SRF Heavy Industries

This one time, just after the close of a recitation on stage, the stadium was roaring and flashing with applause. I had been half-concentrating on the show — my spawn was down there on the stage — but also distracted, in the way that I get sometimes when I think too much, by how the world shrinks to just the tiny part in your view that is changing. The stage was so far away, despite my relationship to one of the performers — I had arrived late — but in a darkened theater, as in other places and situations, what you see fills your being instead of your eye. The overwhelming surrounding darkness fades to insignificance. The light expands to fill everything.

That’s the magic of attention. It’s a magnifying glass, a microscope, a telescope. It zooms in to the boundaries of the action. Which was why, when the applause started, it was like the world exploded. Suddenly the world was full of action and movement and flashing lights. As I reeled I pulled back in my imagination, and pictured all the tiny actions in this theater as it would be from a giant’s perspective — a tiny box full of excitement in the murky darkness and quiet of night in this town, hardly noticeable in the woven trails of light in the main thoroughfares. And from farther still, this whole city would be a quiet glimmer on a background of nothing, and even our giants would be invisible.

I had been working hard all day. My arms were raw and sore and throbbing, and I was wrecked. Maybe that was why I was wandering, having trouble maintaining focus. The crowd had settled down, the theater was dark, and the next piece had begun. And I was lost, staring at the end of my arm as if it were a foreign thing — foreign the way a word or phrase turns to gibberish when it’s repeated too many times. My arms, overused and abused, were long floppy noodles, barely able to lift and twitch the fan on a stick we had all been issued at the door so we could keep from suffocating in the heat in the upper rows, from breathing one another’s exhaust.

There was a pocket of cool underneath my perch, where I’d placed my bag. I reached under as far as I could to carry out as much as the coolness in my bloodstream as possible. I crouched further to put skin in contact with the stone floor. After a moment I could feel it begin to revive me.

And that’s when the vision struck in full. At the end of my arm was a broad pad that branched out into five more tentacles, like someone had nailed on a starfish. The tentacle-armlets moved strangely, bending only in fixed places — like a slender crab was inside me, wearing my flesh and skin. The only thing that kept the growing panic at bay was that the crab felt like it was asleep inside me and I was still in control of my motion and volition.

I was covered in fine cilia. I was truncated. The internal dead-crab structure that would prevent me getting through the passage into my home, unless I could shed it somehow, apparently replaced half of my arms. I felt my top, and it was like I was covered up there in a fine-stranded jellyfish, dead and fibrous. All of the suckers on my arms were gone, even the stretched and torn ones from the day’s work. I couldn’t beat back the terror anymore. I flushed red and bright with distress and slumped to the cool stone floor beneath my perch.

When I regained consciousness, some kind people had stretched me out across a number of seats so I could lay down. I noted that someone had taken care to arrange my skirt for proper coverage and modesty. Someone was going through my purse, looking for my wallet and driver’s license, but I didn’t care. I could feel an enormous nausea retreating. All I could think of was that was my daughter down there on the stage, giving her recital, and I had shown up late and sick and apparently was ruining her show.

But then I noticed that the lights had never come up, and that was her unmistakable masterful attack on the violin below on the stage. I gestured for my purse, and when the man gave it to me, I clutched it to my chest in my hands and breathed as deep as I could, enormously relieved, feeling the rest of the nausea washing away.

[*]

This one time I was on this date thing with someone I had met through a friend-of-a-friend scenario. All things considered, it was less of an actual date and more of an interview over coffee to see if an actual date was something either of us wanted to do. And let me point out that these things are terrifying. Worse than job interviews. In a job interview you never have to worry about hurting the company’s feelings. If it’s not right, you just walk away. You don’t worry about whether the company thought you were a jerk, whether it laughs about you when it talks to its friends, whether it shed any tears over why you never called it back.

I have a couple of female friends, mostly women I wanted to date but things never worked out that way, one of whom likes to take me under her wing for some reason. She just says all I have to do is be honest and polite and respectful. And she says it just as if those last two things weren’t a contradiction to the first. And she says it just as if people aren’t constantly expecting lies out of each other’s mouths 24/7, trying to wheedle them into doing whatever it is they want them to do.

I like people, mostly. But I hate that people use words like tools, like hammers and chisels and lube and duct tape and try to shape other people with them like they were made of wood or stone, not actually dealing with a person with a mind, but dealing with a shape and a substance that they want to fit into a particular blank spot in their plans. People use little lies to do that all the time, like it’s acceptable or something, when you really shouldn’t even do that with the truth. If you really have any respect for someone, you should just present the facts and let them use their own brains, their judgment, to decide what to do.

