SRF Heavy Industries

This one time a small lizard was climbing up the wall, stopping periodically and chirping. I was back in church, communing with the horrible paintings on the walls and the wasps with their separate shrine hanging on the armpit of the crucifix. I wasn’t sure why the gecko was singing, unclear whether it was a territorial thing or a calling for a mate thing or, given our location, a prayer or a hymn.

Most of the plant-life on the island was blasted and burned, but island life is used to a bit of abuse. Mostly from lava flows. Every island there is started from bare rock and whatever washed up on the shore, either on its own or in the pockets of colonizers. I could see the moon out the window, mostly full, and thought of it as it actually is — bare volcanic rock. The last few visitors tried hard not to bring it anything to work with, and I guessed that was a shame. It must be ripe by now, straining for the first shallow, salt-encrusted roots to take hold.

I’d found myself down at the university’s botanical gardens as I was recovering from that nasty fever that had cooked my brains, helping out with cultured coffee seedlings. I was still missing an awful lot that I’m sure will never come back, but I no longer feel like I’m wading through peanut butter to carry my thoughts from one corner of my head to the other.

They’ve got paperwork going to see if they can get me enrolled, but in the meanwhile I’m working in the gardens now, suited up and collecting samples and pollens for archival. I’m on the official payroll and everyone says I’ve got the knack.

I watched the gecko ignore a wasp that had landed nearby. They were near the window now, in the same view as the moon.

There were already a couple of global seed banks, but it occurred to me as I looked at the moon that there was something huge that they were missing, in concept and in actuality. Number one, they were here on earth, where they weren’t exactly safe. All things considered. Second, they all needed a bit of something. Some island magic.

In order to germinate, some seeds need special chemicals and compounds in the soil — and sometimes those are enzymes from particular microbes and larger creatures in the dirt. They needed soil aerators and pollinators and at least documentation of moisture levels and soil composition. The seed banks had maybe a fifth of what they needed in order to be useful. And also, they needed to be on the moon. With worms and lizards and moths and wasps — or at least some frozen eggs.

I had no idea what problems wasps would have with flying in lunar gravity, but I was pretty sure they could work it out. It would be fun to watch. Ants, earthworms, this gecko here — they would have an easier time of it. There should be an archival bank, sure, but there should also be a culture garden. Live and thriving, running twenty-four/seven. Life soup. Like that covered jar on grandma’s kitchen counter where she kept the heirloom yeast going for the sourdough bread.

And the soup pot should have in it whatever nasty virus it was that nearly killed me, that cooked out all the garbage that my head must have been filled with that kept me from being able to be who I am now. And maybe it should also have this tiny little shack of a cathedral, this place where I was found, with its wasp-nuns and gecko-priests and moth-deacons, complete with its abstract (to the attendants) paintings and earth’s last bouquet of orchids, just in case there’s something here, in this place, something inadequately explored by science, that’s critical to the process or preserving life and all the little day-to-day transformations that turn one moment into another.

Tomorrow morning when I go to work, I’ll tell everybody that I’m taking their project to the moon, and they’re welcome to come with me if they want to come.

[*]

This one time the moon was bobbing along in the sky like a child’s balloon on a string. In fact, I could feel the string tugging me upward as I started to stumble now and then as I ran through the woods. Was the string the same as tidal forces? All I know is that when the moon was completely obscured by branches or a swift-moving puff of cloud, it felt like I was falling, but when I could see a glimpse I had an easier time keeping my feet under me.

That didn’t make sense. It wasn’t the moon’s light that sucked at the earth like a lollipop. I knew this. I was sure it would come back to me.

I had no idea who or what had carved this trail through the forest, however. I didn’t see too many hack-marks like from machetes or hatchets, but for all I knew, the place flooded on a regular basis and river-fish cut down the undergrowth with sharpened fins supplied by the long-suffering mercies of Darwin. Or maybe smaller trees were felled by thundering herds of sloths on their annual migrations. Or maybe it was sloths that were felled by growing trees as the trees shuffled around, pushing and shoving and trying to choke off one another’s sunlight.

Was that something they taught in school? It didn’t seem like it. It was more of a school thing to show where sloths hung on the tree of mammalian kinship as opposed to actual living wood, all Latin incantations of classification and where to put the commas when you’re trying to compare and contrast Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Flannery O’Connor. It’s arbitrary. What kids get out of school is twelve years of common experience. You may as well make them analyze twelve years of episodes of Friends and Frasier. The Bible or Greek and Latin and Hebrew classics. Or set theory and differential calculus and orbital mechanics. It hardly matters what the curriculum is, but each time you change it, you splinter one generation from the next.

