SRF Heavy Industries

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.

[*]

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.

[*]

This one time I was in that area of the world where the local civilization had, counter to popular belief, actually invented wheels — but used them only on toys. If they had bothered to put them on barrows, and then filled them with crops or lumber or stone, they would have spent a large percentage of their days chasing shit downhill over the crushed corpses of the people behind them on the trail and dragging it back up. This place had burros instead of wheelbarrows. Convince a burro that there will be fruit or candy at the top of the mountain, and you have defeated gravity.

To an extent. I was here to take it to the next level.

I love to fly. In airplanes, anyway, which has been my only opportunity to do so. I’m not wealthy enough to study for a pilot’s license. I doubt I have what it takes to study aviation at university, and I know I have little stomach for the military, though things might be different if we had a government that was worth taking orders from about who to kill. But I can save my money to go to places where I can hang from zip lines and spend time a little time in high places with the wind under my arms.

And I watch the birds and try not to hate them for having taken my place, even when it seems they are gloating.

I watch a squadron of birds and see it as five fingers lifted up through the surface of a still lake, so all you see are the fingers and not the hand. Watching them spin and dive, I can feel the presence of the hand. Everything that flies is part of the same creature of the heavens, poking through into the sky like the fingers through the surface of the lake. Even the fish that fly are those fingers, trailed in the water by the wind.

I know I am part of that creature. I am tortured, nailed to the ground by the whim of my larger self that governs all flight. Today I will fix that. Six of us are climbing this ridge in the Andes, a grueling climb, to assemble kites that we will strap ourselves into, two apiece, and fly down to the savanna.

My mother knows of my dreams of the sky. She is terrified that the sky will claim me — and then reject me and throw me onto the rocks. I worry about this too — but I worry more that I will have a death other than a death of birds and my god will not claim me into itself to fly into forever.

We started this climb in the dark. Two others accompanied us, nonfliers, to help with assembly and to guide the burros back down. The dawn wind is icy and eager to tug us aloft. We make good use of rocks to keep our kites from leaving early without us. Our three experienced pilots check all of the joints with wrong-sized tools and numb fingers too cold to tie strong knots. They joke and tell us that our weight hanging on the wind will tighten the knots beyond anyone’s ability to untie them, that they may have to rub the knots with sugar and let the burros gnaw through them.

I would not trust the flight if it was a certain, regimented thing. Birds play when they enter the air. They don’t fret over details. They wing it and snatch themselves into the sky.

We tie ourselves into our bright-colored plumage and pass small bottles back and forth between pilots and proteges. Whiskey freezes our lips and teeth and pours fire into our hearts. We point into the wind, one at a time, and run for the cliff. And the wind yanks us into the sky.

Under the instruction of my pilot I pull my balaclava up to expose my nose and mouth. The wind’s kiss feels like it is crushing my mouth and biting my lips off. “Your face will seek the warmer winds. Face into them and turn us with your body,” he shouts. “Birds find the updrafts by instinct, by trying to keep their little eyeballs from icing up. You do the same!”

And by trying to avoid the wind’s brutal passion, we spiral even higher. We cast shadows on condors to watch them slip to the side to keep the sun on their dark feathers. They have no concept of a predator above them, but this is the game they play with one another. Their biggest worry is that we will reach the meal before they do, monstrous beasts that we are, and eat their share.

Far to the south of us are the drawings my ancestors made that could only be visible to the sky, to the pieces of the sky god that peek through the surface into this world — pictures of sky-fellows to entice him near, pictures of prey to draw him closer.

I will see them from this vantage point someday. They may as well have drawn pornography, beautiful women in tantalizing poses, to try to draw me close. I am of the sky now, officially, and for the next few hours in a matter of undeniable fact. I am pterosaur, gliding lizard, bat, parrot, eagle, vulture — even Airbus and fighter jet.

I am of the sky. And when it is time, I will fall.

[*]

This one time I read about this thing, this ritual. It was your basic New Age crap, marketed to unhappy people who felt like they didn’t have enough control over their lives. Like most magical, superstitious nonsense. Send Ten Dollars To This Anonymous PO Box And I Will Send You The Secret!! There are a bunch of different variations on the theme, and a couple kind souls even give away their version for free.