Instead, you have to worry about the fact that they expect you to spin a web of little half-truths and lies to make them feel however it would be beneficial to you for them to feel and then get away before you get caught. If you tell them something harsh or even just unexpected, they build a wall of distrust and wonder what unexpected thing you are trying to get out of them.

I hate playing that game. I have a little of the Quixote in me, the self-deluded would-be knight that lives in an idealized world in his head and has a crisis when other people won’t join him in there. And I’m whining. That’s unmanly. The only right thing is to demand the best from myself and expect the best from others and know I’m strong enough to take it when I get a slap instead of a handshake, a punch instead of a kiss.

Anyway, I’m on this coffee-interview thing, and the woman in front of me is beautiful, if not the sort of thing you’d expect on the cover of a magazine. She is petite and curvy. Her face is framed by dark and wavy curls. She has laugh lines, and that is never a bad thing. I’ve already seen a dazzling smile, but there is sadness and weariness in her posture. And she has worn a beautiful dress for me — not the sort of thing one would usually wear to work, and she has had time to change.

There are a few pleasant words. We ask about each other’s day, exchange complaints about the weather and public transit. And then she asks me, in a clinical and neutral tone, this question: “Why are you alive?”

Of course this is an interview. This is a test. A shock like that, she’s already read who I am off of my face. Did I take it as an accusation, the way I asked it of myself after my daughter died? Did I see it as an opportunity to explain my purpose in life? Did the shock unseat me, like a lance-blow, and land me on my ass in the dust? Was I offended to be examined so directly, that I had lost the upper hand in directing the flow of conversation?

I am not a fast thinker. All of my thoughts show up on my face. I read them from the muscles in my forehead, my cheeks, my jaw, from the corners of my eyes at about the same time as anyone in front of me. And frankly, I am proud to do so. It is far more honest than the words in my head that reflexively try to shield my ego. But I am strong. I can withstand this test.

“It is a mystery,” I reply. “There were plenty of opportunities for it to have been otherwise, from illness or accident or what I can only call lapses in judgment in hindsight.” I laughed a little. “Regardless, I try to do what I can to show that I am grateful to still be here, after everything, and not waste any future opportunities.”

She gave me her smile, but I couldn’t tell if it was a true one. “Aren’t you going to ask me the same thing? To return the favor? I can see that stung a bit….”

“Ha,” I returned. “What would the point of that be? You have been through all of this in your head, or maybe someone has already put you through that. You must already have an answer.”

I watched her face over a sip of con leche, smiling. I did appreciate her stratagem, that she had thought to bring one, and that it was so direct. After a moment, composing myself, I spoke again.

“Here is your test, lovely woman. Fill an uncomfortable silence however you see fit, and I will judge how well you do. And maybe after that, if I feel you have bested me again, maybe we will arm-wrestle and see if I can save my ego on some front or other.”

And she laughed, and I laughed, and she told me how she loved to dance.

[*]

This one time, after cleaning out the recently vacated jellyfish tank, I was faced with the realization of the sheer number of pet deaths I had fostered while the little things were in my care. Things tended, for the most part, to have a decent run compared to their normal span of years. I had a cat make it to fifteen or so, and a couple of dogs that were several years old by the time I got them lived another decade with me as caretaker and companion. But I had kept a number of more exotic pets, exotic in a perfectly mundane sort of way, nothing I needed to have a permit for or wear special clothing to protect myself from. Brine shrimp. A number of fishtanks, both fresh an salt. An ant farm or two. Hermit crabs. A pair of salamanders. A ferret. The occasional miscellaneous rodent handed over by family friends and neighbors when their children lost interest or showed themselves too young for the responsibility.

People mentioned my name and St. Francis in the same sentence, and maybe there was something there. A nearly equivalent patience for handling animal waste and a quick suppression of the urge to twist a little head off of its body when, from fear or mistrust or defense of territory or property or sheer mean-spiritedness, it had applied teeth or claws or beak or pincers or what have you to some portion of my anatomy to make some point or other, I assume, or soiled or broken something beyond the scope of cleansers or superglue. Sainthood isn’t a magical power. It’s an ordinary human skill cranked up to maximum and a documented impeccable track record.

Even so, I was no St. Francis. I was on good terms with animals in terms of points mentioned previously and made a point to live in harmony with the wildlife that came to visit my property, to the point of enforcing a truce between the  birds and squirrels over the contents of the feeder and handling pest control in a way that was conscientious of the health of the animals that would remain. And I never killed a bee or a spider except by accident while trying to relocate them. But that’s as far as it ever went. I couldn’t heal them with a touch or speak their languages beyond a basic understanding of their needs. And the wildlife pretty much never sought out my company in preference to their own.

