[her last installment]

“Jim – Jim Crawley, the fellow I came here with, from Brazil – he headed a roadbuilding project with the Peace Corps, and Togo needs roads. Well, I suppose it does. You Americans have such a funny leftover colonialism. You assume people need things, that there’s an absolute way other peoples’ countries should be laid out and you try to do it that way for them. With them, in theory. Togo’s a skinny little country. It doesn’t have much of a coast and it doesn’t produce much, but it knows how to be small. There isn’t real corruption, despite the Gnassingbé family running the place since God set up his lemonade stand, because everybody knows everybody else. Corruption would be like stealing your brother’s toys. Jim was very kind, and the Togolese got excited, especially about a beautiful stone bridge they were doing. They hadn’t worked much with stone before, just wood carvings and bowls and thatch, things like that. But they knew the stone would last for centuries. There wasn’t that much craft to it – they didn’t know enough – but there was carefulness. Jim is always careful. And kind. I said that. With Americans, you get the idea they’re petting the natives. I don’t mean it isn’t meant well… Jim and I had a good trip, he’s very… I really ought to control myself more. I never know why I’m with anyone. Did I tell you that you’re almost the only person near my own age I’ve had to do with? I’m always involved with older men. Why is that? I’m chained to wheels, I roll away from one and get started on another one just like him. Not just like – that’s unfair. And there’s always biology, I go half way round the world just to fiddle the same things over in another country. This time I didn’t tell anyone I’d worked before in biology. I suppose I wanted to prove that I could make it on my own. But I already proved that in Brazil, didn’t I? Here I think I can keep clear of the higher-ups. That’s what happened in Manchester, at the end, I got involved with Swengdon and he was going off to the Amazon, so I went too. ‘Getting involved,’ a stupid phrase, why not just say I was sleeping with him? Screwing him. In a real sense I wasn’t involved at all. It… he was just handy. That sounds awful, but you can’t afford to spend too much time thinking that the things you do are awful. I always wanted to go to the Amazon, I don’t know which was an excuse for which. Didn’t you? Always want to go there? Oh. It’s one of those places so fantastic it turns out to be just what it ought to. Of course, everything bites, the mosquitoes could make you a half inch thicker all over if you didn’t… do something. Not paradise, certainly no Christian paradise. Togo is  mostly, almost mostly Catholic, which doesn’t do them much good. I wonder why I like jungles so much? Perhaps because they’re places most people never go to. I always want to do things nobody else does, but when I get there I’m not sure why. Except that it’s fun. I’ve said that. Even getting into scrapes is fun when you look back. Even those… unfortunate happenings when they’re happening, or is that just me, the feeling you get on a roller coaster ride, the joy of being terrified without consequences. But I do it when the terror is real. I fell into quicksand once and I really thought ‘that’s the end,’ but it turned out quicksand doesn’t do much to you as long as you can swim and there’s someone to tell you not to thrash about. Are most dangers overrated? Jungles, quicksand, diseases… I don’t expect them to do anything to me – I was scared in the quicksand – so in general they don’t, not so I’ve noticed. I didn’t expect older men would do me a great deal of harm. More or less it… they didn’t, though I was uncomfortable a lot. I would have been uncomfortable with younger men, most likely. There was one man at Manchester – not Swengdon – and it got fairly serious. I mean I did get involved, and I didn’t want to get involved. Through getting involved. Language is strange. That’s another reason I left. I’m always running away. Not a grownup way to behave. Usually I don’t have any particular place to go, just something to get away from. I though that going away from Dublin I wouldn’t have my father to worry about, but he came to visit at Manchester. It was dreadful. The thing is, I really like him. On one level. I don’t know what he thinks of people, I think he steps back and looks at them to see how they can be used. He can like somebody while he’s figuring how to destroy him. That’s too heavy a word, destroy. We got along all right when he came over, but I couldn’t wait for him to go away. At least he didn’t follow me to the Amazon, I got that part right. He can be very funny, and I think that’s why so many people like him. I’d get mad at him and he’d say, ‘Go ahead, hit me.’ One time I did take a swing and he just held my fist in one of his huge hands and I couldn’t move it. He’s incredibly strong. He beat us with a belt when we were children, half the time I wouldn’t know why. I’d find out later. Usually. He did have his reasons. When I was sixteen, about there, we started going out to pubs together. I looked older. Most of them, his friends at the pubs, I guess were used to him bringing in young girls. It maybe never occurred to them I could be his daughter – that was a big joke on them, a conspiracy we had, my father and me. That’s when you’d expect the incestuous business to happen, but we were just pals by then, padres. The other only happened when I was about five. I mean it began then, I don’t remember when, how, it ended. I used to run all the way to school to get away from him. But then I’d run all the way home too. He’d come in at night and make me take off my pajama pants and play with me. I knew it was… wrong. How can you know something like that when you’re too young to hear about it or have anything to compare it to? He never said not to tell my mother, like you hear most do – it was another conspiracy between us. Not a friendly one like at the pubs. Does that make sense? He had enough women going, or I suppose he did, judging from later. It was something else he was doing to my mother. All those women, they didn’t bother me, and he told me about them, but my mother… she was a strong person in her own way, and he must have known that a family with all our children wouldn’t hold together without her. She wasn’t complacent or stupid, she just went on and put up with everything as part of something else, bigger. There was a lot of Catholic martyrdom in it. Irish women always have that, but it was different with her, she really had a noble side, a boring one. She took such care in what she did, in making meals and washing clothes, keeping the hose clean. For all of us. Not resignation… doing everything properly so other people could get along without mess. I don’t want to be that way, ever. But it worked for her, and my father’s way worked for him. Still, you can’t be the way he was and call yourself a decent human being. Did I tell you his name? Francis X. McKinna. His friends call him Deus. Ha! Oh Christ, can the Irish drink. He’d drink so much I expected him to float out the pub door, and he wouldn’t even walk crooked. Just before he left Manchester, when he visited, he did ask me to sleep with him. That sounds dirty, but it wasn’t, it was more like pathetic, so upset to think of me going away, he wouldn’t be seeing me for a long time, maybe ever. Again. He had ideas inside he couldn’t tell just anybody, but he liked to talk to me about them. And his women. I don’t think he ever bragged about them to anyone. Well, I can’t tell that. But when he talked to me it was because he thought it was very funny. It was, too, when he told it – you should have heard him tell me about Aunt Sheila, my mother’s sister. She looked like an artist’s drawing of a whore. My father imitated the way she walked, you never saw anything so funny. They had a kid, my father and Aunt Sheila. Together. He took care of it, brought it into our family, like it was another one of us. Of course he never told mother that he was the father. It was ‘Aunt Sheila’s mistake.’ Nobody expected much of Aunt Sheila anyway. He’d tell me all the things he wanted to do, to get done, and the places he wanted to go. Do you think that’s sad? It didn’t feel sad, not much of it, maybe it was. That might be part of me running around so much. I feel guilty telling even you, though we’re five thousand miles away from him and it couldn’t possibly get back to him. There’s no reason for me to feel guilty, when he hurt so many people. Except being a Catholic – all that fucking to make hundreds of kids, no birth control –  and guilt. What a stupid religion. I said that. Oh, really funny, my father told me he’d peed in the holy water font when he was nine and the priest gave a sermon about it the next week. He was sure he was gong to go straight to hell if anything happened to him, if he got hit by a truck or fell in a manhole. He was afraid to cross the street. His parents couldn’t figure what was wrong. It took him three weeks to get up the nerve to go to confession, and when he did, all the priest said was ‘Tell the Lord you won’t do an evil thing like that again’ and gave him five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys. A  heavy level of penance in our parish, but what a simple-minded way for a priest to talk about something supposed to be holy, inviolate. In violet, in yellow. I didn’t get screwed, myself, intercourse, until I was almost nineteen. There’s nothing much to that part, but I’d already been going out, with older men even then – my father didn’t care and my mother didn’t, wouldn’t know – doing  heavy stuff in doorways. It sounds so unpleasant, but you accept things when they happen and you’re living in a big dirty city. And I don’t know… it was always a challenge. You can be doing something, thinking it’s perfectly natural and at the same time know it isn’t what everybody else is doing, that it isn’t natural or regular, and that makes it almost… necessary. I even did things with a priest. Not screwing. Not getting involved either. I didn’t think I should be dong it, who would? but I didn’t also think you were supposed to say ‘no’ to anything a priest asked for. That was because of my father – the not-screwing part. Somebody would make a grab for my vagina and I would go tight and limp all at the same time, just curl in a ball and feel terrible. I’m glad it didn’t keep up that way. Sex is fun, at least as much as biology. Studying biology. Well, it is biology. I wonder if I should have kept on at Manchester? Instead of dropping out? That was after I started working in the labs. Going to university can be such a pile of shit. I took some biology courses because I felt good about the lab work – really – but I couldn’t put up with all the stupid things they tell you. They don’t try to think it through. You’d expect them to, in university. I wonder, would I be doing anything important now if I’d stuck with it, whatever important is? Did I tell you where I want to go next? Australia. There isn’t anything important in Australia that I’ve heard about, but I want to go there. That would mean I’d been to every continent but Asia, unless you count Antarctica. Can you imagine not going outside for six months because you might freeze solid, a Dreamsicle or whatever those are? I know what I want to do right now, make love with you in the shower, I’ve never done that. Do you want to? I hope I never get a sudden urge to throw myself under a car, I’d probably do that too. Most of the time I don’t consider whether I’m going to enjoy doing something, just whether it will be exciting. Is making love when you’re wet and soapy more exciting than when you’re dry or sweaty? It doesn’t count as a perversion. It might be nice to have sex under a dance floor, in a crawlspace with the room shaking and no one having any idea  there was someone fucking under their feet. I wonder it two people could fit into one pair of pants, a kind of costume, so that no one would ever be able to tell when they were having sex and when they weren’t. But it would be hard to go to the bathroom. I never want anyone to know exactly what I’m doing, then I get a little drunk, and I tell you everything I’m doing or done or thinking about doing. That must mean I’m really doing something else that I’m not thinking about. My tongue gets much more active when I’ve been drinking – you said that when we were kissing? I think we were really drooling on each other. Sex sounds mucky when you describe it. Even walking would sound peculiar if you tried to describe it objectively. Sex is better than walking when you’re drunk, because you don’t have to worry about falling over.”

[Say goodbye to Rylla, and please be nice.

