SRF Heavy Industries

This one time I decided to take a complete vacation from who I was and, you know, left the house. It wasn’t the first time I had done it. I certainly don’t do it often, because it usually ends miserably. But I work at work, and then I go home and work, and in those rare times I pick up hobbies those also kind of turn into work, and sometimes I think that I want that missing hobby to be another person, though, when I’ve done that, that definitely turns out to be work too.

It’s a good thing I don’t really mind work, but sometimes I’m sure there has to be something else to life. I keep hearing about it, and sometimes I catch a glimpse of it on television. But television isn’t real. Those people sitting at a bar by themselves on television are doing it because someone put a check in their hands and told them to look like they belonged there. When I see those people in real life, I see people that are out with friends, which I really don’t have too many of in this city except a couple that seem to be just as busy as me, and I see a couple of people who are desperate to not be home because there’s something at home that makes them so uncomfortable that they want to be elsewhere.

Maybe sometimes I go out just to remind myself that home is, you know, okay. And sometimes it seems as silly as holding your breath to remind yourself that oxygen is kind of cool. But  I do it anyway, every now and then, and I’m really not sure why, at the core. I don’t know what I’m looking for.

I’ve been told that bookstores are great places to meet people, because it helps to have a common interest, and when you go in, there is everyone, milling about but probably not too much, and if you look up at the ceiling or the top edges of the shelves or wherever the signs are, you can see everyone there is conveniently filed by topic of interest. I suppose it works best for people who read. But there are also music stores, or movie stores, or stores that do all three at once. Or hobby stores. Or…. I don’t know. I don’t have a lot of passion where my tastes in entertainment are concerned, and I’m not sure I’d have a lot of patience with someone who did.

Where I do have a lot of passion is in doing whatever I do competently. And I was making a hash of this. As I always do. I don’t like feeling like I’m out of my depth.

So I went to a bookstore. I milled around a bit, more than most people. I visited every section to see if anything would grab my interest. The thing that grabbed me most was a huge art book that was far outside my price range with pictures of a sculpture exhibition, but the pictures didn’t do it justice. Flat pictures of three-dimensional work hardly ever do, but it reminded me that I like to look at sculpture. And that made me wonder why I never visited the museums in this city when I felt I needed to get out of the house. Unfortunately it was too late in the day to go visit any of the museums, but I pulled out my idea notebook and wrote a note reminding myself that I should. And I went to the magazine section to find one that reviewed exhibits, including some of the ones here in the city, and I bought that.

And because I have trouble dealing with cafes of the sort that bookstores have in them, I left to go find one that was a bit more to my liking. And two blocks later, I was sitting down with a latte and my magazine.

The table I got actually had four legs, but it acted like maybe it had only three. I sloshed a bit of my latte into my saucer and onto the table, dousing the napkin I’d brought with me. As the coffee spread into the napkin, I idly tore off the damp part while I flipped through the magazine. The wadded dampness pretty quickly reverted to a pulpy mess in pretty much the way you hope most napkins won’t if you’re going to trust them to do their job, and while I read I found myself squeezing out the extra moisture and using the rest of the napkin to soak up the squeezings and to dry my fingertips between page-turns.

I was about half done with the magazine when I actually looked at the mess I was making. Without even looking, I had rolled it out, stood it on end and squashed it down. With my thumbnail I’d tugged some of the pulp away from the main body and formed two legs sticking out straight in front of it, even formed tiny upturned feet. Setting the magazine aside, I teased out two largely still-intact corners to make into arms that reached down to the table and twirled them until they were slender, spreading out the very ends to make tiny hands. With a little bit more work I made a reasonably realistic head.

Using a disk torn from the dry remnant, I made a wide-brimmed sun hat, and more scraps made a tiny pinafore that I wrapped around the little thing, dabbing a finger in more latte to tack it closed behind her back. And then it was pretty obviously done. And I sat there in shock.

But that was nothing compared to the shock of when I looked around to see if anyone had watched me do this thing, when I saw in a corner of the shop a small play area, with children’s books and loose toys, where sat a little girl, with latte-colored skin, in a white pinafore, sitting in much the same position. The only difference was the sun hat.

I wasn’t even sure this little cafe had a play area before now, and I usually only notice children when they’re being a nuisance, or, occasionally, a charming nuisance. And here I had created, in nearly complete ignorance, a tiny replica. Only because of the order in which I had noticed things, it seemed that I had created the real one by making the tiny model first. I knew that that was impossible, but I was dumbfounded regardless. I felt shattered, dislocated.

I got up and got a to-go box of the sort they give you when you take out pastries and cupcakes. I teased the little mannequin off the table, not too difficult as it was mostly dry now, and put her gently in the box, collecting also her fallen hat and the pinafore that had come open at the back. And I grabbed a small stack of the napkins, maybe ten or so, just in case it would be harder to replicate the trick with paper of higher quality.

And since then I have made little sculptures of maybe a hundred things that I would love to actually have exist. Just in case the magic ever happens again.

[*]

This one time I brought out all the house goblins and arrayed them on the table for review of the troops and a lecture. I didn’t know exactly what was going on, but I knew someone was falling down on the job.

I’m really not sure what good I expected it to do, but I was willing to try whatever. I mean, they were all just a pack of cheap plastic soldiers. My friend had painted all the helmets red with fingernail polish and declared them to be “red caps,” dedicated to keeping gremlins and all of the nastier of the Wee Folk in check by a declaration of martial law.

