The Poison Pie Publishing House presents:

1. BLACKMAGIC link
   
2. BLACKSTRAP link
   
3. BLACKLIGHT link
   
4. BLACKEYE link
   
5. BLACKLUNG link
   
6. BLACKBOOK link
   
7. BLACKDEATH link
   
8. BLACKWIDOW link
   
9. BLACKBOX link
   
10. BLACKBALL link
    
11. BLACKMARKET link
    
12. BLACKHOLE link
    
13. BLACKSHEEP link
    
14. BLACKJACK link
    
15. BLACKSMITH link
    
16. BLACKOUT link
    

This book is dedicated to my sister,
Marie Poonawala

Night is the sky over this poem.
It is too black for stars.
And do not look for any illumination.

You neither can nor should understand what it means.

BLACKMAGIC

All the world is magic to us here where the laws of physics, the theorems of calculus, the corollaries of social justice, the lemmae of reason, the dilemmae of the unconscious, and the touted postulates of history have abandoned us. When we are here, we do not try to understand. When we are here we do not have to try to explain the inexplicable or accept the unacceptable because it comes so naturally that we are able to do so effortlessly. All the world is magic and the wind knocks us down on the sidewalks, scrapes our knees and elbows like we were double-jointed feathers blown from the belly of an up-roosted hen. All the words are sagacious and solemn and subject to ridicule.

In our home, I look for my older sister, Tera, in the bedroom, in the bathroom, in the pantry, in the drainage pipe, in the gutters lining the shingled roof-top, in the curb lining the asphalt, in the sewers connecting each of our homes with secret passageways, frequented only by currents of urine and vessels of shit and bacteria. I put my ear next to the drain opening on the concrete floor of the basement. I cup my hands around it to funnel the sound into my head. My classmates, I feel quite certain, are simultaneously in their own basements, either listening for my message or sending me their own. It’s like a string and two cups, but our strings are rivers of refuse. Our communications are carried in the foul reek of filth and the rancid patterns of expulsion: defecation, urination, regurgitation. We delight in all the world because it is magic, because we have proclaimed it so, because we are meek and would never presume to cast judgment on the vast globe beneath us and call it anything but magical.

I don’t find Tera in the sewers; I don’t hear her calling me like she used to call me. Of course, though, her voice is four hundred octaves above the clanging of those pipes. I climb up to the attic and peer through the windows. It’s hot and the insulation is fiberglass; I am careful not to touch it. I am careful to balance on the joists with rolls of insulation unrolled between them, hiding them, like a grid of invisible tightropes. If I miss one, then I will fall through ceiling of the floor below in a flurry of plaster and fiberglass. I will make my descent as I have always meant to make it: amid the machine-crafted, man-made materials which surround me, and I will hold my breath close to me when I exhale inside my home.

I am a circus now, balancing in the attic like a grackle perched on a current of electricity in the sun, the iridescent sheen of grease reflected in my jugular vein a pearly green. The sun is collapsing through the slats of a rotating vent above me. I reach my fingers up and touch their motion, softly so that it continues at a slower rate and sings now with a ‘tup tup tup’ each time a vent strikes a fingertip. I could never find my sister here where I am forced to make my own noise to hear. She could be calling me but I, precariously positioned, am performing without a net. I can’t hear her for the lions roaring through their rings of fire, the seals hooting and balancing multi-colored beachballs on their noses, the elephants bleating and goring beachballs and seals and lion-tamers with their curved tusks, trampling children like rolling pins over dough, and the clowns screaming and playing with jets of water, trampolines, compact automobiles. I can’t hear anything in the attic where nothing ever stops.

I sneak past this bustle of activity, tup tup tup, bending beneath the slanted ceiling, to a panel that is slightly out of place on the unfinished wall. Pulling it open I enter my sister’s garden of earthly delights. Strung from a myriad of hooks, chains, pulleys, and electrical cords, high-powered fluorescent grow-lamps on timers click on and off, simulating the rotation of the earth is what Tera tells me. I have never spun like this strobe. I have never sank my feet into a brick-red clay pot full of potting soil bursting with nutrients and burst myself with pollen. I have never attracted honey-bees and I never will as long as I live so help me God. I have never demolished anthills intentionally, never pissed on them and caved in their little dirty mounds, soaked their eggs with my own sterile fluid, never collected a red soldier and a black drone and pitted them in ant-to-ant combat in a plastic cup and then doused the loser in hydrochloric acid and the winner in gasoline. Of all the things I have never done, I am particularly proud of that, because I don’t like ants one bit. I am on self-control like these grow-lamps. I am careful not to brush against any of the males, lest they distribute their seeds into all the surrounding females indiscriminately. I know my sister is a breeder, a gene-manipulator, a splicer, and dicer who only fertilizes the females she wishes to seed and come to bud.

The garden hose is coiled up on the floor like a emerald serpent waiting to strike at my feet should I remove my shoes. The watering can which imitates rain is dry now and upright; the metal is rusting. Stacked along the far wall like a cemetery are rows of pots whose plants have died, some with a brittle stalk still jutting out of them like a skeletal leg that didn’t quite get covered up with dirt, and others showing a barren circle of soil or no soil at all. Next to them on a wooden stool sit an unopened plastic bag of potting soil, a hand-shovel, liquid fertilizer, pelletized fertilizer, manuals, catalogues, almanacs, times of sunrise and sunset, times of high tide and low tide. If only Tera could see this: how fine her garden is in her absence, how independent and self-sufficient, how imbecilic, thriving alone in the attic, tucked away from the world, expanding in a static vault until they press against the ceiling and are pressed back down harder. Treasures of Tera’s treasures, all they tell me in the secret garden is that they are not delighted by their seclusion, and thus, I deduce from their message that Tera is not here.

Next I look on the front lawn, in particular on that narrow strip of grass located in between the sidewalk and the street usually marked by streetlights, power-line poles, trees shading the avenue, hydrants, or small man-hole covers leading down to the water-lines. What I see there astounds me and I quickly call the neighbors to share in the spectacle. It’s a pyramid, more-or-less pyramid-like at least, formed of newspapers tossed in the yard. ‘Great Cheops!’ I exclaim, ‘Where did they all come from?’

My neighbors frown at me, evidently quite upset at me. I examine the papers more closely to see if I can discern the source of their anger. I note nothing until quite suddenly the now dangerous-looking mob of neighbors lunges toward the pyramid, each grabbing a paper and, wielding it like a club, they begin to shower each other with blows. I cover my head to protect and isolate myself from the mayhem. I see Times fly past me. Chronicles and Gazettes collide in mid air like passenger-jets. I am beaten by a Dispatch and see Stars poked into my eyes before I can react. I struggle out from beneath Presses, am nearly impaled by a Post, knocked senseless by a volley of Tribunes and Journals, before racing back to the porch where a lone Herald half-heartedly thrust at my back, invites me to return to the fray.

On the porch, I find my sister has left her lemonade next to her rocking chair. I sit in the chair, recuperating, and sip through a paper straw. My next-door neighbor approaches the porch and I prepare to sprint inside. However, he stops at the steps and hails me from there, ‘Nano, why don’t you clean up that pile of papers some time. It trashes up the neighborhood. Nobody likes it. The Birchwood Home Owners Association made a motion on it last meeting to be a topic of discussion next meeting and I wouldn’t let it come to that if I were you.’

I see another neighbor sneaking up behind him with a rolled up Globe in his left hand and a Sun in his right, imitating the solar system, spinning around and clouding all the senses of visions of life on a cylindrical planet. I make no mention of it before he pounces on our unsuspecting neighbor and beats him to a pulp. Soon the whole throng spots this new disturbance and shifts over to battle with renewed vigor and Sentinels and Registers.

It’s too close to the porch I decide and the straw has shriveled due to the combined action of saliva and lemonade, so I leap over the railing, casting a quick glance toward the now dismantled pyramid to make sure Tera isn’t in the news before I flee into the backyard, shutting the gate behind me, bolting the lock, fastening the chain, breaking off the key in the keyhole, and lowering the bar across it. With my back against the gate, I heave a sigh before I notice a massive pile of fallen leaves in the backyard, carefully sculpted into the shape of a sphinx, busted nose and all. I gasp and in response the pounding of neighbors against the gate reverberates against my back. I throw myself onto the ground an instant before machine gun fire riddles the gate with holes. I scramble to the leaf-sphinx and dive inside.

As I wade through the murky darkness, stinking of decay, fragments of brittle leaves break off and get caught in each breath, stick to the mucus lining the inside my nose, and dye it black. I’ll never be able to find Tera here. I paddle onward in a large-leaf-makeshift-canoe through the darkness, until I have completely lost my way and any sense of orientation. I decide to let the currents take me where they will as that is certainly what Tera would have done, except there are no currents here. The overall motion of leaves is non-existent. Right when I begin to despair, I am thrown into a panic, because I have paddled into a sluggish and maggoty dead thing in the leaf pile. I can’t tell whether it’s a bird or a rat. Warily, I paddle onward, fearing more contact with the dead and seeking the exit from the leaf pile, but while I am here, I call out to my sister, ‘Tera, Tera!’ I get no response.

That’s when I hear a voice calmly calling out, ‘Hubert, Hubert?’

‘Hubert isn’t over here,’ I shout back to whoever it is. Then I add, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen my sister, Tera?’

‘Is she tall?’

‘Not too much but kinda.’

‘Maybe I saw her a ways back,’ the voice responds.

‘Thanks. By the way, is the way out over there?’

‘No, this is the way in,’ the stranger’s voice tells me. We are approaching each other and his voice seems to change pitch as we pass each other, our crafts not an arms-length distant. ‘Hey pal,’ he tells me, ‘You got something dragging behind you.’

I look back and see a lump covered with leaves. Whatever is underneath the pasted coating of leaves is wearing bell-bottom trousers and the flair snagged on the edge of my canoe. ‘Tera?’

The stranger rows his boat around, flips the lump over and scrapes the leaves off its face, revealing a plump, well-bred, well-mannered, astute youth with a tendency to spend summer days inside assembling plastic models of satellites and sniffing the plastic cement and the acrylic paints: Hubert.

‘Sorry about that, Mr., I thought he was a bird or a rat when I hit him.’

‘You hit him?’ the stranger asks me in a tone that leaves me unsure whether the calm voice is going to become choked with sorrow or filled with rage.

‘I think he was already dead when I hit him,’ I reassure the stranger.

‘Of course he was dead. You don’t think anyone enters the leaf-pile without the distinct intention of never returning to the outside world.’ The stranger reaches down and pushes back Hubert’s hair with tender caresses. The hair stays exactly as he molds it because it is filled with viscous slime.

I weigh this new information back and forth, from my right hemisphere to my left, occasionally jostling it with my frontal lobe. Certainly, I had every intention of leaving when I entered. ‘I don’t know about that, Mr. I think you might be a little bitter about finding Hubert dead and all that nasty gunk in his hair and just be trying to dampen my spirits.’

‘The problem I’ve got with you, pal, is not that you did or didn’t kill my Hubert, is not that you are or aren’t doomed to die just like my Hubert in this eternal leaf-pile, is not that will or won’t find your Tera like I have found my Hubert. Nor is it what you have or haven’t dreamt of doing to ants in your dreams. It’s not a sin of commission, omission, emission, remission, or coition that I’m holding against you, pal. You’re an alright guy by my standards except that you have a little problem dealing with the magic all around you.’

In the darkness I cannot make out the stranger’s expression, but I can clearly see a beam of light illuminating Hubert’s pallid and well-rounded cheeks. ‘I have no problem with magic,’ I refute.

‘You attribute everything to it.’

‘And rightly so. In this era of ignorance, I am right to do so. I cannot be faulted. By believing what I have just stated, I prove myself incapable of blame.’

‘I’m not referring to your pseudo-blame or quasi-guilt. I’m not talking about self-deception or self-induced-blindness. I’m not talking about mental throwbacks or de-evolution. What I’m talking about is the flaw you have carefully concealed in your magic.’

Of course, the stranger wants me to ask, ‘What flaw?’ Perhaps, he even doesn’t want me to ask it, preferring to make me face some deep-seated phobia I have always denied. Perhaps he is jealous of my phobias and wants me to project it on him. I give him no such satisfaction. I laugh, ‘But my magic works. I understand nothing. I perceive no faults. And my magic works.’ I take my paddle and slam its face into Hubert’s dead forehead, dunking him under the leaves. The stranger howls in indignation, and dives in after Hubert. I hear him shouting. ‘That’s the problem, (gulp of leaf)...standing. (a second gulp, followed by choking and coughing) You will never escape alive! (maniacal shrieks of laughter followed by presumable drowning.)’

I follow the beam of light that lit up Hubert’s face to the surface of the leaf-pile. Still unsuccessful in my search for Tera, I peer about for other possible retreats. What I notice, is the sun is much lower in the sky, the temperature has dropped substantially, the leaf pile has been compressed and lost its form due to half a meter of snow above it. It’s snowing now as I emerge, large flakes that reflect light as they fall like falling shards of glass in slow motion. I feel uneasy but am not cut. The gate has yet to be repaired.

Perhaps Tera has levitated up into the sky and is hidden from my view only by this flurry of snow. I decide I had better go on up and check when a leaf-covered arms shoots out from the pile and grabs a hold of my ankle. I can’t see the stranger’s face, as it is still underneath the pile, but I can hear him shouting, ‘The things we can’t explain are magic, I’ll grant you that, pal, but the rest, no way! You want everything to be magic! No way! You’ve gone too far!’

Luckily I still have my paddle in hand and I beat that section of the leaf-pile until the arms releases my ankle and withdraws. I step away from the white outline of the pile and stare back up at the snow, squinting, trying to make out a glimpse of her brown hair or her pallid flesh. I see no such thing.

Now I am floating through the blizzard, sifting upward through the snow. I can’t tell you how; it’s magic. I look above me and to the sides but I see no other airborne creatures besides myself and the snow, but admittedly my vision is greatly reduced by the storm. I ascend higher until I break into the cloud bank, white like a snow drift. As I lose sight of everything, I am reminded of the darkness which cloaked me in the leaf-pile, but this is nothing like it. The blindness is white, is safe and angelic. Nothing can harm me here. I tumble through the clouds until I find Tera’s mitten. I put it on, as both my hands were cold, and one warm hand is better than no warm hands.

I must be close! The mitten still carries the heat of her hand and the grit which fell from beneath her fingernails. I call out again, ‘Tera, Tera! It’s me, Nano.’ The only answer I receive is a mouthful of snowflakes, turning my tongue to ice. Has Tera fled or is she hiding? Have I been betrayed? I call out the magic words.

‘Cumulus.’ Up here with the thermally unstable air masses, the heap of magic coalesces in the snow, takes upon itself physical dimensions like it was loading our sins upon its back. It dances with those sins, waltzes with the ghost of my sister. Dosey-Doe. Hokey-Pokey. Ring around the Rosie. Now I am shamelessly promenading through the atmosphere without a partner. Because the magic does not find Tera, I move onward.

‘Cirrus.’ The wind picks up and whips my curls of hair across my face. It straightens them out and freezes them that way. My teeth chatter, the air crackles, the orchestra is summoned and released into the fray. The fleecy tendrils pluck my ribs like violin strings, blow over my ears, nose, mouth like lips passing briefly over piccolos or flutes, and whip my arms and legs about until my joints pop like low-pitched xylophones or strained snare drums. I am blown astray of my mission. I lose my focus, momentarily.

‘Stratus,’ I shout. My vision fogs as I drop into a lower bank. It clears only when I come across a Tera-shaped outline cut out from the mist. Wisps of cloud already begin to cloak the trail as I approach. As I step into it, my wake erases the path behind me. I have to sprint to keep up with the disintegration of her trail, but the faster I run, the more I disturb the wind about me, the more my arms throw cloud to either side and before long I am passed by my own shadow and am shrouded completely in thin white gauze-like material.

‘Nimbus.’ The snow thaws partially, turns to a mess of sleet, rain encircling my head with an aura of airborne mush. Now the magic is at my fingertips. I adjust my headpiece to suit me, cock it over one eye. I am in command. Mission Control, I’m here. My radar is down. I’ve lost all contact with my sister ship, Tera. I’m abandoning the flight-path. Fuselage, cockpit, turbine, we’re breaking up. We’re entering the atmosphere at too steep an angle and we’re burning up. It’s ten thousand Kelvin here. It’s t-minus four seconds and impact. I resort to the desperate last ditch effort.

‘Cumulonimbus-cirrocumulus-cirrostratus-stratocumulus-nimbostratus.’ I try everything at once but nothing works for me. Time always wins. Day returns. I fall to earth.

In the kitchen, I place a rusting frying pan with a little bit of water stuck in the bottom of it on the gas stove and turn the gas on high. When I wave my hand over the gas, it bursts into flame. Quickly I set the frying pan on it and watch as the water evaporates. Standing this close to the flame warms my fingers back up as well. When the water is all vapor, the metal of the pan begins to turn a bluish-black. Then, upon it, faint clouds of iridescent colors form. I can’t explain it. I understand neither the physics of the process by which the colors form nor the message they intend to convey to me.

I can’t find her. I give up. My guess is that she’s either wearing a concrete prom dress at the bottom of a river, cloistered in an enormous baptismal cavern of an underground sect of the Blessed Virgin, spending five to ten in Leavenworth, marooned on a vibrantly lush tropical asteroid in a distant quadrant, or hiding faceless in a crowd of starving, migrating wildebeests. Always on the move, my sister Tera won’t show up, so I go back down to the cellar. I hunch back over the drain and holler back in it, ‘Are you still there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I couldn’t find her. Call back later, okay.’

BLACKSTRAP

We are hiding in the forest with good reason. We aren’t bandits or marauders, and we aren’t hiding from the authorities, or anyone else for that matter, but we are hiding nonetheless. The trees link their branches together overhead forming a continuous crown of foliage, shielding us from the sun. We aren’t hiding from the sun.

My companion, Milli, has taken advantage of our locale and taken it upon herself to educate me, as she is fresh from the university and does not know what to do with the lobes of information lodged in her head. So she is eager to dispense the information to anyone within earshot, which in our present state of solitude, is me. She points to a tree surrounded by other similar trees. I am not sure which particular one has aroused her interest, but I let my ignorance lie silent. ‘Black Spruce,’ she announces, ‘Picea Marianna.’ She then turns to me expectantly.

I reply with the blankest stare I can conjure.

‘Come on, Pico, repeat after me or you’ll never learn them.’ She points back in the same general direction. ‘Black Spruce, Picea Marianna.’ She exaggerates the enunciation of the genus and species for me so I can get it right.’

‘Black Spruce,’ I repeat, as I pull a leaf off that has fallen into my long brown hair. ‘Pie Of Mary Anne.’

Satisfied, Milli shifts the direction of her pointing finger and states, ‘Black Poplar, Populus Nigra.’

‘Black Poplar, Popular Niagara? Popular Night?’ I start humming ‘Silent Night’ aloud. All is calm, all is bright I suspect, up above the trees where the sun is. But down here in the patches of matted leaves and soil between the tree trunks, it’s quite dark. I follow Milli weaving through maze of living wooden pillars.

‘Black Oak,’ she announces when she has singled out a particularly fat-trunked specimen. ‘Quercus Velvtina.’

‘Black Oak, Queer Velveeta.’

All of the sudden I feel hungry and say so to Milli who says nothing until she finds our next lesson. ‘Black Alder, Alnus Glutinosa.’

‘Black Alder,’ I dutifully repeat. ‘Anal Glutton.’

All of the sudden I feel the urge to defecate and say so to Milli who wanders off to another tree, allowing me to tend to my duties in peace. I have to use leaves to clean myself as I hum, ‘Sleep in heavenly peace, sleep in heavenly peace.’

When I rejoin Milli, she declares, ‘Black Walnut, Juglans Nigra.’

‘Black Walnut, Jugular Nights,’ I recite faithfully and tonelessly. Round yon virgin, mother and child. I am not a child. Milli, however, is indeed a mother, but certainly not mine. Her baby was taken away from her because the State decided she was unfit to be a suitable parent. I suppose it’s the college lifestyle, rough and tumble from what I hear, but that’s speculation. Anyway, now we’re in this forest, hiding from no one.

Apparently the lesson is over as Milli has stopped calling the trees by their proper names. I think it’s because she realizes that she could call to them until she was blue in the face and they wouldn’t respond. Their ears are up too high to hear her meek voice.

Milli and I wander through the forest, she in the lead, I following. I am not sure whether she has a destination in mind; sometimes her steps are determined and sure-footed, while with other steps, she stumbles over roots, spins to regain her balance, and heads onward in a different direction.

Milli pauses abruptly as she discovers a pipe sticking out of a tree trunk at chest level with a cork plugged in the end of it. Milli analyzes it carefully and then steps back, next to me, to examine the tree at a distance. She circumnavigates the trunk two, three, four times before coming to rest beside me. Before saying anything, she turns to me for my assessment.

‘Pipe in a tree?’ I shrug hopelessly and then remember my lesson and exclaim, ‘Black Pipetree, Petrus Pipus!’ I cock a self-congratulatory eyebrow.

‘Uh-uh. You get a zero for that, but a B+ for effort.’ She leans over and gives me a hug to heal my wounded ego.

I step forward and pop the cork from the pipe. A very thick, dark molasses seeps from the tube and plops onto the soil.

Milli watches it and then pronounces, ‘Creeping flow. Reynold’s number much less than unity,’ describing the flow to a tee.

I nod my head in silent agreement. Milli knows too much useless stuff. Fascinated as we are with observing the fluid trickle slowly out of the tree, we do not hear the footsteps until they are immediately behind Milli. We spin to discover a large woman confronting us. She is more than two meters tall and we have to tilt our heads back to see her face because she is standing so close to us. Her arm is extended toward us with her broad hand open expectantly. She is staring at the cork in my hand so I obediently drop it in her palm. She walks around us and places it back in the pipe.

‘What were you doing with my blackstrap?’ she asks in a deep and resonant voice, appropriate for a woman of her stature.

The word is unfamiliar to me. I recall only a fragment of a nursery rhyme, ‘Blackstrap could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean.’

Milli’s voice pipes up, ‘My friend and I were discussing the flow condition of the blackstrap.’ She says the word confidently, as if she was born with it on the tip of her tongue and had waited over two decades to verbalize it. I shower her with invisible admiration.

The woman looks at us doubtfully, ‘And what were your conclusions?’

‘It falls in the creeping flow regime. Reynold’s number much less than unity,’ Milli answers casually, placing her thumbs in the pockets of her jeans.

‘Much less to be sure,’ the woman concurs, ‘On the order of ten to the negative fourth power.’

‘The Stoke’s approximation is certainly appropriate in this instance,’ Milli continues, visibly impressing the stranger.

The woman shifts her attention to me. I cringe inside. ‘And what is your assessment?’

‘Well...I figure that since it can eat no fat, its wife certainly can eat no lean...’

The woman pauses to contemplate this. I wait for her huge hand to ball into a fist and pound me like a stake into the ground. Instead she asks, ‘What are two girls like yourselves doing this far in the forest so close to dusk?’

I mutely elect Milli spokesperson of our party and she explains, ‘We’re hiding.’

‘From the authorities?’ the woman asks, immediately suspicious of criminals with such vast knowledge of the delicate intricacies of creeping flow.

‘No,’ Milli states without offering further explanation.

Regardless, this short answer seems to satisfy the woman and she lowers her guard considerably. ‘My name is Giga. I live in these parts by myself. As you are travelers, and I do see very few, I would gladly offer my home as a lodge where you can eat a solid dinner, sleep at least on sofas, and depart in the morning.’

‘We would be delighted to accept,’ Milli replies before asking me how delighted I would be. I for one have my reservations because there are lots of fairytales that provide ample warning for trusting solitary women that you just happen to meet in a forest, but I keep my doubts to myself.

Giga tromps off and we follow closely behind her as it is getting dark and difficult to see much more than a few meters ahead of us.

‘What do you with the blackstrap?’ Milli asks as we hurry to keep pace with Giga’s long strides.

‘I put it on my pancakes.’

Recalling the thick, dark fluid, I imagine the brick of a pancake it must take to stand up to that sort of weight and I further regret Milli’s premature acceptance of a solid dinner.

We arrive at a roughly hewn log cabin with high ceilings to accommodate our hostess. Inside we are seated at a table in the kitchen and offered water in shallow cups while Giga cuts potatoes, carrots, celery, onions, and zucchini for a stew. During the preparation and into dinner, which turns out to be delicious and quite filling, Giga describes how she has a garden she cultivates a short distance from here. She then asks Milli what else she knows about blackstrap.

‘Where we come from,’ Milli begins, ‘blackstrap is principally used in the manufacturing of industrial alcohols and also as an ingredient in cattle feed.’

Giga nods her head silently, but her eyes light up in surprise.

After dinner, Giga offers us black coffee which I accept and Milli declines. Our hostess then points to a door at the back of the kitchen and informs us that the door leads to cellar.

Uncontrollably, I think of Hansel and Gretel. This woman is far too large to resist, should she get it into her mind to push us into the wood-burning oven.

Giga pushes herself up from the table and crosses the room to the door. She takes an oil lamp from the wall and says, ‘Follow me.’

Milli seems unconcerned and follows the heavy footsteps down the staircase into the basement. I run over to the counter and slip the knife Giga used to cut the potatoes into my sleeve before I enter the cellar as well.

Downstairs, the oil lamp shines its steady light onto barrels and barrels. There are rows and columns of these barrels stacked two high and extending beyond the light of the lamp. I realize these barrels are just the right size to keep someone like Milli or myself in and shudder at the thousands of innocent skeletons who could be arranged in the room about us.

‘What’s in the barrels,’ Milli asks innocently.

‘Blackstrap,’ Giga announces and moves to the nearest one. She hangs up the lantern from a beam in the roof, too high for either Milli or I to reach unless we climbed up on one of the barrels. Giga then pops the top off the nearest barrel.

Despite my misgivings, I join Milli in bending over the barrel and peering inside. The barrel is three quarters full of molasses. It’s too opaque to discern whether it covers a skeleton or not, but I push myself hastily away, feeling the knife in my sleeve.

‘What do you with all of it?’ Milli asks, peering into the corridors lined by the stacks of barrels.

‘I can’t eat this many pancakes,’ Giga admits, ‘So I just collect it and store it down here. But you’ve given me the idea to manufacture industrial alcohols or perhaps cattle feed.’ Giga’s face stands above the light cast from the lamp and we see only her illuminated torso, legs, and the ends of her arms. ‘And I’ve been thinking since you two are looking for a face to hide, you might be interested in holing up here for awhile and helping me start up a production facility.’

I stare dumbfounded at the woman. Production facility, I repeat to myself. Remembering, Milli’s quick response to the dinner invitation, I blurt out before she can condemn us both, ‘We’ll think about it.’ The cellar is creepy and I want to know how far these hallways extend but instead I climb back up the stairs into the kitchen, replace the knife on the counter, nestle myself on one of the two sofas in the main room, and listen to the murmur of Milli’s and Giga’s voices echoing up from the basement, discussing the possible construction of laboratory scale distillation columns and reactor vats.

As construction of the devices began, Giga’s house was filled with plans and the constant debating of such humdrum choices as stainless steel 316 versus 304, batch versus stirred-tank reactors, and co-current versus counter-current flow heat exchangers. I tried to maintain a discreet distance between myself and the project but was frequently called upon to lend a fifth and sixth hand. During the day I would tend Giga’s garden while she and Milli experimented in the cellar. It was only after dinner that talk would turn from the production facility to chatter about Giga or Milli or sometimes myself.

One evening in particular, Giga talked about herself as she rarely did. ‘You two girls might wonder how I’ve come to live by myself out here in the forest filled with black trees, but you are too polite to ask. I won’t tell you the whole story as that would take all night and we have work to continue tomorrow morning, but I feel like sharing a couple things.’ Giga took a deep breath and then began, ‘I do have a family. I wasn’t raised by a tribe of hill giants who found me swaddled in rags against a tree trunk. In fact I even a have a husband, although no children. He’s gone off for awhile, been away quite a long time actually. I can’t remember the exact reasons; it had something to with the State’s legislature. He could get quite fired up about things happening very far away from him. I couldn’t understand that really, but it was okay because when his mind did turn to things in his immediate vicinity, namely myself, he was always gentle and kind and soft-spoken. You would never have guessed such tenderness could come forth from a man who made even me seem dwarf-like in his stature. He had gardener’s hands, rough, calloused, dirt underneath the fingernails and a gardener’s smile, proud and even, the lips only slightly turning up at the corners.’ Giga laughs. ‘He loved pancakes, ate them every morning. Some nights after a fruitful day in the garden, he would ask me to fix him pancakes for dinner, which of course, I happily did. I expect him back any time now, but I know there are delays when you deal with matters of the legal sort, so I wait patiently. He will be so surprised to see how much syrup I have collected in his absence. We’ll be eating pancakes for a thousand years.’ She laughs again and looks at her finger a long time like she is counting each year until he comes back and then counting again each year of pancakes to follow.

‘He must have been gone a long time,’ I venture cautiously, thinking of all the barrels of blackstrap in the cellar. Since the last ice age, I think to myself. As if my thought were spoken aloud, Giga falls silent and says no more the rest of the night, retiring early to bed.

Milli scolds me furiously afterwards, ‘You spoiled a delightful evening, Pico. You spoiled everything. You don’t like the production facility, you don’t like the names of the trees, and you don’t like Giga.’

I sulk guiltily beneath her stare.

‘I appreciate you accompanying me into the woods when I needed to hide and I needed a friend,’ Milli continues, increasing my guilt with each word, ‘I will never forget that you helped through my darkest time. When I think of who I am today, I know it is only a result of your support that I can be happy and helpful.’

My saliva tastes sour in my mouth and I run my tongue over a chip in my tooth whose nerve throbs at times like this one.

‘If you can’t be happy here, Pico, then don’t let me keep you here. You’ve helped me and I’ll be okay without you.’

How can I express that what little I had before entering the forest with her is now gone? I have nowhere to return to. If I left her here, the only places I could seek out are even darker parts of the forest where not even Giga would venture and maybe there I could hide alone as Milli and I had intended to do together before our plans were waylaid. I can tell her none of this. Milli thinks she is strong, but I could crush her like a twig snapping beneath a footfall. I could squeeze her into pulp like nobody else, not even Giga with her monstrous hands, could. I look at Milli, who wants to say more, but I remain mercifully silent.

The following evening, after dinner, Milli began talking about herself. I guess she hoped that if she started then Giga would join back in and continue where she had left off the night before. While clearing off the table, Milli told Giga, ‘I know when we first met I told you we were hiding. But I never said why. You’ve not asked because you are too polite. I do have a child, a son.’

Giga’s eyes widen in surprise.

‘He’s only a baby and he doesn’t know who his mother is, but he knows she is missing. When he gets to be eleven, he’ll start thinking about looking for me. It will take him a year and a half to muster his resolve, but when he does, at twelve and a half, he’ll begin his search. He’s a bright boy, as boys go, and he’ll quickly realize that I have hidden myself away. With the intuition he inherited from my chromosomes, he’ll deduce that I have come to these woods to hide as it is the perfect hiding place, and perfectly obvious to him.’

I drown out Milli’s words with humming. I am hurt because she has never told me this and she chooses to direct her words to Giga. I feel deserted and hopeless because Milli is a fool to believe her own fanciful words. I run from the table in desperation and flee down the stairs into the cellar. As my feet pound against the steps I hear a voice in the kitchen saying, ‘Just let her go,’ but I cannot tell to which of them it belongs.

In the cellar, I run down a corridor in the darkness until I run out of breath, and still I have not reached the end. I walk at a slow pace for another couple hours but still the barrels line both sides of the corridor. I tap on them periodically to make sure they are full and indeed they thud dully. There is no possibility of me becoming lost because there are no branches in the corridor. I continue onward and find one barrel amidst the row of others that does not have a second barrel on top of it. It takes me ten minutes to pry open the lid but eventually I do. Inside the liquid is thin and transparent, not at all like blackstrap. I dip my finger in it and taste it. It is industrial alcohol. I scoop handfuls of it into my mouth and swallow it as quickly as I can until I feel bloated and dizzy. I put the lid back on the barrel tightly and stand on it. From this level, I can open one of the barrels on the upper level. I do so and discover that it is full of blackstrap. Hesitantly I reach in as far as I can, the thick fluid coating my arm, to see if there is a skeleton at the bottom. I can’t reach the bottom to know for sure so I lean farther over, my head spins with alcohol, and I plunge in headlong. In a panic of drowning in this thick suffocating molasses I scramble around. I think won’t they be surprised one thousand years from now when they find my skeleton in the bottom of this barrel and realize what a monster Giga is. Tears squeeze out of my pinched eyes, forming bubbles of brine in the molasses. This is the barrel of sad syrup. I thrash my arms about until I have hold of the rim, and yank myself out. I have to clear the blackstrap from my mouth before I can breathe as my nose is plugged with the stuff. I snort violently to expel it. I climb out of the barrel, replace the lid, and jump back on the ground. The blackstrap clings to me and refuses to drip off, congealing in the air.