In the forest, humans were outnumbered by any other category of living things by factors of tens, hundreds, thousands, millions, billions. They were individually outnumbered by jaguars and dengue fever and old dead gods that all run on anguish and blood taken directly from a beating heart.

Not too far behind me on the trail I was inexpertly hoofing along was at least one of the three. Maybe two. For all of my good grades in math back in school, it was hard to count too much higher than zero under these circumstances. The number of death.

I was confused and confounded by everything I had seen, compounded by everyone I had recently been, in series and in combination. The forest stank of rot. The acid air stripped the flavor out of the exhausted dirt, out of the bark and leaves and lianas, and flung it into the fog I was trying to breathe. The air was boiling with spores and microbes feasting on the dissolving living things. The air was green with dying life and brown with living death. In my multiple state I hoped, dearly hoped, that I outnumbered death and was strong enough to compete with all the excess life in the air.

In those circumstances it’s important to keep running. You know. In case it’s just a jaguar.

As it turns out, I was partly right. It moved onto the path ahead of me. Apparently it had been flanking me through the trees to the left.

It stood upright, on hind legs like a statue that had been standing there forever. Every time it shifted, it was still an item of permanence and had always been that way. It had no scale for judging its size, ruling such things out of bounds. In my memories it was a little more than chest high, and its head was the head of a badly taxidermied spotted cat, smashed sideways by hundreds of years of death and deathly rigor, permanently snarling. Or smiling. In a jaguar it all means the same thing.

It had always been addressing me. It said, “Use your addled whim to tear a hole from here to the sun.”

I replied, “You … you can’t just … go?”

“What is in your pocket?” it asked.

“I don’t know. It’s metal. I think it used to be a knife.”

“Why do you carry it?”

“I don’t know. I use it to touch things that are too hot.”

It was always nodding. It said, “I have made a knife, and thus you are here. Tear a hole from here to the sun.”

“Now?” I asked.

“Whenever,” it said. “It is always now.”

I put on the oven mitt I had picked up thousands of miles ago and took hold of my blackened and twisted ribbon of metal and cut a hole. I expected to be blasted away by light and heat, but it was just a mild white hole in the air. The jaguar god was going through the hole, was always going through the hole. It said, “This journey will still take time. Thus you have the space of a quarter of an hour to find an afterlife in which to make yourself comfortable.”

So I took off running until I fell down a hole in the ground where I was trapped for a few weeks, living on grubs and a nasty underground trickle of a stream until I could make my leg carry weight again.

[*]

This one time I was walking along a small town’s downtown streets looking for an all-night laundromat or, I dunno, someplace else that I could beg or steal some clothes. I had no idea what time it was, but that was just one thing in a long line of things I had no idea of. A lengthy personal inventory included a cheap bathrobe, a pair of slippers, some bandages on my fingers, a fresh-ish burn on the palm of one of my hands, and a butter knife. And chest hair that was starting to turn gray.

The burn on the palm of my hand matched the handle of the knife. The business end — if a piece of cheap stamped sheet metal tableware has a business end — certainly looked like it had been re-tempered with a blowtorch. Maybe it had been heating in a fire when I picked it up. Or maybe I’d used it to stab some fiery demon thing. Either one sounds like something I might do, so who knows?

I found the laundromat I was looking for. It had three dryers running and a woman who was looking a little rough around the edges sitting in one of the plastic chairs. I came in and took a seat and began the lengthy process of warming up. The woman was staring at me, which I’m pretty sure was justified.

“If you don’t mind, ma’am, I’m just gonna get up and root through some of the machines to see if I can find a shirt and maybe a pair of sweatpants. If you point out to me which ones are yours, I’ll skip those.”

She wrinkled up her forehead. Then she got up and went to one of the dryers and, with some rummaging, pulled out a warm but still somewhat clammy pair of gray sweatpants that she tossed my way. “What’s your story?” she asked. Her voice was steady. A little rough, like anyone’s voice is when they first wake up and haven’t used it yet.

“It’s a pretty short one,” I answered. I sounded rough too, but that was mostly because I was thirsty. “I’m fairly certain I’m an escaped mental patient. You haven’t heard anything about one being missing, have you?”

“Not yet,” she answered. “Do you want me to call the police?”

I grimaced. “Only if you feel you gotta. In my experience, it takes them a while to get to the point. They kinda have different priorities.” I turned away from her to open the robe and pull on the sweats, but that basically meant I was facing the big glass window facing the street. There was nobody out there I could see, though I was working against the glare of the interior light that turned the window into a giant mirror. After I tied the drawstring around my waist, I realized that she would have been able to see my reflection in the glass just about as well as if I had just been facing her. Oh, well. It’s the thought that counts.

