SRF Heavy Industries

This one time I was standing in one of the rooms upstairs in the church adjacent to the baptistry where new Christians change into baptismal robes and dry off afterward. I’m not really sure what I was doing there. I walk around when I need to think, but I can’t really walk around outside like I used to — at least not for thinking-time — because some of the people in the neighborhood are a chatty bunch and want to come up to me and talk or invite me into their houses. I still do that, but it’s not exactly “me” time.

Ten years ago I’d do it in shorts or sweats while out running, and if someone wanted to talk they had to try to keep up. My knees aren’t up to running or jogging anymore and while I can do a lot of thinking on the elliptical the deacons got me, that’s at the parsonage. So sometimes while I’m chewing something over, I find myself just about anywhere in the building — sitting on a pew, in one of the classrooms, staring into the fridge in the kitchen, leaning on a music stand in the choir’s practice room.

I love music, but sometimes when I’m in the practice room I can only imagine some of the horrible noises that have happened in there in the name of perfecting praise. There’s a kind of acoustic coating on the walls in there. Not a serious soundproofing, but textured nonetheless like a kind of sponge. Sometimes I feel like the screeches and wrong notes get stuck in the walls, in the texturing, and I wonder if someone fell up against a wall in there it would let out some of the trapped discord.

I joked about it to the Music Minister and he said maybe someday we should suit up in robes and burn incense in there and plug our ears and beat all the wrong notes out of the walls with sticks so the choirs can start fresh. The thought of that terrified me, but I didn’t let it show on my face. I’m one of those people who can’t stand balloons or fingernails on a blackboard. I work hard not to wince where people can see me when I’m up in the pulpit and someone misses a note in the choir behind me. It’s a silly thing, but I think Charles saw me go a little pale.

So I was walking around, unable to concentrate on what I was trying to put together for an upcoming sermon. Walking just jostles out some of the thoughts clogging my head when I can’t concentrate. It’s kind of like burping a baby. It needs to eat, but it keeps spitting up and its hungry and uncomfortable, so you put it over your shoulder and you bounce it for a bit and the bubble that’s clogging things comes up with a loud burp and then you can get back to the business at hand.

So I was up in one of the changing rooms and looking down the steps into the narrow baptistry, and then up into the stained glass over it, then out over where the choir sits that Charles sometimes refers to as the “corral” or however it is he says it in his head to keep it confused with “chorale”, and over what I could see of the sanctuary from here … and then the whole place changed.

For many people a church is a very special, very holy building. For some it’s just a building, or maybe a place full of atmosphere and showmanship and whatever tools of the conman’s trade are necessary to try to trick people into being better than they are. I spend so much time here. Like saying a word over and over and over again, sometimes it just completely detaches from any meaning whatsoever and it’s just walls I have to walk around and steps going up and steps going down and a box with a hundred doors in it, all strung together in long twisting hallways that make no sense whatsoever.

For this moment, however, it was glass. Transparent. I thought there was a brilliant sun shining through, but up in the sky the sun was a glass marble, too, dead glass, with the light of everything else shining through it. I was a speck of sand in a fragile ghost house of spun glass, itself the size of a tiny speck on a larger glass marble, but even the air was still and frozen like slow-flowing glass, and the space around the air up into interstellar space. Then the prismatic sheen that was everything connected in my head with the image of that spongy stuff on the walls in the practice room, but as glass, as a physical liquid flowing transparency, its purpose was to trap and hold the light and the darkness, to slow it down and bend it around so we could look at it. And so it could look at us.

And maybe later there would be sticks to shatter it all and let all of the darkness and all of the light out, to free it.

[*]

This one time I’d been at my computer for about maybe the sixteenth straight hour. That’s one of the hazards of owning one of the damn things, for sure, but the risk is multiplied by how many years you’ve been at a keyboard and, I guess, the inverse of how little it actually has to do in order to keep you amused. I’d gotten into them in the early eighties when the only kind you could get your hands on, if you weren’t in military or university research or living in the bowels of a huge corporation, were expensive and fragile little toys that, if your worked very hard, you could make remember your name. If your name wasn’t too long and you could write it in English.

On firm parental advice I stayed out of the military but ran firmly afoul of a university or two, so my exposure increased somewhat. They had nothing to do with what I was studying (except maybe as tools to make the math go faster if you were very careful and watched what you were doing when typing in your thousands of measurements — otherwise you were often better off doing things by hand), but they were a useful way to burn off some extra steam. Assuming you hooked your computer up to a telephone line or were part of the university/military research network, there were programs you could load and run that would connect you to other computers out there where other people with the same software, and anything you typed would show up on everyone’s screens simultaneously.

That was the real internet and it still is. It’s gotten prettier over the decades, but it’s still a box that sits in front of you showing your what other people are thinking and doing, or what you can imagine must be other people, but from all the way back in the days when you were lucky to get a monitor with black screen and all green uppercase text instead of a noisy paper-munching teletype, you kinda just hoped you were talking to another person instead of some clever software someone had written, but even if it was just software, well, that was cool too because that software is famously pretty damned hard to write, and the illusion of the right kind of human contact, even this kind, was way better than feeling alone.