And I had buried hundreds, if not thousands, of the little things — particularly if you counted ants and Sea-Monkeys as individuals. It was attention-getting.

I know a lot of animal rights advocates are against keeping pets altogether, as this extracts an animal out of its natural habitat and forces it to live in unnatural circumstances for which it was never cut out. I think that’s a weirdly ironic comment coming from a primate extracted from the savanna, placed under the unnatural stresses of modern crowded human life and denied full use of the fight-or-flight reflex (and supportive casual grooming from neighbors) until parasites and disease and thrombosis takes us all to an early grave. Also, the typical pet has a lifestyle far in excess of what nature would have handed it, and sometimes a higher lifestyle that its owners.

Sometimes I feel I still eat meat out of petty revenge. Jealousy over the lifestyle thing. And a dozen ineffectually steam-cleaned carpets.

But these are animals. Like ourselves. We can’t give them long lifespans. The best we can do is give them a fighting chance at every opportunity and a series of  moments, one more or less after another, during which they might take pleasure if circumstances do not conspire to prevent it. We learn from them. We learn more about ourselves by watching them and helping one another deal with the days. Even the ones that aren’t so cuddly.

Where the activists fail is by the assumption that humanity, with our buildings and pavements and technology and money and entertainment and all of the associated bullshit, is unnatural. We aren’t so damn special, either angels or devils, changers of rules and landscapes. The first crop of life on earth poisoned most of the rest of it off by producing huge toxic quantities of free oxygen, leaving behind nothing that couldn’t either withstand or eventually require the consumption of its wastes. A single family of beavers can flood a million acres, causing localized extinctions far in excess of the construction of a subdivision. Huge numbers of species are so adapted to humanity that they would die without our bodies, our houses, our technology, and our cities. In turn, we are so adapted to our parasites, internal or external, that we would die without them, too.

We make a worse mistake than ever by pretending we are apart from nature, either above it or beneath it or merely bystanders. We have to know where we truly stand before we can act with foresight and intelligence with respect to our place here.

And sometime that place is in the backyard, with a shovel.

We are gods to these things. I have to ask, all joking pretenses to sainthood aside, is this where God stands with respect to us?

[*]

This one time the lethargy was pretty strong and I was having trouble finding the motivation to do anything. I could tell it was out of the ordinary, worse than usual, because there was a man behind me with his elbow around my neck and a knife poking around in the vicinity of one of my floating ribs, and there I was, wondering if I really ought to bother. There was a lot of pressure on my windpipe and whoever this guy was was starting to impinge a bit on my brain’s blood supply. He was saying something and I wasn’t making it out, probably some sort of language barrier thing.

And it all just felt … tedious.

I wasn’t even sure of where I was or how I’d gotten there. My body felt strange, like a size too large or too small, and not entirely under my control. Like I was wearing a heavy sack. I remember that I wondered whether I had been drugged, but the lethargy felt so similar to the crushing depressions I felt after Len left for the Peace Corps. After Grammy died. A couple of other times where I couldn’t really work out what was wrong, but my ass dragged for weeks. I remember that I felt fat even though my clothes were loose.

I have no idea why this man was so upset. He seemed strong and healthy, with a bit of a pudge of the sort that nobody really cares about. He smelled nice, but not in any kind of expensive way. He smelled like he’d been eating steak. He spoke to me as if he was angry about something. Or trying to be intimidating. Quiet, but harsh. I think I remember the word “whore”, but I couldn’t tell you in what language.

I just wanted to lie down and go to sleep. Maybe that was why he was angry. I’d had fights about that before. Or had people angry with me about it before. It’s hard to have a fight with only one person with the energy to be angry. You can have a beating, though.

I don’t know why. Maybe it was just out of habit, something triggered by his smell or the tired fighting. I could barely feel his arm around my neck or the poking in my side anymore. But I reached around behind me, righthanded, and fumblehandedly undid his beltbuckle, popped open the button on his waistband, and half-tugged his zipper down. He shoved me away, spinning us both, and when we stopped, he had my right wrist in his left hand, having dropped the knife.

The lethargy was gone, but I could see its gray iciness hovering behind the guy, like someone had turned down the volume, the temperature, the brightness on a small chunk of the world. He was angry, confused. I didn’t recognize him.

But for the first time in a long time, I felt awake and alive. There were things to do. Air that needed breathing. Suddenly I weighed nothing.

He was braced against me pulling away, so I stepped forward instead and put my hand on his chest. Slowly, gently, I pushed him back into the lethargy he had snatched me out of. I watched his chest cave as he deflated. I watched his eyebrows drop and his eyelids start to droop. One of his hands was still extended forward, the one that had held my wrist.