“Don’t remember much at all?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I wouldn’t say that. I remember lots of stuff. Maybe enough stuff for any ten people. Just most of it’s impossible. And none of it gives me a name I can be sure is mine.”

“I hear you,” she said. “About fifteen years ago I was on a road trip from Mobile to Biloxi to go pick up a friend who was in trouble, and somewhere along the way I lost two weeks and found myself in Aspen. When I finally got my shit together, my friend had found another way to make bail, not that she would speak to me to tell me as much. I’d wrecked my semester, couldn’t prove anything medically to try to fix things at school, so I just dropped out and got on with things. Never did figure out what had happened.”

I just nodded. “So, umm, where …?” I waved my arms around, generally including everywhere I could see.

“You been to Vermont before?” she asked.

I shrugged. “No?” I mean, how could I be sure?

“Welcome to Vermont,” she said. “Have some sweat pants. State motto: ‘It’s closer to Canada than Oregon.’ “

“Thanks,” I replied.

“What else you need?” she asked.

“A notebook and a pen. And a sandwich,” I added.

“And a sofa to crash on?”

I nodded. I winced a little. I’m sure it was visible on my face. “I think I’ve been in jail,” I said.

She put on a wry face and said, “Haven’t we all?”

[*]

This one time I was running through the park on the track they’d put in around the athletic fields. I’d had in mind a specific number of laps to do and had a time to try to beat, but the sun was brutal out in the open and … nobody trusts the sun anymore. I’m sure people have had plenty of time to say what needs to be said about that, but it’s a crushing blow when something that has always been thought of as a source of constant unconditional blessings turns on you and wallops you. The sun has always been the one thing you can count on to just keep doing its thing no matter what. Sure as the sun will rise tomorrow.

It must be like what the first volcanic eruption was like, only without any warning rumbles. Without any smoking vents. Without … okay, maybe that’s not a good analogy at all. Maybe it’s like when you first learn about death. When you hear your first fumbling account from Mom or Dad that sometimes the people you love just go away and never come back, and then try to say that it’s just how things are, or stumble around the idea that they go to be with God and make you feel bad that they’d rather be with God than hang out with you and then say no, no, that it’s what God wanted and then you don’t much like God anymore and you say so and then everyone just gets upset and they tell you that you just don’t understand yet, but that regardless of how you feel everything will work out okay and you try to believe that so you can just stop crying but eventually it wears off and you realize that really, people just go away forever and that nothing about that will ever eventually be okay, that at best what happens is you learn to get by without them.

Sometimes the sun just throws a fit. Sometimes dad just comes home stinking drunk. Sometimes a good friend calls you and they’re in horrible trouble and you can’t get to them and they won’t do the thing that will help themselves the most and then you never hear from them ever again. There’s no reason you should have seen it coming. It just happened. Who knows? Maybe it’ll never happen again.

Run as fast and as hard as you can but you can never outrun that maybe.

I couldn’t handle being under the brutal sun anymore, just running in circles, so I cut off the side and headed for the sidewalk that led to the path through the woods. It was high mosquito season, but that just meant no slowing down. I was okay with that.

It’s easy to understand why people are so willing to bargain themselves away to prevent the pain of tragedy, telling God they’ll willingly give up having any fun, give up any particular blessing, swear to be good for the rest of their lives, if just, please, never let that sort of thing happen again. It’s like dealing with a spouse or a parent that beats you. You can’t be who you are without the love you have for them, so you bargain away the rest of yourself trying to appease them. But it never works. They never change and you just shrivel up to a lump of beautiful wonderful useless love, and we’re really not cut out to say whether that’s amazing or unbelievably tragic.

In the shade of the dense trees along the dirt path, the sun still filtered through in dazzling flashes like fireworks, like atomic fireflies streaking past on either side. It was impossible to see much of the path under those circumstances so I kept my head down and tried to watch out for loose rocks and sticks because I really didn’t want to slow down.

And I guess that’s it, really. The wind felt wonderful on my dripping sweat and the light through the trees was wonderful and the running felt wonderful and that’s what we’re supposed to do when there’s nothing else we can do — focus on what we can do, what needs doing, and try to find the wonderful that still exists, because what point is there in denying ourselves what little joys we are allowed just because we’re already afraid and miserable?

Maybe you can’t outrun the maybes, but you can outrun the mosquitoes.

