The block was not really, but in Lipsies' mind wholly orthogonal, a Euclidean trap of the most heinous conception. The streets were coming at him! Straight on! It was a broadside attack, asphalt from a cannon breaching his environment. He was mixing up the numbers in the address he must find, of the house he was searching for. All these houses that looked the same, planted into shiny earth near the new road, a distressingly fresh black.
"Doctor, Doctor, where are you?!" he kept saying. "Doctor, Doctor! Please!" This was the mantra that kept acquiescence at bay.
Here it is! he said to himself. House number 3333 Armadillo Drive. "Doctor, Doctor!" Lipsies shouted.
He ran up the swerving path that decapitated the doctor's lawn. He would have run through that big wood door if he could have. But was instead forced to confront it with a machine gun belt of knocks. "Doctor, Doctor! Doctor, you must see me! I am of a most urgent need!"
It was 273 seconds before a light was engaged within the foyer, at which point Lipsies terminated his knocking. "Doctor, Doctor! Please! It is I! Lipsies! I am of a most urgent need!"
Doctor Godel Von Neumann opened the door. He was a hunched man with a hunched face, 816 months old. His hunched face wore smooshed spectacles, housing eyes resurrected with annoyance.
"Lipsies! Lipsies, my boy! What in the devil do you want? It is the middle of the night! I had already turned into bed and you come to wake me at this late hour?"
"My apologies, Doctor! I am of a most urgent need! A most urgent need!"
"Urgent?" spoke the doctor.
"Yes, a need! It is most urgent! Please!"
The doctor opened the door allowing Lipsies in.
"Have a seat, Lipsies," said the doctor, gesturing to the living room beyond the foyer.
"Much thanks, Doctor!" Lipsies quickly took a seat as the doctor clapped twice to illuminate the room. Lipsies waited in agonized stasis.
"Now then," said the doctor as he sat in his armchair across from Lipsies. "Please explain what all this is about. It is very late and I am weary."
"Yes, quite late," said Lipsies. He sat there sweating and fidgety.
"Well, out with it, man!"
"Yes, yes. My apologies." Lipsies took a deep breath then rapidly spoke: "Dear Doctor, my life is in danger! I fear I may only have tens of minutes to live. And it is with this in mind that I have come to you. For it is my belief that it is within your power to save my poor, wretched life."
"But how is this?" asked the doctor. "And if time is truly of the essence, as you say, then please continue forthrightly."
Lipsies again took another deep breath: "Yes, Doctor. You see, some years ago actions of mine directly led to the death of one Ichabod Hidalgo. I am afraid the present circumstance precludes the possibility that I might more thoroughly divulge the details of this folly, but suffice it to say that I was in the wrong and the man's vindictive father is in the right----the right that is to take vengeance upon me. Now then, the man's father----name: Catskill Hidalgo----managed to poison me, despite my various precautions, with a toxin well beyond the skill of any other chemist to neutralize; Catskill Hidalgo being the greatest of all chemists to which this era might make claim."
"Yes, his reputation precedes him," interrupted the doctor. "Go on."
Lipsies continued speaking rapidly: "Yes, well, the toxin was quite sophisticated and was designed to leave me in perfectly unaffected health until exactly one year from the time at which I was dosed; at which point I will promptly fall to the ground and die a rather agonizing death."
"And at what time will that be?" again interrupted the doctor.
"That will be in approximately 18 minutes, Doctor."
"I see," said the doctor gravely.
"So, allow me then to continue," said Lispsies.
"Yes, yes, go on," said the doctor.
Lipsies took another deep breath: "Catskill Hidalgo had sentenced me to death and I had reconciled with this. Furthermore, I had accepted it as just punishment for my recklessness. But more to the point: Catskill Hidalgo had in this time realized a revolution of conscience such that he was able to find it within himself to forgive the man responsible for the death of his son! And so he set out to find an antidote for the poison concocted by his own hand, the poison he had intended to bring me to justice. Now, he sent me the means by which to neutralize his toxin as well as instructions for how one ought to mix and administer it!"
