SRF Heavy Industries

This one time I had this dream that there was a kind of rattle-sound in the box at the bottom of my closet. I dreamed that it woke me up, and in the dream I sat up in my bed but I was too scared to get out of bed to see what it was. I pulled the blanket up over my head and I screamed and that must have woke me up because when I woke up I was doing the same thing. I remember I was worried about Mommy couldn’t hear me scream if I had the blanket over my head, but nothing in the world could make me take the blanket off until Mommy came, so I just kept screaming.

When Mommy got there I told her about the sound and she turned on all the lights and opened the closet door and looked through the box that just had old clothes and shoes in it. First she pulled it out and looked it all over to see if there was holes in it, but there wasn’t. Then behind her in the closet a piece of the floor lifted up and I didn’t see what was pushing it up, but I screamed and pulled the blanket up over my head and kept screaming, and then I woke up again and Mommy came into the room and turned on all the lights.

I told her about the box in the closet and that she had already come in here to look in the box and that when she was looking the floor lifted up, and she sat on the bed for a minute and told me I was just dreaming, that I had a nightmare. Then she went to the closet and opened the door, and there wasn’t a box on the floor or anything because there never was. I told her where the floor lifted up, and she knelt down to look at the floor, and that’s when a hand came out of my dresses and grabbed her by the hair and my closet door slammed closed.

I pulled my blanket over my head and screamed and screamed, and then I woke up and kept screaming. Mommy came in and turned on all the lights. I told her that there was a box that rattled and I had dreamed that she came to check, but then I had woke up again and she came and the floor lifted up, and then I had woke up again and she came to check and some man grabbed her hair and pulled her in and slammed the door, and I asked her not to go to the closet to check. But then the door to the closet just came open, just a little bit, all on its own, and I pulled the blanket over my head and screamed and screamed and woke up again.

When Mommy came this time I told her to take me to her bedroom. I kept screaming and I couldn’t talk but I pointed at the closet and screamed louder when she got up to go to the closet door, so she came and picked me up and took me down the hall to her bedroom. Puppy was curled up on the bed and was grumpy, but Mommy made him get down so I could sleep next to her. Mommy hugged me until I felt better but not all the way better and she fell asleep, but I kept hearing Puppy walking around. Then he sat down in front of the door and growled, and I told him to hush up. He was looking at me when Mommy’s doorknob turned and the door opened up, and then another Puppy came in and they both jumped up on the bed and started fighting and I pulled the blanket over my head and screamed and screamed and when I woke up, I was in my bed, with my blanket over my head, and I was screaming.

When Mommy came in and turned on all the lights, Puppy came in with her and went up to the closet door and started growling. I tried to tell her about the box and the floor and the man and Puppy fighting another Puppy on the bed in her bedroom but I was crying too hard. Puppy kept growling and barked at the closet and Mommy went and snatched open the door so hard Puppy had to jump out of the way and there was another Puppy in there only he was hurt and bleeding and Puppy jumped in and dragged him out and then I pulled the blanket over my head and started screaming.

When I woke up this time, Mommy came in and turned on all the lights. I couldn’t breathe or talk, but I pointed at the closet and said “Puppy” and she sat down next to me and told me Puppy had ran away two days ago and hadn’t come home. And then she opened up the closet door and the floor was pushed up and Puppy was in there, but he wasn’t moving but a little bit, and there was a man trying to go back down through the hole in the floor. Mommy grabbed the man by his hair and pulled him out of the hole in the floor and started hitting him and biting him and I pulled the blanket up over my head and screamed and screamed and screamed.

I didn’t wake up again this time, but Mommy sat down on the bed with me and hugged me through the blanket and said that it was okay, that the man was dead and the police were going to come and take him away and that I could go to her room and sleep with her tonight.

[*]

This one time I was standing over the monitors at the security station with the head of building security, the head of HR, and that dumb mouthy bitch from inside sales that everyone always tells all the stories about. She wears the clothes and makeup of a woman ten years younger than her. She’s got a sense of entitlement ten miles wide and an ass to match. And she can wield a sexual harassment suit like one of those swords from “The Highlander.” She’d already got two people fired during her three short years here, and I was the next on her chopping block.

But I was innocent, and we were about to watch the evidence.

See, we were in the elevator, coming back from lunch. I’d had my old college bookbag with me, because I’d brought my lunch and a book read out at the picnic tables in the square, if I could find a place — but as happens about half of the time, all the tables were taken. One of them by her, as it turns out. So I found my car in the company deck and ate in there. Cranked a few tunes. Skipped the book and took a twenty-minute nap. And I left my bag in the car. You know. Since I was done with it.

We both got into the elevator to come back at the same time. Along with about ten other people, and it was mondo crowded. But we worked on the fifteenth floor, and eventually everyone else filtered out.

