SRF Heavy Industries

This one time I was dragging the next roller forward, having already cinched and pegged to keep the god from slipping backward. My “helper” was astride the god. Six or seven birds had also perched wherever they could, taking the free ride. I was singing, but mostly to drown out the drunken yowling of my companion. Even the birds were quiet. Mostly in shock at the noises we were making.

I passed a sea-gray tortoise that was keeping up with out procession. It was the size of the largest stone I could carry in my arms. The tortoise was heading to the last stand of shade before the sun-greeting slope that was our destination. It would race ahead as we moved throughout the day, and probably turn back around and head back to the fish pool this evening, when dusk fell.

I dropped the roller and picked up one of the birds that was hitching a ride. It was too sun-sedated to react at all. I set it on the back of the tortoise and it flapped twice for balance, then settled down. Neither it nor the tortoise seemed to care. A couple of the other birds on the god edged away from me. My companion ignored me, continuing his ululating howl.

I picked up the roller and my song where I had dropped them and continued forward. I set the roller down at the front, stomping it down under the god’s heels. My helper rolled off the god and trotted upslope to the ropes and the cinching post. I moved down to the god’s head and dug my bare feet into the soil. I raised my voice as the signal and shoved. The god and the birds lurched forward as I shoved. Ahead, my helper took up the slack in the ropes and held the cinch tight. I kept a steady push going, singing loudly to concentrate my strength.

The sun had noticeably moved in the sky at my back by the time the next roller came free. I called ahead and my helper called back. He tied the cinch fast while I uprooted the pegs, carried them ahead, and drove them deep into the soil behind the ends of the hindmost rollers.

Sweat ran off of my arms and back in streams. I retied my hair-cords and found the gourds we had carried up this morning. I took a drink from both of them, water first, and noted that they were both mostly empty. I unwrapped the saltfish and nibbled, and took another drink from the beer. My helper was already back astride the god, slumped forward and most likely asleep. One of the birds pecked at his hair and he took no notice.

Ahead of us the angry sky was the same color as the sea. The evening rain would soften the ground and weaken the ropes. I had to decide whether to try for one more push. I rubbed the soil from my hands and stretched and felt the muscles in my arms and legs and back to see what they thought.

“Again,” came a voice from my face-down companion. One of the birds squawked, possibly in agreement. Ahead, the tortoise-rider had nearly made it to shade.

“It’s not like you would ride the god all the way back down the hill when the ropes break,” I replied.

“Again,” he repeated.

“I will throw you into the surf,” I replied.

“You had better,” he replied. “My skin is on fire.”

I groaned and turned it into the start of a storm-greeting song, calling the rain and daring it to bring hail and lightning. I dragged the free roller forward and threw it sideways under the cinch-ropes.

“You are a filthy demon,” said my companion. He got up and bounded ahead to the post to free the rope-ends and start hauling and bracing. “An ugly one!” he shouted back. “With the rotten split open head of a pig! Complete with maggots!”

He was well on his way to making a decent poet.

Thunder rowed in from the distant surf, oared by the lightning. The first huge drops of rain began to fall like drops of fat from a roasting boar. The sun glared in from the west and lit up the clouds with fire, painting the storm with pinks and golds and huge brilliant flowers in the hair of the clouds.

I sang to drown them all out and shoved for all I was worth, letting the rain cool the fire in my back and arms and legs. The god inched forward. Ahead, my helper dutifully sang back and kept the ropes taut. I shoved and I sang. After forever, when the sky was as dark as night and I could no longer hear myself over the storm, the roller came free.

I hammered in the pegs as the hail I had called started to come down, and raced ahead. I guided my way to the cinching-post by keeping a hand on the ropes. They felt sound enough. I made sure the ropes were tied in a way that they could still be untied when they dried out later. Then I went back and put the free roller in place. With luck, the drying ropes would pull the god forward on their own. Or maybe they would just snap. I trusted the pegs to hold, but tomorrow I would bring new ropes, just in case.

I didn’t notice when the birds had left, but they were gone.

My companion was seated by the cinching-post. I hauled him to his feet and threw him over my shoulders like a pig to take to market. He howled and wriggled and cursed, but I had his wrists locked in one hand and his ankles in the other. I ran as hard as I could for the beach and moments later, when I was in the water up to my thighs, I hefted him overhead and threw him out to sea. He screamed with laughter and I heard him splash when he hit.

When he came back up, I heard him shout, “I will sing the lightning down onto your head! You will split like a struck tree and your innards will fall down around your feet like a rope of wilted flowers!”

I laughed and dragged him out of the water. “I’d better carry you over my head for protection, then!”

We ran back upslope to get the gourds and the pack of soggy food. I draped the carrying straps around my chest and heaved him up onto my back for him to ride. “Sing for the lightning all you like now, war-poet! You will feel it first!” I told him.

And I ran all the way back to the village with him on my back, just in case.

[*]

This one time I was staring at the corpse of my future, hoping beyond hope that I had the capacity to bring it to life.

