Speak to no one about this.

15APR2012 – Part of this is my job description, part of this is a dream. There are moments in the light of day when I cannot tell them apart. Sometimes, I travel from place to place at the direction of (a certain government agency) and perform tasks — which began as uncomfortable and tedious but have grown progressively more rewarding.

“Head south, drive for twenty miles. Pull over at (a certain gas station) just outside (a certain town). The station will be abandoned. Open the envelope located under the passenger seat. You will find a pair of gloves. Put them on and pocket both the lighter and the box containing paraffin-soaked cotton. You will break into the office at the back of the building without being observed. Force the lock on the top left-hand desk drawer. There will be a large square package wrapped in plain brown paper. Do NOT open it. Instead, carry it with you to the lot behind the gas station and look for an old rusted drum. Place the package in the drum and set fire to the package using the lighter and paraffin, making certain to scatter the ashes thoroughly and bury the fire. Once you’ve finished, return home. Speak to no one about this.”

Next. “Catch the first flight to (a certain place). Rent a car and drive to (a certain pier) and wait there for six hours. Purchase a sandwich from a food cart at the end of the pier if you get hungry. When (a certain vessel) moors to the pier, board and ask to speak to the captain. When you meet him, hand him a one-dollar bill and take his picture. He’ll know what it means. Once you have his photograph, return to the airport and fly home. Speak to no one about this.”

Next. “Travel by train to New London, Connecticut. Be at (a specific address) by 0800 Wednesday. Someone there will give you a large green bag containing a knife, a compass, a space blanket, a warm coat and a whistle. Purchase sufficient food and water. Then, drive to an old airfield at the edge of town. There you will board the large white military aircraft with an orange stripe on the side. They’re expecting you. It will take you to Newfoundland. When you arrive, walk to the end of the runway and board another white plane. This one will have the word ‘surveillance’ painted along the side in big red letters. They’ll be expecting you. They will fly approximately 375 SE to position 41° 46′ North, 50° 14′ West. When you arrive, there will be a boat waiting. Photograph the boat and any activity you observe. The aircraft mechanic will jettison an object through a drop tube located in the rear of the aircraft. Photograph this event and anything you think might be of interest. Return home. Speak to no one about this.”

There’s never a definite end to the tasks. Sometimes they come in the middle of the night. Sometimes they come very early in the morning. “Tomorrow at 0400, you will don this dress uniform complete with colorful ribbons, insignia and a fancy hat. You will travel to attend (a certain function) at (a certain place). You will be introduced to (a certain person). When you meet him, take his picture. Wait twenty minutes. When he is introduced to (a certain person), you will photograph them together. The photograph should appear natural. It must NOT appear posed. After this, you are free to go. Speak to no one about this.”

Next: “Catch the first flight to New Orleans. Rent a car, drive to (a certain place) and wait for instructions. After two weeks, you will drive to an airfield on the edge of town and board a helicopter. They will be expecting you. It will take you to an oilrig located in the Gulf of Mexico. Upon arriving, you will photograph the drilling equipment, the interior of the control room and anything you think might be of interest. Once you have these photographs, board the helicopter and return to (a certain place). Speak to no one about this.”

Sometimes I receive these instructions in the middle of the task I’m completing ordering me to drop what I’m doing and begin another task, or walk from it away entirely. The standard guidance is simple: “Travel light. Pack a duffel bag of clothes, a laptop, a camera and your passport. Use this card for expenses, and present this piece of paper when challenged. Speak to no one about this…”

TWM

OLD FILM ONE DOLLAR

When I was a kid I would go with my dad to weekend flea markets. We’d load up his F150 on a Friday night and he’d wake me up the next morning for a trip to one of two local drive-in theaters. The South Drive-In is still in use, but the 3C was torn down years ago. This all might have been at the end of the 70s or the beginning of the 80s, I don’t rightly recall.

After I helped my dad set up his stall I’d run off to explore the grounds, the soles of my cheap tennis shoes stumbling across the oversized white gravel. I can tell you from experience that the sound of a rock striking the bottom of a drive-in movie screen not only sounds like laser fire, but if you do it hard enough, the kids gathered around the opposite screen across the grounds can hear you. SCIENCE.