Lipsies took another breath before rapidly continuing: "In addition, he included a suite of rationales for why he would do such a thing, for someone, only a short time before, he could only wish death."
Lipsies took two small bottles stopped with corks from his coat and placed them on a side table. One was made of green glass with a label that read "Red", and the second was made of red glass with a label that read "Green".
"I am only to drink these two elixirs in the proper order two minutes apart and I am saved," said Lipsies.
"Well, it appears that you are delivered then!" proclaimed the doctor. "What could you possibly want of me?"
Lipsies took several sheets of paper from his coat and slapped them down beside the two bottles.
"This is the issue, dear Doctor. I find that I am unable to follow his instructions, sir. I am not sure in which order I am to consume the elixirs, nor how it is that I am to properly admix the auxiliary ingredients. I am also told that if I were to consume the antidote mixed in the wrong order it would not only fail to neutralize the poison but would also increase the pain I would suffer in the last moments of my life. So dear Doctor... You know that my command of English is often wanting, it not being my natural language. I have come to you after many attempts at comprehension. You are among the most brilliant people I know. More brilliant than Catskill himself! I leave it to you to decipher these instructions and then administer to me the liquids of my restitution."
Lipsies passed the papers to Doctor Godel Von Neumann. "Please. How am I to save myself, Doctor?"
Dear Mr. Ellipses Lipsies,
The hatred that consumes me for Ichabod's demise burns as intensely now as it did the day I learned you had wronged him. But also, now it is true that there blooms in my heart the light of Grace, and in whose elevation I now find the strength by which to offer you some road to continued life----which is my mercy, and by which I hope to leave my own soul unburdened of the weight that must wretchedly torment yours. Delivered along with these letters are two bottles which contain the salvation to your dire predicament. But do not be hasty, Mr. Ellipses Lipsies! You must consume them in the correct order, one and then the other, two minutes apart, properly mixed, for them to have the intended effect. Otherwise, the concoction will act more as an accelerant to amplify the toxin already present in your system. I will tell you the sequence, rest assured, I wish only to say my piece while I have your undivided attention. Which I'm sure to have at this moment.
The journey that led me to this change in disposition vis a vis your fate was perhaps long in its total development but was catalyzed very abruptly over the course of a single conversation with a dear friend. This friend was Esmeralda Wong, Esquire & Dean Emeritus of the Helsinki School for Modern Dance. Esmeralda told me of a book she was reading in which the character Bryan is putting on a play. The book is called Time to Know: How to Do When You Have No Time. Anyway, several characters in the book start a theater company called the Still Pigeon and they are preparing to put on the debut performance of a play called----I do not now recall the name of the play----but no matter. The play was about the triumphs and travails of a movie production house set in an alternate reality version of the Golden Age of Hollywood. The hot shot producer, called Goldchest, is fighting with the director over including a scene in which the star actress, whom both the producer and director are having affairs with, would murder a brilliant young programmer, who, brilliant but arrogant, made a tremendous mistake. In his hubris this programmer programs a video game that simulates the experience, or rather reality of being a person that is behind another person, who is reading a letter concerning a man who has been poisoned! And quite coincidentally this man who has been poisoned is named none other than Ellipsis Lipsies!
"This is absurd!" shouted the doctor upon reaching this point in the letter. "The character that is within the story, that is being read by the person, that is being watched in the simulation, that is being programed by the programmer, that is in the movie, that is being produced by the character, that is in the play, that is being put on by Bryan, that is in the book, that is mentioned by Wong, that is in the conversation, that is recounted in this letter, just happens to share your same exact name and predicament? Simply absurd!" the doctor exclaimed again.
"Please Doctor! Please continue! I think I have deduced which of the bottles is red I only need now to know how it is that one admixs Love!"
Doctor Godel Von Neumann eyed Lipsies, unsure how to interpret him.
"Please Doctor! Continue! I am afraid I'm running out of time."