How does the old drill about the humanity of robots go? I think you start by removing a person’s hand. Replace that hand by something that performs the function well enough that there’s no serious impact to that person’s quality of life. Is that person any less of a person?

Then take the whole arm. Then a kidney. Part of the liver. The pancreas. A lung. Replace a chunk of the brain with a lump of solid-state circuitry that performs the exact same function. Replace both legs. Now lets stop and check.

If you’ve done a good enough job with your replacements, this guy might have different issues regarding maintenance and upkeep, maybe different sensations of weight or center of gravity, but is still more functional than some people who operate without a whole suite of parts, due to accident or congenital difficulties, who are still considered people.

Due to social stigma — and, I assert, no other reason — he might suffer some psychological difficulties about self-worth, about feeling human. But let’s say he can get past that. Now lets keep going. Let’s remove the head from the body and keep both parts functioning for a moment. Which piece is the person?

I don’t think it takes much thinking to decide it’s the part that remembers personal history, the part that speaks and imagines and makes decisions, that bears the bulk of the humanity. The body does a lot of expressing its state of being — body language, as it were — but only some of that is done without the direction of the brain. The body goes a long way to tell us how we feel, it turns out, and without that we really do feel a good deal less than human. But that’s just a warning to make sure any new body we’re using has those same mechanisms for reporting contact and position and danger of damage and health and status of any autonomic functions it’s performing.

So there’s a warning. Let’s make sure there is, in fact, a body — and that it chatters nonstop about where it is and what it’s doing. Even though there are people who are definitely people who are  paralyzed and physically unfeeling, who are in bodies that are essentially support systems for a brain trapped in a bone box. I don’t deny the humanity of those people at all, but I’m still shooting for an optimal, healthy case beyond the reach of pity. Provide a body, given the option.

Back to the head. We already replaced some of the brain with circuitry that performs the same purpose. Trust me when I say this isn’t beyond the capacity of current technology, seeing as a prosthesis for replacing the hippocampus has already undergone extensive testing and we’ve had for some time intracranial implants for helping to control seizures. If you think maybe that isn’t complex enough to mimic the more sophisticated capacity for memory storage and retrieval, for metaphor, for complex comparisons and contrasts, for decision heuristics — you’d be right. But for some of those we already have hardware and software that does the job in ways that do not mimic how meat does it, inefficiently and by accident of evolution. It really is just a matter of a few more years, not counting bureaucratic hoop-jumping. So lets replace the rest of it, taking care to read what’s already there, in terms of connections and stored memories and associations, and make sure the replacement has access to those as well.

And before you freak out about that too much, consider that people suffer accidents of trauma and stroke all the time that loses them huge chunks of their own personal histories, and yet we still consider them people. Hell, we throw most of our memories away as we go and don’t ever give it a second thought. So maybe we get all of the memories and tendencies, maybe we just get the Reader’s Digest edition that covers all the high points, but for the sake of argument, lets say we get enough to be able to remember and recount shared experiences with at least the same level of accuracy as we do now, with the capacity to recall and handle emotional response, and continue on.

Assuming we get as close as we can get, and it’s closer than we get sometimes after serious injury or illness … Is the thing on the slab a person, and is it me?

Every evening, or at least most evenings, I lose consciousness. After some period of time, something gets up, wearing my pajamas, with a reasonably good grasp of my personal history, but not exactly 100% error-free, and capable of a good simulation of how I typically respond in typical situations and certainly capable of winging it in ways I’d hardly expect in new situations, and with access to all of my bank accounts and online identities and friends and family and colleagues. That thing is me, or only acceptably, incrementally different from the me that went to sleep, and everyone gives it a bye.

If I go to sleep and the thing on the slab gets up to greet the sunrise the way I would, under the circumstances of the trauma of translation, that are, for the sake of argument, less destructive than the traumas of injury or illness, have I made the transition?

I really, really hope so. Otherwise, someday I may die.

[*]

This one time I was listening to the drums from the lot next door — “Mama”, with her deep voice, the alto tones of “Second”, the quicker rattle of “Bowl”, the insistent ting of “Organ” (these are the names as I heard them from someone whose accent put any certainty about what I was hearing just out of reach) — as the sun was going down. Technically the lot was a church, with a tent of stitched-together tarps covering the largest part of the open space. Tonight I’m sure the lot would be full of people dancing and singing and praying.

I couldn’t relegate the drums to background noise, so I put down my book. There was no way I could be annoyed, though. I’d lived next to a church once that insisted on chiming bells at the top of the daylight hours, and that cycle didn’t quite match up to mine. Also, the “bells” were some recorded nonsense, amplified beyond the true capacity of the system to deliver. The snap of the system turning on was louder than the bells, and the undercutting sixty-cycle hum from the poorly tuned amp made me grit my teeth. Not that any part of the thing appealed to me, but it was poorly done, bordering on the cheesy, and that was hard to forgive.

