SRF Heavy Industries

This one time I was having one of those days when it seemed that no decision I made was the right one — and things were snowballing. Like the wrong answer to “Is this my turn onto the highway?” not only puts you on the wrong segment of the highway. It puts you going the wrong way on the wrong highway — head-on toward a funeral procession. No, no, make that a presidential convoy.

Don’t listen to anyone when they say that everyone has days like that. It’s just not true. Nine times out of ten you wouldn’t get to hear the story of a day like that because the protagonist didn’t live all the way to the end of the story. Some of us just might be better at survival — or have that mean and brutal kind of luck that wants us to experience our misery to the fullest.

It started off with putting off getting ready to go out until the last minute, then choosing poorly which pair of pants to wear, compounded by choosing a pair of high-top sneakers to go with them.

So here’s the cascade. The pants I chose had a hole in the bottom of the right front pocket. I knew about it, but I’d forgotten because the hole was pretty recent. I threw some change in my pocket anyway, but nothing I really cared about would have fit through the hole, so I didn’t think too much more about it. It did bug me, though, but I was in enough of a hurry to that I couldn’t take the time to change. Well, maybe I could have except that I’d already put on and tied up the shoes.

Before I hit the door I’d noticed that a nickel had snuck out of my pocket through the hole. So far not a big deal. I didn’t see the nickel around, so I moved the rest of my change to another pocket and headed out. I may not be wealthy, but I can afford to let a nickel escape every now and then.

I hopped in the car and leadfooted it downtownish to where I was meeting a couple of the guys from work, one with his wife, the other with his girlfriend, and we were going to meet one of the girlfriend’s coworkers (with whom I was certain she was going to try to set me up, and I was kinda okay with that) at a bar before heading to a movie. So far so good. Except, right as she was coming through the door, not that I knew who she was yet, I felt something moving around in my shoe.

When I was a kid I lived down in Florida. The entire state is infested with these things the locals call waterbugs. They’re actually cockroaches, but most people’s nasty-ass cockroaches are maybe a whole inch long and just kind of scurry around. In Florida, waterbugs are about as long as one of your fingers. Also, they fly. But, more annoyingly, sometimes they climb into your shoes at night and you don’t notice one’s in there until you’ve been wearing it for two hours, walking down the hall to your second period class. “Waterbug” sounds like a less disgusting euphemism for “cockroach”, but if you just call them cockroaches, people don’t get enough warning about what they’re up against. There are ordinary roaches, and then there are these Jurassic-sized flying samurai-ninja cockroaches that laugh it off when you stomp on them. It takes sorcery to kill them.

So I guess we’ll call the discovery of the nickel moving around in my shoe a kind of a Vietnam-style flashback. Two tables got knocked over and around three hundred bucks of beer and liquor dumped and/or generally flung about before my friends could drag me to the floor and help me get my shoe off to retrieve my missing nickel.

At some point during my conniption, some helpful individual called 911. While the bartender and my friends were trying to survey the extent of the damage and make sure I was okay, the police arrived and cleared a path for a gurney and the paramedics from a firetruck. For some reason no one could bring themselves to say what had actually happened. Before I could catch my breath and set things straight, I was wearing a blood pressure cuff and was being given a sedative. Someone had handed me my beer-soaked shoe and a paramedic was prodding my foot with something sharp and asking me if I felt it. And then I was in an ambulance and headed to the hospital.

That was the hospital that the presidential motorcade got routed to just after the sunburst started. You can imagine what a zoo that turned into. It started just after I got unloaded, but the motorcade didn’t show up until after dark. Phones already didn’t work, power was already on backup, and … the Secret Service was everywhere. I got shuffled down to the psych wing and bounced right the hell back out, but, in the end, just settled down in a hallway, forever reeking of beer, just me and a blanket and a couple of weeks to kill trying to stay out from under everybody’s feet.

It wasn’t the worst place on earth to end up, but I saw a lot of things I really wish I hadn’t. And if I’d put on the right pair of pants, I’d have ridden this out with friends, maybe even made it back home when sunset fell.

[*]

This one time I was standing on the pier watching the sunlight wash in as the tide limped away. I’d been out of work for a month or so, so work for me was dropping a couple of lines in the water at the end of this pier, seeing as the last thing I saw to before I got laid off was that my fees were paid up.

Normal fishing was a bit screwed up. A lot of the plankton and krill got badly sunburned and the schools hadn’t quite recovered from the loss of food. There were blooms of strange things feeding off all the dead fish in the water and, well, sometimes the best bet was just to drop a line in the water and see what you got. Most often it was nothing, but it was fresh air and sunshine and some days you brought in something that would feed somebody somehow.

