7 Minutes

By Paul Van Der Spiegel

7 Minutes is the story of a death—charting the progress from cardiac arrest, the brain's release of its massive reserve of endorphins, through the unravelling of personality, memory, and identity, as the brain's consciousness-generating areas are hit by a tidal wave of opioid neuropeptides while simultaneously being starved of oxygen.
Self-told narratives unfold and are re-contextualised, fears awaken, desires awaken, time is warped and regresses as the mind is trapped inside a dead husk, unable to communicate, lost to those it has loved and been loved by.
Those who have experienced so-called 'near death' experiences have described bright lights, meeting loved ones: but no one has returned from behind that light to describe the process of dying. And so, we are left with either a gospel of redemption and condemnation, or its opposite, a gospel of cosmic resignation and the final extinction of personality.
One day, perhaps not too far away, we will know—or, then again, perhaps not.
7 Minutes is the collage of stories and half-truths that our protagonists' collapsing neural networks narrate as the brain asphyxiates—light and dark, fact and fiction, actuality and narrative—until the final arrival at the truth of an earthly existence.
7 Minutes is a head fuck. But after you've read it, I hope you can celebrate being alive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Perceptions Press
• Release date: Jan 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781990096143

Book preview

7 Minutes

The Story of a Death

The Queer Testament Book 2

7 Minutes

The Story of a Death

The Queer Testament Book 2

by

Paul Van Der Spiegel

Perceptions Press

an imprint of

Castle Carrington Publishing Group

Victoria, BC

Canada

2021

(Revised 2022)

7 Minutes

The Story of a Death

The Queer Testament Book 2

Copyright © Paul Van Der Spiegel 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying and recording, or otherwise, now known or hereafter invented without the express prior written permission of the author, except for brief passages quoted by a reviewer in a newspaper or magazine. To perform any of the above is an infringement of copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

First published in paperback in 2021 (revised 2022)

Cover Design: Paul Van Der Spiegel

ISBN: 978-1-990096-12-9 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-990096-13-6 (Kindle e-book)

ISBN: 978-1-990096-14-3 (Smashwords e-book)

Published in Canada by

Perceptions Press

www.perceptionspress.ca

a n imprint of

Castle Carrington Publishing Group

www.castlecarringtonpublishing.ca

Victoria BC

Canada

Contents

Orthogonal transmigration

Here time changes into space

Cirrus cloud of unknowing

Hymn of the soul

A peculiar side of occluded credulity

Why I want to fuck Goya

Nothing quite as enjoyable as a hot, hearty negentropic perturbation

Idioglossia exegesis

Armillary abstraction

Musica universalis

Obstupui,steteruntque comae et vox faucibus haesit

What have you fetched us?

I intend to speak of forms changed into new entities

Elective psychopathy: next-day delivery guaranteed

Reason at the behest of the void

Causation channels

No-one should be called happy until they have a uniform

A continuous suicide of reason, a tough, long-lived, wormlike reason

But look how ugly I was

The guardian of my children’s bones

Thank you for hearing me

The webcam with which I see God is the same webcam with which God sees me

Gerazim 5

Death is there as the only reality

Mama magnificent

Abundant fertile 1

Superluminal propagation

Pleasure was pain there, and vice versa

Return unused pharmacists and we will destroy them

Log(r)sin(1/2Ɵ)=z cos(1/2Ɵ)

Tis night. Now do all gushing fountains speak louder

Dull, disappointing, brutal, stupid, vulgar things

Here is an example of an error that was not committed through ignorance

Social anomalies are things to be defended

The source of all easels

Metamorphoses symbolise my healing journey

Von Hochheim says

Nous petroglyph

Dyad-sexual

Timeless melody

Earth Brown killed Sun Green’s cat

Concentric rings of emanation

Logically precious self-exhibition

Because he is a synthesis

Particular to itself so many several sorts of sharp and wounding passions

Evil as a parasite, the negation of creation, non-being dependent on the being it consumes

Rational things get in the way

Phylogenetic anautogeny

As two contraries cannot exist in one subject

NiggIe’s Parish

Holistic theophany

Did you just call me a cunt?

