Have you ever seen page five?

20MAY2012 – Concept: a human life is fully-realized within five weathered pages of a paperback novel, one pressed between many on a shelf near the back of an old bookstore, just to the left of a hand-lettered cardboard sign: FICTION.

Background characters in a novel are summoned forth from the No Thing and brought to life with such mastery, such clarity and depth of definition that the Reader can’t help but identify with these imaginary beings, understanding and identifying with them in a sudden flash of entirety. The Devil lives in the details. These fictional lives brush up against the Reader’s own with unexpected force, jarred into creation by vivid descriptions of spilled drink, flowing tears, clever plans, the rasp of whiskers or raucous laughter, such that the Reader can’t help but cheer them on.

Don’t get cocky. They used to cheer for lions, too.

But then the thumb is licked and the fourth page is turned and somewhere near the bottom of page five, the character is killed off. Is this cruel? Not particularly, that’s just how the story needed to be told.

“We are stories telling stories.” We have control over our own story right up until the moment when it collides with the storyline of another character. (Either we happen to them, or they happen to us. Depends on your perspective, really.)

These fictional characters live so completely on these yellowed plains, covered from head to toe in every aspect of what makes them real, existing behind and between each and every single letter on the page. The postcards, the tickets stubs, the dryer lint, the bar tabs, the take-out containers, the music collections, the book collections, the love letters, the grocery lists – all of the debris and mementos of their imaginary lives – are just dust trapped in the cracks and crevices of every foot of serif of every word of every sentence of every paragraph of the few pages they’re given, compacted by years of fucking and fighting and fear of failure, French fries and Friday nights, the whole thing rusted over with sweat like the pocketknife of an old man. Every word breathes, every letter hums. The characters aspire to learn everything there is to learn about the pages on which they exist; the height, the width and the location of the strange indentation at the upper edge of the third page where a worm ate its way into their falsified reality…

We can tell ourselves what free and wonderful beings we are and insist that everything is one big gorgeous goddamn pageantry. But you and I both know that we can’t travel beyond our own sixth page, and we can’t escape what’s coming up fast from the bottom of the fifth one.

Our destiny, too, is to be fed feet-first and screaming into the Great Grinder of Storytelling; we are brought to life so that the Reader may identify with us and we are killed off in such a way as to propel the story along and make the survival of the remaining characters that much more dear.

“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.” – Chuck Palahniuk

We are trapped like dolphins in a round tank, pinging ourselves into madness. (I think, therefore I am/very sad) We burn brightly while we can, but in the end we simply aren’t equipped to make it to the epilogue.

##

The above (crudely) illustrates a nagging sensation I’ve had for many years, that I left the factory incomplete, minus some very important pages from my owner’s manual, that I’m not a fully fleshed-out character in my own right. I don’t mean that I lack experience – hell, no. I’ve been a-many places and I’ve seen a-many things, and I’m just as impressed by life as you are.

But the miles aren’t long enough, and the dreams aren’t bright enough. I feel like a simulation, a placeholder, the storekeeper in an early Nintendo game, a character on the Holodeck — something programmed with a limited number of responses despite being part of a greater complexity. A one-act play in five pages. Trapped on the stage, unable to see past the lights…

(I can’t give you tomorrow.)

TWM

An Explanation of Subway Stickers and Additional Information

Please refrain from A) the use of a phantom fetus-conjuring blunderbuss B) the levitation of more than three novelty-themed Rubik’s cubes during a single séance, and C) the piloting of a square-wheeled tank boasting ineffective armaments in public places.

We’ll have more news of this at eleven. And now, tonight’s top story:

There’s something living behind the walls of this Brooklyn-time summer moment that paws, sniffs and stamps restlessly at the scattered ground, sifting through the raped and littered soil with a decidedly pointed hoof for telltale signs of a missing future.  And as it just so happens, this creature and I are hunting the same mouse; a secret stashed safely below the surface of the immediate past and cleverly camouflaged by the present tense.

Imagine if the universe worked differently; suppose every minute in history is essentially a separate world which must be built, maintained and torn down once the world finishes with it. And further contemplate that somewhere, someone decided that this particular instance, one containing a living photograph of alien world, needed to archived and viewed again for whatever reason. Okay, but why? What was so important about that moment, that planet and that dimension? Was it worth saving because it wasn’t ours? Was the archivist hoping to somehow rescue this civilization and provide a how-to or an example of how different life could be if it were DIY’d in another part of the universe?  Was this about “art”? Perhaps it was the archivist’s job to catalog civilizations and somehow this fragment was inappropriately absorbed by the bandwidth of my dreams. I have no fucking clue.

