Published by The Future Fire (2008.14), dedicated to “Social, Political, & Speculative Cyberfiction. An experiment in and celebration of new writing.” It’s s always a treat to be published in a magazine that you also like to read! The story was illustrated nicely by Chris Cartwright of Digital Design. See it at FutureFire.

This story is a chimera. All incidents, encounters, speculative or philosophical riffs, are based on actual events. To unify them on the three levels of the story – our relationship to “ultimate realities,” other intelligent life, and the intelligence community’s impact on its most committed professionals – they must be presented as fiction. “Fiction,” as the narrator says, “is the province of the fantastic ….”

The initial pages illuminate the state of the narrator’s mind on all three levels, lest they be thought extraneous … some editors did not understand how that constituted “fiction” rather than an essay. I suggested to one that he think of “Notes from Underground,” please, as an antecedent, and its two parts. He acknowledged that was fair, but still didn’t like the story. It made me wonder if anybody reads fiction from before 1960 these days; then I learned that one can get a degree in English literature at “good” universities without having to do so.

A dear friend, on the other hand, who spent decades as an intelligence professional, highly respected and honored by his peers, told me he kept saying, “Bingo!” as he read it. I guess it helps to understand the territory.

A riff on this text, a different way of saying it, call it what you will, Northward into the Night, is now making the rounds.

Less Than the Sum of the Movable Parts

by Richard Thieme

Nothing gets us through a long day more than an image of a constant self.

My life is one long day, so believe me, I know. It helps. Thinking that “I” was here “yesterday”, “I” am here “now”, “I” will be here “tomorrow”—it’s wonderful, isn’t it? Using an imaginary temporal index linked to a mirage of an equally illusive self to manage an inchoate flow of impressions which turn into pictures in the “mind” to simulate fixity?

I think it’s wonderful, anyway. I think it helps us stay engaged with tasks that might otherwise drive us to despair.

Or worse.

There’s a bigger question, however: is there a connection between the connections? A real one, I mean? A single template that works from top down, instead of bottom up?

Otherwise, it’s just a coding trick—memories encoded in chemicals programmed to disclose aspects of what we call “selves” like origami unfolding to that same subjective self. This recursive program would be a stroke of genius, if a genius existed. A reflexive self, embedded in its own structure, suggests continuity; seemingly real memories frame the phantom self like planes in a cubist painting constructing odd geometries—inside of which we, all unassuming, happily thrive.

Or—to put it another way—it thinks, therefore we are.

Or, in cases like mine, agencies think for us, relieving us of some of the work.

OK. We emerge from braided twists of code like cookies from flour water and sugar. But where does the recipe come from?

Well—who knows? Maybe it evolved. Maybe we were cooked up in a kitchen. I prefer fun hypotheses like Charles Fort’s. It sounded crazy when he said it; now it sounds reasonable, now that we know that UFOs are real and have been around for a long time. Fort, you recall, combed through newspapers and periodicals in the New York public library in the early twentieth century, filtering anomalies into his notebooks. Then he bound them into a vision. He suggested that we might be property, owned by an alien race. He didn’t know if they won us in a lottery, inherited the planet as part of a bequest, claimed us after a battle, or agreed to accept us in lieu of cash in a game of intergalactic poker. The reasons, whatever they may be, are unthinkable because we have no point of reference. They relate to memories in the storage banks of the alien race(s) linked by connections as invisible to us as dark matter. We don’t know if or how they design histories or store memories to preserve identities distributed through folds of space-time. We can’t even see them, much less understand how they evolved. We don’t even believe in them yet. All we can do is suppose that they, too, construct peculiar geometries in the blank space of the zero point field. Perhaps the multiverse unfolds in their imaginations like origami too, a multidimensional canvas on which they paint or sculpt the equivalent of art.

Who knows? Anyway, the first steps are the hardest: believing that they exist, and then, believing in our belief. At this point in time, we don’t believe. We believe in disbelief. By design, I believe.

In a court of law, lawyers tell me, three witnesses who say the same thing are considered the best evidence. Well, witnesses have testified to the presence of our watchers, owners or visitors, whatever they are, by the thousands. The data points are voluminous. They plot countless visits by beings in luminous discs, silent triangles or elongated craft with portholes; they have been documented for decades, perhaps centuries, they have been here anyway a long long time—they or their robots or clones—but we act as if they don’t exist. We can’t map what we can’t comprehend. We have impressions, images of conspicuous displays, stored in collective memory banks, but we turn them into myth. We make fiction instead of history. Fiction is the province of the fantastic and distracts us—and their manipulations of energy or matter seem fantastic, make no mistake. The effects we have observed imply an understanding that we can not apprehend. And they seem to hide and show themselves, they seem to play a game of cosmic boo and peek—but to what purpose?

Once again… who knows?

Anyway… the DNA came from somewhere. Whatever the source, perhaps our owners think of us as dairy farmers think of their herds. Perhaps they sip like emotional or intellectual milk our cultural excrescence which is useful in some way, or tasty, an occasional treat, a distraction from the task of searching for meaning. Maybe we add a page to the choral songbook of the multiverse. Maybe they feel affection when we head for the barn at the end of the day, the sun steeping the pasture with its lone oak tree slanting in shadow. Maybe the twilight sky that brightens before it fades is a liminal image that stirs them, too, a portal to something they have lost and can not recall.

Or maybe they are proud of our halting progress as parents delight in a child’s first steps, watching us splutter into our neighborhood in primitive machines, skipping to the moon or Mars like toddlers coming downstairs and walking around the block for the first time, seeing with wonder that there is something real indeed across the real street.

Seeing the street at the same time for the first time. Seeing the bridge and seeing the distant bank in the same moment.

We have been born or bred to believe we are individuals, discrete entities, selves with will, feeling and intention, and more than that, that we are the apple of God’s eye or—in a more secular vein—the top of the food chain, something special… instead of transient manifestations of energy and matter in complex relationship to everything else.

But it’s not true.

We are more mist than mountain, more metaphor than mist.

Disorienting, isn’t it, thinking like this? It gives me a headache too. Better to believe our beliefs, believe we are the selves that we experience reflexively as points of reference for the shifting contours of our so-called interior lives.

The task then is to manage the threat of chaos. There are three ways to do this: the Small Way, the Big Way, and the Biggest Way. My colleagues see management of the Small Way as their job. We leave the Big Way to visitors by default. The Biggest Way, we leave to It.

Okay. So… are we the sum of our moveable parts?

Who knows? And does it matter? We will do what we do, think as we think, regardless, take comfort in what we call “cultures” which like “selves” exist as higher branches on a fractal tree and also seem to be sums of, more or less, all of their moveable parts.

The machinery breathes. That’s what matters. People believe in their beliefs.

I was walking home the other night at dusk. It is November, and the weather is changing. The dry leaves of maple and ash and oak were blowing on the pavement, the bare branches of trees clean and leafless against a luminous sky. Clouds streamed from the northwest, obscuring moon and stars, low clouds illuminated by light from the distant city. The road was empty. There are no streetlights in the village, and I trusted the pattern of the pavement to channel my walking toward the bridge across the ravine without bumping into something or stumbling into the shallow ditch along the road.

High on the right, through a tall hedge marking a line of property, windows blazed from a mansion built to the right scale for the land. It was an old home, brick and stone, and its high windows glowed. I flashed back to a cold night when I was a child sent to buy a loaf of bread at a commissary in a high rise. The white bread was in a paper sack in my gloved hands, and coming back, the wind stinging my cheeks, I saw through the blurry prisms of my tears high on the right the bright window of a mansion above an elaborate entrance. Through the window a portrait on the wall of a library filled with books lining shelves from ceiling to floor, a woman in a dress in a chair in a golden frame, a picture light illuminating the portrait, the bright window signifying a refuge. A nexus. A place. A node. A home.

That mansion is gone. It was torn down years ago to make way for a high rise, a glass stack of lighted windows fronting the city on the dark water. Now a bluish candescence spills through glass walls floor-to-ceiling into the night and dissipates before it reaches the ground.

The image of that mansion is a memory, don’t you see, a chemical trace. There’s nothing there. The house no longer exists. It never did. Oh, something was there, once upon a time, something that we agree to call a mansion, but I don’t know what it was. Or what kind of life was lived inside. Or who that woman was. And neither do you. You think you know but you don’t.

You believe in your beliefs.

We presume so much, don’t we? We presume everything. These little slides or luminous images in our minds are slotted into a matrix made to hold them like tiny panes of painted glass, buttressing the belief that we inhabited a past and that the past existed. We believe in the reality of vanished landscapes.

If history is a symphony played in a hall with dead spaces, so are individual lives. The chemical bonds between memories weaken, bleed into one another, leak through once-firm walls of cells of a database housing a house of self. The diminishment of memory contrasts with the illusion of fixity of purpose and self-definition that sustained us. The terminator, the line on the moon where darkness meets the light, throws mountains into sharp relief, but the light and darkness on either side of the line are absolute. Only by contrast do we see anything at all, and then, only for a moment.

The darkness and light, as the man said, are one.

A plumb line of gravity sinks as a point of reference for the floor on which we think we walk. Everything, it seems. We are always in freefall in the deep well of the night. We project imaginary patterns onto stars but cannot see our nearest neighbors, even when they cross the street and walk into our yard. We see them if at all through a glass darkly. Civilizations more ancient than we can imagine, invisible because they are unthinkable.

“Ants can’t get that dogs exist.”

That’s what the professor said.

The professor is also named Paul. When I last saw him, he sank into the billowing cushions of his immense wing chair. His white hair flamed from his face like Einstein’s. He is more massive than Brando, he is huge, but embarrassed by the obsession with obesity. It’s only a fad, he says, dismissing it with a wave. Then reaches for something to nibble on, something to suck.

The professor is a loveable cuss who cannot stop looking. He says he’s retired but doesn’t know how. He can’t help it. He still wants to know. He calls it blessing or curse, depending. What else would I do? he asks in mock exasperation. Play golf?

The idea is funny. I imagine clubs like little sticks in his huge hands, his enormous bulk as solid as a building as he whiffs. I laugh.

The professor is always in the grip of some confounding event. He thrives on irregular shapes, feeling rough edges with his fingers, liking the occasional ouch. He wouldn’t know what to do with a smooth surface or a curve that didn’t challenge him. He prefers to live in hair shirts of perpetual perplexity. Itchiness makes him feel alive.

His eyes often look into the distance. Sometimes people turn to see what he is looking at and can’t see anything at all.

On the other hand, the professor often trips over his own feet.

He obsesses about our owners. He knows they come and go. He has been immersed in the data for decades. He has written hundreds of papers, good ones with careful documentation, reasonable conclusions, and of course, he is ignored. His work is published in periodicals that nobody reads. He lectures to empty rooms but no one puts it on YouTube.

He doesn’t know how long they stay or to what end. Even if we analyzed the metal from a crash or their flesh, it does not tell us anything important. We can do that analysis, it is well within our competence, but to what end? We want to know the story, and the story is a muddle without a point of reference. Where’s the narrative? That’s what we need. A narrative, not abstractions. They seem to want to make it a muddle too and so do we, our own people, guardians of the interface, he winks, meaning our colleagues, who muddle the muddle more.

Ideas can be as alive as people, more alive than some. The people who appointed themselves guardians of the interface, keepers of the secrets, do nothing but dream them up. They invent and alter and manage perceptions and images and ideas in the battle space of our minds. They create relationships between things, then fill in the blanks.

Most keep the faith and die in silence. But once in a while one will have misgivings. Then there’s a crack and a little light gets in, as the song says. Someone gets an itch that has to be scratched.

My friend—call him Herb—is a social scientist. Like the professor, Herb is a tenured academic. But he has worked on contract for years. People like Herb say they distrust us but believe me, they’re easier to recruit than hookers. They talk the talk, but they always take the money.

Herb looks like an academic. Can you picture one? Got it? That’s Herb.

Much of his research has been funded in the dark. Of course, a lot of research in social sciences has been done that way for fifty years; everything is dual use, there are always plausible reasons, and then there are the ways the “intelligence community” as we call it with a laugh can use it, too.

You think I am alluding to something small. You have no idea. We have spun a vast dark web for generations through media, research in and out of industry, entertainment, universities—you cannot imagine how vast it is. Because they turn everything typical into an anomaly. That keeps you from seeing it whole. You never see it all mapped out.

Try. Go ahead. Try to imagine how big it is.

See what I mean? You can’t even come close.

Herb works in the blur between social and psychological, looking for means of manipulation, although he doesn’t call it that, and partners with experts in particle beams, lasers, electromagnetic energy—there are many interesting effects. Like stopping people in their tracks. Making them vomit. Or heat up. Or their brains go fuzzy. Or putting voices in their heads.

Memory, too. Herb works with memory. It’s a passion, not a duty. He works with individual memories, not “memory” in the abstract. He makes memories and he makes memories go away. Or he keeps them intact but breaks up the index so they can’t be retrieved without a good program. You have to know the code that unlocks the code. Herb can intensify some memories and reduce the intensity of others. It’s like using a mixer, he says, recording a song. A little more bass, a little less trumpet, and you wouldn’t know it’s the same song.

‘Of Mice and Men’, he calls his current research.

Herb can make mice forget what they just learned. It looks like magic if you don’t know the science. He distinguishes short term and long term encoded proteins and plays games with them. He has a blast. His playground is small at the moment, just little mice minds, but as Herb said the other night, looking at the streetlight refracted through his glass of sherry, “Just you wait.” Then smiled at me and I smiled back.

His wine looked like liquid ruby from across the study. The wind rattled the ornamental shutters on his three story brick colonial home. His neighbor had raked that afternoon but the leaves blew from his piles onto Herb’s lawn. We could see the leaves swirling in the wind. A neighbor was waiting for his dog, scooper in one hand and leash in the other. The dog was a blur. Then the man and the dog moved away, their distorted images flowing along the thick panes of antique glass.

Herb sipped his sherry and smiled again. He and his colleagues had moved a memory from the brain of one mouse to the brain of another. Then they distributed memories randomly in a dozen mice, busting up the culture in a way, the group still knowing everything but not in the same way. The different juxtaposition in time and space changed the frame. The memories could all be retrieved and resequenced in the proper order, restoring the right tilt to the world. But as I said, you had to know the code.

But that wasn’t why he wanted to talk. That was gossip. He invited me over because he had an itch he needed to scratch. When he turned at last to the subject on his mind, his smile faded.

Herb had been invited somewhere for the weekend. They came through a friend with a channel to the place for the meeting. They wanted to discuss disclosure. That’s all he would say. A tap on the shoulder came like an invitation to Skull and Bones, and off he went. A weekend away, expenses paid. He never says no. When he flies, sometimes windows are blacked out. Sometimes elevators take a long time to go down. You can’t even see the road into the mountain, that’s how good they are. Google Earth is their toy, too, and all the mapping platforms, so unless you have your own satellites, or code to correct the altered images, you haven’t got a reference—don’t you see?—so you can’t really see the earth. All you see is the floor they have given you, seemingly concrete.

A weekend away with men and women from diverse disciplines was a treat. There were several dozen, I think he said. Or did I fill in a blank? We make connections without thinking, fill in the blank spaces. Without thinking consciously, I ought to say. Narratives complete themselves. No, I think he did say a couple of dozen. The agenda at any rate was simple: should they tell? They talked over the pros and cons. How long can we sit on this? How long should we? More people know now, despite our work, how well we have hidden it all in plain sight, but they don’t know that they know. That’s the kicker. Some know but don’t know that they know.

But—how long should we keep it up?

Then their facilitator said—now, this is a direct quote, and Herb looked perplexed as he said it, his affect appropriate to the words—”What will the cattle do? Will they stay inside the fence or will they stampede?”

Hm. I see that the metaphor cattle might be confusing. I use “cattle” as a metaphor again, but not the way I meant before. The cattle to which I am referring here is the whole herd of humanity, the mass of all humankind, our shared mental space. Not the cattle I meant before, when I said that we humans might look to our owners like cows. Then I meant cows. That was a simile. This is a metaphor. That was speculation. This is historical fact.

So let me back up and say it again.

One morning my friend Herb received a call. There is going to be a meeting, he was told. People will come together. Then the meeting will not have happened. There will be no minutes, no memory of the meeting.

We need to discuss disclosure—again. Again we must make a decision.

Your expenses, he was told, will be paid as usual through the Department of International Studies at Oberlin. They will request a paper and you will send one. It won’t be published so it doesn’t matter which.

Then the caller became serious. Things have been warming up. You understand what I mean? Yes, exactly. We don’t know how hot it will get. It’s not in our control.

The question is, has it percolated long enough through the mind of the herd to bring us to a tipping point? Will people understand and adjust? Or will they go through the barb wire?

I did it again. That wasn’t much help, was it? Of course you don’t know that point of reference, either. How could you? It’s from another story. So let’s go there, okay? It’s a detour, but the shortest route to all goals is the detours.

Once upon a time, I was waiting at a neighborhood bank—it doesn’t matter, but it happened to be Midwest Bank, a local institution with a dozen branches. I have lunch with some of the officers now and again at a nearby club. Some play tennis, we all play cards. I was waiting that day to renew a CD. A new vice president was helping me, middle aged, mostly bald, a little fringe of gray and darker hair, a paunch pushing at the tight belt of his not very expensive suit, starting to edge over the belt like a shelf. He was friendly enough, the kind of fellow who might manage the branch someday; he was processing papers to renew my CD. A sheet of paper and a couple of cards were on the glass top of his desk. His eyes moved back and forth between a computer screen I couldn’t see and a pad on which he made notations. We chatted as he calculated interest.

My last conversation with the professor—we had gone to a local casino and walked in winding paths among the noisy slots, turning this way and that as we talked, altering the curve of the interface, in case—was on my mind. In the past, I wouldn’t have said anything. But now, I’m old enough so I don’t care. Let people think I am crazy. Besides, it’s part of the job, part of the latest persona. My current job is thinking about things and saying stuff. At least, that’s how it looks. Like Paul the professor, my puppet “Paul” is intended to look creative, eccentric, be genius-level at times, but always what up here they call “different.”

So as I waited I said to Glen, that’s the new V-P, I said, Glen, you know, I read this article the other day, and told him about the sighting I heard from the professor how pilots and air traffic controllers and radar stations all reported the same thing, how huge the thing had to have been to make a blip like that, how huge in fact it was according to both pilots, they literally soiled themselves, I said, and he nodded, filling in my name on a blank.

We had something happen on our farm, once.

Oh? I said.

Yes, he scribbled on a card, up north, on the family farm. One night this trooper came speeding along the road chasing after this bright light flying low along the hills. The thing glowed with incredible intensity, not like something with a light, but like the thing itself glowed from the inside out. It was white but it was so white, the purest white light, and he skidded to a stop, which is when we heard him outside on the loose gravel and went out to see. This thing whatever it was had apparently come down behind our barn. The trooper was a guy we knew, everybody knew Luke, he was standing at the open door of his prowler, behind the door like he was hunkering down, looking at this bright light behind our barn illuminating trees and everything back there. We stood there looking at it with him for a long time. He told us he chased this thing from the other side of town through town and out along the highway by our farm.

Are you going to go back there? I asked.

Hell, no, he shook his head. No way in hell he’d go back there alone.

Then whatever it was suddenly rose up so silent and it moved fast so we couldn’t really see or it disappeared. But one minute this bright white light was hovering over the barn and then it was up there looking like a star and then we couldn’t see it anymore. It was like night descended suddenly upon the house, the pasture, on us, everything, and everything was still again. Then the insects started chirping and we realized they had stopped.

I’ll never forget it, he said. He turned two cards toward me and handed me a pen. I signed the cards on the lines at the X.

That was the end of it, then?

Well, no, he said, see, the next morning we went out behind the barn to see was anything there, and we found broken branches in kind of a circle like something had snapped them off, grass scorched and the edges of the branches burnt too and some of the leaves.

But—do you know much about cattle?

I shook my head.

He said, something scared hell out of the cattle. Cattle know about barb wire. They know what it is. But that night, so many of our cows went through the barb wire, they went right through it, they tore themselves up so bad, udders and all; we had to destroy most of them, they were so cut up.

Nobody ever saw anything like it.

He folded the CD and put it in a plastic sleeve.

OK. So I told you the name of the bank where we had this conversation. I can tell you we put money into that bank or another, but money is another null set, isn’t it? Money doesn’t exist, either. Money is energy stored in a form we pretend. We act like money is real, interest will be paid, businesses exist, and that’s the thing—it’s all held together by couplers that are imperfect but good enough and it stays together because nobody pulls at it too hard.

You don’t want something scaring hell out of the cattle so they go right through the barb wire and cut themselves to pieces and have to be put down.

Anyway, that’s what the facilitator meant when he said about cattle, will they stay inside the fence or stampede? He meant what Glen at the bank meant but Glen meant real cows.

So Herb went to the meeting. Now, I know Herb. I know him as well as one can know another. Or oneself, as I have been saying. Herb went to the meeting intending to weigh in on the side of telling people everything. It’s our planet, he said. People have a right to know what’s happening. It’s time, he chimed like he was an alarm and humanity a clock. Like he knew all about it.

Then he went to the meeting. And when he came back—I never saw anything like it. He had turned completely around. He went away one hundred per cent in favor of disclosure. He came back just as adamant against.

I asked him what he had heard that changed his mind but he wouldn’t say. Well, I asked, who was there? He wouldn’t say. I wouldn’t say, myself. Lots of different ones, he said. Most knew a lot more about it than me. He was leaning forward in his wing chair looking like that trooper might have looked, as I imagine him looking in the memory of Glen the vice president of the bank, staring at the light behind the barn.

He wouldn’t face me exactly. His gaze was at an angle. He was looking out the window but looking at nothing. There was nothing there to see.

That’s all I’m going to say, he said. Then he said, they’re afraid it won’t hold.

What won’t?

He looked at me with sorrow and I believe pity.

Paul, we wake up and get dressed and go to work. We have breakfast and watch TV. We buy stuff and cut the grass. It’s the little things, the things you can’t make people do. They have to want to do them. They have to believe in them. They have to believe in their beliefs.

The way we do it, it’s good enough, it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough. You know that. We can’t take the chance.

He sat back, sinking into the billowing cushions of his immense chair. His white hair flamed from his face like Einstein’s. I knew why he was upset. And he knew I knew why. The loop completed, as it will.

Is it just chemical, I wondered, looking at it from the outside? Looking at Herb leaning in his chair, looking at how I must have looked, looking at Herb. The way fear is transmitted, I mean? Is it some primordial pheromone that triggers fight-or-flight? That makes the hair stand up on the back of the neck? The heart race and the palms sweat?

That makes us want to get out while we can?

Except that what we’re in is ourselves. And there are no boundaries between us. Each the bridge, each the other side.

And we’re in it together. Us and them and then some.

Old men have the luxury of telling the truth because no one pays attention. Old men are irrelevant to currents of action, reflection beside the point when life is brutish.

People concede to us wisdom or perspective only because they don’t matter.