[*]

This one time I was lying on my back in bed, doing the usual thing I do when I can’t get to sleep, which is nothing. Straight-edged shadows crept across the ceiling, accelerating and whipping across, then slowing down again as cars drove past on the road outside, headlights at their brightest on the unlit road. I don’t sleep very well sometimes, especially lately, but I don’t make it worse by letting it get to me and fighting it.

This house that used to be home is now just a large box made of some smaller boxes, connected by hallways. I live here because it’s better than sleeping outdoors. Also I keep my stuff here, not that I have much stuff worth keeping. But when it comes right down to it, I don’t so much live in this place as haunt it.

A home is someplace you can feel protected and comfortable. You surround yourself there with diversions and symbols of peace and kinship and brighter memories of history. My history has been revoked. My future has been shattered. There’s nothing left for me here but debris.

Maybe it’s just the house that’s dead, while I’m still alive. These things being relative, it’s hard to tell which is which. I want to move on, but I don’t even know what that means.

On my back in the bed, I watch the lights and shadows move on the ceiling and — well, I’d say daydream, but it’s definitely nighttime — imagine that the lights outside the window are from a spaceship coming in for a landing in the high grass out front, or perhaps weaving between the thready pines to find a convenient place to hover by my second-storey window. The light brightens to an almost daytime glow as the lock turns and the window slides up. A wind enters second, behind the light, and blows the curtains and some dust around the room, and the next thing to enter is another shadow, followed by the shape that cast it.

In this dream-vision, I am unable to move. The dark figure that has come in through the window fills the room with a presence, the same way that even the smallest snake can fill a room so full that almost everyone wants to leave immediately, even though the snake is in no way threatening. The fact of its existence is enough to make all other details unimportant by comparison.

I can no longer feel the bed beneath me, so I must be floating. I still can’t turn to look at my visitor, my examiner, my judge. The room turns around me. Am I being carried toward the window?

If I were to leave, to be taken aboard the craft outside the window and removed from this place, I would not be missed. I fill no niche. I have no job, no close family. I would just go into the light, and vanish, and be forgotten. I have already entered into my afterlife.

Am I dreaming of the beginning of a new adventure, a fantasy of a fresh chapter, of a clean, break, of abandoning the wreckage to the waves of entropy, or simply escape? The light brightens as my feet orient toward the window and supported by my dream, I float through it into a blinding white light. There is one last dark circle, a black hoop comprised of a thin slice of yard and dark sky. Passing through it entails a brief heart-stopping agony, and then I am on the other side.

The room was gray when I next woke up. The weak early sunlight didn’t want to be in my bedroom any more than I did. The air was stuffy. The window was closed. The floor was covered with a scattering of discarded clothes. Just my luck. I was abducted and delivered to a new life that was, in every way I could immediately see, absolutely no better than my last one.

No matter. At least I knew the routine. I would shower and dress. I would eat and put on shoes and leave my box full of boxes and make the rounds of my usual haunts. But this time I would look for all the tiny details that my imaginary abductor might have gotten wrong, those tiny little details that would be cracks where I could dig in my nails and peel up the layers of debris and dust that were obscuring my new life.

[*]

This one time I was sitting at my desk waiting for the phone to ring. More accurately, I was waiting for Murphy to make the phone ring — Murphy being the evil machine in the basement with the phone numbers in it of all the people we’re paid ten bucks an hour to annoy.

Here’s how it works. Murphy calls the number at the top of the list. Poor bastard #1 isn’t home, or doesn’t pick up, or whatever. So Murphy calls the next number in the list. And so on — until someone actually picks up. Murph has a split second to listen to the line to tell if it’s a machine, and if it is, it can hang up if it wants. But if someone answers, then the next one of us whose phone isn’t busy has ONE RING to pick up our end of the connection and read from the script Murphy shows us on our monitor. One section has info about who we’re trying to talk to, while another has info about why we’re harassing the poor schlub — either trying to make a sale, or get ’em to take a survey, or asking for money to cover an outstanding debt, or maybe it won’t bother any of us humans up here at all and it’ll just connect them to a recording of some kind.

Murphy, when it’s in peak form, can handle initiating thirty-two simultaneous outgoing calls, and, once connected, can hand them off to our telephone system, which supports more than two hundred and fifty. And yes, we have two full shifts and a third that runs about half-mast. We can handle somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 calls per day.

That’s an awful lot of daily misery we’re responsible for.