As the last person except us got off, a got a bit of a bump in the thigh from a sharp corner of a briefcase and leaned into a wall to kind of shrug it off. As I straightened back up, I stuck a hand behind me to steady my bookbag, backward, at just about waist level, to grab it by the bottom. It’s a reflex. Because as you might remember, and as I had forgotten, I’d left my bag in the car.

What I had grabbed by the bottom was the leather-wrapped ass of this bitch, here, who had turned sideways to get into her own purse for some dumb reason. But since it was nearly the shape and texture I was expecting, it took a moment for the confusion to clear in my head.

And then there was the screaming and the death threats and the doors opened and she raced off to HR, trying to drag me with her. I yanked my hand free and was gonna head back to my desk, but a couple of people who came to see what was going on mentioned that maybe I should make sure there was someone to tell my side of the story. So here we are.

And now I have the viewpoint of someone who’s just died, floating above his recently vacated body with a new kind of perspective. Thanks to the tapes and the camera in the elevator.

And I’m looking down at the sad, balding, stumpy, pudgy man in the elevator, wearing clothes at least a decade too young for him. Other people are sneering at him behind his back, obvious in to the viewpoint of the camera. One of them puffs out his cheeks to look like mine and mimics my sad grimace. The guy he’s standing next to grabs some hair and pulls it forward over his not-yet-balding dome, pointing at my head. They laugh silently. The woman whose ass I had accidentally grabbed rolled her eyes at them and turned away, fuming.

It was the cheek-puffer’s briefcase that had nailed my leg. He didn’t even look back.

I could feel the heat of humiliation in my face. I’m pretty sure my fat, balding scalp was on fire. I could feel the blush in my chest. My hands and feet went ice cold. But we hadn’t even gotten to the good part.

As I straightened up, pushing off the wall with my right hand, my left hand went up to where the strap of my bag would have been on my left shoulder. And there I was, sticking my right hand out behind me, right at waist level, palm up … and there I am grabbing a handful of leather-wrapped ass. Suede skirt, not suede bookbag. A pocket on the skirt, not the zippered pouch I was expecting. Facing the wrong way. Did I switch my bag with someone else’s accidentally? Why is it turned the wrong way? How can it be turned like that and not pull on my shoulder strap? Holy shit, where is the strap? Did it break?

You could read it all on my chubby, balding face. Every last bit. You could see the blood draining out of my features, see the fear building, then the anger drop into place to enforce the view that whatever had just happened, it wasn’t my fault. Then her hand snatched at mine, and I cowered back. Jacket too stylish and casual for work. No tie. V-neck polo underneath, at least one button too many left unbuttoned. And a blue that made my blotched complexion look pink and grubby. Some kind of cheap chain around my neck. Pants too tight for me. And a smidge too long. Loafers instead of reasonable dress shoes. And my hairstyle had drifted over the years into an honest-to-God comb-over. A huge-ass metal watch like a pimp would be proud of.

I was ridiculous. And I was proud of it. I thought I was the shit. And it hit me: I was everything I had ever accused her of being. Undeservedly vain. Trying to shoehorn myself back into a younger version of myself and brutally defensive about the bits that wouldn’t fit. Jealous of my entitlements, because if I didn’t stick up for them, who would?

I mean, Jesus, look at me. Look at me.

She turned to look at me, in front of the HR director, in front of the security guy, face all shut down and bitter, and opened her mouth. She was angry, and humiliated, but was ready to do the right thing. I cut her off. I couldn’t stop myself.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” It was what I should have said when I found that I accidentally had a handful of her ass, regardless of how or why. “Jesus, I’m sorry.” Sorry for how I had thought about her, how I had joked about her when others had. Sorry I had in any way thought that was okay. And there she was, on camera and everything, sticking up for me with those two bastards, letting them know in a way that wouldn’t embarrass me that they were being dicks. The same kind of dick I was. Had always been. Except, you know, not as ridiculous as me. Tears were streaming down my face. “Christ, I’m sorry.”

She just stood there, mouth hanging open, face unclouding and relaxing.

The security guy just kept his face down, not looking at anyone. I couldn’t tell whether he was ashamed of something too, or just trying not to laugh.

I turned to the HR director. She looked, at this moment, like the epitome of everyone’s sympathetic mother. I couldn’t take it.

“If we’re done here,” I said, “I’m going back to my desk.” And I bolted.

[*]

This one time I looked up and saw the Earth hanging in the sky, right above the horizon, backlit by the sun, which had set a week or more ago. It was a rare opportunity to get out the telescope and see what I could of earth’s night-side lights, the aurora australis, the light-shows above storms in the south Atlantic….