See, the aforementioned ersatz exorcist used to live in the apartment complex that had been on this piece of property before it was all ripped down and this new complex built. Rent there was quite a bit cheaper than here, as you can imagine, popular with college students and illegal immigrants who all paid the rent in cash or money orders at the beginning of the month. He said that it wasn’t as unpopular as it ought to have been for people to get beaten or even die here, and livestock too, I guess. There was a whorehouse being run out of the upper floors of the main building. I mentioned (kinda) the livestock pens with goats and chickens. Enterprising chemistry students built an impressive PCP production facility in the unit next to his, and, well, life there was about as interesting as you could imagine.

And it was all wrapped up in a hideously decaying Oriental theme. And I use the term Oriental instead of Asian to point out that it was faux-Asian decor and landscaping as imagined by people who had no experience of or respect for the culture(s) they were ripping off. Perhaps you get my drift.

He and some of his friends mysteriously obtained hardhats and, less mysteriously, a cooler full of beer and sandwiches to sit on the sidewalk and toast the start of the destruction when they tore down the first wall. They had all previously been residents, or perhaps just frequent visitors of residents, and were all extraordinarily happy to see some earthmover-driven gentrification. They had withstood break-ins, stray rounds through walls/windows/appliances/boxes of comics, lengthy unexplained interruptions in critical utilities, roof collapses, DEA busts — indeed, lights and sirens from every make and model of emergency vehicle — the sounds of animal slaughter, indecent solicitations at every hour of the day, choking clouds of chemical and/or sewage and/or offal smells, undocumented arrivals and departures of corpses and walking wounded, and cockroaches the size of bedroom slippers with aggressive streaks on a scale usually reserved for wolverines. And a neighbor that greeted the arrival of ten AM every weekend morning with the playing of, alternately, “Thriller” and “Hotel California” on vinyl, at a volume level measured in Richters instead of the usual decibels. That was a certain sign of demonic possession, he claimed.

He was a little worried that there might be a few psychic holdovers, possibly on the Civil War battleground or Indian graveyard scale. So he came over with a broom, a sage smudge, a cardboard package of kosher salt, and some Benedictine liquor he claimed was made and blessed by monks so it must count as holy water plus also we could drink it. And he also brought over the red caps, which he arrayed on the coffee table in much the way I had them now for the duration of the main ceremony, then deployed on windowsills and in cupboards and closets and various nooks and crannies throughout the place. “On patrol,” he said. And everyone who came to visit made a big joke of moving some of them around when I wasn’t looking. For verisimilitude.

I had plenty of guests. And a cat. I got used to seeing them in unexpected places while “patrolling” and never gave it a second thought.

Other than surreptitious troop movements I never caught the slightest whiff of any supernatural phenomena, and that surprised me not at all. Because I don’t believe in it. I do believe in humoring my friends and drinking whatever liquor they care to bring by, but that’s the end of my experience and expectations regarding the occult. Until this one time.

It was maybe the fourth morning running that I had woken up in the middle of the night with some sort of fading vision of a face outside my window — a window that was three floors up, I might add, seeing as I was on the second floor and my apartment was on the backside of the building where there was a cutaway slope exposing a basement wall. Well, call it three nights of a face outside my window and one night/early morning of that face hovering above me in my bedroom.

I checked all the angles to see what kinds of reflections were possible off the glass of the window and the mirror and a piece or two of framed art I had hanging. Nothing made sense on that front, except the usual stuff your brain gets up to in that hypnagogic state that you’re in right when you’re going to sleep or waking up.

Skeptic or not, known scientific explanations or not, it’s not a very pleasant experience to feel that someone is in the room with you and is perhaps not of a mood to shake your hand and drink your health, but perhaps actually willing to kinda vampirically drink your health, if I have to spell it out. I wanted it to stop, and I didn’t exactly want to invest in therapy or antipsychotic meds.

So I collected the troops and assembled them on the table. In an old 1970’s amoebic green ash tray, I lit a small charcoal disk propped up on thin rolls of aluminum foil so air could get underneath it and sprinkled on some rosemary and a crumpled bay leaf, because I was out of sage. And I prayed soulfully to invoke To Whom It May Concern, instructing the troops to echo in their tiny plastic minds everything I was saying aloud so it would carry a little more psychic weight. Sophia, always willing to help and stand in as my temporary familiar, over in the corner and thankfully on the stone-tiled hearth, horked up her best hairball as an offering.

And then I begged the Powers That May Or May Not Be to allow me to keep my grip on my precious sanity and let me get some damn sleep because, as a skeptic, I was busy doing my damn duty convincing myself and anyone else who was inclined to listen that they didn’t exist, thereby enabling them to get up to whatever shenanigans they were compelled to enact without people taking overt action to impede them, and didn’t they appreciate that?

And then the sky suddenly went dark and the building shook like there was an earthquake and a terrible screech rent the air and every last damn one of the red caps fell over. I’m sure the screech had been mine, or at least pretty sure, but that’s beside the fact. The fact is I didn’t sleep that night, but I did the next one, and every night since then, and since then I have never felt so rested as I do now when I wake up in the morning.