Teenagers are the most vulnerable, it seems. Young people who are basically adults physiologically and emotionally — or could be if they were ever forced to fend for themselves — who find every urge, every inclination to go their own way cruelly stamped down by parents, by teachers, by pastors, by a slew of officials and authorities who say it’s for their own good but by now have revealed themselves to be liars and hypocrites and cheats who aren’t above using their power to cushion their own miserable existences from the harsh terrain of actual reality. Who will take advantage of your innocence and naivety for the joy of stripping you of both.

Teenagers find themselves willing to jump at anything that will give them a little control over their own days and nights, over what comes into their lives. I was in that spot, wanting to go out and hang out with my friends, wanting to spend any money due me on designer clothes and expensive makeup, wanting out from under the tyranny of acne and A-cups and hair that I couldn’t make look like the pictures in the magazines for even an instant, dealing with the cramps and bleeding, wanting a boyfriend who wouldn’t kiss my girlfriends, wanting the trust and approval of my parents and step-parents. Wanting friends who would take my side when things blew up.

One or two of my friends turned to God and prayer for their illusion of control, but, to me, he seemed like the ultimate authority who wanted you to do things His way, to never use either the mind or the body that He gave you. It didn’t take long, maybe a few years, for me to figure out that that wasn’t God, laying down those bullshit rules, but every asshole for thousands of years who ever pretended to speak for Him, the ones who discovered that they could use the power of God to determine who had sex with whom and to gather all the power and money. It was a big relief when I figured that out, but that left God a giant mystery with no one to explain Him.

So I always thought something was out there, or maybe a bunch of somethings, because I never got the idea that things ever ran well enough for it to be one entity with one plan and one focus. But I could never figure out where the natural and the supernatural should be divided, or why, or if we were, what use we would have for favors from each other. Did they need us to move rocks around the way we need better luck?

I took the tour. I studied all kinds of “pagan” religions, read all the mythology I could find, attended every church, temple, synagogue, gathering, circle, or whatever for which I could get an invite. I borrowed whatever books my friends said worked for them. The more I saw, the more I read, the more I saw the same stuff. I saw groups of people with certain people fighting to get on top and others looking to be taken care of in exchange for no effort on their own part. I saw people who were amazing people despite what they said they believed, who were goodhearted often despite what their books and priests said they should be doing. And I saw a bunch of people sitting around quietly begging the universe to stop beating the shit out of them. With varying amounts of success.

Guardian angels. Daemons. Alien intelligences. Crystal energies. Chakras and kundalini. Meditations and yoga and various kinds of dancing and spinning. Prayers and candles and painting and writing and burning stuff. Nothing ever did anything for me. Except.

Except.

There was this one book that I read that detailed a spell, in a kind of offhand manner, because it wasn’t really important to the plot, where you imagined yourself holding something in your hand, imagined it surrounded by a brilliant white glow, and that thing, whatever it was and whatever it represented, would be magnetized to you and with all due speed come into your life. I tried it once, and I can’t even tell you what it was I thought of in my hand, because I don’t think it ever showed up. But afterward, I kept stumbling across magnets. For the next week or two I must have found maybe ten different things with magnets on them, or maybe loose magnets just stuck to things or lying around, and then maybe one or two a month for the next several years. It still happens.

Was it just a failure of my imagination? Was it because I understand magnetic forces better than I understand what it was I was wishing for? Did I really just not want whatever it was? That very well could be, because right now I don’t even remember what it was.

And then I thought, what is it everyone wants? Do they want money, or power, or comfort, or sex, or fame? I think a lot of people think they want those things, but I think they back away at the last minute because of all the old fairy tales that tell us to beware of what we wish for. All of those things can come with pretty steep pricetags. And then I had the best insight I’ve ever had into what it is that people want. What I’m most afraid it is that I want.

L’appel du vide.

I’ve seen it over and over again. In myself and others. When tragedy strikes, people root for the earthquake, for the tsunami, for the volcano, for the bodycount on the bombing.. We want the crisis to be as huge as possible. We want to discover that they’ve lost someone they know, fantasize about having lost someone close to themselves.

