SRF Heavy Industries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[*]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[*]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[*]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[*]

This one time the rain was coming down in buckets and I couldn’t even see the street from my front door. It had been a while since the last soaking rain and it was about time for something to wash all the pollen off of everything — even though it meant it would be back worse than ever tomorrow. I’d risk drowning like a turkey in this downpour to get a good deep breath right about now.

I could imagine what things would be like when this let up — little chartreuse rivers going down the sides of the streets. Cars that you could once again tell apart by color. The ability to touch a door handle or a doorknob without having to dust off your hands and having to remember to wash them before I touched my face or eyes.

I wondered if the neighborhood squirrels were sitting this one out in my attic. It was something, watching the cat pace around down here, walking into furniture because she was looking up at the ceiling, trying to track their movements.

Meanwhile, I stood in my open doorway in sweats and a flannel shirt and watched the torrent come down. Rain hitting the stoop splashed my bare feet, deliciously cold. I could see a mist of tiny droplets clinging to the hair on my feet that made my old roommate refer to me as a hobbit.

I started to hear the wind whipping hard through the trees and I started to see little pellets of hail. That wasn’t uncommon in storms like this. If I tried hard enough, I could hear thunder as well, like the coachman driving the storm was using a little of his whip. The dogwoods out front were dancing around in the gusts, shedding leaves and those little red berries the blackbirds came through in droves to devour.

I noticed the siren that sounded when the weather service spotted or got report of a tornado in the county. It had been going on for a while, just drowned out, as it were.

And that reminded me of when I was a kid in elementary school. That wasn’t too far from here, in space, if not time, and it was the practice back then to crack open the windows and herd all the children into the halls, where we would line up against the walls in the main hallways during tornado warnings. We’d crouch down on the floor, knees up to our chests. They seemed to be undecided whether we were supposed to be facing the wall or facing away. I just remember on one of these adventures I was seated on the floor next to a pretty girl I had always had a bit of a crush on — bright, hard-working, not much driven by what was popular. Even at nine, that sort of thing got my attention.

I was a nerd back before nerds were fashionable, so she wouldn’t much give me the time of day. I don’t remember resenting it back then. That was just the natural order of things.

I just remember that she was scared and crying and that when I put my hand on her arm to comfort her, she leaned in and draped my arm around her shoulders, and I held her like that until the “all-clear” sounded, and then we picked up whatever stuff we’d brought with us and got in line to go back to our classroom. She gave me a thank you and went back to her desk and nobody ever mentioned it. Even the kids that ordinarily would have teased the hell out of both of us under other circumstances, who I knew damn well saw us.

It’s one of the moments I go back to in my head when it’s time to talk myself out of climbing up some random clock tower somewhere and starting the shooting. If a pack of rowdy ten-year-olds can tell when it’s time not to tease someone having a weak moment, then there’s hope for humanity.

But every time I hear a tornado siren, I think of her tear-streaked face framed by wavy brown hair and wonder how she’s doing.

When tornadoes are nearby, they sound like a train going by. The one that had been spotted was close. Or rather, close enough. I could hear it. I didn’t particularly feel like seeing this one, as I had already seen a few, what with my likely-to-be-terminal case of not knowing when to come in out of the rain. What can I say? I like to see God work, even when what he’s doing is dragging the eraser on the top of His pencil through a line of houses in a subdivision.

Sometimes it seems it takes the worst that He can do to bring out the best in us. That’s not the way it ought to be, but what can you do? People are stubborn and selfish until they realize that losing everything isn’t the worst that can happen.

But then the rushing sound started to fade, and in the next minute or so the siren went quiet.  And I went to grab my camera. I loved taking pictures of the trees and flowers with water dripping off of them. And that really is the only time someone with allergies as bad as mine can get close to the damned things.

[*]

This one time, about six days into the massive solar flare-up, I was laying out up on the roof getting a moontan. Nobody knew how much worse it would get and we were all, in our own ways, trying to make the best of it. The reports we could get, what with the satellites all shut down, said the UV reflecting to earth from the full moon provided as much as the summer sun would ordinarily give us in half the time, so I figured I could, as pale as I was, give it maybe forty-five minutes per side.

I tried to bring a book to read, but the light was all wrong for reading. The pages were too bright, though just about right if I shaded them with something. That was too tiring, though. And all things considered, the tanning goggles were still a good idea anyway.

