*
As it turns out, I was worrying myself over nothing. Getting to the other side of the artifact is not going to present any difficulties after all, because the artifact is in ruins. There are ragged holes punched in it at nearly exact intervals for miles, and parts of it have collapsed altogether.
Smoke and dust still rise from these fallen sections, and the holes are still dripping bits of concrete, ribbons of water from broken pipes, or, in some spots, faint trickles of vividly orange fire. From the first moment I catch sight of it, the water takes complete possession of my mind and doesn’t let go until I am in the shadow of the wreckage, clambering up the side like a lizard, pressing my face to the wall where water cascades in a sheet, wetting myself, blubbering and inhaling water into my nose in an orgy of drinking.
This is the first thirst I’ve felt in a long time. No hunger though, even now. I sit on rubble and keep drinking at intervals. Unsteadiness expands and luxuriates a bit before it leaves me, taking its time. I know I’m recovering when pointless questions start popping into my head again. Looking into the vertical crater here I see something like a tunnel, with dim light at the far end. It goes all the way through.
I head for the light. It doesn’t occur to me until halfway or so that the rest of the artifact could fall in on top of me at any time, and I press on as fast as I can, stumbling and knocking against things, setting off pain solos. When I bound in haste through to the other side I’m covered in dust and coughing.
Shouts, cries of anger and surprise. Operationals pointing at me, barracks. I think I’m back.
*
Apparently, I did this. That’s what Guerrero is telling me. His face is ashy and drawn even for him. He looks like a Greek icon.
According to him, as the panel were asking me the very last of their questions preliminary to my appointment, I suddenly stood up, somehow activated the bag inside me, crashed backwards through the wall, and then through the walls of seven other barracks, one behind another. Then I went right through the artifact.
No one could say, at the time, what was going on, but I kept coming back. According to information provided by Clare’s contacts, I flew around the world again and again, passing through the camp each time, and smashed a different part of the artifact with each orbit. He doesn’t mention the sunrise, seeing more than one of me or more than one sun.
“Is it ruined?” I ask, in a small voice.
Guerrero shrugs philosophically, looking weary. “How would I know?”
“What happens now?”
“We repair it.”
He doesn’t seem angry. In fact, he takes it so much in stride that I begin to wonder if he doesn’t prefer things this way.
“What about me?”
“You’re going to have to leave.”
What can I say? The bag is lying in the desert somewhere. Without it, I can’t even pretend to be a courier anymore. Of course, I don’t need to make that point for them. I could insist on staying, maybe take an expedition to find the bag with its precious spells. There is that way to keep things going, and if I could just stay here a while longer, I might be able to work up the will I do not have.
“When?”
“Right now.”
A long, deep look follows, and it stops me from saying a word. I give up.
I blunder outside. Yunis is there. He takes my right bicep in his hand, and leads me in silence to a place where I can hear the murmur of many people. They’re going to lynch me.
Here’s the spot. An open space between the barracks, forming a quad of dusty ground. It’s filled with human forms. Yunis releases me into their midst the way you would toss a fish into a pool, without a look.
As I am forced to move with the crowd, I catch sight of Loring watching from a window. His brow is creased, he’s gnawing his lip, and leaning forward on the sill with both hands, like a man wracking his brains. Did he see me? Maybe he’s celebrated his triumph over me already, and has already moved on to scheming about how best to take advantage of my spectacular disgrace. Or is he trying to figure out a way to keep me here after all?
There’s Darren, dressed in a silver outfit, watching from another window. He seems to be in bed, and there’s a woman with him, sitting on the window-side of the bed. It’s the woman who let me have the bag. She was the one in the steel dress; it was their marriage, hers and Darren’s, the others were distracting me from, as if I really would have interfered. Darren points at me and giggles as I go by, and, with his other hand, he takes her by the back of the neck and waggles her head. She abides this with a resignation that I don’t understand, but it’s the look of hatred she fixes on me, as I go by, that confuses me the most.
What did I ever do to her? Does she want her bag back? Maybe I read her features wrong—she went by pretty quickly. But I have all the time I need to understand what that face is saying to me: I hate you. I have a reason to hate you. What comes and goes before my eyes makes just about no impression on them; all I see is her recriminating expression, unmistakeably directed at me and getting more and more distinct in my mind all the time. What? Was I supposed to stop her from marrying Darren?
Clare... a look of utter contempt on her face.
“Fine,” I think. “That’s fine.”
I never made my deliveries, in fact I swallowed the bag with the spells and prizes inside, then vomited it up and lost it, committed adultery with the foreman’s wife, never did whatever Loring was waiting for me to do, and I wrecked the artifact.
Here I am, milling through the swarm of High Rationals like the boy who shat his pants.
Some of them congratulate me, warmly pumping my hand or pressing my shoulder. Others curse me, shout insults in my face, and even grab me by my shirt. For every one who congratulates me, there comes another who curses me. For every one who curses me, there comes one who congratulates me.
“I want to play,” a humiliated, wounded voice keeps whining. My own voice.
