2π28.57mm by Lancelot Schaubert

For Paul J. Pelkonen

illustration by Austin Spencer

story by lancelot schaubert

 I woke to a mass of men writhing and broken, moving as one in their attempt to reach that great circle of light. They looked like ants, but ants without exoskeletons: their soft bits shredding, their hard bits breaking, to make a sort of chickenleg jello out of humanity. The cries of pain and cries of triumph mixed.

I missed the music. I missed writing it. Missed playing it with friends. Missed getting punished for playing my solo poorly. But I mostly missed the money I made doing it. Mostly missed the power it gave me at Julliard. Mostly missed the drugs that it’d buy me, the award ceremonies. I could almost hear it over the din, but I missed the music. Some sort of viscous fluid soaked through my foot and the fluid itself seemed to cry out, but I heard… something. A sort of rhythm, a sort of ebb and flow to the mutual pain in climbing one another towards that circle, towards that beam, towards that light and song that could barely be heard.

The light beamed out into the dark abyss, laserlike, straight and barely widening into the dark fog, a beacon of hope that even many in that great mass could not bear to approach or look at long. They seemed more to have kept themselves set on the memory of the light, the hope of using it for their own means, memorizing its place and then looking everywhere near it but right at it. And then they climbed. One another.

Some folks stood around like me, surveying the lay of the land. One gal — big gal — stood next to me, arms crossed. More arms than chest. More arms than head, honestly, more arms than ass. “Nope,” she said.

“What?” I asked.

“I ain’t climbing that,” she said. She pointed. Her singed weave smacked her pointer on its way to its terminus: full extended arm, on point.

I followed her finger towards the reverse “big rocks first” theory, where the big rocks were somewhat fully formed human beings, the smaller ones beneath them — broken little things, an old folks’s home rendered from strapping young lads — and below them the mash of bariatric patients held together by broken bones, pustules of eyes and ears and fingers beneath that, burst boils and blisters, then the fluid of forgotten humanity at my feet. That interstitial fluid and its moaning…

I heard again a sort of music, the briefest hint of a symphony caught there in the swell and shrink of sound.

A man walked up to us, to me and the woman of the crossed arms, clearly driven out of his mind.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Some contractor,” she said. “Who knows?” She pointed at the light beam.

“I cut it, I cut it, I cut it,” the contractor rambled.

I ignored him. I felt like I might go mad, but I knew I must go on. I left the dog pile of humanity and wandered deeper into the blackness. I realized then that I had a small light with me that other of the zombies — or whatever the mindless hulks of flesh meandering around in the dark grey could be called — oohed and aahed over the candle I carried. A stair presented itself as I walked away from the beam of bright white light and its golden shades. I walked towards the stair and stepped on to the first landing. The moaning and groaning behind me — the reaching and grasping for the candle’s flickering flame — all but unmanned me, but I stepped out onto those stairs, hoping to get away from the loud and annoying mess of fleshbags, fleshplumes, and baggedbones. Three steps down, the cinders in the slated thin concrete gave way in plaques, in grey sheets underfoot. But I felt like the distance from the mass of humanity would help. So I went deeper. A cold wind came up, but I moved a few steps down. On the sixth step the light went out. Clean out. I backed up to the fifth and the candle reignited, but it wouldn’t go at all after the sixth: nothing but darkness and deeper dark of the utmost.

I ran, ran, back up the stairs and back to the wall where the sludgy half-cone of human bodies mushed themselves.

“I cut it, I cut it, I cut it,” the contractor rambled.

I ignored him again. I went back up to the lady with the arms and asked her, “What do you make of this?”

“Not much,” she said, “but I was never much for silly putty and play doh. I need a bit more structure.” She folded her arms.

I said, “But what’s the light?”

“Some lie,” she said. “Some terrible and awful lie.” She looked again at the light and started crying. Then she sobbed. The she pulled her arms out of their crossed position and started weeping into them uncontrollably, turned and fled towards the dark and eldritch stair set, hitting the fourth and then falling head over heels for them, tumbling headlong into the deep. Tumbling asslong into the dark.

“I cut it, I cut it, I cut it,” the contractor rambled a third time.

“Holy shit, CUT WHAT?”

“The circle, the circle, the circle,” he said.

“Wait. Wait, which circle?” I asked.

“The one up above, the one up above, the one up above.”