The doctor relented. His face grimaced as he read. He skipped to the next page, surveyed it. And then the next page.
"Obnoxious gobbledygook," groaned the doctor. "Did someone put you up to this, my boy?" His eyes returning to Lipsies. "Is this some attempt at mischievous high jinks?"
"Sincerely Doctor, I am genuine! At this very instant I fear I am wasting my very last precious moments. I swear it! On my dissertation, on the Constitution, on my life! Help me. Help me Doctor, please! I beg you!" Tears began to well in Lipsies' eyes.
Doctor Godel Von Neumann began to swell in rebuttal but instead sighed. "Alright, my boy. Alright. Let us continue." He again read and after some time and many faces he skipped to the last page in exasperation.
So, Esmeralda tells me Bryan is an addlepate to maintain this inane predilection for the effectuation of pseudo-Mayakovsky-esque stratagems and is merely a co-conspirator in his lackadaisically devised tenebrous opera of self-subversion, disconsolately enacted via psycho-material implements originating in self-odium, the ouroboros mirror of his capitulation to an un-tintinnabulated state of affairs where he is forsaken of the will to eschaton, the Logos Supreme or whatever nom de plume one might fasten to the prodigious plenipotentiary, that spizzerinctum-dreamed doula of this obstreperous spar with vicissitude. We are pugilists, Catskill, she told me. Pugilists at heart, and with fists of hearts and craniums, the effluvium aggregate of these thoughts and feelings that render debauched our proprioceptions. And then my dear Esmeralda looked into my eyes and spoke this. Allow me to paraphrase: If we are to live together in any kind of peace, we must learn to forgive, or else what is there? She asked me again, What is there? And I ask myself this over and over. Mr. Ellipsis Lipsies, if we do not----
"Poppycock!" shouted the doctor. "I think I've at last put together what's going on here, Lipsies. It's quite obvious!"
"It is?" asked Lipsies, weakly.
"Yes, my dear boy! It's obvious to me now that you were not poisoned at all! The idea that someone could devise a poison that could have no effect on you for a year and then miraculously kills you unless you take some concoction that you must administer following these nonsense instructions, non-existent instructions, in a nonsense letter! Don't you see that this is his vengeance? He has tormented you for a year with the, we now see, false knowledge of your impending death. And at the last moment, at the very last minute he sends you this insane red herring of ungraspable hope to torment you, like taunting a child with sweets that you have no intention to relinquish. To torment you one last time before his con is at last unveiled. This is all meaningless," he said, raising the papers. "You are fine. Go home and let us sleep. All will be well! One cannot hope to understand the reality that underrides fiction if fictions are all the realities there are."
"I do not understand, Doctor."
"What does not exist cannot harm you, my boy. I am convinced more than ever that this idea that you were poisoned is merely a fiction created by Catskill Hidalgo to torture you. In punishment for the death of his son. Nothing more. In a way quite ingenious on Catskill's part. He tortured you for a year without ever laying a hand on you..." The doctor gave a begrudging nod then returned to Lipsies. "We are material beings, Lipsies, and ultimately it is only the material that can touch us. That is to say, you can only be poisoned with an actual poison!" He chuckled warmly. "And as proof of my point, it has been exactly 18 minutes since you arrived, and still you stand here salubrious before me!"
"Quite right," spoke Lipsies in recognition. "Huzzah, Doctor! Hazzah! Hazzah!"
Doctor Godel Von Neumann smiled at Ellipsis Lipsies and took him to his door, letting him out. The door closed behind Lipsies as he strode forward, smiling, confident in a new day, free from all the torment that only moments before had gripped his heart. Lipsies made it 12 steps down the path that decapitated the doctor's lawn then clenched his breast as he collapsed to the ground.
-- Siddhartha Winarchist is a pseudonym. As such, he lives in a twilight Twitter world of macroeconomics and anime. The author he represents enjoys long walks and can be found gambling in cat houses along the US-Mexico border. Follow Syd on X @syd_winarchist.