Much of her rambles are based on conversations with a woman I loved way back before. Some of the stories about her father, especially going to bars with him when she was 16, are straight from those talks. I last heard from her in 1973, a letter from Laos. Nothing since. One wonders, doesn’t one, how life unfolds.]

A weird week, this one.

The fracking about 200 yards up the hill from us has provided a loud, constant thumping, overlaid by a low roar, that’s driving us all batty. Yesterday was the first time that Tigger, our cat, stopped being afraid to come in the house. Marigold, the dog, is having problems with her left hind leg that may also have to do with her back.

And Tuesday, Linda woke up with a broken wrist. How did this happen? Good question.

Monday evening we spent in extensive sampling of her excellent orange wine. It was theoretically not quite ready to drink, but that didn’t stop us, because it’s delicious and powerful as all hell. Orange wine? Yes, made from frozen OJ concentrate (the one time we used fresh-squeezed oranges, it came out not half as good).

So Linda’s wrist looked badly swollen in the morning, but she had no memory of falling, and I had no memory of waking to any loud tumble. We’ll never really know what happened, though a later discovery suggests one possibility. I’ll come to that further down, because our most remarkable time was the three hours in the emergency room in Towanda, 20 miles north of our place

We got there around 11 am. Linda checked in while I parked, then we sat for maybe 15 minutes in the odd L-shaped waiting room. Not having anything else to read, I started counting the signs on the walls and doors. I came up with 19, but probably missed a few.

One huge panel of 2-inch hand-painted letters listed all the things one must not do while waiting, such as assaulting anyone or using foul language. Apparently the ER folk get some mighty obstreperous wounded. The largest hung sign had the smallest type but was placed at least 7 feet above the floor. Maybe it had something to do with basketball; no way to tell from below.

The main entry door – labeled “Automatic Caution Door” – was so automatic that every time a husky young teen in the chair nearest the door waggled his foot, the door would swing open and shut. Naturally, that became something of a ongoing game.

But the fun really started when I noticed the doors leading to the medical area, posted with

Stanley

DO NOT

ENTER

OK, I figured “Stanley” was the door manufacturer, but the arrangement flipped my humor switch. When a nurse came by with an icepack for Linda’s wrist, I asked her, “Why don’t you let Stanley in there?”

To our delight, she hopped right on it. “Oh, Stanley was really bad. We can’t let him in for 6 months. You know what he did? He threw his icepack on the floor and it exploded all over the place!”

I don’t know whether other people had asked the same question, or she was just amazingly quick, but now I felt we were going to love this place.

Linda behaved with her icepack, so she was taken back for an Xray, after which we waited while it was being read, then both of us were ushered into a hallway, where Linda lay on a bed, her arm in a sling, and I got to sit on a folding chair. We were close to a much larger set of swinging doors, but these were controlled by slapping a big square protrusion on the opposite wall – with its roughly dozen non-public signs.

The largest hanging “sign” was a clear plastic sheet fastened over a complicated schedule chart covering meetings and goals. One square section was labeled “Huddle Group.” Ummm…

It was obvious that some kind of marker was intended to be used on the plastic, then erased, but none of the labelled squares or rectangles had anything written over them. When I asked a passing tech if this chart had ever been used, she said “Not yet.” 

The most intriguing wall sign requested, in 23 various languages, that anyone needing an interpreter point to that language to ask for help. One the languages was labeled “Karen.” Again I stopped a passing nurse or tech, “What kind of language is Karen?” “No idea.”

(Looking it up at home, turns out it’s a whole linguistic grouping used by about 4.5 million speakers along a north-south shoelace in southeast Asia. It’s good to know things.

Each time I got up from my chair I found myself in the way of some machine being trundled along the corridor. I suggested that I be given my own sign: “Obstacle.” Within this constant parade of little machines, each had a singular, obvious purpose; in mass, they somehow signaled chaos.

The nurse we dealt with most, Heather, openly enjoyed being helpful and never looked pressured. When she and the others heard that we couldn’t identify the origin of Linda’s wrist break – because of the delicious orange wine – they asked not that we be more abstemious, but rather, “Why didn’t you bring us any?” 

Next, the physician in charge, Dr. Khare, joined in. Turned out he is also a winemaker and was fascinated by the idea of orange wine. But now was the time to actually do something about that wrist. So Linda sat up while half a mile of Ace bandage was wound around her lower arm, which was again dropped into the adjustable sling.

No cast, at that time, she was just told to hold her wrist as high as her heart. (The cast came three days later, after our usual 40-mile drive to the main hospital in Sayre.)

We had a fair amount of waiting around in that corridor, but we could hardly conceive of better treatment. All hail the ER!

Yet the pleasant aftermath to an unpleasant night did not end there. We decided to get something to eat at 2:30, having had no time for breakfast. Where? We decided to see what we could find on Main St. in Towanda.

First we tried Vincent’s pizzeria, a terrific place. Not open till 4 pm. So we settled on a lovely little café, the Community Cup, on the next block – light and inviting, with a wide-ranging menu on the wall featuring fresh ingredients.

Right-handed Linda decided a sandwich would be easiest to eat left-handed. What, she asked the woman at the register, would she recommend? “The BLT is the most popular,” so we both settled on that, though I’m not a big fan of BLTs.

What we got was the thickest and best – if also the highest-priced – BLT we’d ever eaten. And my tea was served in a cup of near-boiling water: as it should be, but seldom is.

We were the last customers of the day, so the register lady stopped over to chat: It soon became clear she was also the owner. She told us her name was Joy Harnish, a retired Sullivan County teacher, and that she recognized Linda as a fellow former teacher, even remembered her name and, with a bit more mental searching, that she taught reading. From the founding date noted on the café menu – 2013 – she must have started the business the year before retiring from teaching.

So we closed out the daytime Tuesday saga on another high note. That evening I found Linda’s mangled copper bracelet, which she always wears on her left arm, by the corner of the bed, next to her bureau. I think that may explain her fall. Maybe the bracelet caught on the bureau corner and dropped her into a spill that she tried to stop with her other hand.

Still, we’ll never know for sure, which just makes the whole thing that much more intriguing.

[This is a story I wrote many years back. I’m putting it here for a particular reason, which I explain in the note at the end. But please don’t sneak ahead and read the note unless you’ve given up on the story and can’t take any more.]

The time I spent living under a bridge like a troll has to have been the worst in my whole life. It’s cold as shit under there, and naturally the eight months I spent were from October through May.

I can’t tell you how stupid it feels to be without a place to live. Sure, you’re lonely and miserable, but I’ve been lonely a lot by nature and misery can become strangely normal, but the whole time, I never stopped feeling stupid. How the fuck did I get myself into this, why don’t I get out of it, what’s wrong with me, did I leave all my mental equipment in a bus-station men’s room, that sort of thing.

It stinks under a bridge, and even though you’re protected in a way, it’s an insulting kind of protection, like having the environment thumb its nose at you–“Oh look at you, sap, this is the best you can do, I know rats that have it better.” Nobody pissed under there when I was around, but it still stank of piss from before, and when I went off to dredge up some food, somebody’d come from somewhere and piss under there again. And I don’t like to say it, I did too, sometimes. In the winter. Jesus, you don’t want to go out where it’s even colder, with the wind along the river, just to take a leak.

The one good thing, in an ironic way, was when the river froze over. It was pretty small as a river, but out where water is precious there’s a tendency to call almost anything that flows for eighty percent of the year a river because then it sounds like you’ve got water–“I’m going down to the river.”

But when it froze over, I walked out on the ice. First of all, I think better when I’m moving, and it’s warmer when you’re moving (assuming the wind isn’t whipping down the channel, as it did all too often) and out in the middle it didn’t stink. Sometimes you could play one of those I’m-lost-in-the-frozen-north games with yourself, which is a lot better than I’m-lost-in-the-middle-of-an-American-city.

Second, you’re walking on water, and who hasn’t wanted to (come on–right?). Third, I could feel life flowing along underneath me, the current’s moving even if you can’t see it or feel it, and you know the old moldy carp, the sixth-generation granddaddy catfish are trading wisecracks and letting each other know they don’t give a rat’s ass if spring ever comes because then they’ll just have to dodge hooks and nets.

I used to make up stories that the fish would tell each other, especially when it was getting on toward evening and I couldn’t face curling up in the stink and pretending I was just oh-so-warm when really I couldn’t quite stop feeling my toes but wished I would soon because they hurt, shit did they hurt.

Old Frank Catfish, he’d been a river pilot in the old days, led schools of shad upstream to spawn. (I don’t know if that river ever had shad–I don’t even know what a shad looks like.) “‘Mess of bedsprings ahead,’ I told ’em, ‘gotta detour a bit to the left, damn good spawning grounds though. You’ll be proud of those fry.'” “Eeyup,” says Claude Carp, who’s retired from the Riverbottom Navy with the rank of commander, “them shad were a peaceable tribe, I miss ’em. Too many trash fish around these days. Got some goldfish moved in, come right out of the sewer.” Then they’d go on and reminisce at each other, fins hardly moving, because in the winter a fish has about as much metabolism as a weed, and a conversation like I just related would take them three and a half hours to get through. No, I wouldn’t want to be a fish–that’s how I’d end up thinking each time, and maybe that was the idea behind it all, finding something worse off than I was so at least I could get some sleep.

It was just that one winter. Another one would have killed me.

Here’s the part that I don’t totally understand. I probably could have got a job. I mean, you have half a brain and a pair of hands, and you don’t drink too much or take drugs (all true of me, in varying degrees) and you can get a part-time, ten or twenty hour a week job, a little here, a little there, and you can eat and at least occasionally sleep inside. And there are shelters these days, even in the most medieval American city.

But I didn’t want that. I wanted to be down there, shitting off the side of a rotting piling when nobody was looking and grabbing garbage and rolling in the stink. I hadn’t already gone down far enough, I guess. I’d felt rotten, but I wanted to feel as rotten as anyone could feel, and I didn’t know what would come out the other side.

What did happen was, come May and whiffs of flowers drifted under the bridge, when maybe it would have been possible to live there and think softer troll thoughts, I just walked out, panhandled $2.85, went into a thrift shop, bought a shirt and a pair of pants, went back to the river–and not under the bridge either–stripped bareass, jumped in, scrubbed off eight months of dirt with some old leaves, tied a rock around my old clothes, put on my thrift-shop snazzies, went in town, bought a comb and a throwaway razor with the 35 cents left and got a fast-food job, all in under three hours.