It was right around that time, if I remember correctly, that I met Susan for lunch in Chicago. I have known Susan for years. Susan is a social worker which can mean lots of things. She worked for community services for a while, had a stint at County Hospital, and I think she worked for a time at New Life Counseling Center. Now she works mostly with addicted women who get beaten up a lot. She has done it for some time so she must have learned how to use herself as a tool and still go home, kick off her shoes, and watch TV the rest of the night.

We had lunch at a trendy restaurant on the near north side. We laughed when we read the names of the fancy vegetables. “California stuff,” I said, looking at a waiter setting down a plate of white and pale green stalks and leaves.

Susan had a sandwich with three kinds of cheese and asparagus and a red paste on yellow bread with lots of seeds. The little bit of salad on the side was full of curled greens and coiled carrots. I went for something hot. I had my leather coat zipped up the whole time. I was still cold from walking from my car in that wind.

Susan looked good. She sounded solid. She was into a new relationship so she was hopeful—again. She usually picked horses that came out of the gate strong but faded in the stretch.

I listened a lot and seldom spoke, nodding to indicate what she called “empathetic listening.” Through the plate glass window the gray sky had lost all definition. The discoloration became rain and then the rain turned into snow. There was sleet too and slush along the sidewalks by the time we finished eating, ankle-deep and cold. Susan had parked in front of the bistro and drove me to my car parked a couple of blocks away.

My cold feet flexed in my wet shoes as she turned on the heater. The sleet squeaked on her worn wipers. She turned all the way around to pull out and went slowly down the narrow street.

There it is, I said.

That one? I was looking for the Ford.

The Ford’s long gone. There was even a Mazda between.

She pulled in behind the old Toyota and turned off the wipers. The end of the scraping sounded good. Sleet ran in thick rivulets down the clean windshield.

Susan continued to talk about what she wanted to do next, wondering was it too late, and should she give this guy a chance? Elmo was his name of all things. Maybe it was made up.

She lowered her window an inch or two, letting the car idle and keeping the heater on. Warm air flowed from the vents while a thin stream of cold air from the open window felt like white icing on a cake.

It was one of those conversations. You can’t make it happen, but when it does, you don’t ever want it to stop. First, there was the meal, hot chowder and crab cakes for me, fresh hot bread with drizzle to dip, a delicious sauvignon blanc from Cloudy Bay, the chatter and glasses and silver around us at precisely the right level. We hadn’t seen each other for a long time, and it felt so good just to be with her, eating quietly, taking our time, letting the ambient noise be a cushion for the pauses. It was like a real community filling in the blanks so we didn’t have to do everything ourselves. Beyond Susan at the next table, a young couple were playing footsie, the movements of the draped cloth betraying their game, looking at each other with little smiles. Made me nostalgic. Outside, the snow and sleet were really coming down, the snow blowing slantwise across the window and people hurrying through the mess, holding their coats closed at the collar, dipping their heads in the bitter wind when they had to wait for a light. But we were inside, warm and dry. Susan talked on as she often did about her life. I had heard a lot of it before. It wasn’t what we talked about so much as knowing one another for all those years.

Sitting in the car afterward, I thought I was doing OK, nodding a lot like I said, paying attention most of the time, when she turned off the heater and gave me a look.

“You haven’t said much about your work.”

“Oh?” I shrugged. “I told you some things, what I could, what I thought you might find interesting.”

“Paul,” she said, her eyes not letting me off the hook. “Paul, you told me you were talking to people who were tortured. You were working with people doing it, too. You told me about it last time. How it affected them. Then you were off about where the planet might be headed, other kinds of life forms and God only knows what. But I keep going back to what you said about the Turks. And the Uzbeks. It was chilling.”

I shrugged and shivered. I leaned over and turned on the heater.

“The techniques aren’t the thing. It’s pretty cut and dried.”

She looked at me for a long time.

“Paul,” she said, reaching and taking my hand. “Do you remember what you said once? About people going over the line?”

I did, but forgot I had said it.

“I guess.”

“Paul—you’re over the line.”

I had a sinking feeling and looked down at her hands. Her hands are where the aging showed most.

“You told me yourself, you don’t know how to talk to normal people anymore. You don’t share their points of reference.”

I turned to look outside. “I said that?”

“Yes,” she smiled, getting inside. “You said you live in a world that people don’t want to know. You didn’t want to talk about it, either, but you did, some. Do you think I would forget something like that? Do you think I can’t see what’s going on?”

“Why? What am I doing?”

“Oh, Paul,” she sighed. “For someone so smart, you sure can be dumb. Do you remember the books I gave you on trauma? How it affects people?”

“Sure.” I nodded. “I read some of it. It was interesting.”

“Why do you think I asked you to do that?”

I shrugged again. “Because the people I talk to, whether its ones doing interrogation, or ones who have been worked on, or ones who have had encounters, or the ones who keep the interface, manage the deception, whoever it is, they all show signs of trauma, right? You wanted me to understand what symptoms they would have.”

“Yes, but why else?”

I shrugged a final time. “I don’t know.” I was truly blank.

“Because,” she said, squeezing my hand, “you’re showing symptoms too. From listening. It’s almost the same as being there.”

I guess it was obvious to her, doing the work she does. But have you ever not known something so completely that when someone says it, the recognition of it is like all of the air rushing out of the room? You can’t breathe, you can’t even think of breathing. Then, when you do speak, your emotions are so raw, like someone sank a shaft and hit oil, because they have been buried for so long, you can feel the sobbing rising inside but refuse to let it out.

Susan could feel it, too. She took my other hand and I saw she had lost weight. I noticed for the first time that her navy skirt didn’t pucker as much on her belly.

“Paul, you can’t not know what you know. You can’t unlearn it. It’s who you are. But part of you must know what it does to you.”

I nodded. She was wearing a ring, not an engagement. Then I looked up into the deep well of her eyes.

Everything let go.

“Do you have any idea what we do? Or what they do? Or how long it’s been going on? Do you have any idea who we are? How much we are not what you think? Or who you think?”

She had unleashed a beast and realized it now. The fear in her eyes was evident.

She shook her head. “Do I want to know?” She had lost the offensive and knew it. She was looking for a place to hide. I watched her cover and duck.

“I’m concerned with what it’s doing to you. You say you kind of retired but you still talk to all these people, and –”

“No,” I shook my head. “You think you’re concerned but you don’t know. You don’t know. You’re concerned about the wrong things. That’s how it’s designed, Susan.”

The floor on the deep well of the night gave way. Her eyes darted back and forth looking for something to hold. During that transient glimpse into my life, into all life, she understood, felt it like a sudden chill and almost went into panic mode. She almost headed for the barb wire. Then her eyes shifted from my face to the window where snow was dropping from the trees and she found a reprieve. Everyday people passed on the walk in overcoats and parkas, a woman tottered by in sheer hose and four inch heels, comic relief, watching her step through the melting slush. Behind her, the old stone of a brownstone mansion was whitened by snow blowing off the roof. Susan saw as she tilted her head and looked up an elegant doorway with its black wrought iron gate and above it a second story window blazing with electric light.

“Paul—” she said.

I shook my head.

“Susan, my name isn’t Paul. It never was.”

She looked for a connection. That’s what people do. Try to plug in.

“I remember a few years ago,” she almost laughed although nothing was funny. “Someone called you Herb. You made a joke of it, saying they were getting old.”

I shook my head again. “It isn’t Paul and it isn’t Herb. And I am not a professor. I never was.”

After thirty-seven years. Thirty-seven years.

“I’ve had so many names, Susan, I can’t remember them all.”

She let my hands loose and they came back to my side of the car. I believed she accepted my confession and all of the things that it shattered with professional equanimity. So I leaned closer, hoping to hold her in my arms. I wanted to feel her and inhale her scent. I wanted her warmth. That was all. I just wanted to be close. But the fracture was too abrupt. In the moment, I thought I confessed in order to be real, but as she drew back, her eyes receding into the distance, I realized that she saw more clearly than I ever would that I had, as always, simply needed to prevail.

A splendid slipstream anthology (Subtle Edens, from Elastic Press: London, November 2008) includes this breakthrough story, which received this review:

“Silent Emergent, Doubly Dark” by Richard Thieme opens with a quote from James Joyce, whom I consider to be a primogenitor of slipstream. Thieme, fortunately, doesn’t try to match Joyce for wordplay and instead gives us a calm, flat look into the psyche of an alien being. Thieme explores various levels of reality through his protagonist, moving farther and farther away from the seen, into unglimpsed realms. The story itself, like Joyce, is a bit difficult, but Thieme’s beautiful descriptions and intriguing concepts keep things interesting. This is a piece that truly deserves the slipstream label.

Silent Emergent, Doubly Dark

by Richard Thieme

What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

- Ulysses, James Joyce

I wanted to leave the Earth the minute I knew I could.

Didn’t everybody? Well, no, I learned. Everybody didn’t.

So most don’t. They’re wired by design to like their home planets. I was wired differently. I hungered to plunge into the cultures of other worlds.

First, however, I had to matriculate, study psi and physiology, physics and symbol systems. I had to learn how to weave words, then learn how to weave the wind.

Lacking siblings and close friends, restricted to the precincts of the spaceport by my mother’s work, I played inside my mind in a gravity well of necessary solitude. That, I discovered, was a precondition for the bounce.

“That’s you, there, when you threw the dice,” my mentor said, showing me a retro of a toddler in a room. A doctor entered, and the child’s eyes – my eyes – filled with fear. Then the apprehension vanished and the child rushed into the doctor’s arms.

“That’s when you went off-world,” my mentor said. “That’s the platform, that moment, there. We provided the wiring but you had to make the splice.”

#  #  #

The first culture I explored on my own was the whrill-ggg! or the whirlibangs as I called them. The whrill-ggg! lived in one of the small planets at Sirius B. They lived inside the dirt like ants in a huge hill.

They had ritual memories of when the dwarf roared and they lost all but the most roastable of ancestors. Memories were enacted in the darkness twice each year and then the little ones exchanged hugs and touches. The dark carapace-encrusted ones and the thickly feathered remnants of the flyers were the only ones to survive. The pinkies, the fair-ones, all died in the flames.

Two major races built inside and moved mountains literally, turning everything upside down. Whereas before there had been towers in the sky, there were towers inverted, plunging into the Earth. Tunnels connected them in fractal-branching patterns that looked for all the world like self-luminous trees. They cultivated luminescent bacterial gardens and learned to breed thousands of different batches. The inner darkness glowed with every imaginable color and hue. The inner world became diverse, nuanced with colors that the day-star would never have revealed, had the Roar not happened.

Unfortunately the feathered ones and the encrusted ones decided that they were more bonded to being feathered or encrusted than they were to being a single species. So the tribal divide coincided with the near-completion of the initial work on their inner world. They fractured in two. Still, both tribes spoke glowingly of the beauty of their habitat when seen in a flash, an intuitive flash better than a visual, and that was the precondition of recombination. Even after they fractured, paradoxically, a single luminous web unified their common life.

This is what they did. They built a framework of bonded earthworks that absorbed extraneous light. Absorbent pebbles sucked in the light and left a blackness so thick it was nearly visible. Then they engineered a number of levels by programming tiny animals, then bigger ones, then ones that were unimaginably big, to dig patterns they wanted to etch in several dimensions. Then they lined the tunnels with liquids that thickened and held to the walls as they dried. Then they released luminescent bacteria that found the right walls and began to live and multiply in and on them. But because of the pressure as the gradient increased, there were apertures over and around each section. So from any vantage point in the primitive grid they could see every hallway and tunnel, all glowing with various colors and depicting the entire planet in precise miniature. Then when they altered or as they called it “played upon” one part or another, they could see the effect on the whole as the luminous life-forms adapted themselves to the changes. Then they would execute the changes or not, depending on consequences.

I had just arrived when they took me to see the First Matrix. It had long ago crumbled when they stopped repair-work and built the Second. But its smudged colors and broken walls and portals made it somehow even more exquisite to behold. It was breathtaking, really, coming down the locks and through the gates that held the heat up or out and entering the cooler darkness then being taken by the hand and led through the lightless maze around and up to a platform where suddenly as one came around the last bend the ancient remains of the First Matrix glowed with indescribable beauty. Blues, corals, yellows, pinks, these I remember most. But when I named the colors I saw they laughed. My frog-eye and frog-brain couldn’t come close to saying what they saw with their million-faceted dark-adapted eyes.

The feathered ones and encrusted ones rebonded after the Great War which is why I was able to go. They never sent newbies to war zones or even to temblors, which is what we called cultures that gave signs of impending disaster, war, catastrophe, or collapse. They tentatively called themselves the whrill-ggg! which was an amalgam of their racial names like Serbo-Croatian or Anglo-Franc had been on Earth. You could tell that the name still sounded strange on their tongues, except of course they did not have tongues. They had hundreds of vibrating cilia around their mouths and inside what we called their lips. When they sang together at council, harmonized on hug-days, or aroused themselves for a planetary change, the humming sounded like cellos and bassoons to me, then violins when the younger ones joined, then instruments for which I have no names when the ready women, neuts, and crawlers all joined the chorus.

I learned a few sounds which I made in different ways with my agitator, my cheeks, my sound banks, and my thrummers. I learned how to ask for something to eat or drink, inquire in at least seven levels of formality after their health or well-being, admire with appropriate restraint the nubile budding of their ready ones, and of course ask for directions to the channels of elimination. “Tubes and cools” we called it in the seminar room. There, however, it sounded more like “RRggghhh—hroopeff!” and “Wwwwrilllling-upsss?”

The feathered ones fascinated me because they still had wonderful stories of soaring. Their feathers had thickened for better insulation and most were unable even to flutter or primp. But their hug-fests were filled with images of soaring in the twin-sunned skies before the Roar and their young ones twittered and danced with excitement.

I lived there only for one month. That was the term for the first journey and no matter how much you loved the culture, there was no changing it. I can understand now how impressionable we were, coming out of the academy, so eager to translate or adapt. The danger of falling in love with your first culture and going native, particularly since the target is chosen to be congruent with your hunger for belonging, was too great.

I hated to leave. Since they had seen academicians come and go on a monthly basis for centuries now, they never grew attached. Their hive mind did not entertain attachment in the same way, anyhow. You were either part of the hive or you weren’t. If you weren’t, you were food or enemy or guest. Guests were never loved inordinately or adored during hug-fests beyond their limits.

My eyes had barely begun to open, don’t you see. When I saw the First Matrix it took my breath away but it was as if I was opening my eyes under water for the first time. A week later I returned to the vista and used it as a benchmark. Already I could see why they laughed. There were hundreds of luminosities, nuanced gradations of brightness and dimness I had totally missed when they asked what I saw. They only asked questions, I know now, that the academy provided. They weren’t just being polite, they were taking part in a program the rules and objectives of which they understood thoroughly and had for many generations, too many to count. By the end of the second week I wanted to stay and move my eyes from color to color, light to light. After the third week I was cocky and described the harmonies I could discern with glib triumphalism. This too they tolerated, saying nothing, giving me hugs and strokes with their lateral cilia. Then at the end of the fourth week when I knew I would leave the next “day” I stood there and wept at the beauty of it, the inexplicable patterns I had just begun to notice, and all I wanted to do was stay inside that planet and learn and learn and see and see.

But rules are rules. Through the gates we clambered and through the locks growing hotter and hotter until they bade me farewell and I came up into the tube that sucked me like milk in a straw into the ship and before I knew it I was home.

#  #  #

“Hey! Alien Brain!”

It happened outside the academy walls after I returned from my first excursion. Youth from the spaceport barracks, three of them, made bold when they saw how I walked. I was growing accustomed to Earth weight but still lurched from side to side. I was more aware of the bright light. Everything was glaring! Everything on Earth looked whitewashed in too-bright sun, unfiltered. Colors bled and shadows were shocking and harsh.

The three of them blocked my way. I looked at their faces. They seemed pinched, narrow-nosed. Their eyes were like slits and their mouths gushed words. Humans, I was learning, are a funny species. They think talking is doing. Their souls ride floods of vocables like rafts in rapids.

“So how’s Alien Brain, huh?”

I measured the distance. I withdrew my head toward my shoulders, my neck shortening. My hands rose at my sides like winged claws. My eyes burned with defense-of-nest rage.

The talker cooled and stepped back. His face lost color, nostrils flaring, eyes opening wide. He rose to his height, flexing his fists. But then his fingers unclenched, his expression relenting.

“Big important alien brain, huh!” he said, but he backed off. The others backed off with him, feigning grace and style. “Watch yourself!”

I hunched my shoulders in an unmistakable take on encrusted ones entering the feeding ring and facing down the feathered ones. Ritualized, to be sure, but there was no mistaking the menacing implication. The encrusted ones were fierce. Inside I felt my carapace shift plates and adapt to the diminished threat.

They backed off, honoring their fear. They knew that I knew and knew I knew they knew. It is never disreputable I learned on B to honor one’s fear. Fear is noble when it is honored. It is ignoble only when dismissed.

I didn’t know why they called me Alien Brain. Whatever I had learned from the whrlll-ggg! in one month was still percolating into my personality, still inflecting how I held myself as a possibility for action. I couldn’t see myself yet.

Had nothing to do with a brain, anyway. Brains are physical, I thought then – before I lived four earth-years among the Tzdow in artificial orbiting cities.

After my excursion to Sirius B, I wrote a paper which caught the attention of professors. I emphasized not so much the adaptation of the two dominant cultures to the interior of the planet but the relationship between the symbolic matrix they continued to rebuild with greater and greater refinement, the nuances of the colors, the ripples of luminosity and flux, the fact that a snapshot of the symbolic system at any moment produced a static image of near-perfect symmetry, regardless of the point of view from which it was taken. This meant that the blended cultures had an ability to synthesize diverse thought-forms at successively higher levels of abstraction and was able to think more than multi-dimensionally. They were able to see their mental representations as dogs having not tens or dozens but hundreds of tails, as it were, and they were able to imagine all the dogs chasing all the tails both in a dynamic simulation always in flux and as a static snapshot, a map of the interior of the planet and more importantly of their own well-integrated hive mind.

I was well into the Gray Zone. That’s what pleased my mentors.

The ultimate task for the Cosmos as we arrogantly called our pan-galactic collective was to narrow the Gray Zone. The Gray Zone exists between our mental multi-dimensional maps and the things they represent. Because the hive on B, for example, is dynamic, there is a always latency or lag time between the frequently reiterated map and whatever is “out there” or rather “in here” as in fact was literally true on B. That latency was down to a few nanoseconds for the hive mind which is remarkable considering that the representations were made almost exclusively of wetware, flows of luminous bacteria that constantly shaped and reshaped themselves through spontaneous telepathic connection to subtle alterations in the composition of the materials of the planet – shifting strata, changing chemical balances, fluctuations in temperature – somehow they factored all of it in, devising quantitative measurements for relationships that others had not yet discovered.

As a recent graduate, this taught me how hastily I had applied words like “primitive” and “unsophisticated” to a feat that no other civilization to our knowledge had achieved.

No wonder the denizens of B were honored and were always the first stop of anyone endeavoring to understand how the Cosmos understood itself.

I left the academy infrequently after returning because contemplation of what I had seen, attempting to re-member it, became a preoccupation. This is not unusual, so deeply imprinted is the cadet by the living rainbow arcs of that inner world.

A post-excursion exercise illustrates how difficult it is to re-member what we saw.

I was using movables and mindscreens to plot the points I recalled of the First Matrix. I chose the most basic because it would be simpler, I thought. I smudged colors with an artist’s fastidious hand, moving pastel whorls along cracking lines between zones. The form of the whole emerged in four dimensions. I could run it in real time or let the slide show snap through the cycle.

Watching the weekly run one morning, I suddenly sat up and hit Block. A rainbow bridge spanning the chasm of the third divide did not look right. I took it ahead frame by frame, squinting as the bridge shifted in slow time and arced over a canyon I did not remember seeing.

“That’s funny.”

I buzzed for a Master and waited patiently until she came.

“I don’t remember it this way,” I explained, “but it works in the simulation. How could I have missed it?”

She ballooned her white skirts which seeped air as they settled to the floor as she arrived beside me. Her eyes were magnificent, telescopic and slightly tubular, protruding with the apparatus that enabled her to see little and big in the same scan.

“What happens if you remove the bridge?”

“Remove it entirely? Obliterate the link?”

“Yes,” she said. “What do you think would happen?”

“It would fall down.”

She twinkled. “Give it a try.”

I obliterated the bridge and backlashed parameters as if it had never existed. I fell back to a prior position and let the simulation race. To my surprise, the canyon was at first dark but slowly became self-luminous over time as bacteria flowed along its walls. It began to brighten about the time the bridge would have invented itself and the light arced through the air and formed a different bridge where there had been nothing, growing along a luminous flow. A dozen frames later, the bridge was there, made it seemed of light, pure light.

I sat back, hitting Block to stop the movement, staring at the bridge of light.

“What happened?” she asked.

“It built what was needed,” I said. “I understand that. But there was no material! How did the flow of information create a tangible structure out of thin air?”

“Well,” she said, smoothing her skirts and indrawing her stalks. “What would have to be true in order for that to happen? What kind of universe would it be if this simulation is correct?”

I thought for a moment. “Thought forms!” I said. “Thought forms as real as the material out of which …” – my mind was racing – “out of which everything is made.”

“Which means …?”

“Talpas!” I thought of that nasty monk taunting Madame de Neal. “The simulation forms so-called ‘reality’ in its own image – creates it, in a way – which means that the imagination, the mind, not only half perceives, but also half-creates.”

“And where does one begin and the other end?”

I looked inside my mind to see. After a moment, the Master laughed.

“Can you see? And if you can see, can you say what you see?”

I peered into the darkness, feeling deflated.

“I don’t think I can see, no,” I said. “And I have a hunch that if I could I could not say what I saw without distortion.”

“Without building bridges out of thin air, in other words …”

Suddenly I saw. “Yes!”

“So you do see?”

The moment passed. My mind was clanking machinery again, gears grinding. “I thought I saw …”

“No,” she gently corrected. “You saw, and now you think you saw.”

“Ah!” I said, growing excited. For a moment my mind flickered back and forth like a hologram being seeing and thinking I saw then seeing myself thinking then thinking I saw myself thinking I saw … collapsing into infinite regress.

Then I was sitting there again merely, the Master riffling her skirts as she rose.

“A good day for remembering,” she said with a twinkle. “A good day for forgetting, too.”

My laughter rang out as someone threw a switch in the control room and her simulated image vanished.

#  #  #

The Memory Game, the less pious call it. This is how Harambee, a senior classmate, explained it in a seminar.

“You didn’t grow up with siblings,” he said, “so you don’t know. I had a brother who was four years older. Once he asked if I remembered an incident that took place when I was four. It was very depressing, he said, how our parents lost control of their emotions. They went wild that night.

“That’s funny, I told him. I don’t remember it that way. I remember an argument full of good will, a respectful exchange that ended with a perky little kiss.

“Maybe we’re talking about two different things, he said.

“He was right, but not the way he was thinking. He always thought our home was insane.

So he remembered the story in a way that fit that decision. I always thought there was plenty of affection and good will. That’s how I approach life generally and I remembered the ‘same event’ in a way that was congruent with my happier self, my happier life.