I sealed up all the red caps except one (that wouldn’t fit) in one of those zip-seal baggie things and I keep the lot of them in the toilet tank. The remaining one I gave over in a small pointless ceremony to Sophia, who, although she never took an interest in them previously, promptly ate his little head off and now plays hide-and-seek with his widdle plastic corpse.

And that, ever since, has been that.

[*]

This one time I was in the park with my camera, trying to take pictures of the old shut-down museum across the street. It had closed for good maybe seven years prior, having finally slid off the radar of any organization willing to offer it any support. In its earliest days, which were less than a hundred years ago, it had been completely privately funded. As the owning family slid into financial decay, it was more and more funded by public money and grants from various private foundations. And as that money started to dry up, the hours the museum was open scaled back to two or three days per week, then only during the school year, then only during the summer, then just Tuesdays, then by appointment only.

It’s still open by appointment only, but now mostly to real estate agents and property investors.

My visit was ostensibly on behalf of the Historical Preservation Society, but the charter really only covered buildings and properties and other items of interest that were over 120 years old. This building was five years outside the charter and unlikely to survive those five years until it could officially be considered. Also, it was right on the park and in deadly danger of being turned into luxury residential. You know. If the market were to start recovering at all.

I was basically just here with my camera. If the building wasn’t here in five years, I’d have thorough documentation of its final state, and maybe the HPS would endorse a book deal for me and sell it through their website. Or maybe I could broker its use for movie sets or stuff like that, since I was still in good with the direction department at the university. Or maybe I’d just get some nifty atmospheric pictures of a dilapidated museum.

I started with copies of the building plans. It was a huge place, an old manor gone metastatic, with new wings and additions and outbuildings and extensive grounds, much of which had already been bought by the city and incorporated into the park. The way I was going to keep track of where the pictures were taken was simple. I numbered each room on the multifloor plans with its own number, and then, carrying the plans with me so I wouldn’t get confused, I would jot down in a little notepad what time I entered which room, using the built-in clock in the camera which would also be putting the timestamps on the filenames for every shot. Then, after dumping the files to my computer, I could just make a folder for each room and drag the files into the room/location folders by their timestamps.

You can probably guess by the amount of detail I just went into that there were some issues with that system. And you’re right. And I’ll get to it.

The reason it’s a big deal is that I’m really not a very organized person. Anytime I go out, I have to dump out any of five or six purses and go through the debris to make sure I have everything with me I think I’ll need for the day. And somehow I still screw that up. I meticulously put appointments into my phone’s calendar thing and then lose my phone for three days. But I thought of everything that could go wrong and armored myself against it.

I made copies of my labeled sets of the floor plans, making sure none of the numbers were duplicated — every room got a number based on the floor, and I never got confused which floor was which. I put the copies in a folder in my filing cabinet and carried the originals in my camera bag. Before I started shooting, I made sure the clocks on my camera and my watch and the one on my cell phone all agreed — just in case I screwed up and checked my watch or my phone instead of the camera to jot down the time. And I was proud of myself for coming up with all this and for being so careful.

And nothing went overtly wrong. I had spare memory cards and spare batteries and all of that stuff and didn’t need any of it.

The problem was that when I got home and downloaded the pictures — starting with keeping them in one huge bunch, just to flip through and spot check for lighting issues and such — maybe three quarters of them didn’t look very familiar at all.

I mean, there were five floors in total, including the basement. Many of the rooms were decorated in different themes, depending on the collection being displayed, and some of them were just different because that’s how the rooms were decorated when the manor was still in use and no one thought anything needed changing or updating when it was converted over. And there were still rooms set up to be lived in, by a curator or docent or security or whatever enticements the place could use to keep someone on site so it wouldn’t get broken into. And I documented everything, whether it was officially a part of the museum or not.

I can play the walkthrough back in my head, just looking at the plans. You know. Mostly. But I can’t help the evidence that was in front of me. The camera totally saw different things than what I had seen. I don’t know how else to put it.

I went ahead and dragged the shots into the folders they were supposed to go into according to their timestamps. And I used that to try to make sense of the shots. And it was no use. Some shots matched up, but some showed extra nooks and crannies. Inconsistencies in wallpapers, in paint, in theme of decor, in what was being displayed. Missing windows. Extra windows, even, with peeks of unfamiliar (if not downright impossible) scenery outside, beyond the draperies and window treatments. Not a lot of museums let sunlight inside to fade things or otherwise degrade materials on display, but even so, what little outside views I saw were strange and unfamiliar. Rooftops of buildings that were certainly too far away. Tree limbs visible through windows that were taller than the trees in the yard. And that wasn’t the worst of it.

I’ve been going over these pictures for weeks now, off and on, when I can stand it. And if anything it gets worse instead of better. Shots I thought I could place slip away from me. And every couple of days I get a call from the museum rep, asking for copies of the shots so they can forward them along to their insurance company in hopes of better documenting what they have and either improving coverage or cheapening premiums. And I keep stalling, just in case I can make sense of everything before I bundle it all up and send it over.

I’m terrified it will all just slip away from me.

[*]

This one time I was repacking my meager bag under a bridge over some west-bound Interstate highway or other. Maybe. The problem was that I hadn’t seen a sign in a long while and had slept away a few hours before being dropped here. I was still half deaf from sleeping in the back of an open-bed pickup truck. Every car that drove past sounded like it was sneaking up on me.