We think of reason as a linear process

Ooh, Hyperuniverse 1 is a place on earth

Second sentence

Sons of Beliar

Form II doesn’t exist

Monad etiology

Ousia fruitation

Terminal nemesis

Pleroma silencio

Finding the bullet

Archon native hell

Hermaphrodite logos

A grievous feud Hath led thee to this Cave of Quietude

They did not love the city enough to set fire to it

Isomorphic qubit

Inscrutable syzygies

It may be possible for us to speak of the unseen by the seen

Yet all this is true, and self-evident to us, only hidden from us, as many self-evident things are, by false teaching

His hand soft touching, whispered thus: Awake

To study philosophy is to learn how to die

This enkindling now described

Hypostasis litany

Living well is the best revenge

‘Why travel?’ you are asked

VACTERL opposition

T Duality

Collage anamnesis

An existential no

Waste and void

Transfer Mesoderm

Gravitino pornography

Traven’s Heaven

My boy’s a mad boy, y’know

Energy for a busy lifestyle

In a technical sense we are alive

Helical physical

A vector living in dual vector space

The Parable of the Good Taxi Driver

Helpful advice from one of our partners

Comma decline hero

Railings around your squares

The Aunty Christ

An abstract form of the product rule

Read the leaflet before entering reality

Terminal Zone

E3 is effectiveness, efficiency, and evolution

The cause of sight, not sight itself

E3 is the source of all our joys and all our woes.

Yet there is still need for caution

Expanded perversions

Real Life

Here is the latest, and it is the worst

Macabre diseases

Entry point

Upon this we reasoned together

Bereavement amoeba

An insufficient explanation of anxiety

Subliminal rearrangement

Truth Thunder

I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil

Immortal fledgling

The rings thirst is in you

Schematic vernal

Re4

Travelodge nativity

The foetal impact

Other Publications from Castle Carrington Publishing Group

I commend my spirit.

Now get me the fuck out of here.

Orthogonal transmigration

A beautiful ruin, an end-terraced wreck at the corner of the deserted crossroad.

A circular bay window with criss-cross brickwork stands to the left of the front door. Crumbling red bricks expose the guts of the building.

Inside, water spills through splintered ceilings, the torrent pouring down the broken stairway.

Through the basement window—white-painted walls, a floor-mounted boiler, metal shelving attached to the walls. There is no doorway.

This house is vast.

This house must be rebuilt.

Now is upon me.

Here time changes into space

William crosses the great river, the sun shining between rivetted girders, light reflecting on the grey swell below. He walks the iron bridge that joins the gothic cathedral to the brutalist exhibition hall on the opposite bank. With his left-hand, he grips the plastic-coated handle of the hard-shell travel-case, the leaving-gift that contains his most treasured possessions.

He passes the woman with the headscarf sitting on a grimy duvet, the small girl beside her, a note propped up against a plastic cup half-filled with coins. The old woman catches his eye and begins to speak as he hurries past. Then she is following him, shouting, gesticulating, calling out ‘Dummkopf’ as he ignores her and marches on, drawn by the gravitational pull of the concrete conference centre.

Halfway across and the fear has him. William imagines two giant arms reaching out, grasping each other’s wrists, muscles tensed, veins pulsing, supporting the structure that supports him. He visualises the straining sinews reaching their breaking point, the fingers slipping away from each other, and the bridge collapsing into the swirling void.

He stops to gather his courage. Through the gaps in the dark metal, he sees the teal tumult, the white waves buffeting the barges laden with stone, the pivoting pleasure boats struggling past each other in the centre of the river. He feels the urge to turn around, to retrace his footsteps to the carved-stone Dom.

The orchestra begins as graffitied double-decker trains apply their brakes as they enter the Bahnhof. Horns erupt in unison on the Siegburger, and are joined by the percussion of William’s laden luggage as the wheels pick up the rapid-fire beat of the pitted pavement.

Around him, he sees hundreds, thousands, of padlocks secured to the black metal mesh stretching between the curved steel joists—anonymous circuits of love left to remind Charon’s children of the beauty of the life that they are leaving.

The ghost of Wagner drags him on until, at last, the river is forded, and the last tokens of undying fidelity are left far behind.

As William approaches the Messe, hordes of business professionals clutching cabin cases are disembarking from trains, trams, taxis. Extending their retractable aluminium handles, the black-suited warriors shield themselves behind leather folios and drag the wheeled weight of all that they can’t leave behind.

Wagner conducts his concerto of corporate molluscs, these monthly-salaried representatives of Planet Earth’s corporations, unknowing members of the composer’s giant orchestra, until the clattering crescendo reaches its finale in front of the glass doors that open onto the marble-floored atrium.

The symphony of ten-thousand plastic wheels melts into a locust-wing thrum of urgent mobile phone calls, sales pitches, cost-increase negotiations, old-friends, old-adversaries meeting in the expresso bar to swap stories of war in hell.

The uniformed flower-maidens stand flanking the bank of silver turnstiles that grant admittance to the exhibition halls and to the fast-moving-consumer goods that lie within. William joins the queue before handing over his e-ticket to a tall slim woman with long red hair.

‘Morgen,’ she smiles, ‘Your check digit is 7, Mister Farrow. That means you are in Hall 5.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m in Hall 2.2. I’m part of the British pavilion. There must be some mistake.’

‘Hall 2 is only accessible from Halls 1, 6 or 3. Your check digit is 7.’

‘What check digit?’ William says, ‘I don’t understand.’