I guess I had to know, and now I know. How deep could I go, and how far could I come back? Well, I could have gone deeper–I didn’t kill, I didn’t steal (much), I didn’t go wino and I didn’t sleep in my own shit like a gorilla. But for an upright, intelligent mammal, I hit the damn-near bottom. My goal now is to be something like head of an ad agency. Why? Action-reaction. As far down as you go, the farther up you can come on the rebound. As for ad copy, I’ve got a collection of metaphors you wouldn’t believe.

[Explanatory note: For my column  at the Welcomat in the ‘80s, I sometimes dropped in a piece of fiction – but not labeled as such. I figure it’s the reader’s job to decide what he or she is reading. Well, with this one – which I have changed only to correct one typo – a bunch of people who I thought knew me fairly well took it as a real reminiscence or confession or what  have you.

[So, though I’ve already let the kitten out of the sack here by admitting it’s fiction, I’m wondering how many of you, today, might have taken this for my version of reality? Send a note if you have a comment. Don’t if you don’t. Either way, drink a cup of tea in my name.]

How did the halloweenish Holy Ghost of my youth transform into today’s bland Holy Spirit? 

I guess it’s a crappy era even for the Trinity.

*   *   *   *

I can’t seem to restrain myself from the occasional dollop of political commentary, if only to prove that I can sound every bit as boneheaded as a media commentator. So here, I’m putting all the small fulminations together to get them out of the way.

*   *   

The presidential election this year is on Guy Fawkes Day, November 5 – what better way to commemorate the Gunpowder Plot of 1605!

*   *   

Campaign poster suggestion:

“Support Tump’s campaign to turn America into the Leading  Shithole Country on Earth! Right now, today, stop government interference in the lives of America’s real citizens by ending all public support for the sick, aged and different-looking, who only drag our country down.

“C’mon, let’s Make America Groan Again and Again and Again!”

*   *   

Hatred of immigrants is the universal evolutionary fear of the “other” – in all countries, in all mammals, in all life forms.

In the U.S., it’s been a repeating theme used against the Irish, the Chinese, the Catholics, the Jews, the Blacks. This fury against immigrants is in our DNA, in the the DNA of all living things (except, weirdly, most fungi, who are fine at lending a helpful thread to a plant). 

The great white replacement theory is just the result of a pressure of too many people worldwide living with too much misery, and looking for an outlet that, alas, doesn’t exist.

*   *  

Intelligence, too, is just the latest paste-on to evolution, and like all of evolution, it’s taken an erratic route in its development, with random perversions.

Our vaunted idea of “justice” is a social novelty, its glories ill-defined and unsupported by evidence. How can we prove that decency is worthwhile, when a huge swath of the electorate sees it as an impediment to self-realization?

*   *  

All the fuss about Biden’s and Trump’s age…. Throughout history, within indigenous tribes and across most of the far East, age has been linked with wisdom. There’s been the assumption that in growing up – maturing – you listen to your elders, respect your grandparents, and seek their accumulated knowledge. I assumed that much well before I became fogied myself (I’m now 85, past time to drink my hemlock).

Biden confuses names? I’ve done that my whole life, as have at least half the people I know.

What you need to master to become a worthwhile leader in any endeavor is the nature of the problems you’re dealing with, the facts behind any given situation, and how to choose among the available possibilities to deal with both the general and the particular.

If you mis-identify two French presidents whose names begin with M, you can simply say, “Pardon me.” But if you can’t identify France as part of Europe, that can be… rather disturbing.

As for Trump, he can identify only two entities: Me and Not-Me.

*   *   *   *

Say, did you hear about the self-encapsulated socialite who was voted Miss Demeanor?

*   *   *   *

Why are so many today so afraid of sex? Why should we care who screws whom? And what possible evil can the country’s handful of the transgendered release, beyond flooding our vocabulary with pronouns?

There’s no thought involved in the negative reaction to anyone’s sexuality, no intelligence – just a pavlovian negative response, along with the inability to see the world as a human setting that we’re all part of (and communally doing our best to destroy).

And I wish to hell we’d just switch to unisex bathrooms, like a civilized society.

Urinals and bidets for all!

*   *   *   *

Nostalgic ditty:

I want a girl,

Just like the girl,

That shagged my dear old dad.

She was the girl,

And the only girl,

So it wasn’t just a fad.

A good old fashioned girl

With Great Big Tits,

The kind of girl that gave my mammy fits.

I want a girl,

Just like the girl

That shagged my dear old dad.

*   *   *   *

A train that went fully psychotic had previously been cited for its loco motives.

Why did they have to send him here, of all places, Roswald asked his unresponsive self.

Togo. It didn’t sound like a country, more a comic strip. He didn’t know the language, even what the language was called, and the colonial fall-back was French, which he’d never really managed. What could he represent to them here as a U.S. bureaucrat?

And this damned, rickety railroad station!

Another visitor on the platform, a white woman, her back to him, holding a cigarette like a forgotten twig in stiff fingers, stumping purposefully, kicking up spurts of dust.

It couldn’t be. She snapped to a stop, a dog at the end of its chain, swayed, rammed the cigarette into her mouth, took it out, tilted her head back and blew smoke straight up in the air. Her arms dropped to her sides, she raised on her toes, shaking her head with what looked like anger but must have been something else because she spun ecstatically, arms out, then another intense, mechanical puff.

Roswald tried to steel himself against her presence. Another illusion,had to be. If he could move away or close his eyes… but his senses could not distrust him enough to be saved. He slunk up behind her.

“Rylla.”

For the firs time since he’d known her she received her name without flinching. She spun again, gracefully, radiating the ravening alertness that made her seem larger than her body. When she saw him, her jaw dropped. “Isa!” and she threw her arms around him. “What in the world are you doing here?“

“I’ve been sent here. But you – how is it possible? You wouldn’t be here. No one’s here.”

“I’ve been all over everywhere, and every time I feel I’m getting closer to something, but after two weeks here I was sure this couldn’t be it. They have no idea what to do with a woman traveling alone. I told them I was a Buddhist monk on retreat. Do Buddhist monks go on retreat? I spent ten minutes describing how I dyed my robe in saffron. You see, you have to strip the crocus stamens just after the dew is off – they’re so serious, they believed every bit of it. I don’t think I could recognize a crocus. No, it’s the portulaca that always get me confused. They look like something else, but I can’t remember what. I shouldn’t be jabbering, I’m just so happy to see you.”

Roswald was beyond happiness. “I did finally get your letter, from Brazil, but it was too late to answer. Well, obviously.”

“I was sure you wouldn’t. I think I said that. Before. I never think the post is going to work. Why shouldn’t letters fall out of bags and get stuck behind the backs of things? I wasn’t at all sure you’d want to answer. I suppose I’m worried about why I’m here. I must be here for a reason. Why do we wait inside ourselves for whatever it is to work its will on us, sex or god or the time of day, when the real world is outside. Why aren’t we out in it?

“I would like to make love with you, you know. I always loved making love with you. Something comes out then, something in you that I don’t, didn’t see other times. You ought to look for it. What a horrid thing to say, like I’m you mommy or your confessor. No one should by anyone’s confessor. That’s why I’ve never wanted to be analyzed. That’s what friends are for, not analysts… Did I tell you that I look on you as a friend? There’s so much you never tell anyone, even a friend, and the first thing you don’t tell them, I don’t tell them, is – you’re my friend. Well I think that’s true. God, I’m saying the most terrible things to you. I can’t seem to shake it. Really, there wasn’t any good reason to be hiding out there, in the jungle. Is that why I was there? So I couldn’t hide and wouldn’t want to hide from myself? Oh Isa, that might be it. Just after saying that I’m not searching for myself.

“I didn’t? Say that? Well I meant to. I said it to somebody. About everybody saying you must be searching for yourself. I mean me. That I must be searching for me. But they’re wrong. But I’m finding myself. So which part is incidental? The search for me or the search for that external something I can link up to or be part of or identify as something I’ve lost? Good god, this is all so mystical, and there isn’t anything, not a single thing mystical about this afternoon. It’s clear and sunny and beautifully empty, not empty like in Buddhism, just empty. Mysticism needs murk and ominous warning noises. Don’t you think?

“Goodness gracious!… goodness… what do you suppose goodness is all about? Is it good to do what I do where I want to do it? That’s what I wanted to find out, since I was there, but it certainly isn’t why I came. There. The jungle. Now they call it rain forest. I like jungle better. I read a lot of Kipling when I was little. He made the jungle – though it was an Indian jungle, in India – sound admirable. I find admirable things in the most unlikely places.

“Oh. That’s one way of defining myself – I find things that other people don’t find. I know I’m searching. When I wrote you that letter I was trying to deny it, searching, because it sounds too… easy. To be searching. It’s just a jolly good excuse for going around and never finishing anything, of making a vagabond of your mind. Well, I am searching and I might as well admit it. I was there because something special wanted me there, or that I wanted something special. Maybe I’m a ceramic bowl waiting to be filled and that was a secret filling station. Perhaps now I’m full of jungle water. You’d think I’d know it.

“I’m getting into nonsense. Does that ever happen to you, you start to say something very serious but it gets turned around in your head so that when it comes out it isn’t true any more? Or it’s so far short of what you wanted to say that you might as well not bother? Do you ever start feeling that you’re incredible? I do, all the time. It’s not that I think I’m wonderful, I get amazed at what it is to be a living human being. Silly.

“Suppose we do make love. It isn’t the past, I wouldn’t want it to be, do you? The past? Good. But if it’s the present, whose present is it? I don’t want it to be all yours, and it’s starting out that way. I wouldn’t want it to be all mine. Either. Too much of my past has been a personal present that didn’t want to let go of me. Ugh. So. If… I can have this moment because it’s my moment with a friend and the physical business is a complete part of it… Yes, let’s make love or we’ll never know, and the worst it can be is terrible, then we’ll know. And of course it could be very good.”

Roswald felt stranded on a celestial omnibus without destination or possibility of transfer. It wasn’t a wholly unpleasant sensation – nothing with Rylla could be – but disorienting, overwhelming. She had made it her present, pinning him to the wall for examination. Holding, turning, stripping him.

They were sitting in his room, in a state of pre-something-unstated.

“Isa, in the Amazon, I wonder, was I really in the center of the continent?”

“I don’t know that much about South America. I don’t think it has a center.”

“I went all around in a sort of semi-circle before I ended up where I did, so I thought maybe it was the center.”

“Didn’t you say you landed in Rio and cut straight in? That wouldn’t be a semi-circle.”