As I walk back along the corridor, I feel nauseated and vomit several times, but I continue my progress. I see now that my footprints left trails in the dust on the floor of the hallway. I follow them backwards print for print. None of this happened. We are still lost in the woods of Queer Velveeta and Popular Niagara. The dust I raise sticks to the molasses coating me, and paints me a dingy, sooty hue. Well past midnight, I reach the stairwell. My stomach has settled somewhat. Giga and Milli are still sitting at the table where I left them. I wonder what secrets they have passed that I will never know.

As I emerge they stare at me in shock. ‘What happened?’ they ask in unison, nearly hysterical. I shrug in my syrupy coat which has hardened to a scab-like texture.

Giga approaches me, picks me up like a baby, heedless of the molasses which sticks to her clothing and arms and carries me out of the house to the closest brook. She peels the stiffening clothes off me and douses me in the cold moving water. Her giant hands scrub my skin and brush the molasses off me. I can do nothing but sit there in the water with my teeth chattering. When I am suitably cleaned, she tosses my ruined clothes in the stream and carries me back inside the house, drying me, dressing me in one of her huge shirts, and seating me at her chair in the kitchen. Milli sits silently across the table, watching me. Giga takes the potato knife and steps behind me. She grabs hanks of wadded, matted hair and cuts them off, bundle by bundle. When all the hair I have left is half a centimeter long, she picks me up again and lays me in my sofa. I keep my eyes closed. I hear her tell Milli to go to bed and then she returns to the brook to clean herself.

I slip out of Giga’s house on those nights when I can’t fall easily into sleep and move through the forest, trying to find the Black Alders, Walnuts, Oaks, Poplars, and Spruces, Milli first pointed out to me. When I think that I’ve located one, I take the potato knife, and carve a heart in the black bark. Inside the heart I carve ‘Pico’. I carve only one name inside the heart because I have only one heart and no one lives in it but me.

Once I complete my task, in the darkness I become afraid and run trembling back toward Giga’s house. Each time I pass the blackstrap tree, the moonlight filters through the canopy of leaves and etches a shadow in the shape of a man against the bark. The pipe is gouged through his stomach. Surely this is Giga’s husband. She has nailed him to a tree. He will never return. Then I hear his footsteps behind me and I dash back to the house, slip inside, replace the knife, and curl up on the sofa, where my dreams slow my blood to the creeping of molasses.

BLACKLIGHT

We’re travelling on photons, quanta of light, in deep space. We’re hurtling through darkness at c = 2.997925 x 10⁸ meters per second. My copilot, Kilo, won’t shut up about how we’re putzing along, how he sped through the outer rim of the galaxy exponentially faster than this, how he and his crew were soaring at billions heaped upon billions of meters per second, how they were all careening through space on organic hallucinogens cultivated in the iridescent greenhouses lodged in the glaring tundra of Zed-naught, how their blood was congealing like liquid helium, how a colony of red-warrior vacuum ants climbed out of the warning klaxon, how the horde of arch-nemeses black-drones emerged from the navigation console and scrambled over his view-screen, blocking his vision and causing him to overlook the cloud of space dust which they pummeled into and which consequentially drilled micron sized holes through-out the ship and the rest of his crew. He points out the myriad of black scarred dots pricking his hairy chest as proof.

‘And because of one lousy screw-up, demotion city, and here I am co-piloting this barge in slow-motion to be used as scrap-metal at the next port. It ain’t fair to do this to a man like myself.’ Kilo snorts in disgust.

‘Put your shirt back on,’ I order him.

‘Yes, Captain,’ He salutes and ignores me.

I feel sick and elated, sick because we’ve just awoke from our travel-hibernation and I haven’t yet had a full meal in my stomach, and elated because it’s a wonderful sensation coursing through the blur of space, your body disassembled into its basic components, light and darkness. Garbed in the light part we move around on the ship; the dark we keep stashed in the bulkheads until we drop out of our transmission, gather ourselves together, and step out on some foreign dock amid cargo, cranes, and merchants.

We can’t figure out why the hibernation cycle was interrupted because we are light years yet from our destination. Kilo curses and stomps off to the mess-hall to pick at some rations.

‘Bring something up here,’ I holler at him as he disappears into the corridor.

‘You want cherry or lime flavored?’ he shouts back.

‘Whatever looks ripe.’ I grimace.

I return to my study of the ship’s systems. Everything checks out all right by me. Lastly, I check the life-support systems. I check it last because I doubt that it has failed; if it had, we’d both be dead. The computer notifies me that there has been a pinhole breech in the hull and that the rear bulkheads have decompressed. Activating the intercom, I tell Kilo to come back to the bridge. He shouts something back at the intercom but the static fortunately fuzzes his message into a series of short crackling rasps.

Shortly he arrives with a bundle of artificial oblong fruits, shaped like pears, peeled like avocados, and eaten as quickly as possible. ‘If that don’t beat the barn,’ Kilo announces, ‘Not only are we travelling second-class in a run-down rig headed to the junkyard, but the ration-tree they planted in the mess hall has gone all amuck and is yielding these gray tomato things.’ He takes another bite of one he has already peeled. ‘It takes like the sole of my boots.’ He spits it out on the floor between his chair and the command console.

‘Pick that up,’ I order him, ‘We don’t want ants on the bridge.’

He ignores me. ‘What’s up?’

‘The computer has located a pin-hole breech in the hull.’

Kilo spits out another chunk of synthetic-fruit. ‘Where?’ he asks calmly.

‘In the rear bulkheads. We’ve lost pressure there.’

‘If that don’t double beat the band.’ Kilo stares at me and then drawls, ‘Gawddammit. That’s all I have to say. I was better off hallucinating my way through space than risking my neck in this whimpering tub.’ He kicks the console for emphasis and adds, ‘Gawddammit.’

‘I don’t think we’ll have to drop out of transmission to repair it though. We can enter the adjacent corridor in environmental suits and seal that off behind us. We can plug the hole from the inside.’

‘Yeah I’ll just stick my thumb in the crack.’ Kilo stands and heaves the remains of his fruit down the hallway leading away from the bridge. I hear it slap dully against the far wall.

You have to be a real first-rate Captain to warrant this caliber of crew. ‘I’m glad you’re taking it so well.’

Kilo glares at me. ‘Does this ship even have environmental suits?’

Luckily, one of us went through the pre-transmission checklist. ‘Yes we do.’

‘Well, Femto,’ he starts. When Kilo calls me by my name, I know I am in for a real humdinger of a proclamation. ‘One of us has got to stay up here and seal off the corridor once the other one has entered.’

I wait for him to complete his thought. Instead he pulls a shiny dime from his pocket. ‘Heads or tails?’ He flips it into the air.

I watch it spinning and call tails right before he claps it in his palm and shows me the stern face of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Decked in the worn environment suit, in my right hand the gun is loaded with liquid alloy and in my left two vials of glowing green fluid. The green light on my visor tells me that the suit is sealed and I step through the portal into the corridor and hear it slide shut behind me. I call out on the intercom, ‘I’m in.’ I hear valves shutting as the circulation vents are closed. I climb the ladder to the hatchway leading into the bulkhead, enter the 3 digit code to open the lock, and unlatch it. The vacuum behind it tears the door from my grasp and throws it back on its hinges as the air in the corridor rushes into the bulkhead to leak out into space. Climbing up, I use a small flashlight mounted on my helmet to find the light-switch and activate it.

Globules of condensed black matter float through-out the room in the weightlessness. Some have collided against the walls and ovoid stains have resulted. It is as I feared, as Kilo feared, the dark parts we stored in the bulkheads have been destroyed. I sit down on the cold floor. It’s a terrible thing to realize you are now half-a-man and not even feel it yet, not feel it for many more light-years.

The few other pilots who have had this happen to them, losing the dark portion of their person, return to docks thin and agitated. They go mad in no time flat. You can’t exist outside the transmission severed like you do when you’re in transit. You can’t understand the things around you. Everything and everybody is foreign, unmistakably hostile. I try to grasp what it is that has befallen us, but already it is beyond my grasp. I suppress an urge to weep because who weeps at their own death? I am tempted to collect the splatters on the wall, cremate them, put them in an urn, and jettison them into space as a precursor to my own funeral but instead I stand and examine the glass chambers where we had stored them. Both containers are shattered.

‘Have you found the leak yet?’ Kilo crackles at me, avoiding the real question.

‘Not yet,’ I reply and move to the center of the room where I open the vial. The green liquid is quickly sucked from the container. It forms a thin tendril of color weaving from my position to a point in the wall where it disappears, leaving a greasy red film marking the pin-hole. Quietly and carefully I seal the hole and then sit with my back to the wall to wait the ten minutes it takes to solidify before I can check it.

There is nothing else I can do except sit and watch the half our essences shifting through-out the room like lazy clouds dark with rain. They take on shapes I can’t help but identify as the sick, synthetic fruits the tree in the mess hall is feeding us. Nauseous, I close my eyes but can’t keep them shut longer than a few seconds before I open them again to ascertain into what new shapes the globs of matter have molded themselves. One shape reminds me of the fingerless hand of my now deceased uncle after he got it caught in the gears at the luxury space-craft plant he was so proud to work at. I spot another, certainly tongue-shaped sticking out of nowhere at me, and others, a potato, a hemisphere of brain, a wadded-up sock, a coiled serpent, an anthill.

‘Hey, Femto, quit fiddling around in there. It’s time to check the seal.’

I stand and return to the center of the room. I open the second vial and the green fluid stays put in the bottom of the glass cylinder. I move it directly in front of the plug and still it does not crawl out. ‘It’s closed,’ I call to Kilo.

I hear the rushing of air filling the chamber as I head back to the hatchway. Kilo has activated the gravitational field and the floating black masses fall immediately to the ground with sudden, small splats. One which was hovering above me falls directly onto my faceplate, the black gook completely obscuring my vision. I can no longer see the hatchway so I am forced to scrape my gloved hands across the face plate which only smears it. Stumbling, I make my way to the ladder and close the hatch above me. Back in the corridor, I check the green light on my visor to make sure it is safe to remove my helmet.

I pull it off just as Kilo enters the corridor. He stares dumbly at the black matter spread across my helmet and chest and now smeared across my gloves and arms.

‘Both of us,’ I answer the question he does not want to ask. He abandons me to the task of removing myself from the environment suit and cleaning it.

Kilo is as deeply affected as I am that evening. He takes a handful of barbiturates he had smuggled aboard without trying to conceal it from me. He even offers me several but I decline as my stomach is still bothering me. Within several minutes he has succumbed to a solemn dreamless sleep, leaving me to pace throughout the hallways of the ship, my hard boots ringing against the metal grating of the walkways. By this time I am starving and decide to see if I can find anything consumable in the mess hall.

I enter the mess hall cloaked in darkness. I hear the sounds of chewing coming from the center of the room where the food service tree is located. ‘Kilo?’ I know he is asleep but I also am sure we are the only two on the freighter. I decide against turning on the lights and approach the tree and the continued chewing noises.

‘You really ought to chew with your mouth closed,’ I tell the darkness, certain that I am already in the first stages of the madness of my half-life.

‘Fuck you,’ the darkness snaps back at me.

I move beneath the tree and in the faint light emanating from the hallway I can make out a figure crouched on the lowest branch eating the soft grey fruits. The creature is human-shaped but its skin is a pitch black absorbing the light. A glassy sheen shows on the smooth featureless black orbs which are its eyes. I tremble in surprise and hope and despair. One of our dark parts has survived. ‘Who are you?’ I ask afraid of either answer, afraid for Kilo and myself. One of our fates would be doubly worse once he realized that he was alone in his severed plight.

‘My dear Femto,’ the shadow calls in a lullaby chant, ‘Have you become so accustomed to transmission that you can’t even recognize yourself in the mirror?’

‘Then you are mine,’ I state without conviction.

‘I am only yours, eternally and inseparably.’

‘How is it you survived?’

‘We dark shadows have a way of turning up when you least expect us. When Kilo and I realized that the bulkhead was breached, we tried to escape from our cages.’

‘You would have been safe in those glass containers. They’re hermetically sealed.’

‘Maybe. One never knows in an old tub like this. Nevertheless, I cracked my container first as the air in the bulkhead was screaming out. I ran to closet and locked myself in there. Moments later I heard Kilo’s container shatter. I heard his footsteps running about the room in a frantic panic. He pounded on the closet door but I would not open it to let him in. When all the air was gone he suffocated and his fragile frame exploded. I hid there until you reclaimed the bulkhead and left.’

‘Why didn’t you let Kilo in the closet with you?’ I whisper.

My dark brother laughs, ‘It would be totally out of character. He would have done the same in my situation. We shadows don’t help each other out. We live in the darkness alone and we delight in death.’

‘What am I going to do?’ I ask aloud, wondering how I can tell Kilo that only his dark part has been destroyed.

‘There’s only one course of action now,’ my shadow advises me.

‘If I tell Kilo...’

‘He will certainly become enraged and try to kill both parts of us,’ my shadow finishes my thought for me. ‘He is already succumbing to madness. There will be nothing to stop him.’

‘If I don’t tell Kilo...’

‘And he doesn’t find out then that’s all for the better...’

‘But if he does find out...’

‘Then his rage will be even greater and his madness more possessing.’

‘You must hide,’ I order my shadow. ‘I am the Captain of this vessel and I order you to hide and remain so until we have docked.’

‘I can’t survive without food outside the cage. I have to remain here,’ he taunted me. ‘How much longer do we have until we arrive?’ He plucks another fruit from a near limb.

‘Years.’

‘Can you imagine what I will do for the next several years while you and Kilo hibernate and I am left alone to wander the ship, to eat these mushy fruits?’

‘I cannot. What will you do?’ I ask again fearing the reply.

‘I will certainly go mad myself. We may be whole when we arrive at the space dock but half of you will be crazed. I may even accidentally cause the ship to wreck into a stray moon or drift too close to a blackhole. The prospects look bleak.’

I nod in agreement.

I leave the mess hall and return to our quarters, seating myself on the edge of my bunk, staring across the room at Kilo’s still form, wanting to brush the hair out his face, pat his hard sleeping shoulder, and reassure him, even with lies, that it would be okay.

Kilo wakes groggily several hours later and finds me still sitting on the edge of my bunk. He complains of a headache and swallows a couple of dry barbiturates before I can recommend a more suitable medicine.

I debate how to approach the topic of my discovery, how to cushion the blow, and how to react to his anger and desolation. It is on the tip of my tongue just to blurt out the events as they have occurred when we both hear footsteps on the deck above us.

Kilo looked at me with a wild glare in his eyes, the same sensation filling him that had filled me when I had discovered the shadow in the mess hall and was unaware whose it was. He races out of the room toward the stairwell.

‘Kilo!’ I shout after him, but the following words catch in my throat as he races up heedlessly. I jump to my feet and sprint behind him.

Upstairs we emerge in a long narrow hallway whose ceiling slants toward one wall. Kilo has frozen at the top of the stairs, his back to me. Beyond him I can see my shadow imitating perfectly his pose.

‘Who are you?’ Kilo pleads.

‘Who do I look like, you halfwit, you cripple?’ my shadow sneers back at him.

Kilo rushes down the hall. My shadow turns to flee but has been caught off-guard. Kilo grabs him by the neck and begins strangling him, his hands sinking into the dull black flesh. I pound through the hallway and throw myself on Kilo, knocking him off my shadow. The dark part of myself leaps to its feet and runs off down the hallway, screaming, ‘He’s mad as a bat! He’s completely freaked out! No one is safe!’

I grapple with Kilo but he pins me to the floor and stares at me as if I have most cruelly betrayed him. His hands are linked around my neck but he has yet to apply enough pressure to cut off the airflow.

‘I didn’t know, Kilo. I honestly didn’t know,’ I gasp.

His eyes are those of a wounded animal looking for a place to hide from the hounds, confronting me with his mortal amputation. My mouth opens but no words come out.

The two of us in the hallway are light parts. We both know that. He can’t hurt me. He gently raises himself off me and silently leans against the wall. He turns his back to me and walks down the hallway and back down the stairs. I hear him enter our quarters and hear the rattle of pills leaving the glass jar falling into his palm. I hear him choking as he struggles to swallow them all without water.

I lie on the metal floor of the corridor for another couple hours, unmoving. Abruptly, I stand and go to the medical station and obtain the required chemicals. Returning to our quarters, I feel Kilo’s unresisting wrist. There is still a pulse. I pour some of the strongly reeking fluid onto a hand-towel and hold it over Kilo’s face until he stops breathing and the pulse fades from his wrist.

I haul the body to the furnace and cremate it. Afterwards I gather the ashes and put them in brightly decorated ceramic jar which I promptly eject into space.

When I return to the hibernation chamber, I find my shadow has already enclosed himself in Kilo’s cubicle. I check to make sure everything is functioning properly on both units before I enter my own. As I am fading away, I think, ‘I am all light. I am angelic. I have never committed a sin or relished in the misfortune of others. It’s hard to reconcile yourself to these acts even when one half of you has already acted. But that’s how it is, part of you is beyond your control and the other can only mutely follow, imitate, and help it out when it gets into trouble.’

BLACKEYE

The galaxy is at war over no less of a matter than a woman’s hand. Granted, she is a most singular woman, but a single woman nonetheless. Besides that, she has two hands, and although they are dainty, I hesitate to suggest they are worth the thousands of lives being violently ended each day to determine which monarch’s beard they will stroke, which monarch’s silverware they will pick up in which monarch’s banquet hall, and which monarch’s eyes they will pluck out in her betrayal.

The monarchs of the kingdoms of R- and T- have each gotten it into their heads that the cost of their subjects’ lives is indeed a suitable price to pay for the joy of holding her slender fingers, the wisdom of following the crooked creases in her petite palm, and the ecstasy of losing their eyes to her well-manicured nails.

How they have arrived at this grave and lofty decision is the topic of the heated argument which occupies Peta and I during the long, dull hours of our midnight sentries. Each night we put forth new theories on the monarchs’ methods of determining whether the war is justified and the other shoots holes in the argument and points out its shortcomings. Then during the following day we restructure the argument both in our dreams and in the activities which fill our evening between sleep and guard duty.

Tonight is no exception and I tell Peta, as we sit in the guard station flanking the gate of the palace, playing cribbage and smoking ultralights, of my latest idea. ‘Think of it this way, Peta. The Kings have a great deal of wealth secured in their vaults, precious gems; diamonds, rubies, sapphires, opals, precious metals; gold, uranium, silver, platinum, intricately carved and adorned jewelries; necklaces, earrings, bracelets, anklets, brooches; ancient, exquisitely crafted arms and armors; swords, axes, plasma detonators, laser pistols, flails, chainmail, breastplates, radiative personnel shields, greaves, and coifs, and libraries of unfathomable texts; poetry, dramas, novels, essays, Fortran programs, and banned scrolls. In addition to this massive heap of valuables, the kings have a scale in the vault as well. A large infinitely delicate scale that won’t balance unless all the windows are shut and the cracks in the walls sealed to prevent the slightest breeze from skewing the balance.’

Peta nods patiently, waiting for me to get to the meat of my scheme.

‘Then, when Libra is dominant in the heavens, they place the ring which they intend to present as a wedding band on one side of the scale and then begin heaping their valuables on the other side.’

‘Wait, Exa,’ Peta interrupts me, ‘It would only take one dagger to outweigh a ring.’

‘Let me speak my piece, Peta. You see, this scale of the kings is not a normal scale. It balances happiness. It won’t even out until the king would be more upset by the loss of the vast majority of his wealth than he would be pleased to hold his queen’s elegant hand.’

‘Pure speculation!’ Peta shouts, ‘You have no evidence to back up your claim that such a device exists, much less in the king’s own vault.’

‘And you have no evidence that it does not exist. And who should possess such a powerful device if not the king?’

Peta quiets down. ‘Just supposing, hypothetically, that such a scale did function as you suggest when Libra was dominant, and supposing as well that it did eventually level out to a great horde of wealth, how then would the king equate that wealth to the lives of his troops?’

‘Well, I’m no mathematician myself, but there are such creatures in the king’s service. They would surely have devised an equation to relate the two quantities, factoring into the expression, the average gross income of his subjects, the rate of inflation of his currency, the value of gold on the inter-planetary market, the beauty of the sunsets which collapse on the edges of his planet, the beauty of the queen’s hand translated into metric tons of platinum and carats of diamond, the perpetuity fund to support the soldiers’ widows and orphans, and a host of other dimensionless numbers. Those mathematicians would advise the king how many men’s lives were an acceptable loss. The king would then take that result to his generals and given that mortal budget, they would devise a plan of attack which predicted success within those bounds.’

Peta mulls this over as we continue our cribbage game. Eventually, he concedes that the plan is plausible, but adds, ‘Perhaps only one king has used that method. Then the other must certainly have made his decision based on the following algorithm which I will now describe. The king calls all sources of divination to his castle, from the lowliest gypsy to the respected prophet. Each augur uses whatever means available to him: arithomancy using numbers, cleromancy by lots, hepatoscopy by livers, ophiomancy by serpents, horoscopy by star charts, oneirocritica by dreams, dactylomancy by quija boards, licanomancy by reflections in still water, NMR spectroscopy by radiation, and crystallomancy by crystal globes. Each soothsayer is requested to present the king with a color whether it be fuchsia, indigo, kelly green...any shade which forecasts the outcome of the battle. The king’s advisors arrange these colors in order of increasing electro-magnetic wavelengths producing a spectrum resembling a rainbow. His advisors determine the mean, median, and mode of wavelengths.’

‘Do they take into account quantum effects?’ I prod critically.

‘How could they not?’ Peta casually replies. ‘They are masters at this sort of thing, having been trained for it all their lives. From this information they are able to determine the ideal strategy for their offensive, correlating the spectrum to the colors of the stars. They can determine which planets to take over first, which planets are ideal supply depots, which are key military relay points, which are necessary bastions should it come to a war of attrition, and which planets are perfect resorts for the troops’ R&R.’

‘But that’s no justification for the war.’

‘But it is because it represents the historic best of all possible strategies and minimal losses. Given that there exists this exemplary set of tactics, it must be followed. Otherwise, they would be doing something else which was less than the best which could be done.’

I am much impressed by his logistics, but refrain from complimenting him. Having arrived at these two most feasible conclusions, we then argue over which king, that of T- or R-, has implemented the rationale by scales and which has used the reasoning by spectrum. But we are interrupted by the startled sound of someone knocking on the frame of the open door of our guard post. We turn abruptly and find Susan, the subject of our discussion and the object of the war, standing at our doorway looking sheepish. Fortunately, those infamous hands of hers are gloved in white silk, but I think I can make out the pointed nails beneath them.

Peta and I are members of the United Planetary peace keeping force. We’re not much of a force really, since our intention is peace. We prefer to carry books and decks of cards rather than weapons as they are lighter in our packs and more suitable to our task. We travel between the planets on unarmed and unarmored passenger vessels rather than interstellar destroyers. We have no need of weapons and face no threat from the armies of the kingdoms of R- and T-, for we are not even located on the same planet as those armies. No, Susan, has been removed from the conflict, to a neutral planet, until the situation is resolved. We provide a demonstration of protection, though our role is mostly one of show. We would be quite unable to defend her or ourselves against any military force. However, the kingdoms respect our role and maintain a wide berth about this region of space.

This planet is a lush paradisiacal haven where the mentally insane are tended to by a quiet, gentle race, who has chosen this caretaking as their profession. Susan’s presence, and by extension our presence as well, has been most graciously accommodated.

The two rival kingdoms insisted that the United Planets provide a protection force that could in no way, not emotionally, intellectually, or physically, harm their prize. So there was an extensive weeding out process of applicants for the mission which involved removing any political radicals, schizophrenics, heterosexual males, and homosexual females from the ranks. So Exa and I are considered to be among the truly elite to be chosen to serve on this mission.

Susan is being lodged in a spacious palace ringed by an expanse of orchards, gardens, and greenhouses. A wall surrounds the palace with only one gate. Peta and I occupy a relatively minor role in the overall peacekeeping mission and neither of us had ever seen Susan face to face, but we had, of course, seen photographs in the weeklies and spotted her at a distance traipsing through the orchards with her entourage of maidens.

When we realize that it is Susan herself standing at the doorway to our humble post, we set down our cards. I do so reluctantly because the crib was mine this hand and I had a 6-7-8 run with the 7 repeated and I was eager to plot out my points on the board.

‘Can we help you, ma’am?’ Peta asks cordially.

Susan grins and we are captivated by her charm. ‘I meant to sneak out tonight and go frolicking through the jungle outside the palace walls. Just once by myself without my maidens and aides. But I passed by your station and was intrigued. I forgot myself listening to your arguments and have been caught red handed.’

Peta and I glance down at her white gloves and imagine the hands of whose widely-reputed fairness we have heard so much.

‘That you are, ma’am, but since you seem to have slipped past the interior palace guards, it would be a terrible waste to squander your efforts. Would you care to play a hand of cards with us, Your Highness?’ Peta extends the invitation calmly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

I am shocked by his effrontery and even more so when Susan replies, ‘I’d be delighted. And please, call me Susan.’

Standing, Peta introduces himself and offers his chair to Susan. He takes a stool from the corner for himself. Seeing that I am in state of dumb shock, he introduces me as well, ‘This is my colleague, Exa.’

I nod and smile back at her, like an idiotic donkey. We play three handed spades and either Peta or I win without exception.

Regardless, Susan appears to be enjoying herself and explains, ‘I don’t get much opportunity to play cards. It’s not fashionable conduct in the palace. I’m told it leads to gambling.’

‘Aw Criminy, we’re out of fashion, Peta,’ I exclaim. I turn back to Susan, ‘I’m real sorry we got you involved in this then. We didn’t know it was a vice for up-and-coming-queens. We’re peaceful fellows. We didn’t mean anything by it.’ I gather the cards to put them away.

Susan stops me when I reach to take the cards in front of her by placing her gloved hand on my wrist. ‘Stop. I didn’t mean for you to put the cards away. I was having fun. Besides we’ve already started, the crime has been committed.’ She smiles again, assuring us that her words are meant satirically as I envision the rest of my life in a military prison. I am acutely uncomfortable with the small weight of her hand on my arm so I withdraw it, leaving the cards in front of her.

Susan continues talking, clearing the awkward silence from the room, ‘Well, I’m played out anyway. And my intention is to sneak out of the palace anyway.’

Peta clears his throat. ‘Umm, ma’am, urr, Susan, I think that the point of Exa and I being here is, at least in part, to prevent just such a thing.’ he stumbles over each word.

‘Am I prisoner then?’

Peta is reduced almost to whining, ‘Well, you don’t have to take it like that. I mean you’ve got those fine orchards inside the walls and humid greenhouses with exotic plants and butterflies and those nice gardens. Your grounds outshine the surrounding jungle in their cultivated splendor.’

I nod in heart-felt agreement.

‘But I want to go outside the palace walls,’ Susan insists, ‘and I want to go tonight. How long are you two to remain on duty?’

‘Until dawn,’ I reply. It’s five hours away.

‘And will anyone visit you until then?’

‘It’s unlikely.’ She was our first visitor since we had begun the midnight shift almost a month ago.

‘Then come along with me and you can protect me outside from any dangers which present themselves.’ She stands as if to head for the door, but waits for us to join her.

‘Oh boy, We really can’t do that, I don’t think, sorry to say, as nice as it sounds,’ Peta stutters.

Susan gives us a fierce look and we cringe. ‘Then are you going to forcibly restrain me?’

Peta is visibly upset. ‘Dang! Why do you have to say it like that? Why do you have to put our backs against the wall?’

I feel like I should offer my support but am only able to vocalize a weak, ‘Yeah.’

‘I promise I won’t tell anyone.’

I don’t want to fall for that one and I reply, ‘You say that now, but just wait until you’re a queen, and your children, princes and princesses, and you start writing your queenly memoirs, then you’ll surely mention this and even though Peta and I will have probably retired from the United Planets by then, they’ll look us up and throw us both in the slammer for insubordination and treason and contempt of queens. That is if we don’t get caught tonight and are already in jail by dawn.’

‘I would never write such a thing! I have more discretion than that,’ Susan retorts, insulted. ‘I suggest you follow me to ensure that I don’t get lost or eaten alive in the jungle. Otherwise, you can sit where you are and continue your game. I was planning to sneak out and go by myself anyway.’ She stalks out the door.

Peta’s eyes are wide with disbelief. We mutely follow her past the gate into the darkness, our voices lost somewhere in our throats.

Susan wanders along the dirt road which leads from the palace until she hears the sounds of water coming from behind the dense growth lining the road. She asks us, who have been following morosely behind her, ‘What’s that?’

‘There’s a small river that runs parallel to the road about 30 meters back,’ Peta informs her. ‘It’s not much of a river, really just a creek.’

‘I want to see it. Take me there,’ Susan orders us.

Both of us know it is useless to argue and we begin picking a path through the vines and trees toward the sound of flowing water. It is extremely dark once we have stepped inside the jungle proper. The moonlight is blocked by the leaves overhead. It soon becomes nearly pitch black and Peta leads us only by the singing of the creek. Susan follows him with her gloved hand clutching the tail of Peta’s shirt so she does not lose sight of him. I bring up the rear, careful not to misplace a step or stumble and fall into Susan, knocking her to the ground.

We arrive at the bank of the creek and there is a small clearing only a couple meters wide which we huddle in and welcome the return of moonlight. The bank slopes slowly down to the stream and the edges are shallow water bumping over smooth rocks. Susan removes her shoes and stands in the shallow edge, her pink feet curling over the surfaces of the stone.

Peta appears worried that she might fall in, but the stream is no more than a meter deep at the center and there is hardly any current.

‘Take off your boots and get your feet wet,’ Susan tells us, ‘It’s not too cold. It’s quite pleasant.’

We sit down and obediently take off our boots and socks and roll up our trousers. Standing in the ankle-deep water on either side of Susan, I look across at Peta and see that he is grinning like an idiot. I slowly put my hand over my eyes and want to reappear seated at the table in the guard station.’

‘Relax,’ Susan tells me.

I try to, as there is not much else I can do.

‘Do you really think a scale that balances happiness exists?’ Susan asks me.

I am taken off-guard, having forgotten that she had overheard our entire discussion. ‘Well, It certainly lies within the realm of possibilities.’

‘And if that king wins the war then will he let me use it, so I can discover what it is that will make me happy and how much of it I will need?’

‘Assuredly, he will allow that. You will be his queen. I have no doubt that you will be the head-of-the-household. You’ll probably be running the government as well. You’ll be able to use the scale whenever you want, at least whenever Libra is dominant in the sky. You will surely achieve blissful happiness.’ My feet are beginning to chill in the water.

Susan turns to Peta, ‘Do you think that the other king, were he to emerge victorious from the conflict, could use his method of rainbows and spectrum to decipher the best course of action in pleasing me?’

Peta nods. ‘You will make a fine wife and he will want nothing else than to please you. He will use every means at his disposal to cater to you. You will be the whole of his life and he will decorate every corner of his kingdom in your honor.’

Susan looks doubtful but pleased and flattered. She steps out of the river and slips on a rock. Throwing her hands out in front of her to catch herself, she crushes a small plant rooted beside the bank. ‘Ouch!’

‘Aw, shit!’ Peta exclaims and then covers his mouth in horror as he realizes he has just uttered a profanity in front of a queen-to-be.

‘Aw, shit!’ Susan imitates his inflections perfectly.

We laugh giddily until I see specks of blood forming on the palm of her white glove. I rush to her side. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Yes. I’m fine. There were just little prickles on the stem of that plant I crushed. It’s nothing really,’ she tries to convince us.

‘Don’t take it so lightly,’ Peta says. ‘Take off your glove so I can make sure there are no spines stuck in your hand.’

I avert my eyes as she does so. After several minutes of acute inspection, Peta says, ‘Hmm.’

‘What?’ Susan asks concerned.

Peta crouches and inspects the smashed plant. ‘Just as I suspected. Ma’am, you have fallen into a prickleberry bush of Rho.’

Susan gasps. ‘What does that mean?’

Peta stands and grimaces. ‘Well, its rumored that a prickle from the prickleberry bush will infect the pricked with the madness of the inhabitants of Rho.’

I stand amazed that Peta is telling Susan what by any account is a preposterous lie. Peta is no botanist and I am sure that if such a prickleberry bush existed, I would have heard about it.

Susan seems to agree with me. ‘That must be a fairy tale.’ But she does not sound convinced.