Everything you want always settles to the bottom of the bag. That’s why it shocked me a little to find the energy bars on the top of the pile. I pulled out the little sack and set it aside while I rolled up three t-shirts and a pair of jeans to make it all pack tighter. Then I took out a bar and put the sack back in the bag.

I really wish I knew which way I was going. The sun had been up for maybe an hour, but it was off to one side, perpendicular to the highway. “East” and “West” on highways refers to a general direction averaged over a couple hundred miles. The Interstate system, much like the Romans, will claw a path right through a mountain, so there aren’t many chances for confusing switchbacks, but still. There were enough good ol’ boys around here to influence whose property got cut up when the roads came through that it’s still a bit of a mess. That and the road has to be built on ground that will support a flotilla of tanks zooming by. Eisenhower was big on the idea of getting infantry and cav from coast to coast, border to border, in a big damn hurry, and that’s what these highways are all about.

I just wanted to go south at some point. To cross the border. And then another border. And another. All of them, eventually. I’d started out in Alaska. Crossed Canada to Nova Scotia. South on the East Coast down to Florida. Now west, until I got to a place where I could turn south.

Marching had been all I was good for, they said. I was good at it. I could keep it up all day. And when I got back from being paid to march, my girlfriend was gone, my parents were gone, my job was gone. So I decided I was going to march around the world.

Maybe not march the whole way. But you know what I mean. I was headed by whatever means were necessary down to Tierra del Fuego, then visit a piece of Antarctica if I could, otherwise catch a ride to Cape Town and head, oh, northish.

I didn’t really want to revisit the corners of the world where I had already done a lot of marching, but I figured I could just go around.

Against my better judgment I kept the State Department in the loop about where I was and what I was doing so they could help me with the occasional border issue. I made a point of turning down any favors anyone there asked me to do, delivering messages or packages, but they seemed to be in favor, at least in theory, of the whole project. As long as I stayed out of trouble.

And here I was, in a pretty heavily traveled portion of the USA, not even miserable from the weather or anything, but still with no fundamental knowledge of where I was or where I was going, and by damn if that wasn’t the perfect metaphor for the twenty-five years of my life to date. Comfy. Happy. Lost. Confused. Hopeful that there was a lot more trip ahead of me than behind me. On an endless, pointless journey to nowhere specific.

Then the earthquake hit. I watched two cars bottom out and bounce a foot into the air, perfectly synchronized, while the bridge above me made a noise that nothing that weighs hundred of tons and is hovering over your head should ever make. I ran and dove out from under it, and it embarrassed me by not falling down or dropping anything more than a little dust.

Meanwhile back on the road, one of the cars tipped sideways and slid down the road on the passenger-side door. The other car pulled off the road up ahead, past the bridge. I trotted out into the roadway to see what I could do about the tipped car.

And it was empty. I ran around front to look through the windshield and I saw nobody. I couldn’t see anyone through the back window either. I looked into the floorboards as well as I could through the moon roof. Nothing. Nobody.

I looked back along the road to see if traffic was about to start stacking up. About a hundred yards back there was some kind of break or crack, and cars were, for the most part, stopping behind it. One had nosed over and its front bumper was on the ground. Must be a bit of a drop.

Eventually the guy up ahead came jogging back to see if he could help with the sideways car. We rocked it until it fell back on its wheels and then we both climbed in and looked around. We found a purse with a wallet and a spilled cup of coffee. We shoved it off the road and called the highway patrol from his cell. And when they got me, they were all about running me in for stealing the car, but the other guy swore up and down he saw me under the bridge, going through my bag, and the empty car had been behind him for miles.

I never did figure out what had happened — whether the missing woman had been thrown out of her car somehow and had dragged herself off, or whether she just got herself mysteriously vanished somehow or what any of it could have had to do with the earthquake.

Maybe my grandmother had been right about how the world was going to end, with all the Christians being yanked off the earth in times of earthquakes and volcanoes and whatever other end-of-the-world special effects would be required. Maybe this was just a test run, God checking his equipment before running the full scenario. One person snatched up, one moderate earthquake. Maybe somewhere around here someone’s pantry and refrigerator went mysteriously empty (by way of famine) and a nearby yard got triple the usual number of locusts. And elsewhere one puny fireball rained down from the heavens.

Though I hear that sort of thing happens all the time.

[*]

This one time I had this dream that there was a kind of rattle-sound in the box at the bottom of my closet. I dreamed that it woke me up, and in the dream I sat up in my bed but I was too scared to get out of bed to see what it was. I pulled the blanket up over my head and I screamed and that must have woke me up because when I woke up I was doing the same thing. I remember I was worried about Mommy couldn’t hear me scream if I had the blanket over my head, but nothing in the world could make me take the blanket off until Mommy came, so I just kept screaming.

When Mommy got there I told her about the sound and she turned on all the lights and opened the closet door and looked through the box that just had old clothes and shoes in it. First she pulled it out and looked it all over to see if there was holes in it, but there wasn’t. Then behind her in the closet a piece of the floor lifted up and I didn’t see what was pushing it up, but I screamed and pulled the blanket up over my head and kept screaming, and then I woke up again and Mommy came into the room and turned on all the lights.