Here in the lunar night, my suit was tuned to use body heat to power the electronics and help me shed just enough of the excess to keep me comfortable. I had about thirty hours of compressed oxygen, maybe a little more than half that in the CO2 scrubbers — plenty to cover my shift out here, already mostly over, plus a few hours of contemplation and personal observation of home. Invisible to me, Earth’s magnetic tail fanned out, blown back by the solar breeze and inflating like a parachute. The equipment I was checking out and cleaning was mapping the magnetic lines by following streams of protons as they spiraled in toward Earth’s poles, lit and perturbed in their travels by the lightning in storms below that the infall was, as it settled in, fueling.

I turned with my back to Earth and, as my eyes adjusted, the stars began to appear. Even with occulted earthshine lighting the lunar landscape, painting the gray with stained-glass blue shadows, I was able to see the Milky Way and make out the galactic core without blocking my view of the twilit ground. It never gets less magnificent. I captured a multishot with the full-range array — way overkill for a holiday snap. But that’s the gullet that will eventually devour us. The drain we will eventually spiral down.

Turning back around, dead center in my view of Earth was the huge mess over the eruption of Tristan da Cunha — a slow and steady and steadily worsening mess that was filling the skies with enough abrasive crap to have shut down the last three supply runs, in addition to grounding almost all of the planes on the planet. Over the course of the past two years, the ice caps had grown enough that we could tell from here. Just from the change in albedo. Volcanic gases are greenhouse fuel, though, so when all that crap settles out, assuming Tristan ever settles down, Earth will be a little more screwed without increasing the capacity of the carbon sinks.

It was gonna be a while until the next bus home. Or mail call, for that matter.

It was slow going converting dead moon to biomass, and we were doing well to not be sawing off our own legs and eating them already. Water we could make. We had a lot of really expensive metals just lying around in heaps, fantastic overkill for the printers to make us whatever shapes we needed. Silica and ceramics up to our eyeballs. Every scrap of carbon we found, we reburned and fed to the algae tanks. The salps ate it up, fat and happy.

I never thought I would miss plastic. Aerogels were fun but way too strange, even to someone living on the moon. Vacugels were even more fun. We could make big boats from them to sail the skies of Earth, anchor the bases of the elevators to the stars with neutrally buoyant masses miles above where the planes fly. Normally. When Tristan settles down.

And home. There was home, right up there. I could nearly take a running jump from here and get there in a month or so. Just swim the deeps. She would draw me to herself with open arms. It was heartbreaking.

This was the moment I got the message from base that funds were too tight to send us another bus. Too long without planes shut down too much trade, started a slow cascade that caused too much damage. We were officially out of reach. For years. Maybe two. Maybe a decade. Maybe never again.

Maintenance was my secondary. My primary was chaplain/counselor. Time to button up everything out here and head back to where I was needed.

For however long we were going to last.

[*]

This one time I was rereading a book I know I had read maybe thirty times, and I couldn’t remember what was going to happen next.

I know I’m not the world’s best reader. I couldn’t really even be called literate until the seventh grade, and that was because my grandfather put me in this summer program after the sixth grade. He came to live with us after my dad went to jail, and since he wrote stuff for a living, he wasn’t willing to put up with anyone living in the house with him who was just scraping by. We had a big fight about it, and my mom weighed in, and then there was that scare with the abandoned building on the next block over, and then I figured I owed him something for stepping in to keep me out of juvie.

I remember the meat of the argument after all these years. He said the big difference between people who are in and out of jail their whole lives and people who aren’t is whether those people can read and write well enough to save themselves. I shot back with the counter that there was no way in hell just being able to read and write would keep you from being a criminal. I said maybe it just made you a better class of criminal. Then, because my mom was there, he leaned over and whispered, “Tell me, you dumb shit: what’s wrong with that? Also, why not learn a little bit of how not to get caught? People write that shit down. Find it and read it.”

At least that’s how I remember it happening this time. I never wrote it down until now, to fix it in my head.

Grandpa told me that’s how science and technology are taking off like they are right now, and why it never had until public schools and mandatory education came along. As long as only maybe five people in a hundred could read or write, then everyone who couldn’t read had to count on those people to not be lying for their own ends when it was time to go through what people had already found out and written down.

“Words don’t change once you write’ em down,” he said. “That’s what will save us all.”

I believed him at the time, but I don’t believe that so much now.

I don’t read or write any language except English, but I know English. And I’ve picked up what Beowulf looked like when it was first written down, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and a King James Bible, and a copy of the US Constitution, and some H.G. Wells, and some Vonnegut, and the comments section of any given YouTube page, and I’m convinced that the more stuff gets written down, the faster English itself changes, making all the stuff that’s gone before less and less comprehensible. Like science and technology, it just changes faster and faster.

And this book in front of me, this book my grandfather wrote, I read it every six months. Once on his birthday, and once on the anniversary of his death. And every damned time I read it, it’s different. It’s different to the point that the world itself is different when I get to the end.