We put our shoes back on, follow our trail back to the road, and return unnoticed to the guard station. Susan assures us that she will clean the pricks as soon as she gets back to her room and she will throw the gloves in the fireplace, as she has hundreds of identical pairs. She thanks us for our entertaining her and quickly disappears back toward the palace.

When I am sure she is out of ear-shot and checked around the door to make sure she is gone, I ask, ‘What the hell did you tell her that story about the prickleberry bush for, Peta?’

‘Relax,’ he tells me, mimicking her. ‘She’s a pompous fool.’

The next day the palace is abuzz with rumors that the queen is ill. Indeed she is not to be seen wandering about the palace grounds as is her usual routine. There are even stories that huge black rings have encircled her eyes. Peta and I live in constant terror that she will reveal our escapade. I, for one, also feel some concern for her welfare, although I can’t tell if Peta shares it.

In a week, however, she seems perfectly healed, and is once again seen dancing with her maidens underneath the fruit trees in the palace orchards, apparently as fit as ever. She does not approach Peta and I again, for which we are thankful.

When the conflict between the Kingdoms of T- and R- was resolved, both the methods of justifying the war had proved to be erroneous and the loss of life had far exceeded the predictions. Susan became Queen of one kingdom or another and bore several princes and a princess. Twenty years would pass before her madness overtook her and one night, moons high in the sky, and in a fit of lunacy, she plucked out her husband’s eyes. Needless to say, he was quite upset by the traumatic event but could not force himself to punish the woman he had loved for two decades and still loved despite her condition. He did however hand control of the planets in his kingdom over to his eldest son, who immediately banished his sick mother to remain in the care of the doctors on the sanitarium planet Rho who would best be able to help her.

From her palace on Rho, Queen Susan did write her memoirs and sure enough she recalled the night she had slipped out of the palace with two United Planetary peace-keeping enlisted men. Only she got the names wrong and listed us as Pexa and Eta. I don’t think anyone ever made the connection, or if they did, they let it slide, assuming we had suffered enough already.

BLACKLUNG

It’s all the dust that whirls about in the wind that does it to us. For the most part, we get along with it okay, a little coughing, a little sputtering, a shorter life expectancy by a couple of years on the average, but a much fuller life, which more than compensates, here where the soot settles over everything in thin gauzy layers. It’s just dust, as the saying goes. A little dust never killed anybody, as the other saying goes. Fuller.

‘The world is an outlet for my rage, nobody else’s. And when I am prompted to release it, no one can tell me, “You have no right,” because it’s no longer a matter of rights.’

That’s what Pico told me while she was preparing dinner. I thought she was angry with me. I did not understand then, that nothing had prompted it, that she was telling me something simple like ‘For nothing in the world is it worth turning one’s back on what one loves,’^† or ‘The earth is asleep, Joe, it’s rock, steel, ice, the earth doesn’t care or forgive.’^†† Rather, I thought it was more along the lines of ‘Shut that goddamn baby up and get the screaming kettle off the stove!’ I was mistaken and my failure to understand Pico’s intentions resulted in misfortune.

The next morning when I awoke, Pico was not in bed beside me. I was not particularly disturbed by this, as she often took walks and sat out in the sunrise in the park. No matter what you hear otherwise, all that dust in the air makes for spectacular sunrises and sunsets. I myself preferred to sleep and dream of Pico, doused in grapefruit-colored light, out there by herself watching the sky, collecting her spirits, breathing in the dust which weighed her down to the planet’s surface and kept her close to me.

What did upset my morning calm was the fact that all I remembered of my dreams was Pico sitting in her studio, talking to a sculpture she was working on. And then she took a shovel with a sharp, curved edge and repeatedly hacked at the clay. Each time she struck at it, the shovel would imbed itself in the statue’s torso and she would have to yank at it violently to get it unstuck. Eventually she raggedly cleaved through the torso and I awoke. I decided to go to work early.

I blame myself for my inattention and for not recognizing the signs before they evolved into an ‘episode’. I blame myself for turning a deaf ear to Pico and forcing her to resort to other confidants. I really slap my hand against my forehead when I think of how stupid I was. I slap my forehead just like I did that morning when I walked into the town square and found Pico standing on the central platform shouting at the early morning joggers and business men as they passed or stopped to listen to this beautiful, crazy girl screeching in the splendid oranges and pinks of the sunrise. She shouted, ‘How can you tell the rain it has no right to fall, or that it should leave a column of dry, air surrounding you, and extending up to the sun, like a spotlight? How can you shout over the roar of blood pounding in my ears when the rage has been summoned, is manifesting itself through me onto the world? My rage is like a sculptor standing before a full-sized, clay figure, work of my hands and outpouring of my heart, and swinging a shovel-head into it.’

After slapping my forehead, my hand slid down my face to remain covering my mouth. I listened.

‘All I want is parthenogenesis! All I want is reproducibility without conjunction of gametes. I’m sick of the dreck and I’m sick of the dregs.’ She swung her arm through the dust sifting toward the ground for emphasis.

A concerned gentleman climbed up on the platform with her and asked if she was alright. She knocked him off and shouted, ‘Don’t palpate me, I’m not your sloe-eyed fawn. I’m not a wide-eyed nymph and I’m sick of the dreck and I’m sick of the dregs!’

The crowd grew around her as the volume of her fury rose and infiltrated the houses lining the avenues leading to the town square, waking their irritated occupants. As for myself, I was accustomed to these periodic outbursts, albeit not quite of this magnitude, and took it in stride. I attributed it to the artist’s streak in her. Those of us who don’t have it can’t understand it. I wish I could say the rest of the townsfolk maintained their composure as well as I did. Unfortunately they did not. They were incensed that their home and their lifestyle should be subjected to such vulgar criticism. Moreover, it emanated from one among them, the gall, the insult, the sedition. I thought they were going to lynch her so I ran from the town square.

If you think that I abandoned my partner in such dire circumstances out of fear for my own safety, then I have misled you. I ran from the town square to the stables where I hastily bridled and saddled up our two horses. I knew Pico’s rage to taper off after a half hour, hour at most, so I still had time to rush to the apartment with the horses. I grabbed what I could, a lump of clay, her sculpting tools, a shovel (square edged), a spade (round edged), a hammer, a letter from the Pope granting us clemency in any of his provinces, her pair of cymbals, her pipe, a pouch of tobacco, her zippo lighter, a bottle of Gilbey’s gin, and a lime, (we’d have to hope to come across some tonic water), her diary, a small urn of dust, tunics of deep green synthetic materials that glistened in the sunlight, a pocketful of change, our designer sunglasses, two Glock 17’s, a blanket, and a common toothbrush. I threw all these into a knapsack except one of the Glocks which I put in a shoulder holster and the shovel and spade which I strapped to my horse.

Then I raced back toward the square, the horses hooves clapping against the cobblestone streets, until even that sound was overwhelmed by the roar of a mad throng. Above even that, I heard Pico still raging, ‘Every mouthful, every lungful, every breath, every swallow, every belch, loogie, cough, hiccup, sneeze, vomit, and whistle is fouled. It’s dreck and I’m sick of it! If I was dust before and to dust I must return, then I’d like to take my leave of it in the interim. It’s the dregs and I hate it!’ She collapsed spent. No one dared approach her. A minute passed. Then two.

Pico rose, looked around her and froze. The realization of where she was dawned on her. She peered at the hundreds of faces staring at her and noted that they had become filled with the rage she had just vented. She nodded her head slowly and took a step back.

The crowd surged forward. I galloped behind the platform where the crowd had not gathered and slowed just long enough for Pico to leap upon her steed and we made off, leaving the crowd howling indignantly behind us.

‘How was I?’ she asked sheepishly as we galloped past the city gates into the surrounding wilderness.

‘Wonderful,’ I smiled.

‘I hardly remember.’

‘It’s like that.’

‘Did you get my sunglasses?’

We slowed down as the road entered the woods. We doubted there would be any pursuit. The townsfolk would be satisfied with running us and our shovels out of town. I looked through the pack and handed her the sunglasses as the sun had climbed into the sky which, outside the city walls, was not dimmed by the haze of dust. ‘I got everything,’ I replied as I donned my own sunglasses and tied one of the brass cymbals on my head as a sunshade. Pico took the other and we continued in perfect symmetry. We rode our horses; hers a skewbald mare and mine a piebald gelding and that was their names too, Skewbald and Piebald, respectively.

If you were hiding in the woods, alongside the road outside of the dusty town that afternoon, and you listened carefully as we passed, you would have heard us say, ‘Giddy up, Skewbald,’ and ‘Giddy up, Piebald.’

We veered off the road slightly and camped next to a clear stream, unsaddled the horses, let them graze, and made a campfire simply to warm us as we had not brought any food with us. However we ate gooseberries which grew in abundance around us. We discovered a mulberry bush extending over the creek downstream and we ate some of its fruit as well.

Pico took out her lump of clay. Now that it’s out in front of us, I ought to mention that it’s a magic lump of clay. Pico can tear handfuls from the lump and it never shrinks no matter how many handfuls are taken. I wonder if it would work for me as well, but I doubt it. I am not an artist and I am afraid to try and break it. Besides, Pico is the one with the hands good for shaping things. Even with an endless supply of magical clay, it still takes more than a sharp eye and a steady hand. It takes what I haven’t got and Pico has.

First she sculpted some baked potatoes with butter. Delicious. Then, we were still hungry, so she sculpted us a loaf of sourdough bread and we devoured that as well. Finally she crafted a clay pitcher full of chablis. We drank the wine, in the sunset, laughing at how dull the colors are outside the veil of dust, laughing at the dreck and the dregs, and laughing at how lucky we are to have a lump of magic clay and someone who knows how to work it.

We fell asleep sharing the same blanket, but Pico sharing more of it than myself, and we woke at midnight as if by coincidence, but I knew it to be otherwise. Pico gathered our gear and hefted the pack on her back. She got the spade and I got the shovel. We were not gravediggers and we were not tomb robbers, as we had everything we wanted. We sat astride the long handles of our shovel and spade, as a witch might do to her broom, and we shot off into the night sky, calling out the names of our shovel and spade, which happened to be Piebald and Skewbald, respectively. Our silhouettes darted across the gibbous moon; we did loops, spirals, dives in play, before we began our journey. Upward we traveled, higher and higher, until the pressure dropped, the atmosphere thinned. We leaned forward, making ourselves more aerodynamic and increasing our speed. If I forgot to mention it, the shovel and spade were magic too like the lump of clay.

Before too long, we had left the planet’s atmosphere entirely and were connected only by thins strands of gravity like the moon. We could go much faster in space where there was no matter to slow us down and we didn’t have to worry about careening into some airborne heavy metal particles. And fast was how we did go. In no time, we were circling the moon of our choice and descending into this or that crater, canyon, cavern, or beach.

Tonight, we came to rest upon a beach surrounding a sea of dust. Our good friend, Femto, was sitting out on the beach studying his astrological charts. We exchanged pleasantries, and then Pico, rummaging through her knapsack, took out the pipe, the pouch of tobacco, and the zippo lighter, packed the bowl and offered it to Femto.

Femto readily accepted. He sucked in on the pipe, and blew smoke rings in the vacuum that surrounded the moon, you see, the pipe, too, was magic, and could be smoked in outer space. But that was not the principal enchantment on the pipe, it was only a side-effect. The primary reason for keeping the pipe was that it allowed the smoker to brief spasms of omniscience, or so I am told. I never partook of it myself, as Pico is the one who knows about the magic and I let her keep that status. But I did see the results often enough, especially with Femto, who thought it was the greatest thing in the universe, to know everything for the span of a second and then forget it all, or most of it. He exhaled and I could see in his eyes he no longer needed the star charts. He knew the exact location of each star in each of the 88 constellations. He had seen the entire universe laid out in the form of stellar parallax. He had travelled to the worlds orbiting each of stars, visited their inhabitants, said his adieus, and come back home to spend the rest of the night with us. We were flattered.

Naturally, after Pico let him use the pipe, Femto was more than willing to help us out. I supposed that he would have been willing to help us had we never possessed the pipe, but when I asked Pico if she agreed, she had shaken her head back and forth and said, ‘Don’t count on it. It works better this way anyway.’ So Pico asked Femto to help us find a new vein of magic dust in the moon’s crust.

Femto was delighted to be pulled from his studies, and exclaimed that he knew exactly where one could be found that would suit our purposes to a T. He stashed the maps into a smaller pack of his own. Pico removed the hammer from her pack and Femto mounted it while she and I got on our spade and shovel. I should mention at this point that Femto fit very nicely on the carpenter’s hammer, as he was only one foot tall.

The three of us launched into flight and swung out over the sea of dust. We went farther and farther out to sea until we no longer could see the shore. Then Femto made an abrupt dive and plunged into the sea. We followed. Submerged in dust, our speed was reduced slightly but that was okay because the sea was full of scaly, spiny, iridescent dust-fish, which occupied our attention during our descent to the sea bed. The farther down we went, the less the sea’s inhabitants resembled fish and the larger they became. There were vast networks of creatures that looked like smooth white tubes two meters in diameter and a couple city blocks long. We weaved in between a coil of them and through a fissure in the sea bed.

We stopped inside this fissure near a vein of a greenish tinge amid the ocher crust. I looked in the pack, still strapped to Pico’s back and removed the sculptor’s tools and the urn. I knelt in front of the magic dust and chipped it off the wall into the urn. It’s hard work, and you stir up the dust and gets everywhere. You end up doing most of it by feel. If you come in contact with a hard rocky barrier, you have to chip through that too, as dynamite is hard to come by at the bottom of a lunar sea.

As I worked, Pico and Femto relaxed. She took out the bottle of Gilbey’s and the lime. Fortunately, along with the star charts in Femto’s bag, he had a bottle of tonic, a tray of ice cubes, and a single glass which they had to share. I peered over my shoulder at them, periodically. It was always a peculiar sensation to watch someone drinking from a drink with the magic lime. That lime would cause the imbiber to experience the passing sensation of death. Not only mentally, but I could see them phasing in and out of existence with each sip. The more they drank, the longer they stayed out of sight, but never more than two or three seconds. It seemed to be enjoyable as well slightly disconcerting, as the drinking of the lime juice was always accompanied by subdued laughter. It could have been the gin though, I don’t know. I never tried it myself, never having had the time to grow weary of the living world.

When I had filled the whole urn, we got back on our tools and climbed out of the ocean. Pico and Femto’s flight paths were not so direct on the return journey as they had been coming. Instead of returning to the beach, we ended up in the catacombs where Femto lived. They had originally been mined by giant lunar ants and the only entrance was at the top of the anthill, which in this case was a dozen meters high. We flew to the top of the hill and entered. Pico and I had to duck inside because the ants, giant though they had been, did not stand almost two meters tall.

We wandered through the maze-like passages with literally thousands of niches lining the wall, each with a corpse. Femto resided in no less than the queen’s chamber, where she had mated and then killed her lovers. All the adjoining rooms were egg nurseries where each year her thousands of children would swarm all over each other and gang up on one another, the drones versus the soldiers, the workers versus the future-queen candidates, the blacks versus the reds, et cetera, like children were prone to do.

In the queen’s chambers, we sat on Femto’s queen-sized bed as Pico related the events that had occurred the past day, her rage and the subsequent flight from the city of dust.

Femto showed her no compassion, ‘It’s your fault.’

‘It’s not my fault,’ she denied. I saw her hand straying toward the pack where the magic lime sat. I had to suspect then that she did in fact accept part of the blame, and didn’t want to. ‘They’re independent creatures. They have everything they need.’

‘They had no rage,’ Femto interrupted as he clipped his toenails with a sterling silver toenail clipper.

‘They didn’t need rage,’ Pico replied.

‘Then why did you give it to them?’ Femto asked as he cleaned his teeth with a golden toothpick.

‘So they wouldn’t be so stupid and gullible and innocent. It was practically unbearable living in their presence.’

‘So now they’re just like you,’ Femto suggested as he bounced up and down on the queen’s supple mattress. ‘Except they don’t have any magic.’ Femto did a flip. ‘Come back to the moon, Pico.’

I said, ‘Time to go,’ before she could accept. We bid our farewells, promised to come again soon, and flew off, through the ant-hill corridors out into space.

Pico and I were quieter on the return trip. Even I could sense that Femto had upset something in her. I knew Femto would never do that with the intention of hurting her; he just couldn’t let the truth go understated when it might have a consequence, any consequence. Femto wanted only to see how things would happen, or so he told me, and to see something not happen, out of ignorance, was irreconcilable to him.

We flew over the dust city at about a quarter to five and dropped the daily dosage of dust into the sky above it. We watched the darkness replenished and then returned to our campsite where our horses, Skewbald and Piebald, were waking. We slept ‘til noon.

Later in the day, Pico rubbed a little of the dust from the urn into the clay. She had told me before that the magic dust did not make the clay magic. The clay was already magic and the dust just colored it, so she could see it.

I wondered what she would sculpt now. I anticipated something excellently simple. Since she was considering the dust city, which she had sculpted handful by handful from the lump of clay, every brick, every blade of grass, each inhabitant, and each day, a failure, I wondered what she could make now. But it didn’t surprise me that I couldn’t imagine it. After all, she was the sorceress and I, the familiar. If I haven’t brought up the point yet, I ought to mention that she sculpted me too, out of clay, and Femto is my godfather.

^†Albert Camus, The Plague, 1947.
^††Philip Levine, No One Remembers, 1976.

BLACKBOOK

Everywhere we go, we take our blackbooks with us. The content of the blackbooks varies as much as the languages it is written in and the means in which it in inscribed: ink, charcoal, blood, lead, wax, whatever is at hand and will leave a mark. We go down in the subterranean maze of tunnels with our blackbooks. We sit on the bank of underground rivers that surface for short spans in caverns or fall into chasms as they work their ways to the ocean. And while we sit there, on those banks, our skin is a pastel hue of flesh due to the pasty light which emanates from the phosphorescent molds clinging to the rough walls and ceilings. In that soft, sedating light, behind the current of water, we read what we have written in our blackbooks. Occasionally, we may even write something new in them.

Beside the stalactites dripping mineral-rich water onto the stalagmites is another of our favorite places to read the blackbooks, but not so favorite as the river banks, as the dripping chambers can be quite cool and humid, giving the reader the chills. Some of the stalactites have reached their stalagmite counterparts and joined, forming natural pillars that sweat hard, cloudy water. Others are just about to touch; at most a finger’s width separates them. These almost-pillars, half grounded, half hovering, are our favorites. When we do brave the chill and read in the dripping caverns, we have to consciously focus our attention on the reading at hand, or we will be distracted by the almost joined pillars. We like to watch them to see if they are getting any closer.

We lead solitary lives, most of us, most of the time, at least those of my kind that I have run into in my solitary wanderings have been alone. It suits us well for the rituals that preoccupy our days are best attended to in seclusion. We graze on underground mushrooms with our wide teeth and we snap up salamanders from still pools with our quick, spiny tongues. We burrow new tunnels in soil and rock alike until we break through into someone else’s tunnel. And as I have mentioned we read our blackbooks, by rivers and by pillars, and write in them on occasion.

However, when we do chance to come across one another, our interactions follow a brief, precisely synchronous routine which depends on the season. In spring, when the overland creatures that died in the winter are just beginning to thaw and distribute their nutrients into the soil, in that kind of spring, we, like others who in many other ways are unlike us, mate. The mating celebration is ritualized, as our ancestors were shown to ritualize, as we have been born with the innate sense of ritual. Chance encounters of the appropriate sexes instigate the procedure and then are followed by chase scenes, wooing sequences, recitation of taunting verses, comic relief, the grand ball episode, exchange of fruits, carnal delights, awkward silences, shameful apologies, and finally separation of ways. It’s a hectic time in the spring and one can’t be sure whether one is fortunate to have escaped courtship or not.

In the summer, when the soil is boiling and the days are long, we make our yearly pilgrimage (or migration depending on one’s bias) to the place of our conception where we keep our wristwatches stored in nooks and crannies of the rocky tunnels. When we reach our destination, we take out our watches, place them on our wrists, and individually synchronize them. For the rest of the season, until midway between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox, we wander about underground with our watches and our blackbooks. During this time, if we meet another of our species, the encounter proceeds in the following manner.

‘Excuse me, Sir (or Ma’am), could you tell me what time it is?’ or ‘You haven’t by chance got the time on you, have you?’ or any query along those lines to which the other can respond, ‘Why yes, as a matter of fact, I do. It’s 10 past the hour.’ or ‘You’re in luck, friend, I happen to have my watch on. It’s a quarter til noon.’ or whatever is appropriate. The summer is a time to align our biological clocks, to order ourselves as a species for the year to come, to take stock of how evolution is treating us, and to count down the remaining geologic epochs until the ominous descent of judgment day.

It is sometimes permitted by the younger among us to expand the topic of conversation from the immediate concerns of time, to a related subject, such as geologic epochs. Suitable statements are as follows. ‘I couldn’t live through another epoch like the Triassic, let me tell you.’ or ‘I remember back in the Cambrian epoch when you could go 50 or 60 thousand seasons without a mateable encounter. Now you’re lucky to pass a decade without mating.’ or ‘They don’t call it the roaring Pliocene epoch for nothing.’ or ‘Give me back the Cretaceous epoch, that’s all I ask. Give me that one back and I’ll skip all the forthcoming epochs, the Post-Holocene, the Gondwanalandic, the Buddhozoic, and all the rest!’

When the summer season passes, we replace our wristwatches in their niches and continue along our merry way.

In the autumn, those of us who have filled their blackbooks over the course of the last year, take their blackbooks to the university, nested deeper than any of our tunnels where they recite the entire contents from front cover to back cover to vast chambers whose natural shapes are acoustically suited to deliver their words to throngs of thousands of us gathered around, sitting on picnic blankets, who haven’t filled out books that year. Despite their thin size, it takes several hundred years to fill a book as we are not notably prolific. It seems to work out that each autumn is entirely consumed by the recitals. Some years we have to close autumn early though, if the supply of finished blackbooks is below normal. Other years, autumn runs through half of December before we finish the readings.

In those months, we are understanding the planet and each other. We have abandoned our solitary travels to congregate in enormous masses and expel everything that we have stored up all those years just recently passed. There are several dozen such natural amphitheatres where the readings take place. If one doesn’t like what’s being read in a particular chamber, then one can move to any of the others or even visit the lava pits which bubble up in between the caverns. Once all the completed blackbooks have been revealed, they are thrown into the lava pits, new ones are distributed, and winter begins.

Winter is the season when all laws are broken. All crimes are allowable, criminals pardoned, prisoners amnestied, violations condoned, and rituals ignored. It is a joyful season and the longest. We still keep to our solitary existence, but when we do happen to meet in dark alleys or side-tunnels, we never know what to expect and that, for one season a year, is alright.

It was winter, then, when I was tunneling through a colorful stratum of sedimentary rock and I heard singing coming through the rock in front of me. I stopped my burrowing and listened more intently. The voice was raucous, the tone screechy, the melody broken, and, against my better judgment, I continued burrowing until I burst into the cavern where a woman was bathing in a shallow offshoot of a river.

That singing! It wasn’t even singing, now that it was not muffled by rock, it was hoarse creaking and whining. Why the woman could not even hear the rocks falling about me as I broke through due to the volume of her piercing cries. I admit now, that I would have been better off to have turned around and fled the way I had come, but she was my first encounter of that winter and her voice was singularly grating, so I crept up behind her, planning to join her in a bath, when I found myself crouching on the bank and beneath me were her clothes, her blackbook, and a set of colored chalks. Even in winter, some find it difficult to forgive what I then committed. Of course, I did not snatch her blackbook, even though it was beneath my fingers, such an act is too shocking and harmful to be considered a humorous prank. I had no evil intent. I don’t know why I did it. Rather than strip and leap in the water, I traded blackbooks with her. I didn’t think it would matter so much. I certainly intended on trading back at a later time. The blackbooks were all identical. Mine was half full of entries and this one had a bookmark halfway through it as well. I switched books and scurried out the hole in the wall by which I had entered, all the while the shrieking continued uninterrupted and myself, unobserved.

I ran through existing tunnels, through forks and tees, until I wound up in a dead end with a boulder which served ideally for a chair. By the light of the fungus, I opened the book to page one and began reading.

Dear Hecta,

Know that I have been calling for you for epochs. How slow you are to answer my summons! By the time you read this, my skin will be pink and shriveled like a raisin from bathing in this river for so long. My voice will probably have lost its pleasing tenor because you take so long to respond to me. This makes me more disappointed in you than any of the others.

I was quite agitated after reading this first paragraph, having found it addressed to me and expressing wide-felt disappointment with my actions. I wanted to throw the book down and run back and get my old book back but I did not, and quickly realized that I didn’t even want to, actually. I picked up the book and continued reading.

Hecta, I suppose you are surprised to find yourself at the head of this blackbook, people like you always are. You never suspect that your actions can disrupt the lives of the entire community. How you shake now with indignation and humiliation at these words! You demand to know what crime you are guilty of. Well, Hecta, you have kept me waiting such a long time, that now it is your turn to wait. Go back to the river where you took this book and I will meet you there at my earliest convenience.

Your Probation Officer,
Centi

It was winter. I didn’t have to honor this summons. Apparently I had not been honoring it for the past few epochs. Another few millennia wouldn’t hurt. But I was curious as to the nature of the crime of which I was being accused. Better to find out in the winter when I would not be held liable for my actions. Resigned to my fate, whatever it was, I returned to the bathing scene, and discovered, with no surprise, the blackbook, the colored chalk, the clothes, and the woman, Centi, to be gone.

I was not pleased, either, by the fact that the rest of the book was entirely empty despite the bookmark placed in the middle of it. There was no more to read. There was nothing to do. It felt like summer without a wristwatch. To pass the time, I began writing with my pencil in Centi’s blackbook. As I wrote, I became angrier and angrier with the waiting. My life had been independent, carefree, pointless and purposefully so. Now it was unfulfilled and unfulfilling. I developed emotions I had not experienced before. I created names for these emotions and wrote the names in the blackbook. I followed the names with descriptions of how I felt. They were horrible entries, but for the first time I felt like a discoverer. Never at any of the autumn readings had I heard such information as this. This would be new and hateful. I regretted the hatefulness, but relished the newness. Besides, this was an experiment I had not begun of my own accord, the hatefulness could be tolerated.

In the following months, the blackbook became blacker and blacker with each new, foul emotion I discovered. It became so black that when I picked it up, I would get black stains on my fingertips and when I read it, my irises darkened. The blackbook evolved into a creature with a voracious appetite that asked only to be fed new more powerfully hateful, disgusting, and desperate emotions. I developed names for every shade, tint, and hue of these emotions. No nuance was too fine for my eye to discriminate. Several examples that brought me particular satisfaction are as follows.

snubscoffscornspurnsmirkscowlspoon: It was a black day the first time I felt snubscoffscornspurnsmirkscowlspoon. I curdled rock with a glance. Had there been another creature in my vicinity, I am sure I could have boiled their blood in the arteries and frozen it in their veins at my discretion. I was sitting on the river bank and had been sitting in the same position for quite a while, because during this period I was experimenting with immobility as well as emotions. I looked around and saw the rocks as they always were in this cavern. One more than any of the others seemed to offer itself as a more comfortable roost. I was not inclined to accept its gracious offer. I glared at it and, to my surprise, it shattered. I laughed and shouted, ‘Hah!’ Then I added, ‘Fine chair you are now, rubble!’ I smiled darkly and flipped each of the shards into the river with a wooden spoon I had found floating with the currents the day before.

fetidrancidputridrabidtorpidvapidlividstupidsordidhorrid-insipidmorbid: I lost part of my heart the afternoon, when lying on my side on a mat of pebbles, I was overcome by fetidrancidputridrabidtorpidvapidlividstupidsordidhorrid-insipidmorbid. It created such a stink as I had never smelled before and hope never to again. Spittle flew from my mouth as I lay there on the rocks, my brain was melting from inactivity, my forehead bruised with the pressure. I sputtered meaningless syllables, until my own behavior depressed and horrified me. I would have embraced death then, so disgusted was I with myself. The chamber reeked of filth and decay for days afterwards.

necrolepsy: The winter had drawn to an end and I had already filled a quarter of the blackbook with hate, when I decided I would flee from this terrible cavern. I approached the exit, and discovered something unbeknownst to my conscious self that would not allow me to leave. This something provoked a great fit of monumental unhappiness which I called necrolepsy, whose primary symptom is uncontrollable death over and over. Racked by necrolepsy, I spent my days writhing on the floor, sometimes dead, sometimes only dying. I don’t remember it ever easing up. I don’t remember a period of recuperation. It’s gone though now.

And those are just a few of the emotions I experienced during my waiting period in the bathing chamber. As I mentioned, winter had passed, and the last emotion of the period was the mixed one I felt when Centi, my probation officer (by this time I was convinced that I had unknowingly committed a heinous crime), entered the chamber via the same entrance I had used so few months ago. Mixed is definitely the most profound term I can think of to describe that emotion, because, the winter was over. The spring ritual had to be observed now. I could not understand this meeting in the spring of Centi’s. I did not want any part of it.

What I wanted was my old blackbook back if they were going to let me leave the bathing chamber. Otherwise, I wanted to be left alone with my new hateful blackbook. Not even this was to be granted me. Centi pursued the matter of the spring ritual and I was obliged to play the partner.

I tell you in earnest, if you think my heart was in it, during the chase scenes, then I repeat that I had already lost part of my heart during the bout of fetidrancidputridrabidtorpidvapidlividstupid-sordidhorridinsipidmorbid. If you think I had never run as fast of a chase as I did now, then I must point out that you are sorely mistaken. If you thought my wooing during the wooing sequences was more eloquent, poignant, and heartfelt than any wooing to date, then what you mistook as wooing was certainly the violently sarcastic after effects of snubscoffscornspurnsmirkscowlspoon. If you thought the comic relief more hysterical, then you should know it was cynicism cleverly disguised as humor. If you remember my courtship at the grand ball episode more touching or dramatic than previous such balls, then it is my duty to remind you that I acted only by force of ritual and was driven not by the highest regard for social tradition and not by desire. If you think that the exchange of fruits, a plum from me to her, a pear from her to me, was ritually correct, then let me reassure you that in my half-heart, that plum was a sand-spur. If you think the carnal delight was delightful, I bring to bear the fact that I had experienced during the advanced stages of necrolepsy, not only a little death, but a lot of death, reams and vats of death. It was small change to me. If you squirmed during the awkward silence which followed, you weren’t listening carefully enough to my heart which was rejoicing. If you were embarrassed by the shameful apologies, then I retract them. And when it came to the separation of ways, we stood face to face in the bathing chamber.

I asked Centi, ‘May I leave the chamber now?’ I was looking at the ground.

‘Yes.’ Her voice surprised me. It had healed since I last heard its hoarse call. It was distinctly feminine now, although it maintained the force warranted that of a probation officer.

‘May I have my old blackbook back?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’ll take this blackbook?’

‘Yes.’

‘I wrote in it, you know.’ I hoped to be present at the reading where Centi had to read all the terrible things I had put in that blackest of blackbooks.

‘It’s okay.’ Centi waited to leave until I asked the last, inevitable question.

‘What did I do to deserve period of waiting?’

‘Hecta, you are a precocious child. For all of your life, why have you not once attended the post-autumnal celebrations with the rest of your species? Why, why, why? Why do your shamelessly flaunt your disdain for the rituals we hold so dear. You injure us as a species with your pride.’

I had never heard of any post-autumnal celebrations. This was fiction. We were born with knowledge of all the rituals and that wasn’t one of them. I told Centi just such a thing.

She stubbornly insisted that there was. She even suggested that the rage and despair and other emotions whose names she wouldn’t mention might have erased the memory of my painful neglect of the celebration.

Of course, I denied it. It was as if she was telling me every other member of our species had an additional sense that only I, freak, fluke of bad chromosomes, did not possess. Of course I denied it.

Can you understand that one could be born with all the attributes of any other member of its species, save one? Can you imagine living epochs underground and never knowing something everyone else knew, never knowing that you didn’t even know it? Can you understand such an innocence? When I understood, that emotion I called freakflukebadchromosomeshybridchild and was the last entry I made in the blackbook before I returned it to Centi. ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Then you won’t come to the celebrations after the lectures this autumn?’

‘There’s nowhere to go.’

‘There’s celebrations, festivities, cheer, and happiness. Come,’ she urged me and I believed the sincerity of her invitation, but I didn’t believe that such events existed.

‘I don’t believe you,’ I replied, ‘And besides I don’t want to go.’ It was as if I was owning up to the crime then. It was as if she was telling me I had a fundamental piece of me missing, more than just half a heart missing, more than that, a whole something and something vital. It was as if she was inviting me to stop punishing myself for being born incomplete and I simply refused.