What I do know is this: I’m attempting to reverse-engineer a fragment of a memory using the mnemonic equivalent of a gasoline-scented scratch-n-sniff sticker, an oft-folded illustration torn from a science-fiction magazine and a die-cast metal toy.  And someone off-camera is demanding that I use these items to return a forgotten city to its former glory. The simplified instruction manual provided to me was downloaded as a zip file and stored somewhere in my skull but the link is 404’d, and now I’ve got this… thing bumping around in my not-so-big upstairs with a case of amnesia, creating unwanted bulges in my reality.

Anything I attempt to do while in this state becomes ten times more difficult; everything gets sped up and pinched, as though one were fishing for a shell fragment in a bowl of yolk. Time (yolk) is distorted, flowing faster between the outer shell of this 404′d object (thumb) and the walls of my perceived reality (bowl); images of some mysterious and misplaced Martian market become momentarily visible, projected against the ghostly flicker of heat waves of this New York Minute, brought to you in part by Friday, June 10, 2011, the letter thirteen, and viewers like you.

The good news is that I can almost feel what it was like to live in this place, but I can’t put the experience into words. Not yet. The bad news is that it has to come out.

The key to unlocking this thing’s got something to do with the way that Kanji seems at once ancient and futuristic (likewise Arabic, likewise the art of Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest), so I try to focus on that.  It also smacks roundly of the early issues of Heavy Metal magazine I devoured as a teen, the art of Jean Giraud (a.k.a. Moebius), selected writings of William Gibson and the feel of films like Fifth Element and Blade Runner, where the overt alien undertones are just part of the experience:

- a Bodega cat seeks relief from the summer heat on the lid of an ice-cream freezer.

- a matronly Ugnaught of a woman, with cast-iron breasts like matching Civil War cannons, stomps and sneers and stabs at her sequined-pink cellphone with the gold-painted nails of a velociraptor, talkin’ ‘bout how she gonna “fuck that dumb bitch up!”

- a hovering trade ship from some dusty distant world waits patiently above the East River for permission to land.

… and it’s all part of the Mise-en-scène.

Primarily, it’s got something to do with that fucking sticker.

I scratch at it furiously and press my nose against it, breathing deep. It works, albeit feebly. Something churns in my stomach and my field of vision becomes momentarily faded and narrow.  Encouraged, I scratch and huff at it some more. This goes on for about ten minutes. Beads of sweat begin to form along my arms and a rising sense of vertigo develops in my stomach. Now I’ve got the half-summoned memory of a lost alien world caught like a cat hair at the back of my throat and I’m desperate to cough it loose.

I cram my fingers down my throat and after a moment’s salivation I begin spewing forth watery chunks of buildings and backgrounds which slap at the pavement like horse piss on a flat rock before standing up slowly on their own, like a prizefighter ready to talk serious business at the end of the seventh round. Slumped against a wall with one hand on my knee, the sensation rises up again, coursing through me like a tidal wave as a half-completed grid of city streets soaked in stomach acid snakes forth like umbilical ropes from the enraged space between my lips, anchoring themselves to the soil like plant tendrils and immediately taking root, unfolding like ugly flowers. My jaws are pried open against miles of sewer lines and buried electrical cables and in a brief reprieve I take a few breaths in through my nose. Soon, my abdominal muscles are convulsing and contracting again as the five o’clock skyline of a world I’ve only imagined rockets the wrong way up my esophagus and my mouth gives birth to an alien sunset. It splatters first on the sidewalk before instinct drives it to its feet on doddering legs and it takes its place at the top of the page.

I gasp air for few minutes, wiping the puke from my lips and spitting out the taste of concrete and anodized metal, surveying the half-formed thing that I’ve made.

I’m obviously not done yet, but it’s a start.

TWM

Shimmer Man

(Story originally appeared in Tastes Like Chicken, issue 9, 2005)

The year was 2046.

My parents took me to a fancy restaurant for my birthday; a giant wedge-shaped thing perched on a series of curved, reinforced stilts 200 feet above a forest of deep and infinite green. The sun singed the treetops with an inaudible hiss as it slid below the horizon and a sweet breeze, pumped in from somewhere overhead, made the candles of my birthday cake flicker and sway softly. The light in my mother’s eyes danced and waved like fire. I was nine years old.

As the waiter set the cake down on the table and everyone drew a breath to sing “Happy Birthday”, suddenly there came a terrible pain in my skull, and I screamed like a wild thing. Throwing an arm across my face, I flailed and lashed blindly at the jungle of comforting hands tangled up in mine. My father seized me in his strong arms but was unable to prevent me from flinging myself out of my chair and onto the floor, taking the table cloth and the contents of the table with me. I felt as if the sides of my head were going to burst out like dammed waters, and I could imagine a boiling wave of bloody red breaking like the tide, spilling across the floor.

