Member

by Michael Cisco

  “Don’t imagine that you are the flaneur,” I tell myself, “looking down on people, like you are the last human in a world of machines the passersby are all soulless robots and you’re the only one who cares—that’s high school shit.”

  I’m exhausted. Even the voice in my head sounds tired.

  “All bodies are machines,” it goes on, “and that’s the way it has always been, although the machines change. It’s just as wrong to see humanity as a mob as it is to see it as a group of individuals or as a collection of unique souls with an inside and an outside. Human beings are distributed creatures.”

  Now I have the intuition I’m on to something, but I’m simply too worn out to try to make sense of the idea, and I only hope I have enough brain juice to remember some of it. The bag isn’t swinging me through the streets like a wrecking ball the way it did before; it bears me along, but it’s a burden. It occurs to me to drag myself out of the steadily-increasing stream of people heading to work in the thready brilliance of the sun, and check the man’s phone.

  No good. The battery’s dead. I forgot to turn it off when I put it away. And no charger.

  Back down the block, people curving around me.

  I should be grateful to long-hair, the man who rammed me in the stomach on the train platform. He gave me the opportunity to see something: a vivid picture of myself, stalking away from the station with my hand pressed to my gut and my teeth set, hating being human. Being human means being easily disruptable. Human dignity is disgustingly fragile.

  So-called ‘mechanical’ unemotionalism. Spinoza would say that emotions are more mechanical than thoughts, so the rational machine would then be actually freer and less mechanical than the human. Variety would be a modal flexibility, or multiplicity, not emotional vagary. Now... now a machine...

  Machines are not instruments fashioned by or possessing intelligence, they are articulated intelligence in function, and have as much to do with fashioning intelligence as with the fashioning intelligence that organized them.

  A stream of people keeps passing me, in both directions, on either side. The horror of these relentlessly passing people. They pass and pass, and there’s never a gap. There’s never a pause. It’s getting worse. The feeling is going to snap me in two. They must not catch me with this bag, or see what’s inside. I don’t know why, but I feel it, and I know it.

  Soccer game. The ball rolls, the man follows, any man within a certain radius of the ball begins to move toward it while those outside the radius show varying levels of attention, the increasing speed of one tends to increase the speed of others proportionate to proximity, building to a minor orgasmic discharge of energy, the attack on the goal, whether successful or not, or the interruptus of the foul.

  Parent and child, the child asks the parent, the parent answers,

  conversation

  the party

  the baby grabs the finger

  rats scurry, chase each other, rush into their holes as the trains come, make friends, fight—a man toys with his pen—he sees a button and he pushes it, now he’s gnawing the pen, baring his teeth like a monkey, turning into a three year old boy, then, still gnawing, a grown man in flames, idly gnawing his pen.

  Dogs run to the fence to investigate another dog, master calls them back, they run back and en route begin to race each other, and bouncing colliding brimming with an energy that can’t possibly be captured in a master’s word, or satisfied with a caress, off again. For a moment I see myself as only one other passenger—good... make sure you don’t think “only” though.

  Then I remember, and turn in place. Like magic, I see the building right away; it’s about six stories of brick, uniformly painted a drab, lifeless red color. Above the faded white block lettering of its name, there’s a dingy row of stars, and the last one on the right does have a faint, brassy radiance to it that the others lack. I’m fumbling open the bag and drawing out the tape gun when a man appears in the loading door not far from me.

  I decide to ignore him and look at the star through the sight. It looks exactly like I was told it should; I align the star-shaped guide until its outlines vanish into the star on the building, and snap the trigger. The two rolls that run along the top of the glossy black cylinder draw together and the gun clicks. There’s no recoil, but I can feel the alteration of the mechanism, and the tiny vibrations caused by its motions enter my hand and disperse in the flesh like ripples. The counter says 001. Otherwise, nothing has changed.

  “A courier, huh?” the man in the loading door asks me. He’s tall, older, in a white short-sleeved shirt, white pants and suspenders, a white boonie hat. His hands in his pockets and arms straight down his sides, he’s leaning casually against the frame of the loading door and watching me with interest.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, you got the right building. I know that it can be tough to tell sometimes.”