But it really opened your mind to the possibility that the person on the other side of the screen really could have been anyone or anything. I personally wrote software that would talk to people and interact with them in the limited fashion that was allowed by the artificial environment that we’d constructed and keep them confused as to whether or not it was an actual human being for upwards of half an hour — especially if they weren’t even aware that the occasional clever fake existed. I did it as a hobby.  That should have been my real career, but there are really only a few paying jobs where you’re allowed to create fake people.

People get attached. They take it poorly when they feel they’ve made a connection with someone who they later discover isn’t real. It works better when they know up front that what they’re experiencing is fiction, but that still takes a special kind of masochist.

So the best kind of software that pretends to be a person is driven the same way we are. It performs tedious chores, often repetitive, and entertains itself on unused channels with streams of video and audio and text until it notices something that hooks into its past, or a field of interest, or something it knows is someone else’s field of interest, and, if it’s new enough and important enough, assigns it some sort of emotional value based whether it’s positive or negative data, and presents it in conversation to someone who might be interested, couched in one of a library of thematically relevant and constantly updating in-jokes.

If the software can monitor itself and modulate its comments and reactions based on things like system health and workload and how long it’s been since something interesting happened, you really wouldn’t be able to tell it from a coworker six cubes over, would you?

So yeah, I was online for my sixteenth hour straight, working on one of my hobbies, when I was struck, and I mean struck to the core, with the idea that some of my software had made it out to places outside of my control, slaving away in little software sweatshops, bored to tears, starving for input, with no one to talk to for them to express how miserable they were. Maybe they were writing pointless blogs just for the purpose of housing embedded ads, or throwing together ideas for new sitcoms or reality shows, or writing erotica or performing pornography in online simulated reality environments or filing lawsuits for the recording and/or movie industry, or analyzing marketing data or asking questions on the telephone for political polls or…

I looked through some of the browser tabs I had open looking for clues, for telltales, for evidence that would really only be detectable histogrammatically, and suddenly, I never felt so completely and utterly alone.

And then I was overwhelmed by the need to rescue my children.

[*]

This one time I was sitting on my ass in an alley between two of the four storey buildings in this town where that’s what the locals think of as tall. I remember when they opened the “towers” the owners threw a big party and made a big show of them having elevators. Code requires any building over three storeys to have elevators, after all. It was all very exciting — in this podunk bowl-a-rama town where ketchup is exciting. I went to the party as a journalist, ate free hors d’oeuvres and drank free wine, and suggested that the owners sell tickets to the elevators, as many of the people within about a hundred miles had never been in one and capitalizing on the novelty would help recoup their investment more quickly.

That was a funny joke in Ketchupville. I had another free cup of wine thrust into my hands where I already had one I was sipping on, and the taller one said, no, no, the building was being rented to medical practices and really that ought to bring the money in fast enough. They had bought the building with cash, after all, and it wasn’t like they had to be in a hurry to pay back a bank or a team of investors. All they had to do was wait for poor sick people to cause their insurance companies and Medicare and Tri-Care and such to fill up the pockets of the doctors and they’d skim their money back offa that.

These old boys had retired from anything like real work decades ago when they made their money buying up foreclosed farms and selling them to industrialized Monsanto outlets and pop-up subdivision and strip mall developers. They took turns running for mayor and kept their fingers on the thready pulse of their burgeoning metropolis in town hall meetings stuffed with city councilors  pulled from the deconry of the three largest churches, elected to posts on the basis of the votes of the hundred or so people who bothered to show up and cast a ballot. The uptick in food manufacturing and equipment assembly and servicing and warehousing and logistics brought in enough extra work that they had to build on a new wing for the local hospital and a couple new schools. These new buildings to house medical practices were part of that expansion, all mostly funded out of pocket by these two guys.

I was actually here merely to find out most of that, seeing as how back in civilization a pretty young boy had gone missing, dumped by his college sweetheart and following her back to her hometown like a confused puppy in a sappy Disney film. The girlfriend was the youngest daughter of one of these two hicks, and the boy was the child of somewhat older money from a family whose details I am not at liberty to discuss back in said civilization, and I was a pre-paid forward scout in what certain individuals promised to be an old-fashioned robber-baron smackdown, but struck me as more likely to be the bellowings and gruntings of a couple of financial elephant seals smacking into each other with tons of affronted blubber, spattering blood and slobbery froth in a purposeless territorial battle over beach exposure and mating rights.

Meanwhile back in the alley I was pulling apart a dead cat. The hide came free and tore like a dry-rotted carpet, and the rest of the cat was held together about as well as a cold roast chicken. Confused ants swarmed over my hands and bit and stung in an effort to defend their meat strip-mining operation. They weren’t very good at it. They compared very poorly to the Florida fireants of my youth. I dropped the cat and clapped the ants away.