We were pretty poor and I knew better than to ask my dad for money, so I looked through those stalls as though I were purchasing items with my eyes. I wanted to remember the stacks of Penthouse magazines, the Pink Floyd mirrors, the ninja throwing stars and the tables and tables of trading cards, the milk crates full of dog-eared books, vinyl records, velvet paintings, ornate lamps, enormous belt buckles, motorcycle and car parts, musical instruments, models of spaceships, giant bags of kettle corn — I mean the whole goddamned world was for sale in front of my eyes. It was something –

On Friday nights, we’d order pizza and watch Buster Keaton films on a projector in the back yard. Holy shit, I just remembered that…

Sometimes my dad would just give me stuff that he’d found in a dumpster, or picked up for five bucks at a garage sale. That’s how I got my first planner. When I opened it, I wanted to be able to fill the pages with interesting things and dates to remember and important cards for all the slots. But I was still a kid. I could have (would have, should have) filled those pages with entries like FUCK OFF ALL DAY TOMORROW – STILL ON SUMMER VACATION. I would have scribbled I DON’T KNOW ANYONE EXCEPT MY FAMILY in the address book and never even stopped to consider what it meant. Instead of observations on the human condition worthy of preserving, and lofty insights with which to inspire future generations in the notes section, I probably wrote “RODE BIKE ALL DAY.” I had no responsibilities. I was not yet in the data stream. What else was supposed to go on those pages?

The Navy has employed Smart Sailors as far back as World War II. One elite group of these trouble sniffers could tell how far off shore the German were hiding their U-boats by the flavor of the local fish. LT Chuck U. Farley picks up a chuck of sashimi with his chopsticks and takes a bite. “Thirty miles out… tastes like the crew might have picked up a flu virus in Spain.” He licks his lips, dabs at a morsel of wasabi on the corner of his mouth. “Now would be an ideal time to strike.” He licks his lips and slaps his hands together, barking and flexing his throat. The consultation is over.

Still remembers the first time he obsessed over the correct spelling of calculator,

Mind and Purpose

Approximately 345,125 days have passed since the Battle of Hastings…

Summer is officially over.  Earlier this hour I sat on the back deck of a nearby ice cream and confection shop and enjoyed the last double cone of the season.  Thirty-two minutes after the hour smelled like a lit match, and passed through my body like a lingering acid trip, casting echoes of anti-reality across the yard like ripples on a still pond.

As is my habit, I attempted to put the moment into words: a helicopter circles low overhead, fucking the humidity with five swords in a rough approximation of gunfire…  Navigation lights keep time with 80s era Depeche Mode leaking from a window above the shop where twin Caribbean accents clink and click away behind the dishes, chatting softly about the washing up…   Multicolored pendant lamps hang condemned from the underside of the deck umbrella…  Beyond them, rusted iron straps bolt across the back wall, supporting sagging sections of the aged brick structure and –

Yeah.  Okay.  Great.  “I marveled at the complexity of eternity and the invisible quantum orgy, and I reveled in the giddiness of the moment” — whoop-di-freaking-do! — before my euphoria was crushed by an avalanche of sad realization: I didn’t really know how to capture this.  I didn’t know how to make it stay.

I could give away my worldly possessions and forward my mail to a high mountain monastery, surrendering the remainder of my days to the relentless pursuit of truthful description and worshipping the holy fucking glory of the written word and still I wouldn’t be able to drive a nail deep enough to make this moment or any other linger longer, despite all my longing.

I sat in a Juneau bar one night many nights ago, teetering on the edge of fall-down-drunkenness and thinking carefully about what makes women beautiful (like you do), struggling to capture an ever-elusive essence in a haiku or some such shorthand measure.

What a fucking load of noise!  I might as well have tried to work out why light is bright or why it hurts when I fall down.  But I have no academic training, I (still) don’t know what beauty really means, and to make matters worse I suck at haiku.  Plus I was blind drunk and getting dumber by the shot.

Notes salvaged from that night: “Something about the eyes, some measurement of the face, some mystical number or secret formula.  Sometimes a rock climber’s fingers or the strong jawline like a bow across the strings (and the hips) of a cello, but now and again and again it’s the neck but it’s not always the body and usually the soul but frequently it’s just the way they carry themselves.  Is it this way for everyone?  Do others see them as I do? Am I crazy or just retarded?”

There are writers, and then there are writers.  Me, I’m just a guy who takes notes.  I try.  I really do.  Ultimately, my doctor says I suffer from a curious affliction experienced by a tiny selection of monkeys doomed to live out their brief and answerless lives anchored to a spinning speck at the ass end of an endless universe.

I’ve been given a pen, he says, but there is no ink.