It took a bit of nerve to sit out there a quarter-mile from sunscreen any more serious than a big ol’ beach umbrella, but the ones along the pier had been opaqued. That probably wouldn’t help, but it made people feel better. It made me feel better. I still pretty much got the pier to myself. Me and a couple of lines in the water and a big cooler on wheels and a bait bucket and a couple of rigs I could try random things with until I found the thing that worked today.

The old man I bought the bait from was raising grasshoppers and crickets for people to eat too, now. Apparently if you roasted them and picked the legs off, they were pretty tasty, like roasted nuts, and a decent source of protein. He still kept plenty I could send to a watery doom on a daily basis. His minnows didn’t really make it through the sunburst, but the fish were also starving. Apparently anything would eat a grasshopper these days.

That old man’s a regular George Washington Carver for crickets. Sacks of roasted cricket kernels, jars and tubs of cricketbutter…. I wasn’t in a position to turn my nose up at anything, so I tried all of his recipes. I swear to the good Lord above he’s onto something. The most disturbing recipe he has is something he calls cricket-jerky. It reminds me of this sesame-seed candy my aunt used to bring me when she came to visit, planks of honey-sweet, crumbly stuff that she made herself. I used to pretend that I liked it until I really couldn’t anymore, and then two years after I hurt her feelings about it, I discovered I loved it, and — well, cricket-jerky shouldn’t come with all that baggage. It has enough trouble being what it is.

When he gets his cricket-gin working to get all those spiky legs off (so they can be pulverized and used separately, I imagine) without having to go through them by hand, he’ll be in business. Big time. The legs on those damn things are worse than popcorn hulls for getting stuck between teeth and caught in your gums. And he says there ought to be an enzyme that breaks their little chitin exoskeletons down into simpler starches and sugar, but I don’t know anything about stuff like that.

I’m equally ignorant about fish, but I understand how hooks work and the guys in the parks office at the other end of the pier help identify what I catch (and catalog it all to see what’s still out there and what’s biting) and tell me if it’s fit to eat. These days that’s just about everything, but some fish takes a bit more work to clean and doesn’t much taste like it was worth the effort.

This one morning, though, after setting out the cooler and heading back from the bike-trailer  with the rods and the rest of the gear, I saw a bigger-than-normal wave building out around where the surf usually broke. It wasn’t really too weird until one end of it came free of the water and started curling in the air. I’ve never really had enough imagination to see something as anything other than what it was, and that was a big damn tentacle, like the arm of an octopus or a squid. And since I was seeing it from maybe an eighth of a mile away, I’d have to say it was at least half the length of a football field, and that was just the part of it I could see above the water, with the sun behind it. It twisted for a moment and then just kind of came down, like a cable holding it up had been cut.

About then I nearly jumped out of my skin because the beach was crawling with anything God had ever issued more than the usual number of legs to, and they were high-tailing it onshore with all due speed to get away from whatever the hell that thing out in the surf was. I blew the whistle around my neck that the parks officers had given me to let them know if I saw anything, because this sure as heck was something. Errol came running, got close enough to see what was going on, then skidded to a stop in the sand and turned right around and headed back indoors. I thought I understood, seeing as I was edging for higher ground myself, but then he and a shop owner came back with a huge galvanized can and started sorting through the crabs and such to find the ones that people recognized as good enough and large enough to eat.

A few minutes later, the beach was lined with other people with buckets and coolers doing the same thing, heedless of the little ones nipping here and there and climbing up pantslegs or what have you. I left them all to it. I’ll eat a crab, or a cricket, or damn near anything when its lying still. And I’m okay with a flopping fish trying to rip me open with a spiked fin. But all those little legs…. I retreated back to the end of the pier where my own cooler was and looked over the edge. The water was boiling with fish. I hooked some bait and threw in a line.

About fifty feet away a bulbous, blubbery thing pushed up through the water and it was pretty obvious to me that it was an eye, about the size of a beach ball, maybe, shrouded in what looked like gray skin. I just stood there while it looked around and then submerged.

Then suddenly I had something on one of my two lines and some work to do.

[*]

This one time we were all sitting around the boardroom table, enjoying a catered breakfast of coffee from a cardboard box poured into cardboard cups accompanied by another cardboard box full of cardboard donuts. To be honest, none of us flinched at the contrast between this and previous levels of fare, even given consultations for the retinue of minor royalty in Bahrain and Abu Dhabi that rose above five-star service and bounced repeatedly off the ceiling of debauchery. And when I say we were enjoying the coffee and donuts, that wasn’t any exaggeration. One or two of us hadn’t eaten in at least twenty-four hours or seen coffee in a week. The sugar was real. The caffeine was real. What else did we need?