I’d considered complaining, or offering my help to smooth out the kinks, or starting a collection to get actual bells installed, even, but as things turned out I’m glad I didn’t interfere. Somewhere there was at least one person who was happy with it, satisfied that he or she or they did something they could be proud of, and who am I to suck the joy out of that? Besides, the best I could really have offered was an ancient tube amp that warmed up a thousand times more smoothly but looked like old worthless crap, and I’m sure they wouldn’t have appreciated that or seen the value. And I’d miss the old thing.

These drums were worth listening to, however. The rhythms were familiar, at least by now, but also as elements that had sneaked into music I’ve been listening to for years. And also that was somebody’s prayer of invocation. I might be an asshole sometimes, and not on good terms with too many gods, but I seriously didn’t have it in me to take issue with anyone’s approach to comfort or hope right now.

The sun gave us a whole day of nearly normal behavior today, and that was reason for some amount of celebration and giving thanks. And praying for it to turn into a lifetime streak.

I could get behind that.

I considered going down to see if they would let me join them, but I wasn’t sure how well that would go. I lacked the cultural background to know what was going on, and frankly I was worried that the color of my skin could be an issue. I know the islands range all over the map skin-tone-wise, but I’m pretty damn white. I know they’d rather not feel like they were some kind of spectacle, and I guessed I could hear well enough with the window open.

It feels really odd to think that things might be going back to normal — for a given value of normal. We’ve already had some pretty amazing storms and everyone expects those to go on for a while before they taper off. Power’s back on at least in places. Some of the satellites survived, even. But food’s going to be pretty tight worldwide. It’s going to take decades just to catalog everything we’ve lost.

And nobody trusts the sun anymore. Nobody knows if there’s going to be “aftershocks” or even what caused whatever that was in the first place. I expect all the churches will be full for the next few months, years even, while we sort this out. And out this window, what I have to think of as my own church was meeting.

I kicked the only comfortable chair in my apartment up to the window and sank back into it, closing my eyes and relaxing into the rhythms. My right hand worked along as usual, tapping on my knee and the arm of my chair, and my left? Well, with my eyes closed, my left hand was keeping up just fine. When I sneaked a peek, however, it was still missing. The aches came and went in waves that I could grit my teeth and get through.

Maybe if things had been normal they could have saved it. If the hospital had had electricity and phones, if surgeons and specialists had been able to travel to get there, If I hadn’t had to wait five hours to make the trip and wait an additional six hours to get into an operating room…. Who knows? There are a billion people out there who lost more than a hand.

But when my missing hand was drumming, the ache went away. That was good to know.

The service continued for hours. After a while, Mama and the rest of her ensemble were put away and replaced by Grobaka and Tibaka, and I worked to pick out the separate rhythms.

In just a few minutes I was keeping up and, once again, free of every kind of pain.

[*]

This one time, back when I was a little elf, I was chasing grasshoppers out in the fields behind the little subdivision my family lived in. The baseball diamond, the next field over, was dry and little dust devils were running the bases. The grasshoppers were the size of my father’s fingers, or even larger, and the game I was playing was to charge through the grass at top speed, yelling and waving my arms, to see how many of the buzzing dollops of green and yellow-striped brown I could get aloft at the same time. I’d get three or four in the air in front of me then spin around, running backward, to see if there were any still in the air behind me. The record so far, for the day, was eight. I was frustrated because I was sure I could get twice that many if I could run faster, or maybe had a dog to help me herd them into the powder blue sky.

At the other edge of the field was an old man sitting in the grass. He had one arm up as if waving or pointing, and the his other hand was up to his face, like he was shielding his eyes and looking up at the sky. I decided to charge over and send some of the grasshoppers his way, though I was a little worried this would get me into trouble. Enduring a hail of panicked grasshoppers was a bit of an acquired taste as I had come to find out.

As I got closer, I saw that he had a pair of binoculars — and I knew for damn sure I would be in trouble if I made him drop them. My father had a pair that he treated as one of the most valuable things he owned. I skidded to a stop outside of reasonable grasshopper range to think about things and wipe the sweat out of my eyes. The wind sprang up and blew a grasshopper right at my head, so I ducked it.

From where I stood, I could see this wrinkled old man was kneeling on the grass, holding onto some kind of string tied to the sky. He was using the binoculars to look at, presumably, the other end of the string. I followed the string up with me eyes as far as I could, then skipped ahead a bit, straining to make out anything in the painfully bright blue beyond the little floating spots I’ve always been plagued with, but I saw nothing.

He motioned me over and spoke in a language I didn’t understand. One of the words sounded kind of like “kite,” and things suddenly made sense. He handed me his hefty binoculars as if he handed expensive items to five-year-olds he’d just met all the time, but I already had them in my hands before I realized exactly how stunned I was. They were far heavier than I expected, and my hands were sweating, but I didn’t want to just hold them in one hand while I wiped the other on some handy denim, so I just kept a white-knuckled grip, held them to my face, and tried to follow the string up. I looked around as well as I could, taking minutes and half panicked that he would become unhappy and demand them back any moment, but all I found in the sky was a daytime crescent moon and a puff of cloud in a big damn hurry. As far as I ever knew, he had the string tied to one of those.

