On the Third Day, Boulder (barrier)
VI.ii. The Cooling Tower
— (two.)
The panes of glass are streaked, it’s cold in here. Outside a storm is brewing, and there is someone unfamiliar in the house. I have moved through the pantry into the darkened living room, and I am afraid to turn on the lights. Is anyone there, hiding behind modern sofa furniture in this ghost-ridden aging home. I hear into the silence for its bones aching, the furnace to chatter, but it is only the wet autumnal leaves crawling like lizards across the outside walls. The gusts are rising, and I have just come in from the cold, still in my pea coat, buttons declasped, but a zipper still shuts the knit lining. A twig comes knocking at the double-pane glass door, relenting after sparse effort, pulled in a different direction. Something sounds like the scuff of a shoe on wood floors; have I forgotten again that its my birthday?
Surprise!
Surprise, it is not my birthday, and there are no confetti-bearing revelers stowed in the stillness of the eye of the storm. No, nor are they the generations of stacked souls who have been born and have died in this home. There are cemeteries nearby, and as the obituary logs fill and the suburban real estate market explodes we opt for compression and durability. Just go directly to the mineral, it lasts longer and is itself a carbon footprint, but leave none as it stealthily mists across the ocean.
I wish to be buried in space, mama. I wish it could be my corpse, as if some indecomposable puppet of my fraught biological existence could continue to wander beholden to the earth, but finally enlightened, weightless, floating on somewhere beyond the atmosphere where time runs more slowly. But, here’s the best part. I would take all the digital files of all of my recorded personal life, my journals, my logs, my great ideas, my foolish ideas, my loves, my friends, my family, everyone I ever encountered who left an mark on me impressionable enough that I could remember and re-transmit in audio or video and capture in bits and bytes, all the resin and tar of my existence, the ligaments and knuckle fluid, the entire diaspora of fragmented information that had some right and relationship to contribute to my existence, whether it’s a receipt from CVS or a search history, and I would etch these files onto a perfect tiny crystal, and demand that the mortician fuse this all-knowing time capsule onto my skull, preferably with an black magic marker arrow pointing to it next to the scrawled phrase ‘This Side Up.”
Up, up, and away we go! Into the Ether. Into the Aether, Either, OrThor, Arthur, Gunther, Grunter, Hunger, Butler, Brother. Up and into the great white ether again.
There is someone here I know it. Upstairs. You have to try and be more than just nimble in these situations, but ninja. The golf club I put in the shadow of the inherited curio as a ‘joke’ proves its versatility. I grip the iron by both the grip and the staff, waged over my shoulder like an ax, purposefully intimidating. They have gone upstairs in the home, even closer to the protected sanctum, the safest place any one of us can find to rest and nourish our consciousness. This sort of intruder is the most dangerous. They are not just trying to replenish a lost or forbidden resource, which is quite understandable when we are locked and forced to emanate from these biological follies. If one is hungry, there is little one can do beside take food. We are no longer advocates of pillaging, as we’ve been edging ever closer to the idea of being equitable in our distribution of resources. Tell that to Britain and the black man. But hashing and slashing and rehashing these wounds cannot propel the future forward. Said like a true Uncle Time in his bathing cabinet. He’s been in there far too long, something’s up, indeed!
No, I am not the invader here. Rabbit holes and off-topics tantalize and lure me with their unique siren song as they weave, layer after layer into trance music. No, I am not the invader here. I belong here. I’m stricken by this terrible need to itch as a pass the fireplace tiptoe over tiptoe, like a fire in my scapula, it would be so easy to just take the head of this club and try to find the spot and dig in, but I’m already too tall for these ceilings and door frames, and I might accidentally knock on the plaster and telegraph my coordinates in this rapidly intensifying 3D space.
This is no petty burgle, they have come for something more terrifying. What if it is a they? Would that even be possible? Would you throw in the entire can of worms or apply your brilliant artisan skills to craft one e’er-repeating lure?
The stairs will creak, I’ll need to coordinate my movements with thunder crashes. I’m careful not to whack my leg against the stairwell, as it would be a dead give away as it pinged the metal. The damn hydraulics in the ergo-brace purr softly enough that it should get confused for the wind, so long as the wind keeps up.
Surprise! Lightning crashes, or was it… no, it couldn’t have been car brights. Three, four, five, s-go!
I make it up most of the way with the first rolling acre of thunder. The fucking bathtub is running… What the fuck? I can sense myself choking up my grip on the club, and the objects and rooms are alive with accenting tingles, I don’t just know where everything is, I can feel all of it — it’s dimensionality, its contents. I am as big as my house, and I look inside myself to ascertain where they are, what they are doing. But it’s no easier than pinpointing phantom pain, and I can only hear the hollow pinging of the ceramic claw foot tub, with the awkward ricochet down the drain.