We’d taken a break on usual operations while we were waiting for our market to recover. To saner men, maybe that should have meant that we should stop trying to be parasites on the wealthy and buy a fishing boat or something and learn to be useful — learn to be people who actually produced something people needed rather than simply sucking money away from those who would hardly miss it and let it trickle down to the masses through our grubby fingers, pretending it was a public service. Our numbers had shrunk a little over the last year anyway, presumably as some of us decided to retire on the wads we’d already collected and/or pursue our own goals with more restrained stakes. Maybe at least one of us was already doing something useful. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

One or two ducked out when it was apparent we were working against our mission and caught ourselves sucking money away from the masses and trickling it into the pockets of the already wealthy. The world already has too many victims for us to be among them. That sort of thing is exceptionally hard to take when you know that it’s the poorest that suffer the most when there’s any kind of unforeseeable crisis. And then you have one.

We had money for something better than cardboard service, but there wasn’t anything better to be had. While money wasn’t exactly worthless, having buckets full of it wasn’t going to make you better off.

So we were having a meeting about whether to shelve the project, either for a period of time or indefinitely. Everybody else on our scale was pretty much in bunkers right now and, depending on the variable of foresight, living on some equivalent to cans of beans and drinking recycled urine. Wall Street had burned for more than a week straight. In this case, our foresight was to keep our main offices in Brooklyn. Next to a factory that makes marshmallows. Our street stayed pretty clear.

The current suggestion on the table was that we convert our undistributed holdings to a straight-up hedge fund geared for a bear market and divert any profits into a philanthropic fund that we’d take turns finding beneficiaries for until we were broke or our karmas were clean. Or, you know, until we were broke. At the end of any quarter, any of us who remain could fold our hand, take our share out of the fund, and head for the hills. But no “general consulting” until the general air of desperation was down below the critical threshold of knifing your old buddies in the back for a can of tuna, or maybe never, to be voted on annually at our Spring Retreat.

We hadn’t taken a formal vote, but it was obvious everyone was in favor. We all looked over at Smiley, who hadn’t actually said a word to anyone in two months, but went through the motions of being an actual living breathing eating and drinking human being with the best of us. He stood up and balanced himself with his knuckles on the table like he did at the conclusion of every get-together now and belched his combined approval and benediction.

Then, as the smell of recycled burned coffee wafted around the room, he shocked us all by croaking the phrase, “…and let that serve as a warning to the rest of you.” And gave us all a big, genuine smile.

[*]

This one time I was sitting out one of our every-other-day thunderstorms, watching from under the awning on the restaurant’s patio. There was a fair amount of water in the air, and I was getting damp anyway, no matter how close to the wall I sat. My white shirt wasn’t going to be too opaque after a while of this, but my bra gave pretty good coverage and today was one of those days when I just didn’t care.

I wasn’t angry or upset or anything like that. I wasn’t having a bad shift – except maybe in the way that there was almost no such thing as a good shift these days. Too much had happened. I was just exhausted. Everyone was. Exhausted and out of patience. Just last night I had watched a fifty-year-old woman break up a fight between an arguing couple all the way across the restaurant. She just got up, walked over, and faced them both down. “After everything,” she said, “This is how you want to spend your time?” Then she went back to her table and picked up her fork again.

Anyone who had anything to say about my shirt getting damp wouldn’t want to hear what I would have to say back. If I bothered to say anything back at all.

But this storm was something else. Thunder and lightning were so frequent that the flashes and the growling from the sky seemed utterly unconnected to each other. The wind came in punches rather than a steady flow. Watching the flashing behind the clouds, listening to the thunder run back and forth across the sky, feeling the blowing mist in my face, gave me something back that I desperately needed. The freshness of the smell of the water in the air, of the pummeled new leaves, the teeth-on-edge taste of ozone – it was like the world was showing us what it was like to be awake again.

Without really wanting to, I started looking at the shapes in the clouds. It wasn’t like there were actually separate clouds or anything, but the unsteady flashes from the lightning leaked through and drew bright outlines, lit some patches, and left others dark.

The first thing I saw was a leaping cat, coming down from left to right, from where the sun would be. Thunder dutifully supplied a growl. Next was a small bear-shape, seated, under the slopes of a mountain. After that, the sky seemed a bit more quiet. But then lightning struck right where I was looking, and blinking away I saw afterimages of my grandfather, upright but slouched like he was wearing his long raincoat. I saw this shape as far down the road I would be taking home as it was possible to see, larger than the buildings on both sides of the road.