He kept up a stream of steady incomprehensible chatter that, even if I could have understood it, was mostly lost to the breeze.

My arms were tired from holding up the binoculars to my face, so I handed them back before I got so tired they slipped from my sweaty fingers. At the same time I handed them over, he handed me the string that was yanking at his own withered arms. I’m sure all he wanted to do was wipe the binoculars off on his plaid shirt or maybe loop the black plastic strap around his wattled neck, but the next thing I knew was that I was being dragged backwards across a swath of staining, pungent grass by this string tied to the sky and that I would catch holy hell if I let this man’s precious kite, of which I still had only a garbled inkling for its existence, escape.

I bounced on my ass a couple of times, scattering more grasshoppers and knocking the breath out of me, but I took the opportunity to wind the string around my hand a couple of times and kicked off the ground the next time it yanked me, hoping to spin around and face forward so I could fend off the ground with my dirty sneakers. I started to worry a bit when the ground went a bit farther away from me than I could jump on a good day and was taking its own sweet time about coming back.

But, man, the grasshoppers were flying. As I climbed farther into the sky, I could see at least ten or fifteen aloft, and I wasn’t even chasing them and waving my arms. I wasn’t shouting either because I still hadn’t really gotten my breath back. Also, I had other worries.

At one point I was sailing backward again, because I remember watching the man stand up and turn around, looking for me. I remember the comical look on his face when he saw me sailing off. He stood stock still, propped up on his spindly legs, mouth hanging open, fists clenched in what remained of his white, wispy hair. He was probably shouting something, but I couldn’t hear it. And then he was pounding after me in a sprint, fiercely concentrating.

I only weighed about forty pounds at the time, but still the string was digging painfully into my hand. In my heart, at that moment, I knew he was threatening to flay me alive if I lost him his kite. Now I’m pretty sure I knew better. I also know now that I didn’t have the spindle that must have been bounding along on the ground behind me like a puppy in pursuit. All he would really have had to do to save his kite and, incidentally, myself was to step on it.

After a couple of thirty-yard bounces, I got snarled in the top of the chainlink fence that separated this field from the baseball diamond, my toes digging into the spaces in the weave maybe two or three from the top, but allowing me to drag myself down to the ground. The old man got to me just as I was in reach of soil.

The odd part was that as early as the day before, I was certain that fence had never been there. And the reason why I know is that I had been chasing tennis balls batted by a neighbor kid from that very diamond and had been devoutly wishing that there had been some kind of fence to keep him from knocking the balls so far out of the field. I must have run through the spot where I was snarled in the fencing at least ten times less than twenty-four hours prior.

Regardless, I thrust the string into his hand the second he screeched up, rolling the coil of cord off my purpling fingers. And while he stood there dumbfounded, before he could start shouting again, I bolted for home, dusting off my britches as well as I could without breaking stride.

[*]

This one time I was looking at my pipe, a meerschaum that had certainly seen some action, stained black and mahogany brown with a hundred years of nicotine and handling, but beautiful, and in beautiful condition. It was covered in little abstract paisley-like swirls in a continuous spiral starting around a smooth ring around the lip of the bowl, getting larger or smaller to make up for the swell of the bowl or the bend where the stem was attached. The overall effect was somewhere between waves and the scales of a snake or a fish. It was quite possibly the most beautiful thing I owned.

That might sound a bit sad, or it might not. I’m not any kind of collector. All of the artwork hanging in my house are framed photographs of my family, my children and their children. Other than that, I have a few books that have been handed around and an old weight-and-pendulum-driven wall clock that, while a bit on the baroque side, isn’t exactly what I call beautiful. Technically it’s a cuckoo clock, but a couple of decades ago, the cuckoo actually jumped out of it and landed in a bowl of oatmeal that I was letting go cold in my lap because I was watching television. On my oldest granddaughter’s advice, I replaced the wooden cuckoo with a ballerina from her wind-up musical jewelry box that wouldn’t work and traded her the cuckoo.

As such things go, the music box started working again after a big thump — some spat or other that knocked the box off her dresser with a dramatic sweep of an arm. Now the cuckoo dances to Fur Elise and the ballerina goes cuckoo a hundred and fifty-six times a day. And every time it does I have to wonder on behalf of both myself and the ballerina where we would be if things had turned out differently, and whether we were better off for not having followed what we thought our dreams were when we were young.

I’d had this pipe, treasuring it while using it at least twice a week, mostly in the little spare room where I kept my books and my work bench and a little writing desk, because old books were supposed to smell like pipe tobacco and once I’d made that declaration out loud, all resistance to me smoking it in the house vanished completely — I’d had the pipe for forty years, and had the opportunity to study it now and then for an additional ten or fifteen, and I’d never noticed until now that there were little dots and strokes in the loops and scallops that repeated every so often. I mean I’d noticed before, certainly, but this is the first time I thought of those patterns in terms of a substitution cipher.