“But is it the same event at all? Even if we agreed in the way we told the story, even if we got the planet or the galaxy to agree on how the story is told, would that do anything other than inflect the way we co-create the Cosmos, surrounding ourselves with seamless agreement that determines how we hold ourselves as possibilities for action?”

“Are you suggesting,” I asked, “that there is nothing ‘out there’ except what’s ’in here?’”

“Well, what kind of universe would we inhabit if that were true?”

I laughed. “That’s Theology. We’re in Cultural Studies, remember?”

“Are we?” he smiled.

#  #  #

The middle period of my learning was full of wonder. ‘You are learning so fast it is making you giddy,’ read one evaluation. ‘You can not absorb the lessons in other cultures fast enough to satisfy your hunger. Your need to connect is relentless. Unless you create and recreate the Big Picture, always using more data, you feel as if your life is meaningless. Your mind moves at a speed most cannot comprehend.’

I felt like I was balancing on the tip of a gyroscope spinning on a hair stretched between suns. Naturally, I lost balance and fell. The boundaries between disciplines that I had studied as if distinct disciplines – physics, exobiology, astrochemistry – blurred. Everything, I discovered, related to everything else.

Cultural Studies require at some point familiarity with the major research areas of exobiology. It is impossible to separate the physical from behaviors that seem to manifest what some call spirit and some call soul. Those are names for an integrated whole or the image of the whole projected by the perceiving being. Drill down through levels of abstraction defining behaviors of subcellular automata, cells, individual beings, colonies, or communities of all shapes and sizes and you find they are layers around a planet’s core. At some point they collapse and you plunge into nonspecific awareness where cognition becomes ill-defined prior to self-identification through reflexive consciousness.

The Universe begins and ends in consciousness that half-creates and half-perceives. Consciousness like the Universe is finite but unbounded. Therefore we must grieve not …

But I digress.

Exobiology is fascinating. The Gray Zone is even more important in that discipline. The proper study of biological entities, after all, is form. Form determines identity and identity is destiny. But form disappears in the Gray Zone. That means destiny as an intentional trajectory is impossible to trace to its source. It happens at the quantum level and it isn’t certain whether it’s a function of what’s there or how the mind sees what’s there. The dividing line between them is another Gray Zone.

The holographic brain flickers between distinctions until it gets a bad headache.

The important things in the Universe happen in the Gray Zone, between low and high tide, on the edges of things. That’s where we see most clearly that choices become decisions and decisions are engines of self-definition.

That’s where/when a species stops fooling around and plays the game with real money.

These insights evolved after I visited gas planets where higher beings float. They emerged apparently from the soup as membranes around chemical processes. They look to earthly eyes like gelatinous jellyfish, flexing in the currents of their atmospheres, as adapted as fish in a sea. Their forms are translucent, resilient, tough. They live at all levels of the float. They signal in all frequencies.

At one point they communicated through the exchange of gases but began specializing, making trade-offs. Energy became information and information discovered more appropriate forms for self-expression. Some ingathered nutrients, others defended the distributed network from chemical assault. As nutrient fishers became more efficient, the colony needed fewer of them. That allowed the defenders to evolve elaborate structures that looked more offensive than defensive. At some point in their evolution the distinction became meaningless. Floaters that did not participate in the collective memory disappeared and a single membrane that looked like an immense brain without a skull flowed in the winds and storms of the hot giants.

The only way to study such planets from the inside was to participate in the flow. We had tried to establish observatories (with consent, of course) on their many moons and listen to radio waves, synapses crackling with static, as we learned to distinguish the flow from the colors of the upper atmosphere. It didn’t work. We wound up describing processes as if they were merely physical.

They worked with us to establish modules that synched with their habitats. We designed skeins of tough flexible polycarbons into which we knitted ourselves, brains afloat in translucent fabrics that moved with the winds. We connected our floaters to the planetary being by multispectral communication that enabled us to see, feel, hear, receive, link and – we hope – think as they did.

Visiting the gas giants was a highlight. I practiced for two years in tanks and sims before I was inserted. Still, the first shock of flying was as terrifying as it was exhilarating. I kept feeling for ground under my feet and couldn’t find it. I kept trying to focus my thinking right in front of my face as if I were a brain seeing the world through physical eyes. But the information that mattered wasn’t coming in from the front. It was coming from behind, around the edges, and I had to learn to listen as it were with antennae that extended out and back, gathering signals and processing them in a part of my brain that at first did not feel “real.” I knew theoretically that it was just habit. I had learned from my fetish that images however enticing floated beyond the core reality I sought. I applied that lesson a thousand times on the gas giants. The part of my brain that processes images as if they are real became something I could observe. Instead of seeing things, I saw myself as a process generating images of things. Then I knew how my mind structured or created realities in which I lived as if they were real. Meanwhile I dropped down into a listening place below the level at which images were generated. It felt like letting go of a struggle to stay above the water and breathe air. I let myself sink into the silence of the deep, sink down into the darkness, except instead of dying, I discovered myself more alive, more aware than ever.

I hung between points of gravity in equipoise, listening.

Then I became part of the flow. There was always a level of intentionality that had to happen for connections to be made, but once I learned where that happened and could go there at will, I could always find the reins when I dropped them. Once you know how to regain the reins and know that you know, you have mastery.

Then the synapses crackled not with static but with multichanneled signals layering information into patterns, weaving immense tapestries the size of moons. The signals were like threads built into a pattern and at a higher level of abstraction they became images heard not with the ear but with the entire organizing brain.

When I returned to the academy for a sabbatical after that sojourn I had the most difficult time translating what I knew into language that others could understand. I had to “layer up” from the primary way of knowing to the metaphors and symbols that made sense in another domain. It was as if I was describing life underwater to people who had never left the land, or worse, did not know that two thirds of their planet was under water.

Still, I knew it would be a cop-out to blame a lack of communication on the receiver. I knew that communication was a function of my intention; I learned that on the gas giants, wrinkling and sliding in the upper air. If you did not want to connect, nothing came your way but noise. But if you did, the sense of well being issuing from multispectral multilevel communication among all the cells of that planetary body was a source of ineffable joy.

I realized I would never again be who I had been. The points of reference for my core identity had shifted as a result of changes I had not even realized were happening.

Here’s how I discovered that.

One evening I went for a stroll outside the academy walls. The twilight sky was indigo and the breeze was light. The fragrance of blossoming trees was pale, whitish pink and rosy red. The street was empty until, turning a corner, I found myself facing the three louts who had called me “Alien Brain” so many years before.

I recognized them instantly, but not they me. I flashed on fear, but they were oblivious. I stopped, looking into their faces, making them stop too.

The leader was still the leader. The followers were still followers. But they were much older. I wasn’t, however. They were a hundred and I was thirty. The face of the leader retained its youthful ignorance and disdain for the different. They worked at the spaceport, had worked there all their lives. They were as happy as they could or would be. Their dislikes were necessary, I suddenly understood, for self-definition. Without so many ways of saying who they were not, they would never know who they were.

“Don’t I know you.” the leader said as much to himself as to me.

I flowed in the twilight, feeling the currents of the cool moon.

“You’re one of those Alien Brains. You see different.”

The words were hot but his heart was cold. The differential created an electric charge. I did not object to his memories or need to be right.

“We kicked your ass.” another said. “Years ago, we kicked your alien ass.”

My smiling flowed in and out of their eddying disturbance, contouring itself to their posturing. Felt like going down the drain. Felt like a dark adrenalin-driven hurry-up flow racing to the tip of a spiral and stopping.

“Guess you know who’s king of the street,.” a follower said.

“Guess he does.” said the leader.

We waited in silence in the twilight. The moon rose golden through limbs of a redbud tree. The breeze died, night ready to spring.

I walked toward them then through them as they flowed around me and down the street. Before they turned the corner, one shouted: “Alien Brain!”

The night was alive with triumphal acknowledgement. Ways of saying anything, anything at all, dissipated with the afternoon heat. The flow was all.

Darkness gathered us in, knitting the leaves into an opaque mass.

#  #  #

The Tzdow were a gift, an opportunity, a benevolence.

Because they had been around for so long, the Tzdow had drilled deep into the levels of consciousness that informed and animated the Cosmos. They were one of the oldest races in the Universe. They were quasars of sentience, the furthest fastest manifestations of divergence and convergence as they became one thing.

And I got to go. By the grace of all that is holy, I was able to live for four years in the orbiting cities of the Tzdow.

The Tzdow had gone artificial when the word still had currency, that’s how long ago it was. No natural disaster or catastrophe, no crisis or upheaval forced their decision. They simply looked and saw what was necessary. Mutation and accident had taken them a long way. They wanted to take control of their destiny and did.

It’s easy to say this after thousands of centuries. It had not been easy to do, however. The Tzdow say they invented the words “trial and error.” Billions died, billions were warped or distorted, billions wept before their cities became workable. Was it worth it? The Tzdow say yes.

The transition from appendage cities to orbiting cities took six months. I was immersed in acclimation studies. I was at the peak of my abilities. Still, I nearly lost my mind when I made the jump.

A mind is a precious commodity. You can play all you like with the way it plays, but there comes a time when you have a nightmare in daylight. The light of the sun turns into blood. Then you play the game with real money.

They bombarded me with information, insights, simulated wisdom. They gave me exactly the right amount of time to integrate what I was learning. They did it perfectly and made sure I knew that. But the day came when I couldn’t stand anymore.

I began to flip from modality to modality. I used all the wings of cognition, all the arms and legs of my senses, but began thinking as I had as a child. I thought about the makers of the Matrix and the floaters. I remembered battlewagons, how information became the cornerstone of war, how the hive mind became target and weapon. Illusions crashed into illusions in halls of mirrors, then the mirrors shattered, shards on the floor of my trembling soul.

I thought I would find a point of reference from which to understand what I was supposed to be learning but couldn’t. Then I dropped down to the next level, and the next, and the next, and at each it became clearer that they weren’t kidding. This time they were going to drive me mad with cascading images that overwhelmed my efforts to understand. They did not want me to understand how the Tzdow had learned to construct their worlds. They wanted me to go crazy.

Something broke. Something shattered. Something came apart that would never again come together in the same way.

If one can sob hysterically in silence while the soul falls asunder, that’s what I did. The wings of darkness ingathered my fragmented being and tore it away from whatever illusory center had held it together. The dissolution of my soul felt like lightning striking. I could not think because no one was there to think. I could not imagine because no one was there to imagine. I could not be clear because clarity dissolved into nothingness. When I reached into that nothingness, there was … nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Nor was I in freefall because I was not present to my own dissolution. Nothing was present. Nothing at all.

Then … a point of view ignited from which the event was observed. A point of view from which it could be seen. Said. Described, even.

Then the portal opened and the Tzdow welcomed me to their orbiting cities.

#  #  #

I felt as if I were entering the landscape of a minimalist building. Curved white walls of an immense arc turned to either side. I looked for a guide, a mentor, an ambassador. No one showed.

I centered myself and extended into the environment. I attended to each of my senses in turn, mapping the landscape. The walls were so white they looked like plasmas generated by ships accelerating to lightspeed. I heard white noise in which as I listened I could discern a subtle rhythm. Pattern almost happened but not quite. I smelled nearly nothing, just atmosphere filtered and scrubbed. Felt walls which were smooth smooth smooth. Sampled the air. Spliced the non-sounds. Linked to the flow which meant I could crimp the multi-stranded tangled veins of a deeper organic structure of what had seemed to be merely a mechanical habitat.

The deeper organic structure fascinated, held my attention. Veins were like colored wires tangled in a pipe. The pulsing energy in them sounded like beating hearts but faintly, faintly. Heat generated by processes was cooled by invisible gases hung in luminous blue traps. From that fact I could infer the form of more elaborate processes under it all. Wetware and dryware were one, all of the processes merely a means of maintaining equilibrium, managing the entire system.

Walls floors and ceilings were alive with light.

Along the white curving wall I discerned suddenly – had it been there all the time? Or did it just appear? – a faint off-white line that traced a distant echo. It disappeared around the curve around the bend and I followed, keeping it in sight but not forgetting the other extensions. I was immersed, still astonished. I did not know. I calculated distance and duration, creeping along the wall.

All unknowing. White on white.

The off-white line either ended or grew too faint to make out. In the unvarying light, distinctions were difficult to make. But at my feet I saw an opening in the floor and without thinking, plunged into it head first.

What I saw as I fell was like the First Matrix raised to the Nth degree. The entire fabric of their universe had been simulated in miniature but a miniature, I suspected, that extended across the span of a galaxy. The scale of the enterprise was beyond comprehension.

Still I flowed through empty space until the tunnel became the entrance to a cave in the side of a mountain. The mountain was immense, the cave an opening into its side. I crawled into the cave or tunnel, feeling like a miner crawling on hands and knees, my path illuminated only by a dim light on my hat. The pathway twisted and I had no choice but to keep moving.

After a time, the tunnel glowed faintly with an outside source of light. I paused to get my bearings, making sure I was not imagining. I was not. The light grew brighter up ahead and I quickened my pace, the light growing brighter and brighter until I burst out in candescence like a welder’s torch except it illuminated a vast cavern. The cavern was full of technology I did not understand and myriads of beings tending it with care. The machinery looked like the control room of an immense starship. Except everything was white, the doors opening onto the sources of energy were white, the white fire, the beings in white coveralls attending to duty with loving precision.

I moved through rooms harboring the technology of consciousness both aware and unaware of what I saw, felt, heard. The rooms went on and on but had an end. The deep structure was finite but unbounded. Another entrance appeared that was also an exit because one could go in either direction. I went through and exited the halls, emerging on the other side of the mountain. Instead of darkness, however, the night skies blazed with galaxies spiraling in pinwheel magnificence. I forgot for a moment to breathe. The glowing stars so dense they were like fire whitening the skies. The spirals of light echoing the matrix I had just traversed.

“This is how much you saw,” said a voice. “Imagine a span from the center of the Andromeda Galaxy out to the four-fifth spiral on its distant edge. If that is the scale of the simulation, then you saw but seven inches.”

I felt my mentor beside me and turned as he appeared. He wore an ancient cloak and hood in a humorous reference to the mythic dimensions my entrance into their city had elicited from my soul.

“The myth is your own projection,” he said. “The city – well, you have not yet seen the city. That’s why you will be here for four years, Earth equivalent. That’s the bare minimum for beginning to understand how technologies of consciousness are manufactured and linked. We build floors under floors under floors in infinite regress toward the core of unknowing.”

“I have started the tour, then.”

“Oh yes. But unlike your other tenures, where you had more and more to do, this one will require that you do less and less.”

I laughed aloud.

“You begin to understand,” he said. “You must explore and as you explore explore all of the means by which you explore. By which you see perceive and understand. You must see yourself seeing yourself seeing yourself. You must learn to discern subtle stirrings in the deep currents of consciousness. Minute perturbations in the background radiation that became everything. Then you will understand how and even why, perhaps, this city is alive.”

“My destiny, then” I said, “is not to take action.”

“No. And yes. You do not belong to the city of sentient beings. You belong to what once was called the city of god.”

“But that’s not cultural studies! That’s theology!”

“Isn’t everything?” he said. “All studies become studies of consciousness. The means of deceiving dissolve as the knowing mind comes to know itself. The proper study of self is Self. Except – as you study your self – it disappears.”

“And …?

“You study what is left.”

“But … nothing is left.”

“Correct. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

He took my arm gently and led me back into the halls of light.

“For the next four years,” he said, “walk these halls. Nothing more. Walk slowly in a way that enables you to see. Then see, taking note of what you see.”

He smiled and vanished into thin air.

The first eighteen months were spent learning to walk so I could forget that I was walking. Then I could pay attention. The next eighteen months were spent walking and seeing. Then I could forget that I was seeing. The last year was spent neither walking nor seeing. All the while walking. And seeing.

#  #  #

By the end of the fourth year, I glimpsed the relationship of organic materials to their sources. The sources of the sources, however, were elusive. No language enabled me to say what I saw when I glimpsed an intention that bootstrapped a point of reference out of nothing.

The rhythm of the cities became the rhythm of my body and brain. The cities calibrated my machinery to its own. I learned in four years what I had learned in the first month.

When I left, I was at last a beginner.

I imagined I would weep when I left but didn’t. I was calm and happy and grateful. Four years were just right for the first term.

My three friends were in the street as I expected when I returned. “Hey! Alien Brain!” shouted the leader.

I walked up to face them and saw how they had aged. Their faces were ancient. Had I really been afraid when we first met? Did I really think they meant to harm me? These bearers of my destiny, builders of the ship of my soul?

I saw that they had done exactly as intended. They were not deficient in any way. They were perfect as they were. And seeing who they were, I loved them all.

We smiled at each other. We embraced and held one another tightly. We touched and hugged, twittered and danced. Then the three of them flowed, transparent to their purpose.

I watched them dissolve. Just like that, they disappeared into thin air.

Well … maybe they did not disappear, exactly.

To disappear, you have to be there in the first place.

# # #

by Richard Thieme

[This story was published in the Spring 2008 edition of Karamu (Vol. XXI, No. 1), a literary magazine published by the Department of English and the Office of Grants and Research at Eastern Illinois University with additional support from the Illinois Arts Council. It was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.]

Harry or Eddie or Robert or Lew woke up one morning in a bedroom that had grown so familiar over the years that he didn’t see anything in it anymore. The little bedroom in his head, however, had stayed the same for more than a decade, and that was the bedroom he saw when he opened his eyes, a tiny doll’s house model of a bedroom that had once existed, one in which nothing ever disappeared.

Eddie’s eyes were open but felt a little bleary. Knuckles pressing into his eyes, feeling flakes of sleep.

Vague light had diminished the perfect darkness he required for deep sleep. At first he was barely aware of having awakened. The ceiling was white, cobwebby with shadows. The pillows under his head were white and stay puffed because he spared no expense when it came to pillows. Lifting his head, he saw the top sheet and blanket crumpled in a tangle on his chest; turning his head, he saw sunlight limning the edges of the white shade. The shade made movements in gusts of wind that filtered through the imperfectly glazed glass, slapping the sill with a jerky rhythm.

He threw off the blankets and swung his legs in blue cotton pajamas over the edge of the bed.

He made a noise he had seldom made in the past—the distant past, that is, for the noise must have started sometime which must have been the recent past. He made one now as he pushed up against the pull of gravity, a pull that seemed to have increased over the past few years due to some unexplained but cosmic kind of cause, and he went into the bathroom. Every morning the first thing he did, after opening his eyes and getting out of bed, was go to the bathroom.

Harry had been fortunate. In all his life, it never felt anything but really fine to take a leak.

He flushed when he finished and came back into the bedroom.

There had been two tables, one on either side of the king-sized bed, but now there was only one, on the near side, on which could be seen a slim white telephone, a lamp with a coral pattern, and a paperback book. The book was Raymond Chandler’s “Lady in the Lake,” published in the seventies, the shiny florid cover, one of Tom Adams’, beckoning to him to reach out and feel it.

The glossy cover still felt slick and the inch-thick book felt solid as a rock.
The table on the other side of the bed had disappeared. But Harry or Eddie, certainly not Lew and probably not Robert, didn’t notice. Instead he yawned and went back to the bathroom and showered and then returned to the bedroom to dress.

His clothes were familiar and hung in their customary spots in the closet. They might have been fashionable fifteen or twenty years before. Harry could have been blind and still been able to pull the shirt he wanted from a hangar to the right, his old jeans from the top left hook, then sneakers from the hardwood floor. Leaning to reach them, he made the noise again. He put on a seventies long-sleeved shirt with narrow stripes, blue on white, not noticing that three other shirts had disappeared sometime in the night or the weeks or months before. Fewer and fewer, these ancient shirts of the ages, five or six of them hanging still, yet they filled the space as if they were more.

Harry or Eddie combed his hair and shaved with an electric razor, then shook the hair into the toilet and flushed it again. His face felt a little prickly still but good enough. Then he went down the hall to the small yellow one-window kitchen to make breakfast.

He opened the front door first, however, and picked up a morning paper. Then he went to the kitchen. Cloudy daylight filled it with countertops and a white table with two white wooden chairs. He took a banana from the myrtle wood bowl on the near counter, peeled the banana, and ate it slowly over the newspaper (before that, he threw the peel in the garbage through the swinging swinging white top) . Harry did not notice that three pears had disappeared from what had been a pear-and-banana bowl, leaving it just a banana bowl and a little dusty.

After he finished the banana and had scanned a few stories of scandals (most were political, some were obviously placed for publicity, and one really angered him – it was totally unnecessary, wasn’t it, now? it must have been an editor holding a grudge) he rose and put two pieces of whole wheat toast in the toaster oven and pressed a button. An orange light on the toaster lighted and through the small dirty window on the front of the appliance orange coils glowed, radiating heat. He stood at the toaster enjoying its warmth and read more irritating stories while waiting for the toast to toast.

The newspaper used to have many more stories written by real journalists but most of them had disappeared. They disappeared incrementally, little by little, so Harry did not notice until it had happened. He did notice that once he removed the advertisements for which the newspaper served as a container there was little left. The news hole grew smaller and smaller. Even on Sunday, when he scanned what he called templates, stories that were so familiar they were nothing but fill in the names and blanks sorts of repetitious silliness, he could make it through the huge paper in less than ten minutes.

The orange light went off and the toaster beeped. He slid the hot-to-handle well-toasted toast onto a plate and opened a jar of orange marmalade. Harry didn’t notice that the raspberry jam beside it had disappeared. He thickened the marmalade spread with a double dose and replaced the sticky jar, not noticing that strawberry jam and blackberry jam were also no longer there. He washed his hands because marmalade was always sticky and read the toast over the rest of the newspaper and the paper too, eating the toast until there was nothing to read except old stories and other filler intended to keep him from thinking too much about what wasn’t there.

What wasn’t there was so much bigger than what was.

He cleaned up everything in less than a minute. Then he faced the day.

The day was a vast empty space. He teetered on the edge of it as if it were a pit. With the shades raised, the bed made, the curtains pulled, autumn daylight was everywhere in the apartment, diminishing the sharp edges of the furniture, whitening the titles on the spines of books, illuminating the artifacts on his knickknack shelf. Some of the knickknacks were still there and he looked at them for a long while instead of thinking about how many had disappeared.

The ones that had disappeared were, oh, these or those, the sorts of things one associates with this or that. Some of the ones that were left were bigger than others, some were almost works of art. Their denotation was irrelevant, however. They were less objects in themselves than labels stuck onto events that had flowed by like leaves on a stream – connotations broadcast into a null space, signifying something but Harry wasn’t sure quite what.

