Dead Reckoning and Other Stories

by Dino Parenti

  . . . into childhood?

  The world, it is steam and cast-iron and copper dungaree rivets all of a sudden. Not our childhood, but a childhood of a two-hundred years before we were, though as familiar as the Oregon cabin we summered in. Dad, attired in smeared overalls instead of accounting shirtsleeves, cheek swollen by chaw instead of Doublemint, leans from the shadow of an oil derrick to bark orders at dark-skinned laborers. From a flat rail car I watch this, moored to an iron wheelchair, my misshapen legs deflated under a gingham blanket. My maladroit nature punishing me, his voice echoes. A girl would’ve been more graceful. His loving tease. I wonder if the rumble I feel is a looming gusher, or the voicing of his discontent . . .

  . . . finally confessing something: as an adult and a man of science, I was made privy by fellow undergrads to the power of psilocybin intoxication. Those mind-altering mushrooms that sprout in the droppings of white-tail deer, used by shamans to travel the stars without boosters. That they also manifest nausea and hampered coordination was no deterrent—that was the very definition of my youth! Because of bad footing and weak orientation, all my play took place six inches from my eyes, usually on the ground. Maybe my bones failed to develop. Maybe it was my ears. Whatever the reasons, it taught me of the deceptive sanctuary of the earth. How it can swallow and kill as well as bolster and refuge. Is it why I feel unaccepted by it? Feel that it’s always fought me? Doesn’t want me? How else does one explain those fire ants bursting from its skin to sear me with bites in the spring of ’12? Or the rattlesnake hiding beneath the chaparral as I dug trenches for my little soldiers to fight in? Or the sinkhole on the Friday before the start of the fifth grade that swallowed the garden shed as I played not ten feet from it? And yet as I grew too old to play in the mud, I never lost the pull of the comforts of pretend, though sometimes, when the world’s its quietest and the hole inside me plunges the deepest, I feel cheapened as an autonomous being for shrinking into the niche of fantasy just to fill the void. Is this the best my brain can do? My supposed genius brain? Because of my woeful sense of the poetic and the abstract, I was slotted into engineering. The way people saw the meaning behind paintings, that’s how I saw the patterns in numbers. Yes, the fit was a good one, one of the few that ever was. So I solved the equations, called forth the theories, and crafted a machine that is self-sustaining and can orbit the Earth in perpetuity. Yes, the mushrooms have helped to afford me such visions, but they exact favors in return, favors that render my brain as ungainly as my feet, leading to a slip of temporal cognizance now and again. A good word for it, slip. A smooth, sliding transition from one plane to the next . . .

  . . . where I skulk along a cobbled riverside, this time on hale legs. When my arms sweep into view I notice my skin, darker than my carpish, Portlandian complexion, pulled taut by the half-draw of an arrow nocked along sinew string . . .

  . . . which isn’t like the streamlined fiberglass bow Grandpa taught us on, but his drilled principles are the same: lock stance, inhale slowly, draw, aim, exhale slowly, release. Remember what he’d say? The things he learned as a policeman before his own deep scars and traumas consigned him to tearing down all his oaths? “Whenever you feel adrift and without place, root your feet and fire a few arrows across the backyard stream where . . . ”

  . . . dried salmon and overturned pots of pond-lily seeds litter the shoreline. On the opposite bank, the charred, splintered sweathouse where our grandfather cured us of our winter ills smolders against a stand of spruce. Indians. Yurok. Our people. Their bodies bob and drift in the soft current. The foliage stirs, and before I can react, musket-fire spits across the water. Balls tear into my body, and I fall. My shredded legs twitching, bare and chestnut like my arms, as I sink into the shoreline silt, fading rapidly . . .