“I went along the coast first. It felt like a semi-circle. Going along a coast always feels like a semi-circle, doesn’t it? Especially when it’s that long. As soon as I got to Rio the first thing I did was try to find how to get to Quicolo, and I’d never even heard of Quicolo before. Do you have psychic things happen to you? Premonitions of death or feelings that you’re going to meet someone coming around the bend? I don’t. I didn’t. Then all of a sudden, back before, with this boy Michael I started to feel I was going to end up in the Amazon. I didn’t know what to make of it, so I thought it must be a way I had of looking at things. But when I got there, I was almost sure it wasn’t. A little beckoning finger instead. Well, I don’t believe in that either. Do you think it means anything?”

“Search me.”

“All right.”

She pulled down his shorts, looked at him with a steady brilliance, then burst into a laugh that cascaded a full octave, spraying a mist of mirth through the room. Her giggles landed on Roswald’s shoulders and trickled down his back, washing away the remains of a humorless day.

Roswald wanted the passion from when he had first torn into her with a ravenousness of mind and body that would have been obscene if not returned. His physical explosion tonight had been a throwback. Rylla’s lovemaking had more of a lilt to it, not restrained, but smoother along the edges. The compartments inside her were breaking down. Her mind had always been even in its parts, but the parts not mutually accessible. Now she slowed the wheels enough to see their turning. It could be argued that they had something better tonight, a growing tolerance for each other’s reticence – but he would not be the one to argue it.

Interesting article on satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer: 

https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/may/22/my-songs-spread-like-herpes-why-did-satirical-genius-tom-lehrer-swap-worldwide-fame-for-obscurity

Tom Lehrer quote: “If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worthwhile.”

Poison another moron in the park, Tom.

*   *   *   *

Read that the Dalai Lama, a few years back, commented to a reporter or video guy, “You’re fat. You should go on a diet.” So now people are pissed at the Dalai Lama. One thing you need to know is, the DL has a hell of a sense of humor (shown to charming advantage in an interview with John Oliver). Seems to me we should celebrate anyone who isn’t terminally angry at this point. And also cut some slack for the head of one of the few non-destructive religions in the world.

Which leads me to… How is it that the Western world, in the form of Europe, has been so hellishly vile to everyone else over the last several hundred yeas?

I think it has much to do with monotheism, the most obnoxious development in religion, arising from and expanding horribly in the Mideast. 

Elsewhere in the world, multi-deitied religions let their various gods fight with each other so they don’t have so much time to do damage to the rest of the world. Or, like in much of East Asia, dispense with gods altogether in favorite of harmless philosophies with pleasant phrases and easy exercises. 

In the monotheistic triad (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), our one true god is continually pissed off about everybody and everything and insists that everyone else act the same way. Oh yeah, there are occasional bits of love and acceptance thrown in here and there, but when it comes down to the wire, it’s annihilate-the-bastards, front and center.

I think the wealth of Greek culture sprang from letting their gods be slightly dotty goofballs acting like feuding middle-class families, leaving humanity alone to invent geometry.

*   *   *   *

Coaster embroidered with the face of Sherlock Holmes:

The Arthur Conan Doily

*   *   *   *

Our good friend and nearest neighbor some years back, Joe Colonna, had to have a gall bladder operation. These days, it’s no big deal (or so I hear): Somebody sticks minute holes in your sides, retrieves and removes your gallbladder. (No idea what they do with it.) Sort of like hauling the pharaoh’s brains out through his nose for mummification, I guess.

We learned out it one day when Joe’s son, Joey, who has cerebral palsy, stumbled up our long, steep driveway in a panic, yelling that we needed to be with him while his dad was in the hospital. Joey was then in his late 40s, but with the mentality of… I don’t know where you can place it, age-wise. He can’t read or write but has one hell of a sense of humor.

Of course we said we could come down there or he could stay up here, but we needed to check first with his mom (Mimi) and dad. So we packed up some dessert port wine and slumped down the hill. Yes, we found out, Joe would need that operation, but he didn’t know when. We told them we could be there for Joey, no problem.

Joe (who, poor soul, couldn’t himself have alcohol or solid food until the operation) poured me out a stupefying glass of a whiskey I’d never heard of and we all started talking.

He had worked, he told us, first for his father, and then on his own, as a stone-mason making kitchen counters and cemetery monuments in South Philadelphia. 

He told us about making counters for the grandchildren of the Gambino mob family in New Jersey. He told us of having been stiffed for $300 by a stupid, worthless non-mob heir who otherwise paid over $10 million to build a stupid, worthless mansion-cum-mausoleum in Atlanta. He told us about supplying unique Pennsylvania blue marble to State Department offices in Washington DC.

He told us about how he’d gone the extra mile to do it right for all these assholes and for oh so many others, how it was possible to make a decent living doing extraordinary work for people who might or (more likely) might not appreciate it, those who had the money to benefit humanity but instead chose to screw humanity in favor of their own interest.

Most of all, he told us what it is like to be a working, concerned, exquisite human being , no matter what.

Joe died about a decade back during a different hospital stay, this one for what seemed a lingering flu. We took his wife, Mimi, shopping after his death, until she moved down to live near her brother. 

Joe was the neighbor anyone would wish to have. I’ve missed him almost every day. I’ve written off an on about him and Mimi and Joey. I can’t write too much about them.

*   *   *   *

[Tune: “My Wild Irish Rose”]

My wild Irish nose

Drips the greenest snot that flows

It gets in my hair

Which just isn’t fair:

That snot from my wild Irish nose.

[from my non-existent essay, “How to Stop the Troubles in Ireland Through Humor”]

Ryle Clendon slipped into his 70s with few cares. Head of a huge conglomerate of his own forging, he could, in theory, take it easy – no longer married, one daughter lost to time and distance, uninterested in human connection beyond his meticulously constructed work edifice, nothing to hold him back.

But what was there to draw him forward? As he turned 80 he stood before his mirror. Bad enough to watch the withering of his social equals, sliding into dissolution, but for him, in his own bathroom… He exploded in rage against degeneration, against life, against death – against himself.

“There is no justice!”

In fairness to Clendon, he had no illusions about justice. He had discovered not a trace of it in any sector of the universe he had visited. But his rage insisted: He must not fall into oblivion. He must not die.

Discussions swirling online hailed something called “soul transference,” misty and unlikely experiments that involved flipping an individual consciousness from one human entity to another – or to some undefined receptacle. He dismissed them out of hand when the rattle and blather began – yet another bullshit social-media squeal – but over time, bits and pieces he saw began to reflect the sheen of truth: Two papers, in particular, released in scientific journals of repute, appeared to confirm the mind-cloning of rats and guinea pigs (if guinea pigs could be said to have a mind). What exactly was duplicated, and how it could be tied to a specific recipient remained conjectures, even when supported by charts tabulating near-synchronous mental activity.

Could it be possible, Clendon wondered, to escape – or indefinitely delay – death?

Over the next two years, as his mirrored face developed a cascade of wrinkles, wens and skewings, the transference studies, now referred to as “individual mental duplication” (IMD), had born few solid results, and one of the two peer-reviewed articles had been retracted. Yet… there was one outfit, the ridiculously named OverThere LLC, privately funded and operating outside university-aligned channels, that claimed notable, if loosely documented, success with its animal studies. 

Their work encouraged a spark of hope in Clendon, who forwarded $100 million in corporate shares to OverThere, asking nothing, as yet, in return. This failure to demand a quid pro quo was not unusual for him. Despite his removal from most social interaction, he now and then funneled large sums, no strings attached, to allow those he respected to perform unencumbered research. That was the way, he said, you found things – found out about them.

On May 15th, the week following Clendon’s 82nd birthday, he received a telephone call from Horic Susburl, OverThere CEO. The center’s IMD research, Susburl told him, on promise of secrecy, was drawing close to the possibility of human trial.

Clendon’s spark of hope blossomed into a ground-fire of possibility. Following the transfer of another $25 million in securities, he met with Susburl. After a round of hearty handshaking and standard mutual admiration, he began his pitch, feeling a rare flicker of unease.

“Who are you looking for in the human trial?” he asked “What sort of person, I mean. Must they be young? male? female? high intelligence? What about their health, should if be optimal, whatever that might mean? In this situation?”

“To be wholly honest,” replied Susburl, “age and gender are not so vital… well, not a child, certainly – could you imagine the negative publicity? Intelligence… basic functionality, of course, but more especially, a clear, non-deluded mind. The mind, that is what is vital. You have read the story ‘Flowers for Algernon,’ yes? It is fiction, yes, but it highlights the folly of inflating the lure of game-changing mental research with unexamined or unverified euphoric expectations. We believe human transference will work – for the devil’s sake, we would not think of proceeding otherwise – but we cannot assure any exact result. It is an experiment, and like all experiments we are seeking information for expanding our knowledge and capabilities –”

Clendon flapped his hand at the serious yet voluble man. “No need to go into that, I understand. But I want to know what criteria you use to select your subject. He – or she – must be of sound mind you say, that much is obvious. But what limitations, equipmental or otherwise – regulations, approvals, limitations, as I put it, would have to be in place?”

Susburl shrugged. “Dependent on no public funding, as you know, and with no direct tie to other research organizations of the kind, we can… avoid much of the regulatory net. I do not mean that we will be lax in our intentions or methods, not at all, but it would be very much a matter of the donor’s preference, though donor may not be the exact word in this case. Overseen by our legal staff and associated experts, we are in a unique –”

“I would like to apply.”

“Apply?”

“To be your initial human subject.”

“Ah, this, ah… how quite unusual.”

Clendon shrank back in is seat. “I am too old?”

“Not at all, as I said. It  might require somewhat  more… accommodation for your age, yes, the checking that your health is good, of course, free of degenerate – that it would not be too taxing for… your body. Age does do serious things. I would for certain need to coordinate with Albert, Dr. Albert Dessell, the director of our chemical engineering department. Ah, well.”

“Do you have other applicants? At this point?”

Susburl looked toward his feet. “We have not sought applicants, have not publicized. That is in much part why I asked you not to speak of it, the… No, as yet no others have… presented themselves to us.”

“I am too old – wait! I have not finished. It could be too chancy, too difficult with me as a subject. More ideas and outlooks that must be taken into consideration. Here is a proposal. My proposal. An additional fifty million dollars to cover all subsidiary expenses of me being a unique or different case needing special considerations to… consider. Perhaps creation of a new department or sub-unit devoted to the difficulties of age transition? Of my age. Or that of anyone who might later be in my position.”

“This is sudden. I – I don’t frankly know what to say to it.”

“Say yes, and it – and I – are yours.”