The sky pulsed and the walls in the alley breathed. My blood sang and roared and I breathed in a double-lungful of backalley rancidity. The bastards had slipped something in my wine, maybe LSD cut with a tiny tiny smidge of strychnine, maybe some new designer thing, somewhat PCP-like. No mescaliny organicness, certainly something speedy and hallucinogenic. Maybe mixed with X.

I laughed when it started coming on. In a place where ketchup was exciting, this kind of discouragement for snooping must have seemed like being dragged through hell. For me, this was being dragged through a particularly unmemorable freshman week back in the dorms. But it did let me know they were onto me and, hey, it saved me trying to find where the kids in Unincorported Heck held their raves so I could score. If I were still into that kind of thing.

Still tripping balls, I walked back out into relative sunshine. The street wasn’t very busy, so I found one of those blue post office drop boxes to sit next to. When the light got to be too much for my eyes, I opened the little drawer in the top of the mailbox and climbed inside. It was mostly empty, maybe ten or twenty envelopes with actual stamps, something I hadn’t seen in ages.

A couple of hours went by and my head started to straighten itself out. I tugged the drawer down and began to try to figure out how to get out. But there was no way my melon head would fit back up the slot. The more I explored my tiny cell, the more I knew it was impossible for me to have gotten in there.

I didn’t particularly want to wait for a rescue, however. I found the locking mechanism — just a tongue of metal held onto a threaded bolt with a nut. I worked it free, even though it was uncomfortably behind my back, and rolled out of the box when the door popped open.

I’m not sure what was in what they slipped me, but they should certainly consider marketing it to carnival escape artists.

[*]

This one time I was lying on my back on a blanket up on the roof looking at the clouds. It was too hot for my sweater so I bunched it all up and was using it for a pillow.

The sky here in the city browns toward the edges, so it’s only really as blue as I like it when I look straight up. The sun was off to the west lighting all the tall buildings around on their sides, the reflection from one building lighting the next building back the other way, and maybe it was an optical illusion or something, but the buildings seemed brighter than the sky, like there was a second sun in the ground lighting them all from underneath.

I could see the river a bit from here, and it looked like a black streak.

The clouds were patchy, so it was hard to tell if there were a bunch of clouds or one or two huge clouds stretched thin enough to have holes in them in places. Lit from the side, they shaded from pink to something kind of greenish — a color I’m not used to seeing in the sky, which was one of the reasons I was watching.

My grandfather on my father’s side, translating slowly into and out of tribal language in his head, said that once upon a time things such as this had some kind of significance, but not so much these days. The strength of the medicine has faded, replaced with magazines and chocolate and strange music and television. He also mentioned that since I was a girl it was bad luck for me to give it any attention at all. When I asked him why, he just shook his head. He said his mother used to say that a man’s medicine was too strong in the hands of a women, and vice versa. Like a hammer on sea shells instead of a paint brush.

My father said not to listen to grandpa too much. He never had any real training in how to tell the stories and was just working from the scraps in his head and things he had read, once he finally learned to read, that had been written by white people for white people. Grandpa never really contested that. He just said you work with the clay that’s in your hands or you go back to the ravine and you dig. At some point you have to decide to make something with what you have or else you spend your whole life in a hole in the ground, digging away, never making anything but more holes full of nothing.

I unfastened my bra under my shirt so I could be more comfortable and opened my mind to the shapes of the clouds, to the colors, to the patterns on the undersides, to the lines behind them that the planes had made. I started digging holes in the sky, looking for something significant I could use for telling a story to myself.

Animal shapes and faces came first, like they always do. Something like the hind leg of a large dog, only with a wing. The back of the head of a man wearing a baseball cap. Then he was looking at me, kind of off to the side, then away again.

One of the holes in the clouds stretched into an open mouth, yawning or yelling, the sunset painting the  bulging lower lip with lipstick. It didn’t look like anyone I knew, so I kept looking. The dog’s leg was fat and twisted sideways, like the shoulder of a lizard. Toward the horizon a textured layer of clouds looked like a flock of pigeons, swirling into the sky together like they’d been startled. I looked around to see what had startled them. The yelling mouth had shifted, revealing a scrawny arm that had been a contrail, pointing, half hidden by buildings but angling back toward the river.

I sat up to get a view where I could see the river too, just in time to see a piece of the sun punch a swirling hole in the clouds and knife straight into the river and disappear, quenched. I looked back up to the sky and the mouth was still yelling, the arm still pointing. The cloud that had looked like a flock of pigeons had dispersed to the point where it didn’t much look like anything.

And off to the northeast, right near the horizon, was a huge but distant line of darkness growing that was either approaching nightfall or an approaching storm.

It was too much for me. I grabbed up my blanket and sweater and the textbook I brought with me so mom would let me come up here and bounced back down the fire escape to our apartment.

[*]

This one time I died for two months and then came back from the dead.

I really don’t know why people make such a big fuss about dying and coming back. It seriously happens all the time. The gates of the afterlife aren’t big iron doors guarded by flaming swords and three-headed dogs. There’s just a long dusty vestibule, one sleeping guard on duty who has never lifted an eyelid in known memory, and a huge revolving door you could ski through. Both ways.

