THE SPIRAL STRAND - CHAPTER THREE - Jim

CHAPTER THREE
Jim

Fizz, or more accurately Franklin Fitzgerald, like all persons in my life hadn't arrived there just by chance. Synchronicity was a force in which I placed much faith but I had no truck with chance - things/events were pre-ordained in my worldview but the paths we walked were exactly like the strands on a spiderweb. Let me explain briefly:
There's this big spiderweb see - like it represents all pathways of life and the strands extend all the way outward to infinity while they also emanate from a central point. The radiating strands represent every possible aspect of creation and these are held together by a single spiral strand that interconnects them all, commencing from the centre and spiralling outward in an ever-expanding arc forever...
So we decide to manifest in the reality that we know (the spiderweb) and we choose a pathway to the centre (a strand) and we commence our journey. One pathway may be called Science and science takes you to the centre sure but the other strands called Religion, Satanism, Biology, Fantasy, Insanity, whatever your choice, also lead to the centre. All paths lead to the centre but they just as well lead away from it. And as we move along our chosen pathway, we are constantly meeting up with the spiral strand that magically links all systems and choices. So while we may be walking the insanity path, we can always take a detour on the spiral strand to wherever we wish - sanity and reason for example. And the people we meet on the journey are either on the chosen pathway or the spiral strand and they are there to teach us something even if it is simply how much we can dislike someone.
That's Jim's life analogy and I have yet to discover another system or philosophy that makes more sense. Everything exists in the spiderweb and has validity as a choice or experience but nothing exists without the validation of everything else and everything is linked to everything else. If you see what I mean. In other words - no system or expression of life is better than another nor can it exist without all the other system/s. I call it the everything is everywhere all the time philosophy and it works for me. Time is expressed the same way. You can move through time in any direction and its only a matter of choice how you do it.
Most people eventually find a strand that works for them and they travel along it to the centre, deviating off onto the spiral from time to time but invariably returning to the familiar. More daring people start on one and travel the spiral to a different strand and travel that route for a while hopping between strands on the spiral link until they reach the centre.
And then there are people like Fizz who aren't on a main strand at all - they travel the spiral for the whole fucking journey touching every strand innumerable times on the way so they experience tiny snippets of everything for the briefest of moments. It could be called the schizophrenic strand but I like to think of it as the Fizz Phenomenon or FP. People on the FP have really short attention spans and don't do well at school. Mothers bombard them with Ritalin or have them home schooled or just consider them impossible to teach like Basenji dogs learning obedience training - yeah right!
But FP's are the most interesting people on the planet. Why should they engage in other people's single strand worldview when they are moving between everyone's reality all the time?
You see, my spiderweb philosophy explains everything. Despite this, I still get surprised by FP's when I encounter them. Fizz was no exception.
He simply walked up to me in a coffee shop and sat opposite me, engaging me with his curious blue eyes.
His elongated face was styled like a Philip Bond illustration – a disproportionately large head on a thin, tapering neck - straight out of 2000AD, limp strands of soft sandy coloured hair bobbing across his forehead as he moved. And Fizz always moved. Fizz never stayed still - ever. Even when he slept (as I was later to find out) he twisted and turned or moaned and twitched or spoke or just rolled around. Stillness was to Fizz as Kryptonite was to Clark Kent. Fizz needed life to flow through him like the ever-moving shark relied on the water through his gills. Fizz was in flux.
He reminded me of an avatar I'd seen portrayed once - an Ascended Master - one of those religious paintings from the Renaissance all soft and mystical like. Could have been the Count St Germaine, Sananda - any one of those hypnotic countenances.
And he was dressed as curiously as his manifest energy: shocking-pink long-sleeved grandpa vest beneath a wrinkled ash-grey smock forming the topping to threadbare 501's that boasted patches, the origins and multiplicity of which defied description but melded into the form of a pair of pants only Fizz could have created or found.
"You're not what you seem..." he said cryptically through the rising steam of a skinny cappuccino.
I feigned aloofness.
"You a psychology major?" I responded. We were in a University town. This loon was probably on some new designer narcotic. I was nerdy enough to be part of the trip.
"I'm forty two," he said as if that clarified everything. "I'm not what I seem either. But I live on the spiral..."
That got me. He saw the stiffening of my fingers around the mug and the involuntary wrinkling of eyebrows.
He smiled. "Gotcha."
"Who the fuck are you?" I asked. Nothing could have prepared me for what he'd just said. "Explain the spiral..."
"I see into people," he continued. "Like I see into you... Your worldview is quite refreshingly free from guilt and you see life like a..."  He paused.
"Like a what?" I prompted wondering why I was even talking to this strange dude. But his disarming peculiarity had hooked me - I was squirming on the hook.