The staccato bursts of wind and water finally got my attention as the hail started to fall. A storm like this, in this heat — this is tornado weather. I saw three funnels starting to come together at the same time, right near one another, like black claws coming down through the clouds. Then there was another bright flash and loud clap, making me flinch away. And when I looked up again, the claws were gone. More hail was bouncing in the street, though, looking like it would look if you’d dumped out buckets and buckets of cubes of ice for drinks out into the street. The ones that bounced up at me were starting to sting.

Then was as good a time as any to get in out of the rain and get back to work. Things were rough, but it looked like we were protected.

And maybe when I got home, Grandpa would be there, waiting.

[*]

This one time, in the city of the dead, some of us were having a picnic. Some of the items that make up the traditional picnic fare were problematic, but we had a basket with some bottles in it that we had collected, some large and some tiny, mostly empty but wafting of the spirits of which they were once full. We had also collected discarded candies and candy wrappers, the butts of a few cigarettes and cigars, crumbs of a crushed rock of cocaine, a dropped tablet of ecstasy broken into quarters in a little plastic bag, the crust of a loaf of bread — close enough to the right kind that we could touch it — and, thanks to last night’s storm, some wind-plucked marigolds for a centerpiece.

Being spirits, spirits are all we are allowed to enjoy — refinements and distillations, volatiles and fumes. The bread was refined devotion. The marigolds, distilled sunlight, yellow-orange and bright. We also like glow-sticks. They are recent, but they are made for us, if you think about it.

The picnic was nothing special. We have nothing left but leisure-time. This is the way some of us spend it — herding litter with our little whirlwind dustbrooms until we make a cocktail of elements we can get our hands on and move around. Existing as we do at the border, we are strongest reenacting the extremes, the fringes of life, the purest and most distilled activities, the things most hoped-for, worked-for, and most likely to be passed over if time and opportunity fail to align.

When the picnic is over, some of us will be going to church.

Here on the unmeasurable coastline between the tiny island where people live and the vast sea of the ground-state of eternal rest, I make my own measure with my feet and my hands. I’ve never lived anywhere but on the very edge, and when I died I hardly even moved. All of the energy I expended to live at the edge, paradoxically, left me with too little momentum to head out to sea. It’s all fine by me. Time is a concern of the living. Eventualities occur.

Along the fringes of the borderlands, facing inward toward the metaphorical island, there are giants who make reaching inward their business. They themselves are distillations of hordes of us, distillations of vengeance, essences of passion, unbottled spirits of peculiarities writ large and fed by various means from the other side. We mostly stay out of their way, though I am fascinated by the fire of their focus.

The picnic proceeded. Bottles were sucked dry. Tobacco was rubbed between fingers, into the palms of hands. Candy wrappers were licked. One of us leaned in to try to focus rays of sunlight to set the basket alight but kept getting confused between the sun and the marigolds, which was probably all for the best.

There was a shift and a splash and one of us had departed back to the land of the living, retroactively, as it were. We looked at one another and traded shrugs. All we have to work with are clouds and shadows and sometimes one appears or fades or splits into two or merges with another. Clouds have no causes, just pasts and futures that have no meaning here. Discontinuities are rare, but are also meaningless when continuity is unexplained and causality is on holiday.

I showed the one trying to lens sunlight how to remind a cigar stub how it had once burned, rolling it backward in time until it was smoldering again. As the candy wrappers caught, we stood over the basket to breathe deeply and bask.

And then suddenly I was on the moon.

[*]

This one time I was fixing breakfast and I found an owl in my orange juice. It was a small thing, probably not old enough to fly, apparently sealed into the cardboard carton at the packaging plant.

I’m not one of those people who look for impossible-to-lose lawsuits as a kind of a lottery, but I did take pictures to send back to the company owners so they can figure out how owls could be getting into the system, probably either the tankers or the packaging machinery. I like owls and drowning in orange juice isn’t exactly a natural and fitting end for what would one day have been a beautiful and breathtaking predator.

I fished the little thing out of the glass and spread it out on a stack of paper towels to take its picture. Then I rinsed it off under the tap, washing off all the pulp and stickiness, then spread it out on more paper towels and patted it dry. Then I washed my hands thoroughly and sat down to my eggs and microwaved sausage patties, composing my letter to the juice company in my head.