As I rolled around howling like a wounded animal and nearly blinded by pain, I saw something through my tears. Beyond the enormous picture windows which framed the off-season balcony was a sight unlike anything I had ever beheld– a stack of twinkling lights in the shape of a man, leaning casually against the railing and admiring the view. Those one-hundred-thousand colors I would never learn a name for stood out against the fading twilight, changing and shifting without pattern, without end or beginning. “Shimmer Man,” said my writhing brain. And as I continued to gape in painful amazement, I swear it turned to face me and even waved hello. The knives of pain subsided, and the twinkling lights began to fade.

The year is 2079.

It took the former United States almost 50 years to get it fully functional.

Despite the hundreds who lost their lives before the keel was ever laid, despite two serious on-board fires, despite a near-total fuel contamination which resulted in the jettisoning of a billion-dollar experiment, the Space Orbiting Platform “Promise” was christened on schedule and became a rallying point for post-war citizens. It was our symbol of the pride we thought we’d lost forever.

Nothing lasts forever, except nothing and forever.

When the main stabilizers went offline 72 hours ago, the ship began to slide, drawn ever closer to the Earth’s atmosphere. The captain of the broken Promise gave the order to evacuate the research vessel’s full compliment: giant robotic arms managed to deploy the twin 770-foot life pods before the Earth’s gravitational pull played “she-loves-me-not” with chunks of the mighty ship, dissecting indiscriminately, sending flaming red petals skipping across the sky. It was a horrifying sight, visible from anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere, and covered by every network in every country around the world, simultaneously.

The first life pod was struck by debris from the initial explosion and destroyed immediately. The survivors never had a chance, and the pieces burned up on re-entry. The second managed an emergency crash landing in the North Atlantic Ocean, vanishing under the waves in the time it takes to read this sentence.

The floatation system failed. Two hundred people died, and two survived.

The Promise came down hard. A lot of people wanted to know why, and they wanted to know yesterday. So I admit, I was in a bit of a hurry. And maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention to what I was doing. We were nosing in and around the engine room of the lifeboat, this once-colossal wreck that lay twisted on the ocean floor. Me and Perfect Tommy, my by-the-book dive partner of five years, noting different instrument readings and keeping our eyes peeled for the Engineering Officer’s electronic logbook, which might shed some light on what happened up there. The “black box” system on board the Promise was designed to store reports in triplicate. Two of them were lost forever; the last was here. Somewhere. That’s why we get paid the big bucks.

P.T.’s voice, punctuated by carefully measured gulps of air, came over the Divelink. “Coffee, our window’s up.” Hiss. “Mark position, let’s go.” We use short sentences to preserve energy and air. “Roger.” Hiss. “Mark position.” I removed a luminous wax marker from my sleeve bag and carefully scribed my initials, the time, and a few symbols on the bulkhead in our team-specific color, to show that this space had been checked. “Head for the Bouncer.” Hiss. “Right behind you.” Hiss. “Just want to wave a light in that corner.” Hiss.

“Leave it, kid.” Hiss. “We’ll be here awhile.” Hiss. “Check it later.” But he was out the door, and headed for the Bouncer. He’d probably noticed our mixture running low. He’s good on details.

The remote-operated Bouncer is a combination decontamination station and hyperbaric chamber; it was also our slow boat to the surface. Decom first, depressurise on the way back up. There are formulas to be followed to prevent the dreaded bends.

When high-pressure gases in the air come in contact with water, they dissolve into the water. That’s how carbonated drinks are made– exposing water to high-pressure carbon dioxide gas, and dissolving the gas into water. Surface too quickly, and it’s like uncorking a bottle of champagne. Only really painful, and a lot more fatal. To avoid this, we have to rise slow or make intermittent decompression stops on the way up so the gas can come out on its own. The only solution is to enter a pressurized chamber in which the air pressure matches the pressure at depth (breathing 100% oxygen on the way to the chamber also helps). Then, the pressure is released slowly. But to get to the chamber you have to be “clean”. After all, contaminate the chamber, and we’re all screwed.

P.T. turned to make sure I’d followed him, and I saw his face light up with a smile behind his visor. “Bet I whip your ass in checkers again.” Hiss.

“Sure you will, you cheatin’ bastard.” Hiss. Hearing the sound of your best friend’s digitized laughter in your ears when you’re a mile underwater is a strange experience.