It’s difficult to resist committing each and every mortal monkey moment to paper, documenting them in some electronic manner.  I want to show that I lived.  I want to demonstrate that I felt, that I saw, and that yes, I bought the ticket.  But I realized on that drunken night, and tonight — and probably I’ll discover it again tomorrow — how completely futile it is to try, but how addictive it is to keep going any damn way.

Not only am I shouting into a wind tunnel against the rest of human expression, but memories tend to fit the shape of our hands.  We scoop them to our perspective.  They are never as we remember them.  Flashes of unspeakable beauty happen like a gunshot.  They are vivid once and then they begin to heal as a puckered scar, closing the portal behind them.  (A captured memory would most likely rot like fruit in that well-intentioned bowl you placed on your kitchen table.)

Where is the proof of yesterday?  It survives as a dry cleaning stub in my wallet, right next to the the Metrocard I purchased from an underground kiosk twelve hours ago; close to the rats and upwind from the piss.  Yesterday is the delicious meal I recently shat into the sewer.

(Sometimes when a meal is really good, I laugh.  At least I used to.)

We inhale these spectral seconds in order to keep them close to us, refusing to let the flame flicker out, straining to hold onto important occurrences just a little while longer before coughing in to the basic need for air.  An explosive exhalation precedes an involuntary gasp for fresh O2 and then the moment is lost to the wind and the second hand ticks once like a bomb, never to return.  So many such seconds will fade like photographs on the wall, polished mute like the rocks I’ve gathered on walks without remembering why, or when, much less where they began.

(Morale of the story: Stop playing the movie.  The ending never changes, and the film gets warped the longer you leave it on the bulb.)

From Wikipedia: “The Finnish have an expression for the will to push forward.  Sisu, loosely translated, is defined as strength of will, determination, perseverance and acting rationally in the face of adversity. However, the word is widely considered to lack a proper translation into any language.  Sisu has been described as being integral to understanding Finnish culture.  The literal meaning is equivalent in English to ‘having guts’, and the word derives from sisus, which means something inner or interior.  However sisu is defined by a long-term element in it; it is not momentary courage, but the ability to sustain an action against the odds.  Deciding on a course of action and then sticking to that decision against repeated failures is sisu.  It is similar to equanimity, except the forbearance of sisu has a grimmer quality of stress management than the latter.  The noun sisu is related to the adjective sisukas, one having the quality of sisu.”

…

Hours later in the darkness, sitting in a large orange dish chair near an open window in my living room.  Cool air files in and takes a quiet seat.  A short glass of chilled apple moonshine rests in my left hand.  A man walks down the near side of the street repeatedly muttering something about real estate.  As you do.

Tomorrow I will write a letter to a friend and talk about the fire virus in the trees, and how Brooklyn is beginning to burn…

Tonight I am imagining things; a dark spot on the floorboards near my foot has crawled toward me, twice.  Each time I pin it down with my eyes, it reverts to being just a dark stain on the floorboard, the 78 of an old conversation trapped beneath the varnish.  When I turn my eyes to the laptop screen, it becomes a mouse again, or a roach, or something larger.

I’m not afraid.  I just wish it would make up its mind.

TWM

Her Daddy Was a Killer

The damndest things go through your head before a drop.

15:36:08

In hindsight, I think she really wanted a Killer. Her daddy was a Killer and her brothers were Killers, too. It makes sense. But I’m not a Killer. I’m a Watcher. I thought she wanted me regardless. So where did I go wrong?

14:11:45

But this is not the place for such thoughts. Once you’re sealed up tight in a Cap, there’s nothing but the faint red glow of the LED timer, the intermittent hiss and rubbery taste of your oxygen supply, the hard caress of the fifteen-point safety harness across the map of your body, and the odd burst of radio traffic in your ears to keep you company. The wait is everything.

13:50:11

Some claim visits by astral well-wishers. Still others think of the family they left behind; maybe for one trip, maybe forever. It all depends. All I could see was the goodbye letter, still rich with her perfume. Pretty cruel if you ask me. She wrote it on paper. Who bothers with paper anymore?

12:27:43

I mean, to send me something like that? Here? Now? Before a drop? Fuck! She watches the Feed, she knows what its like. But she sent it, nonetheless. She said I was ‘interesting’, but not ‘interested’. She said I was ‘good-looking, but not ‘attractive’. She said my job took me too far, too long, and far too often. She said it had begun to ‘catch up with me, physically’. She said she needed a man who could keep pace with her ‘changing needs’, whatever that meant. And of course, she ended it saying she hoped I would be mature enough to understand, but that she didn’t expect me to. The whole thing was so down-the-nose. But I must say, I admire her pre-emptive approach, cutting me loose at a time and place when I was largely unable to mount a counter-attack.