It occurred to me that it was probably illegal for me to have the owl as well. Should I call the Wildlife Commission? For which state, because I’m pretty sure we don’t grow oranges here, though we could conceivably have done the packaging. Maybe I should do some poking around to see where I should send copies. Should I include the Department of Agriculture or the FDA? Could owls conceivably carry salmonella?

That seemed like so much bother. “He’s found a dead baby owl in his orange juice, ladies and gentlemen! Call out the National Guard!” I decided to contact just the company and the game and wildlife commissions of whichever states the owl could have come from, just in case they wanted me to send it back to them, and leave it at that. A dead owl just wasn’t a federal-level crisis.

Besides, I’d already had a couple of small glasses out of that carton and I was feeling okay. I did pour out the rest of it, though. I mention it just in case you were wondering.

The whole scenario had left me a little sad. I decided I would feel better if I saw some living owls. The local zoo had a huge enclosure it used for rehabilitating injured raptors and owls, and also a show they ran a couple of times per day with trained hunting hawks and such. I guess there are plenty of people that zoos make sad, and I’m kind of on the fence. People and animals have to learn how to make room for each other. We can’t just steamroller them, but we also can’t pretend we’re not a part of nature.

It wasn’t a workday for me, so a few hours later I was at the zoo. Red-tailed hawks snoozed on perches in the shade. A placard explained which one was there for a gunshot wound to the wing and which had been confiscated as an illegal pet. The one that was awake ignored me. Further along were a couple of different sorts of owls, one of which was clearly asleep. The other watched me as I walked over to it, doing that thing they do with their heads, moving its head around in a circle to better judge distance. I resisted the monkey-urge to mimic the gesture. I watched as it shuffled along the branch and, when it had enough room to do so, it spread its wings, holding them out to the sides. Full-grown owls can be huge things, and so beautiful. The soggy thing I had pulled out of my glass this morning barely filled the palm of my hand.

I hung around until the show where they brought them out. I had a seat toward the back of the tiny amphitheater, apart from where a group of children on a field trip were seated. A handler brought out the birds and explained how they had been raised from chicks and foundlings, what they ate, and how they hunted using exceptional vision or hearing. The owl she brought out was the one I had seen earlier that had already shown me her plumage. She was fed a couple of meaty morsels and then sent aloft to soar over our heads.

I don’t know what I expected to feel, but I was disappointed to not feel much of anything, other than maybe a smile at seeing her fly.

But that was where I was when the searing sunburst hit, and basically why I spent those next two weeks at the zoo, doing what I could to help out there. Those first six hours, until the sun set, was kind of like a war zone. Afterward is was just helping do what little could be done and cataloging the damage.

Without that owl in my orange juice, left to rot on paper towels on my kitchen counter, I’d never have been there.

[*]

This one time I was at a baseball game, supporting our local Boys of Summer, I suppose, just like I had done as a little girl. The town’s minor league team was a feeder for a not-very-successful major league team. I had fun guessing and gauging the “just having a great time out there doing what I love” quotient versus the “hopelessness for my career” miasma that hovered over the whole stadium. I had notepads where I kept my own stats for each player, getting out the binoculars so I could read faces, make notes of petit-tantrums, et cetera. I had developed my own scales over the years. I made it out to every game I could and kept my statistics religiously.

I also had stats for the club owner, the various coaches, the referees, and a couple of the more prominent hardcore fans. And the local bookies, of course. I made no real secret of what I was doing, but I didn’t go out of my way to correct the assumptions of those who thought they could tell by looking. Or anyone who thought I was just some crazy old bat playing a complicated game of pretending to compile real stats.

All I know is I drink for free at the bar owned by one of the bookies who regularly asked my opinion of who was having good days or bad days. I’d developed pretty good predictors for who was likely to have a sloppy game or push themselves to injury. He’d made plenty of money tweaking the odds to cover the information I gave him. When I showed him my stack of notebooks and a printout of one of my spreadsheets, he just sat there in quiet awe for fifteen minutes.

He’s asked me out four times since then. Three official dates and one spontaneous proposition for something that I was raised to think was vile but I’ve always had my doubts if people had been strictly honest to me about. I’m sure I’ll eventually take him up on one of his offers and see how it goes.

This one game was something else, however. It was the bottom of the fifth inning and nobody had scored, which, for my boys out there, was a bit rare. To keep the scoring down, you needed excellent pitching or at least an outfield that could get the ball to the bases reliably, and minor league teams, in my experience, tended to be a bit weak on both. Sometimes we would get scores that looked like scores for a football game. I’m not sure what the problem was, since this was the sign of a very good game indeed, but there was an air of frustration about the place that was both out-of-place and hard to pin down. Maybe the power-hitters, used to being the stars of the show, were the main source of the building ire, echoed and amplified by their fans in the seats.