I took off one of my earrings, a zircon stud given to me by the boyfriend I most recently drove away with my depression. I pinched up some skin in the web between his thumb and forefinger on his outstretched hand and firmly pushed it all the way through. It was a little slick with a drop of his blood, but I managed to get the back to snap on so he wouldn’t lose it.

And then I walked away. I haven’t seen the lethargy since.

[*]

This one time all of us dead people were hanging around on the streets of a city most of us remembered, even though many of us had never been there in life. It was confusing. Particularly for me, as I had never really believed in a soul. I was gratified a little to know that none of the myths had quite gotten it right, and the few consciousness-mystics who seemed to be close weren’t really the sort to be smug, knowing they had gotten there via paths of ignorance and good guessing.

Hear the pride in my voice. I must have the strongest ego ever among the dead. But I had studied everything I studied so that I would know what the hell is going on, because if you know, you can predict and, if technology keeps up, control. I dedicated my life to getting a handle on things, to at least lay the groundwork for the repair of some of God’s worst mistakes — injustice, tragedy, fear, and misery: the four actual horsemen of the perpetual and ongoing apocalypse that is life.

Here’s a take on the events of Genesis that is at least true in a poetic sense — something that helped me get some perspective despite the fact of its mythic nature. This is the true value of such things, wiggly concepts of truth and facts aside. In this take, God had spent six days on the act of creation, exactly as documented. It was obvious, when you look at it from this view, that God wasn’t finished, and this is the evidence: God had a Garden where everything was perfect. Which means that everything outside the garden was still a bit haphazard.

The purpose of a garden is cultivation. It’s a test-bed for tweaking, for finding the balance points. A place that serves as a perfected microcosm. When humankind — glossing over the irrelevancies of blame-shifting and gender politics — opted to have the knowledge of God and to become gods themselves, God, who was still on his break, gave people the other half of the gift: the responsibility to finish, if not the whole of Creation, their own perfected Garden outside the walls of his own. Because, you know, too many cooks and so forth.

You’ll never be happy in someone else’s garden when you think you can do better in your own.

In this version, I am the summation of the worst element of mankind, the sin of Pride personified, internally rationalized and justified by the overwhelming sense of the responsibility to fix every impossible last detail that causes human misery, from unfair allocation of space and resources on an individual level to weather and tectonic drift. That’s my leptonic charge that keeps me from sinking into the bosonic condensate that is the unified ground state of being dead, at rest and at peace, at one with God and the rest of Creation.

Being dead is a complicated state. Elsewhere I am alive, in infinite combinations and variations along the paths of the labyrinth of superimposed possibilities where everything that is permitted is actually mandatory. Outside of the walls of the connected paths, in the parts of the labyrinth where there are no exits and no entrances, are the versions of me that never were and never will be. A larger infinity, as it were. If you are a student of infinities, you will know that some infinities are larger than others and you will understand what I am saying. Otherwise, I suggest you take it on faith, because it is a necessary truth for true understanding.

Here in this city, the unquiet dead gather to enjoy the smell of rain on pavement and the sound of the wind that delivers it. A heartbeat away is the reality that once lived here and will live here again on the other side of the ripple that broke the surface, the stone that shattered the self-healing mirror, symmetrical to the last tiny detail. Here in the shattered, suspended world, the last real child on earth scuffs the new off the tip of his sneakers kicking at the last sun-bright yellow dandelion flower, milk bleeding from its broken green stalk, and vanishes into the clouded lake we swim in without a detectable ripple.

In this disturbed state, it is not possible that humans ever existed. All of the paths in the labyrinth are closed off to us, living and dead, and the city incandesces and fades, a sandcastle without wind and waves to have constructed it, without wind and waves to eventually take it apart. It joins us and lends its probability to ours, with its rain and wet pavement and promise of eventual sunshine and the perfect kite-flying weather. The boy never noticed his transition. Nor did the dandelion.

The ghost pavement is once again solid under my feet. The wet wind is in my hair. I don’t know how much time I have to build a kite and fly it, but I have no other goal right now, none more important, than buckling down and getting to work on putting paper and wood and string to the wind while I have the chance.

And if I fail, so be it. Somewhere, somewhen, I will succeed, and the world will be perfect.

[*]

This one time I had the breeder reactor going full blast, which basically means I was producing U-233 slightly faster than I was producing lead. The neutron gun was good. The beryllium target was in good shape and the layers of foil for slowing the neutrons was doing its job. The heat output was a bit much, but that was what it was all about, right? Cheap energy?

Okay, and maybe not leaving a huge amount of radioactive poison lying around for the neighborhood kids to eat.