After the fifth or sixth time I read it, it freaked me out so badly I started writing down everything that was important to me so I’d remember how things actually happened.

Not that that helped any.

You know already that when you read something, you can be confused about the meaning of the words. Some words have a bunch of different meanings. New meanings to old words crop up all the time, and old meanings fall out of use, and that doesn’t even take into consideration sarcasm, irony, and people deliberately trying to keep you confused about what they mean. Then you have to take into account a book has a hundred thousand words, or maybe twice or tree times that, and when you have to depend on context to tell you what meaning a word has, or a sentence, or a paragraph, or a chapter, you can get a cascade that changes everything, start to finish. A cascade that can sweep you along with it, and change everything downstream.

Especially if what you’re reading tells you important truths about the history of things, about your family. About yourself.

Twice a year I pick up this book. If the past few months have been horrible, I can count on this book to have a good chance of rearranging things so that things will have been better. If the past few months have been beautiful, then I pick up the book with fear and trembling. Sometimes it doesn’t change things. Sometimes it just puts things in perspective or refines them. But you never know.

Context is everything.

[*]

This one time I sat on my naked ass on a beach with black sand. The wind was cold at my back, but when it blew off the waves, it was as hot as any oven. The sun edged toward the top of the mountain at my back, promising a quick and early sunset.

A watched the waves roll in, stacking on top of each other in their rush to bring in the tide. And everything else the tide would bring.

I shivered and gasped with the chill. Then poured with sweat. Breathing was a chore.

With the sun at my back, the colors of the sea were amazing. In the blues and aquas were pinks and oranges, and the sun itself played in the waves like a school of porpoises made of lightning. The clouds in the sky were impossible colors and shapes. A textured leopard-skin shot with green shadows against an orange background. Gulls hovered in the breeze, coasting up and down and looking for snacks, their backs to the impossible beauty.

I coughed. Seawater trickled from a sinus, dripping past my numb lips. My swimsuit was bunched in my left hand. I couldn’t feel that either. My legs, also numb, were crossed under me.

In my right hand I clutched a tiny, tiny jellyfish, freshly removed from my freshly removed swimsuit.

My muscles were locked. I couldn’t move. I was locked up with cramps. Once in a while I could shiver.

Also on the beach: some humongous chunks of driftwood. What looked for all the world like most of the skeleton of a cow. I couldn’t turn to look at them now, but I saw them before I went into the water. Also on the beach: maybe twenty or thirty other people.

I desperately wanted help. Needed help. But I couldn’t move, couldn’t shout, and, apparently a stark naked woman sitting on her ass on a black sand beach, clutching her swimsuit and watching the waves come in, was something to be ignored. Or maybe treated as part of the incredible beauty of the place.

The colors were fading from the world. I was dying, and I was blending right in, wracked with pain, paralyzed, and dying with the sun. Dissolving into the sea.

As blackness approached, giant forms detached themselves from the scenery around me and approached. I was more aware of their presences than able to see them, but the two in front of me were more visible, stretching from ground to sky, black, shiny like obsidian, like the sand of this place, silhouetted against the dimming grayness behind them.

Their forms were dreamlike and harshly beautiful, like this place. Maybe they were the gods of this place, come to collect me.

Scented winds rolled down off of them. The one on my right, closest to me, brought the smell of rotting wood, of musky unnameable flowers, of the sex-life of animals. Without seeing her move, first I saw her looking out to sea, as tall as the clouds herself, crowned by an early star. Then she was facing toward me, as naked as I.

To her left was a sculpted pillar of a masculine form, so tall the setting sun lit his scalp and crowned him with fire. The wind from him smelled of brimstone, of fresh lava, of wind-eroded earth, of wood and soil on fire. To the right of the pillar-woman in front of me, right and beyond, was a wide man with his feet in the water and his head in the growing stars, smelling of the skin of living fish and of the sea.

I could sense at least two more behind me, one for each peak of the mountains, their wind smelling of fresh snow and frozen blood.

They spoke with nearly unheard unearthly rumbles underneath the roaring of the surf and the wind. Or maybe they spoke with the surf and the wind too, and the roaring of the blood in my ears.

The pain was unbearable. My breaths were too slow and too shallow. My cramps turned to convulsions and pitched me sideways. Slowly, sedately, the gods of this place knelt to receive me into themselves.

And then, over the roaring of blood and wind and wave, I heard a distant voice: “In her hand! Holy crap! Is that a sea wasp?”

“Keep her breathing! Let’s get her some help.”

[*]

This one time I was buried up to my knees in shaded, cold loam full of wriggling life, wrapped by green vines covered in tiny yellow flowers, with my face pressed into the flank of an antelope. Moments later I was face down on sunwarmed stone, one hand in a puddle of rose-scented laundry water, spitting from the taste of dry cactus bones. Then I was on my back, lying on air, adrift in a vapor of new cotton, sliced cucumbers, gin, old cigar tobacco, and rotted leather.