The hatch of the Bouncer is controlled by a gamma-specific fluorometer, which takes a reading from every diver working this wreck before allowing them access. The water passing through a cell in the chamber is exposed to an ultra-violet light from a shielded source. Some molecules absorb the energy from this radiation and give back this energy by emitting a light, which is then read by a super-sensitive detector and transmitted to the Bouncer’s brain. The amount of fluorescent light produced depends on the amount of gamma detected, so a high reading above background in an already hot environment like this means I show up hot. And if I show up too hot, the door won’t open, essentially protecting the rest of the crew, and our only hyperbaric chamber from whatever threat might be present until I can be safely cleaned. If the chamber gets contaminated, you lose eight divers to the bends instead of one to gamma poisoning.

Like I said, that’s why we get paid the big bucks.

P.T. eased the bulk of his suit into the chamber, gave me a thumbs-up, and closed the door. The chamber is only big enough for one diver at a time, and the decon cycle takes about five minutes. As I waited my turn, I nervously eyed the rapidly falling needle that registered the amount of good air available (if you can call this shit “air”). Suddenly, I noticed flashing lights on my BUG. Tiny digital words scrolling across the screen made my blood run cold: my suit was losing pressure! As I was leaving Engineering, I must have snagged my suit on something– I couldn’t tell what, or where, or how bad. Looking up and around me, I could see a tiny stream of silvery bubbles colliding with the overhead, coming from somewhere behind my left shoulder.

“A diver need not worry about having his body contaminated, unless the diving suit or helmet physically leaks.” That’s what the rule books say. Unfortunately, I’ve got some urgent little lights flashing on and off on my BUG that say otherwise. The Bathymetric Underwater Gauge on my forearm provides me with critical information, like updated water temperature, present depth, estimated amount of nitrogen, and in this case, a plus-or-minus-10 reading of gamma in my immediate vicinity. Those numbers are rising. Slowly. I’m hot and getting hotter, fast. At this rate, I won’t be able to get into the Bouncer!

I glance up at the stream of bubbles over my shoulder again. They’ve gotten more pronounced.

“If a leak does occur, the dive must be terminated.” Rules are rules. I tried to remain calm. Water is a very dense material, and acts as an excellent shielding material to protect me from gamma. Because I’m immersed in water, I can control the amount of significant shielding maintained between me and the source by increasing the relative distance. Simple. The water itself is not radioactive– the only radiation that can be detected in the water comes from particles suspended in the water. Gamma and neutron radiation are not particles– they’re pure energy without mass, and must be shielded by material that has a great deal of mass, such as water, concrete, or lead. Of these forms of radiation, gamma is the ionizing radiation source from which the diver will receive the majority of his accumulated dose. Since water is such a great shield to ionizing radiation, I work in an environment which protects me from radiation. Pretty smart, huh?

Unless, as previously mentioned, I happen to tear my suit. And that’s just the beginning of my problems.

At these depths, wreck divers face nitrogen narcosis, high partial pressures of carbon dioxide and physiological mechanisms that experts have yet to understand, which can either lead directly to or contribute substantially to certain death. With the increased use of breathing media other than air over the years, there’s been a dramatic increase in fatalities caused by oxygen toxicity. Central Nervous System Toxicity (CNS) is a real motherfucker. Breathing oxygen at very high pO2s for a short period of time means problems arrive that much quicker. We’re talking visual disturbances, pronounced ringing in the ears, dizziness, mood swings, and convulsions and comas. Oh, yeah. And hallucinations.

So, I may or may not be seeing what I think I see ahead of me at the end of Passageway 4– a stack of twinkling lights in the shape of a man, leaning casually against the bulkhead, staring back at me: a hundred thousand colors I’ll never have the chance to learn the names for, changing and shimmering without pattern, without end or beginning… I shake my head several times to get rid of the vision. Must be ambient light passing through the stream of bubbles, casting a shadow, my eyes playing tricks on me, something. But I can’t shake it away, and I can’t tell myself I’m not seeing what I think I’m seeing.

The great thing about the Divelink communication Voice Recognition Chip is that it isn’t triggered by bubbles or ambient noise. The mouthpiece is a patented silicon rubber speaking cavity, and doesn’t require any straps. The automatic gain and squelch controls leave my hands free while I’m working, and it’s good to a range of 4,500 feet. Furthermore, the system is equipped with an emergency signal that alerts other divers (and the surface!) when a diver is in distress. I’ve had conversations with multi-billion-dollar company heads, sitting safe in their polished offices while I’m surveying a wreck, offering an on-scene, real-time cost estimate as to how much it will cost to salvage their ruined high-tech chunk of shit sitting on the ocean floor.

My words are automatically picked up by the surface unit, relayed through a wireless transmitter, and sent anywhere in the world as streaming audio. In this case, my dying words. Somewhere above me in a Shoreside Control Facility crammed with radio equipment and laptop computers, I imagine my raspy voice floating out of the speakers, filling the crowded room with the sound of a broken riddle.