Some mattered, however. However, how? He continued to gaze into the space they created by defining the nodes of a geometric shape without a name as if he were reading a crystal ball. There were still a few doodads, little somethings, pieces of things and several small figurines made of stuff like plaster clay or some composite. Plastic things, too. A Tudor house, half-timbered, attached to an image of the Cotswolds, cold and rainy, and warm bread pudding in a tea room at noon. A copy of a big fat Venus, her immense belly and breasts he had turned around and around in his hands and then purchased from a slim jeune fille at the old Museum of Man in Paris France, the one that has disappeared. Or not? Eddie was uncertain. The original, he knew, was twenty-five thousand years old, more or less. His was a copy, of course, a memory of a memory, and much younger. Most real Venuses had long since disappeared. The people who made them had disappeared. The language with which they conveyed their thoughts and feelings had disappeared. The culture that thought up the people had also disappeared. Then twenty five thousand years of a flowing muddy river buried all but a few, found on the ground. Recent people gave them a name recently (“Venus”), a label big enough to let them pretend that nothing had disappeared. Their precise academic language occluded the immensity of the vast dark cave in which they had been discovered. Their words constructed temporary boats like arks to contain the few bulbous females found and now bobbing along in a flooding river of time, markers of some illusive time and space contained in boxes made of black lines that they drew in their white minds.

The fixity of print dissolved in a digital flow like ice in water running in what Harry and his peers still call a sink and will for a while yet.

One thing there on the shelf was a little rectangular square on which one rested a knife or another thing. There was also an igloo or more likely an Anasazi hut (Harry had never gone to Alaska so it wouldn’t be an igloo). Other things faded in the process of staying or disappearing even as he looked at them, flickering like holograms into and out of visible existence, some with quasi-names and some already nameless. He could see the connotations and could smell the connotations but he couldn’t quite reach their deceptive meaning. Harry felt a vague pain, a dissonance, noticing how many barely existed, half-here and half-not. He hung under them, holding onto the disappearing balloons for dear life, his arms growing exhausted. The tags that identified what they were and where they had been purchased, neither paper nor digital fonts but chemicals, molecules, cells, had disappeared.

Harry now gave the day a salute, a long arms-over-his-head sort of yawn and stretch and he turned and the shelf went out of sight. He forgot it quickly and absolutely. His eyes filled with whatever was illuminated inside his apartment by the pale daylight. The sun therefore had not yet disappeared, nor had his furniture vanished, nor his apartment, its painted walls or mortared bricks. The galaxy was still intact, more or less. Inside (the galaxy, the world, his apartment) he sat and picked his teeth with a plastic pick to stimulate his gums. He took an inordinate pleasure in the dislodging of crumbs from between his teeth which he felt with the tip of his tongue before he swallowed. Then he washed again, wiping maybe marmalade from his mouth and hands. As he dried them in a faded kitchen towel he saw that his hands loomed larger than any hands had ever loomed or looked before. His hands looked huge. Turning them, his palms and the backs of his hands, Harry clenched his fingers, numb with sudden tingling, until the tingling had not quite disappeared but was much less.

He forgot about his hands as soon as they were down at his sides. He remembered his tingling fingers intermittently throughout the day, flexing them when he did. Otherwise he forgot them completely.

He went to the window of his livingroom and looked out. Once he had owned an automobile and parked it at the curb on city streets. In fact he had owned a dozen, more or less, and he saw them along the street in the gray light, a white Dodge Dart, an orange little GM something sporty, a blue Mazda wagon, a big dark Buick, a white Tercel. Then there were Fords, a whole lot of Fords, Taurus upon Taurus, all the way to the end of the street. Then the autos one by one winked out until the street was empty again except for the autos of others, and along the curb, piles of leaves waiting to be vacuumed into a truck.

The wind whiskered dry leaves from the tops of piles and danced them away.

“Darling, don’t! –“ he remembered Malcolm saying. Malcolm was a character in a story he had written fifty or more years before. For a class? A college course? Perhaps. Malcolm had watched his wife Agatha enfolded by the dying light, taking her away. Malcolm was breaking things in the story, unable to cope with the loss—a prescient image for an adolescent at the early, other end of the rope, a tether attached to his youthful self who had twirled it like a lasso with a smirk. Harry or Eddie, Harry, say, Harry once and for all was looking now at the frayed other end of the rope, a rope made of words, words that had held him spellbound in his youth when he believed deeply in so many things that had disappeared. He did not know then that words too were artifacts. Nor that Agatha was a type, a form or a mold like the red rubber ones into which he had poured plaster of Paris, waiting impatiently until he could peel away a white bear, a lion, a dog, still wet and already crumbling.

And a wife.

Harry had believed then in things like enchantment, meaning, the persistence of memory and self.

Harry saw visions of shades or wraiths among the pouring light and the leaves, dust devils suddenly swirling them toward the trees from which they had fallen. Harry suddenly felt, suddenly experienced not remembered the sounds of his childhood kitchen and he smelled kitchen smells, he heard muffled voices and frying sounds and then the entire kitchen was in his head, a perfect miniature kitchen. He ceased seeing the light and the leaves and never saw the young woman walking her small white dog, pausing while it sniffed and pissed, then walking on. That memory must have become someone’s, however. Someone must have seen them come and go. But if it were Harry, he saw the walking woman, the trotting dog, as afterglow, a faint ghostly image among the people in his head-kitchen who were so much more vivid, his mother and his sister, the linoleum looking like a bad Jackson Pollock splashed with red yellow white and black as the feet of his mother crossed the floor and disappeared.

Then the entire miniature disappeared. It simply vanished into thin air. He heard in the long hallway of his aloneness their echoing footfalls fading away. Then he saw leaves again in the light of an overcast sky. He saw the day as it disappeared. He saw the little girl, the jeune fille, the same or another, for a moment before she disappeared.

He would in all likelihood never see that girl again.

The earth shifted suddenly. The floor tilted and slid up until it was nearly vertical. His hands slid down the slick surface. He teetered on the edge of the abyss, flailing his arms, and fell.

Mail didn’t come until late afternoon.

By then the day had for the most part disappeared. Where had it gone? Had the abyss into which he had tumbled improbably become a cornucopia? Had the darkness suddenly poured forth light? Apparently, perhaps. Harry would never know. But one way or another, one thing or another had taken place, something had gotten done, there had been a sequence of things linked in his life or his mind by a thread of happenstance or intention, one. Something must have happened.

Had you knocked on his door in the late afternoon and asked, what did you do today? he would have told you something and you would have gone away with his story seamlessly spliced to the other stories you hear from Monty or Jessica, Max or Loretta, any or all of the others. The stories you have heard have been edited into one long story, the story you tell yourself or tell others if asked or maybe you keep some of it to yourself and tell the rest, the story of your historic climb or tragic fall, your itinerary with all its interesting (to you, to you) detours, the story of your always ending adventure. Harry’s story would have sounded enough like those to disappear almost as soon as you heard it. By the time you said good-bye and went down the short half-flight of worn-carpeted stairs to the inner door of the three-story walk-up, through the mail hallway, out the outer door into the suddenly chilly fading light and blowing leaves and bare trees, Harry like his story would have disappeared and he wouldn’t have held it against you. Harry understood how it is.

Not much flesh left on his bones. Not much story left in his story—pretty much anyone’s story, like his face—pretty much anyone’s face.

The stories, all of them, seem to exist for a purpose. Stories are containers like newspapers for the advertisements of selves. The next day the newspaper is at the bottom of a cage or pulped or burned. Even if saved and pasted, the pages flake and decay. Scrap books don’t last. Tombstones grow moldy and inscriptions disappear. The eroding stone and the faded names dissolve into the odor of yew trees’ litter and duff. Then the nose goes too.

It is not an offense, then, merely a fact that your story too is a template, nothing but a fill-in-the-blanks sort of repetitious silliness.

Still, for a moment, someone listens. Someone listens. Then forgets.

That’s why Harry would never have held it against you. Harry knew.

The real Venus, Harry thought, looking again at the unreal Venus in his hands or his head, had been carved by someone too. The Venus was a story about woman, lust and fertility, a pretty good story, he had to admit, as far as it went.

Once upon a time the carver(s) had heard stories of this or that, but now, there weren’t even echoes. If ever a page, now it’s blank. If ever a kiss, now it’s a whisper.

Flatulence, unanticipated, became a cause for quiet spontaneous celebration.

And mail! So did mail. Mail as little as it was was quite an event. Even when it didn’t come, the anticipation was something. Even the disappointment of receiving nothing, nothing at all, was something to experience. Nothing filled the space as much as something. Getting nothing could take hours. Achieving nothing could last for a lifetime. And having nothing was axiomatic, Harry suspected, his vision clearing even as it dimmed.

The mail fluttered into a box in the mail hall (or not), then his hurrying hands retrieved it and carried it carefully upstairs before it was torn and tossed into the garbage (or they didn’t).

One piece of mail lived for a short while in his head. No, two.

It came from a place he had once worked. It was all about a change in the pension and stories about people coming to work there, starting a new life, people just starting out, advertisements for people thinking they were fixed once and for all but who in fact were carried along in the flow of the life of a newsletter sent mostly to folks who threw it away unread. Pictures of some of them however made a brief impression on Harry’s eyes or brain before they disappeared.

The booklet or newsletter, pamphlet, whatever it was, was quite impressive to Harry, here. There were plenty of photos and someone had taken time because they must have cared. There were stories arranged by decades about different people and what they were doing. As he read however it became more apparent that this missive had not come from his former employer at all. That was the four page benefit explanation or letter already set down on the round mahogany table with the green lamp. This was something else, a second letter, this had come from his old school, and it told some of their stories but mostly consisted of sound bites from people still taking the trouble to send them in. The ones he read said little or nothing of much interest; they were advertisements for the still living in the eight-page black-and-white rag called The Old School News. Reading the names felt like kicking at dirt with the tip of his shoe. A little puff of dust went up, then disappeared back into the earth. Each name an image dissipating quickly and sinking into the ancient ground.

Some names stayed for a moment, however, as if they were typed in boldface. Susan Loomis and John Jensen were alive and had written advertisements for that happy fact. Harry Doskell who sat near him for two years or maybe more was simply dead. The beautiful Gustafson girls, blonde objects of adolescent lust that stirred an echo of an erection in his tented brown trousers, were also dead. Bob Rutkowski who had shared a room with him for a year at college, a strange bird who hated to be away from home, who went home, who left again, who had his life, he too was dead. Jerry Schwartz either German or Jew he was never sure which, he had had a nice smile, was also dead. Their names were printed in the dead list in the newsletter he held for a long while as the light fell and the leaves fell and the curtains he refused to pull so long as there was even a little twilight were as ghostly white as his mother’s nightgown when she came roaring down the hallway in the morning from her bedroom.

The hallway, the bedroom, his mother and father, his sister, had disappeared. Agatha had disappeared, his wife had—Harry turned away from a memory he refused to entertain and forced himself to focus.

The daylight was dying and yellow candescent streetlight painted his space. Day into night.

He remembered once more the linoleum on the kitchen floor and the voices of the few who loved him then the very very very few who were like cries in the twilight like birds ready to roost for the night and he realized, sitting there in the twilight, it was birds making the sounds, crows ready to roost, and all other sounds of the day disappeared. So Harry rose from his chair, leaving the newsletter and explanation of benefits letter on the round mahogany table with the green lamp and went to the window and felt the cold glass with the undeniable fact of the tips of his fingers. The new streetlights were severe, a brutal illumination of darkness that had covered the earth for eons long before night meant electric light. A car went past or a person or two hurried by, their collars up against the wind and their hands deep into their pockets. He felt himself small inside a snow globe that was no longer being shaken, the large flakes settling quietly in the night as the earth ran around the sun and the sun circled its galactic center, a big black hole, and the galaxy wheeled as it would for as long as the stars had not yet disappeared as he himself had not yet disappeared.

These stars, Harry remembered, were the third or fourth round. Stars exploded and their pieces became more stars. If anyone was there to name the next generation of stars, they gave them different names. Likely there will be many more stars, many generations of more stars. Many stars had planets and many planets had life. But Harry would never know their names or why their visits had so far been benign or what would happen next. Epsilon Eridani. Zeta Reticuli. Names once magical now were little pieces of worn paper on slides needing careful cleaning. On each smudged slide was a star and its planets. Labels or cradles of infinitely variable life.

Harry closed the curtains and tried to half-remember the day but the day had disappeared. He went into his bedroom and turned on the light. The bed and the table and the paperback book were still there. A bookmark stuck out, halfway through. He would have that story, then, to know momentarily. Even if it ended.

The floor trembled, he slid onto the bed before the floor could tilt. The edge of the pit was variable, advancing, and he did not understand the kind of geometry that tried to define it. Nobody did.

Harry felt that his bed or a chair was safer than the floor but of course, he knew.

Harry knew.

He closed his eyes and held his face in his hands. The world inside his apartment disappeared, the snow globe world in his head appeared. He was player and field, figure and ground, and all of the advertisements or stories were torn pages in a magazine or comic book blowing down an alley in a black wind, an empty black wind defining glimpses of pictures on flapping pages changing from moment to moment in the wind and the shadow-and-glare of the minimal light, the form of the lost stories framed by whatever, whatever had been, whatever names or labels had once been pasted onto the torn pages disappearing now in the sudden calm windless still of a disappearing planet.

# # #

Published in Karamu and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

By Richard Thieme and Aaron Ximm

[I was whining about rejection slips to my son Aaron Ximm and he came up with this idea. I wrote the story and Analog published it in the Zero Probability category in the October 2006 issue (Vol. CXXVI No. 10) .

This was a poignant moment, first, because Aaron and I had never collaborated before, and second, the first story I ever published, "Pleasant Journey," was published in Analog by the legendary editor John W. Campbell in November 1963. That story was about a virtual reality machine before they existed and a buyer for a carnival who, trying one out, did not ever want to leave. For the full story of that tale and the television program Twilight Zone, see "Talking to Ourselves" in the Islands in the Clickstream Archive (Jan 14 2004).

I was paid $63 for that first story at the age of 19. Imagine my delight when I was paid - you guessed it - exactly $63 for this one too. (I won't bother calculating inflation, it's too depressing.)]

We have been sending signals, one way or another, for centuries, and listening for a reply, thanks to the creaking machinery of that ancient looking-for-a-message-in-a-bottle process we affectionately call SETI.

Never mind that earth cultures long ago abandoned radio waves and adopted lower-register gravity waves for near-instantaneous transmissions to near-star systems.

And never mind that only a few hobbyists know how to build radios.

And never mind that our tidily-wink style of exploring neighboring systems has turned up nothing but rudimentary life forms.

Never mind all that. Religious rituals die hard even in our enlightened times and radio-band SETI searches are definitely a religious ritual. Custodians of the project, spending the accrued interest from an endowment that has grown bloated, are dug in and locked down.

So radio signal sending has continued for centuries because we had the means, the method, and the opportunity.

I don’t think anyone really expected to hear anything back. Even diehard SETIsts greeted the announcement with disbelief. One can announce the second coming only so many times before true believers stop selling their furniture and heading for the hilltops. Yes, maybe the Prophet is right, one learns to say, but … let’s wait and see.

This time, however, it happened. The design of dashes and dots was undeniable. Not in clouds of glory had the extraterrestrial message come but as coherent digital signals enclosed in code wrappers.

Those wrappers were tough to detach. They consisted of braided twists of alien symbols, hundreds of them, interlocking in complex patterns, and it took a massive cracking consortium using Monolith Links in four systems to distinguish the meaningless (to us) hieroglyphics of the alien race from the lucid Chingleese that remained when the wrappers were removed.

The message was distressingly clear.

So we now have a bona fide response to all those messages in all those bottles. But which one did they receive? To which of our many communications do they refer?

Hence this broadcast to all human-cyborg-kind-and-kin in near systems. If any of you has so much as a clue how we might respond, please transmit to Central Station immediately.

The problem is not trivial. Our forebears transmitted millions of ancient and modern messages from “Hello, Rainey,” to weekly installments of WormHole Runners of HyperSpace. We have transmitted on all frequencies, broadcasting in all directions around the spherical bandwidth shell. We have sent the silliest giggles and the most profound insights.

We have sent, alas, everything.

The received message was clearly a response to one of those transmissions. But which one?

WHICH ONE?

We must redress the aliens’ error in judgment. We are a diverse multi-talented species with many variations. We are a bell-curve of modified life-forms, not a simple species that was merely born. Yet we can’t just transmit,

Dear Allegedly Superior Species,
Thank you for your reply. However, to which transmission do you refer?
Perhaps another might be more suitable? Something funnier, perhaps? Or shorter?
Sincerely,
Human-Cyborg-Kind (and kin)

No, that won’t work. It would take forever to get an answer back, if they answer at all. I can imagine the blue-tipped tentacle of some clueless intern wiping out our message, oblivious to the implications.

So SETI may be nothing but a monument to the foolish optimism of human-cyborg-kind. At least the sentient life in our little neighborhood can have a good laugh before shooting itself in its collective head with a gun that flaps BANG! on a drop-stick.

Enough preamble. Here, dear kind and kin, is the unanticipated climax of SETI:

Dear Human-cyborg-kind,

Thank you very much for your transmission. A majority of systems in the universe have now had time to review it and we believe that you show promise. Even the Blander-gsst-thupfft! agreed, and they seldom respond positively to any unsolicited transmission (they stamp “we have heard this before” on every one; given their age, maybe they have.)

While your transmission does suggest a certain quirky creativity, unfortunately you do not meet our current needs. There is, in addition, a backlog of species of your type in the universe, so we will not be reviewing transmissions from your sort for an indefinite period. Please listen to this frequency to learn if this policy changes. Policies are reviewed once every galeemp.

This negative response is in no way a comment on your planetary systems or the life-forms they have produced.

Although we would like to reply to each and every transmission, please understand that with millions of systems broadcasting in thousands of media 4889999955677000-seven, an individual response is impossible.

Perhaps a (very young) parallel universe would find your transmission suitable. I believe the Dirnsa are looking for a pet so you might try the umpteenth bubble in the thirieth froth. If you do transmit to a universe less than six billion years old, however, remember to include return-energy-bands to ensure a response.

Sincerely,

Lem-Lem-Three-bang)!
(designated receiver of unsolicited Flotsam, Jetsam, Detritus and Fluff)
on behalf of HelllenWuline and Associates
(nested at the seventeenth level of the HoHo Reception Group and interim assistant to the seventh sub-Intern’s fourteenth aide)

[The line between fiction and non-fiction is sometimes easy to discern, sometimes not. In this case, not. Names are always changed, of course, to protect the not-so-innocent. Someone might note that I had jobs every year with the city of Chicago while attending Northwestern University thanks to Alderman Tom Rosenberg, later a judge, with whom my mother happened to go to school when they were young, and the alderman did live in a high rise that was fifty per cent taller than the ones around, the builders having received a zoning dispensation, and I did think someone meant my precinct captain, Kitty, when they asked if I wanted to be a precinct captain ...  but (1) that's coincidental and (2) Chicago is Chicago, Illinois is Illinois, and what's so is what's so. The major difference I note between politics in Chicago and politics in Milwaukee is that the larger city does deals on the top of the table, you put down money and say what you want and negotiate from there, and everybody knows it, while in the smaller city, all that happens under the table, and everybody knows that too, but on top of the table, there is the pretense of a different kind of culture, as if human nature had stopped at the state line.

All that gesturing and stuff under the table distorts what people look like. The more so because they pretend that it doesn't.

That's why Chicago was great practice for living anywhere else. One knows how things are done, and if one happens to live where pretending that they aren't is more important, that just gives an advantage to those who know "what's so."

Maybe that's why Rules for Radicals, written by Saul Alinsky, a community organizer and a great Chicago guy, was so helpful for doing parish ministry. I never forgot Alinsky's admonition to take moralistic self-serving statements at less than face value because the bottom line is that everyone is self-interested. In parishes, where moralistic statements are often the norm, that advice was always useful. Just because people didn't know why they did what they did or could not name it out loud if they did, did not mean that they didn't do it.

This story was published in Timber Creek Review in the summer of 2006 and included in an anthology of "summer vacation" stories by Whortleberry Press in 2008. ]

My Summer Vacation

by Richard Thieme

The summer I was eighteen was hot and humid. We squinted all the time from the sun and from perspiration running into our eyes. Everything looked blurred, and bottom line, we couldn’t see very well. We moved through the world as much by touch as by sight, as much by habit as by design.

Nobody knows at eighteen what is given, what received. Foreground and background interpenetrate one another in indeterminate ways. There was not a whole lot of truth, anyway, so we just did what we could. We had to figure it out by ourselves.

After my freshman year in college, I needed a summer job. The best jobs were real jobs, not summer jobs, so that’s what I applied for.

Even then, we used the Net, but we didn’t know it. We did things the way we did them without awareness of what we did. What we call the internet now, that vast network of truths, half-truths and outright lies, was manifest through a different interface, one made of books, printed pages, and above all, conversation, not through a knowledge engine arranging data in luminous panels. Despite radio, television and a telephone system not yet in orbit, information seemed to move about as fast as we could speak.  Our voices drawled like a record going slower. When we walked, our thighs moved slowly as if in thick molasses. Nobody ran marathons or jogged for fun, nobody rode a bike wearing day-glo spandex. When we had to go downtown, we took the bus.

Jerry Snyder lived in the next apartment. During dinner we listened to his step-father screaming through the thin wall. Jerry once caught my mother with her ear to the wall, doing her version of hacking. A glass on the flowered wallpaper constituted a primitive sniffer.

Jerry said I could get a job at the home office of Community Stores. One of the first discount operations, Community Stores reeked cheap. Jerry was a cashier at the store on Halsted and when we needed cash, I returned merchandise straight from the shelf to his register. If an apprentice was watching, Jerry would give him a fifty and tell him to go get change. Then he refunded the full amount, I cashed in the receipt and we split the cash.

So when Jerry said there were jobs downtown, I went downtown.

I loved riding the bus through the park to the Loop. In summer girls wore short skirts or dresses and sat on the side seats, hands in their laps. their bare legs pale and crossed at the ankles. I sat across from them when I could, helpless and adoring in the white-hot silence of my hidden lust.

The buses were loud; engines roared, brakes screeled, the driver shouted the names of stops. Clouds of exhaust rolled like smoke down the crowded streets. I lived in a second floor apartment overlooking a bus stop, so I never used an alarm clock. I used stopping busses or, in winter, steam pounding through the cold pipes, the buses kind of a snooze alarm.

The city was our playground. We didn’t realize that either, then. We just played, all unknowing. Chicago was progressive jazz, the Mayor and Playboy. The Playboy thing was just getting under way. We knew a girl from high school who posed for the cover and lived in the mansion. She told us how Hef invited her upstairs for a ride on his revolving bed. She told us how he liked to do it. She talked about the all-night Monopoly games, Shel Silverstein, Lenny Bruce and how these two sisters, Toni and Sydney, would throw ice cream at him when he was high, all of them naked and wild and screaming.

The bus slowly rocked through the waking playground. I was a passenger. I was asleep.

The offices of Community Stores were west of the loop. I found the building and  walked up wide wooden stairs. Street noise and soot through open windows, standing fans stirring the hot air. Everything wood, walls and floors and chairs banging on the floor when you moved them under fluorescents to fill out forms and wait until your name was called.

Mine was called.

I went into an office and sat across from a woman named Gladys. “So you like arithmetic?” she said, looking over my application. “You like working with numbers?” I nodded. She shifted in her blue flowered sack, her large breasts and corrugated chest uninviting. “You finished a year of college. But you’re not going back?”