“I must check with… fifty million dollars? Like that? Just so?”

“It is worth it, let us say. For everybody.”

The “checking” progressed too slowly to suit Clendon, but weaving the 50 million offer into every succeeding conversation with Susburl or Dessell – he despised Dessell, a firm yet fussy sort who, for some reason, wore a tie while mixing toxic liquids – had an accelerating effect. And he came to see why there had been no other applicants for the human trial. He read not a sane word in the media, mainstream or social, only veiled suggestions of an absurd conspiracy, the sort to delight the looneys but ignored by those who might otherwise be interested. Susburl was determined to maintain the highest level of secrecy – realizing, Clendon felt sure, that legal suits would fall like rain were the lack of outside control to become widely known. Fair enough, to protect his possible entry into an eternal life. But he must make the transition soon, whatever it might achieve: His mirror, like Snow White’s, refused to lie.

As the day approached, he was introduced to an inanimate figure of his height and general proportions. It did not sport his current face, thank God, with its leaking and blanching, but what he recalled as his face of 30 or 40 years past. If in outward form the replicant could pass for the past Clendon, internally it was moved largely by mechanical parts, though with a brain that could fully duplicate his neuronal connections.

How could they have accomplished all this, he asked, when the brain, as he had read, comprised billions of neurons that formed trillions of connections? “Mapping,” said Dessell in his usual off-hand way, augmented by the latest in AI learning. Clendon’s background in financial manipulation lent him little sense of what these buzzwords meant in practice. He had left all such details to his myriad IT technicians. As always, he did not trust Dessell, but here was the nearly complete example standing immobile before him. 

Was Clendon ready to take the leap? He found himself beset by confusion, dillying one day, dallying the next. How eager was he to become a part-mechanical duplicate of his younger self? Would he feel the same – feel human?  And what would become of his former body? Cremation? Burial? Massa’s in the cold, cold ground?

He would, Susburl assured him, once transferred be wholly separate from his former self, know nothing of its destiny. Clendon was not convinced: “This has never been done, there is no template for it, I’ve signed everything you’ve given me to sign, run it through a team of lawyers, themselves threatened with elimination if they breathe a word of it, but how can you provide me with an ironclad guarantee of the results? This is me, my self. What if it vanishes without a trace and all that’s left is an old dead body? It could be anyone, anything. If this fails, I will cease to exist.”

“Do you want your investment back? I cannot give it back, it has been spent. The material and the means are here for a complete and flawless transfer. A new life. Of indefinite length. You would throw that away on the chance if a vanishingly tiny possibility?”

“The risk!”

“Every second of human life presents a risk. There is always risk, from arising in the morning to going to bed at night, from the second of conception until the last breath. What we are giving to you, to your farthest breath, is a lifetime otherwise unimaginable. I’ve provided every assurance I can, by my mouth, in black and white, by inspection of the mechanism, by what you have witnessed. Go home or stay here to consider what you must to consider, then do it.”

By Susburl’s decree, Dessell was not present at this final discussion. That risk, Susburl was not willing to take.

The following Monday, at 10 am, Clendon lay on a standard hospital bed deep within the OverThere Center. Supple plastic lines fed a variety of compounds into his body at multiple locations – arms, legs, chest, mouth, nostrils. His cyborg self-to-be lay unresponsive on an adjacent bed, the space between them just wide enough to facilitate the movement of two surgically masked specialists (surgeons, Susburl had told him, of unique competencies: masters – or mistresses, Clendon could not sense their sex under their gowns – of arcane matters of brain and body not readily described.

In the seconds before the anesthetic sent him under, Clendon knew that his concerns would have resurrected had he not been suffused with compounds to erase all apprehensions. Then no more. No more anything. Anesthesia does not remove only physical sensation, it erases all hint of being.

Swimming awake, trying to recall what to remember, what remembering is… after… who? Remember who… who he is. He had… something happening, may have happened. He moved his head, almost grinding, neck confused. Another bed, on it… someone, he should know, like the mirror. There. He himself too young… when did he get old? Tried to shift, elbows refuse, like neck… keep at it, neck did, elbows can. Too. So… explosion of wonder, knowledge, horror. He in same bed as… yesterday, or today, later today, same bed, unmoving image next bed…

Clendon screamed. It hadn’t worked. All that money, time, hope, same as before. Machine there young not moving except hand twitch? What?

“WHY AM I HERE? NO!”

Masked-gowned figure at run in the door sliding shoes then steady at end of the bed. His bed.

“Can you remember?” mask asked.

“I’m here, why am I here?”

“You came to –”

His weak wavery hand trying to point to other bed. “I sposed be there.”

“You are. It –”

“Didn’t work, didn’t work, dint…”

“It did.”

“Where… suburb, Susburl? Where?”

“You’re here and you’re there,” mask pointing to him, the other bed, back to him.

“Both?”

“Yes. It worked.”

“NO, no, no, nononononooooo…” Dessell there now too, no mask, fucking piece of shit bastard crapfuck Dessell. “What you do fucker fucker, WHAT?”

“It worked. All of it.”

“There’s two, two me, can’t be can’t have two.”

“Yes. That’s it.”

“Told me can’t be two fuckhead kill you,” trying to push from the bed but no strength.

“Get him down, tie him… keep him there.” Dessell shooing with his hands while the mask held Clendon’s wrists to the bed rails, nothing to tie him with, to keep him restrained.

“Over there,” the mask’s nose pointed, “counter – straps.”

Dessell’s dithering fingers grabbing two short straps, dropping one on the counter, picked it up, held both out to the mask hands busy on Clendon’s wrists.

“I can’t let go. Put one around his wrist.”

Clendon tried to yank loose, but his arms had no power. “Sucker fucker didn’t tell me. You knew, didn’t’ tell me. Two of me.”

“What did you think?”

“Transfer, not duple duplicate. Said so! Don’t want him, stop him, get rid of him…”

The mask tightened the straps… Clendon bound for execution.

“He’s – you’re there, still asleep. There.” Dessell nodding at the other bed. “When you wake up you’ll be both.”

“Can’t be. Shitfuck.”

“It is designed –”

“Lied to me. Lied! Transfer, original destroyed.”

“I never said that.”

“Did. Only one me, only one, for however forever. Why I want two of me? How does it-me think, must think like me, hate you same way I do. Want to destroy… Will we merge, impossible, two physical beings, minds merge, then kill this me,” trying to strike his chest but can’t pull his fists from the restraints, “put me in him, where I belong, make me him.”

“Anesthesia,” barked Dessell. The mask fumbled for a syringe, stabbed it in Clendon’s shoulder. Again, no more of him.

The other bed was empty when he awoke, fully awake this time, memories clear too, almost clear. Where was the other him, why wasn’t he in it, his mind? Did the mechanical body fail, gears strip, mind wobble on its spindles? He pawed at the other bed. Futile. “Hey, masked man? Dessell? hey.” No answer. What was wrong last time, his arms wouldn’t work. Working now but nothing for them to do, nothing to reach. He pulled sideways to get his feet to the floor, where was the floor? There.

He could stand up.

Could he?

A woman, gowned, unmasked, bustled into the room. “Hold on. Don’t try that. Not yet. Give me your hand.”

“Who are you?”

“Jane. An orderly. C’mon, I’ll help you sit up.” 

“Sitting awready. Almost. Where’s the other?”

“Other what? Who?”

“Over there.”

“He left. They… well, I don’t know where they were going with him. That’s not my area.”

“Have to find him, I want myself.”

“Oo hoo, don’t we all” She reached toward his clothes, hanging on a wall rack. “You want to get dressed? You’re leaving soon, I think.”

“Yuh, need to leave, clothes,” then he realized that he didn’t need to talk like this, like he still wasn’t seeing or thinking straight. Or should he keep acting confused, get more information? “Is there someone I can talk to, at the nurses’ desk or wherever?”

Orderly Jane shrugged. “It’s not like, not set up like a hospital, no nurses’ desk. They just brought me in and put me here.”

“I’m not in a hospital?”

“You didn’t know that? Didn’t they tell you that?”

“They didn’t tell me. So much not to tell me.”

“Well.”

Clendon dragged his clothes closer. “I’ll get dressed. Will you help me? Not getting dressed, not that, show me how to get out.”

“They’ll come get you.”

“NO!”

“Well, I don’t know what else.”

“I want you to stay – to stay a moment, OK? While I’m getting dressed. In there.” He pointed to a door that must be a bathroom.

“That’s a closet.”

“Ah, uhn, turn your back?”

She turned. He slopped his body into his clothes. If these were his clothes. They didn’t look familiar, not alien either. They would be his clothes now. For now.

“You don’t work in a hospital?”

“Oh yes, that’s my regular job, this is part-time, sort of freelance, you know?”

“I’m supposed to be somewhere else.”

Jane fussed with the cap on her hair, trying to fuss with the hair underneath. “Oh, they’re taking you? Or you mean you have an appointment?”

“I have someone else to be. I have to be me in someone else.”

“Yeah, that sort of stuff happens, with the anesthetic. You should wait for them to show up.”

“I should strangle them.”

“That would be kind of extreme.”

“No, perfectly rational. A balanced approach. Fits the facts.” 

“Sit down for awhile.”

“Do you know Dessell?”

“I think that’s the guy who hired me. It was kind of confusing back there.”

“Is he the one supposed to pick me up?”

“Not sure. If that was him, who took me here, he just said someone would.”

“Can you reach him? Call him? No, forget it, don’t. Not him, not yet.”

What did he want to do, and who did he want to do it to? The urge to kill. He could kill Dessell, it would be fun, but it wouldn’t change the past. The past was what he hated about Dessell. He could kill Susburl, deserved it for setting him up, but it wouldn’t get him anywhere, to the other self. He could kill that self, his cyborg other self, but it wouldn’t be the necessary suicide. So probably he didn’t want to kill anyone. Not right away. Someone else might be willing to kill his other self. He could hire… No point killing the machine self. He should wait till his head was clearer, if he could recognize clarity then, recognize his head attached to some body, else.

Susburl was at the front door, at the end of the hall, and fell in beside Clendon as he walked out. What was this building? Where? They walked like buddies to Susburl’s car, not talking. Susburl opened the car door. Clendon stood away from it.

“Starkett said you sounded like you wanted to kill yourself.”

“Who’s Starkett?”

“The anesthetist. You weren’t supposed to wake up that soon, to see yourself… your other self.” Susburl closed the car door but kept his fingers on the handle.

“Why didn’t you tell me there would be both of us. Huh??”