So I got out some paper and one of my finest-point drafting pens and began to lay down the designs on paper, unspooling them off the bowl of the pipe and stretching them out in a line until I’d racked up a number of rows. Then I did the usual thing, making a chart of all of the designs used and ticking off how many times each appeared. With a yellow highlighter marker, I marked patterns that repeated in the rows.

In fact, I made three or four passes through, since I couldn’t tell whether a handful of symbols were actually different enough to be different symbols or just drift in handwriting, as it were. In any case, I really didn’t have much else to do with my afternoons. Regardless of how similar this was to how I previously made my living, the only time it seemed tedious and annoying was when I really wanted to smoke my pipe, but I had to keep referring back to parts of it without dumping burning cinders in my lap to make sure my initial transcription was accurate enough. But at the end of three days, I had a set of twenty-two to twenty-four possible characters, and transcriptions both backwards and forwards just in case I’d made a bad guess which end of the string was the front end. The message was a couple hundred characters in length, assuming it was actually a message, which means I had a pretty good chance of working it out — assuming I knew the language in which it was written.

It was about then, right before I started in earnest, I started wondering whether I really wanted to know what the message was. This old pipe was a piece of my life and a chunk of family history, having already changed hands three times before it got to me. It would certainly change the flavor of the smoke once it had meaning.

It took me no more than a week to pick the project up again. After all, it was only a pipe. After all the ways my life has wrecked and changed course over my seventy years, I can throw away a pipe and break in a new one. Even this one.

I was worried about the language, given the pipe’s history, but I shouldn’t have. It was merely German, though the spelling was a bit haphazard and the syntax more tortured and archaic than I was expecting. In the end it merely said:

The powers have allocated to the world ten-thousand worthwhile days. The world will not end until that last worthwhile day burns and the smoke of that day ascends to the heavens as a prayer.

As the sun began to set, I packed the day into the bowl of the pipe, and lit it, and smoked it completely to ash, watching the smoke, as I always do, play along the shelves and the wood-paneled walls and pool at the ceiling, spectral in the failing light from the open window. Then the world ended.

[*]

This one time the expo I go to every year had hit one of those lulls where it seems like everything’s frozen and time has stopped. Participation this year was a little sparse. The tables and booths were far enough apart that people wandering the neon-blue carpet could have private conversations with the people manning the booths without being too obvious about it to their neighbors, only now it was so quiet that conversations would have to be held pretty low indeed not to be noticeable. Right at this very moment, nobody was walking. The few people that weren’t behind the tables were parked, standing and leaning in singles and pairs. The people behind tables were sitting quietly or standing as well, looking through their material as if they hadn’t already done the same thing a hundred times.

No one was talking. Everyone was waiting for something.

I pulled a bottle of water out of my bag and snaked my phone out of my purse. I didn’t actually do anything with my phone, though. I just left it on my side of the leaflets describing training programs for new managers and various certifications we offered, classes we taught on location, classes we offered at regional hubs, classes we offered online…. But still nothing happened. It was like the zoo on a hot day. All of the animals had found places to park in the shade. It was siesta time — the time of mad dogs and Englishmen.

I wrote the material on gender sensitivity training, yet I knew the only reason I was the one manning our booth was because I was easy on the eyes. I dressed to play it down, to look comfortable and approachable, to not try to hide my age. It was the best I could do to salve my conscience.

The exhibition space was about the size and shape of a football field. The long walls were glass, maybe thirty or forty feet high, and coated with a heavy light filter to keep air-conditioning costs down. The bottom two or three feet were uncoated for some reason, and the sun outside made the concrete walkways outside as bright as the lights in the ceiling. After cracking open the seal on my water, I found myself fishing my sunglasses out of my bag. I didn’t really notice I had put them on until I was looking at the display on my phone and wondering why it was so hard to read at this angle.

There was, in fact, a small dog outside the window nearest me, staring in through the glass. As bright as it was outside, I wondered how it could possibly see anything other than its own reflection. But then, who knows what a dog looks at.

What got my attention was that it seemed to be smoking. Now that I’ve said that, I’m sure I need to clarify. It didn’t look like it was smoking a cigarette. It looked like there were wafts of smoke or steam coming up from its fur. It didn’t make sense. Maybe it had been swimming in a fountain out there or something, but I didn’t know what it would have to be like out there to see it steaming. Maybe if it were so cold you could see your breath, and the dog had been running.

That’s when I noticed how hot it was getting in the exhibition hall. I took a long pull at the bottle of water. When I looked up, through my sunglasses, I could see the air shimmering around the lights. Back outside, the dog had actually burst into flames and was running in circles. Then all the lights snapped off and the sprinkler system kicked on. The fire alarm started up a horrendous buzzing wail.