Or maybe this was just what a good game felt like. I’d rarely been to a major league game to compare. Considering the parts of the experience I enjoy, it seemed a bit much effort to travel hundreds of miles just to study the differences.

But at the bottom of the fifth inning, a huge black shape circled in front of the lights, flying just over the seats and then dove at the field. At the same time, two of those small Chinese dogs, the ones that look like some kind of tiny bulldog in the face and in their build, came tearing out onto the field from the seats behind home plate, snarling and yapping for all they were worth. Then the bird or bat or whatever it was dropped what must have been a tennis ball and disappeared behind the lights.

The dogs were wearing little outfits. One had something on that looked for all the world like an ocelot cape like my mother used to wear when the opera came to town. The other was wearing some kind of red sweater with a hood that was flapping around its shoulders. It took them no time at all to corner the little ball and start chasing each other around the infield, effectively running the bases. Then a man not much older than I am made his way over a fence, the stem of a pipe clenched firmly in his teeth, spilling ashes and embers, and tugging an enormous pistol out of the bib pocket of his overalls.

The dogs rounded home plate and headed straight for the man, who fired a couple of panicked wild shots at them before the first base coach tackled him from behind and took him down. The dogs ran up and licked their faces a couple of times before a young lady made her way up the baseline to collect her dogs and yell at the man for shooting at them. The umpire, who had followed her, calmed her down and helped her, with a dog under each arm like a football, off the field. Likewise a couple of our home team players pried the man apart from his gun and helped him into the dugout to hold him until someone could decide what to do.

The game resumed maybe ten minutes later, but nobody’s heart was in it. The outfield kept trying to look past the lights to see if the bat-thing was coming back. Neither of the pitchers could concentrate and the scores began to creep back up into familiar territory. And every once in a while there was a happy little bark from behind home plate.

[*]

This one time I was sitting quietly, eyes closed, listening but not paying attention, breathing but not making a chore out of it. My room wasn’t particularly dark or quiet, but that hadn’t mattered in a long time to me. This wasn’t any kind of meditation. It was just sitting quietly. Killing momentum.

Sometimes it seems that all we want to do is zoom around as fast as we can, focused on what we want and where we want to be, always in such a hurry that we take shortcuts that don’t work or overshoot and have to turn around, orbiting in tighter and tighter circles until we can finally make a grab…. It’s often not a waste of time at all to stop completely, face our desires, walk straight at them, and pick them up. But in order to do that, you have to learn to stop. You have to learn what being stopped feels like.

Also, momentum is baggage. And vice versa. If you really want to move quickly, it’s best not to have all that extra weight.

The noises in the hallway seemed pretty insistent but it was easy enough to not let them distract me. Nothing was really required of me until the door was open. Unless I was silly enough to get up and open it, nothing would bring that moment before it was time. But I should be ready for when the moment came.

I got up and went to the coat tree. I selected a light jacket and shrugged it on, then took my raincoat and draped it over my head and shoulders. Then I simply stood at the coat tree and waited.

The door took a couple of kicks to open, and then two men came through the door. One charged past me to look into the living room, then a bit further to get a glimpse of the kitchen. The second man edged past me and the coat tree. As I took one big step toward the door, I let the raincoat slip to the floor at the base of the coat tree, a distraction that would look like something they themselves had caused. The second man lunged at the empty coat for the split second it took to realize what it was and fool himself as to what had happened, and then I was through the door behind them.

I rounded the corner and slumped down the stairs. At a normal pace, I went out through the front doors. Sure enough, there was a car running with a guy sitting in it parked not too far away. He was watching the door, so I just walked up to the car and motioned for him to roll down the window. “Yeah?” he said.

“Your friends in there, they said they were going to be a while talking to the guy in B4. They told me to give you this and ask you to go pick up something to eat.” I tossed a twenty into the passenger seat.

He at least waited for me to go back into the building before he drove off. After he rounded the corner, I counted to ten and went back outside. I crossed the street to the deli and got the attention of the guy behind the counter. “What can I get for you, boss?” he asked.

“I don’t need anything right now, but I could use a favor. There are a couple of guys tossing my apartment right now. Could you call 911 for me?”

He offered me the phone, but I waved it away. “I don’t really need to talk to them right now, but, hell, you can kind of see them through my window up there. They think I’m in there playing hide-and-seek. Just see if you can get ’em to bring a cruiser to catch them as they come out of the building. When they come talk to you, tell them you’ll tell me to drop by the 41st when I come in for my afternoon smokes coming home from work.”