“…so beautiful….”

“Beautiful?” Big Bobby Keegan grins broadly at the gathered logistics team and keys the mic. “Hey, Coffee! Who the hell ya got down there with you?” Schoolboy titters flash like fish in the water from a group of hardened men who work hard, play hard, and live like kings the world over.

“Cut the crap, Bobby,” barks Cappy. “Play back his last transmission. What the hell’s he talking about?”

The looped playback of my voice crackles over the speakers. “…so beautiful… (crack) …so beautiful… (crack) …so beautiful… (crack) …so beautiful… (crack).”

“Good Christ, he’s hallucinating! How long has he been down there?”

“About 45 minutes, doing an engine room survey with…” checks the roster, “Perfect Tommy.” Checks another gauge. “…who is… in the Bouncer.”

“How much good air does Coffee have left?” Cappy looks straight to Big Bobby for an answer, who checks the dancing LED readouts in a hurry as his grin dissolves like sunset.

“Maybe, uh, five minutes.”

“Maybe?!? Shit! How far is the Assist Team from his position?”

“Far end of the ship, about five minutes away, but they can’t do anything for him, Cappy.”

“Why?!?”

“Coffee’s hot. And he’s getting hotter.”

“Rad! Talk to me!”

During all nuclear diving projects, our dive crew is under the omnipotent control of the senior radiation protection technician, Rad Man. Rad is responsible for the radiation protection of each diver, plus the entire crew. He’s a short, fat bastard with more chins than a Chinese phone book, and total authority on the project– any doubt about conditions, the first sign of trouble, and Rad pulls the plug: all the budgeting issues, scheduling delays, and pissed-off stockholders in the world don’t make a fucking lick of difference. Rad’s word is final law.

Rad checks the numbers, frowning, hesitating. “At present… he’s still ALARA.” As Low As Reasonably Achievable.

Cappy takes a deep breath. “Plain English, Rad. Give me something good.”

Rad looks up from his instruments and returns the deep breath. “He’s got a bad suit tear. If we don’t get him out in the next few minutes, he’ll–”

Cappy pointed a finger in Rad’s face. “I distinctly remember using the word ‘good’ in that sentence.”

Cappy turned to another man. “Can P.T. still get to him?”

“Negative, Cap. Tommy’s already in the chamber, with another two minutes in his cycle. We’d lose two trying to save one.”

“Well, we can’t just leave him there! Think of something, damnit!” He keys up the mic again, and tries to find a smile among the cracks in his voice.

“Hey, down there! You doing okay, Coffee? We’re working on something. We’ll get you back. We’ll get you clean, and you can return to the surface. Don’t forget, you still owe me $500 from that bar in Singapore, remember? Don’t make me come down there and get it myself, over!” His voice is shaky with laughter, but his eyes are far from twinkling. He snaps the mic off again.

In the silence, the drops of sweat forming on his bald head are the only sound.

He snatches up the mic again.

“Coffee? You listenin’?”

Static.

“Coffee? Come on back, brother. Don’t you give up on me, over!”

I can hear the chatter from my Divelink’s cushioned earbuds– a tinny voice from the world far above me, somewhere in the warm, glittering sunlight. A world I know I’ll never see again. According to the BUG I just ran out of breathable air. I can feel it already– that shortness of breath, combined with a burning throat and chest associated with Pulmonary Oxygen Toxicity. Damage to the cell lining of the lungs, the lung walls, the formation of fluid in the lungs. The simple act of breathing becomes steadily more painful. In order to conserve my energy, I kneel down to think. Assess.

What do I have going for me? The surface team will try to come up with something. The Assist Team always carry pony bottles of air, maybe it’ll be enough. Too far… I could… maybe I could… what if I… nothing. Nothing’s coming.

The Bouncer won’t let me in. I’m out of air. The nearest Assist Team is probably 50 yards away. That’s nothing if ship’s in orbit. But when that 50 yards is pitch-fucking-black and twisted like a snake with a broken back… they’ll never make it in time. I’m too weighted with gear and too far down to attempt an emergency ascent. In desperation, I refrain from swallowing. Typically, this action seals the glottis and allows pressure to build in the lungs. “Always exhale before trying to inhale,” says the rule book. I’m hoping beyond hope there might be just a few more breaths in there somewhere, and I fight down panic, forcing myself to keep my lungs at mid-volume. Hoping. Waiting. But the doubt creeps in.

I’m done.

And so I raise my eyes again to the shimmering apparition before me, telling myself again that it isn’t real. It can’t be.