But the Stirling engine had been running for days straight on the heat output, and the cold side was staying colder thanks to the laser fluorescent cooling rig that was being run off a portion of the dynamo’s own output. I was down from 5 watts to 3, but it would run continuously with no degradation from heat build-up, so I called it a win. I was also generating a tiny amount of extra juice by firing the alpha particles into the target through a tight coil of maybe a couple thousand windings from a tiny radio tuner and collecting the extra juice into a flywheel I could tap, theoretically, if I needed to take the Stirling offline for tweaking.

I was wondering if I could isolate the beryllium target in vacuum, suspended in a bulb by an insulator, and tap the current from the extra electrons that were stacking up on it with no place to go, seeing as not every single one of them was producing neutrons. It would increase efficiency a bit to catch them coming and going, as it were, though, realistically, it was only a trickle compared to the kinetic heat from fission.

I was breaking an awful lot of tiny little rubber bands holding these little atoms together. Much of the danger to living creatures was based on the pieces that got away. If I could catch every last bit and put it to work, I’d be golden. Oh, and also in possession of a tiny handful of very toxic poisonous garbage.

But that was part of the charm. I needed something to put through the centrifuge, after all. To concentrate down, layer by layer, the truly harsh, truly toxic, phenomenally radioactive crap. So I could leave my little present.

So maybe you can tell by now I’m not a very nice guy. Too smart for my own good, people have said. Antisocial. Psychopath. Sociopath. And it’s all true. You should learn how to use your special abilities for good, they said.

I took the advice to heart.

There’s a lot of the world that I like. I don’t have much need for people, as such, but I genuinely like most of them. They’re selfish and short-sighted, sometimes a little gullible and slow, but really all they want is to be less miserable. To be protected from their fears. To feel connected and appreciated and needed. To feel like there’s a chance for love and happiness. And they have hope for all of this despite everything that’s happened.

They want to know that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. That’s the tough one. There’s no force in heaven, hell, or earth that makes that happen. People care about that sort of thing. Physics doesn’t. God doesn’t. So people have invented ways to make it possible, and acceptable, to cause misery to the deserving. People have invented ways to make people who have done beneficial things feel happy.

That’s the thing that gives me hope. For every super-selfish asshole who wants it all for himself, who thinks he deserves everything, deserves to be on top of the pile with all the money and power and sex and beautiful things that everyone wants, there are a million people who would cheer to see that guy die from something humiliating. These are the same people that barely have enough cash to make ends meet but still hand over a fiver to a beggar who probably, at the end of the day, takes home more money from “work” than they do.

I love every last one of those bastards. I don’t want to touch them or be touched by them, but I love them.

And for them, just for them, I’m refining a scheme for efficient energy from low, low input nuclear power. And while I’m at it, I’m very very carefully collecting this material which promises a slow, lingering death for the next duly elected Most Evil Person in the World.

I already have part one of the scenario in place — an encrypted package with every last detail of how I’ve done everything, even with a few extra safeguards to prevent unnecessary buildup of the radioactive waste I’m collected. I’ve also detailed a recycling program that processes the waste into more alpha-source for the breeder end until it is truly spent and can be packaged for disposal. It’s already online in a thousand different places, ready for the URLs and passwords to be distributed when I’m captured and incarcerated and don’t have access to the site I have to contact every two weeks to keep it from posting the release keys.

As for the radioactive poison and the Most Evil Person in the World? Hell, as far as I know, that’s me. In all actuality. I intend to get caught on my way to an “assassination” with the poison on me in a leaded envelope. That will let people know that the system is still working. It will give them an exciting story to discuss at the water cooler, and I’ll be the demon, the monster they can revile.

But all of the evil people? They can wonder where the next person who figured out the recipe is coming from. And how many of them there might be out there, following my inspiration.

And I’ll get my time in prison, which can’t be any worse in there than it’s been out here. And it might only be a handful of years appealing death sentences and such, but it will be peaceful, and predictable, and, if I play my cards right and earn my way into solitary, I’ll finally be left alone.

And if you want to know why, dear God, why, you can blame, as the last straw, those cheerful, friendly people in black suits that kept ringing my doorbell at ten AM every Saturday morning who seemed to be so concerned for my soul.

[*]

This one time I was out making rounds on the farm, scratching at some kind of new infection on my gills, and coming to the conclusion that porpoises are freaks — and I do mean that sexually. What can I say? The naturalists set up tiny little cameras all over the place so they can study what they get up to when we’re not around, and the answer is, well, the usual. But, significantly, if they want to do anything strange, they bring it over here to the farm.