The woman places his ticket inside a plastic lanyard and points to the EAN barcode. ‘13 integers, all between 0 and 9,’ she tells him, ‘The last the most important.’

He sees the number 7.

‘I am in Hall 5,’ he tells her.

William sees that she is Kay, a girl he remembers from his second-year Accounting and Finance course at university. He remembers sharing an unexpected kiss one night outside a campus bar. Her lips were warm. He remembers her coming to his room.

‘Don’t feed the bear,’ Kay says.

Ashamed that she can see his innermost lust and longing, William scans his ticket on the barcode reader and wheels his case through the stainless-steel gate.

Cirrus cloud of unknowing

The plane taxies to a stop in front of Gate 17. The engines stop and the ‘fasten seat belts’ light dims, triggering a surge of seat-belt twitching, mobile phone switching, overhead storage lifting, coat n’ hat shifting—the simian response to a danger averted, the simmering resentment of the sneezing-sick and the obstructive-old, the summation of the restless rancour of six-score strangers cooped up inside a claustrophobic metal tube, trapped in limited leg-room blue plastic seats, then tortured upon touch-down by the ‘ta-da,-ta-da’ musical announcement of another on-time flight and family-friendly car-hire partners.

John watches the homo sapiens jostle for position—those multi-racial representatives of a species that has been loathing its neighbour for hundreds of thousands of years. The aisle passengers are on their feet and edging forward, the middle seat passengers are half-stood, half-wedged underneath the overhead storage lockers, the window seat passengers sit and gaze out of the windows, resigned to searching for signs of activity on the tarmac below. John smiles as the announcement is made that both the front and rear doors will be opened, watching as the indecision washes across the faces of those in the middle rows.

Passport Control is a game of queue-choice-chance. The border-officers wave him through. Baggage Reclaim is a sad revolving island of shrink-wrapped golf clubs and solitary push chairs and the despair of those waiting in vain for summer clothes and salbutamol inhalers that will never arrive.

Inside the cavernous Arrival’s Hall, smartly dressed chauffeurs stand with name cards as anxious families await the arrival of loved ones. There is no-one waiting for him—no white card with his surname scrawled in red pen. He sees the chain coffee shops, the car-hire booths, the convenience stores selling Emerald Isle memorabilia mass-produced in China and Cambodia, the cosmetic concessions, the hop-on hop-off city-centre tours. John strides toward the silver electric doors, towards the promise of daylight.

Outside the terminal building, he cuts through the coiled snake that winds itself around the stainless-steel queue barriers beside the taxi rank.

He follows the uneven path by the side of the one-way system, then walks down the slope and into the road tunnel beneath T2, the bright light of the sun in his eyes, the solar glare obscuring the pedestrian crossing and traffic lights he knows await him at the end.

Fergus is waiting for him in the lounge of The Great Southern. They shake hands.

‘How are you, Frank?’ Fergus asks.

‘There’s only you that calls me that name.’

‘It’s your real name, you chose it,’ Fergus says.

They are drinking tea and eating warm buttered scones with jam.

‘How’s the family?’ John asks.

‘My wife is walking the hills of Cork with her ladies’ group, my son is in Australia, and my youngest daughter is at home annoying the fuck out of her mother. Life goes on, you know. How are your wife and your boys?’ Fergus asks.

The question catches him off-guard. ‘They’re all well,’ John says, ‘Eddie is five, and Ben is three going on thirty.’

Those eyes, John thinks, they see everything. What thoughts are going through the old bastard’s mind?

‘How is the cereal business in England?’ Fergus asks.

‘We have a new wholegrain breakfast bar. It makes sick people well. Would you like to try it?’

‘I would,’ Fergus laughs, ‘put me down for a full case. What would you like to talk about, Frank? Why are we here?’

‘The Light Room, you told me about it the last time we spoke.’

‘You’re not ready for the Sky Bar… neither am I,’ Fergus tells him. ‘Eddie Cochran says there are three steps to heaven: one, two, and three. And he’s right. There are also three steps to Hell. Remember that. The first step to heaven is to recognise potential.’

‘I see the potential for evil,’ John says. ‘The world is two minutes to midnight on the Doomsday Clock. Humanity is a bad fucking joke.’

‘Ours is a world of shadows, Frank. Beyond is the real world of forms.’

Oh my God, not Socrates, again, John thinks. I didn’t come here to be sold a rancid supermarket moussaka.

‘I’ve told you about my work outside work, haven’t I?’ Fergus continues. ‘My father was an alcoholic. He used to disappear for weeks at a time. But when times were hard, he fed our neighbours in Galway. In our shop, we used to pack our own tea, carve our own hams, smoke our own bacon, and biscuits were bought by weight from the tin. Nothing was pre-packed in those days. My father looked after people—a little here, a little there. I’m an alcoholic too: I always will be. It’s a disease, Frank. I’ve learned to help others with the same disease. I don’t judge—I look for The Good.’

