The Birth Of The Infinite I

Vivian Hensleigh sat back in the cab and shook out an unfiltered Capstan superstrength joint from the silver case which he kept in the left breast pocket of his exquisitely tailored Saville Row suit. Up front, the driver rambled on about Enoch Powell in a borderline unintelligible Cockney patois, utterly unaware of the bizarre transformation which was about to take place behind him. Lighting the joint, luxuriating in the sweet, cloying miasma it produced, Vivian caught sight of his reflection in the silver lighter he held in his perfectly manicured fingers. The man staring back at him from the depths of the mirrored surface was a strong, handsome chap, something big in the city, a hit with the ladies and an all round good egg. Educated, well to do, a bit of a toff but not insufferably so, he was the paragon of upper class manhood in the early 1970s. Looking deeper, he found himself locked inside the endless echo chamber of his own icy, tuetonic eyes. The lighter burnt his fingers, hot rocks from the joint dropping onto the lapels of his whistle, but he was no longer there to feel it.


Nodding out, like all the other stoners. Bloody weekend hippy. Looks too well off for that lark. Probably spends every ha'penny on designer flares and Habitat rugs for his flat in Maida Vale. Wanker.

Viv Hensleigh grunted, sitting up, wondering where the voice had come from. He glanced in the rear view mirror to see if it was his fare but the wanker was still drifting in the back seat. Gripping the steering wheel tighter, he wondered if he'd pulled one all-night shift too many this week. It's that or I'm going bloody doolally.

Slowing to let a couple of pedestrians pass at a pelican crossing, he spotted a lovely young dolly bird in a miniskirt and platform heels struggling to cross without flashing her bum. He waited until she was right in front of the cab, then leant heavily on the horn. She jumped, startled, rewarding him with a flash of white cotton panties that would do him a treat next time the missus went to sleep and left him to fend for himself.

What a perv! The dirty old sod's old enough to be me dad! Me grandad even! Feller in the back look's half decent, but he's not even looked my way. Probably too embarrassed. I'm sure I've seen him on the telly; looks really familiar.

Vivien Hensleigh stood in front of the cab, peering at the man in the back seat, until the driver beeped his horn again and slowly nosed towards her. Shaken from her thoughts, she tottered off to the other side of the road and watched the cab glide past, the passenger still fixated on the shiny silver object in his hand. Transfixed, she turned to keep it in sight for as long as she could, until it disappeared into the underpass at the end of the street.

As the cab momentarily darkened, Vivian Hensleigh sat up in the back seat and shook himself, questions cascading through his chaotic thoughts. Was I really in their minds? Why were they all just like me? Why did we all have the same name?

But the questions would never be answered, as the cab came back out into the blinding sunlight and the polished lighter exploded like a silver star in his hand. The light seemed more intense than the sun, brighter than the white hot heart of the big bang but colder than the depths of the Arctic Ocean. Every glint and gleam was caught and refracted, reflected through the mini-nova he held in his petrified fingers. The flesh was stripped from his bones, every fibre of muscle and sinew scorched away by the light of the silver star, peeling back every layer of his physical form, paring away the days and decades of accumulated existence. At the same time, a sweet, delicate fragrance filled the cab, something Eastern and exotic, like the smells from the curry house on the high street but less fearsome, and he felt his head swimming as if he'd gone through the whole pack of joints in a single session. The radio was playing My Sweet Lord, just for him, and from somewhere close at hand, three soft voices sang in his ear.

"Gurur Brama..."

With a sickening lurch, the cab left the road and ploughed through the railings surrounding a small park, destroying a stand of young trees. A flock of birds erupted into sky, screeching in alarm.

"Gurur Vishnu..."

The driver fell back in his seat, his eyes wide, staring but unseeing, his consciousness a raging void.

"Gurur Devo Maheshwaraha..."

Passersby and pedestrians ran to their aid, but as the radius of his burgeoning consciousness expanded to encompass the park and the roads around it, they too were overtaken by the spreading mind of the new-born Godhead. Limbs and minds slackening, they fell to the ground, the lucky few resting against one another, dropping like flies. A car mounted the kerb and crashed through a television rental shop window, its tyres leaving a black rubber exclamation mark on the pavement. A moment later, the driver slipped out of his seat, crawled as far as the shop doorway, then dropped alongside all the other sleeping vessels.

"Gurur Saakshat Para Brahma..."

As the light of the silver star burned away His shadow, the being once known as Vivian Hensleigh cast His mind out across the face of creation, a searing white hot flame of thought which flickered and roared in the lantern skulls of all the little humans He found.