The shepherds of old spent a lot of time out in the fields with plenty of time to think, and I guess I’m no different. Mackerel have to be at least as stupid and boring as sheep. I have plenty to time to come up with my theories. One, that maybe there’s some scent from our scrubbers or waste treatment plants that makes them all randy. Two, that they really do appreciate an audience — if they get a glimpse of us looking out at them through the windows, that gets them off. And it’s a given that they spend a lot of time coming down to stare at us through our windows. But realistically, I kind of have to go with three, that the walls and windows here are shiny surfaces, both visually and for echoes, and they like to watch themselves going at it.

But I know there’s something to the second point, too. They like to be watched,. They like to play and tease and provoke. And I suppose if humans spent the whole day naked and had blowholes, there would be a number of their fetishes we might adopt, if not their complete lack of discrimination with regard to species or levels of willingness. But porpoises are pretty much perpetual ten-year-olds. Any time I hear a chittering laugh, I just assume one of them is snickering at somebody’s snorkel.

Me? I just want their skin. I think it works better than what I have for shedding random slimes and tiny invaders. And while gills are awesome and the freedom they give is fantastic, they’re nothing but tiny little crevices, and wrasse tickle. I’m up to being able to stand half an hour of grooming a day, but the damned itch I keep getting lets me know that’s not quite enough. I get jealous of watching the reef fish — and I guess I should say other reef fish, as I’m pretty much one of them now — put up with it as if it’s nothing.

I sure as hell can’t just ignore it and get caught up on my reading, which is how I’d imagined it.

And  I miss the sun. There, I’ve said it.

I can still see it, way up there, but the “full-spectrum” bulbs, the ones that pointedly leave out a piece of the spectrum we don’t have much use for, are quite a bit kinder, physiologically speaking. But they’re so not the same.

Anyway, the porpoise pod was done with their obscene little display and they were starting to take an interest in the mackerel. Wolves after the shiny silver sheep. The mackerel circled up, investing in their usual defense of confusing, swirling, flashing displays — which is, in human terms, screaming and running around in circles. It was the best they could do for now, since I was hardly going to swim over and fight off the pod. We tried our best to give the fish an enclosure they could swim into via portals that porpoises couldn’t fit through, but did I mention that mackerel are stupid?

I let the porpoises grab a few, just to be neighborly, and then I hit the button on the remote. What happened next was complicated and sonar-related and disturbingly rumbly at that frequency that makes the jelly in your eyeballs quiver and makes you doubt the existence of God. The porpoises didn’t like it any more than I did. They wheeled wide, facing out and down, looking for what was coming, then took off  for open water.

I swear, from the sound of that thing and what it does to me, that it will eventually make the word end. If not something else actually worse, I worry that maybe it’s merely a mating call for something truly heinous and massive that one day will be lurking just over the edge of the continental shelf. Every time I survive hitting the button, I know in the pit of my stomach that it’ll show up next time, for sure.

And a few minutes later my worst worry in the world is how much my gills itch and how much the wrasse tickle.

[*]

This one time I was sitting on a bench in the mall having my usual fantasy about a zombie invasion. It’s one of the few things that makes visits to the mall tolerable.

It’s not that I don’t like shopping. I need something, I go to where the stores are. When I get there, I look at the selections. I even try stuff on. I make my choice, taking as much time as it takes to rationalize to myself what I’m getting for my money. And then I take my bag and go home.

And that’s exactly what everyone else is doing. Why would that be bad in any way?

I’ll tell you why. It’s the most crowded place in the world where you can be absolutely alone. If you rip the roof off the place and look at it from above, you see an intricate dance of thousands and thousands of people who pretend nobody but themselves exists. Okay, maybe a few of them are there in pairs or small groups, but even those are isolated, traveling around the place separated from everyone else’s reality with little invisible walls. They all see one another, but no one makes eye contact, almost never, and when it’s your turn to get help from the someone on the floor or behind a register, the rest of the world vanishes. No one cares about who they’re interrupting or who’s in line behind them. All the little niceties and protocols that we use to tell one another we’re all in this together vanish. Suddenly we’re all alone.

I wonder if that’s why malls are such popular settings for zombie movies. On the one hand, you get an assortment of resources from all the stores and kiosks and a near infinite number of places to hide — or to have zombies jump out from. On the other, it’s one of the places we’re used to seeing blank stares that look right through you from someone more likely to smear a handful of your brains on their tits than offer you a friendly smile.

I do my part. I try to meet people’s eyes. I smile. I help people pick up things when they drop them. I offer directions to people looking for things and summon help from the floor staff for people who are too shy to ask for what they want. And I live for the day when someone finds that so suspicious that they have security eject me. Because I’m a man here, alone, a bit on the large side, aging, unaccompanied and unsupervised, and that apparently, by popular convention, makes it 90% likely that I’m some kind of would-be predator. Working up the nerve.