“No,” I lied. “We don’t have the money. I have to work.”

She looked at me closely. “Your grades are good,” she said. “The job means using a calculator, totaling receipts. Not accounting exactly but if you learn, there’ll be a better job in maybe a year.”

“Sounds great,” I said. “I love working with numbers.”

So the next day I showed up at eight-thirty and crunched numbers on a calculator until five. I did the same the day after that and the day after that. I sat at a desk with a calculator, stacks of paper and a black telephone, totaling numbers all day, every day.

By the middle of the second week, I was going nuts with boredom. My mother said she could call Nate Rose, the Alderman. Years ago, they had gone to school together downstate; he could probably get me a job with the city.

The next day, she called at work.

“Alderman Rose said go to the park district office and apply as a landscape engineer.”

“An engineer?”

“That’s just the title. It’s picking up trash, cutting the grass.”

“OK,” I said.  “I’ll call in sick tomorrow.”

I went back to calculating totals. Ten minutes later the doorway was filled with the short stocky body of Maurice Zayre, my ultimate boss.  I didn’t know his title, only that he stood every day in the doorway in his shirtsleeves, head glistening, smiling at my apparent progress. I guess he was happy to find someone not returning to school. That morning, however, he was not smiling.

“So,” he said. “You’re looking for another job?”

I looked up. I looked around for a lie that might work but didn’t see one. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you’re looking for another job. You’re fired. Get your check and get out.”

I thought a telephone conversation was between the people on the line. I didn’t know that everything you said at work was owned by the company. That’s when I learned they could listen to personal calls. That’s when I learned that the network wasn’t what I thought.

“Those assholes,” I complained to Jerry. “Can you believe they listened?”

“Of course,” he said. “Use a pay phone, always.”

The next morning I took a bus downtown again, this time to the south edge of the Loop, and walked from Michigan Avenue to the huge Park District office building near Soldier’s Field. I trudged up the steps and through the doors to an information desk.

“I’m here to apply for a job as a landscape engineer.”

She handed me a form. “Fill this out.” I did. Then she told me to take it upstairs to Room 22. I did that too. Inside the room was another woman at another desk. On the wall behind her was a picture of Mayor Richard J. Daley, looking prosperous in a blue suit. There was also a picture of John D’Arco, looking tough.

“You want a job as a landscape engineer?” she said, looking over the form. “Have you taken the test?”

“No.”

“OK,” she said, handing me a test booklet and a pencil. “Sit over there,” she
gestured toward a row of chairs with attached desks. “You have forty five minutes. Just do as much as you can.”

The test was twenty-seven pages of questions related to every aspect of landscape work. Botany questions, chemistry questions about fertilizers and soils, landscape architecture, how to maintain lawn mowers and care for tools. I was maybe half way through, guessing at answers, when she told me time was up.

I gave her the booklet and asked what happened next.

“We’ll call you if you get the job.”

But they didn’t call. I waited most of the week and finally my mother called the alderman and asked why we hadn’t heard. He asked for me.

“This is Alderman Rose,” he said. “Did you tell them I was your clout?”

My heart sank in the ink of its own stupidity as if a ballpoint pen had exploded all over. “No. I didn’t know.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Go back down there and this time, tell them Alderman Rose is your clout.”

So I went back downtown and up the same steps to the same woman at the same desk.

“I’m here to apply for a job as landscape engineer,” I said. “Alderman Rose is my clout.”

“Fill this out,” she said.

“I already did, “I told her. “Friday.”

“Do it again. It’s probably thrown away.”

I filled it out again and she told me, “Go upstairs to Room 22.”

In Room 22 the same woman, the same photo of the Mayor with the flag, the Ward Committeeman staring hard.

“I’m here to apply for a job as landscape engineer,” I said. “Alderman Rose is my clout.”

“You’ll have to take the test,” she said.

She pushed back from the desk and went to a corner of the office where some tools were leaning. She held one out.

“What’s this?”

“I don’t know. Some tool.”

“Close enough,” she said, standing it back in the corner. Returning to her desk, she stamped PASSED on the form. “For future reference,” she smiled, “it’s a hoe.”

She initialed the form and told me to expect a call that afternoon.

So I took the bus back home. After lunch a voice on the telephone asked if I was big enough to haul garbage, lift those big metal cans up to the truck.

“Sure,” I said.

“It’s good pay,” said the voice, “$414 a month less union dues, taxes. If you want, you can work every day until you go back to school. Then they’ll keep sending checks. Some kids never take a day off and get paid until Thanksgiving.”

He told me to report to the Grant Park barn on 11th Street and Columbus in the morning.

I rode the bus downtown again and walked over to the huge barn. Garbage trucks, machinery, lawn mowers, were lined up like artillery for battle. Guys in work clothes lounged around. My boss was a short guy with bright yellowish hair named Wally who, we later discovered, kept an immense plastic dildo in his pickup truck under the front seat (“I wasn’t looking for it,” Harry said, the kid from the south side who found it. “I dropped my candy bar, is all.”)

Wally gave me and Tiny, my partner for the morning, an orientation session.

“Tomorrow you’ll ride the garbage truck,” Wally said. “Today we need you to cut grass.”

We helped him load mowers into the back of his pickup truck and bounced on down the gravel path to a large meadow near the baseball fields. We unloaded the mowers and he gave us our orders.

“Cut this meadow,” he said. “Start on the far side, over there. Take half an hour for lunch and two fifteen minute breaks. We leave the barn at three thirty. Capice?”

“What?”

“Do you understand?”

“Sure,” we nodded. Then Wally took off, and we revved up the mowers and got to work.

It was hot in the meadow and by the time of our first break I was soaked. Sweat filled my squinting eyes and made it difficult to see. I didn’t mow straight but I did mow hard, pushing across the huge meadow and back in crooked lines while Tiny – who was, of course, anything but Tiny, he was a huge smartass kid from Woodlawn – made parallel tracks. The sun rose high over the lake which burned like a sheet of flame. People passed on the walks like apparitions, distorted by perspiration. From time to time we paused, leaning on our machines, and people walked by as if we didn’t exist.

We sat in the shade at lunchtime and lounged in the tall grass. There were benches along the walk where girls from offices on Michigan Avenue ate lunch and we lay there and looked at their legs and listened to their chatter.

Tiny never stopped talking. He said how he fucked every girl he knew, what he would do, how he did it. He described how cool he was at getting them into bed. He talked about money too, how much he made on the side, things we could do, ways we could make some extra bucks.

“Take that guy Red,” he said, meaning this guy we met that morning at the barn. “You know what Red does, weekends?”

“No, what?”

“He collects loans, that’s what. He hangs with those guys over on Rush Street. You look at his knuckles when we get back. You’re big enough, he could get you some.”

The girls returned to their offices and we returned to cutting grass. Around three we started to walk back, pushing the mowers slowly down the gravel path toward the barn. In the distance we saw Wally’s pickup truck careening through the shadows. He braked up clouds of dust, stopping before us.

“Where the hell you guys been?” he stormed. “We got worried.”

“Where have we been? Cutting grass, that’s where.”

He stood there a moment. “Jesus Fucking Christ,” he said. “Show me what you did.”

We walked back to the meadow. Wally stood there wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, looking out over the lawn. Then he turned and said:

“You kids did the work of six men for a week. You do that again, you’re fired.”

He gave us a ride back and explained how it worked.  A fifteen minute break could last an hour or more so long as you took the starter cord and covered the mower with leaves and branches. Hide it in bushes so photographers from the Sun Times didn’t put you on the front page.  Cut just enough, he said, and go slow. Then in the afternoon, you walk back in at two thirty. Two forty five is putting away your machine. Three o’clock is washing up. Three fifteen, getting ready to leave. Three thirty, we go, but not a minute sooner. Reporters sit outside sometimes trying to catch us leaving early.

Newspapers were big, then. Television was relatively new and didn’t tell us much. I didn’t have a father so there was no one to ask. My mother worked, played cards, saw some men, but never said anything real. We had to figure out everything for ourselves.

As the summer passed, I came to love riding on the garbage truck. I loved being out on the streets of the near North Side. I loved looking up at the buildings and looking at girls on Oak Street beach. I loved hanging out with kids from all over the city, all of us trying to figure it out together.

One day a bunch of us went for lunch at Boss Burger on Cermak. We were running late and Harry turned left against a sign. Naturally a siren screamed and a cop pulled us over.

He looked at Harry’s license. “Where you kids coming from?” he said, handing it back.

“The 11th Street barn.”

“You work for the District?”

“Yep.”

“Well, watch the signs,” he said, getting back in his car.

We roared into the parking lot and went inside and got a booth.

We ate a lot of fried in those days. Greasy burgers and great big hot dogs and French fries and fried onions. Real cokes and real ice cream. Real delicious food.

While we ate lunch and talked, I became aware that in the booth behind us, two older guys were talking about a friend. The guy was facing hard time in Joliet. The rest of the kids were laughing and talking loud, but my attention was back toward the guys behind me. I listened on the edges to their angry voices.

“I mean, it’s no fucking joke,” one said. “Those fuckers in the DA’s office are taking scalps. They want headlines before the election.”

“Can’t we do something?”

“Shit, they talked to everybody all the way up. It’s too fucking hot.”

“Jesus!” the other cried out in despair, “Joey could get maybe five six years.”

I didn’t know who was talking or who they were talking about. I focused in front again and saw Tiny slowly come into focus, heard him talking about two women he banged last night, sisters. The Italian kid was listening with his funny smile, Harry was telling Tiny how full of shit he was, then telling about parley cards he was going to make big money, once football started. The Italian kid asked who was the connection for the parley cards? Preston, Harry said, this kid he knew, and behind me, the conversation suddenly froze into a stained glass window with sun pouring through it, illuminating the entire city.

Whoever they were, politicians, the mob, businessmen, bigwigs in the Church, it didn’t matter. They all worked together, one like another. They were everybody and nobody. And no one cared.

The rest of the summer is lumped in my memory like wax from a melted candle. The days were a white-hot haze and the nights were dreams of sex and sleep. I was invisible and didn’t mind. I cruised on the truck high above Michigan Avenue, holding on when the truck bounced up and down curbs. Up there in the truck, you took trash baskets thrust up by the guy below. You dumped them and bounced the basket on top of the garbage, packing it down, then pushing it forward so you could sit. I was stained and smelled like the garbage, a kid up there in the truck, big enough to work but too small to be seen.

Red never said anything even though I asked twice.

In late September I was back in school, getting checks just like they said.

Then it was time to pay back.

“I need you to do some precinct work,” the Alderman said. “Stop by tonight and meet with Kitty and get your stuff.”

The alderman’s new apartment was in a high-rise a lot taller than anything around. He had recently moved from a nineteen twenties buildings just off Lake Shore Drive;  the street was two-way to his driveway, then turned into a one-way going west. That way he could come out of the driveway and go straight to the Outer Drive. Anybody west of his building had to go all the way to Broadway and come around.

I asked how come the high-rise was so much taller. He smiled, opening a briefcase and taking out campaign literature and precinct lists.

Kitty had been our precinct captain as long as I could remember. The precinct was one block square. People on the Drive required subtle enticements. The Alderman sold insurance and handled those at his office. The people over on Broadway were simpler. My job was to take envelopes with money in them or liquor to different ones and say, no matter what time of the year, Merry Christmas from Alderman Rose and the Democratic ticket. Thank you for your support.

Otherwise, we did doors. Hello, I represent the seventh precinct, how do you do, paying attention to what they wanted, making notes of complaints, letting the Alderman know. When people got what they needed, they lined up. If they didn’t, then they didn’t.

The Alderman was pretty good. People would sometimes attack him from what sounded like principled positions. If they kept it up, he invited them to his office. What do you need? he asked. Whatever he said, it translated to, what do you need? Then, a little later, OK, but what do you really need?

Republicans turned into Democrats, liberals into conservatives. It all worked out, and he lived in a great apartment, high in the sky.

At that meeting I sat in a deep flowery chair looking out at the lake and the lights of cars crawling down Lake Shore Drive. The lamps along the walks in the darkening park below were pale, the sky darkening behind the trees. It always felt hushed under the dark leaves, and after I left, I walked home under a metallic sky shining above a canopy of leaves. The days were growing shorter, and I was thinking how everything dies or turns into something else. How the city was enchanted, masked with a magic spell.

“You want to be precinct captain?” Alderman Rose said abruptly. “You talk well. You’re good with people.”

“Me?” I puzzled. “I thought you had to be twenty one. I’m only eighteen.”

“Not a problem,” Kitty laughed. “We can make you twenty one.”

She was eating peanuts compulsively from a plastic dispenser, thumb depressing the lever and her fingers cupping the nuts and scooping them into her mouth. Nuts were all over her lap and the floor.

“Are you retiring, Kitty?”

She looked at me. “No, why?”

The Alderman laughed, “We’re not replacing Kit. We want you to be the Republican captain. That way you can keep us posted, work inside.”

The Alderman wore a monogram shirt and his tie was open on his thick neck. He was the only man I knew that had manicures and wore lots of rings. He wasn’t much fatter than his friends, and as I looked at him, broad, solid against the twilight sky, I thought,  if he had four ways of doing a thing and three were legal, he’d do it illegally just to maintain his integrity.

I’m surprised I didn’t say that, then. I was a slow learner and often said the wrong thing. Later on when I had a car and got so many speeding tickets I was going to lose my license, the Alderman sent me to a lawyer in his office. We walked across the street to traffic court. Inside benches were crowded with black people waiting for their names to be called. My lawyer bounced up to the bailiff and pinched her cheek.

“Hey, tootsie.”

“Hey, Frank,” she said. “Who is it?”

He told her my name and she leafed through a stack of court documents until she found it. “Have a seat.”

“Thanks, sweetie.”

We sat in front and as soon as the judge finished with the case, he asked the bailiff for the next. She called my name and we stood before the bench.

The judge looked at me sternly. “That’s a lot of traffic violations,” he said. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

“I don’t –“

“Shut up,” said my lawyer. “Your honor, my client deeply regrets his propensity to speed. Perhaps if you are inclined to be lenient, he would profit from traffic school.”

The judge glared at me. “You deserve to lose your license,” he said. “But …”  his expression relented. “Perhaps he would learn from school, as you suggest.” He hammered the gavel. “Four weeks at traffic school,” he announced. “You can keep your license this time. But I don’t want to see you here again.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

The lawyer stopped to chat with the bailiff and then we left. As he turned to go back to the office, I said, “Excuse me, but would you mind? I mean, what exactly happened in there?”

He turned and playfully slapped my face. “Look,” he said. “You’re having your appendix out, you sit up on the table and asked the doctor what he’s doing?”

“No.”

“Then shut the fuck up,” he said. Walking away, he turned to shout over the traffic, “I’ll send a bill.”

He did, and I paid, and we paid for votes one way or another and they listened to our telephone calls and we listened to theirs. The net was transparent. We already lived in a world without walls only most people didn’t know. We infiltrated one another and sandbagged one another and lied about one another and then the election was held. It was a big election for my generation, a choice between a young prince on a white horse and a used car salesman. We wanted the prince. He was young, idealistic, charismatic and smooth. And we believed in him. Yes we did. We believed him.

Election night was tense. It was my first time working the precinct and being down at headquarters waiting for results. Every time numbers went up we cheered or groaned. Precincts reported one by one and the night wore on. Some precincts had trouble counting. Results were delayed. I remember sitting there half asleep late at night.  Most results were in but plenty of votes still had to be counted downstate and in the city too.

Kitty was asleep on an old sofa, spittle on the corner of her mouth. Next to her a guy named Paul who worked in Sanitation, a big guy, his belly buckling out his belt, his hand holding a bottle beer. Every time a new total went up he took a swig.

“It’s looking better,” I said when votes from the fiftieth ward were counted.

He laughed. “This is exciting for you, huh, kid? Your first one?”

“Yeah,” I said, smiling. “It is exciting.”

“After you done it a few years, your job on the line, you’ll see it different.”

“Oh? How?”

He looked away. “You’ll see. Anyway, this one isn’t so tense. Some elections, you can’t be so sure.”

I looked up at near-even numbers. “But it’s neck and neck.”

Paul smiled a crooked smile. He wore a stained tee-shirt under a green plaid long-sleeved shirt. His pants were tan and wide on his thighs. His hands were never without a beer, and his eyes behind his glasses were hard to see. “Kid,” he said, “this one’s in the bag. We just gotta wait it out.”

I said nothing.

“When the old man delivered West Virginia and the guys in the Outfit lined up, even with the Teamsters going to Nixon we knew we had it. We just got to wait. Once we know what they’ll take downstate, we’ll know what we need.”

The night wore on, and the downstate results trickled in. Nixon was ahead by hundreds of thousands of votes. Then votes started coming in late from the city precincts, tilting the total toward Kennedy until by morning he was ahead by a few thousand. Illinois was one of the states that put him over. The next day, the Mayor proudly accepted an invitation to the White House. He was the first person to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom.

Monday, I was back in school. The autumn winds when we walked across campus were bitterly cold. Then snow started to fall and never stopped, snow fell through the winter, burying everything, voting machines, mowers and the bushes that hid them, everything. Winds blew, snow piled up in drifts, darkness fell, and you thought the sun would never bounce. But it did. It always does. Days began to lengthen, and sooner or later, you knew, spring would come. You just had to wait it out.

The snow finally melted, crocuses blossomed, dog crap and cigaret butts stank up the lawns and got cleaned up by kids like me and then the summer called us out like a fanfare of trumpets announcing the start of an opera. White-hot heat obliterated everything. Once again, we lived in a haze, we didn’t even think of the snow, once it was gone, or what it covered. We lounged in the tall grass and watched the girls eat lunch on the benches in the park, their pale legs out to catch the sun, and all unknowing, all unknowing, we helped one another figure it out.

[The Last Science Fiction Story was published in April 2006 in the Pacific Coast Journal by Stilson Graham whose novel Random Access Memory is a finely crafted and (like most of the work of most writers) unsung piece of fiction. Graham wrote about this story, “I am accepting this because of its quasi-nihilist tone as a counterpoint to the progressive theme.”

How can you not love a guy like that?

The story was subsequently published in The Circle Magazine and online in NthZine.

The Last Science Fiction Story

by Richard Thieme

Science fiction is how a left-brain society once dreamed of the future.

The dreams became real over long periods of time. Leonardo daVinci dreamed of submersibles, flying machines, all kinds of crazy contraptions. One would guess that many of his contemporaries thought he was crazy. Think of a Neolithic genius trying to describe an automobile. The feedback loop from crazy to sane took a long time.

Humans are social animals.  So civilization is a feedback machine. We build reality in the image of our dreams. As the project of civilization became distributed and more flattened, quicker feedback meant implementing more dreams in less time.

Several hundred years after daVinci we fly and dive.

Going to the moon was quicker.

From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne. A pretty good book, dreamed up in the eighteen sixties. A hundred years later Neil Armstrong was dancing in moon dust, delivering sound bites.

Aldous Huxley dreamed of genetic engineering and social conditioning in Brave New World in 1932. Sixty years later we were hard at it. Call it propaganda, call it spin, call it perception management. Today people are trained to live inside belief collectives and we are learning to engineer and modify genetic traits, those that exist and those we invent. Breeding for success by going to expensive schools looks sloppy and haphazard compared to the precision of genetic engineering.

It took a hundred years to get to the moon. Sixty to create a brave new world.

Faster and faster the whirligig of time returns returns to dreamers who dream.

In the nineteen eighties, William Gibson defined cyberspace. Less than a decade later, we lived in it. Now we don’t even notice, any more than we notice flying and diving and going to the moon and glowing fish and tomatoes that don’t freeze.

First, the dream. Then, in shorter and shorter leaps or loops, came the reality.

Science fiction is how a left-brain society dreamed of the future.

Now that’s done.

Dreams aren’t over. The future is.

The future is past.

This is the last science fiction story ever.

The future went non-linear in 1973.

That was the year of the OPEC oil thing. Big companies like Shell were taken by surprise. They never saw it coming. They had to ask, why?

They had been thinking in straight lines. The present led to the future by one dotted line like a path through a courtyard.  The task was to get there somehow from here. They called it management by objective and it seemed simple.

It was simple. Because there was only one future, the one we could extrapolate from what we knew was true.

Then we realized (a) we didn’t know what was true and (b) we could not extrapolate bull-dippy.

So we invented scenario planning. Actually we borrowed it. It was used in military circles for a long time. It was a methodology the time of which had come.

It works like this: we may not know where we are, but we know we’re here. What are the likely theres out there? We fanned hands of possible futures like playing cards. Three or four hands were plenty. Pick one, any one.

We asked ourselves, what has to happen for this or that to happen?

As futures emerged faster and faster from rapidly receding presents, we had to ask that question again and again, faster and faster.

Yep, you’re ahead of me: feedback loops. That’s correct.

We needed more and more frequent feedback loops to map what was happening now compared to what had just happened. That helped us guess which futures were likely to emerge.

It did not go unnoticed that we were manipulating information a lot like computers. There were lots of “if-this-then-thats” with logic gates AND OR and NOT between them.

The way we were thinking was how our machines were thinking. We built the machines but then the machines built simulated worlds in our minds to match.

Now there’s so much feedback it’s too big to manage. No, that’s not quite right. There are too many feedback loops for the old machinery to manage. We needed new machinery.

And we got it. Or should I said we’ll get it? Both. We got it. And … we’ll get it.

See, the problem is obvious, isn’t it? As fast as we can dream or, more accurately, as fast as the human-machine symbiosis can dream, the thing is realized, if not in actual fact at least in a simulation. But the machine doesn’t know the difference. And because we live inside the mind space made by the machine, we don’t know the difference either. The symbiot dreams and the dream becomes real. Immediately.

It can even become a thing of the past before it is manifest in the present.

By the time The Matrix was made, everybody understood. It wasn’t science fiction, just a metaphorical adventure. Blade Runner screened like history. It had already happened.  The symbiot invents memories at all levels from perception to conception. The symbiot dreams and immediately believes the dream. The dream is reality before we wake up. Or say that the dream takes place at a slower pace than the implications of the dream, fed into a faster part of the symbiot brain before the dream has ended. Like a spell-checker finishing words for us. We’re still typing “spellche—“ but “spell-checker” is already on the monitor.

Some of our best dreams like getting lost and finding our way home are over.

We used to be able to get lost. It was exciting. Will it get dark before we get home?  Will they find us? Will some animal eat us?

GPS killed that dream. Dreams predicated on being lost from Homer’s Odyssey to Joyce’s Ulysses are dreams of the past. The space into which we are all looking now is inside the sphere. Everybody can see anything they want.

This is why the soft stuff – humanities, history, theology – has broken down.

Deconstruction took apart the humanities and keeps on reducing whatever we find in any text to a lower level. It never ends. There is nothing more fundamental to find that is also more real. Whatever “real” means.

History ended when we began inventing myths and narratives to contain them. Need to know and compartmentalization finished the job. Humans live in different niches, swimming in narrative streams that do or don’t connect with one another. We look at painted images on the gerbil tubes of our lives, thinking they’re mirrors.