That wasn’t any kind of big deal. That was usually how it went out by the pool in the summer, too. Except it wasn’t summer, and it wasn’t daytime. I was terrified that I was doing something stupid, but I just couldn’t stay cooped up anymore. I needed some normal. I knew this wasn’t normal, but taking the opportunity on a day off to get a tan was normal. Even if it was November.

I’d take what I could get. And what I could get today — tonight — was an hour and a half of  beach blanket spread out on the roof deck.  Ten minutes into it I started crying and couldn’t stop because it was so strange, but I stayed the whole time. It was what I could get.

No one was a hundred percent sure what had pissed off the sun or how long it would continue, especially then. We were all pretty sure we were headed for crop failures and a mass extinction event. Probably there was a mad rush to go through old tree rings and antarctic ice cores and archaeological samples to see if this had happened before. To see whether it was survivable.

In the meanwhile, the power grid had been down pretty much for the duration. Metal everywhere was sparking like a fork in the microwave. The earth itself was starting to defend itself by filling the air with extra clouds. That blocked some of the direct radiation, but trapped some of the extra heat. We were in for some killer storms in upcoming months, they said. And we were absolutely screwed if the coronal hole all the way around the sun’s equator didn’t close up.

Some of the apocalypticos were already committing mass suicide, or hiding in basements wondering why Jesus didn’t call them into the sky to miss the time of tribulations. The hospitals, many of which were already out of backup power, were full to the brim with people with radiation sickness. People like myself, who couldn’t stand to be cooped up all the time, came out at night, wearing hats or all-over clothes or carrying moonbrellas if the moon was out, to meet outside in the parks or on the sidewalks to check up on each other. Stores that could get by without power opened up an hour or two after sunset and closed a couple of hours before sunrise so the people who worked there could get home.

That was rare, though. It was mostly curfews and martial law and people in various uniforms shooting looters.

While I was up on the roof, though, crying, listening to the sounds of no bird or airplanes or televisions or cars or anything but the occasional ambulance, I heard the roof-access door open. I couldn’t open my eyes to see through the tear-streaked goggles. I was afraid, but I couldn’t look to see who it was or whether I was in some kind of trouble. I just couldn’t care anymore.

Footsteps approached. I could feel a shadow for a moment. Then it went away, and the door opened and closed again.

And eventually it was time to go back inside. When I was packing up, folding up the blanket, I found that the person who had come to visit had left me a bottle of beer. Ironically, a Corona Light.

That was when I had decided to believe we were all going to be okay, or at least mostly okay. For those of us that made it through this, and out the other side.

[*]

This one time I was watching a tiny plum-and-scarlet crab move into a sandcastle and I had this thought about entropy. Entropy is a confusing thing. It’s what people blame when things fall apart. And people are all emotional about how they think about it, because things falling apart is kind of tragic. People we love age and die. Beautiful fragile things get smashed and broken. Sturdier things tarnish and weather.

Sandcastles, for instance, are licked apart by salt winds and the action of the foam-caked waves like a toddler with an ice cream cone. Any inhabiting crab has to perform constant maintenance to keep them up, and, unless the crab is a meticulous and conscientious housekeeper and capable and thorough handycrab, it’s a desperate and ultimately losing battle.

This is the natural order of things, people say. And their argument: “Imagine the action of wind and wave actually constructing a sandcastle. How unlikely is that?”

Unlikely things happen all the time. All the time. That is the natural order of things.

And I thought about it. I looked at my own sandcastle, with its new tenant scoping out the kitchen and planning an island and a total overhaul of the mess I’d made of the cabinets. (After all, building contractors don’t have to live in the houses they make.) I looked down the long, straight strip of brilliant white sand, bounded to the side and above by turquoise, and I saw three or four more.

Four or so billion years ago, probably not a single sandcastle. A few billions of years of wind and water action and some slapped-together chemicals get together and form long, tangly strands and  little curious microbes and gummy wobbly colonies and complex organisms with spines and shells and climb out of the water and, a million thumbs and plastic buckets later, sandcastles are inevitable. And there are more and more every year. More elaborate. More durable. Season by season, year by year, there are more sandcastles in existence in any given sun-bright snapshot-second than ever.

That’s pretty much the opposite of what people think of as entropy, but that’s sure as hell the natural order of things.

“But things wind down,” people say. “In a closed system, things turn into waste heat and useless choking dust.”