“You smoke?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Thinking about starting. Maybe I need another vice now that I’ve stopped drinking. I owe you. You know where to find me when you need something.”

“How much trouble you in?”

I put another twenty on the counter. “How much trouble is the world in, Ayet? Whatever that is, it’s just a tiny slice of that.”

He handed over a pack of Camels and a book of matches. “If you’re gonna be smoking by this afternoon, you’re gonna need some practice.”

I smiled and stuck the cigs and matches in my pocket. “Thanks, Ayet. See you soon.”

And then I walked a quarter mile to the park to sit and do some thinking. I got there just in time to see some huge bat-thing swoop down and eat some poor dog’s tennis ball and fly away.

[*]

This one time I was sitting in my veal pen, going through the desk drawer for all the scraps of papers and scraps of pens left for me by the previous resident. The cubicle walls were peppered with pushpins that held up nothing. Not surprising, as walls like this, the cloth ones with what has to be something like a sawdust core, don’t actually hold onto pushpins that don’t go all the way through to the other side. Walls like these — gray, soft, barely textured — only serve to dampen noise, theoretically to make telephone calls more private or less annoying to others, but also, conveniently, to make it harder to hear your fellow veal quietly weeping over what their lives have become.

Walls like these soak up the audible component of tears and hold them until they can express them by letting pushpins fall like surrogate tears of their own. Okay, that, and they keep  suppressed laughter over what you just saw on YouTube from being contagious and disruptive.

Forgive me. It’s an experimental metaphor still in the process of being refined. I tried a honeycomb first, with all of us being little worker bees, tending the corporate larvae and digesting the pollen of gathered data into honey that we then stored in the files, but then I imagined one of our sales scouts returning from one of his forays, walking along the tops of cube farm walls waving his ass around in figure-eights to tell us about the donuts in the breakroom and then I had to scrap the whole mental image, except you know I can’t.

It’s nice to have an image like that to carry around, something that can make me laugh regardless of recent events. It’ll take us years to recover from the sunburn. Everyone knows someone who lost someone, but the company tries to make us focus on the shrunken economy, the contracted workforce, the shriveled customer base.

This show I watched on TV last night offered amazing insight into how crazy the sunburn made us. Conspiracy theorists tried to corner the market on the crazy. A crazy scientist detonating a “supernova” weapon, space weapons from other governments, space weapons from our own government, an attempted alien invasion, two or more groups of aliens at war over our planet, angry gods, how it all ties in to ancient prophecies, predictions for when it will all happen again, “evidence” turned up for when it all happened the last time and how it was suppressed.

I’ve had enough of the new crazy. I want to go back to the old crazy of Eating Disorder Barbie and the Crazy-Ass Dictator of the Month Club and legions of the homeless and unemployed ripping apart anyone wearing a thousand-dollar suit or even shiny shoes down on Wall Street and what’s left of Charlie Sheen running for president and holding a reality show contest for his running mate. I don’t want anything to do with the New Sun cult.

But first I had to find a pen that worked and also make sure I couldn’t just stumble across any remnant of the previous personality that used to inhabit this cube, just in case they were dead and would climb back in here to haunt me via an old phone number on a sticky note or a grocery list or a dry-cleaning receipt. Or toothmarks on an old pen cap. Ick.

Crazywise, I guess there’s no going back, but at least I can try to keep the hauntings to a minimum. If it gets too bad, I can check with HR and see if they have a recommended procedure … that doesn’t have someone walking the cube walls above us waving his ass around in a figure-eight pattern.

[*]

This one time I was at a university in Italy, in a room that was called — and I’m translating here, but only barely — the Visualization Lab. In Italian it sounded like it could be the name of a famous opera, but my grasp of Italian is purely through a minor dalliance with Latin and everything in Italian sounds like it could be the name of an opera. “The dented door.” “The McDonald’s on the corner.” “My hairy left elbow.” “Visualization” has three Zs in it in Italian. It’s overdone. Uncalled for. We couldn’t get away with that in the US.

The interior of the lab was sick with the same illness. There were metal workbenches with large-screened computers assembled on them, and that was okay, but there was also a huge leather sofa and a couple of overstuffed armchairs facing an enormous flatscreen display — an in-house theater system with seven speakers and full surround-sound setup.

What I thought about all this must have been visible on my face. The woman I was here to see rolled her eyes at it and said, “This is all Thomas Dolby’s fault.”