  . . . into the moment on the rim, just before the launch, just after dropping a good dose. More than one colleague already citing my dislocation, which I wave off because I must anchor myself to the clearest view of the launch, somewhere along the edge where the trees don’t grow. Still another tells me I’m too close, but I answer that I must feel what the indigenous felt. The connection. The oneness. I demanded as such, even during the planning, the designing. When they made their case for ion propulsion, I stood my ground and rejoined that other worlds lacked roads and places with names. That ion propulsion was incommensurate with interstellar travel. That what we truly needed was proximity to home. Not on the surface, perhaps, but in view of it, and in the end they agreed. Because the fear of disconnection and dislocation finally, truly bored into their souls and poured footings. Because they already knew enough. Knew how it might all end and when. And if it should happen, we would have less than a generation left together. An eternity when compared to you and I, dear sister, who only had an hour together after sharing a womb for three-quarters of a year. Before they cut us out, and a choice was put . . .

  . . . in my feminine(?) hands, bronzed by firelight, I piled another stone upon a cairn. Someone I loved, felled on a bison hunt. Without warning the night erupts brighter than the hottest midday, and the ensuing crack blows me off my feet. Sprawled against boulders atop the butte’s edge, I watch beyond my laden belly and scorched legs as Mount Mazama, cloven in two, topples into the crimson horizon before a great geyser of fire that will, over a few thousand years, yield Crater Lake. As archipelagos of burning trees plummet into a mile-wide lava-flow that snakes towards me, a lucid notion breaches forth: the Yellowstone Caldera will be orders-of-magnitude grander . . .

  . . . than this roar, thundering all about me. How I wish you were here, sister. To see how I’ve grown. To see what I’ve built, in this very moment being heaved into the vacuum from the hidden base east of Mt. Scott. I won’t be joining them. Because I’m unfinished. Because despite the hardships, despite the ceaseless void that was once you, we all long to be one with the dirt. To unearth our place. Down here, one day soon when there will be no further need of subterfuge or veiling, I’ll live my remaining days unclothed. Not even the handfuls that initially survive will bat a lash. Nakedness has always been my greatest dread. At pools. At gymnasiums. First sex. How does one explain the clumsy prosthetic that stops the depression on my right where ribs never were? Where an abdominal scar runs from crotch to base of neck, like the equator on a fractured planet? How does one explain that mom and dad had a choice to make—that the kidneys, liver, lungs, and heart could only belong to one brain, and they chose the boy over the girl because of trite, antiquated notions of surname perpetuation. Because the world was so grievously lacking in Smiths, lacking in mercy, lacking in imagination. Did I ever tell you that sometimes, when you were the most gone, I would shift my shadow in the grass so that it would catch and merge with the shadow of a tree or phone pole from the alley, and I would fill in the arms and the legs from the spill of nearby branches, an there we would be, you and I, carved into two by light? Ah . . . the light! There it goes now, rising up and up beyond the rim, the quasar-glow of thrusters and the fleeting umbilicus of white-grey smoke beneath it, the light washing out the shadow of the crater’s rim. The snow beneath me swells and brightens, and my predicament is assessed. Amazing that despite my fully spiraled lower half, there’s no pain. The projections I envisioned earlier—the trees, the candles, the pilings—are the femurs, the tibias, the fibulas piercing flesh and denim, pointing to the sky like irregular lodge-poles. The forest mere inches from my eyes. A petroglyph in the boulder a few feet away that I’d certainly struck, a divot scooped from its face, as though the ancients who’d carved it were foretelling of my arrival. The period to their future account of my tumble down the southern rim. My colleagues high above, able to see me now, their voices buried in the rumble of rockets. Surely they cry out my name, asking if I’m alive, informing others that I’d slipped, which is the only thing that could’ve happened, correct? But you know the truth, sister. Settling into the loam, chasing the rocket’s contrail as it hits escape velocity and breaches the blue, I smile and imagine you here with
me, building tiny log cabins out of pine needles.

  STRATUM

  IF YOU MISSED IT, don’t fret. From up here, the raised thumb of the Yucatan Peninsula passes beneath me sixteen times a day. Whenever possible, I finger-trace the submerged impact depression of the Chicxulub Crater through a portal. Stroke the big rock that ended the Cretaceous Era. When you can touch something that’s never been touched, it should be the final act of your life.