Yeah, but find me a closed system. If you start with a Big Bang and have it wind down through quark-gluon plasma and hydrogen/helium formation and spiraling accretion of stars and galaxies and galactic clusters, you eventually get the superstar that blew up and left the debris our solar system formed out of, with our modest but shiny new suburban sun and all our charming and quietly unobtrusive planetary neighbors and our wind and our waves and our sandcastles. We wind up on the very ticks of the universe itself winding down.

And things are far from over. Our sun has several billion years left on its clock. There are a zillion lumps of strange bits of matter zipping around out there, headed our way to fall into our well and keep things stirred up. That’s the next wind, the next wave.

And hell, maybe that will knock down our fragile little sandcastle and evict our pearls-and-apron steel-toed house/handycrabs. Maybe we’ll all scurry and run and dig into our burrows until the smoke clears. Maybe we’ll make it and maybe we won’t. But here’s something to think about.

What have the interstellar tides and winds and waves been building out there for the past thirteen billion years? What kinds of sandcastles, and what kinds of crabs?

[*]

This one time the old fear came back — the fear of getting lost someplace familiar. I’m an old woman, and you can’t be one of those without having been through your share of fears coming and going, but this one was the biggest one I ever ran across. The one that nearly made it too hard to live.

We keep our grip on reality by being able to trust what our senses tell us. Make someone doubt what their senses tell them and you pry fingers loose. You’ll see a breakdown on the spot. We build a picture of the world inside our heads out of the trickle of data we let in. And we take a lot of shortcuts. And sometimes we ignore stuff that contradicts what we think we know because it runs the risk of smashing the world as we know it and making us start over.

Did I say sometimes? My mistake.

You know your man loves you so you ignore the signs that he’s faking it, looking for excuses to not come home to you. Stuff that’s obvious to anyone who really doesn’t care one way or another. Because once you notice, it shatters your world. That kind of thing. Everybody has comforting illusions that are too dear to part with.

Mine is that I know where I am, where my home is, where my things are.

I live in a big building with lots of floors. Everybody who does has gotten off on the wrong floor sometime, not paying attention, and only been shocked out of it when their key doesn’t fit the lock. Carry that feeling with you for a few hours, that whole-world-out-of-joint feeling, only add to it not knowing how far back you need to retrace your steps to find your way back to the real world.

Imagine sitting in your comfiest chair by the window and worrying that if you get up and start walking with the wrong foot first, you’ll end up not being able to find your way across the room. That you’ll eventually find your way across some room, but it won’t have been yours, and you might not be able to find your way back to your chair.

It might be worse for me because I’m blind, but I imagine it’s the same with strong enough OCD.

It was really bad for me at first because my eyes worked fine up to halfway through my twenties. But it went completely dark overnight. It was a rough adjustment. Once you get to know a place, though, you feel safe again. You can light a room with white noise from a fan, a bowl of potpourri with a particular scent for each room, the smell of a wooden bookcase, the sharp plastic tang of a new bathmat. You might even learn to smell the cat before you sit on him — though if he’s smart, he learns to greet you when you come into the room. Because nothing really ever keeps you from sitting on the cat from time to time.

So this one time there was this loud crackle outside the window where I was sitting, and I could feel the light from whatever it was on my skin like a wave of heat, and then things went quiet. And then there was a roaring, but not a loud one, more like the blood in your ears after a run or sitting up too fast from having been asleep or sex. And then the air in the room changed, like it got colder, or maybe there was more of it. I felt the doorways on the other side of the room, lemon soap and metal in the kitchen, lavender potpourri in the far corner by the hall with the bookshelves, cotton and musk from the bedroom, but there were echoes in the air that were slightly different. Instead of just lemon, a kind of lemon-orange blend. With the paper of the old books, a combination of the same only with more leather. With the cotton and musk from the bedroom, another waft from the same direction with a hint of the smell of a man.

And then instead of just doubling, it doubled again. And again. Like the doorways opened up into a range of variations. Into a dozen pasts and futures.

I was frozen. Terrified. I’m sure I cried out. But eventually I got up and felt my way across the room to the hallway. To a hallway. And then back around the room to my bedroom doorway. Inside there were murmurings not quite drowned out by the sound of the ceiling fan. Scents of things, some of which were mine, some belonging to people lost to me more than a decade ago.