  “Is that so?” I’m stuffing the tape gun back into the bag, which I have gripped awkwardly between my knees.

  “I guess you’re busy,” he says, half to himself. I glance up, and he’s lowered his eyes.

  “Did another courier come by here recently?” I ask.

  He perks up.

  “Not recently. He must have come...” he murmurs to himself and rubs his chin. “Oh, I don’t know, it’s been so long.”

  “Years?”

  “Might be,” he says apologetically.

  “Do you remember what he looked like? It was a he?”

  “Sure, a he.”

  “Lean, dark skin, dark hair sticking up? With a swinging kind of walk? Kept his head back?”

  The man grins, looking sheepish, and shakes his head.

  “I don’t really remember. I don’t think dark skin, but... I don’t remember.”

  “But he shot the star up there?”

  He nods.

  “Is this the kind of bag he had?”

  He nods again.

  “Just like that.”

  “You didn’t see what he had in it, did you?”

  “Well, he had a gun like yours, and I saw some metal things like those—” he points to the tins in the bag, which lies open on the street now, looking like a big, empty scrotum.

  “Did he have a telephone?”

  The man shakes his head, then shrugs. “Well, I didn’t see. He might have had one but I didn’t see it if he did.”

  Hours have gone by since then. I’m in a part of town I don’t know. The street is unremarkable, or it may be I’m so far gone I can’t muster the energy to pick out details. All the benches and outdoor seats are torn out, although I see the traces of them everywhere; an especially mean-spirited giant has been skipping along just ahead of me, wrenching up or closing down any place that might afford me some rest. It’s the bag, though, that really won’t let me. Or is this true?

  I let it fall and drop down next to it, sitting on the edge of the curb. My head dips between my shoulders and I feel myself sag. Then a police dog starts snuffing at me and I have to move along again. Two blocks later, I sit down. I’m not exactly looking at anything, it’s just that my eyes happen to be open. There’s the bag. I could leave it here, and it would probably stay put, unnoticed, the way it did a million years ago when I first clapped eyes on it. That might even be a design feature. As I look at it, I experience a brief flash of clarity and I realize the bag is an incredibly sophisticated and sensitive device, finely tuned to respond to me, and to its surroundings. I need to understand how to control it—maybe by holding the grip a certain way, or measured pressure applied to the handle in a certain sequence.

  Any moment now I’ll be hurried along on my way again. How far will I get this time? Absently, I fumble at the bag’s catches and open the flap on the other compartment. Darkness inside. Wearily I lift first one, and then the other leg, lowering them into the drooping mouth of the bag. My feet touch a yielding, elastic surface, like a billowing sail. I draw the flap closed over me and the darkness becomes almost perfect;
there are a few livid streaks above me, around the edges of the flap, but no other light. The air is not stale at all. I’m stretched out on a wonderfully yielding surface, and at once I feel my mind and life force sinking toward the ground. The bag, I think dimly, was left alone before. It will be now, probably. I hope no officials come along and upend me out of it again.

  *

  The slope of fabric here is black and white acrylic grass with gently-sloping indentations and internal ridges like a cow’s back. Something hovers above me like a forest canopy in the gloom, a rippling lake of cricket song pools evenly all around me, and I’m engulfed in a satiny darkness that’s almost total. I’ve slept, and now I’m lazily regathering myself together, leaning on one arm and lightly skimming the turf with my splayed fingertips.

  Just checking my knee. It hasn’t so much as twinged since I bandaged it. I’d forgotten about it, in fact. Both it, and the unseen slugger who knocked me down. There’s phosphorescent dust, gleaming like moon ashes, on my knee; I pluck at my pant leg and the glow flickers, coming through the cloth from the other side. Rolling the cuff up, I see the bandages are faintly luminous. Checking my injury by their light, I can’t find it anywhere. Only a tender spot, with what may be a slight discoloration. A crumbling track of dried blood leads down from it, but there is no injury. Even as I watch, the discoloration is deepening. The skin is parting, and now there is slight pain again as the wound begins to reassert itself. I wrap my knee back up. The pain disappears. Will the bandages keep the wound in suspense for as long as I wear them, or will it heal during its vacation time?