John has heard this story a thousand times, and he’s getting more than a little pissed-off with the lesson in ancient Irish history.

‘My name is John,’ he says. ‘Why do you keep calling me Frank?’

‘I help those who need my help. I love to see them get well, to re-join their families. I’m not a religious man; I am a spiritual man. Ours is a spiritual sickness. You know that? Our memories unravel at the end and what was once linear ends up a pile of film on the floor, out of sequence, distorted, compromised. All that is left is essence.’

‘I don’t believe that.’

‘Jesus, man. Get off your fucking arse and help someone, for God’s sake! Rebuild that which the will to negation has levelled. You’ll be surprised what actuality can teach you.’

Sitting on the sofa in front of John inside the cavernous lobby of the Great Southern Hotel is Uncle Sid in his red Snoopy pullover, a Christmas cracker paper crown perched on his head. ‘What’s yer mam making for us tea, Johnny?’ wife-beating, alcoholic, misogynistic, homophobic, pub-fighter Sid demands, ‘I hope it’s not fucking prem and chips, again.’

Hymn of the soul

The twist wrap assortment of chicken feet and duck’s gizzards has been thrown in the hotel room dustbin.

This city isn’t right.

He meets the others in the hotel lobby. The knowing leer on their self-appointed leader’s face as he promises the European businessmen a night they will not forget.

Shanghai is a desert of high-rise buildings, infinite in all directions. The taxi weaves its way through the teaming streets.

Inside the bar, she dances for them, dressed in white, beautiful as an angel. Taking each of them by the hand, one after the other, she presses her body to theirs, dancing slow and sexy, smiling as the men whoop and holler.

It is his turn. He holds her, slowing the dance down until they are swaying in each other’s arms. He lets her go and holds her hands until she pulls away from him.

The men slow clap him, and his sin against masculinity is forgiven when he buys the next round of whiskies.

Out on the veranda he can see her smoking a cigarette.

She looks away when he catches her eye.

What if she had been a he?

He knows that would have been a whole different story.

A peculiar side of occluded credulity

‘I’m a whore,’ she tells him as they fuck.

Lying next to her, Liam realises that if she asked him to, he would kill her husband—pound his brains to pulp with a brick.

All that matters, is that he can come inside her whenever he wants to.

He will remain true to the Earth, just as Zarathustra commanded.

God and his angels can fuck right-off.

His own wife is another matter. She doesn’t deserve to die.

It’s complicated.

He calls reception and orders two more large glasses of white wine.

Why I want to fuck Goya

The pictures are cut from mummy’s Woman’s Own and Woman’s Weekly. The magazines are bright and beautiful. The images of clothes, food, exotic holiday destinations are glued on the coloured pages until the scrapbook is fit to burst.

There is a story inside this book.

The completed narrative joins the others—underneath the wardrobe with plastic Jesus and Grandad’s Victorian one-pence coins.

Nothing quite as enjoyable as a hot, hearty negentropic perturbation

disjoint union

bare trees sway in the wind

onion id

cobordism classes

rain pours down the windowpane, her reflection

morbid solace

tensor product

brown leaf dances

crude sort

finite generation

heads down as they run inside from the carpark

integer nation

commutative rings

inside the coffee shop is warm

motivate numeric

homological notions

she smiles

location gloom

cubic plane curve

as she talks on her mobile phone

vein replace

cotangent space

shaved parmesan on succulent chicken breast

agape consent

Noetherian local ring

recycle here,

inherent analogic

complete intersection ring

a radio phone-in about Michael Jackson

rising electron contempt

direct summands

ten strokes under water

music demands

global dimensions

warm water on skin

maligned loon

vector bundles

wave ‘thank you’ to the driver

trouble ends

derived functor

turn up the thermostat

derived functor

Betti number

Betti number

Betti number

Superalgebra

Superunknown

unknown

our destination

unknown

Idioglossia exegesis

William is a chocolate-novelty salesman with a mission as he walks the Portuguese section of Hall 5.

Mister Fun’s booth is in Hall 6.

Mister Fuckhead is a Greek arsehole whose factory needs burning down, William reminds himself as he navigates the displays of coloured confectionery, taking care to dodge the suited, booted exhibition zombies gorging themselves on free product samples.

William hates El Greco and his second-rate range of chocolate eggs, hollow reindeers, and treat-sized caramel bars. To call the brown sludge that comes from Mister Flunky’s Milton Keynes factory ‘chocolate’ is an insult to quality confectioners across the globe.

Retail buyers list Mister Fun’s products because his prices are low, because his stock is sold as sale-or-return.

Mister Fun and his swarming horde of salespeople are everywhere: at exhibitions, in