I told her about the box in the closet and that she had already come in here to look in the box and that when she was looking the floor lifted up, and she sat on the bed for a minute and told me I was just dreaming, that I had a nightmare. Then she went to the closet and opened the door, and there wasn’t a box on the floor or anything because there never was. I told her where the floor lifted up, and she knelt down to look at the floor, and that’s when a hand came out of my dresses and grabbed her by the hair and my closet door slammed closed.

I pulled my blanket over my head and screamed and screamed, and then I woke up and kept screaming. Mommy came in and turned on all the lights. I told her that there was a box that rattled and I had dreamed that she came to check, but then I had woke up again and she came and the floor lifted up, and then I had woke up again and she came to check and some man grabbed her hair and pulled her in and slammed the door, and I asked her not to go to the closet to check. But then the door to the closet just came open, just a little bit, all on its own, and I pulled the blanket over my head and screamed and screamed and woke up again.

When Mommy came this time I told her to take me to her bedroom. I kept screaming and I couldn’t talk but I pointed at the closet and screamed louder when she got up to go to the closet door, so she came and picked me up and took me down the hall to her bedroom. Puppy was curled up on the bed and was grumpy, but Mommy made him get down so I could sleep next to her. Mommy hugged me until I felt better but not all the way better and she fell asleep, but I kept hearing Puppy walking around. Then he sat down in front of the door and growled, and I told him to hush up. He was looking at me when Mommy’s doorknob turned and the door opened up, and then another Puppy came in and they both jumped up on the bed and started fighting and I pulled the blanket over my head and screamed and screamed and when I woke up, I was in my bed, with my blanket over my head, and I was screaming.

When Mommy came in and turned on all the lights, Puppy came in with her and went up to the closet door and started growling. I tried to tell her about the box and the floor and the man and Puppy fighting another Puppy on the bed in her bedroom but I was crying too hard. Puppy kept growling and barked at the closet and Mommy went and snatched open the door so hard Puppy had to jump out of the way and there was another Puppy in there only he was hurt and bleeding and Puppy jumped in and dragged him out and then I pulled the blanket over my head and started screaming.

When I woke up this time, Mommy came in and turned on all the lights. I couldn’t breathe or talk, but I pointed at the closet and said “Puppy” and she sat down next to me and told me Puppy had ran away two days ago and hadn’t come home. And then she opened up the closet door and the floor was pushed up and Puppy was in there, but he wasn’t moving but a little bit, and there was a man trying to go back down through the hole in the floor. Mommy grabbed the man by his hair and pulled him out of the hole in the floor and started hitting him and biting him and I pulled the blanket up over my head and screamed and screamed and screamed.

I didn’t wake up again this time, but Mommy sat down on the bed with me and hugged me through the blanket and said that it was okay, that the man was dead and the police were going to come and take him away and that I could go to her room and sleep with her tonight.

[*]

This one time I was standing over the monitors at the security station with the head of building security, the head of HR, and that dumb mouthy bitch from inside sales that everyone always tells all the stories about. She wears the clothes and makeup of a woman ten years younger than her. She’s got a sense of entitlement ten miles wide and an ass to match. And she can wield a sexual harassment suit like one of those swords from “The Highlander.” She’d already got two people fired during her three short years here, and I was the next on her chopping block.

But I was innocent, and we were about to watch the evidence.

See, we were in the elevator, coming back from lunch. I’d had my old college bookbag with me, because I’d brought my lunch and a book read out at the picnic tables in the square, if I could find a place — but as happens about half of the time, all the tables were taken. One of them by her, as it turns out. So I found my car in the company deck and ate in there. Cranked a few tunes. Skipped the book and took a twenty-minute nap. And I left my bag in the car. You know. Since I was done with it.

We both got into the elevator to come back at the same time. Along with about ten other people, and it was mondo crowded. But we worked on the fifteenth floor, and eventually everyone else filtered out.

As the last person except us got off, a got a bit of a bump in the thigh from a sharp corner of a briefcase and leaned into a wall to kind of shrug it off. As I straightened back up, I stuck a hand behind me to steady my bookbag, backward, at just about waist level, to grab it by the bottom. It’s a reflex. Because as you might remember, and as I had forgotten, I’d left my bag in the car.

What I had grabbed by the bottom was the leather-wrapped ass of this bitch, here, who had turned sideways to get into her own purse for some dumb reason. But since it was nearly the shape and texture I was expecting, it took a moment for the confusion to clear in my head.

And then there was the screaming and the death threats and the doors opened and she raced off to HR, trying to drag me with her. I yanked my hand free and was gonna head back to my desk, but a couple of people who came to see what was going on mentioned that maybe I should make sure there was someone to tell my side of the story. So here we are.

And now I have the viewpoint of someone who’s just died, floating above his recently vacated body with a new kind of perspective. Thanks to the tapes and the camera in the elevator.

And I’m looking down at the sad, balding, stumpy, pudgy man in the elevator, wearing clothes at least a decade too young for him. Other people are sneering at him behind his back, obvious in to the viewpoint of the camera. One of them puffs out his cheeks to look like mine and mimics my sad grimace. The guy he’s standing next to grabs some hair and pulls it forward over his not-yet-balding dome, pointing at my head. They laugh silently. The woman whose ass I had accidentally grabbed rolled her eyes at them and turned away, fuming.

It was the cheek-puffer’s briefcase that had nailed my leg. He didn’t even look back.

