a bent black metal bookshelf on the other nearing collapse filled with copies of Albert Camus’ The Stranger. You’ll wonder if you’re in the right place. Look for the sign taped to the wall that says: Interdimensional Lost and Found Agency. Someone hung it in a hurry between the fire extinguisher and the Tips for Safe Lifting poster.
Maude will ask your name. Give her your first name and the first initial of your last name, but not your full name. Otherwise she’ll add it to the list and you’ll be banned from the ILFA forever. You have to remain anonymous, or mostly anonymous, in order to “look in the bin.” Maude will ask for your license and registration. Just give it to her, without any questions, or else she’ll cross her arms and you’ll be done and you might as well take to wandering the earth because sometimes there are second chances but most times there aren’t. Maude’s seen a lot of uncertainty when people approach the idea of interdimensional retrieval. The way she sees it, leaving your body in one of the three dilapidated gym lockers off to the side should be like hanging up your jacket, a routine part of moving from one space into another, with an unshakeable willingness to step out of yourself to recover what’s fallen into the cracks between worlds.
After you give your name, you have to say the pass phrase, but without stumbling over the words—hippopotamuses don’t like cold rivers. You have to say it while crinkling up your eyebrows and pursing your lips and raising your arms in the shape of a Y and picturing cumulonimbus clouds. According to studies of successful interdimensional search experiences, transitional moments from this reality to the one folded in the shape of an S, Reality 1 they call it, requires this kind of process to loosen the mind from the body, as if your physical being was an egg shell, your mind the albumen, your soul the yolk.
Assuming everything has gone smoothly up to this point, Maude will ask you to sit in the Frank Lloyd Wright plastic bucket chair in front of her desk. Try not to stare at the mess, the clutter of contracts, pink receipts, and manila file folders. Any kind of critical aura detected and she will stand up and point like an angry principal to the double doors leading out of the stock room. That would be your signal to leave Esquire Shoes for good and so what’s lost between dimensions will remain lost and you will have to get used to the lingering emptiness in the space it once occupied.
“What have you lost?” Maude asks, ready to write it down on a water-stained yellow legal pad.
Javier expected to say his wedding band. It slipped off while at Citizen’s Bank Park at the ball game two months ago. He had put on some sunscreen on and threw up his hands to cheer after a home run. When he got to his car after the game, he realized it was missing. But as Maude waited for his retrieval focus, he realized he didn’t pay ILFA $500 to find his missing wedding band.
“Myself,” he says. “I’ve lost myself.”
She didn’t blink. “In what sense?”
“I’m an AI casualty. Back in June. Reservation Desk International. Now I wake up late. Clean the cat’s litterbox. Straighten up around our apartment. Send out 10 or 15 resumes. Take a walk. Come back. Watch TV. Sometimes I go to the gym. Other days I go back to sleep. I ask myself what is it I’m supposed to do? Who am I supposed to be? I look in the mirror and ask. I don’t want my wife to know that I’m asking these kinds of questions. She says I’m helping, you know, I’m useful. And I suppose I am. But I feel like I have this echo inside me so that when I speak, I hear my voice bouncing off the sides of a deep canyon and coming back to me, which makes me feel just how big and open and empty my inner world is.”
Maude puts down her nub of a pencil and smiles, a faint warmth in her eyes.
“We get your type every now and then,” she says. “And I always tell them the same thing. If you step into that locker over there and remove your body and go rooting around in the bin, sometimes you’ll find a self that doesn’t belong to you, but which fits just fine, even better than the one you were born with. There are thousands upon thousands of people dipping into the bin, looking for a better alternative.”
Javier eyes the lockers. Their dented doors have endured the anger of many post-game losses it seems, or post-dip disillusionments.
“Umm, but would I be able to keep it? I mean, isn’t it someone else’s? Won’t they be looking for it? Won’t they want it back?”
“How many things have you lost and stopped looking for in your life?” Maude asks.