I shudder with the return of the itch. Are you fucking kidding me with this? These clubs we use as hands, these clubs we use as feet, these clubs we use as trumps, they are laughably useless at times. Dramatic irony has consolation only for the survivors.
Yes, I remember remembering all of these things. Some images are sharper, and many are disconnected, but I’m starting to see the pattern in these memories, especially now that the tub is being filled.
This is not the tub in which my drunk mother made repeated verbal reference to my genitalia, but I did soak there.
This is not the tub where Nina surprised me as I was masturbating under the warm water, and the shame I felt that she intuitively sensed and loved me enough to make the effort to disrobe immediately and hop on top of me. I remember that I was fantasizing about her younger sister when she interrupted.
This is that tub.
— Milo and his loyal companions, Donkey freighting him and his papoose-strapped Phanstasmannie, currently entrusted with his Top Secret codex, trotted across the hay mounds devolved from bales over the stable grounds to the lip of a gargantuan, expansive cistern misty with condensation. Donkey sidled them up to the rim of the vastness, a radiating, but pleasant warmth who was already let herself be weakened by exertion of churning heavy turbines.
Her breath, lent from this crevice as a kiss, has already turned the wheels of the digital age, where love becomes ones and hates become zeros, forgotten and unknown.
The private man dies, but the public man lives forever, they say.
— A Cooling Tower! Milo blurted out, astounded as he was by its humbling majesty, her selfless giving, breath after breath, mother of our existence in perfect symbiotic compassion of grace… nothing else in nature had he found more moving or more beautiful.
— We’re going down there, Donkey, Milo pointed down to the gentle cough of the abyss.
‘(Where does it lead to?)’
[To the land of gods and monsters.]
‘(Oh my, I don’t know about that.)’
Milo rests his chin on his fists that clutch the donkey’s mane and thinks almost aloud: There are iconically always two towers, as if they acted as eyes for the earth to see its remote place in the universe in stereophonic cosmic rays. It’s a game of mirrors, the blind man said to the dog.
— If we’re on the brink of one, there must be another relatively nearby, Donkey.
‘(Where does that other one lead to, then?)’
[To the land of angels and devils.]
‘(Oh my, we’d better just take this one then.)’
— Agreed.
Against the over-ruled protestations of Phantasmannie, interested as she ever was in allegorical clues that might lead to successful decryption of the C.I.A. message, the trio of minstrels were hurtled, by clearly cloven hooves, from solid cement into a fiction of space, clutched one to the next, in reverse order of direct descent. ‘(Ain’t tat light, chollie!)’
The mist felt queer, like gobbling and choking on tiny tapioca, silicon bubbles and whale blubber glopping past them musically, flatulent pitches popping translucent oleaginous balloons that explode into a acrylic vivid splotches dripping as brown gravy shower, slathered all over the chitlin’ and grit was Annie Jo’mama’s greatest foible, visible only in direct sunlight if staring straight at her. And then she emerges, like light from the womb, to welcome you with open arms into the dental habitat of monikers and avatards.
They plugged in the mentally deficient first, as breaking damaged goods has been an essential innovation tactic since prisoners, since slaves, since Australia, since Africa, since the pillaged, since the children. [Empirically-proven to boot!] — [No money-back guarantees said even finer print.]
Being someone of celebrity descent who had from early on been pegged as “in need of help,” Milo benefited greatly as “beta’tester” guinea pig for emerging technologies. He was under no illusions: automatic doors for handicap access aren’t enjoyed predominantly by the crippled.
But in this terrifying free fall, all the while awaiting the arrival of water, there was little use for the body other than to sensually remind us of the terminal velocity of earth’s gravitation, as their minds whirl more vociferously with thoughten word upon thunk word.
Do astronauts think at the same speed as they did on earth, even though their internal clocks move more slowly in a less-information-rich sector of spacetime?
Milo had been thinking outside of time since he was struck by the Enunciating Annunciating Gordian Angle of his existence, which boiled him down to a bean, softened to one perspectivized packet of individuation.
“If we’ll be able do it then, then we must have been doing it all along, dig?” said the beat poet clutching his King James’ Bible written by a cavalcade of all-too human authors, editors and publishers and bawling loud and naked knee-high in a fecund pile of his own fly-bitten excrement. [And by it he meant solve causality.]
The pastor comes on-stage, curly with his collar, and removes the coded packet of Holy Literature with two fingers stopping his nostrils and two hygienically gloved fingers. He starts to run off with the epistolary masterwork, but is tripped by the smug scholar, and slams to the marble, sending the heavy tome of superhuman knowledge to tumble down a palatial spiral staircase, to finally settle near the bottom on a sparse shelf marked Transcendental Literature.
Our books are made from trees and our tools from mountains, and we often neglect to mention that our poultry tastes like dinosaur.
I am worried that Simon is here. Somewhere.
[So am I.]
‘(Oh my.)’