I made my way around the bed and made sure it was empty before climbing up on it. The textures were too stiff, too silky for a brief second under my hand, but settled down to a familiar cheap cotton. And then the sensation of extra space went away. Slowly. And I must have fallen asleep.

It’s been nearly as bad a couple of times since then, reminding me of a time I was out on a frozen lake once and the ice cracked. Everything’s fine before then, but afterward? Afterward you know it’s broken, and it’s just a matter of time before the cracks catch up with you and you fall in.

[*]

This one time I had a vision of fire.

Go figure. I mean, I am a firefighter. An old one, at that. I’ve done my share of climbing up ladders and passing out from being too hot in the suit and being too cold from being drenched and coughing my lungs out from breathing God knows what. The best part of what I do these days is teach. I teach about what fire is and where it comes from, about how it changes the world around us into choking poison, about how it renders your fat into fuel and sucks it out through your pores, about the mysteries that summon it here and how to banish it.

It depends on who you’re teaching whether you treat fire as a science or as a supernatural force. I prefer science myself, because man can control science, but sometimes I think I’ve seen too much to be able to buy it as 100% science myself. When you’re in a place that ought to be familiar, and you’re looking through a dirty, water-streaked mask into a room so dark all you can see are the creatures of flame leaning up against the walls and climbing across the ceiling, laughing and gesturing like guests at a fancy party, and you banish them and step away and they pop right back up, or circle around behind you — that’s when you know you’re fighting the devil and his minions. Fire does impossible things.

We tell people it takes three things to summon fire: fuel, oxygen, and enough heat to get it started. The oxygen part is a bit of a simplification, but seeing as this is earth and that’s the element that powers it here under most circumstances, we try not to complicate matters. We save that explanation for the kids that aren’t comfortable unless they know why. But those are the ones that really start having trouble once they start seeing the demons and start trying to figure out what they’re saying in the roaring hissing whistling popping cracking language of theirs.

It’s starting to seem like there are other sources of fire these days. That the triad of fuel-oxygen-spark is, you know, just kind of a guideline. I don’t like that. But it’s true. Stars, for instance, make fire just by squeezing hydrogen really really hard. And if bullshit like that works, you have to wonder what else might. We’ve learned fantastic ways to make light without heat, without that cascade that starts with something rich and ends with ash. Maybe fire’s killing attendants, the fat-melting, desiccating heat and the strangling, lung-tarnishing smoke, are free to travel without fire’s supervision. Maybe fire itself, the standing flame, can wander afield, harmless. Like a mob boss you can’t pin anything on.

I prefer to know how things work. Without a bit of consistency, there’s no hope to the job.

But, you know, a few days ago I was down in our little weight room with the boys trying to keep some muscle tone on my arms and keep my black ass from spreading from all the sitting around. We had all the doors open since it was a nice day. From where I was spotting for the guys, having done my rounds with the gear first, I could see out to the street where people were walking past, and I could see out the back to where there were public tennis and basketball courts. And, as best as I could tell, the world was on fire.

There were flames, ranging from the size of a dog to twice the size of a man, moving around out there like extra people on the sidewalks, extra people on the courts. Maybe four people out of five had one right nearby, or maybe even wrapping around them, and then there were flames that seemed to be walking around unattended. I could see a tree or two from where I was walking around, pretending nothing was wrong, and they were enveloped in flames. But nobody was being burned up. No pain, no screaming, no smoke, no soot, no ash.

But, a few days ago — that was only the first time. It’s gotten worse.

I don’t know what it means. Are the flames actually demons or angels or our own spirits? Is that the fire of living, of us using up the fuel and air we have as we go about our business?

I wish to hell I knew. Because otherwise I’m just going crazy.

[*]

This one time we were all on the stage pretending to be all musical and stuff, because that’s how we get paid. I’m pretty sure you’ve heard of us — pretty sure — but you’re about to hear some things that might contradict a few of our public statements here and there, and our PR guy works really hard at scripting those and making ’em sound like our own voices. He’s about the only member of the band that we all universally have any respect for, and also we pay him good money, so you’ll understand if I don’t want to be the one to undermine his good work.

So yeah, maybe I’m just a little bit in love with my body and spend a lot of time working on it and keeping it happy. And I’ll admit that gets me a frightening amount of attention — way more than I deserve and some of it truly, truly frightening. But singing and playing and keeping it moving onstage so the act is actually interesting to watch is an athlete’s job. Dancing for a couple of hours is hard enough work on its own, but try it when you can’t take a breath when you want because it would interrupt a phrase.