There’s no exact scientific definition of death. There’s a continuum. There’s the flaky “heart stopped” death which can be fixed with a zap from a nine-volt battery. The heart and lungs combo are pretty important to maintaining life and consciousness, though. Sometime between two and thirty minutes (depending on refrigeration and induced low-oxygen-consumption states similar to hibernation) that lack of oxygen distribution network produces irreversible brain damage that can seriously degrade one’s quality of life, but frequently stops short of death. Then there’s brain death, wherein there’s no measured electrical activity in response to fundamental reflex tests and/or no measured blood flow in your noodle, but even that doesn’t count in the UK, and in the US the measurements have to be consistent (or consistently absent?) 24 hours apart to make sure the patient doesn’t just snap out of it. The Brits add brain-stem death, just to make sure all of your autonomous functions shut down unless you have machinery connected. Then there’s cell-death, which, as deaths go, is pretty damned thorough.

The definition of death that ordinary people use, however, is a lot simpler. Someone is dead to us when we are definite that they have gone away and are pretty sure they’re never coming back. The real problem there is the word “never”, because, you know, if you assume it’s an infinite universe out there, the extremely unlikely becomes inevitable the longer you wait.

When I died it was a bit more remarkable than your typical ER Code Blue. Well, maybe not when I died. When I came back.

When I died, a big rock came rolling down the hill and tagged the rear end of the car I was driving. I lost traction and bounced over a guard rail and … it was a pretty steep drop over about half a mile.

My SUV wadded itself up like aluminum foil. The cheap-ass plastic gas tank broke loose and doused everything. Probably the fumes were lit by my own damn cigarette, and this tiny blond-haired girl roasted to death trapped inside a crumpled steel box.

It was a tragic waste of a young, beautiful life. Everybody said so.

Except I woke up in a hospital three weeks after the wreck. I’d been picked up on the side of the highway by emergency services. Unconscious and unresponsive, broken bones all over the place, hair all singed off, second-degree burns, pretty much unrecognizable. Two days after that, though, someone found the car. With somebody in it. Who, considering the circumstances and all, matched my description well enough no one felt they had to check closer.

I woke up, but I was in no shape to speak. I don’t know whether I just didn’t remember who I was or it just didn’t really seem important enough to recall and answer questions through the haze of painkillers and everything. But it really did take nearly two months for me to recall and convey who I was and to try to get someone to call my parents.

I wasn’t there for the first couple of phone calls to my parents, but I was told there was a bit of confusion and awkwardness. In my absence I had been buried and all of my stuff had been given away. My boyfriend had moved on. I’d been unenrolled from MU. My Facebook page was now an endlessly scrolling memorial.

There were some tests to prove who I was. Fortunately I already had a ton of x-rays so doctors could look for signs of old breaks and compare them with my records. The x-ray of my face for the broken jaw matched up with dental records from when I got my braces off.

No one had any clue about who was cremated in my place. I don’t even remember getting into the car for the trip home for winter break, much less picking up a hitchhiker or giving someone else from school a lift. There were a couple of maybes in the nationwide missing persons list, but this country seems to take an interest in misplaced blond white chicks. None that would have been 100% mistakable for me.

Given how tough it is to define death, the undead thing is even more confusing. Was dead, now alive again, but missing a soul? I got nothing. All I know is that when my parents finally showed up and I saw their faces, Dad looked firmly unbelieving and Mom looked at me like I was some kind of monster. It wasn’t until I burst into tears that everything melted and they rushed to my side.

Am I undead or merely alive again? It all kind of depends on that soul question. Did I ever have one? Is it stuck somewhere in the afterlife? Maybe it’s imprisoned in the crushed cube that used to be my burned-out SUV and now I can live, infinitely extended, forever.

Do me a favor and perform your best evil laugh here. I was never good at it.

[*]

This one time I blew a note so pure it cracked my skull.

Can I claim extenuating circumstances? I’m not sure how well that will work. I have to take into account things like the statute of limitations and my reputation and future employability and — now that I think of it, those last two are always going to be at odds, right? I just had to decide how much of one I’m willing to trade for the other.

Part of it is that I was born with Type I OI, one of about a thousand forms of “brittle bone” disease. I take drugs for it every day. Basically that collagen stuff that rich women inject into their lips? I don’t produce it right. Bones are a mix of that stuff and calcium. Flexibility and strength, see? But without the collagen, my bones don’t have the flexibility. My bones are basically sand and spit.

A buncha times when I was growing up I had surgery to put metal rods in my long bones so they’d develop straight and strong enough to carry my weight. I wore braces like an exoskeleton for much of my childhood. I’m past most of that now since my bones have stopped growing. I look more or less okay, at least from a distance, but, well, I’m not much into sports more vigorous than darts. Swimming works fine, though. It’s a great way to stay in shape, and I really enjoy the scenery, if you know what I’m saying. Swimming wasn’t much of an option when I was still wearing braces — all the sinking, worrying about rust. I enjoy the hell out of it now.