  Previously, when I was skimming the grass with my fingertips, I felt and fondled the corner of something I couldn’t see. Groping for it again, I knock my hand awkwardly against it and recoil with tingling knuckles. Pulling my pant leg back up again, I search in that direction by the faint glow of my bandages, dipping my injured knee into the grass here and there like a proboscis. Well, here it is. A recorder. A dry wind ruffles my face as I take it in my hand, air so dry it makes my nose smart and my eyes chafe.

  I’m walking. The darkness around me deepens as I wade out into it. The voice belongs to a woman. The recording was made in the open and her voice is never especially strong or clear. The sound of wind is constant but it doesn’t gurgle against the microphone; she must have kept it screened. Her voice floats in and out as the wind fluctuates; it’s the coronet voice of a cultured older woman, and she’s making a Jane Goodall-style field recording, thinking out loud in no order, with gaps in between, and turning the recorder off and on.

  “This ecosystem is made up of one species with a bizarre life cycle that takes it through countless, totally different stages, from plant to animal and through differences I would have thought were so great that they could only arise in different species. It might be that every living thing here will eventually become every other living thing.

  “One moment I feel their intense regard, and the next moment it’s as if they aren’t aware of us at all, and had never been.

  “This wind never stops. The whole planet is just swept with one wind.

  “Well, first the physical description. I’ve worked it over several times, and I think it’s pretty good. The wings open in a plane that crosses the plane of the lower body at right angles.

  “They don’t age because they have no water in them; water essential to aging. Older specimens are shaggier.

  “Their ‘brains’ circulate like blood through their bodies. They see out opportunistically from wherever the wind parts the tapes.

  “Invert the torso, stick the head between the legs, tapes wrap or are drawn in completely and glider wings extend. When they land, the tapes are released immediately, they serve a very complex tactile function that includes aspects of other senses.

  “An embracing gesture, just now.

  “Sense organs in the body like small dark bubbles or beads. They float inside and appear opportunistically.

  “They can read, using metal implants that look like zippers or tiny jaws. The writing is written on strands they read by pulling them through the zippers.

  “Tools, stones... embedded in the fibres, used as hammers, daggers, axes.

  “Organs probably bundled into thorax.

  “They venture out in groups to skim over the smoke ocean. They skim the waves and catch animals; I can’t tell what kind. They just embrace the animal for a while and then drop it again. The animals are still moving when they are dropped, and don’t appear to have been injured. This is the only thing at all I’ve seen that resembles eating.

  “They make inscriptions of very shallow braille writing; it’s almost imperceptible. And they make sculptures on the insides of large stone blocks, which can be explored with the tapes. I’ve found one that fell and broke open.

  “They don’t reproduce. They just refurbish aging ones. They do it by clustering around and engulfing. I’ve seen shaggy, sort of beaten-up looking ones put through this process and they emerge looking the same as the others again.

  “They draw their tapes in when they go airborne, like they’re closing their eyes. The sense globe probably narrows to beam in flight.

  “They infest into each other some times in what appears to be sheer irritation. They seem restless, impatient, tending to do many tasks a little at a time instead of attending steadily to any one thing.

  “Their legs are stiff cartilage. They don’t walk, they hop by compressing their leg-structures and then releasing them.”

  I see before me a pale curve, like the bend of a cheek. There’s no sensation of walking. It could also be the transparent, white curl of a fingernail, and now below the white there’s a fuzzy pink ember like a fingertip. All surrounded by an emptiness intensifying and falling into the depths and almost crackling.