BLACKDEATH

We considered ourselves fortunate to be living at the height of our civilization. We had nurtured our planet, Simuliidae, back to health, had cultivated the renewed growth of endangered ecosystems, had introduced clones of extinct species back into their natural habitats. In Simuliidae’s cities, poverty wore a happy face and wanted not, crimes were committed only to stir the imaginations of the weeklies. In our schools, our children were taught to develop kind technologies and harness them peacefully, to write new genres of literature and distribute them freely. The armies had disbanded, the navies dissolved, the gangs formed into socialist collectives, and the anarchists despaired, composing dialogues deliberating their continued existence in a society which had lost its hierarchal order. Everyone claimed victory. The streets, lit each evening by solar fuel cells renewed during the day, showed the carefree faces of the pedestrians, creases fading, rings of sleeplessness softening, scars healing. I knew then, as I took my routine walk across the bridge into the fields and patches of forest outlying the city, that we had indeed peaked and could wait now only for inevitable reversion, a cataclysmic event which would jar our people and throw us back into the dark ages.

I knew it would be a single event, and not a slow gradual decay because we were stable, as a group, to small disturbances. What would crush the Simuliidae would do so in a swift, certain stroke. I imagined the streets I passed through, as I headed toward the woods, as they would appear after the collapse. They would be guarded by border patrols governed by feudal lords, exacting preposterous fares in exchange for meager protection from the rampant bands of marauders crawling through out the forest. I saw everything Simuliidae had become dissipate like nectar from desert flowers as we passed through midday. I saw the destruction eminent and omni-present and I saw that it was good.

We had taken it upon ourselves, Milli and I, to discover in what form our peoples’ downfall would manifest itself. Our motives were purely academic; we had no intention of notifying the populace of the results of our research, if we ever did arrive at any. We simply desired to understand this magnificent death and the putrefaction that would follow, as nothing of this sort had ever occurred before on Simuliidae, to our knowledge.

Never did we expect that the decomposition of our culture could be brought about by as simple a device as a set of mutated chromosomes, a benevolent bacteria with a malevolent streak in its genetic strain. Perhaps because we were searching for grand symptoms: economic trends, political upheavals, and the rising prominence of discordant orchestral performances by the city’s philharmonic, and perhaps because we had been raised in the secure knowledge that our science was unthreatenable, that we overlooked the obvious natural disasters.

And such a microscopic creature it was. We named her Yersina.

On rare occasions, Milli would share my evening walks with me, and I enjoyed her company because she was Milli, and because most of time, she allowed me to take these walks by myself. Her eye was sharper than mine, her imagination more vivid, and her curiosity more poignant. When we passed the road kill, in a bloody pulp on the side of the street, the original creature indistinguishable from the mass of flesh and hovering flies and a crow hopping near it, Milli decided to examine it. I was not much taken by blood, weak stomach and all, so I played with the gravel a couple of meters down the road. I did see Milli remove a Petri dish and a small stainless steel spatula from her jacket pocket and scoop a specimen into the glass and then seal it closed. We continued our walk.

Milli and I also considered ourselves fortunate to be living at the height of our romance. I can’t recall which of us drew the parallel first, of the glow of our relationship to the peak of our culture, but once it was made, it was certainly me who equated our people’s unavoidable ruin to our personal disintegration.

Upon our return home, Milli cloistered herself in the attic where her laboratory was situated. I left her to her devices and went down to the cellar to attend to my own. In the basement I had assembled a mismatched fleet of central processing units in a parallel array to compute the various strategies we had devised to qualitatively predict the means of the collapse. There was an eclectic array of mismatched motherboards arrayed around the room, each casually functioning when needed to calculate the various unknowns. A portion of the system operated continuously, linked to global networks including local bulletin boards, university mainframes, and industrial data-bases. I thought, in this age of reason, when our progress in every minute respect was analyzed for possible repercussions by experts in a multitude of fields, that a shred of evidence might be upturned by someone looking for something else, and hopefully might find its way to my system, where I could carefully place it in the overall mosaic. I had scarcely begun to study the day’s influx of information when Milli came rushing down the steps, breathlessly excited.

‘Hecta, come upstairs and see what I have found.’ Without waiting for me to follow, Milli ran back up to the attic. I neatly set down my papers, knowing that I had the rest of the night to go through them. I stopped in the kitchen to get a cup of coffee before I proceeded to the top level to find Milli, seated on a stool, bent over her microscope. She moved to the side when I entered and let me peer through the lenses as well. I saw spirilla dancing their Brownian motion on the plate. To my untrained eye, they did not appear unusual. I withheld any comments as Milli had already moved to the electron microscope. I listened to the hiss as the sample chamber was evacuated, and to the clicks as Milli photographed particular perspectives of the bacteria. She took the film into the closet-now-darkroom to develop her pictures. I peered at the television screen of the electron microscope, reduced the magnification to 10,000x, and watched the blue and white image of dead bacteria flicker. I saw the intracellular structure of the creature, and other patterns I could not recognize or name. There were series of regular lumps, narrow passages, pear-shaped organs, among other things. On the screen, the spirillum looked like the blueprints of an intricate house. I thought of myself living there. Walking through the twisting narrow corridors into an open ballroom, down the steps to the back porch which overlooked a sea of thick fluid, into the endless closets of hidden secrets. I thought of Milli living there with me. I saw us dancing in the ballroom, rocking in chairs on the back porch in the sunset, cramped in closets developing film, pacing around the bed in the bedroom. I saw her retreat to the nucleus which must be her attic laboratory and I to the appendix to complete unknown functions. I saw our model house lift off into space as the rest of Simuliidae perished. Us on a comet, discretized in bacteria, is what I saw.

Milli returned from the darkroom, and clipped her photographs up to dry on a length of twine. I moved to her side and examined them with her. Rooms and hallways, I thought.

‘Thank you for being so patient, Hecta. What you see before you is a possible avenue of destruction for Simuliidae.’

‘Everything that passes before my eyes, Milli, is such a possibility,’ I laughed gently, nudging her hip with my hip.

Undistracted by my comment, Milli continued, ‘This bacteria has had its DNA manipulated by a heretofore unknown virus.’ She pointed vigorously at some smudges on the print and I nodded in ignorant agreement. ‘Unlike everything else that passes before your eye, this strain of virus is not directly lethal to the populace of Simuliidae. It however exhibits certain properties which merit further investigation.’

‘And how shall you investigate it?’

Milli looks thoughtfully at the photographs and then said to me seriously, ‘Hecta, are you committed to discovering the cause of the throwback of our civilization?’

‘You know that I am.’

‘To what extent?’

‘To every extent short of separation from you,’ I answered what I imagined to be the honest truth.

Milli walked over to the lab counter again and dipped the spatula in the Petri dish. She peered at it, again thoughtfully, taking her time, before she turned and began stirring my coffee with the spatula. When she withdrew the tool, the lump of matter that had clung to it was gone. ‘Hecta, this is Yersina. Drink.’

I did as I was instructed and went back down to the cellar to continue compiling the information that flowed incessantly into my home.

How could I have done any less and remained true to my mission? I had done what any devoted researcher would have done and put the project before my livelihood. Rather than play the martyr, I relished the newfound energy the revelation filled me with. I was a living symptom of the collapse. I was death walking the streets in the disguise of a computer technician. At first, it was only my imagination that led me to act any differently than my norm. At dinner, I no longer picked at my food; death ate indiscriminately of what was placed before him. In the basement office, I was able to scan the information far more rapidly than I had before. A glance was all that was needed to tell me that all this data was trivial in comparison to the change my chromosomes were undergoing. I began sending out fragments of reports via the modem to various bulletin boards diagnosing the progress of Yersina. The messages would state cryptically, ‘Left ankle to left knee has fallen to Yersina. Resistance moved up to the thigh.’ or ‘Right eye blurring, depth perception fading. Each orb moving independently. Yersina versus the host.’ or ‘Host has reclaimed the use of left ring finger from Yersina. A small victory but does it auger larger ones?’ Indeed, I did what I could to resist her advances. I made no pretense of hiding the struggle from Milli, who said that it was a natural reaction, and strengthened rather than diminished Yersina.

My reactions, however, were not wholly hostile. Even as the white blood cells inside me made concerted efforts to snuff out Yersina, the recesses of my mind were nurturing her like an infant or an amoeba being taught all its evolution in a matter of months. I began even to welcome the daily injections Milli administered as each syringe brought me closer to discovering the collapse.

I continued my evening walks in a shadow of the solitude I had once enjoyed. I carried the presence of Yersina with me and the regular pattern of my footfalls over the dry autumn leaves brought me no relief. It was during my walks that I began to discover the contours and depths of Yersina. She was a quiet girl, steady in her determination to succeed with no doubts of the eventual outcome. She continued her conquest ruthlessly, but mercifully. When a segment of me had fallen to her, she would restore it to its natural order and maintain it better than I had ever been able to.

When she took over my tongue, she spoke gracefully. Although she did not confer with me over what she said, not once did she say anything that I disproved of. Yersina was a sweet genius, but hid from me the full outline of the plan of Simuliidae’s fall. Whether she knew it in its entirety and kept it from me, or whether she was unaware of how the design would unfold I did not know.

She confided to me, once, during our walks, that she felt a deep regret for proliferating at my expense, especially now as she had come to know me and regard me as a friend. It brought tears to my eyes and strengthened my resolve to hold out as long as I could so I could see how everything would turn out, so I could see the darkness descend.

Through me, Yersina learned of the eminent collapse and, more importantly, of her pivotal role. She did not understand, as I did, having lived within this city all my life, that the change was necessary and pleasurable. I held myself at fault for instilling in her a deep sense of shame for the destruction that was to come as I was utterly unable to convince her it was cause for rejoicing.

Her train of logic was beyond my comprehension. In our internal dialogue, she would ask, ‘Hecta, why are you contributing to your self-destruction?’

I would try again to explain to her the importance of her role and how it commanded more than friendship but my admiration and sympathy as well.

To which she would then ask, ‘Hecta, how does it feel to hold Milli?’

‘You know as well as I do. You have controlled my arms as I have embraced her. You have kissed her with my lips more passionately than I could ever hope.’

‘But what does it mean to hold a Milli you love?’ she persisted.

‘Do you not love her then, Yersina? She is your mother.’

‘I feel the most tender hatred for the creature that nourished me to consume you, Hecta, and the rest of your people.’

‘I expect no less from you, my precious child,’ I did my best to understand her, ‘Don’t despair; It will all become clear.’

‘But you won’t be there to share it with me,’ Yersina pouted.

‘Milli will, and I in her, and I in you. This is my body after all. You can erase me and my memory of it, but you cannot erase my body’s memory of me.’

‘Then I will live in a shell that constantly mourns, that despises me for usurping its throne, that vigilantly waits to stab an infection to wear both of us away when my guard is down. I do not look forward to your absence.’

At first I kept the discussion between Yersina and I to myself. By the time I thought I ought to share it with Milli, I had lost control of my tongue. Yersina understood however and at dinner, sitting across from Milli, she broached the topic. ‘Milli, I’ve been talking with Hecta.’

Milli tried to hide the shock from her face. Up to this point, she had only suspected that Yersina and I had been struggling for control. She had no idea how far Yersina had progressed and I had kept it from her, playing my own small role in the collapse by instructing Yersina what little I could myself. ‘Where is he now?’ Milli asked Yersina.

‘Presently, he is scurrying from a virus horde somewhere in my stomach. His demise is certain and nearly completed.’

‘So soon?’

‘He has known it for some time. Hecta didn’t tell you because he feared it would weaken you.’

Why Yersina lied on my behalf I was not sure. Perhaps she knew better than I did the reasons for my silence.

I had expected Milli to take it in stride, as I did, but she faltered and stopped eating. ‘Can I speak to him?’

‘I speak for him,’ Yersina stated as compassionately as she could, ‘He’s not in pain, you should know. And he’s happier than I am.’

Milli repeated her plea again, ‘Can I speak to him one last time?’

Yersina shrugged. ‘Speak, he can hear you.’

I knew what Milli wanted to say, wanted to tell me that this is what we both wanted. I already knew it. I wanted it myself and was somewhat surprised by her reluctance to accept it herself. She moved across the table and Yersina stood to meet her. They embraced and in a small instant, I was able to elude my pursuers and brush lips briefly with Milli, before the pack of viruses were nipping at my heels again.

I took my usual evening walk after dinner. My steps had become unsteady and it took me a considerably longer time to make my way to the bridge. Once out on the country streets I felt a little better. The winter wind had picked up, though, and I tucked my chin into my scarf, pulled my hood down over my forehead, and kept my face bent to the ground. When I arrived at the spot that Milli had first found the road kill harboring Yersina, I took careful measure to step around it. I think it was the whisper of the wind combined with the hood pulled tightly around my head that caused me to miss the hum of engine as a commercial bus roared down the street, carrying its tourists back toward the city. The roads were icy and it could not stray from its course, so it careened into me, throwing me meters back to rest in an angled lump at the side of the road. The bus slid to a stop farther down the road; the agitated passengers peered out the windows at the creature who meant to destroy them.

In this, my moment of weakness, Yersina found the door open to assume complete control of my body and mind.

It was only once Hecta had been completely consumed that Yersina understood the collapse of Simuliidae. It was not a violent disaster or crime of action which doomed it to stagnation, but one of omission. In the chance killing of Yersina, in ending her existence before she had a chance to extend it to others, in missing the opportunity to evolve into this new creature of gentle resolve, ether, and innocent shame, Simuliidae had been passed over by the angel of death, the agent of evolution. They were unchosen people now, damned to continue in their blissful state of graceless prosperity, to maintain the peace that would cloak them for eons and eventually represent them, long after their extinction, in silent exhibits in museums across the galaxy as a wise, ancient civilization, governed and extinguished by peace.

Yersina knew, now in the fulfillment of her metamorphosis, that it was too late; this body was beyond repair. She thought of Milli, in her dying, Milli, her mother and lover. It was up to Milli now to grow and implant a second culture in herself, to propagate it in her descendants. But Milli had no heart for it, having killed her lover, lost her child, and resigned herself to relax in the collapse of Simuliidae.

BLACKWIDOW

Everything takes three times as long for us here on the planet Gammagammagamma as it does for anyone else anywhere else in the universe. Our weeks are 21 days long instead of seven. In addition to Sunday through Saturday we have 14 more weekdays including Horrorday, Fervorday, Turgorday, Dolorday, Tremorday, Stuporday, Tumorday, Parlorday, Torporday, Terrorday, Pallorday, Ardorday, Splendorday, and Furorday. Our shifts at work last 24 of the 72 hours each day. 24 hours of standing at the assembly line while a conveyor belt slides bottles of fungicide for me to inspect the seals on, 24 hours of leakproofing. On a Torporday or a Tumorday, it is well high unbearable, where on a Splendorday or a Parlorday, it’s slightly less than intolerable.

The clock strikes noon three times a day and each time I begin mentally composing one of the many documents I am expected to prepare. These documents include a statement of forfeiture of the executor’s position of my husband’s will, a letter of explanation to the children, and a curt epitaph for the headstone which currently sits blank and idle in a workshop across the street from the cemetery where he lies, unadorned. Other documents I sometimes begin writing mentally, as I stand on the platform marked ‘LEAKPROOFER’ and surrounded by black-and-yellow striped tape, include the eulogy I have yet to give at the belated wake, the excuses I have to dissect for the corporate counselor I have been referred to, and the even more belated last words I have to speak to him to reconcile the differences which existed in the last hours between us, which, I should mention, took three times longer than they would have with any other pair of lifelong mates on any other planet.

The children’s letters should be written first. They should be informed that their father is dead. It’s regrettable that I have procrastinated so long in attending to it, but the telephone was disconnected as I stopped accepting mail after he died and the bill was thrown away as well. It’s a distasteful task anyway, and having never been one enamored with tact, I don’t feel up to the delicate missive. Besides, I have no idea where their addresses are or in which cities they currently reside or what salutations to use. Is ‘Dear Son’ or ‘Dear Daughter’ appropriate in this circumstance? What if they have married in the interim since last we spoke? Will their spouses be offended? Should I write, ‘Dear Son/Daughter and Spouse (if applicable)’? What if they have begotten children during their absence, in or out of wedlock? Should I write individual letters to the possible grandchildren? If such grandchildren exist, in their letters, should I include a sweater or a twenty dollar bill?

LEAK!

You can see why I don’t get much accomplished here at work: these erratic bottles of fungicide leaking carcinogens onto my nail-bitten fingers. Before I go home in the evening, I scrub my hands in the ladies locker room, and if it’s been a particularly leaky shift then they may shake insolently right in front of me. I calm them down by reciting the 36 months: January through December plus the months of Frantic, Skeptic, Chronic, Hectic, Spastic, Dynamic, Phallic, Platonic, Emphatic, Specific, Attic, Ecstatic, Traffic, the dismal month of Septic, Heretic, Systemic, Jurassic, Atomic, Frolic, Panic, Syphilitic, Aesthetic, Manic, and the bleak month of Arithmetic.

In between the alarms, I try to set the thoughts straight before I allow them out. ‘Dead, dead, dead, drinking dead lemonade in dead rocking chairs on dead porches with dead cars parked on dead curbs, dead passengers and dead drivers wearing seat dead belts inside,’ is what he says and what I think is he’s got a one-track mind. He talks to me in this manner and I am able to compose correspondences like:

Dear Progeny,

Your Father, the one who propagated you inside your mother long ago, is dead. ‘Dead, dead, dead, sitting on the dead toilet in dead mornings, smoking dead cigarettes while the dead sun is coming in red through the dead window.’ That’s what he told me the morning of that fateful Ardorday last Jurassic. Then he said to me, ‘Why do old people get up so goddamn early in these dead mornings?’ All this said to me from the toilet. That man, your father, had no problem smoking, thinking, talking, and defecating all at the same time. And early is what he meant. It was practically the dead of night when he’d get up and stumble about the bedroom. He pulled the bed out away from the wall for the express purpose of having a clear runway to pace around the bed on when he’d wake up and stumble about so goddamn early. It came as no surprise to us; the signs of his illness were all posted for three times longer than it took to notice them.

Love,
Your Mother

Sometimes I feel that my efforts at communication are quite adequate, but in the evenings, taking the Metro home from the fungicide formulation plant, I feel decidedly under-represented by those same letters. As a result, I am never satisfied long enough with any one revision of the letters to post it.

Back when I had my youth, and a husband, and friends, this bus ride didn’t take so long. There were co-workers who look the same bus route and accompanied me nearly all the way to 135th Terrace. Those women don’t take the bus route anymore; they’re locked in corporate-sponsored homes for the terminally ill, festering with cancer, having been exposed to simply too much fungicide. There was a brief episode in my life when I visited my former colleagues in their moribund states, Alice, Bertha, Chandra, Denise, Elise, and all the rest. Because the bus takes three times as long to get to 135th street as anywhere else, I would chat with them, but as they are no longer Metro-riders, instead I talk to the gentleman sitting next to me on the bus.

This gentleman, whom I have seen travelling on this route at this particular time of day several times before, but by no means on a regular basis, is dressed in a brown suit coat and baggy pair of trousers. His clothes are smeared with dirt and splotches of colored punch. His leather boots have been worn through on both soles as I have had occasion to notice when he rests one foot on the other knee. His crumpled gray fedora tilts down over his face covering all but the wiry brush of white hair that sprouts from his chin. How his shoes reek; the reek of those feet are matched only by the periodic pulse of breath that escapes from his lips.

I say to him politely, ‘Sir, excuse me, Sir?’ No response. Pretending to rearrange my purse, I nudge him in the ribs with my elbow, clear my throat, and say again, ‘Sir?’ Still no response. I take off his hat and poke a finger in his closed eye. Finally, a response. Everything is like that now, every action must be committed three times to achieve the desired result.

He jerks to a straight sitting position and whirls around before settling his gaze, first on his bent hat in my hand, and then on me. ‘What the Hell do you want?’

Returning his hat, I say, ‘I wanted to make sure you hadn’t died beside me there in that plastic metro chair. Death has been following me around and I wanted to make sure it wasn’t him sitting right there next to me on the bus home from work, dying.’ I watch him rearrange his hat. He doesn’t deign to speak to me. ‘I take it you’re not death then?’ He grabs his hat, which still rests on top of his dirty hair, as if I’m going to snatch it from him and searches in the inside pocket of his jacket for something. Death, I think, waiting for the snub-nosed pistol to rub noses with me, to rub me out. He removes a pair of sunglasses with one lens cracked, though still intact, and dons them.

‘You can’t really blame me for mistaking you for death. It’s the smell you know. You smell like putrefaction.’ He grumbles something unintelligible. Now that I am aware that I have his attention, I say, ‘Sir, I’ve been composing several short things, and I’ve been rereading them in my mind and I want to run one or two of them by you and see if you can give me any criticisms, curt witticisms, or suggestions. You see I am currently seeing a counselor of the fungicide industry and she has asked me to collect and arrange the reasons that death is following me. So all you have to do is tell me if you think these are valid reasons. Okay. The main reason is that I have only died twice thus far. Bad things happen in threes, historically speaking, I have been told by process engineers at the plant and I have only died twice. The second time I died was due to fungicide poisoning. The bulk shipments unloaded at the receiving dock were still in powder form in 55 gallon drums. They had to be mixed with a solvent before they were put in the individual jugs which I leak-tested. The giant shaker and sifter that put the powder into vat of solution exploded then. Fine white dust fell everywhere inside the formulation plant like mists of snow or finely ground cocaine. It fell on the conveyor belt, on my co-workers, in my hair, on my hands; it coated my glasses. They closed the plant for three weeks after that to decontaminate it. During that time, I worked a stint as a bar-maid. Anyway, Alice, Bertha, Chandra, Denise, Elise, and all the rest, they’re dead or good as dead now. I’ll tell you something else, it’s a genuine corporate statistic that it costs a company five times as much compensation for a maimed worker as for a killed worker. All my girlfriends are saving the company 80% by dying off. Only me, saving the company millions in a worker’s compensation suit by emerging perfectly intact. Is that a good reason?’

The man refuses to turn his head to look at me, but I can see behind the purple-tinted lenses, his pupils shifting my direction.

‘The first time I died was when my husband God rest his soul wrecked the Buick into a tree during a family vacation in a national forest. Dead, dead, dead then. Dead husband, dead children, dead dog, dead tree, dead forest, dead nation, dead me. I died the first time then, not knowing what it meant to die, as I was young and still menstruating regularly. And that too is a valid reason in my book for counseling.’

The man takes off his glasses, ‘And the third reason?’

‘Do you mean the third death?’

‘No. Death isn’t the only reason. I mean the other ones.’

‘Oh, them. Well, it’s that everything takes three times as long now.’ I have perked my listener’s interest as he takes a hand-sized spiral notepad out of his jacket and asked me for a pencil. I lend him one, and he writes down, ‘three times’.

‘It’s not just time is it?’ He watches me. I can tell he expects me to pour forth a barrage of examples.

With calculated restraint, I reply, ‘Three times of some things. Three times the number of cardinal points of a compass, not just North, South, East, and West, but also Lethal, Fetal, Mortal, Oral, Fatal, Brutal, Metal, and Spinal. We were travelling Fatal-by-Northmetal when he wrecked into the tree. That floating compass stuck to the windshield was rotating like a top. It settled on Fatal-by-Northmetal at impact.’

‘There’s more,’ he prompts me, scribbling in his assignment pad.

I lie, ‘No more.’

‘You lie!’ He threatens me with the dull point of the pencil. ‘Tell me, or else.’

‘You are death! I suspected it all along. But you fell into my trap.’ I laugh haughtily.

‘What trap?’ He ceases to brandish the pencil menacingly.

‘I gave you fake cardinal points of the coordinates, hah!’ I sneer at him, triumphantly.

His jaw lowers in what I first take to be disbelief. The assignment pad falls from his hand and lands face-up on the bus floor at our feet. I look to see the false entries and am startled by what I read, ‘North, South, East, West, Vicious, Luscious, Salacious, Lascivious, Salubrious, Scabious, Seditious, and Insidious. She was traveling Lascivious-by-Northvicious at impact.’

Confronted with the truth, I am terrified and confused. ‘Are you, then, or are you not death?’

‘My name’s Atto.’ The bus stops and Atto exits at 92nd Street. I shout after him, ‘I’m Milli.’

Atto Death! Romance on the Metro! My heart has not felt such stirrings since, since, since senselessness first sprang upon me like a grizzly bear in that National Park, natural keepsake of our Nation, the beautiful from sea to shining sea.

The following morning I call in sick to work. The secretary at the other end gasps, ‘Not you too, Ms. Milli!’

‘No none of that fungidical over-exposure syndrome,’ I reassure her.

‘You’re sure?’ she asks hesitantly, ‘Maybe we should send the company doctor over to check on the situation.’

‘That won’t be necessary. I haven’t got the symptoms. No white fungal growths dying on the tongues of my shoes. No anti-perspirant balling up into white clots in the sweat of my armpits. No racking spasms of pain crippling each step I take, no none of that. Just a stomach virus, I suspect.’

She breathes a sigh of relief, ‘The execs will be glad to hear that, and the corporate lawyers who haven’t had a proper holiday since the sifter-explosion of a decade ago, they too will be glad to hear of your continued exuberant health, taking into account the minor regret over a wholly natural stomach virus.’

Today then is a holiday. I wait until after the morning rush hour to catch a nearly empty bus to the 92nd Street exit.

I walk between the closely packed shops, between the butcher and the liquor store, between the arcade and a small jazz bar, behind the adult books store, behind the deli and the laundromat, in the alleys and dead ends where trash overflows the dumpsters and accumulates in puddles and sheets of newspaper, released into the wind, settle.

In each of the alleys, I call out, ‘Atto, it’s me, Milli. I’ll cooperate now. I’ll tell you more.’ The bums and drunks and junkies I do rouse with my hailing give me irritated glances at having been disturbed so early in the morning. I am not deterred. I call out more forcefully, ‘Lascivious! Insidious! Vicious! Luscious! Salacious! Salubrious! Scabious! Seditious!’ Every direction I call to him, but I find him at none of their points. Finally, a man of thirty with rashes covering his face and hair, which he scratches continuously, tells me, ‘Atto ain’t here. He sleeps behind the muffler and brake place that way.’

I thank him and I leave the alleys and cross the street to the muffler and brake place. There is a slot between that building and the next about 30 centimeters wide. I have to turn sideways to scoot through. When I emerge at the back of the building, I confront the swirling blue and red lights of two squad cars which came down the alley either way and stopped 20 feet from each other. They, the two officers, are, as of yet, unaware of me standing behind them. Their interest is focused on Atto who is sitting on a fruit or vegetable crate.

‘We know you did it.’ the swarthy lead officer says vehemently to Atto.

‘I don’t deny it.’ Atto shakes his head and raises his hands together as if they were to be cuffed.

‘None of that now,’ He is told, ‘We’ll get to that part later. What we want to know now is why you left the bomb on the bus.’

I silently gasp, and squirm back a little deeper into the crevice between the buildings. Bomb! For me? Atto is death’s servant, if not death himself.

‘I told you guys already, I had orders to.’

A second, less swarthy, but burlier and surlier, officer steps toward Atto, ‘You had orders to leave the bomb on the bus with the timer set to detonate! Why you left the bomb with the detonator untriggered is what we want to know.’

I try to make sense of it all. Atto must then be a servant of death. He was trying to carry out death’s orders. And those orders were to kill me a third time, but he couldn’t! He was enchanted with me and couldn’t bring himself to set the bomb! I am delighted. My attention however is wrenched from my thoughts when I hear the less surly and burly lead cop announce, ‘For that, Atto, you must die.’

Two deaths have not prepared me for what I have to do. A life three times longer than any I should have had has not given me the insight to understand how I must react to this, these unforeseen circumstances which have come upon me in a ruthless manner. I become a human cyclotron. Everything spins: head swivels upon neck, fingers rotate upon hands like ten independent drill bits, eyes emerge from their sockets and revolve about my center of mass; I am modeling the atom and the solar system; turn season turn. My hands begin to flutter in front of me, my teeth begin to chatter, my shoulders shudder, words sputter from my mouth, thoughts clutter my mind in this delightful, circular tarantism. I cannot think clearly. I focus on three times the holy trinity: the father, the son, the ghost, the great uncle, the step-nephew once removed, the first cousin on my father’s side, the brother-in-law, the paternal grandfather, and the surrogate-man-of-the-house. Everything is so complicated. Take me home. Take me back to my family. Give me back my first two deaths and I’ll let this one go. Give me back that tree with the trunk so appealing that we rammed into it. Give me back those branches that fell on all our soft heads and I’ll jump from them, with or without Atto, into the waiting arms of death or onto the rocks below.

Blood surrounds me. Blue and red wavelengths immerse me. I am painting my face with a salty red and the air with a war cry. The capillaries which carry blood to my pupils, which map the whites of my eyes, grow larger and become swollen, obscuring my vision. The tight fit of the two brick walls compress me as these vessels expand. The alley becomes dimmer and dimmer. I fall to one knee and instantly, Atto is crouching there next to me like a mother wolf protecting one of its litter, the only one left.

‘Atto’, I tell him, for even in this darkness, I can tell him by the strength of his hold, the tenderness of his grip, ‘Bomb or no bomb, you are taking me anyway.’

He does not respond to me, but I can see in my mind’s eye, the nodding of his head, the reticent assent, supposing it is beyond my view.

Then I tell him, just to please him, as I have wanted to please someone for so long, and not found that willing ear, I tell him, ‘Three times the five food groups: not just grains, fruits, vegetables, dairy, and meats, but also blood, phlegm, choler, blackbile, brine, spirits, mineral water, melted snow, silt, dust, and cobwebs. These things that pass into and out of us without our knowing, these things that I have partaken in every day to be balanced.

‘Three times the absolutes: not just yes and no, but shunt, shuck, shrug, and shrunk as well. So many times I have wished upon stars and upon pebbles at the bottom of river beds to be answered, not with yes, and definitely not no, but Shunt! or Shuck! or even just a shrug. I could take that and build on it.

‘Three times the primary colors: not just red, yellow, blue, but also black, black, black, black, black, and black. I have a portrait painted of you the size of a stamp, the size of a thumbprint, stuck with your spittle to my heart.

‘Three times I have died, now. Atto, will you take me?’

‘Death had nothing to with it. Death had nothing to do with it. Death had nothing to do with it,’ Atto tells me in triplicate. ‘It’s the corporate lawyers. It’s five times the expense to compensate a maimed worker as it is the family of a dead one. In your case, you haven’t got a family.’

BLACKBOX

These are the things we hear and do not understand: why the seismic howling of the planet’s crust repeats over and over, ‘Help me, I’m being held prisoner by forces I cannot comprehend’, why the songs of the humpback whales are dirges lamenting the loss of their keepers, why the roaring of public transports past our windows shriek of machines trapped in mines, why the ticking of clocks is synchronous with time, why the shrill bleating of flutes and whistles pleases us, why the buzzing of hummingbirds’ wings echoes in our ears at night like the whispers of dead parents, why the static of the radio is the jumbled messages of foreign insects we can’t decipher, why our own voices are unintelligible to us.

These are the things we see and do not understand: why upon entering an unlit room after working in the sun our eyes themselves darken, why the sun turns its back on us every day yet persists in returning, why blood is red with iron yet iron is black, why there is a Detroit, why tears are briny and the sea is green, why hot asphalt looks like water in the distance and not oil, why belief is based on the sight of something whose substance we dilute with the suggestions of our memory.

These are the things we smell and do not understand: death in bedrooms, on operating tables, on highways, in alleys, in cribs, in wombs, in mass quantities on foreign soil; dead reptiles, mammals, birds, fish, dogs, people, plants, beef; mother’s milk in their infants sweat, of incense in empty boarding houses, sex in churches, burnt hair in bathrooms, urine in snow; beer, perfume, vomit, socks, and breath on our pillows when we wake.

These are the things we taste and do not understand: onions in our eyes, lemon pulp caught between the gaps in our teeth, uranium decaying in our tap water, nine-volt electricity pressed to our tongues, each season in the fruit available at the grocer’s, and aspirin past its expiration date.

There is nothing we touch that we understand. There is nothing we think that we understand. That is why we have the blackboxes.