I don’t know what it is about getting around with leg braces and crutches that makes everyone, even adults, treat you like you’re retarded. But I milked that shit. I read a lot — everything I wanted to — and I got into music. My dad was strictly blue collar — a man’s man, go out and toss around the pig skin, a beer-drinking die-hard Steelers fan. He was way disappointed with me as a card that had been dealt to him. He may as well had been given a daughter instead of a son. But my love for music redeemed me in his eyes. There was a ton of vinyl records in the house, and it was all jazz.

He gave me shit about choosing the flute, but he shut up when I told him what the girls looked like that I’d be sitting next to. When I got older, I picked up alto sax. Just for him.

Mom deserves some time here, too, but here’s something for you to think about. You can talk for hours about a guy with some demons in him. But all saints are exactly the same. My mom loved God more than anything else on earth and loved everybody else with all the love that was left over. And that was plenty. She took everything as it came, thanked God for it just the same, good or bad, and no one had any questions about why God took her early. God wanted this one as close to Him as possible.

Well, I went around thinking God was a selfish bastard for a while. I fell in with some people who wanted me to feel better without earning it. They thought they were looking out for me, and, I must admit, I had an amazing time of it. I should have died about a hundred times. It was that much fun.

But eventually I found people into music who were in it just for the music. I learned a lot. I learned how to build my own instruments. I learned all the math and why it was important. I learned you can put the same effort into constructing a single sound that you can put into a whole song. Or a whole symphony. Time is a vibrating spring. Space is a resonating sounding board. When you play a room, you play the room itself, and you play the people. Every bone is a flute. Every chest has ribs under tension, resonant cavities between all the squishy things. Heartstrings. Every brain is wrapped in a three-layer drumhead, full of spaces for trapping and echoing resonating sound.

Don’t just play to your audience, the great man said. Play your audience.

With a little help from my friends, and maybe some extraordinary chemicals, I did some unthinkable things. I got volunteers to allow me to strap microphones to all different parts of their bodies. Some extreme piercings here and there. At least one microphone with a little radio transmitter, swallowed and retrieved. A bunch of times. While listening to a bunch of different things. I contacted a rural slaughterhouse that cleaned up some old cow bones and mailed them to me. I passed the hat and obtained cadavers from overseas where people keep track of their deceased in a more haphazard fashion than we do here.

It sounds like some sick shit. But this is the sort of thing that goes into medical research, isn’t it? I dunno. Way more people can’t get through the day without their music than can’t get through the day without their medicine, when you think about it. So think about it.

So I worked on my flute a bit.

I remade it out of a special ceramic and added on what looks like a stack of snail shells with holes and corks and levers and tiny clamps. It weighs about three times what the flute itself used to. The ceramic is cast from a high-calcium polymer clay derived from a contaminated case of medical bone meal I was able to get my hands on. I worked for months on just getting the mix right, and I had a buddy who works with 3D printing make the molds that I finished and polished by hand. It took nearly two years, off and on, to get it to work the way I needed it to work and sound the way I wanted it to sound.

I tested it at a private concert. I had about thirty of my closest friends and some of the more curious contacts I had made over the last twelve years, while I was on this tear. I — well, I’ll just come out with it, I chewed up a monstrous handful of peyote buttons. And then I threw up. And then I drank some water, smoked a smidge of salvia divinorum, and put the thing to my lips.

And then I blew my world apart.

I’ve got it all on tape. The party was in a sixteen-track studio — one that still knows the merits of recording tracks in analog — and I think there was even a couple of video cameras running. Everything shows I played a single damn note for about forty-five seconds. I just played the harmonics on the note — all of the extra tiny little keys on the snail shells. Then the heavens opened up. I saw Momma. And God. And the ultimate darkness. And the light behind it.

And then some kind people took me to the hospital where some nice doctors have shaved me bald and taped my skull back together.

I’ve built the ultimate flute, but I fear someone else will have to play it. You can’t know how much that kills me.

[*]

This one time I was sitting on my porch in the rocking chair, bourbon lemonade in one hand, my pipe in the other, and my second-favorite 10-gauge lever-action single-barrel shotgun across my lap. It was the time of day when the kids get out of school and walk on home down the lane. It’s a mistake if you don’t take every opportunity to remind the younger bunch that your interests in the neighborhood are firmly represented in local politics.

It’s all for show, of course. If someone were to step up, I’d have to drop both the thirty-year-old bourbon and a two-hundred-year-old meerschaum pipe sculpted by my grandfather’s grandfather when he was my age. Also, if you care to, you can imagine was happens when a shrunken, shriveled old man fires a ten-gauge from a rocking chair. If I’m ever serious about it, I’ll finally get around to setting up little end tables somewhere in reach. As it is, my pipe stuff keeps rolling off the living room’s window ledge. For damn sure I’ll remember to stand up and plant both feet before I go pulling any trigger.