Javier nods, seeing her point.
“Sometimes you have to just say forget about it—and move on. Do you want to move on, Mr. Javier?”
He entertains the idea of an entirely new consciousness and direction and spark. His shoulders relax and he slumps back in the chair, forgetting that the bucket curve is making his back ache.
“Will I move into whatever body it is, whatever self, for good?” he asks. “And am I taking a chance that it will be worse, because it’s one that someone else didn’t want?”
Maude’s smile grows by a sliver, still noticeable and still faintly warm.
“I guess it’s always a risk,” she says. “You only get one dip in the bin.”
Javier stands and walks over to the first locker, wondering what it would feel like to shed himself and sort through the options in the bin, whether he would grasp their entire range of memories all at once before having to decide, what age they might be, their health status, moral fiber. So many unknowns. But the appeal of it comes sweeping back as he thinks about the long hours on his couch of late, staring at the ceiling, feeling next to nothing.
“Is there anyone famous in the bin?” Javier asks, wondering what it might be like to walk the red carpet and drive an Aston Martin. “Someone who would give anything to have an ordinary life like mine?”
Maude stiffens. “I’m not allowed to tell you that. Privacy rules, you know.”
“What if I wanted to stay between dimensions and just float. Like in a pool, without stepping into any other self? Do people do that?”
“Some do,” Maude says. “But I can’t tell you what that’s like because they never come out of the locker.”
She glances at her watch, a tarnished silver antique by the looks of it. Javier wonders if she plucked it from the bin herself, maybe a perk of the position.
“It’s almost 8. I’d like to go home soon. What’s it going to be, Mr. Javier?”
“Yes, okay,” he says, standing. “I’m ready. Does it matter which locker?”
She says it doesn’t and offers him a small bag of kettle chips from her top desk drawer. She says a second can feel like a year and so he’ll definitely want a snack to tide him over. Maude watches Javier eat the chips as if watching a child to make sure they finish their vegetables. She takes the empty bag from him, folds it in half, and deposits it in the small plastic wastebasket by her feet.
Javier straightens his shirt and steps up to the first yellow locker. He pulls the latch and the door groans as it swings open, rusting at the hinges. A small wave of humid air hits him as if coming off an ocean south of the equator. He can see the locker doesn’t have a back to it, but is the entrance point to a long narrow rectangular passageway that disappears into that humid darkness. He looks back at Maude who gives him a little encouraging wave. Javier turns sideways so he can fit inside, realizing he’ll have to sidestep his way along. Maude moving slowly from her arthritis, makes her way over to the locker to see him off.
“Safe travels,” she says. “Oh, one other thing.”
“Yes?”
“Best if you don’t deliberate too much. Just choose one that chooses you and come back.”
And with that, she slams the door behind him, plunging Javier into the thick damp tropical darkness. He stands there in the dark, breathing the humid air, reviewing his life from the beginning and its status quo handoffs from one ordinary, uneventful milestone to another and thinks why not dip into the bin. Marina would miss him, but she would get over it in a week, maybe two, and maybe even feel a little relieved.
He shuffles sideways along the passageway about twenty feet or so, pausing in between each step to make sure he still has a solid floor beneath him. At one point, his right foot comes down and doesn’t touch anything. Eyes adjusted to the dark, he sees he has arrived at the edge of a deep shaft, what seems like an air duct, shoulder-wide, leading straight down. The source of the humid breeze lies somewhere far beneath. He considers turning back, more out of fear of leaving his body, not knowing what it would feel like, wondering whether it would hurt. He had always had a fear of needles and so he hoped it wouldn’t be like getting jabbed with needles. But then he thinks about emptiness of his apartment, the monotone coldness between him and Marina, how the dust drifts in and out of the sunlight and settles over everything—the TV, the sofa, the photographs and he closes his eyes and steps sideways off the edge.
