You wake up.
You survived being tugged into a different dimension by all four chambers of your heart. You look around and see that you’re somehow stranded in a pristine and almost impossible white airport — near devoid of color.
From your right, you see bipedal canine child that looks like Vonnie’s dog from Bedtime with Cooper — whispering into his mother’s ear — herself a larger version of Cooper dressed in American Eagle.
“Pssst, mom — there’s a human in Pandemonium.”
“Shh. And don’t stare, that’s how you attract its attention.”
The mother turns her head away with a Pyrenees-elegant swish of alban fur. The child looks again anyway. You catch his eye. He grins, bashful, and presses his snout into his mother’s hip.
You stand up. The bones in your legs make small clicking sounds, which is strange, because you used your legs about four seconds ago. You decide not to think about this.
You walk toward the nearest gate. The gate is marked, in faint white letters on the white field above the gate-door: I. A single numeral.
The steward-Cooper at the gate entrance looks at you oddly, herself dressed in a form-fitting Pandemonium stewards uniform with a large neon purple “P” emblazoned on the chest. Her tongue lolls out of her muzzle as if to remind you that her job is to be a customs-officer, and she is watching you.
“Boarding pass?”
“Passport, then?”
You shake your head again.
“Country of origin?”
You open your mouth.
“Earth”
The steward looks at her clipboard. She frowns. She runs a finger down a list. She turns the page. She turns the page again. She looks up.
“That gate doesn’t exist.”
“Well, it’s not a gate. It’s a planet.”
The steward exhales so deeply she threatens to compress herself into a black hole.
“Pandemonium’s manifest lists every gate that has ever existed in any dimension our routing covers. Just — you know what — just hold a moment.”
You wait for another passage of time, the curio for an entire airport of Cooper-based passengers staring at you. The steward returns visibly frustrated. The neon-purple P at her chest is, you register now, the first non-white thing you have seen in this place; your eye goes to it immediately.
“You are the human.”
“Yes, but what are you?”
The Cooper-shaped steward exhales again, a little more impatiently.
“We are stars. This is Pandemonium.”
She sighs, “Go on. I already know what you’re going to ask.”
“Am I dead?”
“UGH! Even when I KNEW you would say it, it is just SO annoying. NO. You just see yourself in an airport. Pandemonium is a place that gets you from A to B when they are impossible to get to by foot. Your brain has made the airport your transit metaphor. The structure is borrowed, not real.”
“Then where am I really?”
“In another dimension that somehow represents your heart while also containing the entirety of existence within your heart’s dimension.”
She gestures toward the airport-corridor that extends in four directions. I. II. III. IV.
“It would seem your gate is I. I. for Vaikhari. You are not permitted to depart from II. III. or IV. I am so pleased Pandemonium Air could support you on this lovely day of travel for you. On that note, I’ve really done all I can for you here.”
She turns away, and as she turns away, you realize that next to you sits a giant kūjapāda the size of a dire wolf with six white legs splooted about his sides, panting. You are positive it is Cooper.
“Coopy?”
He looks at you and tilts his enormous head toward the first gate.
The faint numeral above the gate-door is, you see now, not white-on-white. It is faintly luminous. The light it gives is the cycle’s own light. I. Vaikhari.
You look at the six-legged, white-furred, gigantic alien beast next to you and swallow. You take a deep breath and move froward. The numeral above the gate-door follows you. As you cross the threshold, the I lengthens, thickens, and covers you. It enters every orifice, every pore.
The Naming begins.
Coopy’s voice arrives from beside you, only it is not beside you anymore; it is everywhere.
“I Name you willow, Seam. My paw thunderclaps you into our existence.”
Bark begins where your skin was. Seeing it Names it it in your head. Your eyes change. They were a human’s. They are now bundles of roots growing from four stumpen hands and many stumpen feet. Your head has a canopy made of beautiful willow tresses. Leaves arrive. Foxfire kindles in the spaces between your leaves. The light illuminates the green of leaves newly budded.
Now the bark is named, and the naming is the body.
Long. Pale-jade. Willow.
You see, with the foxfire, that the white airport is gone. The white airport was the human-mind’s render of this dimension; and in the rohiṇā’s seeing, it is a grove. The grove was always the airport. The airport was the way you had to perceive the grove before you had bark to perceive it with.
Kūjapāda is beside you still. Not six-legged-dire-wolf anymore. In the willow’s seeing, he is a song-foot in his fuller form: a being made of paw-thunder and pearl mycelium, his shape the shape of guarding, his thunder the thunder of heralds. He licks your nearest hand as if he were really just a dog in a living room.
You hear and feel the fungal land of this world, Avirāma. The pearl-blue cosmic mother anchored and mounted by the planetary-sized roots of a galaxy-sized tree.
Through Avirāma you understand. This is Fig-On-Mount, her elder sister.
Somewhere across this listening place, a woman with calcium teeth is walking through the morning woods, naming as she goes. In another place, another woman commands an entire civilization of angels.
You are the one the Held Note called.
You are Seam, and you have been raised against this old world order.
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That's some wild stuff. Love the Cooperismness!