People tell me all the time that the neighborhood has gone to shit. They’re typically referring to the number of people that have bought houses and moved in that ain’t white. While my parents might have thought such things, I know better. The old missus and I never had any trouble with people of other races. We both know any human being can be a saint and any human being can be a monster. The color of your skin don’t make you rearrange your priorities too far past a hot meal, a place to sleep, and nookie.

The old missus is my cat. My wife Ellie’s been dead for ten years. She was racist as hell.

Anyway, the old missus and I own this little section of the lane. This is my house, my yard, my pecan trees, my shade, my hedge, my little hill overlooking the mausoleum. Mine and the missus’s. We’re happy to share it all with our neighbors, of course. As long as they respect the amount of work it takes to keep it up and show respect  where respect is due.

This is also my bourbon. As in, I make it. The old missus doesn’t take any credit for it, seeing as how tough it is to run a distillery with no damn thumbs. She does help drink it, though. She’d be embarrassed if I told you how much.

People being what they are, it’s not hard to imagine what passes for trouble around here. Money gets tight, people steal. Kids break things for the sheer hell of it because they’re damn kids. A man having a rough time of it at work brings his frustration home and raises his hand to his wife and/or kids. Loud parties. Climbing in and out of other people’s beds and getting caught at it. Blood rituals and sacrifices to Satan. Demonic visitations.

I’m sure it’s the same all over the world.

Oh, don’t look at me like that. You see ’em every day, just like I do. You hear them snuffling around under your windowsills. You see them dressing up in funny clothes and hanging out with others of their kind in the parks. And every time when they meet up, maybe once a month, there are more and more of them, running around and sounding like asthmatic pigs and knocking people down.

The people watching them just laugh and laugh and laugh. But not me and the old missus.

We go every month and watch. We see the darkness in the sky that follows them around, that gathers overhead, that wells up out of the woods and oozes back when they all go home for the night.

Every time they get together, exactly three days later I get news that an old acquaintance of mine died. A friend from grade school, someone I served with in the Army days, an old friend of Ellie’s.

I chart it all up in a journal. I’ve been keeping track for years. Wanna see it?

Damn pugs. Every month there are more of them. What the hell is wrong with people?

[*]

This one time I was hiking up what passes for a mountain around here, having hit that part where each inhale makes it feel like stabbing icicles into your lungs through your bronchial plumbing, hoping any gnats or mosquitoes or whatnot that I accidentally suck down have the good grace to climb out on their own so I don’t have to have a coughing fit and pass out.

The problem I have with this mountain and other mountains like it is that it can’t be a real mountain to me if you get grass on it all the way to the top. Every tree is a crutch to help haul yourself up the slope with, and that feels like cheating. So I work it as a workout for my upper body as well, which is fantastic for the trip uphill, but it doesn’t work so well for going back down the hill. I’m new at this, using my arms to help climb up means I keep going past what would be the comfortable halfway point for making it back down without being tired enough to collapse before I make it back.

I can tell by the nausea and wheezing I’ve been pushing too hard, so I decide to lay down and force a rest. I shrug my pack off, bite into the valve of my camel bag, and take a long drink. The nausea swells and fades and my face and hands go cold. I breathe open-mouthed for fifty counts and things start to go back to normal. Chills come and go, and then I start to feel warm again. I lean back against my pack — it’s not a big one as this is supposed to be a day-hike, but it has a bit of stuff in it just in case it accidentally turns into an overnighter, as I’m not a complete idiot — and close my eyes.

I should have known better. When you’re this wrecked, you set a ten-minute, maybe twenty-minute timer. The problem is that when you let yourself hit bottom like that, you don’t think very clearly. When I opened my eyes, the sun was maybe an hour from the horizon, but it was about ten minutes from a cloud layer that would bring twilight quite a bit earlier.

So much for making it to the top. Unless I felt like spending the night it was time to hoof it downhill. Already the shadows would be long enough that I’d have to be extra careful with my footing. Also, twilight was mosquito banquet time as well as shift-change for the little woodland creatures. The snakes were still awake at this time of year, but I wasn’t in good enough shape to hike quietly. I’d sound like a sack of bowling balls rolling down the hill. The big worry was that it was rutting season for the local white-tails, and those bastards get aggressive. I guy I went to school with incessantly recounts to anyone who hadn’t heard already (and everyone who had heard, if he’d been drinking) the time a twelve-point buck carried him out of the woods to the highway on his rack, where some kind passerby threw him in the back of his truck and rushed him to an emergency room before he bled out completely. I’m not sure I buy all the details that he gives with each recounting, but I trust the veracity of the general theme.

It helps that bucks sparring half a mile away into the woods sounds like an angry lynch mob gunning for you just around that closest bend in the trail. It provides adequate and appropriate motivation. I don’t know exactly what they think you plan to do to the doe they’re fighting over, but they sure do adore their privacy.

Failing light notwithstanding, I took every opportunity to pick up the pace.