I looked and saw that great portal of light above that great mountain of broken humanity, of bodies mangled and mangling. I noticed that it wasn’t just a beam. I noticed more than the radiating light that went out into my personal hell. The place where I couldn’t compose, couldn’t play, couldn’t sing, couldn’t get in trouble for doing any of those poorly. And I heard the music again. “That light circle?”

“I cut it, I cut it, I cut it.”

“What did you cut?” I asked. I was desperate at this point. I had to know. “Tell me. Tell me what you cut.”

“2π28.57mm. 2π28.57mm. 2π28.57mm.”

“Two pie twenty-six millimeters? Wait I know that…” I thought — hard, I mean really friggin hard — back to my time in geometry. I saw a large notecard on the desk before me, the different formulas for basic geometric shapes and how to find area. Scrap the millimeters, it could be any measurement. And the number that came with them. 2πX — what was that? What was that?

I knew that…

I knew it…

2πX — what was that? What was that again?

Circumference.

The circumference of the circle is twice pie times the radius. 2π28.57mm. Is 179.511mm. Or a 57.12mm diameter. That’s the size of my old buddy’s camera lens. Why would they cut something the size of my photojournalist buddy’s old camera lens. “Did you cut it for a camera lens?”

“I cut it, I cut it, I cut it.”

“Oh… oh God. Oh dear God no.” I didn’t know for sure, but I had to see. I had to see. I ran over the interstitial fluid of humanity and heard it groan. I hurdled over the mush and mangle of humanity and heard it more. I moved over the bags of bones and the lumpier trashbags of men and women until I was up on the invalids, then — survival of the fittest style — climbed over those too, smashing them with roughly new sneakers compared to theirs (how long had they clambered over one another?) until I was fighting tooth and nail with the weaker ones there on the great dog pile, the great junkpile of men and women and… were those children in the higher stages? I couldn’t face that, needed to see the light hole. The circumference of the circle is twice pie times the radius. 2π28.57mm. Is 179.511mm. Or a 57.12mm diameter. That’s the size of my old buddy’s camera lens. This size of his old camera lens.

I fought over the strapping young lads, over the rest of the newly acquired and acclimated, throwing them ten, twenty feet away from the edge of the dog pile. They screamed profanities at me and howled as they hit the outside border of the first hints of that half cone of manflesh. I didn’t care. I was inches from the top. I reached that portal and stretched my right arm through the porthole of illumination, grabbed on to the other side and clung. I obscured a good deal of the light for others that way, but I could hang on for a whole lot longer than most. And I heard it blasting out, blaring out to me: the symphonies! I heard Mozart again and Tchaikovsky and Mahler and Wagner and Strauss. Bartók and Dutoit and Li and Britten. I pulled myself up — full pull up like I hadn’t don’t since high school football — and looked out the hole straight into the light.

A roar of protest sounded behind me.

I didn’t care. I pulled up, ready for more money, ready for more of the political power it’d bought me, more of the drugs, or the trophies.

And through that porthole of light, I saw the stage and the players and the audience and the balcony and the chandelier of Carnegie Hall. What beautiful people in suits and collars. What polished wood and golden light. The sound of Ricola wrappers coming undone in the free dispensaries through Carnegie’s hallways. The smell of so much cologne and perfume.

“I CUT IT! I CUT IT! I CUT IT!” the contractor cried over the din at me from below.

He meant the photographer’s hole, the way to photograph the music from backstage. He’d cut the hole in the wall so a photographer could get an audience-facing shot. Only somehow… somehow I’d ended up in this hell of people that’d come here for all the wrong reasons. They weren’t here for the music. They definitely weren’t here for the desire behind the music. They were here for the things the music coming out of that light hole gave to them, proximate goods. Just like me: the money, the power, the pleasure, the honor. Not the desire behind those desires, oh no. Not the Music behind the music.

Just surface things. Just skin-and-bones.

I got yanked so hard by six men that my forearm snapped in twain and went to muddy.

From there I tried to climb back up, but a broken forearm’s no match for strapping young lads.

Soon after that, you’re broken on multiple extremities: you’re an invalid.

Then you’re so many bits of human scattered across the dog pile.

And by the time you realize how deeply you long for the Music behind all music and the Light behind all lights, you’re a pile of mush, a liquid ooze and secretion of a thing, reduced to… nothing really substantial at all, aching just for one more glimpse of Carnegie through the cinematographer’s hole, the entrypoint of music into an otherwise deaf domain.

You start to see that you’ve been fooled: it wasn’t the music you wanted, so much as just finding the music.

But of course, by then, my mind was little more than a lake of fire spread out over so much black sod.