Tera and I work in our local blackbox along with several thousand other citizens. It’s an assembly line of sorts, a plant, a giant warehouse with aluminum sheet walls and steel reinforcements, painted black on the outside, six stories tall, sitting on the edge of town next to the river. When a resident of the town is confronted by one of the infinite mysteries which not only perplexes them but also deprives them of sleep, they make a trip past the suburbs to the blackbox. They purchase a ticket for a nominal charge, as the institution is a government funded cooperative, and approach the east wall. In the east wall is positioned a hatch just large enough for a pair of eyes and a mouth to fill. The querent rings the electronic bell next to the hatch prompting the receiver, inside to open the hatch and peer out at the applicant. The receivers usually harass the applicants a little bit, or joke around with them before they get down to business and carefully write down the query in triplicate as the person states it through the window. It’s a little awkward, especially since the receivers are notoriously dirty folk and coming face to face with a smudged, scraggly unshaven smirk in that small hatch can be quite an unnerving ordeal.

Of course, the receivers are but the first stage in the twelve step process by which the questions are answered. The basic structure of the twelve steps: receiving, analyzing, cataloguing, phase I reviewing, phase II reviewing, assembly, refining, quality assurance, phase I approval, phase II approval, recording, and responding, are well known, but no one is quite sure how the entire process fits together to form an answer that is invariably correct. Most residents have a sister or cousin who works there, and they might doubt their relative’s intelligence, but they do not doubt the validity of the answer which the process creates and they assume their uncle or niece, must be only a minor cog.

Tera and I are responders, the last stage. It is our duty to speak through a similar window located on the west wall and give the blackbox’s reply to the querent. Sometimes Tera responds and sometimes I do, depending on the answer. We never get to see the questions though, only the answers which the recorders hand down to us. Sometimes we get these answers and we alter them. At other times, we discard them entirely and make up our own. We don’t really understand how that works, and choose to do it at our whim. However, it must be by design since the blackbox is infallible.

One thing that gets to us though in responding is never knowing the question. We usually try to guess the question from the answer. Sometimes it is easy to discern and sometimes the answer is nonsensical regardless of the question we match it with. The other thing that bugs us is the apparent arbitrary nature of the answer when we choose to alter them. Surely we know no more than any other stage of the process but we seem to wield a great deal more influence. Of course, we do not bring this matter up with our foreman, as we like our jobs and are meek by nature.

After discussing these matters at no small length, Tera proposed, ‘Since this question has continually plagued us, it can’t be completely trivial, and therefore I suggest we submit it to the blackbox.’

‘But how should we state it without implicating ourselves?’ I ask her. ‘We can’t simply say “How does the blackbox function correctly when the responders alter or substitute answers of their own before releasing them?” That would put us in some hot water.’

Tera laughs at me. ‘Micro, we don’t even know that what we are doing is not condoned. Perhaps that is how blackboxes across the globe operate.’

‘Perhaps they are all equally flawed then?’ I whisper conspiratorially.

‘Then we shall have to form our question delicately. How about, “Can the receivers sabotage the answers?”‘

I grimace. ‘Too direct.’

‘Okay. How about, “Can one stage of the blackbox foul the rest of the system?”‘

I shake my head in disagreement. ‘Too general.’

Tera places one hand on her scalp and thinks. ‘Then how about, “Is it possible to sabotage the blackbox?” or better yet “How is it possible to sabotage the blackbox?”‘

‘Good heavens, Tera. A question like that would land us in the interrogation booth.’

‘Okay, Micro, okay,’ she mutters rapidly, ‘Then what about, “Is the role of chance fundamental in the job of responders?”‘

‘Hmm. I still think they could imply the deeper question and trace that to us.’

Tera nods in half-hearted agreement. ‘Well, what if we ask, “Is the answer correct at any given stage of the process?” That would tell us if the answer that the recorders give to us should be altered or not.’

‘They might be correct, but we might alter it to be more correct. That’s too obtuse.’

Tera snaps her fingers, ‘I’ve got it. “What is the role of responders?”‘

‘We already know that; it’s to relay the answer from recorder to querent. That’s written in our job description.’

‘Okay, then we should ask, ‘Beyond relaying, does the responder have any additional duties which determine the validity of the answer?”‘

‘It seems innocent enough.’

Tera and I let the question hibernate in our heads for a week before we agree that it seems to be the best question. I, however, add a new complication when I ask, ‘Tera, how will we know when the answer to our question arrives. We see hundreds of questions each day.’

‘I’ll have the ticket stub, silly. The numbers will match.’

‘Then I’ll have to tell you through the window.’

‘So you will,’ Tera agrees, relishing the prospect of being on the other side of the window for once.

‘But what if they realize what’s going on and alter the answer before it gets here.’

‘How can they? The blackbox is infallible.’

‘Still, Tera, I’d feel better if you followed the message through each stage.’

Tera is shocked, ‘What? Nobody can do that.’

‘Sure you can. You ask the question during lunch break and take the stub, and then hurry back inside and follow it through. You shouldn’t spend too much time in any one area so no one will notice. You don’t need to peer over their shoulders, just make sure it doesn’t get tampered with.’

Tera replies, ‘I won’t.’

‘You must. It’s your question. I can handle all the responding this afternoon.’ We argue back and forth. Tera is indeed reluctant to follow the question through. It’s sort of taboo to question the blackbox and heresy to understand it. However, by the time lunch had arrived, Tera has agreed to go through with it. I slap her heartily on the back and wish her luck.

When she reaches the front of the line, Tera is motioned to the window and she rings the bell. The slot slams open in the east wall and a pair of eyes squint through it; a gruff voice snarls with its mouth full of a bologna sandwich, ‘What do you want?’ Pieces of bread crust are spat through the window and land on the frozen ground and on Tera’s coat.

She brushes them off nonchalantly. ‘I have a question.’

‘Surprise, surprise,’ the voice growls, ‘What is it, honey?’

Tera is not put off by the rude inquiry. Calmly and politely she asks, ‘How can Responder Micro sabotage the answers which he relays from the recorders to the querent waiting at the west wall?’

The receiver is unperturbed by the question. As procedure dictates, he orders, ‘Please repeat the question.’

‘How can Responder Micro sabotage the answers which he relays from the recorders to the querent waiting at the west wall?’

‘Got it. Give me your ticket.’

Tera pokes her ticket through the window. The receiver tears it quickly in half and throws the other half back at her. The window slides shut with a slam.

Tera re-enters the blackbox and enters the door marked ‘Level One East: Receiving’. Once inside, the stench of rotten food and urine invade her nose. She pinches it shut. The room is completely dark except for a small square of light at the far wall where two men are lit up briefly as the slot slides open and one of them shouts, ‘What do you want?’ Tera cannot hear the question but can see them diligently writing it down. Shortly the door is slammed shut and the two men laugh at each other. ‘What a stupid question. Nothing like that last one. I don’t know that Responder Micro but he’s going to get his, no doubt.’ The receiver looks over the previous question again before placing it in an envelope and dropping it in a slot.

The other replies, ‘Well, what about this one? It’s a boring question.’

‘Throw it away. I’ve got a better one.’

The other crumples up the question and tosses it on the floor to soak up the rank garbage lying there. He takes a pen and a new sheet of paper. ‘What is it?’ As the first receiver dictates, the second jots it down and repeats each word, ‘How many appaloosa’s on the beach, at midday, in October?’ They both chuckle over that before the put it too in an envelope and slide it into the slot. The bell rings and the first man throws the hatch aside, ‘What now?’

Tera quietly lets herself out and climbs the stairwell to the second floor and enters the door marked ‘Level Two East: Analyzing’. The room is brightly lit and several dozen wooden tables fill the room, all bare except one where two analysts are withdrawing a sheet from an envelope. As they work, another envelope falls from a slot in the wall into a wire basket at their feet. The first analyst hands the letter to the second and places the envelope on the table. ‘What’s it say?’

‘How can Responder Micro sabotage the answers which he relays from the recorders to the querent waiting at the west wall?’

‘Analyze it,’ the first analyst orders the second.

‘Dangerous.’

‘Serious?’

‘Deadly.’

‘Horrors. What do we do?’

‘What we always do. We analyze it, conjecture, form hypotheses, perhaps a character sketch, dismiss false hypotheses, look at it from different angles.’ The analyst holds it up to the light so that both can view it from various perspectives. ‘We’ve got to check for secret codes written in lemon juice and other such means. And then of course, we pass it on.’ They nod in agreement, slip it back in the envelope and slip it in another slot.

Tera climbs the steps to the third floor and enters the door marked, ‘Level Three East: Cataloguing’. Inside, two catalogers sit at metal desks in swivel chairs behind computer terminals blinking green and orange lights. They take the envelope when it arrives. Glance at it individually without communicating.

‘Primary reference?’ asks the first cataloguer of the second.

‘Sabotage.’ He states calmly as both enter it in their data-bases. ‘Secondary references?’

‘Treason. Blackbox. Responder. Micro. Interrogation Booth. Capital Punishment. Existence. Self-Definition.’ Having entered that, they briskly slide the letter back in the envelope and place it in the chute marked ‘out’.

Tera quietly exits and climbs the stairs to the fourth floor, entering the door marked, ‘Level Four East: Phase I Reviewing’. Inside a great laboratory is set up with pendulums, bubbling flasks of ethers, chalkboards filled with derivations, super-computers running simulations of helium at 2.18 Kelvin, rheometers, microscopes, viscometers, telescopes, gas chromatographs, spectrometers, voltmeters, and Vernier calipers. Pairs of chemists, physicists, and mathematicians bustle about the room rubbing shoulders and comparing notes. A scholarly-looking phase-I-reviewer opens the envelope when it arrives. He types the question onto his computer and it appears on a large television screen above him. A small horn sounds and all scientists turn their attention to the sign and read Tera’s question. In a resounding chorus, they shout in unison, ‘Not our Department!’ and continue their work. The Phase-I-reviewer hands it to his partner who places it back in the envelope and sends it off with a shrug.

On the fifth floor, Tera enters the door marked, ‘Level Five East: Phase II Reviewing’. Once inside, Tera is struck by the vivid colors splashed across the walls and the cacophony of instruments which bombards her ears. Sculptors run their fingers over clay sculptures. Composers pound away at pianos, bleat terrifyingly on saxophones, thump on snare drums, and pluck at cellos. Poets hurriedly scribble down sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, haikus, and obscene limericks about the pope. A Phase-II-reviewer mounts a dais, places himself behind the pulpit, and announces Tera’s question, ‘How can Responder Micro sabotage the answers which he relays from the recorders to the querent waiting at the west wall?’ Abruptly, the artists smear their palettes across their canvases, punch holes in their sculptures, scar their bronze reclining figures with welding torches. The poets howl, ‘Anarchy!’ The Phase-II-reviewer hands the letter back to his partner, who takes a quill, dips it in an inkwell, scrawls, ‘Anarchy’ slips it back in the envelope and sends it on its way.

On the top floor, Tera enters the door marked, ‘Level Six East: Assembly’. Inside an assembler takes the letter and places it on a large conveyor belt which spans the length of the room. He attaches the sheet of paper to the belt with a rivet at each corner. Below it he attaches a second sheet of paper, this one not white but pale yellow. At intervals of about two meters an assembler sits along the belt. As the sheets pass them, they read the top sheet and jot down a word, a letter, or a short prepositional phrase on the bottom sheet. They do not speak to each other but attend to their work almost mechanically. Tera watches the sheets move from one end of the room to the other, the bottom ending up filled with a response. Another assembler carefully removes both sheets at the end and stuffs them together in an envelope and into a nearby slot.

Tera races across the hall into the door marked ‘Level Six West: Refining’. Inside the envelope has already been opened. The yellow sheet is placed on a stand between two refiners who are entering it into a terminal, adding punctuation and correcting grammar and misspellings. Tera cannot read it from across the room. The first states, ‘It don’t make no sense.’

The second refiner replies, ‘It makes too much sense,’ and he gulps loudly to emphasize this.

‘I don’t like it. I’m going to change the tense from present to future conditional.’

‘That will change the whole meaning. I recommend the denominative exclamatory case.’

‘Of course,’ the first agrees as she types the question in future conditional.

The printer neatly prints out the answer in a large font and the two refiners slip it back in the envelope with the question. They place the original answer in a metal drum between them which has an oil fire simmering inside. Once that is completed, they shake hands on another job well done and wait for the next answer.

Tera runs down the stairs and enters the door marked, ‘Level Five West: Quality Assurance’. Inside two quality-assurers in three piece suits are gazing back and forth, first at the question, then at the answer, and then at each other. ‘Does it measure up?’ the first quality-assurer asks of its partner.

‘Quality through and through. It gives me chills when I think of how sleek, how perfectly effective the system is that we never have to send back any answer.’

‘It makes my head spin. I feel dizzy.’

‘I feel giddy.’

Tera watches as they tear each others’ suits to shreds and leap naked upon the desk to engage in torrid, carnal delights.

Tera descends to the fourth floor and enters the door marked, ‘Level Four West: Phase I Approval’. Inside, legislators, judges, and political executives are rapidly copying the question and answer onto wallet sized cards to be distributed among each member. A great many of the representatives have black eyes and slings about their arms or limp around on crutches. There are even a few wheelchairs to be seen, strolling through the throng. When it appears that at least a majority has a copy, an ancient Phase-I-approver wearing a white cotton wig slaps his gavel on his table and shouts, ‘All in favor say aye.’ A shriek of ayes comes back to him. His partner, at the adjacent table, wearing a white horsehair wig shouts, ‘All opposed say nay.’ A second shriek equal in volume sounds. The two phase-I-approvers look at each other questioningly. They whisper back and forth. The first repeats, ‘All in favor say, aye.’ ‘Aye!’ And the second follows, ‘All opposed say nay.’ ‘Nay.’ ‘In favor?’ ‘Aye!’ ‘Opposed?’ ‘Nay!’ The shouts overlap and each faction attempts to shout louder than the other until mayhem results and a courtroom brawl ensues. Tera ducks as a briefcase is thrown at her. She does however see the two ancient Phase-I-approvers put the question and answer back in the envelope and toward the next stage.

She flees out of the room and down the stairs to the third floor where she enters a door marked, ‘Level Three: Phase II Reviewing’. Inside, colored light from the stain-glass windows swims through the heavily incensed air. Ministers, Nuns, Rabbis, High Priestesses, Monks, Medicine Men, Holy Women, Reverends, Sorcerers, and Cultists parade about the room in the robes of their orders. A deep booming voice rings out in a long forgotten tongue through the murky smoke announcing the question and answer. Rosaries are said, prayer beads are thumbed, some apostatize, others are reborn, gods are reviled and condemned or worshipped and adored, the proper meditation stances are assumed and virgins are impregnated. A Phase-II-reviewer becomes entranced, babbles in tongues, sprints toward the letter and answer, crams them into the envelope, and ejects them into the out slot, before fainting.

As she races down the stairs, the tension mounts in Tera. Only one more level and then Micro can respond to her. She enters the door marked, ‘Level Two West: Recording.’ Inside two recorders input the question and answer, date and name of querent into their computer terminals. The room is completely silent and they look over their shoulders as Tera enters. Their faces are heavy with knowledge. One whispers to her from across the room, ‘Hurry,’ and then turns again to finish entering the answer before placing it, minus the question, in the envelope and dropping it down to responding.

Tera sprints down the stairs and throws open the door marked, ‘Level One West: Responding’. I am at my chair at the slot in the window with the envelope unopened in my hand.

Tera smiles, ‘You’ve got it.’

I return her greeting, ‘I’ve got it.’

Tera sprints outside, pulling the ticket stub from her pocket. She runs around the corner of the building to the west wall where her ticket number is being called. At the window she rings the bell. A foreign pair of eyes greets her. ‘Where’s Micro?’ she asks.

‘I’m his replacement, Mega. This is highly unusual, you know. We responders deserve a certain degree of anonymity just like anybody else.’

‘What happened to Micro?’

‘Look, lady, do you want your answer or not?’

‘What happened to Micro? Did they take him away?’

‘Come on, lady, don’t give me a hard time. His partner’s not even here today and I gotta do the whole thing by myself.’

Tera repeats, ‘What happened to him? Did they take him away?’

Mega whispers, ‘Now look, you didn’t hear this from me, but word is, he applied for a transfer to receiving.’

‘He did what?’

‘Hey, that’s what I was told. The foreman told me he caught Micro changing the answers, even this one I’m holding for you he apparently changed. Rather than face the interrogation booth, he opted to transfer.’

Tera becomes incensed, ‘He changed my answer?’

‘Looks like it. The original typed answer is all scratched out, it’s unreadable. He’s scribbled in here only one line.’

‘What is it?’

‘Three and a half appaloosas,’ answers Mega, ‘It don’t make any sense.’

‘That’s not my answer.’ Tera grabs the sheet and examines the number. ‘It’s not even my number!’

‘It is, honest,’ Mega replies apologetically.

Answer in hand, Tera rams her fist through the slot giving newly appointed Responder Mega a bloody nose. She runs back inside ‘Level One West’ and confronts Mega, who is holding ‘three and a half appaloosas’ over his nose, soaking up blood, and leaning his head back.

‘What is the answer?’ she demands.

Disgusted, he tosses her a folded up sheet from his back pocket. ‘What was I supposed to do? He’d scratched it all out. I just read the next answer.’

Tera examines the sheet; the number matches her own. The typed message has been scratched out. Below it, in Micro’s handwriting, it says:

A thousand times, if not more.
p.s.
I guessed correctly that you had changed the question,
so now I must guess what it is you asked and I guess it is:
“On the beach, with you, during midday, in October, how many times have I wished for nothing more?”

BLACKBALL

At this point, the best we can do is piecemeal. He stays shut up in his room and doesn’t come out except to pull his shift or to shuffle around the space station making a point of it to stay out of our eyeshot. What we know about him we learned in fragments and without understanding. What we first learned was in the personnel file the department forwarded prior to his arrival. When we all work in such close quarters out on this space station, light years from anybody else we want to talk to, we need to know who it’s like that’s coming, so we don’t step on any toes and put the wrong foot forward, and make the lasting bad first impressions like we did with him. All we got out of the personnel file was he was ex-military, academy-blueblood, rose through the ranks with mercurial deftness, got a purple heart and a golden parachute and drifted down to outer space with the rest of us. What it didn’t tell us was he still expected us to act like we were to shy from his iron fist, like he was pointing a Browning automatic at the small of our backs, like we were supposed to step aside when we met him trudging through the corridors, like even the vastness of space was too small for him to find a place where he could fit in. What else they didn’t tell us was that somewhere along the line he picked up a pair of lead feet, a silver tongue, and a nasty cough. It was easy to see right off how there was going to be problems. We gave him the red-eye shift and let well enough alone when he took it, but that wasn’t good enough for the old boy. We’d hear warning klaxons, intruder alerts, sirens, and fire alarms all through the night and nobody could get either a wink of sleep or a straight answer out of him. He’d swear he’d been at the console or the telescope all night and dismiss the automatic sprinklers which had doused the entire station with a wave of his hand. When it came morning and we all groggily went about cleaning up the mess from the night before, he nickel and dimed his way out of every chore, blaming his cough. One well-aimed blast of breath and mucus and he could convince anyone on board he was best sent straight to bed. It isn’t at all like we shunned him from the start. In fact, we even tried to work him in with the rest of us. Personnel file said he had a green thumb, so we put the arboretum under his charge and he let them die, all the plants. File said he liked music, so we invited him to our rehearsals, but he had a tin-ear and made us tune-off our instruments something awful. File said he was awarded for bravery more than once, but he was yellow-bellied and white-livered the first time we ran into trouble. We didn’t bother him about that. We gave him some slack on that, being his first night here and all. No, that first incident isn’t at all why we don’t like him.

But the fact remains we don’t like Micro a bit, no, not a whit, not a one of us, not him. When we take the time to think of things we don’t like, he’s the one we think of as much as we don’t like to. None of the rest of us had any problems on this space station that no one ever hails or much less visits, that is until Micro. Still, each of us know how it was when we first came out to station Lambda, being far off from everything, even suns. The only light is specks of stars or else artificial. Especially when you come by yourself like he did, then all the other crew have got their regular routines: all the bridge tables are filled, the poker night set, the silent understanding of who is who in the space station like invading a family. Then you get the new-boy who, even if he is a sharp one, if he hasn’t spent some time in the close confines of an outpost like Lambda, will have trouble adjusting to the sense of no escape, the claustrophobia, the abandonment of deep space, the irregular mail from the rest of the universe, the long bouts of silence, the mood swings of the rest of the crew, just everything gets in your way when you first come and start wishing you were anywhere else.

Now we didn’t suppose it was going to be anything like that with Micro because his credentials included serving admirably aboard a frontier research post even smaller than Lambda. What we thought of him before was that he was a space-veteran. It was only later when we tried to contact his previous outpost, to figure out what we were doing wrong, did we discover that he had been the sole member of that research station and that it had been destroyed, prompting his transfer. The nature of the destruction was classified.

Even before we discovered that, even as early as the first day when I entered the receiving chamber with the intent of welcoming him aboard—as was my privilege since I had spent the most time on the station, and in that respect had a sense of seniority among the rest of the crew—even as early as the first time, I knew something wasn’t fitting. What I found was him sitting on a trunk, his chin in his hands, looking like he was having the worst Monday of the year and a hang-over to boot.

Nevertheless, that didn’t stop me from extending my hand and greeting him, ‘Welcome aboard Lambda 101325. I am Mega, senior observer of the frontier post.’

He looked up at me and that was the first time I saw him and he only vaguely resembled the photograph in the file, not only out-dating it by 10 years but also in the smile and the hands; he was missing two teeth and two fingers off his left hand. He had the tired, hungry, and sick look you get when you’ve just been transmitted across half the cluster. He didn’t grip my hand with his two-fingered-and-thumb grip and he didn’t say anything, so I led him to his quarters and told him to get washed up as I would give him a tour of the facilities in an hour. Now his silence didn’t strike me as too odd as I have a wealth of respect for folks who know when to keep their mouths shut and I told him there wasn’t anyone here who was going to force him to speak more than he felt like. On the contrary, he would probably find himself able to speak more clearly than ever to fill the walls of the space station with the echoes of human voices.

What I showed Micro that evening was the telescopes and the recording console. Lambda sat on the edge of charted space and we had several long range telescopes scanning outward marking the movement of stars, the tails of comets, and always keeping one eye open for other space-going life forms. That doesn’t happen often, only once as long as I’ve been out here and then it’s still kind of unclear whether that’s exactly what it was or not. During one of my shifts at the telescope, the instruments indicated a deformation in the vacuum. I peered through the lenses and mirrors but saw nothing. Curious, I bombarded the suspect area with a scatter of gamma radiation. It was only then that a shape defined itself, a massive object, shifting, beating like a manta ray, speeding through space until it disappeared. I was lucky to have caught it on the view screen or no one else would have believed me. As it was, they weren’t happy. It was yet another bizarre phenomena which teased our puny efforts to explore, classify, and understand. As much as the rest of the crew didn’t like that, they don’t like Micro worse.

We had our weekly meeting where all nineteen of us, now twenty, except Micro didn’t come, met to discuss the results of the past week’s observations. It was pretty much routine until somebody started in on Micro and the nightly alarms which had plagued us all, followed by the morning clean-ups. Some pretty strong opinions were thrown around and I called them to order and suggested we take a private polling to get a view of the spectrum of the opinions. Out of the nineteen, five suggested killing him outright, another two suggested beating his skull straight with a wrench, there was one for ejecting him into space, and two for transmitting him there. There were three, more-reserved votes for forcefully transmitting him back to the department, three for just notifying the department of the intolerable situation and waiting for their response, another two in favor of a wrench-beating, and myself for calling up the outpost where he had previously been assigned to see what we were doing wrong. Well, I followed my own advice like I usually do, seeing as I am the senior observer, and when I found out he had been the only observer, then I began to understand.

I went to Micro, to explain to him that I did understand, that I too had served for many years alone on research outpost Lambda before having the rest of the crew transferred aboard one at a time.

I found him sitting at the desk in his quarters, poring over a book. When I told him what I had to say, Micro just stared at me in disbelief. Then, to mask his confusion, he told me, ‘Senior Observer Mega, you were the only observer aboard Lambda before I arrived.’

‘That was way back when,’ I explained to the man, who apparently was unprepared to be understood in the deep and thorough way I was understanding him. ‘That was in the years when the frontier posts project was first starting up. After the department realized how crucial outpost Lambda was, they assigned eighteen other researchers, albeit one or two at a time, as the work load grew.’

Micro still denied what I was telling him. ‘Look, Mega, you are, were, and always have been the sole crew-member of Lambda until my arrival last week.’

‘You’re not getting me, Micro.’ I sat down on the edge of his bunk to make myself clearer.

He set his pen down. Now I noticed he was writing in the book as well as reading it. He turned around in the plastic chair and looked at me like he was trying to outstare Medusa.

This is what I have to think about now; how to explain and not digress, how to tell about the first year on Lambda before any of the others had arrived. I was working eleven week shifts with two weeks off in between that first year. It started with, of all things, clothes. The project was in its infancy and I was on a proto-type station which hardly resembles the re-vamped Lambda in which Micro and I sit facing each other now. It was a new system being tested and all the quirks had yet to be removed. The paths of the telescopes had to be synchronized so that the records did not overlap unnecessarily. That piece took a good deal of fine tuning. The laundry system went out as well. The washer was deemed low-priority and wasn’t repaired. To understand that you have to see me then, fresh from school, silent and studious and eager to explore the universe on the sedate terms of this isolated space station. You have to see me as I saw myself: adept at certain arts: astronomy, stellar chemistry, celestial physics, quantum mechanics, and ignorant of other arts: psychology, speaking, social graces, self-maintenance. By no means was I as ignorant of those second items as I was knowledgeable of the first, but I pretended to be. I prided myself on my deficiencies because they made me human when no one else could. What I prided myself on was the balancing between things I could and couldn’t do, the defining of myself by these self-imposed abilities and limits, the knowing of the effects of my actions, and though they might be undesirable, the committing of those same acts, not because I felt forced to, or I even wanted to, but simply because I had been taught all my life that I had to suffer the consequences of my actions. I was ready to suffer then. Not any more. But I did, then. When the washer broke, I mechanically filled out a maintenance request. When I was informed that that had been dubbed low priority, I let it drop but I did not forget about it. How could I forget when I went for eleven weeks at a time without changing my clothes? Of course, I could have put them in a basin or a sink and washed them by hand, for that matter, I could have simply pressed more irritably for the repair. By trade, I am a researcher; I have been trained in the art of finding solutions to problems. That’s what I wanted to tell Micro, but all I managed was:

‘I am a researcher by trade; I find solutions to those problems which are posed to me. However, Micro, those problems which are not posed to me, I accept them in their unanswered state, even if they could be answered, especially if I could answer them, but refrain from doing so out of some idiosyncratic perversity that is me.’ I smile at him to make the tone of my message clear even if the words in particular are not. I was trying to tell him about why not to get the washer fixed then.

I can see now, in the way Micro shifted his eyes from a defiant gaze level to mine, to a thoughtful gaze scanning the edge of the blanket lining his bunk, that I have gotten through to him. I am surprised. If I never got through to anybody then I guessed it would be this, this about me, that I would not ever be able to get through.

‘You and I are the only researchers on this space station,’ Micro repeats. His obstinate insistence on this minor point does not perplex me. I never expected ease to accompany this process, the process of undamming a river a molecule of concrete at a time, of stemming and controlling flow, of systematic breakdown, of the self-dissection into ordered arrays laid out for the careful examination of others to whom I am trying to communicate who I am, and who they are, and how it is I understand.

I try to tell him without the history, without the broken washer and the start of the same clothes as I did before. I tell him like this:

‘It’s one and one is two, Micro. I was on a space station by myself and you were on a space station by yourself and then later I was on a space station with other people, one at a time, until twenty now. Your problem is there was no gradual increase, you went from one to twenty like jumping up a cliff that you can only fall down if it were left up to gravity.’

Micro looks up again and says, ‘You make me sick.’ He doesn’t wait for a reply but rises and exits. I hear his footsteps ring off the metal-floored corridors, trailing toward the observation deck.

It’s not even that, the reason we don’t like him. If it was just that then we could live with it, no problem. But once Micro began picking the molecules out of his own dam, he couldn’t piece them back, is what I guess. They started dissolving until the whole structure started large scale disintegrating and the dam developed pin-pricks that quickly eroded into holes and sporadic surges of pressure shoved parts of him out that he didn’t want to meet, which is what I could have helped him with if he had not been made sick by my words.

The making of sickness is a tell-tale sign of what’s coming and when it’s accompanied by the shifting of cause from self to other then what’s coming is even better defined and it’s like entering those symptoms in a recipe book and finding out they add up to a pie that your mom has baked for you every year of your life until she died.

‘Shit,’ is what I am thinking now. My fellow researcher has spent more than one too many years in this outpost by himself. I debate whether to inform the department that Mega has developed multiple personalities, apparently eighteen of them, in addition to whatever was the original. It seems difficult to believe that the department is unaware of it, but Mega has served flawlessly at his station for so many years that they can not doubt that he best does his job alone. So I question myself whether it is my duty to inform them of the sickness of one of their employees when their treatment, which would certainly involve removal from the outpost, would upset him much more than his present condition.

All this, however, is purely academic, because of the second reason I am thinking, ‘Shit,’ that being the purpose of my visit. I have no idea how to inform Mega of my purpose as he seems so steadfast in his belief that I have come to research with him.

‘Shit,’ sums it up. Thinking this makes me laugh because, perhaps, I am a cartoon. Perhaps I am personality number 20 of Mega. Perhaps he actually believes that I am only the next personality. I wonder if he had to condition the other 18 when they first ‘arrived’ as he has tried to do with me. I wonder if he ran about at night then, as he does now, setting all sorts of alarms off, and then retreating to his bed to awaken with indignant patience and blame me for his deeds.

‘Shit,’ once more because I consider how Mega has reacted to the presence of one intruder into his life. How would he fare with a wave of such people as myself? What shrieks would form and froth forth from his mouth if he were situated in the center of a throng of scientists like myself, all of them, in his vision, clamoring to be heard and reasonably instated inside his head. He doesn’t make me sick as I told him he did. It’s all the shit that makes me sick and the news I have to tell him. If I tell it to him harshly it’s because he will consider its meaning far harsher, he will be dealt with in a harsh manner by a harsh departmental hand, and I am only trying to prepare him like I would my own son, had I one, for the shit to come.

Hatred is all I am feeling now. Rage held in my impotent hands that can’t hurl it against walls or grip a nearby beat-worthy wrench. Not that it matters now, what with Micro having left after scavenging over the entire ship. Taking inventory of each monitor, gear, and spoon. Everything was there, exactly as I had signed for it when I first came on. Except, even though it was fixed, the washer still doesn’t work very well and leaks dirty water when it drains into the tiles behind it. Hatred and ignorance, uncalculated ignorance and unlike mine, which is crafted and considered, is all he brought with him and he left half of it behind. I try to convince the others that even if we had killed him, others would have taken his place. That doesn’t satisfy them is what makes them so mad.

I thought I understood. I could see the signs but I didn’t see them lying to me. I could see him feeling the more people inside him as I have and I could see Micro trying to make them stop and I wanted to let him know he could open them up like I had, like petals, and it was better. That’s what I thought I saw. That’s what I believed. What I thought was two people was actually just two faces. What disguised itself as sickness was betrayal and as regret was guilt.

Now I understand the destruction of his previous station. Now I see he brings death with him station to station like a bacteria or a charm. Now I see he marked that station for death with a scratch of his pen in the notebook.

And I was curious why he was going over the ship like he was when my records were impeccable and had told him so, so what I did was have to ask that made him answer and tell me what I didn’t want to hear. Piecemeal is what I am living now. Scrap parts and sheet metal, shrinking bones, wrinkling flesh, crooked back, and shriveled face is my life now that I am old. Now that Lambda is old and out-moded and no longer able to function in a manner that is in keeping with the newer mobile unmanned probes. Scrap parts make me ask what a machine in a probe needs with a washing machine that leaks or the intricate and delicate manual adjustments of the telescopes which will no longer be maneuvered and manipulated by hands such as mine. That is what the closing of Lambda means to me. It is the sacrilegious burning of my home, the destruction of my family. They are dying now, succumbing to a merciless cancer. Micro has given them two months. I doubt any will make it that long because once the dying has started it wants nothing but to complete itself. They are dying alone with me in outer space: Exa, Peta the first, Peta the second, Tera, Giga, Mega, Kilo, Hecta the Lesser, Hecta the Greater, Deca, Deci, Mr. Centi, Mrs. Centi, Milli, Nano Sr., Nano Jr., Pico, Femto, and Atto: all dying when Lambda is decommissioned, dismantled, and redistributed along the farthest fringes of known space in modern, sleek instruments that are taking cells of my blood, forging them with iron, and spreading me like the disease that now eats at my heart across the universe is what I imagine this dying to be like.