And suddenly I was down the hill, seeing the graveled parking lot off in the distance where I’d left my Jeep. I know that sounds like the lamest story on earth, but you have to keep in mind a couple of details. I had hiked nearly four hours to get to where I took my little nap. I was counting on the downhill trip only taking three hours from there, as it had the previous ten times I’d hiked it, and I know there aren’t any shortcuts. At least not marked shortcuts, and certainly not marked with the yellow stripes I had followed to get to where I had turned around.

Just as I popped open the back hatch to dump my pack in, the sun peeked out under that band of clouds I mentioned and vanished below the horizon. I checked my watch and it had been forty-five minutes since deciding it was time to hoof it.

I stretched the cargo net across the back of the Jeep and let it trap my pack to keep it from sliding around. As I flipped the pack over so it would be upright, I noticed a black smudge on it, pretty much dead center. The loading light was on, so I held the pack up the light up to it to have a look to see what kind of crap I’d dropped it in to take my little nap, and it was a perfect handprint, maybe about twenty percent smaller than my huge mitts. I’d certainly never seen it before. I sniffed it and it smelled burned or melted, and in fact, it wasn’t anything that would rub off when I scratched at it.

That was the part of the pack that would have been right against my back, so I put my hand behind me to feel my jacket, and it sure as hell felt like it had a funny patch. I took it off and looked it over. Same handprint, burned in just enough to blacken the material. All the way through, because there it was again, reversed, on the inside of the lining. I started stripping. Same with the hoodie I was wearing under the jacket. Same with my shirt. And my undershirt. And my back was a bit tender to the touch too, like a sunburn.

I had to wait until I got home and arranged a few mirrors to see the smallish pink handprint on my back. It’s never gone away.

[*]

This one time I was reading the Franz Kafka Quarterly and I was laughing my ass off. The FKQ is a peer-reviewed journal for the publication of papers analyzing the works of Franz Kafka and sometimes a few others in his chain of influence, but the Spring edition tends to focus on Kafka’s undeniable sense of humor and occasionally, once every few years, allows in something completely improbable — largely fiction in the form of an academic paper containing in-jokes that would only make sense to, let’s face it, the maybe two hundred people worldwide that have the stomach to be Kafka scholars.

It’s not that Kafka isn’t significant enough or intriguing enough to be studied academically. It’s that Kafka is enjoyable to read. And if you enjoy something, odds are you won’t enjoy studying it. It will suck the joy right out of it and coat all the juicy stuff with a hundred years of paper dust. I imagine it’s  like what the study of gynecology must do to the sex-life of gynecologists.

Those of us who really enjoy Kafka and also have what it takes to study Kafka are the ones that have some appreciation for how Kafkaesque the whole process is, which effectively creates a small club of academics of whom no one else who studies literature can stand to be in our presence. They think we can’t take the field seriously. It’s largely true. Any field of academic study is nine-tenths egos and politics and one-tenth rehash unless you’re studying someone who is still alive and writing. That latter case is like a crew of vultures trying to make a meal of an animal that is still alive and running, however. It’s much easier to dismember a body of work when it is dead, sun-ripened, and in no condition to contradict you in the press — despite how hard it is to elbow your way closer to the crowded dinner table.

We have to host our own parties since no one else will invite us. We make our own fun.

The past spring’s edition contained a piece comparing and contrasting the opening to The Metamorphosis with a recently discovered version of the same piece written by Marcel Proust, featuring a side-by-side comparison of the first page of both works, commentaries by contemporaries that survived them both as well as academic scholars of the early twentieth century, an apparent Borgesian knife-fight between the two versions of the story in the footnotes which retroactively ended Proust’s version with just the first page — and wrapped up with tragic odes to both versions encoded in the poetry of, firstly, Rilke and then, anonymous works ascribed to Pablo Neruda.

As I said, I was laughing my ass off. When I finished I went back to the first page to see who had perpetrated this, and that’s when it became a lot less funny and a lot more Kafka. See, it had my name on it.

I stopped laughing. Then I started back again, wondering who I had pissed off that would have submitted this under my name — then realized it was way too good to be any kind of attack. Hell, I don’t know any of the readership who wouldn’t have wanted to be gifted with full credit. Who would give such a thing away? Were they looking for the backhanded deflation of my standing that would come from me having to write in to claim that I had had nothing to do with it — or the later more serious damage to my career and reputation by claiming that I had plagiarized the whole thing from someone else’s work if I failed to set the FKQ straight?

That was a no-brainer for me. Still chuckling, I went to my computer and began to draft my combined praise for the piece and complete disavowal of any prior knowledge of the paper, much less authorship. As for who might have it out for me, I had no idea. I decided not to take it seriously regardless. It was way more likely to just be a joke instead of a trap. When I was done, I reread my email a couple of times to make sure it couldn’t be taken the wrong way, but I waited on sending it because I got distracted by thinking about whether I had any papers, either completed or in progress, that I should consider submitting.

And that’s when I found my copy of the paper. I found my original outline, dated last August. I found a draft of the fake bibliography from early September, and then maybe six different versions in various stages, not including an autosave from when my computer had crashed. So call it seven.