And the truth of it is that every time I see that fear, that assumption on someone’s locked-down face, it brings on the fantasy. Because zombies at least want to interact, to take something from me that they need. I would be important to them in some direct and straightforward way, if not exactly special. And I wouldn’t be some object of casual fear.

Some days the fantasy is pretty strong in the direction of raiding the sporting goods department for a baseball bat and starting swinging. So maybe that’s what people can smell on me, on the other side of my friendly and helpful smile. Maybe that reinforces the fear.

But sometimes the fantasy runs the other way. Sometimes I imagine them seeking me out, converging, pushing me down, tearing strips of skin and flesh off of my body as I struggle involuntarily from the pain, and they feed, impersonally but hungrily. Maybe they’re aware in some little kernel of their empty heads of the horror of what they are doing to me. Maybe they’re not. But they notice me. They want me. They cooperate with each other by sheer dint of numbers, giving each other whatever room is absolutely required for motion, cutting off my escape.

And this sham of life where we all pretend we are walled off from one another ends.

[*]

This one time I read this fairy tale about some kid or other who was playing chase with his sister. In the course of the game they ran three times counter-clockwise around the local church and ended up lost in the fairy realms, where they had to rely on the knowledge they’d been taught by stories they themselves had heard in order to rescue one another from danger and eventually find their way home.

As I recall, some of the dangers were all night dancing to injury and complete exhaustion to hypnotic music, unhealthy food and drink (either all flavor and no nutrition or dangerously potent and filling), a constant walk-through hallucination masking untold dangers, a twisted sense of how much time must have passed, and continually being kidnapped/relocated every time you fell asleep. And maybe waking up pregnant without so much as a by-your-leave.

I think I’ve been to that party a number of times.

Cynically speaking, that pretty much nails certain areas of town after sundown. And probably the whole Burning Man thing. But lately it occurs to me that covers the entirety of Western civilization, and America in particular. We’ve completely separated flavor from nutrition — to the point of genetically modifying good old potatoes to have a third fewer calories just so we can eat more goddamn fries. Somewhere around a quarter of the world’s population goes to bed hungry, and we invent food with less food in it. That’s a fairy thing all over, stealing the goodness out of food, leaving food that looks and tastes the same but doesn’t get the job done.

We’re masters of glamor and illusion, makeup and clothes, image and pretty words, constant mood-altering hypnotic music, potions and pills and essences and drugs going into orifices not particularly designed for intake. We work to exhaustion and self-injury in the name of maintaining the enormous and dangerous hallucination that is Western culture. We have separated time from the natural rhythms of sun and moon and season and it loses all meaning. A single misstep like going through a wrong door can take you to a place where you have no idea where you are — especially if that door is one on a train or a bus in this city. And there is no way a sane person would ever go to sleep unless it’s behind a locked and guarded door.

We’ve turned into the monsters our mothers warned us about, and we did it so slowly that we still tell the stories that would warn our children, but we snicker up our sleeves at the stories and the make-believe dangers we’re soaking in. We neglect to mention to them that they already live in the fairy lands, where the signposts are the Starbuck’s Siren and the Golden Arches.

If we were to bring some Dark Ages children from Ireland forward in time and drop them right in the heart of any big modern American city today, they would know exactly where they were. And probably what they needed to do to stay safe. It makes me wonder whether old Irish grandmothers knew more about human nature than they ever let on — or whether the stories they told made us so dream of fairies that we eventually became them.

It doesn’t take much of a cynic to think that stories of the fair folk originated as tales told by darker-skinned people to their children to warn them against getting involved with the decadent and wealthy wastrels that were probably the local lords. And that tales of the smaller, motivationally confused, hard-working brownies originated as tales the lighter-skinned folk told their children about the darker people that shared their islands. Tales of dwarfs and giants make much more sense if you imagine them as originating from two different races, each describing the other in terms of the height of a man, where a man was typically maybe fifty-five inches tall in one case and maybe more than seventy inches in the other. As the peoples interbreed and diets merge and heights average out, the stories stay the same. “Head and shoulders taller than the tallest man you’ve ever seen.” “The tallest of them would barely come up higher than your waist.” You get the idea.

But the fairies? That’s us. That’s so us. Because of where we stand, we would think that their magic would have to be more magical. Like giants would have to be taller, and dwarfs shorter. But they’re us. And I know that.

So why I was so confused when one day, around sunset, I drove around the block with the cathedral on it three times counterclockwise and ended up in the middle of an unfamiliar countryside, the surrounding hills populated with nothing but ruins of old stone buildings? Or when I woke up in my own bed a week later, fifteen pounds thinner, with no knowledge of the time that had passed? Or when the pregnancy test came out positive?

