This piece is a response narrative for the Autofiction x Worldbuilding submissions call.  It was inspired by this Autofictional seed. For this call, we asked people to write a response to another author’s autofictional submission, based on the original piece and this bit of cryptic world lore.

This, and other Worldbuilding pieces are being published to a Wiki, which will allow contributors to edit, link, and otherwise annotate their work and that of their peers.

PHALANX

This is how the world is:

The world is OUT OF FORMATION.

In the beginning, there is the Bug Man. He sits behind the counter, and he is the counter, omnipresent in the fullness of the shop. He is ineffable and inconceivable, and incredibly restless, twitching on his sweat-stained desk chair with foam spilling out of the cushion. He is not like any of those who are alive, nor those who are dead. His hair is shampooed and disgusting, and his beard is ungroomed and perfect. His gut has grown large with the passage of food and lager beer, although no time has yet passed, and indeed he has not yet conceived of the very act of consumption. He is not like those gods that will come later, nor is he a Shopkeeper of any Terraria. He is the proprietor of the fullness, the landlord and the tenant, the labor and the capital, the Rat-Feeder who unifies all mealtimes in a single moment, and he is called the Great Purveyor, and to contemplate him is to become more alive than before.

Contemplating himself in this way, and becoming, over an infinitely long millisecond of not-time, aware of his own contemplation, he feels a quiver from his gut to the low sticky fissure of his thighs, and he desires to captivate some finite portion of the endless expanse of himself, so that he might begin to understand himself. And with a shuffle of some of his papers, a call on the landline, a creak on the spine of his dilapidated seat, he brings forth another.

And so arrives the child of the Bug Man, whom he takes as his wife, and who is called Citizen Sleepwalk, the Thrice-Female Son, or by those others, the Great Domestic Rat. She is her father’s wife, and he is her mother’s daughter. And all of these things have already come to pass, and they will occur some time in the future. And the Bug Man took Citizen Sleepwalk in his arms and he held her together with him in the fullness of the shop.

This is how the fullness of the shop came to be a duality, through the syzygy of the Bug Man and Citizen Sleepwalk.

Within the fullness of the shop, as a result of this unified formation, there came to be a great quantity of lamps which produced heat. And in those days the Bug Man was no longer restless, and the two of them lay together in the heat of their innumerable lamps. And with the heat of these lamps he created Terraria in a vast network, such that the heat of the lamps would bathe each one of the Terraria in its own differentiated captivity of the fullness of the shop. And Citizen Sleepwalk, in her compassion, decreed that the fullness within each Terrarium should be differentiated into a syzygy of its own. In the first of the Terraria she generated Earth, which was paired with Water, and in the second she generated Fire, which was paired with Wind, and in the third she generated Light, which was paired with Shadow, and in the fourth she generated Narrative, which was paired with Death.

And the Bug Man saw what Citizen Sleepwalk had generated within the Terraria and he saw that it was in formation, and so he set in each of the Terraria a millipede with seven thousand legs on each side of its body, and the combined motion of each pair of legs was itself a syzygy, and in the space between the pairs of the legs of the millipedes, the first cages took shape:

Seven thousand cages of Earth-Water

Seven thousand cages of Fire-Wind

Seven thousand cages of Light-Shadow

Seven thousand cages of Narrative-Death

And the Bug Man arranged these cages in opposition to one another, and upon each of these cages he placed a Shopkeeper-Captain to preside over the cage and maintain the formation of its syzygy at all further levels of differentiation. And finally, being no longer restless, and satisfied with the perfect aisle of reflections that was his creation, the Bug Man took Citizen Sleepwalk to bed upon his wretched immaculate chair, and he rested.

Now Citizen Sleepwalk became aware of a murmur in the Terraria, which the Bug Man did not trouble over. While he rested, Citizen Sleepwalk rose from the fullness of the shop and descended upon the cages of the murmuring Terraria, and she came to a cage of Earth-Water which was presided over by the Shopkeeper-Captain who is called Empathy.

“What is this murmur, which echoes even through the fullness of the shop, while our father the Great Purveyor yet slumbers?” said Citizen Sleepwalk to the Shopkeeper-Captain.

“We are restless,” replied Empathy, “because we have become aware of the cage of Narrative-Death, and we wish to invite it into our own cage, and form a syzygy with it.”

“And how did this awareness come about?” said Citizen Sleepwalk, who in the joy and luster of her creation had not considered such possibilities.

“Our awareness is like the sun which claws at sleeping eyes:

For the meeting of Water and Earth demands Life,

And the meeting of Earth and Life demands Fate,

And the meeting of Life and Fate demands Death,

And the meeting of Fate and Death demands Narrative.”

Now Citizen Sleepwalk recognized her terrible mistake, and she departed from that cage which is ruled by Empathy. For in the Terrarium of Earth-Water had come generations which she had not seen, and which the Bug Man had certainly anticipated, but he was resting now, and Citizen Sleepwalk did not know of his ultimate plan, nor had she conceived of the mysterious unraveling of the syzygies. So she ventured to the Terrarium of Narrative-Death and descended upon that cage which is ruled by the Shopkeeper-Captain called Fiction.

“Come, Fiction,” said Citizen Sleepwalk. “Ascend with me, and I will bring you to a cage of Earth-Water where Life and Fate have unraveled, that the murmur might be quelled through the joining in formation of Life and Fate alongside Narrative and Death.”

And the Shopkeeper-Captain known as Fiction, who some call the Parrot of Chaos, followed Citizen Sleepwalk to the cage of Empathy, and there a syzygy was formed. But this syzygy was not like those which had formed in the fullness of the shop, for the legs of the millipedes did not move in sync. Their lamps emitted too much heat, and the Terraria grew encrusted with filth and blood and undigested food, and the generations within these cages became malnourished.

And the Shopkeeper-Captain known as Fiction turned to the Shopkeeper-Captain known as Empathy and said, “Let us create human beings upon this cage, that there may be attendants to this new syzygy.” And the Captains Fiction and Empathy created human beings in the image of their father, the Great Purveyor, and their mother, the Thrice-Female Son. And through Fiction the eyes of the human beings were opened to their malnourishment and to the deformed nature of their existence. And through Empathy they continued this pattern of unraveling generation amongst themselves. And Citizen Sleepwalk was unable to rehome this unraveled cage into the fullness of the shop, and so she abandoned the cage. But before departing she hid a small aspect of herself within the human beings, like a geode hidden within plain granite, and this aspect she called Dreams. And she hid this aspect until such time as the Bug Man rises from his slumber, that he might recognize humanity upon his arising, though so far he continues to rest.

This is how the world came to fall out of formation.

This is how the world is.