BLACKMARKET

We were taking the public transport to the market. Our fellow passengers, seated in aisles ahead of us, behind us, and beside us, speak in loud voices of the tasks and errands that they are in the midst of fulfilling, the personal tragedies they are in the midst of coping with, the affairs they are dissolving, the babies they are aborting, the birthdays they are celebrating, and the operations all of their fathers must undergo this afternoon, yesterday morning, or tomorrow night. Hecta and I cannot afford such a luxury as the errand we have embarked on is secretive in nature. Surely the municipal agents that Hecta suspects are following us have seated themselves within listening distance. Surely these same agents, whom we cannot identify beneath their clever disguises, have amplifiers surgically implanted in their ears, trained on the frequencies of our voices so as to be able to distinguish our words from the hubbub of voices overlapping them, that is, if we were saying anything.

Alas, we have nothing to say. What could have been spoken between us required a dark room. What my lips could have shared with Hecta’s ears could only be shared in darkness. The light of the transport is artificial and fluorescent. It reflects off the uneasy sheen of his brow. Even now that light penetrates him, attempting to wrest the secrets from his superciliary ridge. I see the sweat beading from it, resisting its interrogation. I move my hand inconspicuously over his hand to falsely reassure him that he is not alone. My poor friend, Hecta, is alone.

‘To the market,’ he whispers daringly, ‘To the market.’

‘To buy a fat pig. Home again, home again, jiggety jig,’ I respond filled with a stern seriousness I cannot imitate. We won’t be safe when we get home, assuming all goes well at the market and we make it home. Even then we must repeat our actions in various manners several times so as to confuse unseen spectators as to which has substance and which is mockery. This morning Hecta washed all the silverware in our apartment, 2 knives, 2 spoons, 2 forks, and one spatula four times. I watched him out of the corner of my eye as I read and reread the morning paper upsidedown, backwards, back to front, bottom to top, until I was certain that whoever was there besides the two of us would be just as confused as I was as to what I had just done. Four times the silverware and only once with soap. Which was the real washing, the first? The second, third, fourth? I don’t know. Hecta tells me that it’s best for neither of us to know too much. I strive to know as little as possible to please him.

This is the eighth transport we have taken this morning. Some we took full circle and disembarked at the point of our origin. Others we took one way and then took another at an obtuse angle. This particular route will deposit us in the rural outskirts, in the vicinity of the market.

I have memorized in my subconscious a list of half the items which we will requisition at the market. I can’t recall them at the moment but there is a phrase, that Hecta will say to me when we are within the safe confines of the market, which will trigger my memory and I will recite the list. There is a phrase I have memorized which will bring forth the other half of the list from somewhere inside Hecta. I suppress it.

The gliding transport lurches forward, Hecta and I throw our arms forward and brace ourselves against the seat in front of us. The screen of voices rises quickly to a cacophony of shrieking confusion. Someone shouts that the lead compartment of the transport has derailed. Passengers run madly toward the exits. Above this, we hear the piercing scream of gaseous propellant leaking from a ruptured fuel tank beneath us. A cloud of yellowish gas jets into our module from beneath the tiles of the floor. Now we hear coughing and choking as people stampede toward the exits, trampling the weaker among them. Closing my eyes, I open my duffle bag as does Hecta and we count to thirty before we pull out our gas masks and fit them tightly over our faces. I scan the compartment; several bodies lie mashed against the floor. They are our only companions.

Hecta removes a flameless welding kit from his backpack and proceeds to cut a half-meter circle in the floor. I hold the edges until he is finished and then we lift it up and lean it against the seat, revealing a manhole cover in the transport tracks beneath us. We remove that as well and Hecta climbs in. Before I join him, I remove a small cube of dry ice from a vial in my bag. Inside the cube is a pinch of sodium which will ignite the propellant once the dry ice coating has sublimated. I set it on the seat, follow Hecta down the ladder into the sewers, and replace the man-hole cover above me.

In the sewers, we discover two sets of clothing in shades of non-descript browns and grays of the municipal water works department, wrapped in cellophane. The boots that have been left for us, despite their appearance, are rugged, water-repellant, and steel-toed. We change on the ledge lining the channel of sewage and place our previous clothes in what looks to be a dented breadbox. When Hecta closes the lid, the box begins to glow with a dull reddish tint. We avert our eyes as the glow becomes brighter and when the light behind our eyelids has faded, we open them, and the box with its contents has disintegrated, revealing a small hole beneath. I reach into the hole and remove two flashlights. Handing one to Hecta, I nod and he moves eastward along the sewers. I turn and move west.

‘Jiggety jig,’ thinks Hecta, ‘Centi doesn’t know what she is dealing with to joke about it so lightly. We aren’t going to the market for a bundle of blackberries, two filets of black crappie, and a jar of black mustard. And we have no intention of buying a fat pig, or at least, that is what I suspect since I can’t recall what it actually is we are purchasing. But the reasons are all too clear. The success of our venture is crucial and we cannot second-guess ourselves or each other.’

Hecta reaches a T in the tunnels. He hesitates. When he hears footsteps approaching from the tunnel on his right, he flattens himself against the wall, flips off the flashlight, and hopes to remain unseen. The slapping of hard soles against the concrete ledge becomes louder and eventually turns the corner and faces Hecta, prone against the wall.

A gentlemen in a navy blue business suit, toting a briefcase in one hand, stops and asks Hecta for a light.

Hecta reluctantly hands him the flashlight, relinquishing his vision in these tunnels. The man takes it casually, unscrews the end of it, drops the batteries into the channel and examines the interior of the flashlight. He removes a sheet of paper coiled along the inside, and hands it to Hecta, saying, ‘Don’t bother to read it. It’s the same old thing.’ He then squats down, adjusts the combination of his briefcase in the darkness, snaps it open and hands Hecta an identical flashlight, replacing the shell of the other in the case. Hecta stuffs the paper into his pocket as the businessman returns the way he came and his footsteps grow fainter and fainter until all Hecta can hear is the echoes coming from the other fork. Eventually those echoes become louder until Hecta is sure another person is approaching. Again he flattens himself against the wall and waits in the darkness.

‘There are things,’ Hecta thinks, ‘that I have never said to the sun. There are secrets that have been passed from body to body without vision. I imagine a room without windows or bulbs of artificial light, where our bodies are illuminated not by phosphorescent lichen coating the walls, but by motes of radiative dust sifting through the room, so that the air itself is light, so that we breathe light. I imagine Centi’s lungs full of light, shining through her flesh, outlining her ribs so I can count them in pairs. Two, four, six...’

The steps arrive and Hecta spots Centi behind the flashlight. She looks down both the tunnels, and then at Hecta.

Hecta leads her back the way he came until they reach the ladder they entered by.

Upon realizing this, doubt flashes upon Centi’s face but she ignores it as Hecta seems confident in his movements. He ascends the ladder and pushes open the manhole. Removing the welding kit from his backpack, Hecta cuts a circle opening in the surface above him and pulls himself through. He reaches a hand down to help Centi up as well. They replace the manhole cover. They have arrived in the mail compartment. Canvas bags of parcels and letters have been tossed haphazardly across the floor. Centi opens the nearest one and removes a package addressed to the municipal water works department. Inside are two postal carrier uniforms and a roll of tape. They quickly don them and neatly fold their previous uniforms, placing them and the flashlights in the package. Centi reseals it with the tape and puts it back in the bag. An intercom mounted on the wall squawks with the voice of the conductor of the transport, ‘We’re sorry about the delay folks, but we ran over a businessman in a navy blue suit and we had to clean up the debris before we continued on. We can keep our municipality clean if everyone does their part.’ The message ends and the transport glides into motion again.

Hecta and Centi find postal bags large enough to fit in. One is marked for the sixth planet of the Epsilon system, a resort for the retired wealthy, and the other, the ninth of the Upsilon system, a penal colony. Centi hands Hecta one of the bags and they close themselves up in them and then lay down on the floor next to each other, listening to each other’s breathing.

In interstellar transit, my thoughts dissociate from my body. My body has a destination. It has an address and adequate postage. It houses my certainty that I am still headed toward the market. My thoughts however, are not so sure. Not so sure that I will ever reach that haven. Not so sure that I will ever see Hecta again. I fear that since our last encounter, I left part of me in his parcel. I fear that if we are not soon reunited then he might have lost it in his travels. Or even worse, he might have consumed it, and thus, be unable to recognize what’s mine as mine. I have no doubt that he will return it for the asking but it will not be as if I were asking for a part of me back. Rather it will become me asking for a part of him. He will gladly grant me that, but he won’t understand that he’s not being disassembled in the process, diminished.

When I arrive at Upsilon 9, the conditions are hellish. Even inside the cargo freighter, the temperature has dropped below zero. I do not venture from my canvas bag, despite my hunger, as it is my best protection from the cold. Along with other boxes, I am taken by forklift to the penal colony’s mail distribution center. I hear the inmates crowding around the growing pile of packages for the monthly ritual. When they have all arrived, names are called out and the stack of parcels is reduced one by one. I wait impatiently to hear the name of the person who is receiving me, but the distribution continues until I am the only one left. I feel a heavy hand stamp an inky message across my bag and then I hear his footsteps fading as he leaves the hall. I wait several minutes and then open myself like an unwanted birthday gift. I am seated inside the colony’s mess hall. It is night and the chairs have all been stacked upside down on the tables. I hear the washing of dishes emanating from behind the food service counter. I hop over it and open a refrigerator to locate anything to sate my hunger. The dishwasher apparently hears me as the running water stops and approaches my direction.

The dishwasher is a middle-aged woman with tattoos of fish swimming up her arms into the rolled up sleeves of her dingy t-shirt. ‘We’re closed,’ she tells me.

‘I’m hungry.’

The dishwasher opens the refrigerator and removes a vat of dark jello. I eye it suspiciously. Noticing my hesitation, the dishwasher explains, ‘Best I can do. Black raspberry jello. Tonight’s leftovers. Vitamin and protein enriched. It’ll do the trick.’ She abandons me despairing over this vat and returns to her dishwashing.

I dig into the tub with my hands and scoop the shimmering jello up to my nose. It smells vaguely fruit-like. I hold it up against the light but am unable to see through it. I taste it. Horror upon horrors, I am hungry and I manage to create a large dent in the glassy surface of the jello before I bite into a hard kernel of something. I spit it out and find a tooth, a molar. I have cracked it with my own teeth and I pull the two halves apart. Inside is a tiny silicon chip. I place the microchip carefully in a glass vial from my duffle bag. I return to the empty postage bag in the middle of the room and discover, stamped on it in dark red ink, ‘Refused, Return to Sender.’ I crawl back in am soon hauled back onto the freighter and once again am amidst particles of light in interstellar transmission.

My resolve has been strengthened by the unknown message I have received and the doubts which plagued me on the first leg of the journey, do not reoccur on the return trip.

When I arrive back in the municipality, I am abandoned in a compartment of a public transport. I kick and wiggle around to work my way out, and in doing so hear someone grunt with pain beside me. Hecta escapes his cocoon first and helps me out of mine. ‘You kicked me,’ he whispers as if all we had done is lie on the floor of this transport, sleeping, and he had awoke only because I kicked him.

At the first full stop of the transport, Hecta slides open the door of our compartment and jumps out of it into a field of corn. I jump out as well, closing the sliding door behind me, and run after Hecta, already disappearing in the shoulder-high stalks.

In the center of the field we find a rusted combine, which appears to have sat motionless, sinking into the earth for several years, if not decades. We climb into the cab and rest, sharing the wide seat. The combine roars to life of its own accord, startling both of us. We allow it to steer its own way through the corn, into the woods which lie at the edges of the field. During our progress, Hecta finds two worn overalls and two straw hats behind the seat. Cramped in the cab, we awkwardly change into the overalls, nudging each other with our elbows and knees. I laugh and Hecta frowns. We stash our postal uniforms behind the seat. I laugh again at Hecta in his straw hat and farmer’s frown.

The combine drives us through a path in the woods, barely wide enough to accommodate it. It approaches a clearing and before our eyes, the ground opens up and swallows us whole.

We have arrived at the market. We are escorted off the combine by quiet people with poker faces. We are brought to a room and told to sit down. Eventually, a man about thirty, wearing jeans and a dress shirt with pearl buttons enters and asks Hecta for the paper. I have no idea what he is talking about but Hecta hands the man a sheet of crumbled paper. The man does not read it but instead hands it to me and orders me to do so. The paper says in italic type, ‘This man is a traitor. Kill him. Jiggety jig.’ I read it aloud. The pearl button man removes a hand-gun from his waist and fires a small red hole into Hecta’s forehead.

I sit there dully, wanting no more than the same. The pearl button man asks for the memory chip I have on my person. I hand him the vial. He inserts the chip into a hand-held digital device, studies it for several minutes and then informs me I will not be shot. He orders me to get up and follow him. We leave the room from a different door than we entered and are now at the end of a hallway with a door at each end and one in the middle. From the door at the far end, I see another pearl buttoned man leading Hecta inside.

‘I thought you were dead,’ I manage to get out without gasping.

‘They just killed you,’ he tells me with a clear voice.

‘You’re lying on the floor behind this door with a red hole in your forehead,’ I reply.

‘Likewise I’m sure.’ Despite the bad news and his utter lack of understanding, Hecta grins. It is the most hopeless expression I have ever observed on Hecta’s kind face.

We walk toward each other and follow our respective pearl buttons through the door at the center. They motion us to sit in this new room as they exit.

We sit quietly, unable to speak. I want to tell Hecta that I have seen him die. That I have seen someone who was not Hecta die and I thought it was. I have betrayed Hecta in a convoluted sense. Tears are gathering in my eyes because I cannot explain my relief to him, that someone who I think is Hecta is sitting next to me on this bench along the wall of this white room. It’s too bright here, for words.

A woman draped in a green monk’s tunic now enters the room. She stands in front of us. We stand to face her. ‘What do you want at the black market?’

At this prompt, Hecta recites the phrase that will bring back half the list. He mutters something I cannot make out but part of me clicks. I mutter the same thing back and I see him snap to attention.

I say, ‘Ovum.’

Hecta says, ‘Sperm.’

We buy a baby at the black market and take it home with us. It fits in well, bearing no resemblance to either one of us, as we bear no resemblance to each other.

Since we bought a baby at the black market, our house has three masses moving through it from room to room. One smaller and louder than the other two. It will learn to grow. It will learn to be big like ourselves and hide it well. It will learn once its cries form into words that the things we speak in darkness are terrible and dangerous things. It will learn to shade itself from the light, to ripple its flesh to shake off light like a horse or a cow ripples its flesh to shake off flies. It will find itself one night when it is not expecting anything more than the wind tinkling the mobile above its crib. It will find itself and discover it needs something else to complement it. It won’t know what it is then but it will find out just by its not being there. As parents, we can’t tell it anything. Mutely we watch it stumble through the darkness, calling out for something it has only imagined will respond. As it grows, it grows away from us, like a plant leaning into the window toward the light. We are darkness and death to it, our baby, who becomes itself.

This is how Hecta and I have lived all our lives, separate and distinct. I regret that our relationship has been one of darkness and uncertainty, but as that is how it as always been between us, I can think of Hecta in no other terms than the outline of shadow pacing from wall to wall in the lightless atmosphere, periodically brushing into me, as if by accident finding me, misplacing his lips against my own, whispering into my mouth, which cannot hear, secrets that I can love without understanding.

BLACKHOLE

We have evolved out of eyes here on our collapsed star. With our sight, we also lost our beauty. The pressure here is so great that our eardrums burst long ago. In our deaf state, we have lost the music of our voices as well. The atmosphere is so laden with heavy metals, iridium prominent among them, that our nasal passages have been scalded and scorched nerveless, leaving us unable to smell. Since most natural life, flora and fauna, died when the star collapsed, our food sources were extinguished and it became necessary to cultivate those genes which led us to stop eating. With that, taste was forgotten as well.

Fortunately, the mutations which deprived my species of 80% of the sensual world graced us with four replacement senses. The empty sockets of our eyes have become sensitive to large motions and we are able to detect asteroids which get caught in the phenomenal gravity of our blackhole, enabling us to dodge them before they smack into the surface and ground us to pulp. Our now silent mouths are ideal for holding a bite-size morsel of rock from the crust of the star. The dense block sucks in light from distant beacons. Newly formed channels and conduits carry it to various parts of the body, nourishing us. We are able to distinguish between the different wavelengths of light, across the spectrum, and lean like plants to the sources that we need. Our ears have grown a fungus-like organism which is able to translate magnetic fields sent from another such organism to electrical impulses which our brains can rationalize. By pressing two such organisms together, that is by pressing our ear against that of another, we are able to communicate. Lastly our noses now function to alert us, not only to the presence of others of our species, but also to the general tone of their immediate intents. The adaptations have proved sufficient to maintain the existence of my species on this dense core of fizzled star.

Our days are numbered though, and we are well aware of it. With each passing mass that falls into our gravity and throws itself against our star, the core is compacted inward and becomes denser. Eventually the star will become so dense that the residual heat still simmering at its center will not be able to reach the surface and we will freeze. With each rotation, we monitor the average temperatures by placing our hands against the stone and feeling how much colder it has become. In the face of certain extinction, our species, rather than devise crafts which could carry us to another warmer, more secure collapsed star, spend their time in trivial distractions, roaming the surface making maps of our home as it is now and won’t be, digging up minerals to place in their mouths which refract light and feed them odd, bent angles, composing the couplet which will complete their endless sonnets on the glories of the senses: motion, light, fungus, presence, and touch.

I do not pretend to condemn them for their ready acceptance of their fate. In fact, I too participate in these idle activities. I too wander across the surface. I travel with a research expedition. When we sense the motion of a body trapped by the star, we move to a safe distance from the perimeter of its impact. When we feel the thud of its contact, we wait for the dust to settle before we climb down in the crater and explore what it is that has joined us in our certain doom. Most often it is a piece of rock or ice: comet, asteroid, or meteorite. Every once in a while, we’ll find a small, stray moon or a chunk of smashed planet. Less frequently we might find in the icy head of a comet, bacterial life-forms, utterly desolate upon finding that their voyage through space has come to an abrupt end. It’s not the cold here that kills them, they are used to that. It’s the pressure; they have spent too long in the vacuum to adapt to the terapascals which crush their unskeletoned forms. They need to be practically all bone, like we are, to survive. Sometimes the meteorites we find are rampant with radioactivity and the stones in our mouths digest the strange radiation and it send tingles along our spinal columns. The doctor’s tell us it’s not healthy, but none of has died yet. We are long lived species as even in its collapsed state, the star is quite large and it may take us thousands of rotations to reach the site of impact. It’s even rarer that we find an exploratory satellite, sent by some sentient species from some distant galaxy eons ago. When it arrives, if it is still functioning, it may blurt out some message. We press our fungi to it, to catch what it is saying. More often than not, it tells us, ‘We are the blah blah species of planet blah blah in the blah blah twin system. We are eager to meet you blah blah blah. Come and visit us sometime. This is how you get there: take a right at the blah blah nebula, (watch out for the blah blah pulsar), etc.’ The message repeats endlessly and it is a source of great delight to visit one when we are feeling lonely or disenchanted and remember that there are still some creatures who will find our fossilized remains, packed beneath layers of cosmic dusk, and perhaps resurrect us as skeletons in a museum, who will find the fragments of our sonnets and publish them in leather bound volumes, who will read our maps and say, ‘They were a reasonable folk, they knew how to get from here to there.’ On the other hand, some messages state, ‘We are the blah blah warrior clan. We’ve traced this satellite to you and are currently on our way to plunder blah, rape blah, pillage blah, and sell your whole lot into slavery blah blah blah.’ We find these types equally amusing as the signals don’t have enough strength to escape the gravitational field, and besides, most of the time, they are absorbed by a fungus pressed against them. Once we were lucky enough to discover a mechanized probe which partially functioned after its crash. It had a shovel which it used to scoop dirt off the surface. A second appendage held a metallic canister which had been smashed beyond repair. It would shovel up a load of soil and then rigidly move its arm over the battered canister and proceed to pour dirt over itself. We had a global parade when we discovered that. We followed it around in lengthy trails, all of us scooping up dirt and dropping it carefully on our feet, causing quite a commotion. Eventually we tired of that and let it continue in its predestined routine.

The number of individuals in our particular research team varies as creatures fall in and out of interest but it is composed of a steady nucleus at all times. The constant members include Kilo, the sisters, Deci and Deca, and myself, Nano. There’s no hierarchy or authority as we each are self-sufficient, and the event of an impact is rare enough that two never occur simultaneously and we are never forced to choose which way we will go. Deci and Deca do, however, bicker, albeit in a friendly sibling manner, ceaselessly. They quarrel over anything, verbose descriptions of the sensations radioactivity gives them, the time which will elapse before the next impact, the appearance of the hearts of the species which have sent a particular satellite. Deca will insist that it’s the flesh of peaches she feels brushing against her spine when she encounters radioactivity, while Deci will contradict her, adamant that it is the pit. Deci will propose that the next impact won’t occur for quite some time, while Deca will counter that it comes tomorrow. Deca will suggest the hearts of the war-like message-senders are smooth and glassy like polished marbles, while Deci maintain they are porous like pumice or limestone. Deci, the elder, always yields in the end, breaking the fungus contact. Their rivalry doesn’t bother the rest of us as we have to press our fungi against one of theirs during the debate to catch any of it. Besides, our noses can sense their moods and always it warms us.

Kilo serves as our scout, despite there being little to scout out. He often wanders off to the sides of us, when we are pursuing a new site and then returns to us and reports what he has determined we are passing. It is a good system as periodically he discovers something of interest which we would have missed without his surveying.

I am the scribe, recording the details of each expedition: the date of impact, and the date of inspection, the location of impact, the radius of the crater it formed, the composition of the object whether it be mineral, metal, or ice, and the presence of any oddities such as bacteria, messages, or probes. When I fill a volume with data, I keep it on my person until I pass close to a monastery where the inhabitants relieve me of it, copy it, and distribute it to all other monasteries where it can be read by the rest of my species. Of course, I am not the only scribe and we are not the only research expedition. The monasteries are full of such volumes and if we find ourselves near one, in between impacts, I might spend some evenings there, keeping myself current of other discoveries and chuckling over the follies of my species.

When the most recent incoming mass is detected, we agree that it is not a large object, not of the size of a stellar body. Many such smaller objects fall to us and we inspect them all, expecting a bit of meteor, but always hopeful for a satellite or a probe. The predicted crash-site would not be too far from the canyon we were currently travelling through, so we do not hurry in finding a point where we can scale the normally steep walls. We do find a gentler slope but hesitate in climbing it, as we will be better able to shelter ourselves from any debris down here in the canyon. Our patience is fortuitous because the object, when it arrives, impacts along the slope and skids madly down it, burrowing a channel, throwing back dirt, and grinding to a halt in a mound of soil at the bottom of the chasm. Even from our vantage point, several hundred meters away, we could feel the repercussions carried through the ground and feel the heat rising from the object. I open the volume, and record the date and location of impact. As we cautiously approach, our noses begin to twitch, causing us to sniffle and scratch them. We have to hold back and wait for the heat to dissipate before we can study it further, since we haven’t any eyes and we have to examine it by touch. So we crouch down on the rock and turn the stones in our mouths toward the distant specks of light in the sky, refueling ourselves for the upcoming investigation.

We are delighted when, with a whoosh of dense atmosphere rushing inside, a portal in the side of the object opens. ‘A probe!’ we hope until we sense the muted presence of something else, something alive and larger than e. coli. We wait anxiously, unable to detect anything more. It is a sensation we are accustomed to: unable to determine motion of such a small object with our eyeless sockets, unable to communicate until we press our fungi to it, unable to digest it unless it gives off light, unable to determine what lies before us until we are close enough to touch it, unable to know more than a presence and a mood which is decidedly perplexed.

Deci and Deca rush to one side of me, Kilo to the other, and we link fungi and a chatter fills my head.

‘A creature?’ asks Deca.

‘A creature!’ Deci confirms to her younger sister.

‘It seems confused,’ Kilo states, ‘Does it know we are here?’

Suddenly Kilo jumps, the presence has moved closer and now stands centimeters from him. He leans back down to reestablish contact with the rest of us. ‘He’s close and he’s cold. I feel no heat emanating from him, but his confusion has changed to a perplexed curiosity.’ Kilo jumps again and tells us needlessly, ‘It’s touching me now, on my other fungus. It’s trying to contact me, but can’t generate the necessary magnetic field.’ Kilo’s disappointment is felt by all of us as the creature breaks contact and his presence diminishes as he returns to his craft.

‘What did it feel like?’ Deci asks, ‘Like the flesh of a peach or the pit?’

‘Not like that,’ he answers, ‘like a brick or a pipe. It wasn’t alive. The creature must be wearing an environmental suit to sustain itself under these conditions. What I felt was an inanimate coating, perhaps a glove, a boot, or an earmuff.’

‘Well of course it couldn’t communicate if it had earmuffs on!’ Deca exclaims, her shrill voice piercing through our heads.

We shrug in unison, a concerted effort acknowledging both our ignorance and Deca’s.’

The creature’s presence grows as it approaches Kilo again. This time we sense a plan and uncertain confidence.

Kilo tells us, ‘It’s established contact with me again.’ We sense it as well, channeling through him, like the static of a receiver in between frequencies. The creature adjusts it and the white noise recedes, revealing a weak voice, ‘...don’t know what the hell I’m doing trying to talk to a bunch of mushroom-like toad-things with arms and growths in their ears and no eyeballs...’

‘It speaks!’ Deca shouts.

‘Ahh, I gotta turn the volume down on this thing,’ the creature groans. ‘Yeah, I speak,’ it continues in a softer voice.

‘How?’ Kilo asks.

‘Well, I got this here universal translator plugged into an inductor attached to the face of the stethoscope from the medical kit, and then I manipulated the frequency...’

‘Stethoscope!’ Deca shrieks again, ‘Are you a doctor?’

‘No, I’m not a doctor. It’s just a goddamn stethoscope. I’m a...’

We feel the uncertainty in his voice.

‘I’m a merchant.’

We feel the lie. I do not express my knowledge of this fact, as the creature is apparently unaware that we are able to communicate, at least one-way, on a second level beyond the fungi.

Deca, the youngest among us, does not have the same restraint, and says quite sure of herself, ‘You’re no merchant. You’re a pirate. You’re probably bloodthirsty and ruthless and all kinds of mean.’

‘Am not!’ the creature retorts indignantly, ‘I’m a benevolent pirate, as pirates go.’

Kilo asks, to divert the ensuing argument, ‘What’s your name, creature?’

‘Peta. Captain of the now defunct, Detritus.’

‘What kind of name is that for a spacecraft?’ Deca asks belligerently.

‘Well, it’s a pretty fitting one, considering the state she’s in now.’

‘You had a female spacecraft?’ Deci asks astonished, ‘Was she your mate?’ and then immediately regrets her question as perhaps overly insensitive, since obviously Detritus is recently perished.

‘You guys don’t get out much, do you?’ Peta breaks contact and we sense a moody stream of curses before he links back up with us. ‘Where am I?’

‘You’re in a blackhole,’ I inform him.

‘That’s bad.’

‘Oh, it’s really quite pleasant when you get used to it,’ Deca tells him, defending her way of life in a most patriotic manner.

‘Hey, can I ask you guys a question?’

‘Certainly,’ Kilo agrees, ‘We’re delighted to speak with you. As you surmised, we don’t have many visitors down here, a few bacteria that quickly die, a broken sampling probe, not much else.’

‘Right. Um, How come you guys have rocks in your mouths?’

Peta is intent on leaving the blackhole. He claims there is no hope of resurrecting the Detritus, so he is attempting to construct a transmitter to contact his sister ship, Attritus, whose Captain, Peta confidently claims, would risk his own life to save Peta’s.

Not to discourage him, but to alert him to the difficulties of such a task, we relate how previous probes have been unable to generate a signal which can break free of the blackhole’s gravity. He shrugs and tells us he wasn’t kicked out of the transmission engineering department of the academy for bad conduct. Oh no, he had to break a few laws of physics to warrant expulsion, and he’ll break them again if that’s what it takes to get off our star.

When he rests from his work, we link back up to him and ask him whether he knows any other blackholes, suitable for our habitation, as this one is rapidly freezing and our extinction will soon be upon us.

‘Despite what you may think,’ Peta tells us, ‘I don’t make a habit of getting drawn into blackholes. This is the first one. And my knowledge of the stellar charts is lacking in some spots. Can’t help you, sorry.’

‘Sure you can,’ Deca tells him, ‘In a rightly pirate-like manner, you can commandeer a large freighter and pick us up a batch at a time and transport us over to our new home.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Peta agrees, ‘In a rightly pirate-like manner, that’s just what I should do.’

On the morning when Peta gets his transmitter to operate, we crowd around and hold our stones toward it, sampling the radiation.

‘Stop it!’ Peta shouts at us through his stethoscope, pushing us away, ‘You’re eating the signal. How am I ever going to get the message out if you’re eating the signal?’

Chastised, we back off and huddle in a circle, our backs to Peta.

‘It tasted like the rotted flesh of a worm-infested peach to me,’ an upset Deca snarls.

We wait for several rotations of our star, before we sense a second object entering the pull of the blackhole. It duplicates the descent of Detritus almost exactly, skidding to rest barely ten meters from the original. Peta tells us it is a heavy shelled escape pod. Inside he discovers the materials to construct an industrial personnel transmitter and a note from the Captain of the Attritus. He reads us the letter, alternately laughing and cursing after each sentence. ‘Dear Peta, sucks to be you. You owe me big for this. Nearly got atomized by a frigate when I swiped this little missy. You owe me BIG as in vats of mercury, reams of uranium-235, and skads of heavy water. However, due to my BIG heart, I might be able to find a spot in my crew for you when you get up here, perhaps in the scullery. Say hello to your mushroom friends and don’t eat too many rocks. Exa of the sisterless Attritus.’

As Peta assembles the device, he doesn’t speak to us, except to bark at us to be careful as we feel all over the device to get the dimensions so I can mark them down in the volume. When it is ready to activate, he comes over to us, and tells us to keep our fingers crossed.

‘Will you commandeer a freighter for us?’ Deca asks, sure by this time that her quest is hopeless.

We sense the guilt of Peta as he stammers through the stethoscope, ‘Probably not. But who can say, we pirates are a wily lot, given to whims. If I find an available barge, who knows, I might. If I do though, I’ll send a message through the transmitter. So just leave it on. But don’t use it because once the Attritus breaks orbit, it will just transmit you into space.’ He breaks contact and returns to transmitter. It activates with a glow of energy and we shield the rocks in our mouths from it, so as not to absorb any of its energy.

Abruptly, Peta’s presence has vanished. We do not know whether the process was successful or not. Abruptly, Deca’s presence vanishes. This sort of thing only happens when a member of our species dies and despite ourselves we search the surrounding grounds for her corpse, knowing she has fled with Peta.

After that, Deci is heartbroken. She refuses to move from her station beside the transmitter, waiting for the message. Sometimes, she despairs and confides to me that Peta probably sold her sister to a zoo. At other times, she envisions Deca sitting on a lush, tropical blackhole, sunning herself and waiting for the rest of us to arrive.

Kilo has left to inform the monasteries of exactly what occurred, explaining to them the slim, almost negligible chance that someday a transport may arrive to ferry our people to a new home. He stresses that it is highly improbable.

I wait each minute by Deci’s side. Her shifting emotions become mine despite my intentions to maintain a safe distance. We spend our days with rocks pointed toward the stars, the energy trickling in to feed our bodies and our despair.

As word spreads, our people migrate slowly toward the transmitter at the bottom of the canyon. They even begin to neglect the investigation of impacts on the far side of the star, for fear that in the long journey it would take to get there and back, the freighter might arrive and abandon them. To me, this neglect of impacts strikes at the very core of our being. Our existence becomes frayed and tentative. I want to smash the transmitter but cannot, solely because Deci waits.

As it turns out, Deca abandons the pirates shortly after she joins them, and makes a moving plea to a United Planets sub-committee. They rally to her cause and outfit her with several freighters to move our people to another, younger blackhole that still seeps with heat. When her joyful presence rematerializes on our star, Deci’s eyeless sockets weep. Only now do I feel the distance I tried to maintain.

The mass exodus begins and tapers off with the last few stragglers. The young leave first as they are eager to explore their new home. The elders among us, including Kilo and myself, are split in two factions, those who want to go and guide and aid the youths, as Kilo does, and those who have become too attached to this star to leave it without grave misgivings. I am among them. Deca pleads with me to join her, but I tell her, she has her sister back and doesn’t need me like the untended impacts do.

The sort of thing that needs me with all these altered senses is not a new world, but a flare of meteor puncturing the atmosphere and burning in its descent. What I am good for is an abandoned monastery aching for the sound of prayer. I am feeling my way through darkness and I haven’t found the door. I tell her, ‘Deci, whose darkness is my darkness and my joy, on this new blackhole you go to, name your firstborn Detritus because that was her only hope for survival and because somewhere in the heavens, she will have a rogue sister, wreaking chaos and shifting from system to system, unattached to and unbroken by the dying of any one star, as I am.’