My grandmother’s first husband had been a perfumer. They had managed to escape Paris for Switzerland when the Germans came, though he managed to die from food poisoning within a month of their escape. They had somehow left Paris with a full trunk of bottled essences, which was possibly used as the excuse for their travel in the first place. I forget the story, but I remembered the trunk. And when my grandmother died, thirty years after the death of my father, it passed to me.

In transit the the US from Switzerland via Holland, with my father as a tiny child, the boat they traveled on encountered some rough weather. Or maybe it had even been fired upon by a submarine. No one had the story anymore. The research was beyond me. But nearly every bottle in the trunk had broken or come uncorked, and all of the essences and oils and resins had escaped into the wads of padding or into the case itself. The case was well sealed and waterproof. My grandmother had left it sealed for the most part and had opened it only once a year, and then only for the first five or six years, on the anniversary of my grandfather’s death.

And thanks to that trunk, I knew what it was like to be surrounded by snakes in a pit of damp sand, warmed by a lump of burning camphor. Or wearing a suit made of seaweed and strips of green birch with a lump of musky alabaster in my mouth.

The nose cheats. There is no other way to put it. You can be walking along, minding your own business, and then a whiff of something can yank you out of yourself and drop you forty years into your past into a recollection that has to be real just based on the strength of it, but otherwise would never have been revisited. Cinnamon-roasted almonds, diesel fumes and fish guts. Cherry blossoms raining from a snow-tainted sky. Mud from the back of a tortoise. A green-stained handful of shredded leaves and fresh bright blood from stripping a thorny vine through your fist. An elephant upwind, accompanied by fresh paint and cotton candy. Seared flesh and charcoal and lighter fluid and the smell of a young girl’s screams and tears. Dyed silk and formaldehyde and nail polish and the wrong shampoo.

But the nose cheats worse than that. It will take you to places you have never been, to impossible places that have never, that could never, exist.

I opened the trunk a whole inch and let it slip closed. And then I was in the presence of burning plastic wrapping lemon-soaked boiled eggs, put out by damp blankets of rabbit fur. Again: a mouthful of slivers of tin and dried beans and hair glued to porcelain dolls. Again: a head-to-toe shroud of lavender-laundered lace and a pillow of onionskin pages. Again: the warm glow of the inside of an old tube radio, burning dust and dessicated spiders and a hidden love note with a single pressed orchid. Again: a flurry of feathers and diaper-rash ointment and brilliant red magnolia seeds.

The fluttering light changed with every slam of the trunk lid. Outside the draperied window, the wind drove a flurry of heavy clouds past the sun, but the light brightened or darkened at the slamming of the lid, accompanying the whooshing of impossible years and incalculable, improbable distance. Distant power lines moaned and screeched at the strain on the boundaries of reality.

Breathless, finally breathless and wiping away tears, I put my head on the top of the trunk and breathed in the here-and-now scent of old wood, leather-wrapped brass hinges, old books, pipe ashes, dry-rotted quilts, death from long illness, and the discarded dander of many dozens of known and marked and dutifully buried years.

But I never forgot that escape was just on the other side of the lid.

[*]

originally published February 1, 2008
in “Letters from Heck” at TheFootnote.net

I was walking the pugs when I found a note next to the corpse of a squashed squirrel. It was in the road next to a sidewalk in my neighborhood. This is what the note read:

———-

To Whom It May Concern,

I have no remorse. I have lived a long life full of joy.

I was Chitterer Extraordinaire in the Signal Core back in The War. I was only in the Signal Core because I was too young for Infantry.

Once, back in the early nineties, I shat on Mr. T’s limo from my perch on a tree branch. If you have to ask why, then remember he once had a Saturday morning cartoon. I saw it through a living room window a couple of times. And then I waited two years for my chance.

I have taken great joy in planting acorns and poplar seeds in flowerbeds and clogged rain gutters. I have pissed on the handles of every mailbox door for twenty blocks in every direction. I have tormented all the cooped-up cats and dogs and birds in all the houses through windows and screens. If you’re local to this neighborhood, odds are I’ve watched you masturbate. And made sketches of it for that comic book thing I’ve been doing. It sells really well in Boise for some reason.

I played clarinet for an amateur Klezmer band that threatened several times to turn pro. Once I climbed up Anna Nicole Smith’s skirt while she was passed out drunk on the patio of a local restaurant — but then who hasn’t?

Once, at an outdoor music festival in Midtown, I danced onstage with Lenny Kravitz. My first wife was maimed by a schnauzer at that show, but you have to take the good with the bad.