I haven’t seen the Shimmer Man since I was nine years old, but I’d recognize it anywhere. For a thousand nights after that first encounter, I tried in vain to recreate what I had seen with my colored pencils and pens, hiding under a blanket in my room till all hours with a flashlight, but without success. Every time I had a headache, no matter how slight, I looked around for the Shimmer Man, but I never saw him again. Why here? And why now?

Nitrogen narcosis. High partial pressures of carbon dioxide. Pulmonary Oxygen Toxicity. Central Nervous System Toxicity. Gamma radiation poisoning. Sure and sudden death. Drowning. The tremendous pressure of the ocean. A host of problems seeking me out, as I cower in this darkened wreck full of dead bodies on the cold sea floor. That’s why I get paid the big bucks.

And then I can hear the sound of Perfect Tommy’s digitized laugh. “Bet I whip your ass in checkers again.” Hiss. “Sure you will, cheatin’ bastard.” Hiss. I see all the weekends spent at his house on the beach, playing with his kids, and keeping my eyes off his wife. Like any good friend would do.

I stopped focusing on the grim facts and concentrated instead on the glowing apparition before me. “…let go… return to surface….” This thing, this creature of light is speaking to me in soft broken phrases, but the meaning is crystal clear. It’s time to go.

First, I have to purge my suit.

Of course, there’s no way I’ll be able to follow the Shimmer Man to where ever it is we’re supposed to go with all this equipment on. Ignoring the flashing depth gauges, and struggling against the depleted heliox for every breath, I reach up and begin to open the top-mounted helium double exhaust valve on my DESCO 9 Commercial Diving Helmet, and begin working my face free of the chin button, which allows me to regulate my exhaust and control my buoyancy without using my hands.

My heart is pounding, and all I can think about is the water that’s going to rush in and the terrible pressure that will shove the last breath of life from my lungs.

“What the hell’s he doing?!?”

“I can’t tell! He’s just… kneeling in… Passageway 4… outside Engineering near the Bouncer shaft. He’s just staring at a blank bulkhead, I don’t– oh, Jesus….”

“What?!?” Cappy’s face is contorted, the face of calm control is gone.

“He’s trying to take off his helmet.”

Cappy snatched up the mic again. “Coffee!” he shouted into the mic. “Do not take your fucking rig off, Coffee! You hear me?!? Whatever you’re seeing isn’t real! Get it together, son! We can get you out of there! Hang on!” He slams a hand down on a large red button on the console before him, and throughout the cramped quarters of the dive pod, a blaring klaxon wailed.

“Goddamnit, where’s the Bouncer?!?”

“On the way down, 30 seconds!”

A second flashing red light appears on a control panel, and sirens begin to wail. The pressure in my suit begins to drop rapidly.

“Assist Team! Move on Coffee now! Move it!” Cappy’s anguished voice fills the SCF, and desperation grips him in the pit of his stomach.

“Coffee! It’s Tommy!” P.T.’s voice, wrapped in warm echoes, comes to me. He’s safe and sound in the Bouncer. Such beautiful children, a loving wife. He’s fine. He’ll be fine. Looks like we won’t get that last game, though. Pity. “Hang on, man! We’ll get you out of there! Wait! Wait for me, Coffee, please! Wait! What the hell are you doing?!? Wait! Coffee–” The water is absolute cold, and pounds against my head, turning it inside out with blows from a giant hammer. And there is nothing else.

The Shimmer Man smiles at me with infinite patience, one hand extended and waiting for mine. As I turn around, I see the jagged lights of the Assist Team moving as fast as they can down the darkened passageway, skidding to a halt when they see that my lack of a head will more than likely prevent any resuscitative efforts. The bright beams twirl like fingertips in red paint, stirring infinite patterns. I feel bad for them, having to find me this way. “It’s okay, guys. I’m fine. I’m here.” I want to reassure them. I can see them gesturing to each other, and I know they’re talking to the Shoreside Control Facility, delivering the news. They’re going to take it hard. But it will pass. Everything does.

The Shimmer Man smiles at me again with infinite patience, one hand extended and waiting for mine. And there is nothing else.

In The Silence That Followed

For the moment, it’s All Quiet On The Western Front.

I’ve spent the morning taking portraits of my fellow office employees for the “Who’s Who” wall, and trying to solve the ugly jaundice of florescent lighting and it’s unfortunate effects on the ethnic skin spectrum.  I typically shoot near the window for natural light, using a speed flash as needed.  And still, some of them come out tinged even after color correcting with ‘Curves’ and ‘Photo Filter.’  Perplexing!