“There had to be both. Keep both. If we killed either one, after, it would be murder.”

“One’s a machine. Half machine. There’s no law about machine murder, murdering a machine.”

“Maybe we could find it legal some way, but it would take months, years of legal work, courts. It’d cost us everything we could make out of this. We can’t let the courts decide anyway. That would pile up a whole mountain of shit we’d never shovel down. And why would we want to kill him? Why would you want him dead – that’s what it was about, making you live longer, half at least of forever.”

“I don’t know what’s happening. In him. In another me. Can’t feel it, can’t know how we each other think… I’m me, put here, not continuing inside him? That’s it, huh?”

“It’s the same, for both, your personality over there.” Susburl flicked his hand, maybe pointing, looked more like trying to shake snot off his fingers. “It’s the same. It’s you. If this you, here, dies, you go on, over there, no matter what.”

“I don’t know that, don’t feel it, how can I know that if I can’t feel it? I can’t believe it or you. Not Dessell. I need to talk to him… to the other me.”

“No. Shut up, get in. Can’t happen.”

If Clendon got in the car, where would Susburl take him, what could he to do at his own office if that was where they’d go? What happens if there’s wo of him there?

He held his arms straight out. “He can never be in my organization. I won’t allow him in there, nobody can see him.”

“They wouldn’t recognize him, he doesn’t look like you, the you out here, they wouldn’t believe it was you. No problem.”

“I don’t care. Don’t take him there, ever.”

“We didn’t plan to.”

What else did they plan to do or to not do? He had to talk to himself, see if the other was really him, find a way to merge, to be one, only one, again. A person is one.

“Where is he? Where did you put me?”

“Later. Get in.”

Clendon got in the car. His body was shaking. He needed food.

“I need food.”

They stopped at a deli with two small tables off to one side. Clendon had no idea where they were, were they in the city, not in the industrial park, where? Susburl ordered something from the counterman, Clendon didn’t hear, didn’t care, just needed food to stop the shakes. Susburl brought over a sandwich with meat in it. Pastrami? Ham? Not baloney. It had no particular flavor. Susburl got a soda from somewhere and pushed it toward Clendon. Clendon pushed it away, stopped himself. Can’t afford to look anxious, must turn the conversation. “You know, one time, all the money I made, financials, I looked at it, at the idea of it, you know? at the accounting columns? It looked like nonsense, just numbers, any kind of numbers, piles of peanuts, spectators at a football game, all the stones on Mars. You know? Does that happen to you? That numbers or something abstract loses meaning, aren’t even numbers anymore, just something. Inside you they’re amounts, you can feel that, but you don’t know what, you know the amounts but not what amounts are, how amounts mean.”

“No, never had that happen. I usually know.”

“Uh huh. Well, me either, not, I mean, any other time, but it’s something I remember, the… change away from normal. What if numbers didn’t mean anything, not money, the peanuts or… anything? What if numbers existed without meaning? Or words? Or things? What if none of any of it meant anything? That could be what people think in bad times, you know, the Depression, without realizing it, that nothing means anything. Does the vacuum, empty space, mean anything? How could it, since it’s empty? But that’s where everything comes from, the vacuum, all the stuff comes from there, also time, the continuum… Not sure what it meant that time, about meaning, if it meant anything when it happened, that pile of numbers. But I’ve never forgot it.”

“Yeah. You going to finish your sandwich?”

“You want it?”

“No, just you should eat. You hat a shitty time and you said you need to eat. Do you always think this way, like what you were saying? The numbers and abstract things? Whatever?”

“Did you ever hear me think like that before? Did I?”

“No.”

“So no, I didn’t before and don’t always think like that, just that one time, with the numbers. What would we do with numbers if they stopped meaning or never meant anything but only a… pile? If numbers are math, are they outside us, are they real so it doesn’t matter what we think about them, or is it if we stopped thinking they were anything that we could count with or use different ways, would they maybe disappear? Poof, no numbers? It was just that once, but something like that sits in your mind. When it happens. Doesn’t it? It does with me. But if you never thought like that, there would be nothing to sit in your mind that kind of way.”

“No. There’s dressing or something on your chin.”

Clendon wiped his chin. “I didn’t taste the dressing, didn’t notice it was there. But dressing isn’t numbers. It’s there, dressing, whether I think of it or not. You saw it.” He folded his dirty paper napkin carefully, as if it was clean and ready to be put away. Susburl might be thinking his mind had flipped, but he’d taken the talk away from about which of him was or wasn’t himself, and whether they, the two, could meet. Susburl had to forget about that, because he was going to make sure they, the two him, did meet. But how would he find out where the machine self was if they couldn’t talk to Susburl about it. “I need to get back to my office.”

“I’ll take you there.”

“Thanks. Yeah. This has been… very interesting. I need to be somewhere to think, need to do something else so I can think underneath the work piled up at the office.”

“Numbers? Those piles?”

“Just work. Not numbers. Some numbers, sure, but work is real because you can put your hands on it, hold it. You can’t hold numbers. You can hold things to count, but not the numbers themselves.”

“True.”

The work at Clendon’s office had piled nose high, but he ignored it. The one important thing was to find his other self, the rest of him. Where were they keeping him? Must be at the OverThere Center. He could go there, but they’d be on the lookout, especially Dessell. Why did he think that – especially Dessell? Dessell hadn’t shown for the pickup, only Susburl. Clendon had to be careful with assumptions, especially assumptions based on raw hatred. Don’t waste the hate. Or hate them both equally. 

At his desk he linked to the OverThere website, knowing it wouldn’t immediately tell him that much, but it might give him clues. Clues, rhymes with news. Or shoes. Or booze.

Got to clear his head all the way.

The “directions” page on the site included a simple schematic of the Center, with “entry” highlighted where Clendon knew it was. Main areas had similar all-caps markers, but there were also undefined sectors, mostly toward the back – amorphous grey not divided into rooms. Could be anything.

No schematics of systems, they wouldn’t be on the public site.

Where was the URL Susburl had given him one time, the “just in case” internal link? He found the slip in his right-hand drawer. (Clendon was somewhat obsessive, not too obsessive, about where he kept stuff.) This link required an ID. Clendon had his OverThere ID that he used at the entrance. He copied its numbers – numbers – and that let him in. Careless of Dessell or whoever, but only if you already had the “secret” link. This schematic included systems and areas marked Medical, Electric, Break Room, Changing Room, HVAC. 

Medical? Most likely. But if they’d be looking for him to appear at the Center, he for sure couldn’t sneak into the Medical area. But…

But….

The orderly: Jane who? He hadn’t asked her last name, didn’t know where she worked, and she couldn’t even recognize Dessell’s name. The anesthetist: Starkist? – that couldn’t be it, but something like that. But the anesthetist had been masked. Jane he could recognize. So Jane it had to be. Try it.

Absurdly disguised under sunglasses and a large floppy hat with a feather, he sat on a bench by the OverThere entrance. At close to 10:30 he picked out Jane easily enough. But following several feet behind, he was struck by the thought that exactly because he was unrecognizable, someone might challenge him, even if he was using his card. And it had his picture fused on, so he would probably end up with a guard manhandling him to the area marked “security” on the schematic.

Only one way to make certain. He slid his card through the reader. No challenge. But where had Jane got to? Ahead, off to the left, turning a corner. Clendon picked up his pace, falling in behind as she reached a door near the far end of the corridor. This had to be where his other self was being kept.

Weird thought, he was in the corridor and also behind the unlabeled door, shifted through space. Wormhole. Anatomical obscenity. He walked past the door, around another corner… What next, lurk in the hallway? Would his entry card work in the door ? How could he explain himself to her, once inside? Could he trust her? Why should he?

He asked himself these questions to keep from focusing on the one answer, the only answer that mattered: That he was two people who were the same. Or that weren’t the same. He couldn’t find that answer without meeting himself.

The tiny green light flashed and the door clicked when he inserted his card. The too-easy route to the answer?

The room was narrow, lined with shelving on both sides. It led to a further room, hidden except for the common continuing wall that looked like the end of a wider room. He hung back for two seconds, three, then almost sprinted through the doorway. Jane was fussing with something on the countertop to his right, but he ignored her hands, because on the bed lay himself, in a hospital gown, awake, looking at Clendon as if he expected him.

Jane turned, startled. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I should be, but I’m not supposed to be. Officially. But I should be. I appreciate what you’ve done for me. For us. I don’t know your last name.”

“Melvin. Jane Melvin. You have to go out.”

“That’s me,” pointing to the bed, “you know that?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s what they put me into. A cyborg? Not fully a cyborg? It has my mind.”

Jane edged slightly away, “You need to –”

“They didn’t tell you. A lot they haven’t told us. So I look insane to you, what I’m saying, on the edge, nuts. Did they tell you at least who I was, who he is?”

The figure on the bed raised a limp hand, pointed. “Listen to him. You can believe him. Us.” The voice was his, Clendon’s, as he’d heard it recorded and always hated, the whiny certainty that cancels himself as soon as he talks. Whenever he hears his voice, unfiltered by his head, he wonders how anyone takes him seriously. Ever.

“I like you Jane, good to me” said the him on the bed

“had a wife sometime a daughter, girls are daughters are girls” said the him standing

“didn’t pay enough attention”

“lost them they lost me”

“forgot about them, way things go” said the him rising  from the bed to stand

“wonder where they went to” said the him now sitting in the only chair

“in the sea of time”

“floating floating”

“girl and buoy”

“sweep of the waves”

“wave to them on the sea”

“see them in the waves”

“What are you two, what are you doing?” Jane backing into a corner, cringing.

“Not two, we are ONE” chanted in unity standing while sitting down

“believe in us”

“like we believe in you”

“how the world should be”

“interdependent”

“Christ on the cross”

“pendent between two thieves”

“beautiful dreamer”

“dreaming of the father”

“holier than the ghost”

“You’re not the same, can’t be,” Jane holding bandage shears before her en garde.

“I can dance” standing feet shuffling

“I don’t know how” sitting immobile

“I lie to each other”

“lie at each other”

“I stand”

“I sit”

“no one lies”

“down”

Jane squealed, a piglet trapped in gravy while the one-two one-two failed its attempt to dance

“who am we”

“what are I”

“Charleston”

“Charleston”

“front and back”

“number” the sitting him drawing the gun from his waistband to blow his brains out but it does not fire the gun has no bullets his brains have gone to live with his wife of the him standing next to the bed laughing pretending to fall dead

“Stop it stop it stop it,” screeched Jane, and both of him did, because he likes Jane, respects Jane, would not hurt her feelings or emotions inner or outer if he could and can help it

Jane dashed for the door, will they-he stop her, he does not, but she has not yet opened the door, lost in amaze at their different sameness, can’t find the panic button to alert the guard somewhere in the maze of the building.