  The recording ends, and now the pulsation of the crickets is the only thing I hear. I don’t think the sound belongs to where I am. I bring it with me, or it brings me here. In all of infinite space, there are only myself and this pale object, and I have the sensation of hyperventilating brought on by the realization that the object before me is a planet that I thought only a moment ago, not knowing the distance, I could simply cup between my two hands. It’s clearly visible to me now, tumbling slowly in empty, starless space, wreathed in smoke. The dumb beauty of that thing crashes in on me. I draw near to it; it inexorably fills my field of vision. A rough, square scar, churning with sluggish vortices of smoke, opens across much of one side of the planet. Tornadoes rise undulating from the mass, and spill plumes of smoke beyond the extremity of the atmosphere, leaving a clotted trail in space after the world. The edges of the scar form snaky cracks and, in one spot, a sprawling delta; rivers of dense smoke flow from the interior of the planet and across its surface, collecting here and there into turbulent lakes and seas.

  The veil of the atmosphere parts for me and I’m looking down at the bare landscape directly beneath; the ground looks like custardy, diseased skin, pink and yellow and lavender, with satiny bruises that stir and stretch. Deserts, high plateaus with mountains and mesas. A constant, high wind, apparently always streaking in the direction of the planet’s rotation. Clouds of colored smoke that don’t disperse or mix with other clouds. Billows of smoke throb in impalpable waves against isolated orange and purple mesas, and boulders striped white and red.

  Winking tablets school in streaming bead chains in air soft as leaves. Huge thunderheads, all red or all green, hurtle all around me, travelling swiftly right along the ground, following its rises and falls as if they rolled on invisible wheels. Every now and then one envelopes me, and in that flashing motion I see that the clouds are teeming with lice or something, organs capable of independent movement.

  I’ve got something looming over me. It’s a fact. I don’t know what it is and I don’t want to know. I desperately don’t want to know, and the dread I have of making that discovery hangs over everything I see. Is this what am I so afraid of?

  The horizon is broken in
a few places by colossal, trembling things that are neither buildings nor dense, isolated clusters of huge cancerous growths, and that glare up at the sky. They are solid objects, but their outlines waver with soundless violence; their sullen nervousness is contagious and I avoid looking at them. Titanic, serpent-like things, stone trains miles long, creep along the surface in perfectly straight troughs that lead to and from those other things I don’t dare look at. The foremost portion of each train is a rig of triangular vanes that towers above the plateau, raking it with shadows whose spidery edges busy themselves unwholesomely with the egg-shaped boulders and outcroppings. Turbine ‘plants’ turn the mechanical energy of the wind into heat, chemical energy, metabolic energy; this is how they live without sunlight.

  Come to think of it, how do I see all this when there is no sun, no luminous object at all, in the sky ribboned in clouds? The light is chemical phosphorescence in the smoke, and perhaps in the silt that weirdly refuses to be stirred by the wind.

  The thought flashes on me that I might have entered into correspondence with a sensation machine that’s visiting or remembering a visit to this planet and transmitting its impressions; this might be what it’s going through at the moment or remembered at a distance, translated from its sensation experience into sensory language I can perceive. That’s the strangest feeling of all: I look at what I see without focussing my attention there—I am not the one directing my senses.

  Now I stand on the top of a conical hill. Anenovore plants grow in serried hedges down the sides. Luminous clouds are the only source of light; the dark sky beyond them is hidden by layers of translucent soot. Empty stone “trains” creep across the distant desert.

  From the distance a dark object careens out of the sky: it might be half a mile away when I first glimpse it, but within a split second it thuds into the slope before me. The body unfolds the moment it lands, its wings drop out of sight and the whole surface erupts in a boiling chaos of shaggy black mane that rattles in the wind. A few more creatures drop down nearby, and begin to examine the surface of the hill, moving by leaning forward and compressing the elastic, bow-shaped lower two limbs, then letting them snap outward, propelling them forward in short hops. They make a continuous, metallic grating noise, like the buzzing of a low string against a resonator. The wind whips their long tapes this way and that, parting them here and there, and wherever they spread apart, I can see a grey, knotted-looking “scalp,” and beads, like spider’s eyes, popping up. Those clusters of tiny eyes shift to wherever the wind parts the locks.