I’m sitting in my cube listening to ‘God Speed! You Black Emperor’, and the background chatter of the janitorial staff conversing in laughing Spanish.  No temporal distortions today; no pondering thoughts into the Great Beyond, no journal entries or dreams made into weird fiction.  Instead, I’d like to talk briefly about George Sodini, the man who shot three women dead in a Pennsylvania gym before killing himself out of an apparent desire for a girlfriend.

“A man needs a woman for confidence.  He gets a boost on the job, career, with other men, and everywhere else when he knows he has someone to spend the night with and who is also a friend,” wrote Sodini.  ”Flying solo for many years is a destroyer.”

In a video he’d posted to YouTube, Sodini toured his house and made offhand mention of the matching chairs and cleanliness of his living space before remarking, “it is easy for me to hide from my emotions for one more day.”

“Take a long drive in a car,” he told himself.  ”Listen to some music, daydream or just do some mundane task around the house that really doesn’t need to be done that’s not too important.  And there you go, one more day, and one more day turns into one more year.”

I’m sure that it’s part of Allegheny County police superintendent Charles Moffatt’s public relations responsibility to say that a person capable of pulling the trigger on a class of exercising women “just had a lot of hatred in him,” but I don’t think it was as simple as hate.  In his online journal, Sodini confessed that he’d “never spent a weekend with a woman, never vacationed with a woman and never lived with a woman,” and that he had had limited sexual experiences.  It’s obvious he felt a growing rage for the women who’d rejected him, and for the world he felt had abandoned him.  I don’t think this action was purely about rage. It was about stopping the pain.

I’m not saying I support or condone his actions. By no means. I just wish…, I don’t know, that someone had bothered to stop and talk to him, offer advice, ask him how he was doing.  The man was in pain, and nobody seemed to notice or give a damn until it impacted their lives in a violent fashion.  I feel the same frustration each time a shooter makes the news; I wanted to be in a position to dissuade Klebold and Harris from carrying out their plans, and I feel a tinge of regret and disappointment for every copycat the world has been introduced to since.

I’ve been in lonely spots, but I don’t think they were anywhere near as rough as George’s.  All in all, I’ve had and continue to have a pretty amazing life.  I’ve been to more countries than most folk have vowels in their names.  I’ve got an amazing kid, good friends and an interesting job.  I’ve had rewarding relationships with a handful of remarkable women, the majority of which I’ve managed to either part on good terms, or continue to claim them as friends.  I’ve had my evil days, but my heart is full of good.  As the X-Wife likes to remind me, I’ve been pretty damn lucky – not everyone has the same opportunities.

According to the article on CNN (which was quickly replaced by a story about Twitter’s denial of service attack), police spoke to a pastor mentioned on Sodini’s online diary.  The man said that Sodini had attended his church but stopped in 2006 and that there was a minor incident involving a woman who felt “he was paying too much attention to her,” Moffatt said.  The pastor spoke to Sodini, and it stopped, he said.

“He was hell bent on committing this act,” Moffatt said.  (Of course he was, genius.  He hadn’t had sex in almost 19 years.)

The guns aren’t the real story, and this shouldn’t involve the NRA.  Heartache is what pulled the trigger, and loneliness put people in the hospital with bullet wounds, and three others in the ground.  A human being felt pain, felt misery, felt loneliness, and when he could take no more, he acted out.  Read the excerpts from his (edited) online diary before it’s gone.  Some of it seems a little crude, admittedly, but that’s the nature of human thought.  ’All things holy and profane’, as Thomas Hobbes put it.

Naturally, they ran an unflattering photo of the man.  “Look at him!  He was obviously a freak!  He wasn’t like us.  No, sir.  I feel safer now that he’s gone.  What if it’d been me?” Of course you’re free to judge, but I ask you to try on George’s shoes at least once.  What if it had been you?  What would you do in his situation?  How would you feel?  How would you cope with decades of rejection if you were George Sodini?

“Well, I’d never do that, I have more respect for myself, I’d do this, I’d have done that, I’d –”  Yeah.  Great.  Let me stop you right there, my friend.  I said ‘if you were George Sodini,’ the man no woman would touch, much less talk to.  He had a job, he worked out, went to church for awhile, he was clean shaven, took pride in his appearance, and no history of mental illness.  He was just a man.  And still…

As a result of George’s actions, I think I’m gonna take the buds out of my ears for the next few days, look around more, and talk to people.

Those killed were identified by the county’s medical examiner as Heidi Overmier, 46, of Carnegie, Pennsylvania; Elizabeth Gannon, 49, of Pittsburgh; and Jody Billingsley, 38, of Mount Lebanon.

 

Three Dreams

I was jolted from slumber by the angry klaxon of my alarm clock.