When I was young and athletic I was a state champion at that game where you drag a paperclip or some other piece of metal scrap up a utility pole to drop on the terminal of those garbage-can-sized transformers to blow them up. I can’t hear very well anymore, and I’ve logged more air-time than the average Delta pilot, but in terms of making entire flocks of pigeons and migrating blackbirds and crows drop bomber-loads on bicyclists and pedestrians, I was truly world-class. Now I coach a little-league team. We’ve only had four fatalities this season, and that’s good.

I’ve killed four mockingbirds with my bare hands. If you know mockingbirds, you know that’s an accomplishment.

I’ve never gone a day without eating or having a warm place to sleep. Also, I have more than 3,700 grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And I never have to buy them presents or feed them at holiday gatherings.

This is why I am dead now: I have achieved all I have ever set out to achieve. I cannot think of anything more that I need to do.

There is a legend that the one who has achieved everything will be the one to stop a UPS truck with a sheer balls-out frontal assault. The fact that I am lying here right now, inert, proves that I am not the one of which the legends speak.

I must have missed something, somewhere, then. But if I did, I have no idea what. Since I have no idea what I could have achieved that I did not, I am perfectly happy.

But the UPS truck? I made it swerve. That’s good enough for me.

———-

I kept the note as a source of personal inspiration. If, in the course of eventualities, the turn comes for my existence to end, this is how I want to go. I want to at least make the truck swerve.

And I let the pugs eat the squirrel.

[*]

This one time I was out on the prairie in the department’s secondary (and therefore crappier) blind, checking the mixing board and the microphone and speaker hookups, contemplating the end of my academic career. I had shade, I had a misting fan, I had a cooler full of icewater, a five-pound bag of nutritionally balanced (for humans) trail mix, and a somewhat smaller baggie of my own special blend of herbs and spices. And the video cameras.

Prairie dogs have a language. And they talk. When we’re giving presentations and writing articles for publication, we cast it all into the most conservative language ever, falling over ourselves to back it off to “calls” and “signals” and, at the edgy, risky end, “language-like behavior.” But they effin’ talk. They have as many nouns as you think a prairie dog might need, plus a couple, and when they see something new, the first one to spot it makes up a new word. If it’s a variation on an old word, say, you start with “human,” you get words like “huge human wearing yellow” in which you can still hear “human” if you try.

The reason I was in the secondary blind is I was way off our usual sites. I didn’t want to taint one of our research towns or even a control town, though it was hard enough to keep everything pristine enough for our purposes anyway. We weren’t exactly operating in secret. We keep getting written up in popsci outlets, and every Chomsky- and Wittgenstein-quoting wannabee science tourist comes out to visit. Also our permission to study dog towns comes from whatever rancher has prairie he doesn’t have an immediate use for. Until he changes his mind. It would be different if we could convince the little bastards to stay on protected public land, but those lands, while not necessarily shrinking, keep having the mineral rights leased out from under them, and that means all of our laid-back, fun-loving prairie dogs have to come up for words for “Holy-@#^&!in-Jeez-run-it’s-a-backhoe” and “-sample-drill” and “-ground-penetrating-radar-unit” and, occasionally, “-gusher.”

I hate it when the Republicans, pockets loaded-to-dripping with oil-squeezin’s, are in charge. There. I’ve said it.

I’d been out here for a week, recording samples of everything they might say to make sure the dialect was the same as what we’d picked up about fifty miles to the south. The stuff I had already prepared before I thought maybe the usual problems were bad enough, and while I might be throwing away my career, I shouldn’t be contaminating anyone else’s work. It’s tough to listen with the ear of a prairie dog, but there were some differences. I rerecorded the calls that were different. I added a few new ones to cover the gaps. But I was just working with the basics anyway.

And then I spent maybe forty-eight hours straight in Earl’s studio, distracting him with enough weed that he’d forget to keep trying to put his hands all over me. Though when he finally clued into what I was doing on the second day, his help was invaluable. And he even kept his hands to himself.  It was Earl’s idea to mix up a rhythm track based on sample noises of wind in the grass and distant sounds of cows mooing and other animal noises and miscellaneous bits and pieces.

And this one time, out in the prairie in our secondary, crappier blind, right at the bright golden hour of sunset, I set up the cameras. And then I cranked up the amp on the portable stack and played them my poem:

[distant and soft] Deer-colored-human-with-box
[louder] Deer-colored-human-with-box
[louder] Deer-colored-human-with-box
Windstorm keep-low
Windstorm keep-low
Windstorm keep-low
All-clear! All-clear! All-clear!
Run! Run! Run! All-clear!

Rain-come water-high
Move-the-babies
Rain-come water-high
Move-the-babies
Rain-come water-high
Move-the-babies
All-clear! All-clear! All-clear!
Run! Run! Run! All-clear!