  Twenty years ago, as the tour-guide prattled on about diving-depth limits, this was on my mind. See, I hadn’t flown a thousand miles to Chicxulub to pearl dive. Nor did I end up in outer space last week just to drop a few steel sepulchers into geo-synchronous orbit. But to straddle time, one first requires staging.

  ***

  One thing I did glom from that tour-guide in Mexico: human physiological limits with scuba gear are around two-hundred feet.

  A five-millimeter layer of Neoprene, a quarter-inch of tank steel, and assorted plies of rubber and plastic keep you ticking. Beyond that, without specific air mixtures and a slow, careful ascent, you’re feeding tube worms.

  Up here in the derelict International Space Station, it’s no different, really. A few centimeters of Kevlar-reinforced insulation swaddling mere millimeters of aluminum. That’s it. All that stands between me and the vacuum.

  Between me and Perses, the other big rock on the way.

  The impactor, if we must get technical at this late hour.

  ***

  How I got here is, after the navy, and after my wife split for any number of reasons legitimate and otherwise, I fell into designing high-end safes for wealthy VIPs. I innovated a self-locking spherical model composed of titanium, got wealthy, then got bored.

  After Perses appeared, so did motivation. One day I cladded a sphere with a layer of tantalum to shield against ionizing radiation, and the prototype for the Remembrance Sphere was born.

  When I was offered a small fortune to crank out a batch in short order, I deferred it. I had no idea how to monetize a thing that I saw as achievable by any number of other obsessives.

  ***

  The Chicxulub asteroid I yearned to feel has no name other than for the region it hit. When asteroid 2071-ND13 was discovered eighteen months ago, it was designated Perses, after the Greek titan of destruction. An amateur stargazer in Idaho with a backyard telescope spotted a fourteen-kilometer-wide rock that none of our underfunded agencies could with their vastly larger arrays.

  Once the number-crunching verified the worst-case-scenario, it was decided that cultural posterity should reside separately from where the only viable shelters were being covertly built under the Patagonian Andes, ironically not far from the ground-zero camp from which an ancient superbug was exhumed not two generations ago, soon thereafter to take out nearly half-a-billion souls.

  The funding source for these shelters remains vague, diffuse, unhampered by red tape. Like the perpetual motion rocket program scrubbed twenty years ago after the explosion that killed two-hundred pilgrims, there was no one to credit or blame, and the Yosemite caldera remains intact, though swollen like a tic at a Vegas buffet. Compared to what’s coming for certain, that’s like dropping the trailer hitch into the pool instead of the whole damn truck. Then again, we’ve always been a species that ignores the truth for wholesale irrationality.

  ***

  It’s been said that an opened Remembrance Sphere evokes a split locket, but they always remind me of the nautili and the oysters I swam past as I plunged deeper beneath the Gulf of Mexico, unspooling rope into a rapidly fading light.

  ***

  Water fills three-quarters of the world, ninety-nine percent of which is inaccessible without some manner of technology. The thinnest of sheets keep us alive. If the Earth were a Remembrance Sphere, its atmosphere would be the thickness of cellophane. All our bare flesh can hope to touch of the universe is a hair’s breadth. This has been my life’s great quandary and disappointment.

  ***

  Eight days after my dive, when I finally awoke from the coma, they said I’d nearly reached three-hundred feet before the boat hauled me back up. Even unconscious, they said I was smiling. The rapid decompression had caused all my joints and muscles to seize. The inverted half-domes stippling my body are the result of uneven pressure dispersal. My grandfather in Cuba was riddled with them. Pitting edema, it’s called. But to touch what’s never been touched often yields scars.

  It took two men to pry the mud and rocks from my hands.

  ***

  The thing to remember about maximizing your survival time in the vacuum of space is to not hold your breath. Unlike the compression from the bends, the gases in your lungs and digestive tract will expand rapidly from the sudden pressure loss, and while you’ll bloat some, you won’t explode like in the movies of old. Amazingly enough, your paper-thin layer of skin is tough enough to keep you whole.