I could feel the heat of humiliation in my face. I’m pretty sure my fat, balding scalp was on fire. I could feel the blush in my chest. My hands and feet went ice cold. But we hadn’t even gotten to the good part.

As I straightened up, pushing off the wall with my right hand, my left hand went up to where the strap of my bag would have been on my left shoulder. And there I was, sticking my right hand out behind me, right at waist level, palm up … and there I am grabbing a handful of leather-wrapped ass. Suede skirt, not suede bookbag. A pocket on the skirt, not the zippered pouch I was expecting. Facing the wrong way. Did I switch my bag with someone else’s accidentally? Why is it turned the wrong way? How can it be turned like that and not pull on my shoulder strap? Holy shit, where is the strap? Did it break?

You could read it all on my chubby, balding face. Every last bit. You could see the blood draining out of my features, see the fear building, then the anger drop into place to enforce the view that whatever had just happened, it wasn’t my fault. Then her hand snatched at mine, and I cowered back. Jacket too stylish and casual for work. No tie. V-neck polo underneath, at least one button too many left unbuttoned. And a blue that made my blotched complexion look pink and grubby. Some kind of cheap chain around my neck. Pants too tight for me. And a smidge too long. Loafers instead of reasonable dress shoes. And my hairstyle had drifted over the years into an honest-to-God comb-over. A huge-ass metal watch like a pimp would be proud of.

I was ridiculous. And I was proud of it. I thought I was the shit. And it hit me: I was everything I had ever accused her of being. Undeservedly vain. Trying to shoehorn myself back into a younger version of myself and brutally defensive about the bits that wouldn’t fit. Jealous of my entitlements, because if I didn’t stick up for them, who would?

I mean, Jesus, look at me. Look at me.

She turned to look at me, in front of the HR director, in front of the security guy, face all shut down and bitter, and opened her mouth. She was angry, and humiliated, but was ready to do the right thing. I cut her off. I couldn’t stop myself.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” It was what I should have said when I found that I accidentally had a handful of her ass, regardless of how or why. “Jesus, I’m sorry.” Sorry for how I had thought about her, how I had joked about her when others had. Sorry I had in any way thought that was okay. And there she was, on camera and everything, sticking up for me with those two bastards, letting them know in a way that wouldn’t embarrass me that they were being dicks. The same kind of dick I was. Had always been. Except, you know, not as ridiculous as me. Tears were streaming down my face. “Christ, I’m sorry.”

She just stood there, mouth hanging open, face unclouding and relaxing.

The security guy just kept his face down, not looking at anyone. I couldn’t tell whether he was ashamed of something too, or just trying not to laugh.

I turned to the HR director. She looked, at this moment, like the epitome of everyone’s sympathetic mother. I couldn’t take it.

“If we’re done here,” I said, “I’m going back to my desk.” And I bolted.

[*]

This one time I looked up and saw the Earth hanging in the sky, right above the horizon, backlit by the sun, which had set a week or more ago. It was a rare opportunity to get out the telescope and see what I could of earth’s night-side lights, the aurora australis, the light-shows above storms in the south Atlantic….

Here in the lunar night, my suit was tuned to use body heat to power the electronics and help me shed just enough of the excess to keep me comfortable. I had about thirty hours of compressed oxygen, maybe a little more than half that in the CO2 scrubbers — plenty to cover my shift out here, already mostly over, plus a few hours of contemplation and personal observation of home. Invisible to me, Earth’s magnetic tail fanned out, blown back by the solar breeze and inflating like a parachute. The equipment I was checking out and cleaning was mapping the magnetic lines by following streams of protons as they spiraled in toward Earth’s poles, lit and perturbed in their travels by the lightning in storms below that the infall was, as it settled in, fueling.

I turned with my back to Earth and, as my eyes adjusted, the stars began to appear. Even with occulted earthshine lighting the lunar landscape, painting the gray with stained-glass blue shadows, I was able to see the Milky Way and make out the galactic core without blocking my view of the twilit ground. It never gets less magnificent. I captured a multishot with the full-range array — way overkill for a holiday snap. But that’s the gullet that will eventually devour us. The drain we will eventually spiral down.

Turning back around, dead center in my view of Earth was the huge mess over the eruption of Tristan da Cunha — a slow and steady and steadily worsening mess that was filling the skies with enough abrasive crap to have shut down the last three supply runs, in addition to grounding almost all of the planes on the planet. Over the course of the past two years, the ice caps had grown enough that we could tell from here. Just from the change in albedo. Volcanic gases are greenhouse fuel, though, so when all that crap settles out, assuming Tristan ever settles down, Earth will be a little more screwed without increasing the capacity of the carbon sinks.

It was gonna be a while until the next bus home. Or mail call, for that matter.

It was slow going converting dead moon to biomass, and we were doing well to not be sawing off our own legs and eating them already. Water we could make. We had a lot of really expensive metals just lying around in heaps, fantastic overkill for the printers to make us whatever shapes we needed. Silica and ceramics up to our eyeballs. Every scrap of carbon we found, we reburned and fed to the algae tanks. The salps ate it up, fat and happy.

I never thought I would miss plastic. Aerogels were fun but way too strange, even to someone living on the moon. Vacugels were even more fun. We could make big boats from them to sail the skies of Earth, anchor the bases of the elevators to the stars with neutrally buoyant masses miles above where the planes fly. Normally. When Tristan settles down.