I grabbed my phone off the table and wrapped it up in one of the bags the pamphlets came in. I dropped it in my purse and set my purse and bag on the seat of a chair and then shoved the chair forward until the seat was underneath our tabletop.

I wanted to go help the dog, but I was sure it was too late. I didn’t know what was going on. After a moment I just climbed under the table myself and hoped that if the place was really on fire that the ceiling would hold until help got here.

It was a couple of hours until the sprinklers ran out of water, but it wasn’t until sunset that anyone came in to tell us what was going on and what had happened.

Something had gone wrong with the sun and half the world was on fire.

[*]

This one time I was facing the wall of a cell, trying to see if I could see through it into any kind of future worth inhabiting. Unpainted brick, grooves worn in the mortar from the gropings of previous residents, both temporary and long-term. I wasn’t sure which I was yet, but I was wondering how much of that decision was my own choice.

My living conditions had gotten worse since my arrival. Originally I had cheap and worn (but not too badly vandalized) wood furniture, a lamp and an alarm clock, walls with somewhat scarred wallpaper, a light switch that actually did something, a dresser with three out of four drawers, and a door with a knob on the inside.

This was the sort of accommodations you earn when the police pick you up for vagrancy and you are convincing when you tell them you can’t tell them who you are. Also it helps for them to look over your hands, and when they ask you what the hell happened to them, you say, “I think I did that myself.”

So after that they follow the blood trail back as far as it goes to make sure its all yours, and in the meanwhile, you get a 72-hour evaluation in the brand-spanking-new mental health facility that, charmingly enough, advertizes its services as a clinic for rehabilitation and also a specialty in depression and anxiety, with rooms for people who need inpatient treatment. It’s maybe six months old, and yet it already looks a bit like a twenty-year-old junior high school on the inside, from wear and surreptitious graffiti, and it’s a toss-up whether that has more to say about mental health facility inmates or how we treat our schoolchildren. But I digress.

Skin and nails, even with a bit of charring, grow back pretty quickly on fingers and hands. For the purposes we usually put those things to, we go through skin on our hands quickly anyway. There wasn’t any tendon damage or much nerve damage, so two weeks of bandages and another week of disposable cotton gloves later, they merely looked horrible but mostly felt fine. But also the 72 hours had gone by with a number of interviews that had yet to turn up a name that checked out or any grasp of where I was or how I got there that made any sense to them — and then there was the fact that I had mentioned that I was in the neighborhood to spy on and follow a particular individual for money, but couldn’t produce any license information or ID of any kind, and  refused to name the individual, or produce any sort of information that could be verified by interested parties.

Also I had apparently vandalized a streetcorner mail drop, but there was some evidence that someone had locked me inside first and I was merely trying to get out. They were withholding federal charges until they could nail down who else might be involved.

I tried to tell them that I remembered going in through the mail slot, but they refused to listen. Can’t blame them. They showed me pictures of the mailbox. I couldn’t have fit through the package slot without being folded at least twice.

And since I hadn’t been too annoying as a patient and was possibly suffering from symptoms they couldn’t rule out as head trauma, even with MRIs and CAT scans, they were taking it easy on the medications for me, maybe a light antipsychotic, maybe a mild sedative around bedtime that I barely felt. The antipsychotic made me a little tired, but it quieted down all of the noise in my head I had to struggle to think through sometimes, constant internal distractions, but I worried that it had silenced a voice I needed to hear to sort things out.

Things had kind of gone downhill, though. I had decided a couple nights ago that I could probably get a better grip on what was going on if I was allowed to participate in my own investigation. I was just going to, you know, leave, seeing as I had earlier that day failed to get the doctor managing my case to agree to release me, especially seeing as no one knew who to bill yet and I didn’t have a usable identity, per se. So that evening I had tried to open my window, plexiglass, bolted shut, by trying to pry the frame out of the wall. I’m not sure I remember what I thought I was prying with. Maybe I was a bit groggy from the sedatives. But the window frame shot sparks while I was straining to get it to move and caught fire a little, and when they came in with the extinguisher I was sitting on the bed staring at my singed fingertips, answering questions as well as I could about why I didn’t have a lighter and trying to get my own answers about whether they knew about the loose wire in the wall or whether they just electrified the frames on purpose.

As things wound down, I was reminded about how badly scorched my hands were when I was first picked up, and how the interior of the mail drop box thingy had showed some signs of heating around the access panel and the interior lock mechanism. My doctor was unhappy about being awake, but took it well enough. When he recommended a room with less in it that I could destroy, and that maybe the staff should check me over carefully to make sure they’d removed my lighter, I really couldn’t come up with coherent objections.

So in my new room I had concrete floor with a drain hole, a small window with bars on the inside of it, a foam pad for a mattress and a blankie and a pillow and a robe and a pair of slippers. I remembered jails and prisons that were substantially worse, and that was cheery until I realized I had that knowledge firsthand. And I remembered thinking that as soon as I had fingerprints again, we’d have a good shot at finding out who I am.