Sitting him dropped the gun

standing him picked it up, examined it, shook his head – in sadness?

“will my daughter be like Jane”

“she’s 50 now Jane’s too young”

“Jane’s farther away from death”

“I will not die” standing him thumping hollow chest

“I will die” sitting him awash in tears

“will won’t will won’t will won’t” not knowing which is who is live or dead is one or two or many or none he reached himself engaged hugged wrestled strangled sought advantage there was none

Jane opened the door and ran and ran and ran ran ran ran…….

[If some of the bits below sound familiar, I may may be that I’ve written about them before. If so, I don’t apologize, since it’s so easy for you to hit delete.]

I sometimes miss the difficulty of uncovering obscure knowledge. I mean, it’s too friggin’ easy these days to find out almost anything, no challenge at all. (Past ignorance may be a weird thing to have nostalgia for, but at least it’s a basic American trait.)

Fortunately, even in this era of ubiquitous knowledge it can sometimes be hard to track stuff down. And when you do manage to find the elusive Aha!, it’s often the result of a slap of serendipity.

An example: Many years back in freelancerdom I was asked to update a dozen or so slim texts for middle-school students. Each book covered the history and customs of a single county or a group of small adjacent nations.

One was dedicated to the Caribbean-island country of Trinidad and Tobago. There was’t much that needed to be updated, but one question nagged at me.

The Trinidadian population was evenly divided between Black and East Indian. Among the Indian sector, young teen girls were routinely pushed into arranged marriages, a kind of misuse of the young and of women that pisses me off no end. So I wondered: might this have improved in the decades since the book was put together?

The internet was youngish when I searched for the answer, and trying every combination of terms for the country’s name, population breakdown, and local customs, I uncovered not a single reference to marriage arrangements among the Indians. Then, about to give up, I stumbled on a breakdown of the country’s suicide rate, broken down by age and population.

Where was it highest? Among young teen Indian girls.

That answered my question, though not in a pleasant way or one that would meet legal or scientific certainty. I had not the least doubt that, yes, these girls were forced into arranged marriages, so no change to make in the book.

But now I wonder, is the kind of unproven assumption I made also of the sort that, in different situations, can lead to conspiracy theories? Here, it led to nothing but the further deflation of my respect for humanity.

*   *   *   *

Subhead on recent news article:

“Data reveals at peak of pandemic in 2020, people in prisons died almost three and a half times more frequently than those outside”

And I thought dying just once was bad enough!

*   *   *   *

Two Russians were walking down the road. One could calculate square roots in his head, the other could not. The one who could not calculate square roots in his head asked the one who could: “How is it you can calculate square roots in your head?” The other replied: “That is very simple. First I grasp the trunk. Once I have the trunk, it is quite easy to proceed to the root, by digging down. This, of course, provides you only with the round root, but once you have the round root, you merely trim the bark to gain the square root.” The first was amazed, but also perplexed: “That is indeed a most remarkable method, but how do you grasp the trunk to begin?” The other smiled sadly: “That can too often prove a problem. I still have not devised a way to grasp the trunk without first retrieving it at the the reservation counter of the railway station. By then, of course, the person who has requested the square root has in most cases already looked the answer up in the Vast Compendious Table of All Known Square Roots, which is kept in the root-cellar of the library. The failures which result from this problem can make me seem an incompetent fool.” The first Russian, feeling sympathetic to his plight, offered to buy him an extensive set of trunks from a friend who dealt in antique transportation materials. The second Russian is now able to calculate in his head the square roots of several numbers which had previously escaped him, including 17, 3, 634, and 19,760. He discovered one trunk that leads to the square root of -1, but he has since lost the key.

*   *   *   *

How often have you bought a workshop tool and had to wade through 6-10 pages of “warnings” in the supposed operations manual before you got to the actual instructions on how to use the tool?

It’s bad enough that these warnings assume your elemental stupidity (“don’t stick your finger or any part of you body in the socket”), but do you know what creates the worst danger of injury from a tool? – not knowing how to operate it, instructions for which are half-way back in the manual and missing half the essential operational details. 

*   *   *   *

Recent ad headline:

“This TikTok-Famous Veggie Slicer Is Half Off Today”

When a veggie slicer is half-off, what exactly is left for slicing vegetables?

*   *   *   *

Linda and I have read a fair number of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels and enjoyed them muchly. But after a half dozen or so it got to me that they all had insipid, almost indistinguishable titles. I’d find a listing for a Reacher title and wonder “Did we read this? Didn’t we?” No way to tell unless I had a copy in hand to flip through.

Then one day I began to wonder: could this be a deliberate marketing gimmick to get people to quickly snap up a “new” title only to realize, damn, I read this two years ago. That would seem a pretty sneaky way to bring in extra profit, but I’ve read that Child is very happy churning out highly commercial, very remunerative work, so… why not?

I mean, his given name is James Dover Grant, only choosing Lee Child as his pen name once he starting writing mystery novels. By some lucky chance, this slips his work between Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie on bookstore mystery shelves.

So was it lucky chance? I’ve seen a convoluted explanation that the adopted name arises from something he used to say in his childhood. I’ve also read that it was indeed a deliberate marketing ploy.

Hell, I’ll take a clever, nefarious ploy over lucky chance any day.

In recent years, Lee’s handed the Reacher series off to his brother, Andrew Grant (now Andrew Child). May the lord Grant them both great sales.

*   *   *   *

A suggestion:

Make a deepfake of Trump singing:

I wanta be near me,

I’m the one for me, for me,

I wanta be near me,

I’m the one for me-e-e.

Problem is, would anyone ever believe it was a fake?

*   *   *   *

How many dictionaries have you accumulated over the years?

By my count, I’ve picked up four “unabridged,” though I’m currently down to one – and it’s very happy sitting alone on its tall reading stand, a birthday gift from Linda.

After years of fumbling through the Merriam Webster Collegiate – which always put me off for some reason – while I was working at the UPenn bookstore I picked up the Webster’s Third International (unabridged), because, as an employee, I could get it at cost.

Wow! A brand new, freshly-minted, up-to-the-minute international compendium of all known English words! Except I quickly discovered it was nothing of the sort. This “update” actually dropped thousands of words from the universally loved Second International.

What the hell was going on? It’s never been clear to me, but I think the compilers lost interest in the importance of etymology and literate history, so if a term was no longer in current use, they just canned it. 

Well, shit. I look to dictionaries to give me not just the definition, but the whole schmear – the word’s place in the world.

A couple years later (though maybe I’ve got the timing a bit wrong), an entirely new major dictionary appeared, the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged.

I liked it. Despite not having a century-plus of American publishing history behind it, here was a weighty lexicographical collection with entries that just begged you to read them. Good enough for me, by gosh. I snapped it up and it took pride of place on Linda’s reading stand. The Third International went somewhere.

So what came next – and why?

1971 saw one of the most remarkable (and, in retrospect, rather strange) publishing endeavors, the release of the Oxford English Dictionary – the most exhaustive dictionary of the language ever produced – photographically reduced to a two-volume format of minuscule type that you could read only using the accompanying rectangular magnifying glass. Yes – the entire 13-volume first-edition, including supplement – shrunken to ant tracks on near onion-skin paper.

So of course I had to have it. 

Which I did, once it went on steep sale. I loved having it, loved fiddling with the magnifying glass, loved the idea of having it. But I probably looked up no more than five words in the thing, because, despite my interest in etymology, I really didn’t need to know how Aethelfark the Ungracious may have used “besotted” in the 6^th century. And that magnifying glass – a damned good one, but a strain on the eyes.

I sold the shrunken OED or gave it away a few years later, though for some reason I still have the magnifier, so I’m not sure how this person can read the scratchings.

Since then, the OED second edition was further shrunken to near invisibility – 9 original pages crammed onto one printed page. I can’t imagine anyone trying to deal with this. But now the OED is online (at oed.com) while in the midst of an ever-evolving third edition. You can look up the convoluted history of any word in seconds.

After handing off the OED, I held on to the Random House dictionary. I mean, I do want to look up words, right, if not needing to know every use ever made of the word under consideration.

And my tale of lexicographical absurdity did not end there, boys and girls. For, after my brother Rod’s death in 2009 – one of the saddest days of my life – his widow, Ginny, bestowed on me his Webster’s Second International, alway open on a bedroom table of their house.

Let me tell you, this is the true king of English dictionaries. It has all those words later cast into oblivion by the Third International, along with clear yet detailed notes on derivation and etymology. This is the dictionary to have for actual daily use. It now sits on that lovely reading stand, replacing the Random House, which I recently donated to the local library.

Yet, like most everyone else in these instant-gratification days, when I’m sitting here at my MacBookPro and want a quick check on a definition, I first look online. And where am I sent by default?

To the damned Merriam-Webster Collegiate. 

Having just turned 85, I’m definitely older, but hardly wiser.

[a continuation from two episodes past]

Dear Isa,

This is where I got to. It’s a tiny place on the Amazon River, not a place really, because it wouldn’t exist if we didn’t hack it out of the jungle every day. You wouldn’t believe how fast things grow here. They know – the trees and vines and such – that this is their land and they have the power. They throw all their vegetative serfs at us and let us lop off their heads. Some day we will stop the lopping and the trees will pull the whole place to bits and pieces. Why not?

I’m not with Swengdon’s group any more, too much the same thing along the way as at Manchester – pour viruses into flasks, slosh them around, dump them. We were measuring different things in different places, but it was the same thing we were doing. That wasn’t what I was looking for. Then or now. I can’t say – yet – what I am looking for, but I’m getting quicker at seeing which directions are wrong.

I feel that I have to go through something before I can settle down. Do you think I’ll settle down? Also, I got involved with Swengdon. Well, you’d know that. It happened before we left, and it got worse, got moreso. He’s a fine man, may be a really wonderful man. I think he is. He believes in what he’s doing. Perhaps too much, it eats into him all the time. You can’t help admiring him even when it becomes frightening.

The coffee is wonderful here. It’s a silly way to identify a country, by their coffee, but at least it’s true. I seem to spend a great deal of time drinking it at any rate. Most of the last four or five months I’ve just been traveling. Around. I lived with an Indian tribe for almost six weeks. Indigenous is the right term now, like rain forest instead of jungle. I don’t think they ever did know what to make of me. Women have a very particular place in their culture and I didn’t act like a woman so far as they were concerned. They took it fairly well from that angle – I mean they didn’t try to kill me or even send me to Coventry.