And home. There was home, right up there. I could nearly take a running jump from here and get there in a month or so. Just swim the deeps. She would draw me to herself with open arms. It was heartbreaking.

This was the moment I got the message from base that funds were too tight to send us another bus. Too long without planes shut down too much trade, started a slow cascade that caused too much damage. We were officially out of reach. For years. Maybe two. Maybe a decade. Maybe never again.

Maintenance was my secondary. My primary was chaplain/counselor. Time to button up everything out here and head back to where I was needed.

For however long we were going to last.

[*]

This one time I was rereading a book I know I had read maybe thirty times, and I couldn’t remember what was going to happen next.

I know I’m not the world’s best reader. I couldn’t really even be called literate until the seventh grade, and that was because my grandfather put me in this summer program after the sixth grade. He came to live with us after my dad went to jail, and since he wrote stuff for a living, he wasn’t willing to put up with anyone living in the house with him who was just scraping by. We had a big fight about it, and my mom weighed in, and then there was that scare with the abandoned building on the next block over, and then I figured I owed him something for stepping in to keep me out of juvie.

I remember the meat of the argument after all these years. He said the big difference between people who are in and out of jail their whole lives and people who aren’t is whether those people can read and write well enough to save themselves. I shot back with the counter that there was no way in hell just being able to read and write would keep you from being a criminal. I said maybe it just made you a better class of criminal. Then, because my mom was there, he leaned over and whispered, “Tell me, you dumb shit: what’s wrong with that? Also, why not learn a little bit of how not to get caught? People write that shit down. Find it and read it.”

At least that’s how I remember it happening this time. I never wrote it down until now, to fix it in my head.

Grandpa told me that’s how science and technology are taking off like they are right now, and why it never had until public schools and mandatory education came along. As long as only maybe five people in a hundred could read or write, then everyone who couldn’t read had to count on those people to not be lying for their own ends when it was time to go through what people had already found out and written down.

“Words don’t change once you write’ em down,” he said. “That’s what will save us all.”

I believed him at the time, but I don’t believe that so much now.

I don’t read or write any language except English, but I know English. And I’ve picked up what Beowulf looked like when it was first written down, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and a King James Bible, and a copy of the US Constitution, and some H.G. Wells, and some Vonnegut, and the comments section of any given YouTube page, and I’m convinced that the more stuff gets written down, the faster English itself changes, making all the stuff that’s gone before less and less comprehensible. Like science and technology, it just changes faster and faster.

And this book in front of me, this book my grandfather wrote, I read it every six months. Once on his birthday, and once on the anniversary of his death. And every damned time I read it, it’s different. It’s different to the point that the world itself is different when I get to the end.

After the fifth or sixth time I read it, it freaked me out so badly I started writing down everything that was important to me so I’d remember how things actually happened.

Not that that helped any.

You know already that when you read something, you can be confused about the meaning of the words. Some words have a bunch of different meanings. New meanings to old words crop up all the time, and old meanings fall out of use, and that doesn’t even take into consideration sarcasm, irony, and people deliberately trying to keep you confused about what they mean. Then you have to take into account a book has a hundred thousand words, or maybe twice or tree times that, and when you have to depend on context to tell you what meaning a word has, or a sentence, or a paragraph, or a chapter, you can get a cascade that changes everything, start to finish. A cascade that can sweep you along with it, and change everything downstream.

Especially if what you’re reading tells you important truths about the history of things, about your family. About yourself.

Twice a year I pick up this book. If the past few months have been horrible, I can count on this book to have a good chance of rearranging things so that things will have been better. If the past few months have been beautiful, then I pick up the book with fear and trembling. Sometimes it doesn’t change things. Sometimes it just puts things in perspective or refines them. But you never know.

Context is everything.

[*]

This one time I sat on my naked ass on a beach with black sand. The wind was cold at my back, but when it blew off the waves, it was as hot as any oven. The sun edged toward the top of the mountain at my back, promising a quick and early sunset.

A watched the waves roll in, stacking on top of each other in their rush to bring in the tide. And everything else the tide would bring.

I shivered and gasped with the chill. Then poured with sweat. Breathing was a chore.

With the sun at my back, the colors of the sea were amazing. In the blues and aquas were pinks and oranges, and the sun itself played in the waves like a school of porpoises made of lightning. The clouds in the sky were impossible colors and shapes. A textured leopard-skin shot with green shadows against an orange background. Gulls hovered in the breeze, coasting up and down and looking for snacks, their backs to the impossible beauty.

I coughed. Seawater trickled from a sinus, dripping past my numb lips. My swimsuit was bunched in my left hand. I couldn’t feel that either. My legs, also numb, were crossed under me.

In my right hand I clutched a tiny, tiny jellyfish, freshly removed from my freshly removed swimsuit.

My muscles were locked. I couldn’t move. I was locked up with cramps. Once in a while I could shiver.

Also on the beach: some humongous chunks of driftwood. What looked for all the world like most of the skeleton of a cow. I couldn’t turn to look at them now, but I saw them before I went into the water. Also on the beach: maybe twenty or thirty other people.

I desperately wanted help. Needed help. But I couldn’t move, couldn’t shout, and, apparently a stark naked woman sitting on her ass on a black sand beach, clutching her swimsuit and watching the waves come in, was something to be ignored. Or maybe treated as part of the incredible beauty of the place.