Scorpion, fast coyote, hawk-aloft [hawk cry]
Freeze!
Scorpion, fast coyote, hawk-aloft [hawk cry]
Freeze!
Scorpion, fast coyote, hawk-aloft [hawk cry]
Freeze!
All-clear! All-clear! All-clear!
Run! Run! Run! All-clear!
All-clear! All-clear! All-clear!
Run! Run! Run! All-clear!

Deer-colored-human-with-box
[softer] Deer-colored-human-with-box
[quiet and distant] Deer-colored-human-with-box

By the time I was done, there were maybe five hundred of these guys out of their burrows and blinking in the setting sun. There was a cry I was picking up on the mics, and it was pretty much just a handful of dogs barking “all-clear.” And as they started to lose interest and wander around, I played it again.

And then there was a thousand of them. Or more. And the way they would freeze and run at the right times looked like a kind of dance. And according to the mics near the burrow entrances, some of them, on the third repetition, were singing along….

And when it was over, “all-clear!” “all-clear!” “all-clear!” …

I started turning off the gear and packing it away. I left the mics and the recording gear for last — except for the video cameras, which I would have to go collect. But right before I unplugged the headphones, I heard from one distant mic:

Scorpion, fast coyote, hawk-aloft
Freeze!
All-clear! All-clear! All-clear!
Run! Run! Run! All-clear!

Maybe I’ll go back soon some Friday for Open Mic Night.

[*]

This one time I was driving to work and it was taking forever. The commute wasn’t the longest I’ve ever had, but still….

The driver’s seat of my car was the most comfortable chair I owned. The CD changer was full of good music to listen to, and my commute buddies, the cars and trucks and SUVs I drove this route with every morning, were all familiar faces, other half-awake zombies like myself, usually polite and considerate because there was really no need for a hurry. All things considered, the destination was merely, for any of us, another eight to ten hours of work. It could be worse.

In China there are rumors of traffic jams that last for days. A week or more, even. So I try not to complain.

The route held to the template of just about every commute I’ve ever had in this town or any town similar to it: subdivision to feeder road to highway to the beltway/perimeter/ring-road and then a kind of reversal, back to a highway/feeder road to a main thoroughfare to an urban cross-street to a parking garage. For the duration, we sit in our little plastic and metal boxes, relegating the actual operation of a vehicle to the same portions of our brains to which we relegate the boring and repetitive portions of our usual workday. For most of us, it all happens in a kind of trance, and emerging from the car at the end of wherever we’re going is like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon.

We get out, we yawn, we stretch, we pump blood into our atrophied limbs to reinflate them to usefulness — and then we enter another cocoon.

In the trance, the driving trance, that’s where the edits happen. The last thing you remember about where you’ve been is driving under the cacophonous symphony of upflung concrete noodles that every town calls Spaghetti Junction, then cresting the hill to where the sun behind you hits what passes for a skyline… and then you’re missing ten or fifteen minutes.

It’s not like you were actually asleep or abducted by aliens or something, but you’re missing time. And, to be frank, a bit grateful. It wasn’t necessarily time you needed to experience.

Sometimes I think about where the time goes, and if maybe I’ll ever get it back when I have a better use for it. And then there was this one time.

In my opinion, every day you have to leave your house before dawn is ruined. In the colder months, when it’s dark when you leave your house and dark when you leave work to go home, sometimes it feels like the whole day passes in a bit of a dream. Whole series of days. And if it rains on the weekend, it feels like you can lose half a month or more. Sometimes it feels rare to actually experience the passing time. So this one time, this one morning, went on forever.

My ass plopped into the seat and I started the car and … there was a sudden spike of panic because I didn’t know how long I had been sitting there, zoned out. I checked the dash clock and I was only running a minute or two behind. So I backed out of the driveway … and it seemed like it took half an hour to get out of the subdivision. My house is toward the back anyway, but I kept making the same turns onto the same roads, and the particular song the stereo was playing wasn’t my favorite, and it just kept dragging. I wasn’t nearly running late enough to be worried about the time, but I checked the clock again, and it wasn’t even two minutes after I checked the first time. Except I remembered checking the clock at least twice before. On my way out of the subdivision.

Eventually I made it to the feeder road. And then the highway. I felt half freaked out and half in some kind of fugue state. On bad days, when there’s a wreck or construction before you even get to the highway, or when there’s ice on the road, it’s taken half an hour or forty minutes, and this felt worse than that. And every time I looked at the clock, it had been four minutes. Five minutes. Eight minutes.

Going down the highway, I was finally in the commute trance, but kind of sideways. I kept thinking I’d passed intersections I was just now coming to. Again and again. And checking the clock. And eventually I heard the song on the stereo change. And eventually I made it down the ramp into Limited Access Hell. The beltway.