When I went back to the mattress pad I lifted it up, because you never know. And under it was a plain old table knife, like from a school cafeteria. Obviously left by a previous resident who failed at the attempt to get up to no good, or perhaps lost the motivation.

I took it to the wall and dragged it around a brick a couple of times, but it was damned loud. And obvious. I could try to muffle it with the pillow or blanket, but even so I’d be at it for a week and it would be noticeable the whole time.

So I took two steps back, used the knife to cut a burning hole in the air instead, and walked through that. That seemed to work just fine, except now I was lost in the woods in a robe and slippers, with no sign of the hospital anywhere behind me. Oh, and I had a fresh burn from the handle of the knife on the palm of my hand, and that was no fun at all.

[*]

This one time a team of ants were dragging me through the rainforest, their aggregate tugging no more effective than the tidal tug of the invisible moon — but also no less. Progress was slow and sporadic. But it’s not like ants have to hurry home from work to get ready to catch a show. Individuals work until they are tired or hungry. Then they rest, or go home find a snack. When they are ready, they come back. When they are gone, they are replaced by others who have followed the trail to see what needs to be done. An ant follows its own needs. Ants, together, follow a larger purpose that serves their tiny nation, that, in turn, serves them as well.

The parts of me that were too big or unwieldy to go over certain obstacles were broken off and carried around by a different route. In transit, I crumbled. I arrived as not much more than a powder. It took weeks. But I was not their only project. Fortunately, I am not jealous.

I am a stone, a book, a lump of self-knowledge written in uncountable parallel conditional actions. I am holographic, each piece of me containing the whole in my details, while the whole, taken together, defines a purpose of being, a being of presence, a presence of action, an action of purpose. I am a dead jaguar. I am a mummified corpse of a jaguar god, buried for a thousand years. I am a blood infection transmitted by the gnawing bite of time. I am a spore of strangeness coasted here by delicate starlight. I am, myself, a single ant from a hive that aggregated so large that it collapsed under its own mass and imploded and exploded ten billion years away.

I am a spiderling that extrudes a filament of silk into the sky to lasso the interstellar wind. I am one of a countless number. Of all of those, I am the seed the wind blew to here to fall upon this rich and fertile soil.

The jaguar was not my first incarnation here. My first local incarnation was a network of ions twisted in the web of magnetic bands that gird this world. Then I was a wind. Then, a pellet of crystalline ice around a speck of ash. Then a drop of water seeping through a sterile mountainside. Then a growing crystal of glass. Then, deliciously molten and cast skyward again.

I’ve bled out and called myself together thousands of times, learning the code of water-activated protean carbon. Each time, I have learned exponentially. I called myself together, infected the jaguar, and reigned for five hundred years before I realized my limitations and allowed aggregated resistance to bring me down. It was fitting that I be so enshrined. I infected hundreds of men who handled my body before I was sealed in impermeable unguents and wrapped in sterile stone. They died horrible deaths, flayed and tied to stakes until the new life that I gave them was roasted from their bodies as they thrashed. My priests kept things going as long as they could, sacrificing themselves so that others could drink the tainted blood and conspire together for my exhumation and release, working together like ants, but too few in number, and too weak.

So be it.

Something new is coming. I could smell it on the interstellar wind a thousand years ago. I could see it coming in the patterns the stars made, in the paths between them that were opening.

The ants carry me to my new birthing place, through damp, warm loamy soil. They will feed on me and, in turn, I will feed on them. They will work hard to distribute my spores throughout the richest source of life on this mudball, and I will call myself together, and I will reign once again, but on a scale that has not been seen since the explosion that sent me here. I will extend myself to the core of this place, to the filaments that warp and twist above the sky, and reach up to grab the sun itself.

A million times magnified, I will greet this new thing. And then we will see.

[*]

This one time a bunch of us were sitting in the hot springs, some of us up to our chests, a few of us up to our nostrils or eyeballs, letting the heat soak in and pump throughout our bodies via our blood and breath. I was one of the ones in only up to my chest. I could feel ice clenching in my hair, pinching and pulling if I moved too much. My arms were on the stone surrounding our heated pool, drawing in the lesser warmth there. The stone was as warm as stone elsewhere would be in the summer sun. It was a happy medium between the too-hot water and blowing ice crystals out of my nostrils.

This time of year we spent mostly in the caves through which the hot springs flowed. The caves were temperate through the harsh winter. We ate bugs and lichen and sleepy bats until the trees and bushes flowered — then we’d eat the flowers and tender green shoots and sour fruit through the summer, then, as the fish got sleepy and distracted, we’d pull them from the water and supplement that with beetle grubs. The springs and hot pools were too poisoned and too suffocating to support fish, but by the time it warmed enough outside for us to range further downstream, we wouldn’t have to spend too much time breaking the ice with rocks to get at them.