Murphy isn’t perfect. Murphy will connect me to a fax machine sometimes. Murphy will flub the handoff to the main telephone system (“Monroe”) sometimes, or maybe Monroe runs out of lines or has a bad one in the rotation, and the call gets dropped. But Murphy’s favorite way to screw with me is to connect me with someone and show me a bogus script. Or no script at all. I’ll get a page with no personal info on it for who I’m supposed to talk to, or a script that’s in a language I don’t know, or sometimes both sides will just be blank, leaving me talking to someone who I don’t know who it is about … nothing. Monroe can tell if I hang up on someone, as opposed to when they hang up on me, and I’m supposed to hang up on them if Murphy goes wrong, but when I do, I’m supposed to hit a button and fill out a quick form saying what happened. And sometimes that button doesn’t work either, and then I get written up and then I have to try to explain to my supervisor how busted — or maybe just malicious — Murphy is.

The screwed-up Murphy/Monroe combo has gotten plenty of competent people fired over the past couple of years, and that’s not counting supervisor incompetence or malice, like when they’re supposed to disconnect you from the system when you’re at lunch or on break, but they reconnect you before you come back and you rack up “failures to pick up,” which are nearly as unforgivable as hangups.

So when Murphy rang my phone, the screen snapped on and showed me the usual stuff. Kinda. I’m used to there being gaps sometimes or an old script we hadn’t seen in forever, but the script didn’t seem familiar. As I picked up, I heard the trailing “for quality assurance purposes” recording that was occasionally played when it took a few seconds for one of us to pick up, or when Monroe was feeling particularly sluggish finding an open associate. If it took too long, it would go straight to some horrific light jazz stuff that would hopefully stun and hypnotize the joe on the other end into not hanging up. But the script server knew I was online, so I was waiting for it to tell me it was my turn. Meanwhile I looked over at the script.

“Mr. Aan?” I asked. My ears went into autopilot waiting for something that sounded like an acceptable for on acknowledgment while my eyes flicked over the the script. Oh no.

“Yes,” came the response. I braced myself for the new weirdness and bulled on.

“My name is Leslie and I’m calling on behalf of –” and I’m not supposed to tell you who we contract for. You can imagine that many of our clients prefer to give the impression that we work directly for them. But I can tell you it gave me a chill all the way down to my spine. So anyway. “– and I’d like to offer my condolences for your loss, both from myself and from our entire organization.”

“Th-thank you,” he interrupted.

“Mr. Aan, I’d like to ask you, is there anything that we can do for you here, anything that you need?” The script here said to make a note of everything they say in the feedback section, which was just an open text box, though it mentioned that if it was profanity or abuse that we could just summarize.

“Well, actually…” he started. I braced myself. “We need four five-gallon tubs of cow blood for the rites, and, well, we’ve called around to all of the butchers and there just isn’t that much available. If we had a truck, I guess we could drive out of town….”

I started typing. “Twenty gallons of cow blood in four five-gallon tubs, Mr. Aan?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied.

“When do you need the blood, Mr. Aan? And what’s the address where you can take delivery?”

“No later than three days from now, Leslie. Friday afternoon.” And he gave me an address, and I confirmed it.

“Mr. Aan, I will pass along your request immediately, and someone will call you to confirm whether we can help you. Again, we are all very truly sorry, and we wish you the best for the future.”

I hung up, finished up the notes, and hit “submit.” And then I waited. And waited one moment more.

Then Murphy rang the phone, and I dove right in.

“Mrs. Abbot? My name is Leslie and I’m calling on behalf of the XXXX Corporation. I’d like to offer my condolences for your loss, both from myself and from our entire organization.”

“Th-thank you,” she replied.

[*]

This one time the twins were both sitting up on the sofa and trying to give each other this ratty old stuffed bunny. I could imagine why neither of them would want it — it was old enough to vote and get drafted and buy beer, though it might not be able to grow a decent beard without the help of whatever fungus might be growing on it at any given moment. It’d been ripped open and unstuffed and restuffed and had ears and eyes sewn back on and done about as many stints in the washing machine as my cousin Bob has done in jail, but those brief absences let me know what to expect if it ever disappears for good.

It’s basically a sponge for soaking up whatever oozes out of the twins, and I guess about ten or so previous owners as well, plus about a million unnameable puddles it’s encountered during its lifespan. As long as it’s been in the family, it’s been an important part of training developing immune systems. It’s like an heirloom sourdough starter.

Right then I loved that awful thing because it was making them laugh. The Man calls it “Pestilence Rabbit” and won’t touch it without gloves or a fresh one of those baggies that he takes with the dog when they go for a walk. The twins know his weakness, though. They try to touch him with it and make him flinch. And that makes me laugh too. Which The Man does not appreciate. Lately he’s been trying to change its name to Mercy the MRSA Bunny, and I have to admit it’s catchy.