Here is the entry into the interior, the point of occlusion they call it: where you detach from the outline of your body. Something in that humid tropical air tips the scales, taking you from loose correspondence to a staggered offset. You fall down that air duct in full possession of yourself as formless yet coherent energy, a vibrational heat concentrated as if from the surface glow of a red giant star, retaining within its final throes all your accumulated memories, likes, dislikes, worries, and aspirations. You have the sensation of seeing, expanding in every direction, a full 360 degree panoramic view—which at first are the metal sides of the duct and at the end is the far vista of all the caught materials between dimensions. It will feel like you are falling for days, which is why Maude wants everyone to have a little snack before they go. You land in the bin after a year of falling, 12 months compressed into 3 seconds.
Here you swim among the smaller ephemera, the wallets, socks, earbuds, car keys, retainers, coins, phones, rings, bracelets, charger cables, sunglasses, driver’s licenses—and the medium kind, cats and dogs of all sizes and breeds—and the larger kind, from the whirlpools, disappeared 767s and 777s over the Indian Ocean and vanished cars from I-60 and missing boats from New England harbors. Here you await the other energies until they drop down into your vicinity. There are millions of vicinities and millions of new arrivals each day in those vicinities, searching for new histories and futures. The bin stretches across Planck’s constant and this is felt as nature’s lack of continuity in these between-states, in Reality 1, shaped like an S, sandwiched between Realities 2 and 3, where the speed of light is doubled, tripled, quadrupled.
Then come the twinges, the photonic dialogues. Simple exchanges of life topographies and intentions on horizon 0, a kind of interdimensional speed dating. Javier trades life landscape glimpses with a bee keeper from the UK, an architect from Vancouver, a writer from New York City, a fisherman from Norway. None seem to fit until he merges with a more nondescript harmonic energy, graceful in its curiosity, soft in tone, warm in heart, one from the Hollywood Hills, early 60s, looking for no one and nothing in particular. Javier questions why he chose to root around in the bin.
I’m curious, that energy says. I guess I’m also looking for a more ordinary perspective for the years I have left. Javier asks who he is. Keanu, says the energy. Keanu returns the question, asking the reason for Javier’s dip in the bin. Because I want to feel and know things that are extraordinary and be friends with extraordinary people and go to dinner parties and award shows and see the world. Does that make me shallow? Or a bad person? Keanu says not at all and he thinks they’d make a good match.
The warmth of their merge becomes a light blue fire. There’s the sound of air being sucked out of the bin, a small pop. As the lift begins, Javier’s memories start to fade, of Marina and his cats Frankie and Betts and the heaviness of lying on the apartment sofa all those days. As he’s rising, a white gold wedding band floats by and he draws it into the center of himself instinctually, a center now more occupied by long film shoots and crowded premieres and backlots and parties lasting until early morning. The original Keanu drifts further away, becoming the energy of who Javier was and is for good, distant and strange now, being drawn up into the air duct attached to the stock room of Esquire Shoes.
He wonders what Keanu-as-Javier will think of Maude and hopes that she’ll be nice to him. Nearing his own intake channel, the one lined up with Culver City, Javier senses the wedding band, pulled into the core of him, indistinguishable from the one he lost, and this sends a flare of panic outward, against the pull. He struggles to reverse the merge, fighting to get back to his original air duct like a swimmer trying to free himself from a riptide, flailing to recover the memories of Marina and his cats and the couch. But it does no good. He’s rising fast through a different rectangular shaft, 12 years passing in a single second, absorbing into Keanu’s body that stands mid-stride like a wax figure in that locker-bound corridor of darkness. Amid an onslaught of sensations in his new body, a thought materializes like none he has ever had before, one drenched in warm California sunlight: I have a lunch date tomorrow with a producer at Chateau Marmont on Sunset to discuss another Matrix project. And then a feeling he cannot locate from any residual strand of his previous life: bliss. Maybe it was there. And maybe it wasn’t. But he feels it now. And that’s all that matters.
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