BLACKSHEEP

Ours is a nomadic tribe, travelling from steppe to plain to basin, following the sun, the vegetation, and the other flocks. My twin, Deca, birthed minutes before me, nudges me in the stomach or leg, keeping me headed in the right direction. ‘Otherwise,’ Deca claims, ‘you’re prone to wander off and end up in a wolves’ lair, howling at the moon, the song of lupus spreading beneath your wool coat.’

I tell her right back in an imperious tone, ‘Leave me alone. I’m not looking for carrots or scarce patches of grass. What I’m looking for I might find only beneath the moon in a fit of lunacy. If I’m ever going to find it, you need to let me be.’

Deci shrugs and elbows me back toward the flock. My vision is poor but I can smell the flock ahead of me, lugging their light gear and kicking up dirt. I can smell my mother up there. I’m sure she can smell me as well, smell her milk in me, the reek of her own fluids emanating from my flesh. If I were to wander off she would have the whole flock retracing their steps until they found me tearing at an unfortunate plant with my blunt teeth, like a dog gnawing bone.

The satellites that look down on us at each moment, trained in orbits that follow our erratic migration, see the wool coats bundled around us. We are digitized clouds to them, low-lying fog scraping the country side, obscuring their sight. I wait for the day when they will send down a fiery ray of voltage and reduce our flock to a sulking crater, pocking the landscape. I wait for giant asteroids to collide with our planet causing massive tidal waves, upheaving ridges of stone, dimming and cooling our globe. What I wait for is mass extinction.

What the packs of predators behind us are waiting for is a young, weak, and foolish girl like myself to stray from the flock and take me down with bleats, blood, and exposed bone and sinew.

With the skies silently armed above us, the packs of wolves hidden behind us, and a desolate expanse of barren trees and icy streams before us, it’s a wonder, to me, that we simply don’t surrender. We could move underground and migrate through natural caverns, into catacombs niched with corpses, beside subterranean rivers, springing from the stone at one point and then trickling into dark holes at another.

But we are sun-worshippers; our pagan rituals center around that yellow blur and we won’t abandon it, despite the great distance it maintains between itself and us. At noon, we bring out the whistles, flutes, and tambourines and stamp a great deal of dirt down in our sun-dances. The sun won’t acknowledge us and I curse at it, under my breath, as the rest of flock shrieks with giddy spasms of enlightened madness before throwing themselves prostrate in the soil. I curse it, whispering, ‘Sun of yellow, dingy wool, you wrap my people in a thin gauze binding none of their wounds. Were I to pull you away, you would cling to our scabs and tear them off, leaving red sores for the dust to settle in, the bacteria to proliferate and infect. Sun of urine, you piss your steady stream of light onto my people, souring our best intentions with vision too acute. Were I to spin you around, your stream of waste would sputter into space, freezing in a vacuum that abhors you as much as I do. Sun of bile, you regurgitate your fusion onto my flock and we walk in it, we breathe it in, we see each other by your cosmic vomit. Were I to heal you to such an extent that your stomach ceased to purge, our plains would steady themselves and solidify. We wouldn’t always move to keep up with you. We could find a decent valley and call it home, Sun of suns.’ I don’t dare vocalize it. I, Deca, am a little girl of my people and am dispensable in the face of such heresy.

I have to wait until darkness to steal away from the flock, to recant their solar prayers, to let moonlight guide me alone to the meeting place. The meeting place changes each night, as our position does. I know only to look for a prominent rock, a solitary tree, or a broad expanse of plain. Atto of the wolves meets me there. It is always Atto meeting me, finding me beside some lonesome oak or jutting stone marker. He approaches conspicuously, I do not fail to see his figure growing toward me in the distance before he arrives. He does not hurry and, upon his arrival, removes his backpack, performs a mockery of the sun-dance, standing on his hands, somersaulting, getting leaves in his hair, to appease me.

He brings a flashlight, which he ties to an overhead limb or sets on a rocky ledge above. It is by this light that my formal education has progressed. Atto teaches me about the planets, about transmission of ships and people through space as quanta of light, about foreign thinking creatures, and most of all about the treachery of the sun. He has taught me ours is one of countless suns, indistinct except for the random placement that has set it so near to us.

I have learned the suns come in many ages, sizes, and colors, suns of blood, suns of ice, suns of water, red giants and blue dwarfs, thriving suns and dying suns that burst in a last gasp before they collapse inward. Ours is a mediocre sun, not more than a blink in the celestial heavens is what I have learned.

Tonight Atto meets me in the bend of a creek. Small tree limbs, leaves, dead animals that fall in the water upstream are carried here and deposited as the river turns sharply away. As he nears me, Atto juggles tiny acorns that he picks up off the ground, calling out names of suns, Ro, HH Phi, Mu nu, Kappa e, as if his hands were large enough to palm stars and toss them carelessly hand over hand into space. ‘Deca,’ he calls out, ‘sunshine of my nights, I find you land bound once again, on the banks of a creek as insignificant to the oceans as your sun is to the universe.’

I listen to his banter as he strings his flashlight up from a spruce above us. ‘What are my lessons tonight, Atto?’ I divert the conversation from myself to my studies because what am I looking for I won’t find inside me.

‘Tonight, my ardent pupil, we study wolves.’

‘I don’t want to learn about wolves. I don’t want to learn about anything that is within sight of our sun.’

‘Wolves are nocturnal creatures. You have a lot to learn from them.’

As if in response to his statement, we hear the howling of a pack not too distant. I am not afraid, not because Atto is with me and will keep me from harm, but because I have grown to admire the wolves that roam untended by elder twins in the moonlight. ‘I too am a nocturnal creature,’ I insist, nodding at the moon as if to catch its attention and prove my point.

‘Then you may stay on the ground, Deca, as I climb into the trees and secure a safe roost before they come.’ He climbs the spruce and settles in the crux of a limb about four meters up.

I crane my neck to look at him. ‘How will they know to find us if we are perched up there?’

‘Because I will call them to us.’ Atto howls from his tree and quickly receives a chorus of replies.

Frowning, I climb as well and settle one branch up from him.

‘While we are waiting we can review your studies,’ Atto announces. ‘Tell me about the Carnot engine.’

‘Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot,’ I answer confidently, ‘was a 19th century French Physicist who wrote ‘The Motive Power of Fire’ and then later described a fantastic engine whose efficiency was equal to unity less the coldest temperature of operation over the hottest. It was a breakthrough in that it clearly defined the most work one could expect from one’s efforts. It doomed him and all other thermodynamicists after him because it defined a limit, it capped humans’ efforts, saying, “You can do no better than this. Try as you might, you have no choice but to obey me.” Unappreciated, Carnot died at age 36. Centuries later, the Carnot engine was refined giving due regard to post-relativistic discoveries and is now the force that propels ships at greater than light speed through the interstellar void.’

At that point, we hear the patting of paws against the mat of leaves below us. The wolves have arrived bearing yellowed teeth, showing rows of ribs, and shifting their slit eyes. They smell me crouched in the tree and circle it, barking and growling, gnashing their teeth, and salivating.

Atto lets them begin hopping up against the trunk, falling well short of us. I pay particular attention to the behavior of the wolves, although I have seen them many times, as it is the subject of tonight’s lesson and I will surely be quizzed on it tomorrow and succeeding nights. What I notice is a bunch of stupid, slobbering canines throwing themselves against the bark.

Atto then asked me which of the wolves looks the leanest, the most tired and vulnerable. I point to a runt keeping its distance along an arc in the circle.

‘Sleep,’ Atto tells it and a transparent beam of bright particles shoots out of the sky and lodges in its skull. The wolf promptly goes to sleep.

Atto looks up at me and I, in turn, look up toward the sky through the screen of branches, vainly searching for the satellite which has sent that beam. Unsurprisingly, I see nothing. ‘Which satellite is that?’

‘That’s Sleeper Seven Halves. Try it.’

I wave my hand across the whole lot and chant, ‘Sleeper Seven Halves, to sleep with them all.’

As quickly as I have finished the words, eight similar beams simultaneously strike from the sky into each wolf, dropping all of them to their sides.

Atto climbs down the tree and walks among them examining each individually. I follow and pass over each restful body with him.

‘What do you see, Deca?’

‘I see sleeping wolves.’

‘How do you know they are sleeping?’

‘Because I could wake them.’ To demonstrate, I point toward the runt beneath our gaze and call out, ‘Waker Five Thirds, up with this one.’ A beam indistinguishable from the others spits into it and the wolf springs to his feet and lunges at Atto, clamping its teeth around his ankle.

Surprised, Atto shouts, ‘Die!’

A beam appears briefly and the wolf falls limp at his feet, its saliva drooling over Atto’s feet. Atto bends over and pries the mouth off his leg. He has several deep punctures around his ankle. He looks at me. I am not sure whether he is upset or simply in pain. He limps off in the darkness without bidding me farewell, so I figure he must be upset.

What I learned that night was wolves. You can put them to sleep, but even in their dreams they are hunting you. You can kill them if you have to, but it won’t bring you any pleasure.

When I tell Deci that I have been sneaking out at night, she is shocked, terrified and disappointed that she had been left out. She would have run and told mother had I not begged her into secrecy, and even then, finally resorted to promising her she could accompany me this coming night.

During the course of the day, I tell her of Atto, transmission, engines, and even the suns. Deci seems to take it all in stride as if she has suspected as much all along. I know inside she must be bursting with the excitement that I first felt, but she reveals nothing.

When we do sneak out that night, we are discovered by a rogue wolf. I expect Deci to be amazed by my powers to put it to sleep, but she just steps over it as if it were the long dead corpse of a deer or a rabbit. We stop by a copse of oaks where she settles in the shadows of the trees.

When Atto approaches, limping slightly, but still mocking the sun and carrying on as usual, Deci steps out of the shadows and gives him such a fright as I have never suspected him capable of. I quickly say, ‘Atto, this is my twin sister, Deci.’

He watches her intently until she points at him and commands, ‘Sleep,’ to which he falls to the ground.

I gaze at her in amazement, she who had feigned indifference at my lulling the wolf, but must have been acutely observing me.

‘Examine him,’ she tells me, ‘What do you see?’

‘I see a sleeping Atto.’

‘He has two hands like we do. He has a bandage on his leg and a smirk, even now, unconscious, on his face. Do you like him?’

‘I like this sleeping Atto,’ I reply.

‘He is a galactic jester, the fool in the universe’s court. He does not deign to amuse the king, he only tricks impertinent girls like yourself.’

‘And like you,’ I jab back at her.

‘What can he teach you? Those things you so eagerly revealed to me today?’

‘He can teach me more than he could ever teach someone like you who refuses to listen to him.’

‘Then let him let teach us,’ my sister states ominously. ‘Forgetter Nine Tenths, make him forget. Waker Five thirds, Wake him.’

Abruptly, Atto rises to his feet. I help him up. ‘You passed out. Is the wound in your leg okay? I’m sorry for it.’

He shrugs it off and appraises my sister.

‘She’s here to learn,’ I inform him.

Atto doesn’t reply but consents to sit in a circle with us. He turns to my sister, ‘What do you know about uncertainty?’

I lean forward, very much wanting to show Atto and Deci what I know about uncertainty. I know that Werner Heisenberg in the twentieth century claimed we couldn’t know everything, that we could know only position or velocity, and by examining one, would alter the other. I know the entire field of uncertain psychology had been founded on this innocent revelation and thereby conjectured that humans could only know where they were or else where they were going, never both. It was a saving grace to relieve an entire species of seeking out an ultimate truth, when at best only half of it could be known. I know right now, where we are, that is too close to our sun, but I don’t know where this night will take us. When our flock travels, we don’t know where we are, but we know that we are going somewhere. It is only in deep space transmission, Atto has told me, when you really aren’t anywhere at all, that you can get an inkling of both. But I don’t reveal this. I sit quietly and wait for the response of my sister.

Deci scratches at a lightning bug hovering near her temple. ‘I don’t know. And that is all I need to understand uncertainty.’

‘Philosophical pig fodder,’ Atto announces, surprising me immensely for I have never heard him degrade one of my answers in such a brusque manner.

‘Are you sure,’ Deci asks, tempting him to violate the uncertainty principle.

Atto grins, ‘Maybe.’

‘Why have you come here?’ Deca demands of him.

‘I am a scout and I am scouting.’

‘For?’

‘Suitable companions to take with me into space.’

My stomach stirs with excitement. I have always hoped that I might travel with Atto, abandoning this sun, despite regretting that I would leave my backward people.

‘To what end?’ Deci asks as if the glories of space travel aren’t enough.

‘I have a plan,’ Atto replies seriously, ‘a plan for a better atom. It’s not patented yet so I can’t reveal anymore than that to anyone who hasn’t taken a pledge of confidentiality.’

Deci spits on the ground. ‘I have a better atom in my womb.’

Startled, I look for it, but I can’t see through her wool coat.

Atto is caught completely off-guard. I have never seen him look so foolish, falling for Deci’s sarcasm. I am disappointed and envious of the interest my sister had aroused in Atto, when all I can do is get him bit by a wolf, and a runt at that.

The following night, after not speaking of the encounter during our day of travel, Deci decides to accompany me again. I am not sure I want her company but I am in no position to stop her, so I don’t mention my uneasiness.

Atto greets us without his ritual mimicry of the sun. It starts the lesson off on an unfamiliar tone and I am wary of it.

He asks me, ‘Deca, tell me about ether.’

‘Oh, Ether, that elusive substance,’ saying the word thrills me. It reminds me of mass extinctions that have already taken their prey; it forecasts my own with delightful ambivalence. ‘Ether, as suggested by Rudolf Clausius, was a little bitty piece of something that existed in between the atoms of a solid. When you cooled it, it seeped out, evacuating its niche, explaining why solids contracted as the temperature fell. Unfortunately for ether, no one at the time could see a creature that small and thus they doubted it. When other theories gained popularity, ether fell into disuse until another of the theories was finally proved. And there it met its sorry end, being brushed into non-existence simply because something else had formed in the minds of humans to take its place. No one ever saw it, and now that it was extinct, no one ever would. Thus it could not be proved that it might have actually existed at one time. It wasn’t until the Carnot engine ferried humans into space that ether was rediscovered biding its time in the dimensionlessness of supra-light vacuum.’

He nods without appreciation. ‘Deci, tell me the form of the better atom.’

My sister stares up into the sky and I am afraid she is going to put my teacher to sleep again. Instead, she replies, ‘The perfect atom is in waiting for an ignorance so blithe that it can infiltrate it and co-mingle with the rest of the atoms, silently, patiently transforming each ordinary atom it comes in contact with into one of its own.’

I wonder why none of my studies ever concerned the better atom which now seems vitally tantamount. Humbled, I listen and try to learn. My new resolve crumbles, however, as Atto announces that he is leaving the planet now. ‘Atto!’ I gasp, ‘I want to come.’ Even as I say the words, I feel their uncertainty.

‘I invite you both,’ he states passionlessly.

I can’t understand the despair I feel at this statement. I have yearned to flee the planet, but Deca has poisoned it with her better atom.

Deci asks me, ‘Sister, will you go?’

I begin crying. I am only a little girl, strayed too far from the flock. How can I become this great, dismal adventure before me? I express my feelings only through returning my sister’s gaze.

‘Then I must go alone,’ she tells me.

The only thing I feel is thankfulness that she has relieved me of my burden to decide. Already I know I may regret my indecision, but now, I am not ready and I will stay.

Atto stands and shakes my hand. ‘You are not the most adept pupil, but you are the most endearing.’

‘You are not the most accessible professor, but perhaps you’ll do better in the future when you see the scars on your leg.’

I hug my sister and she whispers to me. ‘It’s Retriever Two Elevenths to call me back.’ She walks off side by side with Atto and I think of my mother walking likewise with my father before he died.

When they are gone and I am watching the moon with my poor vision, I call out, ‘Aborter Six Zeroths, bring me the better atom.’ A faint beam of light discreetly strikes down in the distance, and then a second lodges the atom in my womb.

I am a slothful guardian of my tribe. I see danger as we approach and do not raise a cry or summon a beam of light to save us. I see children dragged off to be ravaged by wolves and only act to put them out of their misery before their flesh is consumed. I am not without mercy, however, as the perfect atom encounters the rest of me particle by particle, converting me into the angel I was intended to be.

BLACKJACK

The first thing we noticed about Jack was how black his heart was. The next thing we noticed was that he was an excellent card player. The last thing we noticed was the club he carried with him at all times. ‘To bust heads and beat ass,’ said he. We took an immediate liking to Jack after that; we thought he was pretty funny about that bustin’ heads and beatin’ ass stuff. We, who are meek and small, afraid to act out of turn and terrified of being accused of something we did not do as well as being responsible for something we did, admired his open invitation to the possible consequences of his rash violence. We saw in him all the things we weren’t and on rare occasions wanted to be. We also saw him as a possible receptacle for all the things we were and did not want to be. Besides that, his skill at bridge was remarkable and we were looking for a fourth.

We, who never bite off more than we can chew, played contract bridge according to Goren. We, who never overextend ourselves, should we have set the opposing team, would apologize profusely to mend the feelings that might have been damaged by our bold playing. We, who never take more than we can handle, would meet early in the morning, before reveille, and play behind the glare of the spotlight in the tower located in the center of the garrison. The light rotated, covering the entire base in a beam of light briefly, regularly, during the dark hours. We, whose mouths are chaste, would laugh in giddy, conspiratorial respect when Jack would curse like the devil after losing a hand, which wasn’t very often due to the remarkable level of bridge at which he played. We, who are humbly reserved and overtly conservative, would dance the dance of peace, chant the chant of peace, and make the peace hand signal at each other, secretly, before dawn, praying the war would end, while our warring commanders were still asleep.

That was all during our period of soldiering, prior to the subsequent period of veteran status when we took to hitchhiking from city to city, spending time in various V.A. hospitals and being sorely neglected by the government. Before that, Jack was a peon just like we were, all enlisted personnel were, but he was a powerful peon, without vision, without any concept of the peonhood about him. That is not to suggest he was surrounded by an aura of leadership either. On the contrary, he was a peon but just not like us. He was the best of peons, a prince among peons, a secular paragon of our lowly status as peons. How we admired that, the being the best of something, anything, even of peonhood, as Jack was. We were too shy to be the best, we would have been embarrassed to have been called the best, or even runner-up, I think, would have brought blushes to most of our faces. But not Jack.

Sometimes Jack would meet with us before the sun rose, and his black heart would be worn upon his sleeve for us to inspect at our leisure, and his club would be gripped firmly in either his right fist or his left and it would be bloody.

‘Jack!’ I would exclaim under those circumstances, ‘What happened?’

‘Been bustin heads and beatin ass.’

Deci laughed, then, Ha ha ha. ‘Jack, you’re a real crack-up. You really crack me up.’

Deca wept and sobbed, ‘Jack, this weeping, this sobbing, each tear is shed for you.’ I understood that each of them exaggerated their responses in an attempt to make them more palatable to Jack, who was not keen on subtlety.

How we loved Jack then. How we understood that we were ‘living vicariously’ through Jack as we had been so often accused of doing with other people. Jack was the black star which hung over our Bethlehem. Jack was the angel of death who visited us each night and assured us, should birth control fail, he would take care of our first born for us. Jack was the pig-swindler that Mary and Joseph displaced from the manger to bear their child. Jack was short-sighted, narrow-minded, hot-tempered, and a happy scapegoat for our desires.

‘Tell us how it went, Jack,’ I would implore.

‘Tell us of the beating of heads,’ Deca would add.

‘Tell us the part about the busting of asses,’ Deci would add further, and then clap her mouth in delightful disbelief that she had just uttered that mild profanity. We were pitiful soldiers to be sure.

We would sit down to our cards and begin. No one mentioned to Jack that the blood on his hands stained the faces of the cards. No indeed, for that same blood smeared across the tart gaze of the queen of clubs would brush against our thumbs as we thumped her down to trump or lay her down to be taken by the king.

He would look about the table, and wait for a full rotation of the spotlight around us, so that he could stare down each one of us in its shadow. He would then breathe deeply and state, ‘Heads were beat.’

‘And?’ asked Deca.

‘Asses were busted.’

‘And?’ asked Deci.

‘Et cetera.’

‘To what effect?’

‘The worst effect, indubitably.’

Gasps came from all around the table. Concentrations were disrupted. Cards were misplayed, played poorly, or played not at all. This, or that, or something unbeknownst to the rest of us, threw Jack into a terrible rage. He threw down his cards in disgust and shouted, ‘The world is a backbiter! The world is a vat of hatred and spite! And I hate it!’ His rage was so fierce that it made the rest of us cry.

We cried, in whispers for fear of being heard by the rest of the camp and called sissies, ‘Stop, Jack! Don’t say it. You don’t mean it, Jack. Say you don’t mean it.’

Jack fell to his knees and cupped his head in his hands, ‘I should have listened to the old man when he told me, “You will never find what you are looking for in this world.” I should have taken him at face-value, but I had to go and see the world for my self, like an ignoramus. Now here I am, surrounded by spite and fury.’

We crouched around Jack, maintaining a respectful distance. ‘Jack,’ Deca said, ‘The old man wasn’t speaking to you when he said that.’

‘Of the many things you are to us, Jack,’ comforted Deci, ‘Ignoramus is not one of them, scapegoat perhaps, peon definitely.’

He ignored Deci and snapped back at Deca, ‘And who do you think the old man was talking about when he said, “Should you replace your heart with a machine, you will not find your condition improved,” if not me?’

‘That was a long, long time ago, Jack. He’d been living in the desert for too long, eating locusts and wearing camel hide. Some of his clockwork had gone awry by the time he said those things,’ Deca explained. She wanted to approach him and put her hand on his shoulder, but she was not sure whether Jack would tolerate such a presumption of intimacy.

‘Of the many things we liken you to, Jack,’ Deci commented, ‘Machine-hearted does not come readily to mind. Of the many adjectives we roll about on our tongues and delicately toss forth to describe you, machine-hearted is one that rolls about a lot less frequently than many others, on the whole.’

‘Besides,’ I told him, ‘We like your artificial heart, pumping mechanically without any pretense of sentiment.’ Deci and Deca glared at me from behind his back. It’s true though, we liked those qualities in Jack, beside whom we appeared as angelic in comparison.

‘I know, I know,’ Jack moaned, ‘You’re so transparent it’s disheartening to sit at the same table as you. It’s disconcerting to read every emotion play across your face like you were still practicing them.’ He leapt to his feet startling us all. A sneer rested upon his face, he took that ever-present club and bashed in the spotlight. The camp was cloaked in darkness.

‘We’re done for,’ Deci pouted and gulped noisily.

‘History,’ I agreed wholeheartedly.

We heard the shouts in all directions and footsteps of soldiers, awakened by the smashing of glass, running toward the light tower. I turned to the others, ‘Follow me.’

We ran down the stairs of the tower at least halfway until I heard footsteps coming up. I stepped off on a landing and hid in the shadows, with what I thought was Deci and Deca and Jack bumping behind me, until the soldiers passed. I re-entered the stairwell and fell in with the rear guard ascending to the scene of the crime. Looking over my shoulder, I saw only Deci and Deca. I stopped in my tracks, wanting to ask where Jack was, but I was silenced by a second wave of soldiers rushing past me. We stumbled over each other briefly and then continued up the steps. When we arrived, we found the shattered spotlight, broken glass, and a bloodstained two of diamonds which Deca casually covered with her boot.

It wasn’t so bad that we spent the rest of the night combing the grounds, searching for the vandal, whom none of us suspected to be one of us. Nor was it so bad that Jack, delighted with the results of his work, decided that altogether too much light shone on this world that he was now convinced was a vat of hatred and spite and he took to bashing out the spotlight on a regular basis. After each such attack the camp spent the rest of the night sleeplessly searching for the culprit, who virtually everyone now suspected must have been working from the inside, a traitor. It wasn’t even that bad that we did not know how Jack had made his daring escape that first night of spotlight-bashing. What’s more, we weren’t even bothered by the fact that our pre-dawn bridge games had to be canceled for fear of being discovered during one of Jack’s sabotage ventures. None of these disturbances compared with the overwhelming changes that were sweeping over all of us, since that ill-fated night.

‘Jack.’ Deci had cornered him in the barracks. Everyone was on weekend leave. We too were on weekend leave but we were still in the barracks, cornering Jack. ‘Tell us what happened on that ill-fated night. Sate our curiosity. Fulfill your destiny.’

I was sitting on my bunk bed, the top one of the pair, my legs dangling down into the air. My back was to the both of them, their confrontation of which I was not a participant. I was wondering what would result from this clash of wills, Deci’s weak will pitted against Jack’s obstinacy and saucy irreverence, in much the same way one would wonder who won the world cup 17 years ago, as a minor trivial splinter protruding from the frontal lobe, demanding attention temporarily. I had risen above these petty quarrels. I had transcended Jack, although I had not usurped his throne of peonhood. My transcendence was strictly internal. It was a product of the world changing the roles of its inhabitants without informing me of the changes or how to adjust. I had spent too many nights filtering through the grassless landscape surrounding the base, searching for the basher of the spotlight, who I knew very well to be Jack. If Jack was inactive on a particular night, I woke to the moon unsure of who I would be in the morning or who I was then, in the transient mode, shifting from day to next. Not only sleep-deprivation had done this to me.

‘It’s hardly my destiny to sate you, Deci,’ Jack retorted as he took a toothpick out of his pocket and began flinging pieces of meat and spinach from between his teeth.

‘Then whose is it?’ Deci followed the inevitable course.

I wanted to warn Deci to turn back. I had been on this road myself before. I had seen where it led to and turned back just before my demise. I had beheld the evolution that waited to mutate Deci. I had seen bashed spotlights become busted heads and beaten asses. Now that I had transcended, it didn’t amuse me like it use to. Perhaps, there was still some amusement; I hadn’t lost my sense of humor entirely, but it was funny now in different ways that I couldn’t explain but could only evaluate subjectively, wordlessly in my new state of angelic bliss. Instead, I said nothing, and concentrated on floating here, above the top bunk. Not only my legs were dangling, but my whole body was dangling now. I was a dangler. I was a heavenly doppelganger who had assumed the form of this soldier. I woke this morning, not surprisingly, unsure of who I was. I didn’t want to believe I was an angel but I looked in the mirror and saw the unmistakable aura. My halo was gray, that was why it could not be perceived in the darkness, especially in the absolute darkness that enveloped us when Jack had ravaged the spotlight.

Jack did not answer Deci’s question. Rhetoric, I suppose, so Deci asked another, ‘Who do you think you are, Jack, to do that to her?’

‘I thought I was an ignoramus, but you all corrected me. I thought I was a machine, but you all told me that won’t work. Now I am the bringer of darkness. Now my night is overflowing.’ Jack’s tone had subtly changed from one of defense to one of seduction.

Deci was not prepared for it.

They embraced. I could hear the sounds of embracing, the rustle of one shirt fabric against another, the wrapping of arms. I heard Jack whispering words that I could not make out. It was only now that I realized my transcendence had not gone unnoticed. They were whispering in those slight tones outside of my hearing the things they knew I did not want to understand. I thought I had kept it so well hidden, but they knew. They, Deci, Deca, and Jack, saw through me, so transparent had I become in my ethereal state. They knew now what had happened, all three of them. Only I did not know in my angelic bliss. I contemplated this sense of not-belonging. I attempted to fathom the source of my outcastedness; did it stem from them, meaning Jack, or myself? Did I want to step back out of this role that had made me a stranger to them, someone to whom they would not tell their vital secrets? I was not sure, but I felt soon that I would arrive at a decision and then I would be less unsure than I was at the moment.

Deca found us in the barracks and called us out into the moonlight. How lustrous her hair had become. It was not a trick of the moonlight playing across her scalp; it was the real thing. How I wished the moonlight played more often than it seemed to be doing lately. Deca’s posture had straightened and her laughter had rid itself of the cynical echoes which once characterized it.

We walked through a narrow path in the woods, usually only wide enough for us to proceed in a single file but sometimes opening up for two to travel abreast. It was as if a whirlwind of domesticity lashed out of the sky and spun us all around in its vortex, leaving us much as it found us, except quiet and exhausted. How glorious we were. How like a family we had become in our inability to resolve our differences and yet continue to exist in each other’s presence, able to smother our differences in vague actions without direction like night-time walks through woods.

Or so I suspected until we ventured off the trail and headed along a barbwire fence, then followed a creek for a short distance until it dropped a couple meters into a pool. We scurried down the small, steep incline onto the stone encircling the pool which tapered back into a creek at the far end.

‘No spotlights here,’ Jack said with comfort.

‘Shut up with your stupid manias, Jack,’ Deca ordered. Never had I seen such authority emanate from my meek comrade.

Jack was so impressed he was tempted to shut up, but then he reminded himself who he was, Jack, buster of heads and beater of asses. He wielded his club menacingly. ‘Don’t make me do something I’m going to regret.’

With a snarl, Deca leapt forward and, following a brief grapple, snatched the club from him. She held it in imitation of Jack. Then she hopped around on one foot, and sang mockingly, ‘I am Jack, black-hearted, club-wielding, bridge-apt. Pah!’

Deci sprinted off into the brush. I knew she was shrieking, but all I could hear was the scratching of twigs against her face and arms as she sprinted through them.

In the distance, I heard bursts of automatic machine-gun fire. Gunplay! A soldier’s dream and nightmare.

Jack, unaffected by her departure or the sounds of combat in the near proximity, demanded, ‘Give me back my club.’

I tell him, ‘Jack, it’s not the same now. She fouled your club. You’re not peon-king anymore. We’re sick of your willy-nilly antics, Jack, sick and upset.’

Jack spat at my feet. ‘Is that all?’

‘You went too far, Jack. You’re at the end of your leash, and Deca’s pulling you back into your cocoon. The old man was right, right about the spite and fury, right even about the machine-hearted.’ I cringe as Jack cocked back his fist to bust my head.

Deca cracked the stick over his skull and Jack fell facedown into the pool. I jumped in after him and hauled him out, laying him down on the far side of the pool.

Deca, peon-queen, didn’t deign to see this. This was the moment of her coronation, her head was raised high, counting the stars shining on her dominion. ‘If the stars wish to shine in my dominion,’ Deca proclaimed, ‘they must pay a shining tax proportional to the square root of the intensity of their light and the frequency which they are visible. Thus I have ruled.’

She climbed back up the slope and trounces off, returning to the base to greet her subjects.

The entire universe was disordered, out of whack, and off-kilter. I looked down in the ripples caused by the creek trickling into the pool and saw my wavering, shifting reflection. In the moonlight, I could just make out my halo. In the serene calm which had blanketed me, I asked myself, ‘Do you see, Giga, how all this disorder began?’ Of course, I saw. With a heave I stretched the wings which were, up to this point, curled against my back, and began to rise in the air. Of course I could see hovering, as I was, above the treetops, the way their crowns formed a jagged canopy, the way the clouds dabbed at the moon like dirty gauze, the way the bays neaped and ebbed repetitively, the zigzag movement of game birds migrating across continents, the banter of crickets and frogs.

I tried to call you, FIE, but all I got was chirping crickets and croaking frogs on the answering machine. It was okay. I chalked it up as a ‘learning experience’. I skirted around the currents of air, trying to unlearn. The other angels were unhappy with me. They conspired against me to ruin my wings. Already I felt them shrinking away, becoming smaller and frailer, unable to support my weight. Defeated, I gracefully spiraled back to the ground before the wings disappeared altogether, and with them the halo.

How like the universe to serve me humble pie when it found me weakened and abandoned. And how like me to have accepted it with gratitude.

The entire universe was disordered, and how like a universe to become agitated by a fly buzzing at its nose, snap at it with gnashing teeth, crush it, swallow, and then settle coldly back down to the same stance it had maintained before. That is where I find myself, the transcendence retracted, Giga on the worn-smooth stones bordering the pool beneath an echo of gunfire, going fainter and more sporadic with each passing minute.

BLACKSMITH

Of all the ways he had to die, we thought it particularly embarrassing that he would be crushed by a falling anvil. Then again, in the workplace, accidents happen despite the occupational safety and health statutes that have been erected to prevent just such falling of anvils. The falling of this particular anvil though, disturbs us, as it had no place to fall from, unless it fell from a pair of hands which had hefted it over the deceased’s head and then released it. If this were the case, then the occupational hygiene people would get off our backs and out of our neighborhoods. With this in mind, I led the investigation of the death of the blacksmith as effectively as I was able.