It felt like I was driving laps. Changing lanes to get to the one I favored, away from the ramps but out of the way of the people in the far left lane that could find a way to be late even before sun-up. Or maybe their day jobs were on the NASCAR circuit. And it was interminable. I popped the “next track” button again and again and again trying to find a song to listen to that wasn’t one I’d heard a thousand times, one that still had some remaining amount of interest in it, one that I could associate any memories with that weren’t the thousands of iterations of this thousand-mile commute. I went through all six disks in the changer before I resorted to the radio. I spun the dial all the way left to the college station that would play stuff you’ve never heard before and will likely never hear again — and it was some droning community-interest lecture.

I could feel my hair turning gray and my teeth loosening in their sockets. I expected to have to trim my nails a couple of times before I passed the next exit. And eventually I got lost in fantasies of what it would be like to shrivel and fall apart doing laps on this highway to nowhere…

And then I found myself at the top of my exit. Like I had broken through whatever barrier I’d been trapped behind. There was the white Lexus behind me that always went into the garage across the street from mine, and that sometimes I would follow most of the way home. And like an angel it escorted me through the next five traffic lights, to the right-hand turn, down the strip past the community center with the pool I’ve always meant to try, to my garage…

And I emerged from my cocoon, yawned, stretched, pumped the blood into my shriveled and atrophied limbs, grabbed my courier bag that rarely held anything more than my lunch, and … entered my other cocoon.

And I didn’t give it another thought for a months. Until the sun finally came up.

[*]

This one time I was a lizard, a gecko, running around on a stucco wall of a tiny church stalking moths and houseflies.

I don’t really have any explanation for it. Suddenly I was just a guy, though, blinking in the brightness of a tiny, tiny church on an island. The bright sun was outside and the church should have been dim, but it didn’t seem like that. I was sitting on a harsh hewn bench, blinking in the brightness, with no memories at all except that the inside of my mouth felt funny, clothes felt funny, my hands and feet felt funny, and I was hungry.

I looked up in the corner of the high ceiling and there was my old self. Eyes closed. Inert and resting, if not asleep. Below the no-longer-me gecko was what must have been the worst religious painting in the world, painted in faded tempera directly onto the plaster wall. Thematically, it looked like the Devil was having yet another very rough day. In the child-rendered lines of his face, he looked more resigned than anguished. Saint Michael’s spear was a fork giving a complicated nipple piercing. His tongue was hanging out in concentration. The Devil was like, whatever, in desperate need of coffee.

I remember not understanding the painting underneath my feet. It was just a texture of muddy colors that insects — and occasionally other geckos — would hide in. I remember the dry tackiness of my hands and feet, curling them and wiping the dust off against my ribs, licking the dust off. I missed my tail.

I was alone in the chapel. I put my hands into the front pockets of the khaki shorts I was wearing. One pocket had thirty-seven dollars and fourteen cents. US currency. Another pocket had six small stones of different textures and colors. I recognized coral. At least two different forms of lava. A large lump of olivine. All of the stones had rough holes in them, natural-looking, but hand-smoothed by years of fidgeting.

I didn’t want to go outside because it was so bright, but I could no longer eat bugs. I left the chapel, stalked quickly down the hill to a shaded thicket. I found papayas on the ground, fallen from their tree. I opened them with a sharp rock. I ate two of them, drying the juices off my hands with dust and then rubbing the dust off. I left the pits in the thicket.

When the sun moved away from the top of the sky, I followed a narrow, crumbling, asphalt-topped road toward a small group of houses. I knocked on a door and told them I just woke up in the chapel, and that I didn’t know where I came from or where I was supposed to be. The woman there let me sit in a chair on her porch and gave me some water. She went back inside to make telephone calls, and later came back out with a plate of rice and beans with some sausage in it, and a couple of tiny bananas that were orange inside, and she gave me a blanket and said I could sleep on the bench-swing until the morning. She left me a small pitcher of water. She said someone would come by in the morning to take me to town, to see a doctor.

Eating didn’t put much strength back into my muscles. I went to sleep, wondering if I would be a gecko again when I woke up. Instead, I was still me. A policeman woke me up, let me go off behind the house to pee, and then took me into a small town, where an old man I could barely understand looked me over and explained to me that I had survived a very bad fever that had damaged my brain, probably. He looked my shorts over for signs of diarrhea, shrugged, and said that was the best he could think of. He stuck me with needles and took blood. He gave me a bottle of something salty to drink, a handful of vitamins that he put into a small bottle and gave me back to the policeman.

I sat in the policeman’s office for hours while he made calls on his telephone. Eventually he told me that someone had offered me a place to stay, with food, in exchange for picking coffee cherries, and that he would give me money as well. He asked me if that was okay, and I just nodded.

Since then I have been Gecko, living a life as simple as a gecko, picking coffee cherries, eating, sleeping, and sculpting beads from stones I find. Beyond that I have nothing, and I think I am happy.

[*]