Anyway, how would anyone know? And who might that person be?

Theology? Don’t make me laugh! Once we shake ourselves free of Greek or medieval models, it turns into modular fluid constructions that fly by like fractals animated by a fast processor. God is interactive, morphing like us.

OK, go back to that paragraph you just read beginning with GPS about being lost. “Lost” was a metaphor. For everything I am talking about. See? Shadows have vanished. Night-time is over. There is bright light everywhere and those of us who have lived at the poles know that makes us giddy.

Think of the moon without a terminator. Night meets bright with no liminal zone, no borderland or portal. The magic of twilight has vanished.

I could go on, but what’s the point? You get it, right?  The flat earth fills with streams of feedback overflowing their banks. As soon as we dream of the future, trying to write science fiction, feedback loops capture our dreams and deliver them to the recent past. By the time we finish, the future is past. The symbiot anticipates the ending and fills in the blanks, getting there before the author.

Reality, that is, the information we call “reality,”  happens so fast from so many directions, so many flows, that it factors back into the mindstream and makes reality one more dream. By the time we wake up to that fact, it’s already morning.

Real dreams, the ones that happen out there beyond our ability to sense or know, come after the fact, not before, like before.

Throw in non-local consciousness, using event horizons of black holes to move around the galaxy, listen to our designer progeny laughing at those who were merely born—what is there to write about? As fast as we put finger to keyboard or voice to conversion program, our visions are obsolete. Think up an original story, and guess what? You can find it in some anthology a decade or three ago.  Or covert operations have already produced the miraculous shape-changing metals, remote viewers and Psi spies, multi-Manchurian candidates, anti-grav, you name it, they already made it and keep it hidden. Aliens have come and gone, everybody who looks at the evidence knows that, but so what? Contact is an empty set, a null set, as boring as UFOs on Mars, a couple of big orange beach balls bouncing down and delivering two little robots that crawl out and drill and transmit, squeaking like R2D2.

See what I mean? R2D2 in fact was squeaking like them. We just didn’t know it yet.

Vanity of vanities, saith this writer. All is vanity. I am a silver back, ancient of days, and I know: in my entire life, every idea I have had, including the five or six that were terrific, had already been thought. Every single one. Some were in books, some in blogs. Some were footnotes, some mentioned casually over coffee. Originality no longer exists. Creativity might be real but it’s an action in a collective and nobody can claim credit for anything any more.

Including this so-called work of science fiction. That “by-line” is a joke. As if all this came from an “individual” with a boundary around its brain!

Besides, there’s not one original idea in this entire story.

Some of you will insist this isn’t a story. It’s not fiction. It’s real, you will say. In fact, of course, you already said it. This dream, you said, is a string of obvious facts.

But then, that’s the point, isn’t it? When I began this story, short as it is, it was fiction. Now, just short of the end, it is not only fact, it is fact of the past. I can hear you saying, I know that. Everybody knows that.

That’s how fast it happens.

Others, of course, think this is a fictional narrative but like most fiction, it’s a dust devil on Mars whirling past fast. Now you think it, now you don’t. I mean, think it through. What have I actually said?  Nothing. Everything I mention—hard science like physics and biology, soft science like soc and psych, social roles, what it means to be human, alien visitation, time dilation – all of the themes of twenty-first century science fiction have already come and gone. This is the first century in history that lasted only five years. I don’t think it’s fair even to call it a century anymore.

So let’s agree on one thing: Everything is over. The feedback machine is faster than we are. Individuals don’t exist. Dreams come after reality, now, not before.

A left brain civilization has gone so far to the left we’re right. The circle is complete. The fractal is self-similar at all levels. Goedel said it best: we can’t even say we’re here, doing this, except from some other place. But when we go there, there we are, all over again. There we all are, stuck once more. Inside a circle turned into a moebius strip.

There’s just no escaping the bad news.

So do whatever you like with the rest of the story. Take the narrative anywhere you want. I don’t care. Take the “I” or “we” or whatever it is, take it away or take it apart. The “I” telling this story is as insubstantial as smoke. So is the “we.” So, dear reader, are “you.”

It’s all mist or haze or vapor or fog – they’re all words from the built-in thesaurus anyhow, we all build with the same bricks—so watch the smoke that we were once upon a time drift out of the window and disperse in the wind, a colloidal mist that seems to vanish in the empty air but is there forever.

That’s what happened to science fiction.

This is where or should I say when you found out.

And that, I’m afraid, is the end of the story.

[This is "flash fiction," a new category generated from the fact that smaller texts are more congenial to online reading at the moment.  This was published in the Potomac Review, a literary magazine from Montgomery College in Rockville MD in the Fall/Winter issue opf 2005-2006.

It reminded me of that figure-and-ground plaything which looks like a silhouette from one point of view and a chalice or cup from another. Then it flickers back and forth between the two. This story should read the same way.]

The Importance of Responding Rightly to Critical Information

by Richard Thieme

Now that know I am dying, it is necessary to decide what to do with the time I have left.

News of this sort is never unexpected – or expected, really. Our troubles, my Buddhist son tells me, come from believing that today we won’t die. Borges said something similar, that we forget we are all dead men talking to other dead men.

I wish I could say that, once we know, we don’t forget – but we do. Denial is more addictive than crack. That feeling of urgency, knowing what’s most important, diminishes over time and we act once more as if we will live forever.

Awareness has a half life of ninety days when it’s caused by trauma.

This time I really did get it, however. At least I think I did. The way it was said, the way the data was presented, left nowhere to hide. So maybe I won’t forget this time.

I notice a real change in the way I am behaving, for example. I find myself appraising the relative value of friends. I don’t dismiss the ones who don’t measure up but I refuse to make them priorities. I’ll be polite when I can but if they don’t get the message … well, look, I will say in effect, I don’t have forever. Every minute of our lives is a hotel room that can never again be rented. We had better invite the right guests.

Then too I want to take a good look at how I spend my time. Our choices are more constrained than we think but there is some leverage. It begins with being aware, I think. I’ve known for a long time that I am not doing what I really like. I hear whispers from the closed-off rooms of my haunted house of a soul. If I don’t listen, the whispers will grow louder and turn into a crazy aunt in the attic banging on the floor at all hours. It’s better to engage. Then we can negotiate. So long as she knows I’m working on it, I think she’ll be reasonable. Those distorted voices are like children left in a room with the door open. Seeing your mother working in the kitchen makes it easier to be there. Knowing you can talk to her helps.

First, however, I have to tell Jan, my wife. We have to make plans. There are things to do. But Jan will have an even harder time keeping this information in the foreground. At first it will be like a flashing neon sign or a large italicized font; then it will dissolve back into the white noise of her life and the foreground will fill again with trivia, unreality, bogus goals. I can’t allow that to happen. There’s too much at stake.

But you know Jan. You know what she’s like. You know why in some ways I am less afraid of dying than telling Jan what I found out. …

[Published originally in Porcupine as a "literary" story, subsequently reprinted in Zahir, a lovely science fiction magazine edited by Sheryl Tempchin.  It has been critiqued, too, as an "essay." So there you have it - life in the 21st century.

I received a telephone call from a former intelligence analyst for one of the agencies after it was published. He was laughing, he said, because this story reminded him of Three Days of the Condor, the Robert Redford film about a CIA analyst who read fiction to determine what was true.  "About 5% of this story," he said, "is fiction, but the trick is knowing which 5%."   His estimate was a bit on the low side, but the challenge is the same: among so many words, which ones are the key to the crypto?]

By Richard Thieme

I used to think that death bed revelations were nonsense. I knew lots of guys who kept their vows to the last breath. Some even spread disinformation as they died under torture. Intelligence professionals have discipline that sticks, most of the time.

I was sure that I did too.

Then I got the diagnosis. Cancer, inoperable. All through the gut. Stomach, liver, the intestines.

As if I couldn’t guess.

Luckily we manage pain well these days. I feel as much as I want to feel. The pain reminds me that my life is nearly over. I don’t want to forget that. A morphine haze reduces the urgency I need to make myself tell the truth. If I find myself drifting into a fog, dreaming about something in my non-existent future, I ease up on the meds until I vomit, bent double and clutching my gut, then take pills until I’m coherent again but can still remember that I only have a day or two left.

I am writing to three of you (you each know why and do not need to know the identity of the others) and sending one copy to a writer who will know how to use this information. He is not one of the usual suspects, not a name you would know, certainly not one of the useful idiots we use to spread disinformation. (We have more reporters in our stable than stars in the sky. And they say that two sources validate a story!) I am giving it to a man who understands that fiction is the only way to tell the truth.

I am also giving the story to a blogger, but just one. So real gold will be buried on the Net like the dwarf did in that fairy tale. (That’s an inside joke. You’ll understand in a minute.)

You remember the fairy tale, right? A guy forced a dwarf to tell him where gold was buried in a forest? But he didn’t have a shovel? So he tied a scarf around the tree and went to get one after making the dwarf swear he wouldn’t untie it? But while he was gone, the dwarf tied scarves around all of the trees?

So one blog, at least, will have it right.

My God but this pain is intense. With each wave, more of the contents of my life tumble into the darkness. I feel pieces of myself fall away with every breath. Memory modules disconnect and disappear—so many stories, so much distortion, so many lies. I don’t even know what’s true anymore.

I have been instrumental in building the false history that you live in, that you believe. I created false points of reference to anchor your beliefs. You have been wandering in a mist, thinking the sun was shining brightly. I confused the darkness for the sunlight, too. Is that any consolation? Maybe that’s why I want to tell you the truth about Roswell. I just want to shed a little real light before I die.

The human condition is hard enough, what with death mincing our memories, shredding the fabric of our shared mythical history. Many events leave no record at all. Orders were whispered and once they were carried out, the deed never happened. Most real history disappears. The narratives that remain are often bound together with glue to create illusions, but over time, even those lose the ability to stick. Things fall apart.

Nothing is what it seems.

Working in the intelligence community all my life, I know how most nodes, the keys that unlock the real stories, are hidden or were altered to blend in with an acceptable narrative, the consensus reality in which you live. Without a point of reference, don’t you see, you can’t know what you don’t know. But the points of reference are hidden on other planes in some kind of complex non-Euclidean space. Most of us Masters know some but not all, a few of us know most. Those nodes require keys to a code, but even if you had them, they would lead you into a cul-de-sac. The solutions to the puzzles are always layered, and to see it whole, you would have to go through a portal into hyper-dimensional space and turn around and see how everything looks from there.

Enigma is one example. There are many more.

Before it was known that the Allies cracked the German code, everything written about the war, about Churchill, what he knew when, what FDR might know, was written from a false point of reference. Once historians knew that he knew what he knew and when, everything shifted, the entire context of how you humplings knew your own history shifted. History not only looked different, history was different. What you thought you had lived was seen in a parallax view. It makes you dizzy to realize this, I know, so you recoil into a saner, more comfortable place. It is going to take energy for you to listen to what I am saying.

But please do listen. Please, you who for a moment are free of pain and live in the light and think the darkness will not win. That’s one of the myths you celebrate in story and song. But I am already fluctuating between the fading light and the immense waiting darkness and I can see that the darkness does win. It does. So please, please listen.

I am going to alter your beliefs. However disingenuous I may sometimes seem, I want to bequeath to you humplings the little bit of the bigger truth that I still have.

Oh? You’re not familiar with that term, humplings?

Let’s say that humanity makes up a bell curve and it looks like an animal, OK? It has a snout, a big hump and a tail. Ten per cent live in the nose. Ten per cent live in the tail. Up front are the Masters who manage reality. That’s us. Back in the tail are the dregs. They’re benchmarks that humplings use to tell themselves they’re doing fine. That’s why we keep them. The eighty per cent that live in the hump—that’s the humplings. That’s you. You inch along inside a shared consensus like a huge worm. Your world is defined by things that are real but they’re contextualized by those points of reference I mentioned, the ones we provide. The index by which you arrange memories and thoughts, in other words, creates an illusive matrix in which you live but which you never see.

Fish in water. Humplings in a hump.

Since shortly after World War 2, we have managed that hump. We had to, don’t you see. Humplings don’t know what’s best for themselves. Humplings are happiest when kept busy and not quite comfortable. Then you buy things you don’t need in pursuit of a peace you will never have. The thirty year mortgage, one of our ideas, was sheer genius. During your potentially dangerous years, it keeps you invested in stability, chasing a dream. Because you want to keep believing what you believe, you’re easy to deceive. We use sleight of hand or illusion, and if something leaks, we discredit or ridicule the sources. Then we can hide it in plain sight. Everyone swears it isn’t there and walks all around it.

We Masters make history, then hide it. We have put so many people into power, if I were to tell you their names, these political figures around the world we have assisted in different ways, you’d be amazed. The list is long, and the names are distinguished.

But this isn’t a primer on the Big Picture. I need to tell you just enough about our work to help you make sense of the Roswell event. But first, you need some new points of reference.

You do want to know, don’t you? I mean, ever since you heard that an alien spacecraft might have crashed in the New Mexico desert in 1947, ever since you heard that alien bodies might have been found or that a rancher maybe showed his kid material you couldn’t burn or break, ever since you heard of technologies we might have seeded into R&D, giving them to Bell Labs, Xerox Park, RCA, IBM and other friendly household names so alien technologies would become part of the history Americans pretend to have invented–you do want to know how much of that was real, don’t you?

Think of how the story came to you in pieces. When did you first hear it? What did you hear? You can’t remember, can you? It’s all a confabulated blur. Where do you get your information? From television, right? From a joke in a sitcom or on a talk show, from books or movies or reading tabloid headlines while waiting to pay at the supermarket – that’s how we do it, slipping it little by little into the known and familiar, using repetition and reinforcement until there’s a shared memory. You repeat those falsehoods to each other until they become facts.

You can’t change reality, but you can change the facts.

Anyway, the grays that crashed in the desert were not the first. Aliens had been exploding out of portals for centuries, keeping us under surveillance. Sometimes they landed to check our reactions. Chariots in the skies, visions of angels and saints. Once we were able to see them as machines with people from other places, they altered their strategy, showing themselves but keeping a polite distance until we were used to their presence. Like NORAD telling radar guys to ignore the blips, those are only “visitors” coming down the coast at impossible speeds. It became like walking through pigeons in the park, not even noticing they’re there. Some look a lot like us and blend in well, studying our languages and cultures, doing a physical now and then on a “volunteer.” They did sophisticated brain scans long before we even knew how electric we were.

Mostly they maintained sentinels until—now, I don’t know this for a fact but we believe it’s the least unlikely hypothesis—we were on the brink of becoming a Second Level species. Then they paid closer attention.

This is inference, I want to be clear about that. I know why I believe it but I can’t tell you. There’s too much back story, not all of it verifiable, and anyway, there isn’t time. I wish I had started telling the truth sooner.

I was involved plenty but not at the top. Smarter people than me are managing this thing. We relate to one another through a compartmented matrix of need-to-know modules and comprise an elite managerial class. Of course, sometimes we’re as bumbling as humplings but we always forgive ourselves quickly. We have developed quite a confident culture after several generations of sanctioned protected malfeasance.

But I digress. (I need to take a pill. Please wait).

OK. Here’s an example you ought to be able to understand.

Most of you use the Internet, right? OK, good.

The Internet is a two-edged sword. Like speech or writing or printed words, any symbolic matrix invites projections. We empty the contents of our minds, our souls, even, onto the symbols. We can’t help it. We reveal ourselves every time we communicate. The Net sucks everything out of us, good bad and indifferent.

Bad guys use the net too. (We’re the good guys, remember; whoever we’re fighting is bad.) After Northwoods Two, when the war on terror cranked up and the flow of funds and the fear that fuels it was at a level needed to keep you guys manageable, the evil doers ramped up their use of the Net for all sorts of nefarious purposes. They planned attacks, moved money, communicated with stealth. Their web sites multiplied like roaches.

Now, that fact alone made humplings anxious, just knowing how fast the sites were growing. We amplified your fear by using the “nightly news” to do “in depth” features on terrorist web sites. They would show a few photos with a voiceover that distorted what viewers saw, added a few sound bites, hell, the entire text might be no more than eighty words, all designed to frighten you. Then ads would soothe you and you would go out and buy a ton of stuff.

Some of you, however, quite predictably, became enraged. Fear turns to anger easily, especially in men afraid to feel fear. Then you have to do something to discharge the emotion. If you’re a hacker, you’ll attack those web sites, thinking you’re helping the cause.

But invisible enemies are dangerous. We don’t want the web sites down. We want them up so we can track who visits, watch what they download, see who talks to who. It’s their highway, too, and that way we can track their cars.

So when a well-intentioned humpling defaces or DOSes an enemy web site, we have to go in and put it back up. In the past, we invented anonymizers, built email programs like Hotmail and migrated them into the public domain, made all sorts of honeypots. Half the attractions out there, the most attractive attractions, we made. We have partnered from the beginning with the big guys, don’t you see. We built remote access into the chips, into all the hardware, in fact, even printers, as well as the software that’s now a platform for the business of the world. We go into telecom networks at the front door, sniff cables on the ocean floor, have thousands of redundant sensors in space to watch everything. You can’t sneak out for a cigarette but that we detect the smoke. We’re plugged in at the root, have back doors into most components—we don’t even intercept signals much anymore. We just sit back and let the data come to us.

The whole network is metered. If someone uses crypto, it’s already cracked, and the fact of its use tells us they’ve something to hide. We encourage paranoia by planting those stories, then fear makes people predictable, they go on automatic and they’re easy to track.

Some of those bad guy sites were a real mess. They didn’t have a clue how to write code. We had to do remote administration, install fire walls, close holes, apply patches. Sometimes we kept the holes open, of course. That’s how we get in. So when some do-gooder tells the world about a software flaw, we have to get to them right away and tell them to stop. Those holes are useful. You can’t exploit a secure Net.

So well-intentioned humplings are a headache. They want to do good, when all we want them to do is nothing. We want them distracted. We don’t want partners. We don’t need partners. All we need are secrecy and the vast resources of potentates and kings.

Stay with me, now. OK? I’m telling you this so I can show you what the aliens did. This has a point.
It’s not easy, I know. Humplings are not used to thinking outside the lines, and it’s hard for Americans anyway to understand other cultures. We don’t appreciate people who blow themselves up, for example. Even though we do it too. But we make it look different, like something Americans do. Then you don’t notice.

After we realized why the grays died in the crash, we experimented with chemicals to make our soldiers ferocious. Nothing worked. They killed each other and everyone in sight, not just enemies. We’re getting there, though. Now we know that the fear of death or the fear of anything, really, is a function of protein clusters. Strathin, for example, a protein chain that effaces fear. We’re using it to create warriors who will do just about anything. Berserkers, we call them. In the past, we had to wait for their random appearance in a population. Now we make them.

Berserkers are our version of guys willing to commit suicide. We hide the purpose in the concept of a “hero” and send them down a parade route off to war.

The aliens knew how to make grays fearless when we were just learning to store data by making incisions in wet clay. Grays are the little guys with the big heads and big eyes that seem to hypnotize people (it’s really a kind of magnetic induction—their brains, like ours, are resonant with energies transmitted in fields, but they’re more intentional about it, and of course, their large designer brains do it better).

Anyway, they made grays both with and without fear. The latter we called their suicide crashers, once we knew what they had done. The four small beings found dead or dying at the crash site had volunteered to die for the mission. They made it look like an accident because they knew that our species, barely sentient after a long preparatory sleepwalking sort of ascent, still thinks accidents happen.

The Aliens knew our weapons were getting better, and our propulsion systems, communications, materials science, everything was leapfrogging ahead thanks to our frequent wars. They knew our science and saw that relatively soon, our practice would follow from our theories. We would become dangerous, maybe pose a threat to some of their allies. Even without their help, we would one day learn how to open portals and use them to slip through spacetime. It was implicit in our physics.

They knew we would discover how they went into black holes and came out of white, how they could bunch up spacetime like a rug and bring it from there to here in a snap. They knew we would learn how to negate gravity and use arrays of lasers to create negative energy, then make black holes big enough to exploit.

They decided they would lose little in the long run by accelerating our progress. They sacrificed a pawn to take a queen. They gave us the means of advancing faster along the road we were already traveling in exchange for direct access to our thinking.

Imagine the scene. The hole in the hillside, the remains of the wreckage sticking out, was still smoking. The perimeter had been secured. We had cover stories to give whoever showed up related to whatever clearances they had so they could make sense of what they saw.

It’s dark out there in the desert on a moonless night. We didn’t have night vision then – that was one of the technologies in the wreckage – and we didn’t want to light the place up like Times Square. Hundreds of workers on hands and knees with lights on their hats like miners scoured the site so everything would be gone by dawn. When they finished they brought in shovels and removed the top layers of contaminated sand, then molded the landscape back so no one could tell.

Two grays were dead on the ground. One was nearly dead. The other was injured but alive.

Our medics were useless. The transparent fluid circulating in their well-machined bodies was beyond our understanding. This is when we still thought that “natural” and “artificial” were meaningful distinctions, remember, that “made” and “born” meant different things.

The third alien died in minutes. The forth was leaning on a rock, gasping for breath. It was suffocating but we didn’t know that, we didn’t know if the noises indicated pain or distress or whether it was trying to say something. As it turned out, it was all of the above. It knew that imitating our speech, making noises that carried in the air, that is,
wouldn’t be intelligible, so the being reached out to the small circle of concerned personnel crouching around it with intense beams of electromagnetic energy. Everybody got headaches. They thought they inhaled something toxic. But the gray was simply sweeping a shaped field through an arc to try to tell us that we had taken one or two steps in a journey of a thousand and were just beginning to climb from the vast cave of night into the starlight.

When they were all dead, we shipped the bodies on different flights to Texas and Ohio. They were packed up and crated in the desert, not back at the base. All that nonsense about the mortician and the nurse, that’s crap. Those stories were part of a Loch Ness scenario, locals trying to create a tourist destination.

The counter intelligence guy at the base was terrified when he read the message we told him to send, that one of those flying discs had crashed and we had the wreckage. He should have sent it with a “destroy” memo on a data page but was too freaked. So later I had to track them down and change “disc” to “weather balloon.” We amplified that into Project Mogul once we could.

That’s not speculation. That happened. I know because I did it.

Anyway, we had protocols for investigating crashes, first, of German, then Soviet planes. We collected everything and wiped out any traces that remained. We transported all of the material in special containers for analysis and subsequent distribution. We put our clothing in special containers too. We seized material a rancher had gathered. We rounded up witnesses and kept them in a room for hours. We threatened them with big fines and prison time if they said a word. We told them how traitors were discredited, their careers and reputations destroyed. We alluded to people who had disappeared, who turned up dead one day, victims of “sudden adult death syndrome.” Everyone signed a secrecy agreement with heavy penalties and then went home.

We followed them out into the desert night.

I have lived in that long desert night for sixty years. Dying made me see the light: the light is everything, everything that matters. Darkness is the enemy.

I spent my entire life in that darkness. Now I must betray it.