To begin with, I thought I ought to question the two apprentices who worked in the smithy. The first apprentice, Peta, was the blacksmith’s son, born with a pronounced limp, which caused him to lurch to one side every other step. Peta and his father had lived on the floor above the shop by themselves as his mother had died in the bringing of him into the atmosphere of this planet, P-omega. Now I imagine Peta lives there alone. Anyway, word is that he and the other apprentice are managing the shop themselves since the incident of the falling anvil.

The second apprentice, Exa, was the bastard child of a prostitute and an undisclosed merchant or mercenary whose craft had docked briefly at the spaceport and then lifted the presumptive father back off the planet. I had encountered Exa several times in his youth concerning various indiscretions on his part which occurred in my precinct, which includes the spaceport and the smithy, but I hadn’t encountered him since he had begun his employment at the smithy.

On my walk over to the smithy, I stop by the bakery for some donuts and coffee. I only eat glazed donuts as I don’t like frostings or jelly-products. From my stool at the donut bar, I gaze out the window at the crafts docked at the spaceport, primarily small transports which shift cargo and passengers from the surface to the larger ships orbiting the planet. It’s too early. Nobody gets up this early except me. The mechanized robot vendor doesn’t count as it doesn’t sleep. I am up early though. Interrogations are most productive in the morning when the sources are not fully awake.

I down the last swig of my coffee and get a mouthful of dregs. I grab the donut vendor by his mechanical neck and haul him across the counter. ‘I see through your machinations, android.’

Green and orange lights frantically flash inside the visual perceptors, but the creature makes no response. I release him and he drops back down to his metal feet. He backs up a step and then flips me the bird with his synthetic digits. ‘My apologies, Officer Kilo. You ate your donuts, now get out.’ The robot has been programmed with personality.

No one is happy getting up this early in the morning even if they never sleep, especially if they never sleep. It’s hard on your constitution.

During the investigation, I have obtained a key to the smithy and when I enter, I approach the counter and ring the service bell. Waking sounds from the floor above respond to my query and I walk over to the staircase and shout officially, ‘Police.’

‘Come back later, asshole,’ is shouted back down at me, ‘And don’t forget to lock the door back up when you leave.’

I climb the stairs. Coming from above, more thumping sounds of waking greet me. I push open the door and find Exa standing in the doorway, blocking it, his arms reaching up, holding an anvil, which were I to take a step forward would be hanging directly over my head.

‘Good morning, Officer Kilo,’ Exa says as he lowers the anvil and raises it again.

I eye the anvil suspiciously.

‘Just doing my morning calisthenics,’ he explains as he continues raising and lowering the anvil directly in front of me.

I examine his bare torso, lined with impressive muscles. ‘I thought I’d find you here,’ I state accusingly.

‘Yeah, I live here now.’

At this point I gaze around the room behind Exa. It is a small sitting room lined with sofas and large pillows. Four doors lead from it, all of which are open, revealing a bathroom, kitchen, and two bedrooms. ‘You do?’

‘Yeah. There’s an extra bedroom now.’

I nod. Can unveiling crimes be this easy? Can I inveigle a confession before lunch? Alternatively, can I confound the alibis and convince myself to dispense with reasonable doubt? It’s too early in the morning to begin an internal dialogue on whether I have spent my life in a trivially easy activity, whether the difficulty I perceived in the past in fulfilling my duties was self-imposed, whether I can ask these young men what they know and what will they tell me honestly? ‘Where’s Peta?’

In response to my question, the blacksmith’s son limps out of one of the bedrooms and stands crookedly in the sitting room, glaring at me with squinted eyes. He seats himself in a sofa. Exa turns around and tosses him the anvil from across the room as if it were a wrench or frisbee. Peta catches it calmly and begins raising it from his lap to back behind his head and then back, repeating the motion slowly and effortlessly.

I am blocked at this early juncture from a quick decision. Of course, nothing is this easy. I rebuke myself for questioning myself and my dedication to justice. Exa goes into the kitchen and soon I hear the drip of automatic coffee brewers. ‘Is that the one?’ I ask Peta, gesturing vaguely toward the anvil.

‘Is that the one that what?’ he replies innocently, staring me down.

‘Is that the one that fell on your father’s head and changed the natural contours of his skull?’

Taken aback, Peta quickly asserts, ‘No. That one we use only for precious metals. This is the calisthenics anvil.’ He demonstrates the lifting process for me again and then offers, ‘Would you care to try?’

I decline. I pride myself on my ability to maintain a discreet distance both emotionally and physically from my work. ‘No. What I would like to do is to ask you two some questions. I’m sorry but some of them may be painful for you but I must ask them anyway.’

Exa returns with three coffees on a silver platter. He offers one to me and catches me admiring the metalwork. Seating himself on the sofa next to his fellow apprentice, Exa explains that the platter was hammered on the very same anvil which did the blacksmith in.

I prefer stiff-backed chairs, but there are none in the sitting room, so I am forced to sit in the sofa facing Peta and Exa opposite the coffee table. Should I suspect the coffee? Should I suspect them of poison? They are not employed by an apothecary but rather a blacksmith, or rather were employed. Now they are the owners. Is that sufficient motive? They both have adequately demonstrated they possess the means to drop the anvil. But certainly possessing the ability to commit an act does not mean one has committed such acts, but perhaps one is tempted to do so. Should I ask? Should I play the part of the temptress? Am I dressed appropriately for the role? How should I begin? Has the ice been sufficiently broken? Can I begin questioning before I have tasted my coffee? Two cups of coffee in the morning won’t bother me. Is this nervousness or boredom that I feel? I begin, ‘The anvil that fell? The blacksmith it fell on? The smithy it fell in? The funeral he was mourned at? What do you know of the accident? Was it even an accident? If so, who is to blame and what can I tell the industrial hygiene people? If not, who did it and why? Tell me everything. It won’t help to hold back. You’ll feel better if you come clean and it’ll go easier on you in the long run. In fact, you both better start at the beginning and move forward in a clear, concise, and linear manner. I mean it. I’m not joking. It’s too early in the morning for the joking which I am not going to stand for. What do you think?’

‘You mean business, huh?’ Peta whispers, impressed by my admittedly daunting barrage of questions.

Exa confidently responds, ‘The precious metal anvil. Peta’s father. Down stairs. Evil and bloody. Nothing. Yes. Peta’s father and anything you want. I have. I know. I feel better already. No kidding. That’s what I think now, having not given much forethought to the incident. Not much forethought and not an afterthought, either.’ He sips his coffee cockily.

I should have thrown Exa in jail when I busted him as a youth for gun smuggling. Instead, I mercifully let him off with three years in the juvenile detention center. And then there was that time I let him get off with six months in rehab instead of sending him up-river. I shouldn’t forget how I gave him three more years in a sanitarium when he got out of rehab and was found with the drums of liquid explosives behind my office. Have I shown him nothing but tough-love, only to be the receptacle of his ingratitude? I think not. It’s high time I exercised a little restraint of my kindness and showed him I too can play hardball. I take out my flashlight, lean across the table, and pop him on the head with it. ‘No more of that. It’s not linear enough.’

In tears, Exa agrees, ‘It’s not linear.’

Is it my heart that is melting? Can tears break me down into my atomic components? I restart the interrogation. ‘Now from forethought to afterthought, what to you think, Peta?’

Peta, who has meanwhile applied a cold compress to his fellow apprentice’s forehead, answers, ‘From forethought to afterthought, in light of the foreshadowing of accidents and the afterimage of white chalk outlines, from foreplay to afterbirth, I consider the whole event a regrettable affair, carried out with the utmost gracelessness and artlessness, both attributes which I personally find distasteful.’

In my notebook, I jot down, ‘regrettable affair...distasteful...tell that to the industrial hygiene people.’

‘I see. In the beginning, then, Peta, you were to blame?’

‘From one perspective, I was the fatted calf, the sacrificial lamb, the disappointing exchange of wife for surrogate son, which needed to be rectified and could not be. In that respect, I was to blame for every ill deed that chance saw to throw into our midst. From a second perspective, I was the golden calf, the idol, made in the image of my mother and a symbol of her continued existence through me. In that entirely different but simultaneous respect, I was exalted above all other sources of joy which chance similarly casted among us. Thus I claim to be my father’s salvation as well as his demise.’ Peta leaps to his crooked feet, ‘I am the whore and virgin!’

‘No, no, no,’ Exa interrupts, ‘I’m the whore. You’re just the virgin. You have to be careful. You can’t define yourself in contradictory terms to the police. It’s unacceptable and you might get popped.’ Exa’s forehead has begun to swell despite the compress. Its color is changing as well to a brownish-purple. Peta reseats himself.

I jot down in my notebook, ‘Peta--claims father’s demise--book him.’ Can I uncover a conspiracy? Can I purge this port of these no-gooders? Is there a crime more offensive than pre-meditated patricide? In the event of such a conspiracy, will Exa get sent back to the sanitarium on an insanity plea? Should I enforce street justice and plug them both full of hot lead right here? Could I sleep at night if I undertook such measures? Of conscience and judgment have I any concept? Can I sleep with my eyes open if my lids were removed? Has the coffee gone cold without my touching it? ‘Exa, you then, are the whore,’ I state with certainty, ‘Explain yourself.’

‘Should we refer this to the sex-crimes division?’

‘I am the sex-crimes division. I am all the divisions,’ I respond. Am I asking the questions here? Should I let him have it with the flashlight? He flinches from me. Am I so transparent? He fesses up.

‘From the forerunner, that is the precursor, to the aftereffect, I have tried to perceive the overall picture, the global effect. I have the interests of the community at heart. From the forecast, that is the prediction, to the afterlife, I imagine the blacksmith to be somewhere in between and it to be partly cloudy with a high in the lower sixties there. As to whether he could drop that anvil on his own head, I dare not say. However, from the foreskin, that is the prepuce, to the aftertaste, I might have an opinion, unrelated to the matter at hand. On the other hand, it could be the crux of the incident. The forensics of the argument have eluded me thus far, but I can tell you that in the juvenile delinquent halls, in the rehabilitation institutes, in the state sanitariums, I have spoken with agents, mediums, lunatics, perverts, morons, creeps, assholes, cripples, fools, cretins, and idiots who could tell you.’ Exa pauses and catches his breath. ‘Yes,’ he continues, ‘And what of it?’

‘What of it?’ I repeat, enthralled.

‘And one blacksmith dies. It is utterly bearable in the larger scope.’

‘It’s nonsensical,’ I argue, ‘It’s senseless and demeaning to reduce a man to a bearable mote for the sake of tidiness. What good can come of it?’

Peta, whose attention had drifted off, now re-enters the proceedings, ‘Officer Kilo, are we discussing philosophy here? No. I am not. Are you through? Can we go back to bed?’

‘It looks bleak for both of you I have to admit.’ I sigh. ‘Just one more thing, Could you two tell me your accounts of what happened the day of the falling anvil?’

‘No problem,’ they agree in unison, their willingness to participate is heightened by the fact that they will end the interrogation.

Exa begins, ‘The blacksmith was coming down the stairs in quite a disagreeable state of mind. I was at the forge forging and Peta was at the precious metal anvil hammering a plutonium tiara for the local oracle. The blacksmith, for no apparent reason, rushed over to Peta and punched him in the jaw, knocking him off balance and to the ground. I ran across the room and grabbed the nearest item, which happened to be the anvil Peta had been working on and I dropped it on his head. Needless to say, the tiara was ruined.’

I look at Peta, ‘Is that your version of what happened as well?’

‘Almost, The blacksmith ran in the front door, leading a donkey, laden with tungsten-rich ore. Apparently, he had gotten quite a bargain on the ore, and in his haste to begin purifying it, he raced over to the forge and knocked me over. Exa thought he had done it intentionally, and told him, ‘Blacksmith, no metal is worth stepping on your son like that.’ The blacksmith lunged at him with a hot poker, and Exa fled and hid behind me. The blacksmith came at us, I ducked and the poker rang against the anvil. Next thing I knew, Exa dropped it on his head.’

I look back at Exa, ‘Do you have anything to add?’

‘Why yes. The blacksmith snuck in the window and stealthily crept up behind me. I was intent on my work at the cashier stand counting the coins and I did not notice him. Peta was upstairs, sleeping in. The blacksmith tried to take advantage of me, tried to molest me. I grabbed a roll of pennies and struck him but that did not stem his advances. I shrieked for him to stop and, giggling, he chased me about the forge. Peta heard my shout and limped down the stairs, grabbed the anvil, and dropped it oh the blacksmith’s head the next time he came around the forge.’

Peta adds, ‘When the blacksmith came home from his business trip with the caravan of camels carrying urns of mercury, he greeted us warmly at first. But then, his face became blotched with purplish specks. I feared it was the symptoms of some malady he had contracted in his travels. He flew into a rage, spittle foamed from his mouth. Exa put a leather belt between his teeth and we tried to pin him to the ground, but the blacksmith could not be sedated. In his fury, he grabbed the precious metal anvil and threw it into the air, placing his head beneath it when it fell.’

Exa clarifies, ‘The blacksmith caught an early spacecraft home from the metallurgical convention and arrived unannounced. I was behind the counter counting out the money, Peta was upstairs in the kitchen eating bread and honey. Upon entering, he accused me of pilfering funds from the register to aid my gun smuggling business. I adamantly denied it, citing the high profit margin of gun smuggling, but he persisted in his accusations. He then propositioned me, telling me, he would let me have the funds if I agreed to his terms now and then. For the petty change I had been stealing, I was so insulted I dropped the anvil on his head.’

‘As I recall,’ Peta adds, ‘The spacecraft the blacksmith had intended to take was canceled and he was lucky enough to find passage aboard a freighter, the Attritus, I believe, that agreed to transport his recent metallurgical acquisitions. He returned quite pleased with himself and told me of his plan to make tremendously powerful bullets with the alloys which Exa could unload on the illegal gun market at a high margin of profit. I was proud of my father until he told me I could have no share in the profits unless I consented to his desires. I fell down the staircase. At the bottom, he hovered over me until Exa dropped the anvil on his head.’

‘Of course, the blacksmith came home early,’ Exa recalls, ‘I showed him the golden tiara I had finished in his absence. He was pleased until he saw the pitiful golden tiara his own son, Peta, had made. Then he accused me of switching tiaras, which I adamantly denied. We argued and Peta fled to his bedroom, weeping. ‘Now look what you did?’ he said to me. I dropped the anvil on his head and then I said, ‘Now look what I did.’’

‘Now look here, Officer Kilo,’ Peta says, ‘What happened was the blacksmith had been traveling in a caravan with a combination of donkeys and camels who did not behave well together. He arrived home tired and frazzled. He had been ripped off by some fly-by-night miners and showed us the pitifully poor ore he had acquired. I scoffed at his measly business acumen. He became incensed and called me an irreverent son. I showed him the exquisite silver platter I had hammered in his absence and he told me he would see that my head sat upon it. I told him it was for coffee only. We argued until I felt faint and dropped the anvil on his head. Exa was at the donut shop while all this was happening.’

‘The way I remember it now,’ Exa says, ‘is the blacksmith arriving from his business trip and unloading his acquisitions downstairs without either one of us helping him because, in his absence we had gotten into the habit of sleeping late and opening the store after lunch. That didn’t upset him though. ‘Boys will be boys,’ he always said. What did upset him though was when he came upstairs and found us asleep in his bed. He chased me naked around the shop until, out of desperation and self-defense, I dropped the anvil on his head.’

I nod. I can’t tell this to the industrial hygiene people. This is a dark truth that I must let smolder in my heart and carry with me to my grave, this inconceivable behavior, this non-linearity, this secret of the blacksmith’s that led him to his own grave, this Exa and Peta, to whom the dying of the world around them is only a symptom of their own decay and thus to be ignored in this time of thriving, in this time of spring.

BLACKOUT

...I think my liver is diseased. However, I don’t know beans about my disease, and I am not sure what is really bothering me. I will tell you all the same that a bad liver and a chemical imbalance in the brain are the roots of my ill health. I don’t know bunk about which chemical and I am not sure what effect its imbalance has. When I lived underground, I was diagnosed with necrolepsy. They told me I didn’t get enough sun. Now that I no longer dwell in subterranean caverns, now that I no longer sleep on mats of bat guano, now that I no longer nibble on pale, tumorous mushrooms and fiery, slick salamanders, I see the sun almost everyday, for at least 20 minutes. I try to get my vitamin K or D...I don’t know duke about the nutritional alphabet and I am not sure which ones I am deficient in. However, when I feel my condition become unbearable, I blackout.

I wish I could say the blackouts were involuntary seizures, that it was nature acting mercifully on my behalf to rescue me from some horrid, unsympathetic confrontation, but I cannot. Nature has abandoned me to my own devices; I have to fend for myself. I have to summon the blackouts and release myself.

I have never been so happy as when I lived in outer space. Those were the days. I had a garden, if I remember correctly. I grew insects. Cockroaches, mosquitoes, ants, and honey bees were my stock crops. It was subsistence farming mostly, but at that time in history, it was enough to subsist. I would go so far as to say that it was vogue to subsist, back then. It was a pleasure to sub-exist. Now-a-days, the trend is toward supra-existence, which is a more arduous task, resulting in less pleasure. Having had a taste of both, I can say I have never been so happy as when I lived in outer space, eating cockroach pancakes with fresh honey.

What is a blackout? Where do you go during a blackout? Whom do you meet? What do you wear?

Blacking out is like reaching up your arms, so all the blood drains to your feet. The pictures on your retinae are shown in negative, the sun is a black circle, the sky fades to gray around it, the clouds are pitch against it. If you are standing on a sidewalk, outside a brick building perhaps, then pedestrians passing you are silhouettes filled with flat black and outlined by a ring of glossier black. If someone has his arms about you, or for that matter, only one arm, then it is entirely appropriate for you to turn to him or, if it suits you, to keep facing forward, and say, ‘Everything is going black.’ As the myriad of shades of black blend into a single shade, you slip into unconsciousness.

I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but when I blackout, I go back to my farm in outer space. I named those cockroaches, like other children name their milking cow, slaughter heifers, and sows. I remember all their names: first there was the Lepton family, ν_e, ν_μ , e^-, μ^-, and then there was the Meson family, π⁺ and Κ⁺, not to mention the Baryon family, p, n, Λ, Σ⁰, Ξ⁰, Ω^-, and finally the orphan γ. How sad I was when it came each of their turns to die. But the funerals were always grand. Composers were hired to compose requiems in their honor and then jazz musicians were engaged to perform them at no less than three times the intended tempo.

The jazz in outer space is like no other jazz. How the mosquitoes would buzz about in glorious agitation under its influence. I would run to the humidified green house and release them all out into the garden. They would settle on my arms and neck and helplessly leave their marks upon me. Those who wanted to, would eventually return to the terrarium after the gala affair. The rest flew off into unknown regions of outer space. Those that always returned I got to know. Some of my best friends were mosquitoes, the twins, Boson and Fermion, the three brothers, Quark, Quirk, and Queer, whom met with such grave tragedy as I hesitate to recall lest I upset myself with the tender memories, and the seven courtesans, Largo, Adagio, Andante, Allegro, Vivace, Presto, and Prestissimo, whose finesse in the realms of carnal delights were unequaled in the quadrant, and in whose congregation, a seeker of such pleasures could find the ideal pace. How sad I was when I no longer could seek refuge in their caresses when the government took the farm from me.

I have yet to even mention the extensive ant farm I maintained. The Queen, Petulant VI, maintained a cordial, if slightly cold, distant, and arrogant relationship with me. Her colony of hunter-gatherers helped keep my farm together during harvest time. Her red soldiers in the Salvation Army helped tend to the victims of the famine of the late seventies caused by the drought of the early seventies which nearly ruined me, had it not been for my prowess at finagling the banks, inveigling the investors, clever balancing of the books, and jimmying of locks. I suppose what eventually did the farm in was a combination of my bad credit history and the fact that when Queen Petulant VI was deposed and the Anarchist Queen Remorseful I usurped the throne, the worker ants revolted and I lost the better half of the harvest due to delays in the labor negotiations. How sad I was to see the royal Petulant beheaded. The ants, though, perhaps because of their puritan work-ethic and their love of the bureaucratic run-around, did not enjoy the jazz which pleased the rest of the garden so much and as a result, even at the height of our prosperity, they would stage periodic picketing bouts simply to express their dismay.

Back in those days, I rode a beautiful green combine through the fields. During the jilting rides, from the cabin, I would sing the field songs, the working songs and the songs of outer space and the bees would come out of their hives, away from their honey-comb chores, away from their pollination, and follow me about in great swarms as if I was the pied piper and they, lowly sewer rats, or as if I was Africa and they, an endless black cloud of locusts. Those bees, too, were lead by a monarch, no less than the just Queen Dysfunctional, during whose proud and prosperous reign such wonders as the founding of bee cooperatives, the establishment of a uniform honey parity, and the annexation of Mexico, were accomplished. How sad I was when the wise and comely Queen Dysfunctional asked for my hand in holy matrimony and I had no choice but to decline, as my heart had been given long ago to my first love, and long since been destroyed, burnt, plundered, trampled, pillaged, sacked, ravaged, ruined, and raped upon the death of said first love, and was not to be resurrected.

Have I bit myself in the back? Have I called myself a liar? Have I cast the shadow of doubt across my original affirmation that I had never been so happy as when I lived in outer space? If so, it was not my intention to do so. The happiness is distorted in retrospect only. I can assure you, patient reader, that nothing I have experienced prior to or since, has brought me such happiness as I have known riding in that beautiful green combine through the fields of outer space.

And what of this first love? Or rather the first nine loves, the first of which I mentioned and the last eight of which I omitted from my explanation to Queen Dysfunctional as I was not sure she would understand that after nine I had to draw the line, that she might say to me, ‘If nine, then why not ten?’ I wasn’t sure if I could explain the whole story to her and maintain my composure as those sweet honey tears welled up in her eyes and overflowed onto her black-and-yellow striped cheeks, where we swiped at them with our fingers and spread them over biscuits with our morning coffee. Honey tears from a Queen! Even now I falter when I try to recall anything quite so sentimentally tasteful.

But those tears have fallen and been digested, regardless of how delicious they were, and I move on to the tale of the nine wives. Even before I begin, I should clarify that their periods of marriage were sequential and not simultaneous, that I devoted myself faithfully to each one during the time when we shared a nuptial bed. I might also mention, if I’m not mistaken, I think they were all sisters. At least, toward the end of each of the nine marriages, when minor disagreements escalated into full-blown violence, such as you might see on prime time TV, before stomping out of the house and slamming the door, they would grab me by the collars of my shirts from across the kitchen table and shriek at mach five, ‘I’m the daughter of Zeus, I can do damn well what I please.’ When I think of all the broken sound barriers lying around the house, stuffed into closets, stacked in the attic, buried beneath layers of concrete below the basement floor, how sad I am.

If the truth be told, or at least hinted at in a satisfactorily vague manner, my nine wives were all descended directly from the gods. Their father was Zeus, the thrower of thunderbolts, King of Olympus, of yore, and their mother was Mnemosyne. Their flawless memory was inherited from their mother’s side and was used in countless arguments to prove to me my own ignorance and shortcomings, which I had apparently forgotten, but which, when brought to my attention in such clear and concise terms, was painfully obvious.

Stop me. I had no intention of dredging up, completely out of chronological order, the ruinous tapering out of each marriage before I had completely swamped you with the periods of glorious happiness which preceded each. And such a sweet swamp it was, the marsh of marriages, a fen of fidelity, a slough of self-abandon, a bog of bliss, a quagmire of, quintessentially, the happiest days of my life!

How can I show the truth of my happiness? Let me count the ways: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.

November 9, 1066
At that time, Calliope and I were riding on an underground river which, centuries later, would be polluted by the industries of Kansas City, Missouri. In our makeshift raft, we were being tossed about quite freely by the whimsical current. Calliope, who was never without a writing tablet and her stylus, was worried that she might lose both her prize possessions as well as her life if I did not manage to bring our craft to lodge against a bank in one of the subterranean caverns. In fact, she said, ‘Exa, the ropes holding the individual logs of our flimsy raft together are fraying!’ I was going to respond but the frayed ropes snapped and we were tossed into the river. We tumbled head over heels and were deposited with the silt into an underground Gulf of Mexico, of which very little is mentioned in encyclopedias (this you can verify). For good reason though. Calliope had lost her favorite stylus and we searched up and down the beach for what seemed like epochs. But it was just a phase. We got over it and built a bonfire on the beach, where she substituted shards of seashells for her stylus and recorded it all as an epic poem entitled ‘The Tribute to the Underground Tributary which I Flew down with my Love’ which pleased me.

October 25, 1111
On that day, I pleaded with Clio who had been staying up nights as of late to scribble down secret glyphs in her treasured roll of parchment. Curiosity was really getting the best of me and, as we were sunbathing on the beach of the bay where Tampa, Florida would later sit, I said to her, ‘Beloved Clio, let me see, please.’ To which, she replied, ‘Peta, just because we are married I do not have to share everything with you. There are things we share and things we do not share. There are questions of our individuality that are best not allowed to intermingle. Take, for example, my half-god nature. I can not share that with you. And for that, be glad. The world has changed a lot since Olympus was the focal point and not for the better. And the future looks worse. I have the unenviable distinction of outliving my historical milieu and you are spared that sad fate.’ That was Clio though, the charmer who could convince me that I did not want to know her secrets, and in fact was quite fortunate not to know them. That was Clio for you, she could sell you the salt from the ocean and make you happy about it.

October 19, 1221
Nestled in the mountains where Chattanooga, Tennessee would find itself later on, Euterpe played the double flute and I blew the policeman’s whistle. We were an orchestra unto ourselves. Her fluting and my whistling filled the air, lulled birds to sleep and riveted the attention of squirrels to us, agitated the insect world, even then, I had it in me. We paraded through the foothills of the Appalachians. They were old even way back then, but our music made them stand a little taller, peak a little more steeply, erode a little more slowly. It was on such a renewed peak, during such a duet, with the undertone of the wind instrument accentuated by the blurting and bleating of the whistle and the whisper of the wind through the conifers, that Euterpe said to me, ‘Mega, my husband...’ I couldn’t hear the rest of it as I was blowing the whistle to a tune that could not be disrupted. It was an inner tune. Euterpe recognized it and began playing the accompaniment.

February 26, 1308
It was not too far off the San Francisco bay where Thalia and I built our cabin of straw. I had recommended that we use more reliable materials of construction, but Thalia had laughed merrily, ‘You joker, Kilo, ha ha.’ In the mornings, when the fog clung to the thatch of our roof, collected moisture there, and dropped on our sleeping foreheads in well-calculated splats, I would squeeze my eyes shut and pull the tarp that I had taken to using as a blanket over my head. Thalia, though, filled each morning with laughter, thought it quite humorous, and strictly forbade me to repair the roof. After the earthquakes came and leveled our feeble house, I sat down on the fallen door. Thalia only laughed. She thought everything was funny. Her laughter echoed inside the actress’s comic mask which she hardly ever removed. I stood to reprimand her for her foolish appraisal of the loss of all our worldly possessions. After all, she was the daughter of Zeus, they meant nothing to her, but I was mortal and stood before her empty-handed. Her cheeks wrinkled behind the mask as she grinned and she reached down, grabbed the handle of the door I had been sitting on, pulled the door up, and lo and behold!, there was before me a staircase. She led me down into a chamber inside the earth, decorated with precious ores and rare minerals, where each peal of our laughter reverberated a thousand times before dying away.

April 14, 1492
When I lived in Atlanta, Georgia with Melpomene, we knew even in the 15th century that someday somebody would make this place a penal colony, and later a state. But to us, it was always that first penal colony. I’m not sure what attracted Melpomene to it, the stench of hard labor or the narrow cells she imagined gracing the landscape like a million secluded outhouses, but the red soil convinced her to take root here. We were sitting on the future foundations of the city, above the rock that would be excavated for the subway and sewer system to run beneath us. Melpomene, removed the actress’s tragic mask from her face, something she only did on special occasions: our wedding day, our twenty-fifth anniversary, and that day. She whispered as she held back tears, ‘Hecta, can’t you see we are cultivating this marriage to be harvested by ruin? Naturally, you cannot understand. You can’t see me swinging from a tree in the breeze, my belly heavy with expectation. You won’t see that. To you, I will only disappear. And to that end, I might as well, as I am half-immortal.’ She replaced her mask and kissed me. For she so loved me, that she left me with our children unborn, intact.

July 14, 1574
“Boise, Idaho!” sang the chorus of maidens-in-waiting who attended to Terpsichore at all times. She was quite fond of the chorus and complimented them so frequently and with such fervor that I sometimes wanted to be a maiden-in-waiting myself. But I contented myself with watching Terpsichore dance. She danced in frenzies for hours on end without stopping to catch her breath or pausing for a glass of water. When she finally was compelled to stop dancing by the blisters on her feet or simply from exhaustion, she would collapse in my arms. The chorus would follow behind me singing, ‘See how Micro carries our lady to her bunk! Such tenderness as she leans over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes! And oh, such a delectable tuber she is! See her regal face as she is unloaded on her bunk! See how her devout Micro tends to her blisters with a soothing balm! See how he cleans the wounds with the sleeve of his shirt! Such caresses as he wraps her feet in bandages! Up to the ankles! Up over the shins and calves! Up onto the knees! Around the thighs!’ I played pinochle with the chorus during those times when my dear wife was recuperating.

September 1, 1644
It was never my intention to move to Minneapolis, Minnesota but Polyhymnia insisted that the snow was necessary to aid her in the composition of pious hymns as well as to complement her singing of them upon their completion. And so right she was. Polyhymnia would stand at the window watching the snow fall like tiny shards of atomized glass because it was too cold to go outside and watch them. But when she did stand there and look thoughtful, with one finger raised to her lips, even I, with my ears ungraced by spiritual serenity or fortitude could hear the snow-flakes combining their six-sided shrill in glorious adoration of her father, Zeus, King of the Gods up on Mount Olympus. I am quite sure that Zeus himself heard as well because thunder would ripple like a bass drum across the sky providing a beat for the sacred songs. After one such performance, Polyhymnia reclined in a rocking chair next to my own, in front of the hearth, and told me, ‘Nano,’ and she raised one finger to her lips, ‘I’m sick of god, play the piano.’ I played some tunes that Duke Ellington would make famous in a few hundred years.

February 11, 1787
Back in the 18th century, there wasn’t much to Manhattan, Kansas. Even today there’s not a whole lot, but Erato has filled my memories of that one-horse town with visions of Eden. We would sit out in the cornfields by ourselves, between the rows of corns. Had anyone looked out across the field, they would not have seen us. As it was, there was no one to look out and that suited us fine. We had everything we needed in that paragon of all cornfields, that temple to the agricultural revolution. We took the ears of corn and we shucked them with zealous glee. She picked off the individual kernels from the cobs and arranged them in mosaics on the fertile soil and spelled out quaint messages like, ‘Femto + Erato’. I picked the kernels as well but I tossed them into the air. The crows would come to dive down from above and grab the kernels in their beaks. Erato would play her lyre and set their aerial ballet to music as I conducted them, carefully aiming each kernel to direct their movements in a manner both synchronous and aesthetically pleasing. I think my love of farming stems from that era of my life. I think it is residual left-over love of Erato and crows.

October 2, 1844
My last wife, Urania, the astronomer, convinced me to leave the planet and settle in outer space. I think I would have objected more strongly except she promised to help me start a farm out there. This was when I was still in the farm phase that I never fully outgrew. She was my last love, and the only one that her royal bee majesty, Queen Dysfunctional, knew. When Urania left me, as all the others had, Queen Dysfunctional waited for a proper period of mourning to pass before proposing to me. How could I explain to her, that I, Femto, was married out? Even if there had been a tenth sister, (and rumor had it that there was just such a sister, not yet of age, studying women’s clinical care), I would not have been able to marry her. For Urania was still lurking out here in the stars and I was quite sure I would find her. I felt almost confident that, hidden behind some nebula, she would see me carousing through space on my beautiful green combine and she would forsake her hiding and return to me. I could see her now, standing up in the cockroach field. The globe of this or that planet would be resting in her hands, as one always was. She would throw it to me and I would grasp at it madly from the cab of the combine. I would miss and the world would float away in space, and Urania, whom I called ‘Ouranos’, having lost her world, would come back to me.

When I blackout, they come back to me, one at a time, sometimes in pairs with arms linked. They are muses, of course, and I am amused. When I was empty, when I had nothing, they filled me. Now they are gone and, incredibly, I am filled with something else. I can’t exactly put my finger on what it is. It has a life of its own, it swells and recedes, but never disappears completely. It possesses seed-like qualities, a husk, a hypocotyl, the potential to grow. It makes me suspect, with a hint of nostalgia, that it was left there intentionally, without my knowledge, by someone who had a clearer perception of things to come than did I.