[*]

This one time us trogs were on an extended twenty-day exploratory and mapping jaunt. The base camp, supplied for thirty days, just in case things went haywire, was in a huge cavern about a half a mile deep with its own supply of fresh-ish water, but we were on channels down, water-carved, to be sure, where the water picked up too many naughty metal salts to be healthy. We were far enough down that it was starting to get warm again, finding steam vents a little too warm for them to be comfortable and sauna-like.

We’d long stopped ignoring the pretty flow-stone formations and were onto the trail of increasingly huge selenite spars, where huge in this case was maybe the length of an arm. I’d begged for years to be taken on a trip to one of the two places the world knew about where they were as big as houses, and that was an ordeal that was worth it. It was the steam room in Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, and it was a mankiller, cook you through like a shrimp in a steamer while you stood around goggling. The truth was I’d been in the maw of an underground beast with a mouthful of broken teeth, being digested in the little boil-in-bag of the protective suit I was wearing. And I’d do it again, with better portable air-conditioning and more bottled air, because there had to be something more amazing further on. But that was another trip.

This one was what you’d expect — if you knew what to expect where a tectonic plate cracked and one edge pushed up on top of the other edge and basically made a path where you could just saunter nearly horizontally down the crevices, down to the earth’s mantle. Okay, it was never that easy, but spelunking is full of paths you just can’t take regardless of how huge the cavern is on the other side of the hole you dangled the camera down. Finding a series of connected paths where there were plenty of places to rest and the slope averaged no steeper than maybe fifty or sixty degrees … well, some of my hardcore cavers — some legit geos, but a couple of sherpas and rock-jocks — were on my ass for taking them on a hike to Disneyland.

The biggest part we’d screwed up on was that a jaunt this easy, well, comparatively speaking, anyway, was easy for wildlife as well. We were seeing signs of biomass, stuff I personally didn’t recognize, and while we were taking care not to stomp all over it too much, we should have brought someone who might have been able to understand what we were seeing. I’d taken a class and attended a couple of seminars, but we really needed someone along who could have taught the classes. Like they didn’t let me run trips like this until I’d been teaching for ten years.

We weren’t quite in extremophile territory — a super-lost bat could get down here and theoretically back out again as a day-trip, and would probably even live if he didn’t stop to drink the water. Though I wasn’t too sure it was really bad stuff. It could be the worst thing would be argyria if you drank it for more than a couple of months. Your first attempt at a suntan would turn you Bizarro blue. I had a bottle for a sample of what would be the lowest point for each day’s exploration, give or take. It was more gentle than drilling a core sample but brought back similar data.

Like me, water picks up a little bit of everything as it goes along.

It’s been more than twenty years since we thought that every living thing needed sunlight. Or to eat something else that needed sunlight. And sunlight certainly didn’t make it that far down. A single lost bat couldn’t feed too much down there for too long, so anything we found that far down really had to be an enclosed system, though it was possible that it could be derived from an invasion from above, slowly winding down.

My favorite was the puddle. We carried plenty of light, mostly LED since we didn’t need the heat of carbon lamps at this depth, and boy did we appreciate the lack of weight and fuss. But when the light hit this puddle up ahead, ripples spread out from the center like someone had thrown a pebble in. Or maybe we had timed it perfectly to catch a drip from above. We were close enough to bingo fuel, energywise, just enough to get us back to camp without wrecking ourselves, so I shuffled forward to get a sample of it to carry back for analysis. But by the time I made it to where the puddle should have been, it was gone.

I was far too old a hand with this stuff to think I’d gotten turned around, but when I asked for people to help me look for it, there was chuckling. Even so, we were kind of shocked to see that it was a few feet ahead of where we knew it to be. And still rippling. I pulled out a pair of disposable gloves, scooped a sample into a vial, wiped it down, dropped it into a baggie, then stripped the gloves and dropped them and the  tissue I’d used for wiping down the vial into another baggie for later disposal.

When I turned back again to take another look at the puddle, it was gone again. And it was about five feet further along. It was running away.

It was about then that we felt the first of the tremors. “High-tailing it” back to camp was still a five-hour ordeal, but it seemed the thing to do. We couldn’t make contact with the NEIC about the tremors, or  at all, for that matter, or the USGS, or the university, and we decided that was odd, but we did find that the topside radio gear had relayed down a cryptic message that there was something wrong with the sun and that we should consider staying below ground until supplies ran out or someone came to get us. And good luck.

We were supposed to be down for another two weeks regardless, so we just sent back a confused acknowledgment and went back to work. In retrospect, what else could we have done anyway?

[*]