The small craft that crashed was not what they used for serious trips. Their mother ships are immense—some are half a mile long. They park them remotely and disguise them as space junk, just as we do with backup and killer satellites. But the little ship had plenty of treasure.

Over time we fed everything into R&D. We were developing fronts and proprietaries then that made it easy. The President obliged by giving us carte blanche to do as we liked. Money went to fake foundations with one or two members who transferred it to the Ford Foundation, say, or the Rockefeller Foundation or any of the hundred foundations that existed only on paper. Then it flowed onto balance sheets written with invisible ink, winding up in corporate and university labs. On the government side, we began budgeting black projects and millions of dollars, later billions, were hidden in existing missions. Seeding projects was easy. Keeping secrets was easy. The problem was understanding what the stuff was, what it was good for. Some of it, we still don’t know.

We didn’t have fiber optics, integrated circuits, networks of computers, don’t you see. We didn’t know that humans are electromagnetic systems for animating chemicals, that our brains can be tuned to wave functions to fly ships or fire weapons, make things move. We didn’t know that consciousness was non-local or that we could see anywhere we could think.

We didn’t know then that sentience was everywhere, linking up.

Do the research. Follow the money. See how historians say that microchips and lasers and super-tenacity fibers were invented. Map the process through a paper trail and computer files. Use FOIA, for heaven’s sake.

It looks like everything really was invented here, doesn’t it?

That’s what we did. We thought we were so damned smart.

When you’re dealing with alien civilizations and lack points of reference for how they think, how they construct reality, you don’t know how the pieces fit. There’s no picture on a puzzle box. We believed the event was the accidental crash of a small exploratory crew.

The event, in fact, like everything else, was dual use. It served their purpose and ours at the same time. It was beautifully designed and executed. Let’s give them credit for that. The technological benefit to us was immense—they knew what we valued—but what we created had even greater value for them, for these species that had watched us for ages and watched again as we took their gifts and swarmed out of a dark cave like bats at twilight and colonized our solar system telerobotically with an aggressiveness they knew needed to be modified or managed.

They couldn’t take any chances. They had to understand the mind of the whole hive.

The military industrial complex—add education, entertainment, and the media to the mix—used those tools to build the Net. It was built for easy access, based on trust, as if built for a single tribe. But tribes also distrust one another, and as the Net became a platform for the whole planet, we exploited those attributes to create a capacity for ubiquitous surveillance, data mining, intrusion on a panoptic scale. With back doors in every system, space loaded with multi-spectral ever-open eyes, we had the whole world locked down. We were the smarty-cats that ate the canary. We were the top of the top of the food chain. We became complacent.

We opened the gate and wheeled in the Trojan horse.

We found technology in an “accidental crash” and used it to build the Net, just as they intended. Then we did our thinking on the Net. We poured out the contents of our minds and psyches for everyone to see. Too late we realized what we had done, too late to disconnect mission-critical military and intelligence nets. But it wouldn’t have mattered if we had. Back doors were implicit in how we used the tools they gave us, how we had to use them, given what they were. Self-revelation is axiomatic to the architecture of the Net.

We might as well have sat naked in our bedrooms, shivering in the dark, waiting for the doorknob handle to turn.

We were patsies. We were playing a game that was way over our heads.

They crashed so we would reverse engineer the technology we found. Did anyone wonder at the time why it was all intact? No. The obvious is invisible. Obviously, if they had wanted to destroy the ship they would have wired it to explode. We never war-gamed a vehicle coming to us bearing technological puzzles tailor-made for the kinds of games we like to play.

So we built a platform onto which humankind projected the contents of its soul. Then anyone with access could understand us better than we understood ourselves. We revealed ourselves in embarrassing detail. No longer did our visitors have to sit in libraries, doing tedious research, or listen endlessly to mind-numbing sitcoms that taxed the limits of even their mission-specific brains. They did not have to go to any more cocktail parties and pretend to enjoy themselves while they took notes.

We told them everything, everything about us. Now they know.

And now, you know too. I swore I would never tell. But I am dying and my family is in hiding. I want to shine a little light before the darkness swallows me up.

Our only hope is to link up. They seduced us into building the Net. Now we must use it to transcend ourselves and transcend our former purpose and perhaps theirs. Something genuinely new can still come of all this.

I know it’s hard for you to grasp how you were duped, how you have lived your lives in a maze you could never escape. You were hoodwinked, you were conned by the Masters who manage your planet, an elite that pretends to care for and tend you.

But we too were conned. By diverse unnamable incomprehensible species from the stars.

Once the shock diminishes, once you accept that you were betrayed, please trust each other even if you can’t trust us—and how could you, after what we did? Please be motivated deeply by a thirst for revenge. Use that primitive gene to get back into the game.

Maybe they planned this move too. Maybe they’re fifteen moves ahead. Maybe we play in four dimensions and they play in M-space.

Who knows?

Not me. I only know we have been deceiving you humplings with false stories for years. I didn’t know we were also deceiving ourselves. We said we did it for you, but in fact, we were drunk on power and needed control. Our goal was the social, economic and political control of the planet. You were expendable.

I used you. I’m sorry. I knew what I was doing but I didn’t know the cost.

So that’s the story. Roswell was a zero day and this is the moment of disclosure. But like most disclosure, it’s too late to do anything about it. The zero day is everywhere.

We are owned.

But we can still make it work for us. Everything is dual use, as I said. They can’t play the game if we aren’t here. Hackers don’t crash the Net because then there wouldn’t be a game. The Net should have crashed many times but someone always stood it back up. Domain Name Servers are loaded with holes, but someone keeps patching them.

Someone remotely administers the Earth from a mother ship in the Kuiper Belt.

Someone wants us in the game.

Perhaps you can use the hive mind we have created on the Net to lose and find yourselves, to self-transcend and play the game at the next level with a new handle on your altered identity.

Do what you can. That’s all I ask.

We got you into this mess. It’s up to you to get us out.

by Richard Thieme

[This story has an interesting history. Way back, when I was still in the Episcopal ministry, I wanted to start writing again and wrote a story called "The Bridge" on which this one is based. I had no idea if it showed promise or not and on an impulse I sent it to John Updike, whose work I had been reading since college days. ("Pigeon Feathers" was the first, I think.)  He wrote a nice letter back encouraging me to continue writing and made some specific suggestions.  Much later, when he came to Milwaukee for a reading, I could tell him how much that kindness and encouragement meant. It reminded me of the time my eighth grade teacher, Ted Besser, told us to write a novel, so I did. I didn't know any better. It was about 150 pages long, a kidnapping thriller. He told me that it was really something, for a 13-year-old, and he took it to a master's degree class to show them. Now, growing up without a father, and male teachers not much in evidence in those days in lower grades, to have a male authority figure affirm a talent no one else in my small family valued very much, meant a lot. I have tried to find Ted Besser to tell him that the significance of his kindness and encouragement was magnified tremendously by my need for it, but never found him. I tell that story to teachers during presentations to remind them that they may never get feedback about the difference they make, but the vulnerability and inarticulate state of young teens nevertheless amplifies their positive energies beyond anything they can guess.  In transition later as an adult, the same vulnerability made Updike's encouragement important. And I still have his letter.

This story, at any rate, is not only psychologically true, it is true in other ways too. We'll have to wait, however, for the Mind of Society to take it in. The woodcarver, of course, c'est moi.

"More Than a Dream" was published in Nth Degree, an online sci-fi magazine, in 2005.]

It wasn’t a dream.

I dream a lot. I know the difference.

It wasn’t a dream.

I am inside a dream when I dream.  I am not transported out of myself into something else. Dreams, like cones, are enclosed. A cone is enclosed; the symbols on something conical, let’s say a conical hat, like half moons and stars on a wizard’s, are finite. What happened in the Bin was not enclosed and the symbols were … more than finite. I don’t mean endless or infinite, I mean … more than finite. I don’t know how to say what they were. They did not behave like delimited images meaningfully exchanged in a shared field of human subjectivity.  The Aliens tried, I am sure, to utilize human symbols with care, intending to simulate or replicate the exchanges they had overheard for centuries. Nevertheless, at one point, all of  the symbols seemed to rise into the air like a scream. Once a bat crawling down from the attic got caught in the ceiling fan in the bathroom. I thought some shrill metal pieces had come loose instead of it being a living thing shrieking.  That’s how the symbols sounded, not only screaming but like that bat, bleeding into the darkness, bleeding into a whirlwind that transformed light into darkness, meaning into chaos. I tried to stand but was held by the straps. I could only clap my hands over my ears, mouth open in a widening O, and cry stop! stop!And they stopped.

The firestorm ceased immediately, broken symbols gently settling through the air like feathers floating to the ground. Symbols falling like confetti thrown by the wastebasket-full from office windows onto the streets below, astronauts back from Mars sitting in convertibles, waving dimly in the whiteout.

Inside the Bin I realized I had held my breath. I exhaled, and the Aliens rearranged things, causing a shift in what I heard or thought I heard. The force field within which they communicated either distorted or no longer distorted, I don’t know which.  Either way, the pain ceased. Then clarity came, spoken symbols entering my awareness gently, feeling like good will, feeling like the generosity of spirit they intended, I know, to be the subtext of our conversation. The warmth of intentional benevolence is irresistible.

That’s how I know it wasn’t a dream.

In a dream, the screaming never stops. The invitation never comes.

My name is Hartmut Lipsky. I live in a basement apartment sublet years ago from a student named Jake who quit and went home to Natoma. He sent a post card once, wishing the oven and refrigerator well. Still stoned, obviously.  I had settled in by then and stayed on. I have lived here for years, not by design, but by default. It was easier to stay than go.

On a bright day, the light in the basement is like twilight. So I installed bands of bright fluorescents that crackle above me when I carve, hissing like bug zappers, me the mindful moth, an erratic percussive rhythm above the soft chunk of the blade whittling wood in my outstretched hands.

I carve for a living, sort of. The simpler truth is, I carve because life seems to work better when I carve.  It even made a little money – now it makes a lot of money, after the Bin – but I would have carved even if no one bought the fantastic creatures I release from their prison of wood. Some are based on games kids play.  Some on toys. Vampires, witches, goblins are popular. Demons and gods from anime. Trolls and dwarfs, too, real ones, the kind that scared my grandmother silly. She told me about them before she died. Described their demeanor as they approached her in a dark wood.

I remember. I remember.

Keeping up with the images in kids’ heads is how I stay sane. They help me learn what symbols come to mean. The same symbols, differently meaning. When you live within symbols, you don’t notice how much they change because there’s no benchmark. It’s like fish swimming in a pond. They notice the water when something catastrophic happens or something anomalous, challenging the consensus, calling attention to itself.

When we try to translate a text, we discover the meanings inherent in our native language. Translations always fail. They never mean what the text said. Carving is like that, too. Translating from nothing into real imagined shapes which emerge from the wood as I whittle teaches … how, it teaches how the Aliens created a matrix of extended-alien-supra-human language as the basis for a self-transcending conversation out of nothing.

The Aliens pulled me through a knot-hole or a not-hole into a looking-glass world. I like to think my little immortals do that for children, too, while they play, all unknowing.

So comic shops and game shops sell legions of my painted creatures. Then I can pay for more wood and make more. Rent is low, heat adequate. Noise enough so I can pretend I am not alone. I hear buses and cars outside and when I climb up and look out the half-window I see through the bars feet walking in sneakers or boots, sandals or high heels, revelations in footwear of the psyches of successive generations.

I go out as often as I need. I don’t hide inside, as some stories have claimed. When I first moved here, I went to the coffee shop every morning and after a couple of years began to fill in as a barista, unusual work for a pretzel-head. Listening closely to long descriptions of the specialized latte someone wanted helped me to focus. That work enabled I believe the real work of my life which is understanding the people on the other side of the counter. Because I was barely above the counter myself, my head twisted back and away from their downward gaze, I learned to listen as well for what they felt. It was like learning to discern subtle colors. I learned to listen around the edges and then when they weren’t looking I would plunge deep. I picked up feelings or thoughts in a form that felt like iron filings in a magnetic field, feeding the base of my brain, going around. I learned to mirror more normal lives transparently and none of them knew when they looked my way that they gazed into the depths of a still pool.

I passed.

But it’s also true that I prefer working to not and I work alone. When I carve, my imagination is all the playground I need. My inner snowglobe is lighted, alive with the world of my mind, a little blizzard always falling on elves or mini-dragons or stone trolls.  I coax what I see from the wood into a tentative shape, but at some point, the wood itself begins to speak. Then I become its partner, a willing servant.

As I have been falsely accused by malicious and ignorant critics of being for the Aliens.

My head is bent up around as you have seen in pictures because of that spinal disease. That happened when I was four. Straight-ahead people as I call them never know if I’m coming or going. After a while, neither did I, which is fine with me. There is nowhere to go, anyway. Journeys are delusions, fabricated itineraries that enable us to invent the trajectories of our lives. I prefer to live with imprecision, poised on the edge of whatever is next; I learned to balance precariously on the heads of minutes ticking by, my tiptoe pirouette through life poised on moments before they dissolve. I dance on transitions, not notes.  I live in the pause, and I grew used to funny looks from normals and returned their stares while peering into their souls. Between the things they say they reveal everything in gesture, inflection, silence. Then they feel me seeing deeply into their wishes or fears and turn away.

Is that why the aliens picked me? Because I can? I’ll never know. You’ll never know, either. Scholars weave hypotheses on looms of illusory objectivity, build reputations on speculation about two unknowns, me and the Aliens. They write reams of not-knowledge about worlds never explored. I don’t mind. They have to invent themselves the same way I invent creatures and give them form. I understand that who we present ourselves to be is carved from the wood of our hopes and dreams.  Nothing comes from nothing. So – we speak again.

I am inscrutable to theories. I am impervious to lies and distortions.

Here’s an example. That proverbial knock on the door did not come at midnight. That’s the first distortion in a now-mythical narrative brimming with lies. The next is that I knew he was coming. The third was all the things I supposedly said when the colonel came. That’s not how all or any of it happened.

The simple truth is, me and the Aliens met in the Bin, wherever it was, whatever it was, and had the courage to face down the horror of the Other. That was the bridge, it turns out, so maybe they did know what they were doing.

However, dear reader, let us turn back to that proverbial first knock. Anything as archetypal as a midnight knock on the door is going to be distorted. So let me say plainly that it came in the middle of the afternoon, one warm day in late June. On a Thursday. It was cloudy, judging from the not-light not illuminating my work surface. Fluorescents hummed above my head as always, and I was twisted as always, twisted around to watch the knife in my right hand whittle the wood into a long-nosed elf with a green mushroom cap on his head. My hand had a life of its own and I was watching, a spectator at my own play, a disinterested tourist in my own territory.

Knock. Knock.

“Who’s there?” I said, startled. I did not expect a visitor.

Knock. Knock knock.

“Who is it?” I said more loudly.

“Hartmut Lipsky?”

“Yes. Who are you?”

“Colonel Nate Reid formerly of the Air Force now of the Space Command.”

I waited.

“What do you want?”

“I want you to open the door,” he said, “so we can talk.”

I slid off the stool and scuttled sideways like a crab to the bolted door. I unlocked and opened it and looked up around at a tall officer. His immense bulk filled his blue uniform filling the doorscape. I thought of a large bullet with eyes and nose painted on for a face. Through his legs and the sharp creases of his blue trousers I saw the steps behind, littered with newspaper, saw the concrete wall shaded gray in the summer light.

“Talk about what?”

The colonel stooped and pressed his face against an invisible pane just inches from my nose.

“I would rather explain inside. May I come in?”

That was the real moment of decision, that was the instant in which I could have said no. But instead I backed in and he followed, closing the door with a soft click.

He looked around at my studio, the unmade bed, the dishes in the sink. He correctly identified a chair under some clothes. “May I sit down?”

I hobbled over and removed some dirty shirts and threw them into the corner.

“Thank you,” he said, settling as best he could into the low seat.

I could see his penetrating gaze more clearly now and looked him up and down and decided to listen. I think you get all the information you need in the first minute or two. I felt like I knew him well enough.

“Tell me,” I said, taking him into my confidence. Master and man becoming man and master. “Tell me.”

The colonel asked about my work, then my background, then my life. I have no reason not to live transparently so I told him. I discussed my childhood, how I learned to imagine in the absence of genuine friends. I talked about learning to like myself inside, then using myself as a sounding board when I decided to engage others. I described the nature of the transformational engine when I turned inside out in my twenties, how I came together again with a snap at the next level. I explained hierarchical restructuring of the psyche in terms of organizational complexity which he better understood. I told him how I listened with my ear to the ground as it were on which others walked. I talked about the wind harps I discovered were the inner lives of women and men, how their music moved me, how I learned to prefer it to making them do things or using them to advance. Because I was so warped or distorted in their eyes, any threat I posed was neutralized by their habitual dismissal of significant difference and I became more like water in which they dissolved. I seldom used what I learned to get things, so my power grew, I believe. I explained this to the Aliens too when they asked me to explain myself. It was little different, really, talking to them in the second phase after the horror of the first had passed, that and talking to this alien human from Space Command.

Then I asked why he came. I asked other questions too, and he talked all around them for twenty or thirty minutes, then got to the point.

“Do you believe in intelligent life elsewhere in the universe?”

“Of course,” I said. “Here or there, what’s the difference? There, here is there.

“I believe, too,” I added, “that we have been visited. We have been sending up smoke signals for hundreds of years. If anyone cared to look at the horizon and see them, if anyone else is curious as we are, always heading for the next hill, then they came and had a look. Wouldn’t we? Don’t we?”

The colonel smiled, his once-grave face reminding me of an egg breaking. “Yes,” he said. “Most of the stories about visits are silliness, disinformation, experiments in social control, the confused self-interest of useful idiots and a cottage industry thriving on lies. 99% of it is that.”

“And the other one per cent?”

“The remaining one per cent consists of observations of a cultural intrusion by a complex civilization into our spacetime. We’ve known they were here for a long time but didn’t know why. Couldn’t do a damn thing about it, either. Now they want to run some tests; more precisely, they want us to run some tests on their behalf while they watch. They’ll learn by watching and we’ll learn by watching them watch.”

I turned off the fluorescents and we sat in the twilight. This immense well-pressed fellow was as out of place in my cave as a gourmet meal. Still, I sensed his genuine interest as well a commitment to the job he had to do. I drew myself closer. If we had had a hearth or a fire it would have been perfect.

“So why are you telling me all this?”

He looked away, perplexed, I guess. The man was used to being in charge. His confident smile died.

“Because they made contact,” he said, “as I have been trying to say. They want a sit-down, want to meet with someone face to face.”

“Is that cool or what!” I felt like a little kid and know I sounded silly. But it was cool,  damn it. Way cool.

“It is,” he acknowledged. “They chose three people and want to pick one to meet. Raafat Nakla from Abu Dhabi unfortunately dropped dead when told of their wishes. That leaves only Luisa Martinez from Union City. And you.”

There was more than a roaring in my ears. There was a maelstrom obliterating prior appropriate forms of thought or behavior, an annihilation of imaginative speculation as his words turned into cold fact. That was the first intimation of impending chaos, of breakdown. Elongated streamers of colorful beliefs were sucked through a knot hole. The twilight in the basement dimmed, the walls fractured, shattered into pieces.  But I was still on my stool, somehow, head bent up toward a silent officer sitting improbably in my chair. I was Hartmut the harmless, the neighborhood cripple, the improbable part-time barista. I understood what he said, but felt that I knew nothing, not my name nor my history nor the form of the future. I was a blank space, an erased letter, a deleted word. The world tilted. The Colonel observed. I enabled, I allowed.

Yes, I said, oh yes I will, oh yes yes. Yes!

Nothing I have told you makes sense. I concede that. But then, that’s the point.

The way we think, nothing makes sense.

Besides, they – the powers that be – layer deceptive skins, playing with us, interlacing skeins of diaphanous fabric stenciled with colorful cartoons. I loved the stealthy way they arranged for everything under cover, for example. In the world, nothing happened. You will never find any evidence that any of this took place. Trucks went down roads, trees might be seen blowing in the wind, but nothing was what it seemed.

In retrospect I realize that the Colonel was not in fact in uniform when he called. He wore navy slacks, a light blue shirt, and a windbreaker, collar up. He also wore opaque sunglasses, which I neglected to mention. At the base the next week I saw him for the first time in uniform and must have pasted that impression onto his first visit like those paper doll clothes we used to cut out and put on cardboard figures with little paper tabs. So if I don’t know what I saw, exactly, that June afternoon, and I was paying close attention, then neither did a casual bystander. That’s why the stories in the tabloids are nonsense. No one saw an officer arrive improbably at the basement door of a crippled woodcarver. Nobody watched, but if they had, they would have seen an anonymous gent in a windbreaker, collar up, walk up the steps with the midget who lives in the basement apartment, get into a blue Ford Taurus and drive away.

Had they followed, which they did not, they would have seen us arrive at the airport twenty minutes later. Instead of following the public road, however, we entered a restricted area and then a hangar and then went down a ramp into a tunnel and came out in another hanger where we entered a waiting plane. The windows were blacked out, it was dark by then, anyway, early evening, and we flew secretly into a dark cloudy sky. We banked and circled and turned this way and that and climbed above the clouds, then headed what I guessed was north. We flew for at least two hours. The colonel was quiet despite constant questions overflowing my brimming brain and bouncing off his stony grave demeanor. The unreality of what was happening made my questions irrelevant, at any rate, because they all had as their point of reference a world that had ceased to exist.

When we landed we left the plane. I held to the wet metal of the handrail and stepped carefully down the slick steps. I inhaled the wet smell of the north woods. Litter and duff and felled timber, said my sniffer. Mold and moss and rich moist loam.

Time was already ticking to a different clock. The crystal prisms defining my landscape shifted sideways. Everything blurred at the edges where the world curved away into nothing. I saw trees and tarmac and hangars in the distance and a few parked planes. If you look at satellite photos you will see nothing. The base is not on any map. I looked, and reporters looked, later, and you can look if you like, but you’ll never find it. You will never corroborate the simple disappearance of a doubtful reality with maps built intentionally to a different plan.

“Smells like ripe watermelon,” I said. “Going to rain.”

“We need it,” he said, speaking down to me. “Farmers are upset.”

I followed him into a low building with naked bulbs surrounded by rainbow haloes as if I had just come out of a chlorine-saturated pool. I must not have been watching where I walked for I tumbled suddenly into a hole and fell end-over-end-over-end, and then I fell some more, end over end over end ….

They settled us into our plain but comfortable rooms and explained the plan for the daylight hours. Luisa Martinez and I would be given tests. That was it. The Aliens had tapped into the commercial database forever ago as well as all the government networks. They found back doors in our back doors and watched us, unobserved. They had been lurking for as long as we had networks. The colonel confessed one night after his third beer that semiconductors had in fact been seeded into our culture when an alien craft crashed but not by accident, oh no. They wanted us to find the chips and build computers and then networks and then the world wide web so we would project the contents of our lives onto screens of digital simulation, showing and telling them everything. The Net was a trojan downloaded into our hive mind and its contents were dye in the arteries of the world soul.