Sometimes they waggled their hands in a peculiar way, their equivalent of shrugging their shoulders. They use poison darts to hunt game. It’s amazing to watch. They stand still – completely still – for hours, holding the dart gun, ready to blow on it, then something comes by, a monkey or a bird, they just give one big puff and hit it, every time. What I don’t understand is why when they’ve poisoned the animal, eating it doesn’t poison them? They boil everything, that helps, I suppose. But when I asked them, they just waggled their hands at me.

I should get more out of situations like this than I do. I’m enjoying myself, of course – every day is some new amazing thing, a bird or a crocodile or an idea I’ve never had because there was no place like this to make me have it. I get discouraged because I ought to be learning something I’m missing. The worst is that I feel like I’m on the right road but in the wrong place. Do you think that’s a good sign? Some things don’t change though. I still can’t sit anywhere for very long – you remember that, you said so.

I heard about a program in Africa, and I might get into it – one of the men from Swengdon’s is going there. He told me before I left the group. You don’t know him. Why would you? It will probably be the same all over again. But it might not.

I wonder what Africa is like? What do they drink there that’s hot, do they have coffee?

I honestly miss you Isa, which is hard for me to say. I like to cut things off and remember them instead. I suppose I think nothing can hurt me that way, which means everything hurts more that I would want it to. I felt that way at Manchester and I’ll probably feel that way in Africa. If I go. I want to see everything!

You can write to me here for the next month or so. After that, before Africa, if,  I’ll probably go down to Rio for awhile and you can write care of Poste Restante, if they have it there. I don’t know what will happen after that. Africa? I hope.

Love, Rylla

P.S. A huge snake just went by past the window. Not an anaconda, that big, I’ve seen one or two, but it was just wandering along being its snake self. What a place! To have a yard outside, a garden almost, with ten foot snakes that belong there! Snakes always seem to know where they’re going. How does one get to be a snake?

###

Rylla was walking the room, puffing a cigarette with quiet determination but without the respiratory assault she once had. Roswald should get up, but unfamiliar parts of himself had stiffened. Someone had injected cement into the hunker muscles of his thighs, and an area between his shoulder blades had rusted solid. Maybe if he rolled over first…. The floor mat rolled with him, then started to pull away like a body-length bandaid. He made the sound of a pig with its tail under duress and flopped back, bent fetally.

Rylla, called back from her mental wanderings, tried to make sense of his whimpers and feeble hand signals, then pried him slowly, painfully loose. He sat up, one side red, cross-hatched, fine grit particles pushed deep into crevices. She bathed him carefully, head to foot, like a baby, and bundled him to bed where, from bodily perversity, he could not sleep.

He rustled uncomfortably on the clean white sheets. “I can’t sleep.”

“Oh.”

“You aren’t very sympathetic.”

“Snort.”

“Don’t snort at me.”

“You’re the only one here, who else can I snort at?”

“What I mean –”

“Isa. Do you suppose part of me was in the jungle all along?”

“How, what do you mean?”

“That… some essential piece of me broke off, I don’t know when, maybe when I was born, and ended up in the Amazon? Or there was a mix-up and parts got switched. With somebody else?”

“A warehousing error?”

“I’m not being funny. I’m trying to see what being there meant, means. Suppose the missing piece is slipping back in.”

“Spiritual osmosis…. hmmm, I have to say, on careful reflection, that that sounds nuts.”

“Remember the first time we met, I was telling you about that business of molecules fitting into people’s noses? I don’t think my idea sounds any more ridiculous than that, and I found afterwards that he, that Swengdon was probably right. I’m not saying I’m right this time, but does anyone know anything about why people happen the way they do, why I can make an equal guess. Too.”

“But there’s more known about molecules than how they fit into noses.”

No answer, and she went back to pacing and prodding the furniture. Why was he needling her? She took dismantling accepted theories as a challenge, looking for equally plausible alternative ways of accounting for facts. Yet so far she hadn’t dabbled in mystical hokum. 

“All right,” he said, “what else?”

“What what else?”

“There’s more to your idea. I wasn’t trying to blow you off. Where does this take you – how does it fit, with what?”

“It just fits with me, that’s all. Of course it’s silly. I have silly ideas. I like silly ideas, they’ve given me beautiful sunsets, let me see the clouds break up in Nepal after the monsoons with mountains bigger than God reappearing like pieces of forever that somebody’s forgotten. 

“You see? They even make me sound poetic, and you know I’m not poetic. What I’m beginning to see is that I’m collecting myself. There’s a myth about that somewhere. Osiris, the Egyptian god or whatever he was got chopped up by somebody and scattered over Egypt and he had to go looking for himself under rocks.”

Roswald, drifting into the warmth of listening to her, a moist, cradling warmth, was whacked fully awake… what he had been thinking about earlier, lost pieces, Roswald bits scattered across the landscape. Not so bad to be fragmented… good enough for Rylla and very old gods.

She drifted on. “I thought I was searching for something outside, a corner, an… angle I guess I mean. All the forces of the world as lines and planes, all coming together, but I couldn’t see the corner where they met. But what if the corner’s inside me? I certainly wouldn’t see it then, would I? If I’m looking outside? People corners and thing corners, how would that work? We probably can’t see unless the lines extend far enough. If you come along too early, too soon, there’s nothing to look at but a hodgepodge. On all those projects I must have thought I was following the forces. Then I’d get into… fucking somebody and I wouldn’t be able to see them, the forces. I’d get so angry at myself.

”Sex is its own force, has to lead somewhere too, but the people I… slept with, they weren’t following anything, and I wouldn’t find that out until too late. I’d lose track of them, the lines of force, then I’d march off and try to find them again. I couldn’t like myself while I was doing it. But… what if everybody is their own corner? I mean, forces come from different directions, from all over, they could all meet in someone, in everyone…. Shit, that doesn’t work, it wouldn’t matter who was who was where, everywhere would be the same. I should have only one silly idea at a time.”

Roswald had fallen back asleep. Rylla felt an urge to tuck him in, kiss his brow. No. She didn’t really want to kiss his brow. She wanted to kiss the brow of someone – something? – she had not met.

She stretched both arms and touched the air. She ran her fingers along the walls. They were only walls. Isa was only Isa, the bed he lay on was only the bed. There was nothing wonderful in any of it, yet her fingers and her body knew they were only an inch away from a different touching.

Then the fire of certainty left her, seeped out through the almost-touching fingers, gone off to play. Possibly it would end up as someone else’s certainty. For the unconcerned world, it should be just as good.

She lay down beside him, staring at the ceiling. It was white. She blew out the dribbling candle and, once her eyes adjusted, the ceiling turned silver-gray from moonlight. She wondered why things could be the same and different, changed yet still the same.

These two names popped up in the news this week:

Joel Smallbone

David Pecker 

Now, wouldn’t you love to see them form a law firm:  

Smallbone and Pecker

*   *   *   *

I don’t know if you’ve been following this 30 million cash heist in LA, where they can’t figure how it was done, who did it and why there wasn’t any real security to prevent it. Especially, how they broke into a massive safe to steal almost two tons of bills.

I had the sudden idea that maybe the cash just wasn’t in the safe when they broke in, that it had already been stashed in boxes for easy grabbing.

Well, obviously, one way or another, there was inside planning, but it would be much more clever if the safe-break was a false lead.

*   *   *   *

A convoluted tale of broiled mushroom caps.

Over 30 years ago, Linda and I were friends with Goetz and Luci Mayer, an Austrian couple who married in 1941 and fled the Nazis to South Africa. 

Goetz, then in his late 80s, had been a friend and roommate of playwright Bertolt Brecht in Paris during World War II, and wrote wonderful scattershot stories of his life for the Philadelphia Welcomat (while I was arts editor), that he called “Suitcase Memories.” Luci, then about 90, was one of the finest people I’ve ever met, a force of nature with an interest in almost everything, an interest that never waned.

They came to dine with us a few times when we lived on Baring St. Once, on whim, I decided to whip up broiled mushroom caps for dinner. I’d never dared this before, had no idea how to approach it, so, as usual, took a seat-of-the-pants culinary approach and added everything I could think of to the stuffing that might create a good mix. Somehow, the caps not only worked but were – by my and Linda’s and the Mayers’ telling – wholly delightful.

Thing was, I didn’t write down the “recipe.” Was I depending on my memory for later? Good god, I should have known better. Over the years, I’ve tried my ever-lovin’ best to duplicate those fungal wonders, but have never succeeded. Come close a couple times (including last week), but the perfect balance is lost to time.

Luci died of cancer in the late 1990s, one of the few times I’ve cried over a death. Goetz never admitted, to us, how heavily he was hit, after their close to 60 years together, but his health slid steadily with neuropathy and whatall else. He would sit across from us and say, simply, “Everything hurts.” He failed to wake up two years later, on the second anniversary of Luci’s death.

I don’t remember if I cried when Goetz died, but dammit, I still cry every time I fail to make the perfect broiled mushroom caps.

*   *   *   *

The abbot was asking the gardener if he had seen the missing monk assigned to oversee evening prayers.

Replied the gardener, 

“Oh, the monk? He wrapped his tail around the flagpole.”

*   *   *   *

In Catholic elementary school (starting in fourth grade), we ended each school year doing not much in the classroom. Instead, we were asked to take our textbooks home and clean them up as a favor to the following year’s class – erase underlining, put on new dust jackets, that sort of thing.

This set fire to the obsessive-detail side of my pinched mind. Laying the books out on the kitchen table at home, I’d cut new dust jackets from paper shopping bags, and fold them over so that I could insert the hard-bound text covers. Egad! I was a nerd before the term was even invented.

And the underlining!

Did I underline texts myself in those days? Not that I can recall. Ever the neat freak, I’ve never liked underlining anything I’ll ever look at again, and lord how I cringed when I dribbled tea on Thomas Pynchon.

But many of the school books had not only simple pencil underlining, but deep-blue pen slashes. Determined to right all damage caused by Paper Mates and Parkers and Esterbrooks, I’d page through each text with a saucer of bleach at hand that I would apply to every last pen underline, using a matchstick, delighting as the illicit smudges vanished, or at least mellowed to a gentle pink.

I wonder now how the students of succeeding years reacted to books that disintegrated into isolated strips of text. Chlorine bleach is a remarkably active substance when applied to paper.