I no longer remember what color it was supposed to be. It’s freakin’ bunny colored. It may have started out blue or yellow or tan, but now it was one of those colors a designer would charge you a thousand dollars to smear all over your walls, something that would change based on lighting and whatever your color your chintz throw pillows were. I was tempted to take it down to the hardware store with the fancy color-matching paint-mixing system and see if they could manage it. Maybe I could patent it or trademark it or whatever and license it to the high-end nail polish companies. “Raggedy-Ass Bunny” could be the new hot color at all the nail salons.

But anyway, I watched the bunny hit the floor and continued to look over from time to time while my show was on to see what the twins would do about it. They could climb down and get back up by themselves, though they weren’t so big that it wasn’t a lot of work, whichever way they were going. One of them was standing up and bouncing, now, and the other … was just gone.

While I was looking around, she came running back in from the hallway, where she could never have got to without me noticing, and then there were three twins — one bouncing up and down on the sofa, one climbing into the loveseat, and … one on the floor between the sofa and the shoved-back coffee table, starting to cloud up because she couldn’t find the bunny.

I got out of my chair as the one looking for the bunny faded away. And then the one bouncing on the sofa vanished. The bunny was limp on the carpet, next to the sofa leg. The twin on the loveseat was looking at it making that fist opening-and-closing thing they do when they want you to give them something, and then she looked at me like she was starting to realize something was wrong. I picked her up and studied the little clues that changed every day to tell me which one she was and … she was both of them. The shape of the left ear, the self-inflicted scratch on the shoulder, the way she held out her leg when I picked her up… Every sign I looked for to know which she was was there. She was both of them.

I found myself starting to doubt how many children I’d given birth too. It was like a nightmare or something. I was starting to freak out.

I bent down to pick up the bunny so that maybe at least one of us could feel better, and, as my shadow fell across it, I saw it drift mauve, then bluish, then maybe something brownish, like old bones. I checked with my baby to see if she was looking at it, and when I looked back, the bunny was gone.

This was nuts. I was going crazy. I know these guys don’t let me get enough sleep, but still….

I set her on the sofa and got down on my hands and knees to see if I had nudged it under the sofa or table and looked up just in time to see my other baby climbing up onto the other end of the sofa. I looked up and there they were, Lisa on one end and Jillian skootching her way onto the middle cushion and … Mercy the MRSA Bunny was right on the floor between my knees. Not under the sofa. Not under the coffee table. Where I should have seen it the whole time.

I gave them the bunny and they were happy again. I, on the other hand, was breathing hard, like I’d just been through the most harrowing thing I’ve ever been through in my life. I was shaking. I went back to may chair to sit down, and I knew for sure there was a fresh glass of red wine in my future.

It was like we’d been cycling through different scenarios, different realities, for some reason, trying to get back to the one we could live with.

Whatever. I had my babies. They had each other and the bunny. We were all home. I didn’t give a damn about anything else.

[*]

This one time I was headfirst up past my shoulders in the guts of one of the most overdesigned inkjet printers it has ever been my distinct lack of joy to service. Imagine a set of steady streams of pulsed fifteen-micron drops from six nozzles with ten-micron diameters with a tuned timing system to put static electrical charges on each every drop that’s intended to not hit the page, being deflected by a magnetic field and hitting a knife instead and draining into a waste bottle, while the droplets that are selected for the page have to hit a rotating cylinder of specially coated paper that’s doing 500 revolutions per minutes for reasons I can’t clearly comprehend….

Of course these things are popular as medical imaging systems, so it’s pretty important to make sure all the dots that the doctors are looking at are actually part of the image and not just some random blob from a malformed droplet or whatever. This means I spend most of my time driving to hospitals, or sometimes flying to hospitals, trying to sync up with an overnighted box of parts to swap out, with the climax being wrapped up in a pair of too-hot coveralls and performing messy surgery on patients no less delicate and stringy with goo-filled tubes and squidgy on the inside than the human patients down the hall in surgery. Except my insurance is cheaper.

Only much of the time the problem is with the computer that’s attached and sending the images to the printer, so I have to be up on every ancient and esoteric piece of crap that’s ever made one of these printers work — plus whatever latest and greatest sleek and evil monster looked good in the glossy brochure that they hope will work but in fact no one bothered to check.