  ***

  Two-hundred-and-fifty. That’s how many Remembrance Spheres were ultimately commissioned, each to contain the works deemed by the selected lot of philosophers, artists, and statesmen as the epitome of humanity.

  Personal mementos such as photos and journals were deemed optional, a most dangerous word, fraught with permissibility.

  Once I completed the spheres, the issue of deployment jumped to the forefront. With dwindling time and resources, mankind’s executor would likely be facing a one-way mission. A volunteer was needed.

  I’d found my fee.

  ***

  So you won’t explode in space, but what will happen, initially, is the moisture in your eyes and mouth will instantly boil away. Wait about a minute, and you’ll start convulsing as hypoxia kicks in. Wait two minutes—the maximum survival threshold—and your blood will start to boil. Then your heart stops. But two minutes is enough. When I was pulled from the Yucatan’s water, I had two minutes of tank air left, and I managed to graze singularity.

  ***

  A week to kill and surrounded with this much knowledge and secrecy?

  Yeah, I’d sworn an oath. Resisted permissibility. But to fail to touch such accessible greatness? Too much incongruity to defy.

  Oh, I’ll fill them back up and deploy them as promised. All these broken, hinged orbs careening softly in the three ISS modules sadden me too much to leave as is. Oysters gutted of their pearls, in this case, any number of baubles, trinkets, crucifixes and wedding bands. Photographs of sentimentality and perversion alike. Even a few baby teeth and locks of hair.

  One such item is a hundred-year-old bottle of Macallan ‘M’ whisky. Much pricier than what my adoptive father was fond of drinking. I remember his confessions as we split a bottle of Journeyman on my 21st birthday. About the birth mother I never knew. His second wife whom he’d designated as unfit. How he basically kidnapped me from her to raise for himself. Because he couldn’t issue one of his own. That God had crossed his plumbing, or something to that effect. That he wanted better for me and for himself, and he had crossed a country on the lam for a shot at it.

  I wonder how he’d feel about how far his half-son has traveled for the same?

  I’m tempted to open the Macallan, but I don’t. In a way, it would feel too much like grave robbing, and this prompts me to start strategizing on how best how to refill the spheres. Yeah, the items may not match the makers in the end, but if in a millennia they’re retrieved and opened, the numbers will still add up to the same graceful uncertainty.

  ***

  To graze singularity again, I’ll have to position the ISS perfectly. Only then will I aim all the cameras and open the airlock and, forgoing all tethers, float unencumbered straight towards Perses. I should just catch its wake before it unzips the cirrocumulus blanketing the Iberian Peninsula. Only then will I shed my helmet, and for as long as my eyes continue to work, I’ll watch the east coast of Canada rise in an impossibly bright, inverted conical that breaches the caul of the atmosphere, and all that was scooped from me will be replenished.

  THE MOTHER-OF-PEARL
WAY

  I

  MEN SHAMBLED DOWN the glittering slope in a cluster carved of coal, rendered flat by the crimson glow at their backs.

  Only when the Mother-of-pearl Way leveled off and their outlines contoured by virtue of waning coal-torches did Luna recognize the armor she’d labored on for months. Cable-knit gauntlets of braided leather. Nicked and dented greaves fashioned from parts once known as car bumpers.

  As their backlight molted she saw that a fifth was hoisted upon their shoulders. Davie. Lanky, nimble, and retaining a scowl too dismal for his vernal musculature. Davie, who lived by the quarry, and had a voice like a tidal surge—except on this night, where it stretched into the shrill of an infant many days bereft of milk. And as they ferried his writhing body to his parents’ dwelling, Luna could not tear her eyes from the track of blood in their wake, sluiced from the entrails heaving through his torn abdomen.

  Fingers knotty yet tender wrapped around her upper arm and led her at length back to their dwelling. Her grandfather. Her Pappy. Always the stickler about avoiding the Way, sometimes to the point of stridency. Especially on the eve of a Covenant.