Luisa had little to say, in English. I had little to say, in Spanish. We groped our way toward a viable connection, nevertheless. I loved the way she smiled and how she folded her fat hands in her lap in the creased folds of her flowered dress. I guessed she hadn’t a clue as to what it meant to be chosen to test methods by which another species would arrange for a sit-down, flesh-on-flesh, face time with an alien race. Of course, neither did I nor did the Colonel nor any of the other actors on the set.

“How did they select us?” I asked again and again until it was clear that no one had an answer. It wasn’t something trivial like looking at ants from a high perch and blindly picking some out. These were sophisticated beings, after all, from a remote star system, infinitely older. They may have been ugly but they weren’t capricious. The simple truth was, the military didn’t know. The agencies responsible for intercepting signals and observing near-earth space, monitoring everything inside the asteroid belt in real time, knew for a long time there were meaningful signals and artificial observables behaving with purpose but they didn’t know what they were. They learned to live with ubiquitous surveillance the way the rest of us learned to live with their surveillance of us.  After a while it becomes commonplace, and anyway, there’s not much you can do about it. We can learn to live transparently in a village of any size.

Maybe that’s where working with the kids had given me a leg up. I saw how the technologies of my time had transformed the best brains on a generation into hackers. The Aliens in a way were hackers too, listening in. Getting to the root of a questing humanity, unsure of its footing as it left its home planet for the first time.

Of course, it’s much deeper than that. My hunch is that the Aliens understand us in a way that we can’t imagine because they know with subtlety and depth that information comprises the essential structure of the universe, that relationships between things determine the identities of everything. Rearrange molecules and different substances emerge. Rearrange relationships of beliefs and meanings and cultures transform. Even if you don’t alter the beliefs and meanings themselves, the culture transforms.

The Aliens did their homework, is what I’m saying. I think the medical data was key. Because they had accessed what every therapist entered in every patient record, aggregating and mining the scanned data of every registered human being, data fixed in chips embedded in all of us now, they could discern patterns we couldn’t because our minds were blind to the heuristics or goal states of the search. How could we find what we wouldn’t recognize anyway, even when it was right before our eyes? Which is where of course it always is, anyway. I mean, where else can anything be but existing in the fields of probability that we can or can’t see? The ones we see, we call reality. The others, we say, don’t exist. Reality is a probability wave actualized.

The Aliens, once they had me in the Bin, intended to stretch the boundary between potential and actual, I believe. Take me by the hand and lead me gently into a zone of annihilation.

So the data was our data, linked in ways we couldn’t see, related to points of reference that were utterly alien (duh!) to our history. Everything aligned differently, don’t you see, in their imaginations, painted with colors of a vastly different palette.

I am not saying this abstractly to avoid the hard work of disclosing the details of the complex process that led to the Bin. I am trying to say that the process was not something any of us understood. All we could do was do what they requested, run the maze and recognize when we got the cheese.

Luisa and I endured long tedious days of medical tests. We hunkered down like good little mice, rat-labs, guinea pigs, good little humans. They ran us through scans, sliding us in and out of tubes, sliced and diced our 4D digital images, showed us fascinating displays of fire and light in our brains, monitoring everything we said or did or refused to do. It was all transparent to the Alien Red Team somewhere out there in a nebulous haze.

Luisa grew on me, I admit it, and I think she was fond of me, too. She had worked in a cafeteria in Union City High School, serving macaroni and cheese and chocolate pudding to hoards of raucous students. I concluded that she did it the same way she went through the tests, with a smile and genuine pleasure in her eyes at being alive, just being in the flow. She served, I think, because she loved to serve, finding real fulfillment in dishing out steaming scoops of food to screaming teens. I searched in vain during our truncated conversations or quiet time together for guile, deceit or resentment. I never found any. She was rare, a human being transparent to her kindness, exposing the folly of trying to reduce benevolence to a symptom of dysfunction.

“How do we know the aliens are real?” I said one morning. “How do we know this isn’t a fake air base built to fool us so we’ll go through the tests for whatever reason?”

Luisa smiled, shaking her head. “No se,” was all she said.

“And how do we know that, even if the aliens are real, there aren’t ulterior purposes on either or both sides?”

“No se,” she said again and we both laughed.

Her parents died in an accident when she was a child. She came to Union City in the middle of the night in the back of a van. She worked for a few years picking crops, then got a job mopping schools. She heard about an opening in the cafeteria and applied. That had been her life since.

She spoke of the students with affection. They told her, she said, that she was shaped like a sweet potato, which was true enough, but her lumpy appearance disappeared over the weeks into her personality as I warmed to her presence.

I liked her, in other words, and enjoyed going through the motions with her, all unknowing.

My childhood had not been normal either. My parents did what they could and ran me through procedures at free clinics with predictable results. A little money moved from the government into the pockets of docs but I remained bent. I missed school most of the time and amused myself at home. Naturally other children mocked me and I kept a safe distance, losing myself in stories, dissolving the pain of daylight into the redemptive narrative of comic books and sequential art. I first learned about wood carving on the Hobby Channel. I begged for wood and a knife and began whittling. When the first vague shapes emerged from blocks of wood and little nubs of wooden eyes looked back at my own, I was hooked. The wood coming alive in my hands transformed my life, providing feedback loops that allowed me to leapfrog myself by stages. I grew somehow the way a tree grows from a seed, despite drought, despite fire. I consumed the myths and legends of my heritage, begged my grandmother to tell me again and again the stories of the northern forests, sitting rapt as legacy forms from ancient days threaded down my twisted spine to my stiff fingers and through the chunking knife into wood.

Others liked my little people. They saw in them their dreams, they saw the archetypal forms brimming with the deeper truths of their confused humanity. My little toadlike individuals were often fantastic, but people saw themselves in even the most extreme creatures. I showed them, I think, the gods and demons inhabiting their souls.

The darkness in which I worked turned into light. Being still, I learned to listen. Listening, I learned to see. Seeing, I became an invitation and people completed their own sentences, knowing I never tried to finish anyone’s sentences for them. Listening to their narratives through the feedback loop of my attention, they saw possibilities emerge as if we were at the terminator on the moon where darkness meets light and everything is thrown into relief.

After a month, Nate Reid said it was time for the next step.

We were contacted, he said, pretty much like that movie, Close Encounters. Nothing magical or mysterious, really. They gave us hints and we played them like a computer game. We followed bread crumbs through the forest, but not to a mother ship. Instead we discovered a collection of black boxes, appliances plugged into our networks that no one had noticed, stealthy devices never detected by security. Of course we reverse engineered them and made a honey pot, plugging ourselves and the Aliens into that instead. They knew that but didn’t object. Some think that was the plan all along.

So they watched us watching them watch us. Nothing was being stolen, near as we could tell, nothing sabotaged.. As they claimed, the devices seemed to be translators, letting us interface with a network solely for the purpose of connecting.

Then one day they showed us a recording. This is how we draw you, they said, and now we want you to learn how to draw us.

I was standing before the wall of knowledge, the Colonel said, watching screens update. It’s the connections between the data, between the images, you know, that takes you to the next level. No matter how well we build it, we can’t build in the human brain doing that. There are post-it notes and people shouting around their laptops all the time in the skiff, which tells you what we’re missing. We’re missing the interstitial tissue which would give unity to the level at which we’re stuck and let us move up.

Anyway, on four of the sixteen monitors appeared quadrants of a face. It was more or less human, with reasonably attractive features, expressive eyes with real depth. The smile seemed right, words appropriate to gestures. The moving mouth said human words.

They said they had been observing us for centuries, waiting for the right time. They never said why that time was now. They sketched an image of their origin planet, the planet that spawned the !kiii–^6, they called it, three spiral arms across the galaxy, orbiting a middling sun like ours. Details were obscure, historical facts in short supply. Our questions focused on economics, politics, social and cultural life. They never answered. This was not a tutorial, they said; it was an announcement.

Nexus, they called it. Nexus.

Reid stopped talking. He showed us their planet and the simulated humanoid face. It felt like watching a puppet.

“So?” I said.

“That’s it,” he shrugged. “They concluded with a request for a training program for the three of you, now two. Then the sit-down. A face-to-face is not trivial, they explained. They did not want to alarm us, but they had been plugged into humanity for a long time and as sentient beings go, we are a little quirky. We were worth preserving but first they had to find a work-around so we didn’t sabotage our future. This was that point of inflection, they said, and it was critical to get the design right.”

He paused for effect.

“They told us this morning they had made a choice.”

Anxiety seized me and I jerked. I had treated the adventure as a lark, telling myself the experience alone was worthwhile.  Now I realized I had lied to me again. I nearly pissed my pants.

Luisa sat quietly, waiting.

“Yes, well … Hartmut, the Aliens would like to meet you. If it doesn’t work, Luisa’s the backup.”

“Bueno,” she said, hands folded in her lap.

I tried to say bueno too but couldn’t breathe. The dizzying fall through the rabbit hole had ended and I landed flat on my back. I was exposed suddenly to daylight erupting in my brain so bright I had to squint. But through the narrower aperture of perceptual possibility the horizons of humankind widened at lightspeed and would never shrink again.

I was moved to another part of the air base. Luisa disappeared from my daily routine and I didn’t see her again until long after. I wanted her to confirm that we had indeed shared those four weeks of tests and she did. She has repeated her testimony many times, but you know what they did to the poor woman, ridiculing her broken English, making her sound stupid. Now this good woman is lost to us, ridiculed into silence.

With my physical infirmities, blasting off into space would have been impossible. The Aliens had a better idea.

I called it the Bin and now the rest of you do too. It looked like a storage container with  grooves along the four corners in which strong flexible cables fit. The means of uplift was not disclosed. I went through the drill and sat comfortably in a padded belted seat facing a sealed window. The cables apparently contained a core made of composites which released the energy of uplift when injected with the right amounts of a radioactive liquid. The math breaks down when we try it. It simply doesn’t work.  It worked on July 23rd, however.

This is what I remember:

Without so much as a tremor, the entire Bin rose on its cables soundlessly into the sky. Through the window the landscape fell away or I watched a video, I don’t know. The curvature of the earth appeared, then the blackness of space. I never entered orbit but hung at the top of the needle in the Bin, held there by inexplicable energies or maybe by black magic. There was no feeling of movement. Not a creature stirred, not even Hartmut Lipsky. I sat in my chair as if I were perched on my stool in the studio, waiting for what’s next.

The coupling happened behind so I didn’t see. Some deride me for that fact, saying it plays conveniently to my story. But that’s how it happened. There was a slight shiver behind me and then a sound as the wall became a door and folded down into another Bin or some kind of collapsible compartment which had brought the Aliens adjacent. The Bin became a bigger Bin and I felt a presence, a palpable prop wash of otherness surged into the cabin and I retched. Three of their species let my brain know and steep in the astonishing possibility that became actual after a long pregnant pause. How long did they wait?  Hours, days, years. Who knew? Who knows? They waited until the nausea passed and I was breathing more normally. They waited until I was able to begin to understand.

I tasted something coppery, swallowing hard. The atmosphere was heavy with dread. Had I not been strapped into the seat, I would have plunged through the window, I would have done anything to escape. Through the window I saw the black and blue of sky and space but the hairs on the back of my neck rose with terror at their approach. Something smeared the floor, something green and liquid discharged or was happening behind me. I experienced their wordless greeting as a feeling of imminent doom.

The straps, I realized, were not meant for ascent but for the arrival of the three beings.

“Do you remember what happened on that hill in the driftless area?” a voice said in my head.

I flashed back years before. It was a time of alienation, a time when the pain of being alive made me writhe. Somehow in the ravaged landscape of my torn soul a flash of light illuminated the ragged edges, showing them to be places of possibility. I sat in a yellow van at the top of a hill in the driftless area, land untouched by glaciers, humps of earth and hills. The van was packed with the sick or retarded but I was encapsulated in silence, looking toward a river, a glint in a distant valley. Someone or something other than my companions communicated during that moment of hesitation an image which manifested in my mind, not a memory but a presence, a creature I had never carved, a face unlike and like my own, human more or less, redefining human in our moment of exposure. We looked into each other’s eyes and were fused by the glue of the universe.

“Yes,” I said. “I thought it was a hallucination. I was in that van and we were going to a river town. Everything stopped. Something happened.”

“You were alert during one of our searches. We introduced ourselves. That’s all. You were an ant learning that dogs exist.”

“What?”

“Most ants don’t get that dogs exist. You did.” A presence filled the Bin like air or water ten degrees warmer than the layer adjacent. “The readiness is everything.”

Then the room grew cooler. I pulled at the straps. “I can’t turn. I want to see you.”

“Do you remember what happened next?”

“Yes.  I returned home more than myself. More than human, as we had defined it. Knowing that another hunted our scent through the void.”

“Let’s test it, then.”

Straps fell away and the chair turned slowly. Three lurid creatures resolved dimly in the half light of the Bin and my stomach heaved. They spoke our borrowed language by moving air through body cavities, visible now through translucent skins. The gelatinous cavities were whitish, pinkish, reddish, veined with a vascular system the color of eggplant. Liquids must maintain a metabolic balance, for they dripped or surged in response to a flow that must have threatened disequilibrium. Were those faces? were those sense organs or something analogous in the sac-ridden ballast that filled the hold? I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t see any pattern. My throat tasted of vomit. The stench of otherness, more than pungent, more than repulsive, nearly but not quite unbearable.

I held my gaze on their foreboding forms. I endured.

I trembled with helplessness, aware of being captive in a well-designed cage. They moved closer and that’s when the symbols, barely intelligible, started to scream. No longer chatting on a pre-school level, they endeavored to draw me into a zone of annihilation where the past could implode and impending transcendence emerge. There was no possibility of meaning, not in that moment of extinction when humanity vanished utterly. Nothing could be understood, nothing could span the incomprehensible gulf. I was a sacrificial ant in the slaver of the jaws of the dog. The symbols entering my head heated the circuits of my brain. I covered my ears and cried, “Stop! Stop!”

The communication aborted. Words or images, whatever, dissolved into the gurgle and flow. They immediately spoke a variation in a dialect that sickened me to hear it. I did not want to hear it. So that stopped too. I was still listening, however. I had not denied the necessity of their presence.

“Understood,” someone said. We were back in kindergarten again.

But it wasn’t over.

Fingernails screeled on chalkboard, but inside me, then stopped. Reach! I ordered my distant self, looking as the sun must look from Pluto. Reach!

From a nether world a question arose. I said it aloud, hearing my voice speak.

“What is it like to be a child on your world?”

I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. Someone told me. The nurture of disturbing tendencies instead of elimination made for greatness, they believed. They cultivated anomalies, dismissed more conventional frames. Gently however. Always gently. Sports were woven in a glad-basket of helpful extensions. Binding otherhood in time.

“Ah! Then tell me about do you call it as we do family. When you travel, do you miss someone? anyone?”

Someone sighed. Family or its like was linked in inkless loops of bound discourse and the memory of pleasure, threaded throughout a vascular system that remained strange whether metaphor or fact. I thought it horrific a moment ago and now it was benign. As metaphor it was a shared point of reference, however I misunderstood.  Bubbles looked like … inflections, not discharge. A means of equilibrium. Family too. Family a multiple spawn of a matrix of related skins, undiminished by outbreeding of sentiment or felt presence. Distance and the unexpected elimination of individuals weren’t the same because individuals didn’t exist nor would they ever exist again for us, not like they used to. Tiddlywinks. We were networked now and the network does its work quietly by design over summers of time. Then fruit detaches from a branch at a mere touch. Images of countless others glowed suddenly on their translucent skins like reflections on soap bubbles, an infinite regress making me cry. I saw more than possibility now. I had crossed over. I saw symbols become quietly more and I cried quietly for a long time.

When I was able to speak again, I said, “When you saw stars for the first time, did you sense the immensity of the universe? did you feel wonder?”

Listening felt like carving. Something out of nothing. Something was in the Bin that didn’t have a name. A smile or its analogue slid along their skins, a viscous slick, rainbows shining on its surface like water in oil.

Then they showed me something akin to wonder. It felt as if a toddler was coming down the steps for the first time, its little hand in someone’s bigger hand. Its wide eyes looked across the street where one day it might go.

We conversed now on new ground.  The dude inside, obliterated, nevertheless abides. Heavenly delight sparked my realization. I had lasted. My capacity to remain intact while staying available to an alien presence had been tested.

And I passed.

”Takes time,” someone said. “Like leapfrog.”

The Bin emptied and filled with kinship and joy.

Then it emptied in fact, not a symbolic fact, a physical fact, and I was alone in a chair going down. The window became bright then gray then rain pelted the thick glass and I arrived at a base in the north woods. The door was a door again and opened, making me shiver in the wet chilly air. Rain blew into my face in sheets. The storm had broken in my absence and the sky was dark oh dark indeed.

I crept from the Bin, cold and wet, into a crowd of waiting expectations; I was unable then or later to shelter myself completely from their appetites. They all took a piece. I was debriefed, scanned again, debriefed again, then dissected by shrinks and all the means at the disposal of our primitive minds and science.

When they finished they told me the new plan.

I was to say nothing.

“It’s better that way,” said the Colonel. “Then we can analyze their game plan using the data you provided.”

“Is that all I am to you, then?” I asked. “A sensor?”

“In a nutshell,” said the Colonel, “yes.”

I was taken to a hangar and flown home.

Who leaked it first? No one knows or – more accurately – no one is telling. The media found Luisa and made her look like a simpleton. Her smile played well on the wide screen and her big brown eyes, without guile, were touched up to appear shallow. Then they found me and bent me a second time, this time with perceptual leverage, making me into the image that most of you know.

Transparent to the end, I told and tell my story without significant variation. I don’t hesitate or pretend to remember. I just say it. A thousand organizations from cults to corporations want to rent me, lease me, or buy me outright. All I want to do is stay in my cave, my tomb, my womb, and carve what I have seen, my life theme and its variations, worlds without end.

The Colonel denied everything. The event was spun in the mind of society as the febrile dream of a lonely mole.  News groups gathered documentation to support the official twist. Tabloids, owned by intelligence agencies, did their job, rendering the event absurd by covering it in detail. Investigative reporters scoured the north woods and as I predicted found nothing. How could something so fantastic happen at a base that did not exist? Rumors grew like mushrooms, spreading wildly in the dark. Despicable as their campaign was, the malicious spin boosted sales and enhanced the value of my work. Reinforced by intermittent repetition, the persona stuck, and Hartmut Lipsky is now and will be forever a half-mad recluse inventing stories every bit as fantastic as his carved hobgoblins.

People looked for a squid and saw a squirt of ink or they looked at the wrong thing, the real eclipsed by sleight of hand. Or they looked at an elephant hiding in plain sight, unable to believe what they saw or afraid to say.

No secret sharer emerged from the shadows to reassure me with a furtive whisper that I was sane. No corroboration from an unknown source leaked into the public domain. Instead the horses of distraction went galloping down cobblestone roads, leaving me with a quieted if still slightly uneasy mind in a twilight world where I am free to carve, converting memories into images. My tableaux of the Aliens, me seated before them in the Bin, sold more than a billion copies. Alien dolls with sophisticated hydraulics sell for a good buck. Some discharge or leak by design. Computer games take you to the Bin to shoot it out with Aliens unlike any I ever met. Saturday morning cartoons retell the story, extending it in fanciful directions. Then they write books based on the cartoons and make movies based on the books. They twist the symbols into a thousand fantastic forms.

I give up. I surrender. If fiction is the only place I can tell the truth, then fiction it is.  I have long been accustomed to looks and whispers and a reputation for strangeness. This is a deliverance. Inside my all-too-human heart now is a deep well of serenity. Even if everything I have said is a lie, the lie contains the deeper truth.

Tiddlywinks. One disc at a time, hopping another. Leapfrog. A fractal landscape we sentient creatures climb to self-similar discoveries at every level.

All I know is they came and got me and I went where they took me. Then I connected in the Bin with the slobbering ambassadors of another civilization. I asked some questions and listened to their answers. We created or discovered together a means of making sense. Then they left and my role, whatever it was, was over.

Sometimes at night when I am done working, I outwalk the city lights and scan the skies for stars. I see and imagine planets, half create or half perceive the inhabitants of whom the Aliens whispered. My dreams are alive with creatures with silvery wings hovering over oceans aglow with iridescent scales, with the heads of dragons, fire-breathing, and with gargoyles and angels, their glass skins the colors of amethysts, sapphires and rubies. I don’t know if I am remembering or merely dreaming. But I know, and you know too, now, that the angle of our consensus has shifted. I know and you know too that the future is past, that the days to come are already here, and the bridge that we built or became in the Bin is crossed in all directions, myriads of beings of a thousand shapes and hues streaming in the light of setting suns.

[This is "flash fiction," a new category generated from the fact that smaller texts are more congenial to online reading at the moment. This was published in several online magazines - Words on Walls and The Listening Eye - and withdrawn because of prior pubication from others - Abyss & Apex and Liquid Ohio. Published in and around 2005.]

It’s Relative

by Richard Thieme

The sheer mass of her came through the room like a dark bronze horse, bending light from the lamps, turning everything into smears of light. Then the sofa began to slide slowly down the tilting floor, picking up speed and going faster and faster until it required an immense amount of energy to drag myself out of its path, the momentum of the sofa squared as it crashed through the doorway, breaking off its arms, splintering the doorframe.

She had merely walked in from the kitchen with her hi smile but had bent my crooked heart into a J-shape and held it hooked as if her hand had grabbed my necktie and jerked me off the floor, holding me suspended in the air until it was clear that nothing was under me, nothing at all, no firm ground, no, nothing.

“Hi!”

Shattering walls and windows into shards of color and light. Her hair was massively black and her blurred smile made me brace against the gale force of her immeasurable pull which captured me in orbit around and around and around I went in a smoothing ellipse. So that was that. I am an asteroid. All she said was Hi and she had me.

Once in orbit I became aware that I was moving forward. I could only see forward. To one outside it might have looked as if I were circling but in fact I was moving forward.

I exhaled. Remembering I had been here before helped. That was a crow-bar, leverage that enabled me to resist her extraordinary force. Once captured, you never forget the feeling of freefall, the vertigo of always falling forward as the fun-house mirror of your mental world collapses into an event scene framed by her simply coming into the room from the kitchen and going through the room and out of the room through the shattered door, leaving light airy feathers of blurred light falling like falling leaves behind.

Her smile hung in the void like the grin of the Cheshire cat and widened from her disappearing face, a smoke ring dissipating in the darkness.

“Hi!”

The sound of my too-late hi could not be heard. The wind roared, drapes blew in through the broken windows, table lamps flew across the room. She the poltergeist, me the disturbed mind. The little black laquered table trembled and flipped onto its side. I might have been blown through the door too but turned aslant of the enormous force field, bent but aware of the intended trajectory. It’s intuitive, you know. That gathered more leverage. Then I could back off in the residual disturbance as the wind died. She was outside now, the force field weaker. My heart beat more slowly although faster than if I had been completely at rest.

I had been collected and put on a shelf, a forgotten trophy: my frame dragged, my destiny inflected.

The dust settles. Twilight glides. The room reassembles into the still and prescient moment between rebirth.