Theory of Everything #3

Theory of Everything #3

By Ramon Atila (in a Joking Mood)

The sun was high and the road was long. The kind of road that makes a man think about time. About how it slips through your fingers like sand, or like the ash from a good Cuban cigar. I lit one now, rolling down the window of the 1965 Jaguar E-Type, because speed and smoke are the only things that make you feel alive when the universe is laughing at you.  

The car purred like a stallion—no, better than a stallion. A stallion is wild, untamed, but a machine like this? It obeys. Mostly. Unless it doesn’t. And then you’re just a man on the side of the road with a cigar and a busted transmission, wondering why God gave you hands if not to fix things that break.  

But some things you can’t fix.  

A man once told me, “When you get past the dimensions of space, there are the dimensions of time, and after that are the 3 dimensions of reality, where space-time is simply a coordinate in a graph. The dimensions of reality start on the 7th dimension.”

I laughed. Then I drank. Then I laughed again.  

The 7th dimension, he said, is a lightning strike, a heartbreak. You ever been struck by lightning? No? Good. It’s like love, but faster and with less warning. And like love, you don’t control it. You just stand there, smoking your cigar, waiting to see if you’ll live or die.  

“You cannot fold a piece of paper in half more than 7 times,” he said, “and as a human, you cannot get past the seven dimensions and still have agency in the physical universe.”

That’s when you hand the reins to God. Or the devil. Or the taxidermist. Because what’s the difference, really? They all take what was alive and make it stiff, permanent. A trophy. A memory. A joke.  

The 6th dimension, he said, is the beginning, middle, and end of the movie, all contained in the rolls of film. The 7th dimension? “The final edited production contained in a movie on a videocassette.”

I thought about that. My life, already edited. All the bad cuts left in. The drunken nights. The wars. The women who left. The ones I left. The cigars smoked in silence, staring at a stuffed marlin on the wall, wondering if the fish had been happier in the water.  

And then he said, “Up to the 9th dimension, you’re working with multiple videocassettes containing movies that had the vision of different directors.”

Christ. No wonder life makes no sense. We’re all just spliced-together reels from different films. Some tragic. Some comedy. Some just bad cinema.  

You can control the cigar you smoke. You can control the car you drive. You can control how fast you go, until the engine blows.  

But you can’t control time. You can’t control the men in detention centers, locked away like animals, waiting for a future that may never come. You can’t control the lightning strike. The heartbreak. The way the universe folds and unfolds like a drunk origami master.  

I drove faster. The wind howled. The cigar burned down to my fingers. I didn’t flinch. Pain is just time’s way of reminding you that you’re still here.  

A stallion runs because it must. A car runs because you tell it to. But both can throw you. Both can kill you. And both are beautiful in motion—muscle and machine, sweat and oil, dust and exhaust.  

I once saw a man try to stuff a stallion. Taxidermy. A stupid idea. Some things should stay alive or stay dead. No in-between.  

The sun dipped low. The road curved. The last of my cigar was ash.  

I thought about the 7th dimension. About how we’re all just films spliced together by a drunk editor in the sky. About how little we control.  

Then I laughed. Because what else is there to do?  

The universe is a joke. The punchline is death.  

And the best you can do is enjoy the ride.

ATILA