The colors were fading from the world. I was dying, and I was blending right in, wracked with pain, paralyzed, and dying with the sun. Dissolving into the sea.

As blackness approached, giant forms detached themselves from the scenery around me and approached. I was more aware of their presences than able to see them, but the two in front of me were more visible, stretching from ground to sky, black, shiny like obsidian, like the sand of this place, silhouetted against the dimming grayness behind them.

Their forms were dreamlike and harshly beautiful, like this place. Maybe they were the gods of this place, come to collect me.

Scented winds rolled down off of them. The one on my right, closest to me, brought the smell of rotting wood, of musky unnameable flowers, of the sex-life of animals. Without seeing her move, first I saw her looking out to sea, as tall as the clouds herself, crowned by an early star. Then she was facing toward me, as naked as I.

To her left was a sculpted pillar of a masculine form, so tall the setting sun lit his scalp and crowned him with fire. The wind from him smelled of brimstone, of fresh lava, of wind-eroded earth, of wood and soil on fire. To the right of the pillar-woman in front of me, right and beyond, was a wide man with his feet in the water and his head in the growing stars, smelling of the skin of living fish and of the sea.

I could sense at least two more behind me, one for each peak of the mountains, their wind smelling of fresh snow and frozen blood.

They spoke with nearly unheard unearthly rumbles underneath the roaring of the surf and the wind. Or maybe they spoke with the surf and the wind too, and the roaring of the blood in my ears.

The pain was unbearable. My breaths were too slow and too shallow. My cramps turned to convulsions and pitched me sideways. Slowly, sedately, the gods of this place knelt to receive me into themselves.

And then, over the roaring of blood and wind and wave, I heard a distant voice: “In her hand! Holy crap! Is that a sea wasp?”

“Keep her breathing! Let’s get her some help.”

[*]

This one time I was buried up to my knees in shaded, cold loam full of wriggling life, wrapped by green vines covered in tiny yellow flowers, with my face pressed into the flank of an antelope. Moments later I was face down on sunwarmed stone, one hand in a puddle of rose-scented laundry water, spitting from the taste of dry cactus bones. Then I was on my back, lying on air, adrift in a vapor of new cotton, sliced cucumbers, gin, old cigar tobacco, and rotted leather.

My grandmother’s first husband had been a perfumer. They had managed to escape Paris for Switzerland when the Germans came, though he managed to die from food poisoning within a month of their escape. They had somehow left Paris with a full trunk of bottled essences, which was possibly used as the excuse for their travel in the first place. I forget the story, but I remembered the trunk. And when my grandmother died, thirty years after the death of my father, it passed to me.

In transit the the US from Switzerland via Holland, with my father as a tiny child, the boat they traveled on encountered some rough weather. Or maybe it had even been fired upon by a submarine. No one had the story anymore. The research was beyond me. But nearly every bottle in the trunk had broken or come uncorked, and all of the essences and oils and resins had escaped into the wads of padding or into the case itself. The case was well sealed and waterproof. My grandmother had left it sealed for the most part and had opened it only once a year, and then only for the first five or six years, on the anniversary of my grandfather’s death.

And thanks to that trunk, I knew what it was like to be surrounded by snakes in a pit of damp sand, warmed by a lump of burning camphor. Or wearing a suit made of seaweed and strips of green birch with a lump of musky alabaster in my mouth.

The nose cheats. There is no other way to put it. You can be walking along, minding your own business, and then a whiff of something can yank you out of yourself and drop you forty years into your past into a recollection that has to be real just based on the strength of it, but otherwise would never have been revisited. Cinnamon-roasted almonds, diesel fumes and fish guts. Cherry blossoms raining from a snow-tainted sky. Mud from the back of a tortoise. A green-stained handful of shredded leaves and fresh bright blood from stripping a thorny vine through your fist. An elephant upwind, accompanied by fresh paint and cotton candy. Seared flesh and charcoal and lighter fluid and the smell of a young girl’s screams and tears. Dyed silk and formaldehyde and nail polish and the wrong shampoo.

But the nose cheats worse than that. It will take you to places you have never been, to impossible places that have never, that could never, exist.

I opened the trunk a whole inch and let it slip closed. And then I was in the presence of burning plastic wrapping lemon-soaked boiled eggs, put out by damp blankets of rabbit fur. Again: a mouthful of slivers of tin and dried beans and hair glued to porcelain dolls. Again: a head-to-toe shroud of lavender-laundered lace and a pillow of onionskin pages. Again: the warm glow of the inside of an old tube radio, burning dust and dessicated spiders and a hidden love note with a single pressed orchid. Again: a flurry of feathers and diaper-rash ointment and brilliant red magnolia seeds.

The fluttering light changed with every slam of the trunk lid. Outside the draperied window, the wind drove a flurry of heavy clouds past the sun, but the light brightened or darkened at the slamming of the lid, accompanying the whooshing of impossible years and incalculable, improbable distance. Distant power lines moaned and screeched at the strain on the boundaries of reality.

Breathless, finally breathless and wiping away tears, I put my head on the top of the trunk and breathed in the here-and-now scent of old wood, leather-wrapped brass hinges, old books, pipe ashes, dry-rotted quilts, death from long illness, and the discarded dander of many dozens of known and marked and dutifully buried years.

But I never forgot that escape was just on the other side of the lid.

[*]