The lights and the smoke and the lack of sleep and the stupid things you do to try to make up for the missing sleep and the huge fights that come from the stupid nothings that a bunch of people who used to be best friends so they never hold back anyway and are now just sleep-deprived thirty- and forty-year-old toddlers in a six-month extended whingeing fit will age you pretty quickly. We can’t all be Tina Turner. And she paid for it with Ike, if you know what I’m saying. It gets harder all the time.

Do I sound a little defensive? Maybe I’m a little defensive. Maybe I know that I’m screaming sleep-deprived toddler number one, and I feel really guilty about the burden I put on the rest of the band. And it’s absolutely unfair that our bass player and his old high school ex-girlfriend write all of our best stuff and no one will ever remember his name — or that she even exists. And our lead guitar and our sound guy have been through some truly heinous shit in the past ten years that no one will ever get to know about, and all of it just because one’s gay and one’s of mixed racial heritage and that shit doesn’t die even in the twenty-first century.

I’m nothing without the band, and I knew that before I went solo for a couple of years. I did the solo thing to prove to them and the world that I needed them, and to let them figure out whether they really needed me, or wanted me despite everything. To give them the space. I did it as penance, to spiral down like a moth that got too close to a hot light, to show them, and all of our fans, that I really did know my place. And I did it even though no one will ever give me the credit for doing something like that on purpose. Because I’m just a dumb bimbo who flings her breasts and ass around onstage to keep the fans drooling and shelling out for tickets and a trickle of MP3s that they can close their eyes and masturbate to.

This is all beside the point, but this is the only place I could ever get something like that off my chest. Someplace anonymous. So it was either here or on that “Three Wolf Moon” t-shirt thread at Amazon.com. And I really am so self-centered that I would waste your time with this when there’s an actually interesting story that needs telling. So be it.

So we were doing our job as a band, pulling together where we were supposed to and leaning on one another when it was time for someone else to shine, and you could see it by watching the crowd. It wasn’t a huge venue, but we weren’t in one of the huge population centers either, and it was all okay. Big gigs come with so much extra production and promotion that they’re three times as exhausting as the one-day shows in flyover country. I learned to love the smaller shows flying solo.

But the crowd was something else this time. It was an open-floor arena thing, a sold-out show and fairly-well packed, and the crowd had done that thing it does that gives me the willies, but it’s the thing you go for. It’s the goal. It had started to gel into a loose mass of bouncing heads and waving arms and everything it did passed through it in waves. You could see a ripple of identical motions bounce around like waves in a big boiling pot, with little nuggets of holdouts here and there, being excluded for a moment and then reabsorbed.

I learned a long time ago to look out for those little clumps where things don’t mesh. And there was one this time. And the closer I looked, the more I knew what was up. There was someone with a gun.

It’s amazing how the world shrinks to a tiny point and you can focus on something that’s no bigger than the head of a pin at arm’s length. When you’re numb from the sound and bounced around by the kick-drum and blinded by dripping sweat and flashing lights. But I knew if I froze, if I stopped singing, the crowd would fall apart.

I saw one flash, then another, but there was no way you could even hear a gunshot in this place over the band. I couldn’t look around to see what happened, but nothing happened to the music. I took it as a sign that the shots missed.

But then I saw the crowd react. The gap around the gun widened in a fast ripple, but when it hit the edge it rebounded twice as fast. I saw motion zoom toward him over the top of the crowd. I saw the circle around him close, cover him for a moment, pinch him to the top, and surf him to the edge nearest the stage on a sea of arms like cilia on a microbe — where he was dropped at the feet of security guards. Where his corpse was dropped at the feet of security guards.

Questions asked after the show brought me the news. Every rib had been broken. He had just been smashed where he stood, both lungs and his heart punctured by bone fragments. And yes, they had found powder burns on his hands. And a gun in a trashcan on the opposite side of the floor. And, eventually, two holes in the backdrop and the walls behind the stage, proving that he had actually been firing at me.

The show never stopped. They just assumed the guy got hurt in the mosh pit until, after the show, the rumor got around that someone might have been in the crowd with a gun. God forbid anyone do anything to stop the show just because someone was taking aim at the lead vocalist.

But the crowd is a beast. It has a survival urge, and it knows that it will die when the music stops. Who can blame it for wanting to live as long as it can?

[*]