But the point I’m building up to is that machines that are this sensitive are sensitive to lots of things. And you’d be surprised how many calls I get where I have to ask, “Really? Tell me, do you know if the MRI machine was doing a scan at the time? Yeah, I know it’s in the other corner of the building in a shielded room, but can you check anyway?” And frequently it’s not in another corner of the building, because you tend to want the printer for the imaging equipment to be somewhere near the imaging equipment. Especially if you leave that up to a space planner instead of anyone with any familiarity at all with an MRI scanner. Also, shielding tends to be retrofitted by whoever was the lowest bidder.

But there’s this place I keep going back to, and yes they have an MRI, and yes it’s almost certainly an issue, but I can’t see how it would be the kind of issue that causes the things I keep getting called out there to fix. I’ve climbed into and out of their printer maybe a hundred times, replacing the firmware (and the chip it resides on), various control boards, power supplies, cabling and connectors, you name it. I’ve reinstalled the software on their controlling computer. I’ve carried image files back to the office to make sure it’s not how the files are being rendered.

On the lighter areas of the prints, where fewer of these fifteen-micron dots hit the spinning paper, they’re pointing out faint but definitely recognizable images of faces. Or occasionally abstract and unrecognizable shapes. Sometimes words or fragments of words. I print these files elsewhere and it’s just noise. I print them a second time on this machine, the one I just climbed out of, and I get a different face, or maybe a sheep’s head, or a skyline from an unfamiliar city.

I’m familiar with pareidolia — and I can admit I only know the name of it because of this damn printer. The tendency to see faces or other recognizable shapes in clouds or woodgrain or a grilled cheese sandwich…. But I don’t see this stuff nearly as much coming off of other printers. And when they’ve mailed me prints, I see the same things elsewhere, under normal office lighting, under incandescent bulbs in my house, outside in the sun.

In order to prevent moire patterns, the imaging software uses a stochastic process — random dots rather than a set pattern — to fill in areas that need fewer dots than solid ink coverage. It’s mathematically possible that any individual print could have accidentally built some kind of image in the noise, just really really really really unlikely. Like winning several lotteries in a row kind of unlikely.

After I climbed out of the printer, I grabbed the sheaf of suspect prints they’d been collecting and headed up to a board room where I could spread things out on a table. All of the faces I collected in one section, bodies and animal shapes went into another pile, landscapes and abstracts made another stack, and then I spread out the words and word fragments. There were about thirty prints in that stack, and I moved them around trying to see if I could make them makes sense as a sentence or a message. And I kind of did:

 
And then I snorted and put that stack away. But I never did find any other patterns in what was coming up in the noise.

[*]

This one time a handful of pigs built houses to live in and then a wolf with really bad breath came through town and knocked them all down except for one or two, and everyone tried to move into those houses simultaneously, and then there was what you might call a bit of basic unrest.

You can see the immediate problems with all this. Pigs all over the world do well for themselves without even knowing what a house is. Then they get the idea they need a house, and don’t really sweat what that entails. You have goobs on the city council inflate the housing codes to require materials their idiot brother-in-law has managed to corner the market on just to make their wives tolerable to live with, then you have contractors who know that the codes are B.S. just do whatever they think will make a house stand up because they all individually consider themselves to be geniuses but they’re really just good at building shams and bribing inspectors, which is often cheaper and inflates the profit margin, and the pigs just care about granite countertops, huge TVs, impossible-to-maintain landscaping, and enough “curb appeal” to make the other little pigs green, knowing in their little piggy hearts that if something goes wrong, it’ll all be someone else’s fault, which we all know is the thing that counts in a crisis.

Because if it’s someone else’s fault, that means the people who have done wrong are obliged to take care of whoever they’ve wronged, right? Because if there’s one thing pigs know about little piggy nature, it’s that those with criminal profiteering intent are big on fulfilling obligations to their victims when the chips are down.

And when the sheriff is dragging people out of a crowd, one at a time, standing on their necks, prying baseball bats out of their hands and trying to talk them out of the murderous rage they got when the aforementioned granite countertop fell through the floor and crushed the 58″ flatscreen in the basement boar-cave, also rupturing the home-brewing rig and incidentally breaking the leg of one of the piglets that was trying to scurry to safety, the sheriff has to listen to the same old litany of blame that loosely translates to the list of people the pig would like to take care of them now that they don’t have a house to live in: the wolf, which has already blown out of town, the builders, the contractors, the “insufficient” building codes, the city council, and the well-off/foresightful few who still have houses that are standing. Just about always there’s one individual prominently left off that list, and its usually someone with a recent bootprint.