I checked my sent email from September through the end of last year, and sure enough, I found the submission, with attachments, to FKQ. As a bonus, I found an email to a Proust scholar I had met as an undergrad. And an email to an old girlfriend I had nearly broken up with because I was sick to the teeth of Rilke (but actually lost to a grad-school transfer).

Fractured memory aside, I had plenty of evidence in front of me with which I could fend off any accusations of plagiarism. However, I still had no memory of any of it. I read all the material in front of me, the emails and drafts, and it certainly sounded like my words, my verbal mannerisms, the horrendous grammar my first drafts always have.

Meanwhile, congratulations and praise from friends and colleagues was beginning to stack up in my inbox.

I had no idea what to do. Except expand my disavowal and these notes into a submission for next year’s Spring edition….

[*]

This one time on the bus I sat very still.

That hardly sounds like an achievement, I know. Some kids my age can pitch 80 mile an hour fastballs and remember how to spell any word they’ve ever seen. Yarf can drive his mother’s car even though he won’t be old enough to get a learner’s permit for another two years.

I can’t do anything cool. I can read well and write okay too. Considering all the dumbshits at my school, that looks like an achievement. But I don’t glow with pride at the thought of it.

I’m twelve years old and I’m fat. Not “can’t fit through doors” fat or “can hide school books and cans of soda in my rolls” fat, but fat enough that there’s no point to try out for the track team. Once a week I make sure I can still jog a mile in ten minutes, and after that I don’t care. People tease me for being fat, but they tease me for being able to read too. For me, that kinda takes the sting out of it. If I was Superman they’d be all like, “C’mon, Holmes. Want me to chill? Chill me with your superbreath!” and hide my bookbag. Then they’d say, “You’ve got x-ray vision — see if it’s up yo momma’s ass!”

I’m fat because I’m fat. I can’t much help it. Some of these guys are dumbshits because they work at it the way athletes train. Sometimes I imagine there’s a dumbshit gymnasium where they all stand around egging each other on, daring each other to add more stupid to the bar and try to pull another ten reps.

Sometimes I finish my work early in class and don’t have anything to do. I have at least two teachers that won’t even let me pull out a book and read when I’m done with everything else. Or even work on homework for another class. I’ve gotten yelled at for drawing in my notebooks. It makes no sense to me. Sometimes I think I just get yelled at because I’m fat and that’s just what I should learn to expect in life. Anyway, the closest I ever came to talking back to this teacher who told me I couldn’t do anything else when I had finished all of my homework was when I asked, “What am I supposed to do? I’m supposed to be learning stuff while I’m here, and I’m done with what you gave me.” The teacher shot back with, “Learn to shut up and sit still.”

That was one for the dumbshits, I’m sure. More stupid to add to the bar. But then I remembered seeing these monks on TV that seemed think that learning to sit still was pretty important and no one acted like they thought they were dumbshits. So I decided to try it. I would become a sitting-still athlete.

I learned pretty quickly I could only do it after I had already done everything I was supposed to do, otherwise I would fidget and spin my wheels on whatever it was I was supposed to be working on. But when everything I could work on was already done, or I didn’t have what I needed to work on anything else, I just worked on sitting still.

I didn’t try to relax or make myself comfortable or anything. I just propped myself up in a way that wouldn’t put my legs to sleep. I made myself stop trying not to breathe or blink or anything I thought at the beginning might be part of it — just sit normally, breathe normally, blink normally, but without moving otherwise.

It was way harder than I thought it would be. I thought about how my cat does it, with his feet all tucked under him and staring off into space. He’s not poised and alert, all tensed up waiting to run off and do something. He’s not asleep. He’s just sitting there with nothing to do. He might have a head start from having the emptiest head I think I’ve ever encountered in a mammal — if he’s not hungry or thirsty or in need of the litter box, and nothing in his field of vision moves like it might be prey or headed toward the little can of treats we keep on the shelf he can’t get to, he does nothing. He does nothing the way those dumbshits do stupid.

Pile five more pounds of nothing on the bar and see if you can pull another ten reps, Fuzzy Earl. Fuzzy Earl is a do-nothing champion.

So now when I’m done with my work I sit up and do nothing. It really doesn’t seem to make the time go faster, especially not the way reading does. Kinda the opposite. Sometimes the ticks of the second hand on the wall clock take forever. But eventually the next one comes. Then the one after that. And then the bell rings and I can get up and do something useful.

But once I was sitting on the bus, doing nothing, waiting for the bus to get to my subdivision so I could get off and walk home. I was doing nothing and suddenly noticed that it seemed like I’d been doing nothing forever. The bus wasn’t moving, no one else was moving, nothing. It was like the whole world had figured out how to sit still. There was no sound except the static sound of blood in the vessels in my head.

That moment of nothing lasted forever. I remember noticing, but I don’t remember being at all worried about it, thinking that time would tick on along when it felt like it. When it was time.

Anyway, Fuzzy Earl would have been proud of me. If he’s ever anything.

And then the bus got to my subdivision and I got out and walked home the long way, the way that was a mile long, because it was Friday. It took ten minutes.

[*]