Because the world is so damaged we just want to smash it. Because we know that the survivors, if we are among them, will gain one another’s sympathy. Because there will be fewer mouths to feed, true, but more importantly there will be more willingness to share resources and comfort among those who remain. We all want to live through a horror that brings us together, even if it means we risk death ourselves. Even if we risk being the last ones left alive. It’s Münchhausen syndrome by proxy, where the child whose health we’re willing to sacrifice for sympathy and attention is the world and everything in it.

In my nightmares I do this spell. I picture my hand, and the glow, and then whatever is in my hand fades away, leaving nothing. Nothing, surrounded by the brilliant white glow.

Then the spell takes hold.

[*]

This one time my cat came in from outside and brought me a present.

It’s what cats do. If they think you’re having trouble remembering when mealtimes are — or perhaps you just keep a food bowl full and it hasn’t sunk in that you’re the one that fills it up — they get the idea that perhaps you need some help with the hunting. If they’re really convinced you need help, they’ll bring you something alive, but maybe injured a little or with the wind knocked out of its sails, and then set it loose around you so you can practice your hunting skills.

My cat thinks I’m a lousy hunter. I go out a bunch, don’t keep a normal routine, sneak food into the bowl when she isn’t looking. Therefore: live chipmunk.

I don’t freak out. My whole freak-outer thing is busted. I don’t know what the deal is with that, but a number of other emotional responses seem to be a bit truncated, too. It takes a lot to get me worked up. I used to think I’d just completely mastered this “playing it cool” thing, but now I’ve come to realize I probably just have some kind of illness.

I’ve been through some pretty rough shit, so maybe I’m just out of juice. Give me a couple of years of tranquility someplace restful with no stalkers, no threats, no tragedy, no arguments, no drama, and it’ll all come back a lot closer to normal, I’m sure. Meanwhile I’m ace down at the arbitration center, and I’ve got the unofficial top score at shoot/don’t shoot drills that my buddy on the force let me go take after one of our afternoons at the range.

And screw the chipmunk. If Loretta wants to bring home a pet chipmunk to make up for the fact that I’m hardly ever here, who am I to blame her?

I did bother to look up whether chipmunks are big parasite and rabies risks in our area. Consensus seemed to think it wasn’t much of a problem. I checked to make sure Loretta’s shots and worm preventatives were up to date and left the chipmunk to her. I expected it might leave messes in places that would be hard to get to, but the chances were just about as high that I would wreck shit moving furniture to try to get to it. And if you worry too much about those kinds of messes, you probably shouldn’t have a pet to begin with.

The more I thought about it, the more I decided it would be best to direct things at least a little. I found an old cardboard box and filled it with newspaper. I figured if I were a chipmunk, that would be a fairly cozy home — and something I could throw away once Loretta was done playing.

Thing was, after she brought it into the house, she just ignored it. She really seemed to think that the thing was supposed to be my problem now. She would walk into the room, look at me with that look on her fuzzy face that seemed to be dripping with disappointment, and then walk away.

She would do that anyway. I guess now there just seemed to be a point to it.

But eventually the chipmunk started coming into the room with me too, to check out what I was doing. It would sit in the middle of the floor, grooming, and criticize whatever it was I was watching on the television. Loretta would poke her head in the door and, after looking at the both of us, walk away in disgust.

Then the meteorite came through the roof one morning and smashed him in his little box.

It was the damnedest thing. Hole punched through the roof, grazed a joist, through the ceiling, punched a hole right through the box leaving a tiny bloody mess, punched through the floor, and came to rest in the crawlspace under the house. Lump of nickel-iron about the size of the first joint of my thumb.

My little chipmunk friend, companion for nearly a fortnight of bad reality television, killed in a drive-by shooting by God.

What can you do?

I buried what was left in the backyard and got some people in to patch things up a bit. Meteorites aren’t much covered by insurance, so I had to eat about two grand in repairs. I covered where the finish on the floor doesn’t quite match with a new box, filled with new balled-up newspaper. Sometimes I think I can hear rustling in it, but there’s never anything in there when I check. No holes, no signs of chewing.

Loretta looks at me with a little bit more respect lately, though. An unexpected bonus.

[*]