11:19:36

Especially when I’m strapped chin, belly, arms and legs inside a vacuum-sealed, ceramic-alloy Capsule in the firing tube of an orbiting Destroyer, just 15 seconds from the drop window, with very little opportunity to respond to the obvious flaws in her argument. Perhaps it’s for the best.

10:15:25

Man, I really wish I could cover up that LED! There’s nothing worse than watching the seconds creep by. I’d prefer not knowing when it’s gonna happen, you know? I’ve been in the launch bay gathering B-roll before, so I know what happens: Hundreds of thousands of Caps hang from gleaming metal rails that snake along the launch bay, just waiting for the word…

09:50:36

…and upon that word, they drop one by one through a hole in the deck, drifting aimlessly toward the shimmering GravCloud hovering along the belly of the ship, before a sudden force snatches them with invisible hands, hurling them toward the planet below. The sudden increase in momentum slams your stomach back around your spine, and its not uncommon to pass out on the way down.

08:20:11

I’m told the ‘Cloud is a mirror image of the gravity found on the planet below. I’m not sure how it really works – something about introducing sudden directional gravity to a weightless object – but it makes an invasion like this possible at a fraction of the energy cost.

07:08:15

In just a few more seconds, swarms of caps will punch through space, skimming along the atmosphere like flat rocks on a still pond. But right before I fuck the ground moving a couple billion klicks a minute, the gyros will kick in, the jets will fire and I’ll come to a sudden stop like a spent man in the arms of the prom queen.

06:27:13

The Killers are grunts, stars of the show. They take the field, attacking everything in their path with total ferocity. Me, I’m a Watcher. It’s my job to document this ferocity, which explains the swarm of A/V gear covering my suit. The moment I hit, the sensors are rolling, taking directional cues from the ‘Cap gyros. Eyes and ears of the invasion, that’s me. Even as I’m stumbling around punch drunk from the impact, the gear is sending clean, focused intel back to the ship. The gear is designed to fire when it sniffs fresh O2, so I don’t waste memory filming the inside of my cap in the event I pass out and start babbling commands.

06:09:18

Watchers compile specific footage of specific invasions, and beam it to other worlds, show them we mean business. Seems to be working so far. Ratings are high, and resistance has been minimal, which means we’re spending less fuel and deploying fewer troops. Think of it as economic combat.

05:55:18

I feel a jarring sensation; they’ve chambered the next round of caps. I’m next. I hear radio traffic in my helmet confirming this:

“Roger, tower. Launching One-Thirteen; One-Fourteen, four-one.” I’m Cap one, row one-fourteen. ‘Four-one’ means I’m clear for launch.

05:28:11

Dammit! Again with that letter! It’s a terrible time to reflect on this, but just between us? I always thought it was her love that made me invincible. I’ve been in some pretty tight scraps, I don’t mind saying. But I managed to come home clean every time. She used to tell me she’d lie outside at night gazing at the stars; find the one I was working, and never take her eyes off it till she got the call from me. I’d come home, fall exhausted into her arms, and she’d murmur, “I kept you safe, baby. I didn’t take my eyes off you, not once, you’d be so proud,” over and over as she stroked my hair. I can’t explain properly how much those moments meant to me, and to think I never told her. I thought she just knew… I should have said I just should have. Even once. I feel my throat constricting now as I think about her voice, and I take a long gulp of air to loosen up, fight it off. But I’ve never felt more alone.

04:56:02

Thinking back on the letter, I tell myself she’s probably looking up, but only as far as the ceiling these days. (OK, that was off sides…) With a sudden lurch, the Cap swings horizontal. I’m supported by the straps, poised over nothingness, biting down hard on the bitter tang of rubber, panicked snorts escaping through flared nostrils, fighting for focus. I feel the beginnings of an anxiety attack coming on. Breathe, slow down, relax, the MedTechs are probably monitoring my vitals.

03:28:46

Suddenly I’m free-falling, biting down, making fists of my eyes, waiting to be snatched like an apple from a tree branch, and flung full force toward the planet below completely exposed, totally vulnerable.

02:11:01

But all I want to know, all I could ever hope to care about, is that maybe she’s watching the stars just this one more time…

01:13:02

…just for old times sake.

00:00:00