"Tasmai Sree Gurave Namaha..."

They were all like Him. More; they all were Him. Extensions and reflections of His own self, like a soul in a hall of mirrors. He felt Himself being subsumed into the greater mind of the universe, a single drop of water in a limitless ocean, and it terrified Him. From a hundred million mouths, He screamed.

"Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna..."

His scream was the birth cry of a new universe, and as it sent ripples through the neighbouring realms, He felt the fear it generated, and in an instant, a paradigm shift of cosmic proportions occurred. No longer dissipating into the overmind, the new God felt Himself infect it at every level, a viral deity spreading like cancer through the healthy flesh of existence.

"Krishna Krishna..."

The souls He touched were His, to raise up and smite down as He saw fit, to animate with life or to consign to the tomb world once and for all. Looking down upon the vacant form of the cab driver, He felt the urge to raze the whole of creation and begin anew, with a strict exclusion policy for oiks like that. But what then of the man in the back seat, or the girl at the side of the road? They were all aspects of Himself; all He could do was fight to preserve them, one and all, for all eternity. What use is a dying God?

"Hare Hare..."

With a wistful sigh, the divine being returned to His cage of flesh and blood, slowly withdrawing His controlling influence from the tiny souls surrounding Him, turning back the wheel of time to return them to their original states; Glass reformed, charred embers blazed briefly into flame, then died away to leave perfect forms beneath, broken bones knitted and healed in the blink of His cosmic eye. Life seeped back in to the scattered shells and the spark of sentience flashed anew in countless eyes. He had taken His people to the brink of destruction and returned them whole and unharmed; His was a benevolent, loving reign, and it would last until the final star was plucked from the firmament by His majestic hand and doused at His decree.

"Hare Rama..."

Settling back into the ill-fitting form of Vivian Hensleigh, He thought of the life He had known and understood how poorly it would suit Him now. Like The Redeemer, He would walk amongst them instead, taking on their sins, relieving them of their burdens, bringing them back to His loving arms one soul at a time.

"Hare Rama..."

As the radio faded out, Hensleigh became aware of movement and noise nearby. Opening his eyes, he found that he was still in the back of the cab and that they seemed to have been in an accident; There was a cast iron fence pole poking through the shattered window and a number of firemen were inspecting it and shouting at him. He couldn't hear what they were saying as they appeared to be at the bottom of an almost endless well, peering up at him with faces frozen in masks of concern and despair. Leaning forwards to peer more closely at them, he felt a tearing sensation at his shoulder and realised that the fence post came much further in than he had at first surmised; at least three inches of it was embedded in the seat behind him, having passed right through his shoulder on its short journey. He howled, then wondered why the universe hadn't recoiled in terror at the sound. As the world rushed back in to surround him, he realised that he had been dreaming, an instant of excruciating pain and shock tipping his mind from the rails, sending it screeching through the stranger realms of hallucination and insanity. Despite his pain, despite the creeping numbness which affected his right arm and the certain knowledge that it would never work again, Hensleigh giggled. The fireman leaning in through the window with a ferocious set of oversized bolt cutters to trim his iron pinion paused and shouted at him.

"Are you alright sir?"

Hensleigh grinned, "I think I met God."

The fireman smiled back as he prepared to cut through the fence post, "Really? Well, I'm sure he'll get you through this. What did he have to say for himself?"

The fireman tried to move the post as little as possible, but it was impossible not to and the cold iron ground against the ruins of his shoulder, crushing and twisting the bones and snapping more tendons and nerves. Hensleigh gritted his teeth in a rictus grin.

"He said, doolang doolang doolang!"

Then the post snapped, the end springing upright and severing the last sinuous threads which gave him control over his arm, the pain lancing through his mind like a red hot javelin. He screamed until his lungs ached and his voice went, cracking two fillings as he ground his teeth together. The sudden spurt of blood which sprayed the seat in front of him was the final straw and the new constellation it created, ruby stars on the black leather sky, was the last thing he saw as the darkness overtook him and he fell into merciful unconsciousness.

Perhaps the world went away, with no guiding light to shepherd it. Perhaps the souls simply winked out of existence with no deity to look upon them. Perhaps the universe held its breath, waiting for the new God to return from the darkness and to bestow life upon it once more. Perhaps all this and more occurred when Hensleigh went away, but if no-one exists except in the light of the Lord's gaze, then who can say what happened while He slept?