I try to make myself feel bad when, while standing on the necks of the people who were kind enough to elect me to office, instead of feeling charitable, I really wish I was a wolf myself and could blow through this spontaneously organized, prey-concentrating farm, wilting the overpriced hairdos of all the wailing survivors and, I dunno, have a really big damn lightning-powered barbecue to celebrate the windfall of free-running piggies who suddenly have nowhere to hide. I consider beating myself with the bat I’ve just taken away because I can’t feel any sympathy and I know I should be hurting somehow, but unfortunately I was blessed with insight and common sense and a stress-triggered fight-or-flight response that evolution insists I have, while the majority vote of the diseased organism of which I am a sometimes useful part has promised an extraordinarily miserable decade or two as a reward for me if I use it.

So here stands the sheriff, with his boot on the neck of a distraught citizen, better damn be sure on-purpose-like holding this bat by the wrong end lest thousands of hours in batting cages take over his muscles by reflex and start swinging for the parking lot on the other side of the upper deck of the bleachers.

And then, because something has to give, there is a strange noise in my head and the world shatters into a million pieces and I start laughing and I know this is nearly as bad as swinging but I can’t stop. I can’t stand up anymore so I chuck the bat out into the street and fall down on the grass laughing like a madman, laughing and laughing and laughing at the stupidity of everything going on, everything mankind has ever done that makes this the thing that happens again and again and again everywhere in the world where bad things happen to civilized people and then a big wolf howl comes running down the street laughing the way wolves laugh, joining right in and screaming to the sky how funny it all is and then, apparently, they loaded me into that ambulance and took me to the hospital and treated me for a stroke which pretty much left me untouched except for the occasional olfactory hallucination and the tendency to laugh like a madman when I witness tragedy and human misery, except I’m really not so sure I’m not faking it and using the stroke as an excuse.

But … whatever it takes to keep me from swinging that bat, you know?

[*]

This one time I was sitting on the wall down at the park with a couple of my, you know, the guys I hang out with. We had each other’s backs in school when the gang stuff got bad, formed our own gang and all that stuff and acted tons harder than we were. That got us into more trouble than it was worth, but it kept some of the others off of us and kept some of us out of worse trouble, like if we’d joined up with some of the other gangs. Three of us were waiting for a fourth to get off work running deliveries, so basically we were just hanging around making people nervous, and that kinda sucks, because really we’d just rather enjoy the sun, you know, if it was going to behave today, and watch people at the park.

This was the last year in school for most of us, but the school year kinda wrecked with the sun thing. We lost weeks while folks were trying to figure out if we were supposed to be going at night, but some of us had night jobs, and some of those jobs were for places that were still open, and then there was the stuff with the barricaded blocks and shooting all those looters and the general work of collecting bodies that people kept finding and trying to make sure those people actually died from sunburn or sun poisoning and not from something else and just, you know, disposed of where the sun would cook them and cover up a killing. Not everyone was up for stuff like that, so the boys and I helped out with some of that instead of finding out where school was supposed to be or whatever. Also we made the rounds checking on people and making sure they had food and water and stuff. When we could get away with it.

So for some of us the school year was going to run an extra month, some of us are just gonna take our finals when they’re offered and hope for the best, and we’ll all just do what we gotta. Same as always.

Six of the eight of us made it through it, and that was pretty good, considering. Those of us meeting up today were headed over to go hang out with the two that didn’t, over at the memorial park. Meanwhile we just watched the traffic. There were fewer cars. A good deal less honking. People were in a hurry still, especially outside, and the scorched park was just, you know, empty. 

We were all pretty sick of it. Tragedy after tragedy after tragedy — small ones, big ones. We were all like veterans of a war. We’ve seen some pretty horrible stuff, done some horrible stuff, some of us … made some horrible choices that nobody should ever have to make. We were all just ready to get moving again. So we’d made a plan.

Tonight when we go to the memorial park, we’re going to sow some seeds. We got an overhead map of the place and made a grid on top of it and, you know, the way those people fake those crop circle things, we’re going to walk around and make a design. But we’re going to do it with this grass seed that comes up really damn dark blue-green and is almost a weed. We’re gonna do it slow and casual and right under everybody’s noses.

I worked up a stencil of a trumpet player and made it really simple and easy, and that’s what we’re gonna put down on the grass down there. And then we’re gonna go around town and everywhere we see a place where we know someone who died, we’re gonna spray up a stencil of this trumpet player, with his horn pointed up defiantly at the sky, and we’ll end all of this with permanent shadows cast by the biggest jazz funeral ever.

Maybe it’ll catch on, maybe it won’t, but we’re going to get it started. Somebody has to. And I know if we weren’t down both of our trumpet players, they’d be playing them for real tonight.

[*]