He sipped the coffee, forming a smile through the foam on his upper lip.
"Like a spider's web," he said, scanning my face for the awe he knew would be there.
I hunched forward conspiratorially, as if unseen forces were eavesdropping on this bizarre encounter. Why would they be? Why was our autopilot instinct so defensive? Was there some cellular incipient memory prompting us to return to the lower chakras and simply survive first then ask questions later?
"How the fuck do you know that?" I hissed. I hadn't shared those thoughts with anyone. "Who are you?"
The remains of the cappuccino was quaffed and an absent pink cuff  mopped up the foam moustache.
"Frederick Franklin Fitzgerald at your service - Fizz. Fizz to my friends," he said with a pseudo serious look in his eyes, extending a foam-flecked paw expecting a reciprocal companionly shake.
"Okay, Fizz is your name, buddy but who are you?" I asked ignoring the horizontal hand.
"So damn suspicious, Jim. So defensive..."
"Wouldn't you be if the roles were reversed?" I said. He knew my name?
He stowed the hand below the table and rocked back on the bench. He began to move in a systematic rocking motion, backward and forward reminding me of a friend’s autistic child who frequently and inexplicably disappeared in the same way, sometimes banging his head against the wardrobe door over and over again in about the same cadence as my visitor’s movements.
I shivered.
Fizz’s eyes had glazed over at the outset of this activity, far away – absent.
Just as suddenly, he returned from this momentary hiatus to say, "Hell, I don't rightly know about that," Pause. "Y'see I'm in as much of a quandary as you. But for different reasons."
"How do you know my life philosophy - um - Fizz?" I pressed, skirting the crypticism with which he chose to respond.
"Let's just say I have inner vision. It's my gift or curse - just like yours is thievery..."
I gulped on my own coffee almost choking as I swallowed.
"Can we get out of here?" I said, rising from my chair. "We need to take this away from here..."
We did. We left the coffee shop and hit the mall where the cacophonic hubbub offered my jangling nerves a measure of anonymous security.
I steered him to the fountain in Mandela Square. The disproportionate statue of Madiba towered over us, static and much more devoid of animation than I'm sure the sculptor intended. It was a fucking horrible piece and had I been Mandela, I'd have had the prick redo it until it looked like me, exhibited some form of sensitivity and was at least in proportion. Curiously perhaps the old man had liked it. Every time I set foot in the square I took a spare moment to hate it.
I wasn't sure what I was feeling toward my recently established acquaintance, however.
"Talk to me about the spiral," I hissed at him over the noise of the dancing fountain. "What do you mean by that? And where do you get off calling me a thief?"
Fizz was still smiling but given the colour that had begun to creep into my face accompanied by a scowl descending my mouth into a portcullis, he pulled his own lips straight and began to talk.
"I told you - I see into people... and things...bit of a curse really but has some merits of course..."
My eyebrows descended into deeper vees as I augmented the already established scowl.
"Okay already," he tutted. "I hang out at the Mocca Jive quite a bit and your aura kinda intrigued me. I try not to invade people's space but you have a very curious vibe about you so I kinda found myself probing. It just kinda happens sometimes...
"And I saw that you were - well - not what you made out to be - let me say nearly all of us aren't - but you were pretending on purpose. You were leading a real double life and that intrigued me..."
I'd lost the scowl by now and was mesmerised by his soft drawl.
"Go on," I urged.
"I locked onto your thoughts once or twice at the coffee shop and then got really excited..."
"Excited?"
"Yeah for sure. I saw you picturing the whole spider's web thing in your mind - y'know your worldview. And that just blew me away because it made so much sense of how I am and why I experience what I do."
I didn't know whether to feel violated by his psychic voyeurism or flattered at the complimentary way in which he perceived my life philosophy. I guess I was experiencing a little of both.
"Explain," I said.
"Well, Jim, I travel the spiral strand and never really spend any kind of time on the main ones. It just kinda made sense to me y'know. But more than that - it just feels right."
I didn't know what to say. It was all too strange.
"And besides," he said, "I can help you."
"Help me?" I sneered. "I don't need your help. Help to do what?"
He was smiling again.
"Help you to get rid of all that valuable inconvenient stuff you dunno what to do with."
"What - I - um - how?"
"How many times do I have to tell you - I see into people. I can find the right person to fence it off. Just got to get the right vibes and bingo we're home free..."
It was insane, I know, but he'd just proven to me that he could do what he said. And the "we" he'd elected to use clearly indicated that there was a budding symbiosis in the offing.
"Exactly," he said. "Symbiosis. I can do what you cannot and vice-versa so why shouldn't we both gain from it?"
And that was my first encounter with Fizz.