I cleared my throat. “I understand he developed a –“

She cut me off. “No. I mean personally. He came by, wanting a favor. Signal processing for something he went on to patent. Then he came back and did this. This sofa I think was in someplace he lived.” She took a seat on it, claiming a corner. “Probably he and his astrophysicist girlfriend enjoyed it themselves a number of times.” She patted a spot on it nearby. “Here is where I do some of my best work.”

I gave her my best “I’m on to you” look. “You’re unbelievable.” But I took a seat in easy arm’s reach. She liked to grab nearby arms for emphasis sometimes, and if you sat too far away she just looked lost and petulant.

In a corner of the room another woman’s voice piped up. “Si dovrebbe crederle.” I thought she had been asleep, but she was just facing a blank wall wearing 3D goggles and headphones.

“See? Gi says you should believe me.” She laughed and pulled a keyboard and trackball off a coffee table. The giant screen turned on briefly with some sort of pulsing disco lightshow patterns and then quickly turned into a computer display. I saw a cursor briefly and some menus popped up and an opening screen for some sort of application opening up, then more choices to open an environment of mathematical equations and constraints. My collaborator gave me a running under-the-breath commentary to help me keep up.

“I’m turning off much of the rendering because we’d like to see the results today, while we wait, even. So. Boring white space, smudgy black lines for the graphs. And so. This is the path of our phenomenon’s centroid. A portion of it.” She turned to look at me. “Before I continue, I should ask you: Are you a big fan of causality?”

Her face said she was serious. Over in the corner, in plain view, Gi turned up the volume to whatever it was she was listening to and slouched back in her chair. I couldn’t tell whether it was some sort of commentary on our conversation or just an attempt to drown us out for her own purposes.

“I have a strong preference for the concept of causal associations, but I am, after all, a scientist. Show me a rigorous convincing argument for a different model and I’ll consider it.”

“I can never tell when you’re joking,” she said. “So I assume either you’re joking all the time or you never ever joke, or somehow manage to do both at once. A superposition of eigenstates that never resolves.”

I shrugged. “It’s a knack. I like to keep my options open, so that if I offend someone, I can always claim that I’d been joking afterward.”

“For someone who likes causality, you like to keep your fingers in the past so you can change it to give you a more pleasant present and future. But here is my actual point.”

The black arc went away and was replaced by some sort of three-dimensional spiky thing. I was kind of reminded of the crown shape you get when you take high-speed pictures of a drop of water splashing into a pool of more water, only it was spherical.

“The software takes the data and plots it, and then analyzes the fit with respect to all kinds of different curves. You can make suggestions and it can use those as a starting point, or you can let it run wild. Part of the charm of how it works is to separate the noise of the points into several interacting equations. Signal processing. Fourier analysis. It has equations it already knows about from its previous uses — the path of Earth through the heavens, including revolution and rotation and neutation and wobbles induced by other gravity sources, continually corrected. Twice we have had earthquakes in the past two years that have changed the length of Earth’s daily rotation, which, if we had allowed the software to flex enough, it could have predicted for us.

“This beautiful shape,” she continued, “only appears as a simultaneous plot holding the surface of the Earth fixed over, to be complete, a period of more than a thousand years. Much of the detail appears within a five year period, at least half of which is covered by the date collected from the noise from your apparati, but there are holes in the data that strongly suggest extrapolation in this manner.”

“Umm, that’s a huge amount of extrapolation from the data we’ve collected,” I cautioned.

“Not as much as you might think,” she countered. “We’ve assumed a kind of symmetry, which doubles the data, yes, but the actual addition is less than five percent.”

She did some more tapping to bring up a different model, which she animated. “Here we have a sphere of liquid, or something liquid-like, I should say, being impacted by a much smaller sphere of the same traveling at high speed. Note the entry and exit. And how it responds prior to impact as the incoming mass approaches and how afterward it just looks like ripples. It is perfectly symmetrical with respect to time. This is an idealized case of our model.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“When we got the match, I had to look it up and make some phonecalls. To Switzerland, and to Chicago. It is a splash of bosonic matter, previously entangled. One of the proposed models for a macroscopic mass of strange matter, the up-down-strange quark liquid. No baryons, no fermions.”

I looked at her. She shrugged.

“The non-idealized version. Your extrapolation. The distortions are…?” I asked.

She grabbed hold of my forearm with both of her smaller hands. “The mass of the sun. The mass of the earth. Gravitational attraction. Assuming a temporal view, the incoming arc is what we’ve been following. The departing arc or splash, or whatever…. That heads straight for the sun.”

“What’s the point of symmetry? When?” I asked.

She gave my arm a squeeze. “Twenty-two hours, thirty-eight minutes. Give or take about fifteen minutes.”

[*]