After first rewarding myself with a big cat stretch, I unplugged a tiny silver spike from the back of my head. The tiny silver tower was wrapped in black cloth which spilled down to the floor and snaked across the room before climbing the scarred wooden legs of a cluttered workbench before vanishing into a bird’s nest of transistors, antiquated vacuum tubes, ’50s era voltage regulators and an over-clocked CPU awash in a wild show of blinking lights and (dangerously) exposed cables, one of which fed into the side of a battered electric typewriter I’d acquired at a recent fire sale. The paint was charred down to the metal and it was missing a few parts here, and there but after a few weeks of patience I’d managed to restore it to good working order.

Sitting down at the bench, I tugged on the overhead lamp and began scrolling backwards through more than 20 feet of butchers paper – half-formed thoughts and vague concepts churned out by my subconscious mind during the past eight hours, carefully imprinted with delicate force on crisp white paper by tiny steel arms bathed in ink.

The first entry went like this:

“Bicycle messenger… crisp uniform, shiny shoes… delivered legal document, folded tight, wedged into miniature bear trap… something women might shape eyelashes with. Paper concerned illegitimate child; French girl, 14 years old… named me as father?”

I frowned. That’s absurd. I’ve been to a lot of places in my life, but I’ve yet to set foot in France. Besides, why would anyone wait so damn long before serving such a notice? It was obviously a cheap bit of REM spam, one of those desperate meathead rantings one might receive from an “African Dignitary” or a dethroned member of the “Lithuanian Royal Family,” offering to share a percentage of fabled millions in exchange for your bank account number, a retina scan, a pap smear and a Dutch dinner date at a fine restaurant.

I looked at the next one:

“Danger… strong cravings to force you from bed and into million candle watt power lights of local stop-and-rob, ISO vanilla rice milk… 2:00 A.M. Exercise caution in vicinity of aisles three, five, nine; alligator pits. Rice milk in two, just past tanning booth containing your nude fifth grade teacher… (classical music, drove red Corvette, kept horses) Avoid backdoor of store as escape route; leads to towering maze, concrete walls, broken glass, concertina wire, bad news… protected by men in black body armor and vicious attack dogs… brutal, stylish guns: dull, black, snub, wide-barrels, air hoses, and an ammo feed system which makes no practical sense… afterimages of scaling chain link fence with groceries, something with teeth pulls at my leg, lots of screaming, and ketchup. Hunger is a beast, the beast never sleeps.”

I can remember the teacher, but not her name. Something beginning with an “R”? An amazing figure wrapped in long skirts and tight sweaters of grey wool, exotic silver jewelry and soft, luxurious hair piled high on her head. She had the most amazing eyes. She smelled sweet like a rainstorm when she’d lean over my shoulder to help me, and she was forever pulling me out of class and administering these weird logic tests. Did she see something in me? I loved her class, but never raised my hand. I used to fantasize, as children do, that she would never age, and that someday I would be old enough to ask her to go out on a date.

I sighed softly and read the next entry:

“Alabaster Rocket Ship to Mars… shaking so hard… rip the armrest off the fucking chair… heart replaced by swarm of locusts, shivering, rib cage popping rivets… can’t see straight, have become abbreviated light, moving so fast, spine feels like electric eel… can’t find door home… head on fire… will explode upon reentry, shaking apart at seams, skin stretching, painful, will tear soon, can’t open eyes for fear of losing them to excessive speed, dissolving, thousand miles per second… my debris field will be scattered across countryside, some sick sort of self-inflicted Lockerbie… lucky I don’t have any fillings… if I miss Earth, I may never stop… shoot right across the galaxy, pass the Magellanic cluster, the Great Beyond… if I hit, I might keep going, but, being unable to escape Earth’s gravity, will no doubt turn and pierce again, again, again, punching repeated holes through crust, magma, tectonic plates, mountains… causing earthquakes, tsunamis, floods… terrible choice, simple decision… make it soon, here it comes.” Weird.

The rest of it was a wash of nonsense and misfires– the “S” and “E” keys had stuck together again, giving everything a weird neo-Roman feel which slowly faded away like the mighty empire itself. I was running out of rib — I sniffed. Something was overheating.

I glanced at the maze of switches, dials, and flickering numbers on a large black box. All dials read green; no spikes or warning lights. I ran one hand over the maze of multi-colored wires in the blinking Lucite box, frowning, feeling for heat.

Suddenly there was a loud pop and a blue flash scorched my finger. I shook it and popped into my mouth. Yep. There’s the problem. Looks like that last dream caused a short and might have just fried one of the processors. Oh, well. I could always get some long cables and move the processor into the refrigerator. Have to shift the beer to help regulate the temperature. After breakfast, I’ll head out for the replacement parts and, with luck, I’ll have the dream again tonight.

I tore the paper free, dated it, and put it with the others.