The sun barely bothered to climb into the sky during the day now — barely a finger’s breadth above the horizon. It was different now. It stung and heated my face when I looked directly at it, hotter than the hottest days of the summer. We hid from it and spent our time outside in the pools at night.

The skies above us, normally so clear that we could see every star there ever was when the wind wasn’t blowing the snow off the tops of the peaks, was a shimmering wall of green ice, tinged with sunset red. Sometimes we would see the green willowy veil at night, but never like this. Every night it came, almost completely opaque, rippled like the caves carved through the glaciers by the trickles off the peaks in summer. But not the blue of deep water. It was as green as the new green leaves of spring, swept across the top with a brilliant red of ocher, of ripe persimmon, of blood in the trees.

It was beautiful, but strange. It was hard to get comfortable while watching it. Sometimes lightning crackled through it, but there was hardly any noise of it over the distant roaring of the starlight. No smell of ozone over the sulfur reek of the water or the smell of wet monkey.

My neck was tired from looking up at it. I sank lower in the water to quell a shiver and watched the reflection on the still surface of the pool, watching the image break around the bodies and features of my fellows and companions. Despite our disquiet, we were the very picture of habitual serenity. In the pool, especially in the nights of this broken time, there was no play, no maneuvering to move closer to someone who was with someone else, no drama or politics. The eerie glow glistened on damp hair and we kept it all reigned in.

I couldn’t be the only one who wanted to cry and howl. But even the youngest of us were quiet. How can you raise the alarm when you don’t understand the danger? It wasn’t hunger, or loneliness, or injury, or a predator, or an earthquake. It wasn’t invaders from another troop intent on rape or theft. It wasn’t betrayal, or a lie, or a joke gone bad.

How do you voice your disquiet when there are no words?

[*]

This one time the world was beautiful and filled with a constant buzz of wonder at all the inexplicable delight — or so I was told. I could waste an entire afternoon playing with two magnets and a magnifying glass. Or trying to fill a shoebox with grasshoppers — or, once dusk fell, a Mason jar with fireflies. I could read my books or hold a coast-to-coast rally with the tiny metal cars or build the final word in secret strongholds, complete with its army of defenders, from LEGO. All of these things could hold my attention for the duration, with varying degrees of grudgingness, but the only thing that really gave me that throttle-locked-wide-open thrill was flying around the neighborhood on my bicycle. Okay, that, and watching things burn.

Well, alright, the fireflies were cool too. Still are. But they aren’t a year-round thing.

There really are only a couple of things that bring that kind of joy for me. One thing that does it is somehow bringing that kind of joy to someone else, whatever way works. Another thing that brings a kind of joy is the creation or adoption of a tool that extends my capabilities in some way, ranging from a new pen for sketching to some consumer electronic gadget to more ordinary sorts of tools — as long as I can then demonstrate to myself that they weren’t a waste of money or effort.

But my absolute favorite is by creating something with the semblance of life — either a story that is so true to itself that it has a life of its own, or a drawing of someone that you can imagine, in the very next moment, will take a breath. A photograph, similarly pregnant. Or a sculpture, even an abstract twisted-up piece of paper, that exhibits an illusion of awareness or self-awareness or intent.

There have been other experiments, harder to explain or describe, that fall into that category as well. Software, ideas and mental images, philosophical experiments and conceits. And other stuff. Unclassifiable projects, most of which are waiting for the resources to become available to enable realization.

Thankfully words are cheap and in infinite supply, though spare time for assembling them is quite a bit more rare.

These are the moments it takes to recapture that fabled earlier time when everything was a brilliant new discovery, made of magic, and filled with animating spirits with unknown drive and purpose. In a hit-or-miss kind of way.

This one time, when my bedroom wall was warm and thrumming with the colony of honeybees that had moved into the space between the outer wall and the inner, I put aside my fear and leaned back against the wall, heedless of the thin trickles of honey coming down from the windowsill and leaking out around the electrical outlet. A single honeybee had also managed to leak into the room through some undiscovered crack, and while typically, at four years old, this would have sent me into hysterics and forced me to sound the alert and rally troops to smite the murderous invader, I simply watched it.

I was electrified by fear. I could feel it as it walked the window ledge above my head. I watched it explore the colored patches of cotton cloth on the quilt I used for a bedspread. I watched it hover in the sunbeam — now between me and the only exit from the room — stirring dustspecks into whirling maelstroms with its wings. Her wings.

I wondered even then how much of the dust was pollen, and whether she saw the particles as loose apples that she needed to catch and put in her basket, fighting against the frustrating downdrafts from her buzzing wings. Her buzzing was amplified by the wall I leaned against, a baritone roar modulated by wax and insulating fiberglass floss and pounds and pounds and pounds of honey and the heat of bees and a thin layer of painted gypsum board. The roar I felt through my back was its own separate creature. A creature of which the dainty golden thing floating in front of me was a tiny part.

Before I knew it I had extended a hand with a finger outstretched for her to land on. And she landed on it.

[*]