“You damn fool, you don’t even know your own place in your own story!”
“Well why didn’t anybody ever tell me anything?”
“That’s your business! Why don’t you just mind your own business?”
“Now now,” says the doctor everybody talks to, taking me gently by the elbow. “I think you’ve done a splendid job. Just look at it!”
He waves happily at the artifact, a huge piece of toast with bites taken out of it. The Newest is just visible, floating behind it.
“Just the sort of shake up we needed around here! My friend, your task here is done.”
And he at once claps the backs of his wrists to his temples and begins his thinking. The rest of them, too, all break out spontaneously in their own proper rationalization postures, and in moments the courtyard is filled with gestures and expostulations.
Operationals glide together in a clear space, where several lanes meet, carrying large pieces of building material. Following the music of the High Rationals, they assemble something that looks like a carriage made of brightly-colored candy. With uncanny dexterity and effortless strength, they fix the pieces together, until the capsule is ready. Guerrero is behind me now, herding me into it. Half the High Rationals call out their farewells to me, the other half is telling me to get out. The Operationals retire, indifferent as ever. They’ll march obediently back to the rubble I made and dutifully begin putting it into some other shape.
I catch sight of Loring, standing next to Clare, and Darren on the other side, waving a limp hand frenziedly and grinning from ear to ear. Loring watches me neutrally, his lips pursed, arms folded across his chest.
A shadow engulfs the capsule, and certain sections of its structure emit unnatural sounds.
The capsule rises in the air, taking its ascent in short, rolling jumps, like a kite. The camp falls away, and the ruins of the artifact. The last face I see is Darren’s.
Section Three:
peppermint boulders
Human beings are complex, but it is possibl
e to understand this complexity because the thinker is human as well. The more complicated models see through the simpler ones. At least, it seems to go that way.
Human beings are machines. For example, on the subway, a girl of about seven years, A., sits beside her sister, B., who is close to her in age. A. brings her face to within an inch or two of B.’s face and says “bllllaaaah...” over and over, slowly. She opens her mouth wide to expose the flip of her tongue, and bathes her sister in her breath. This is not just some random behavior or other, because A. wants, probably without having the slightest idea of what she’s doing, to get a reaction. Repeat “bllllaaaah...” until B. isn’t just giggling, but actively trying to suppress a repetition. A. wants to take this procedure as far as she can, and is excited in ratio to the degree of demonstrated effect she has on B. This requires concentration and some skill in reproducing the sound and gesture each time. The repetitions come in sets of four. This is perhaps because A. has already heard enough conventional music, with its mindless reliance on fours, to have the unit-of-four pattern etched into her brain. Her interest begins to wane around the time she’s completed her sixteenth repetition. It is mechanically necessary that she repeat in the same way and in keeping with this unconscious pattern. She is not free to adopt a different approach.
Another example: trying to explain to someone that the time of an appointment has been changed. The news must be repeated again and again. B. listens the first time as if in a trance. B.’s mind is a million miles away, only just stirring in response to a faint and distant summons. Those repetitions are the beacon that guides it back to the present. B. stares at A.’s mouth, and then, speaking like a medium entranced, proceeds to inform A. of the alteration of the time of the appointment, whereupon, hearing it again from another’s mouth, A., who delivered the message don’t forget, realizes that, in the rush to deliver the message, it was misstated, and an important detail was omitted. Can A. manage to go upstream, even try to correct it, when the current in the other direction is so unaccountably strong? Maybe A. needs a breather. The conversation appears to end. In its dissipation, the “current” driving it toward its unknowable endpoint slackens, and the resistance is reduced. Finally, A. becomes able at last to offer the correction from a distance, having taken a number of steps away and then turned around, sometimes with the help of a little shout or a movement of the hand. B., in any case, has to repeat the news again and again, like a music student trying to match his teacher, before it really sinks in. Does this seem like the behavior of a free rational being, even partially in command of its own senses? And why can’t A. shout or wave his hand during the conversation, seeing that he has lost B.’s attention and that the message is garbled? Then again, why should it be necessary to shout, or to correct?
It might be objected that a machine would get it faster, right away, but that’s the problem with machines. The machine understands too quickly, before the idea of what is wanted has become clear, and they are inscrutable, because it can’t be known how they’ve taken it, what understanding means for them. This aspect of machines actually makes them more like people. People are more like machines in that there is obviously a loose-jointed apparatus at work in them, which responds to blows. The train slows down; A. immediately prepares to get off. Upon coming to the realization, an instant later, that the train is stopping not in the station, but in the tunnel, A. experiences something analogous to trying to take a step that isn’t there, the jolting, downward step into sleep that only spins against the mattress, and which is more of a jolt than an actual step would have been. There has appeared a very jarring, because very elementary, confusion. When the doors actually open in the tunnel, and the loudspeakers bray villainous instructions, telling passengers get out, climb onto the ledge, leave all your belongings and clothing on the seats and climb, naked, out onto the filthy ledge in the tunnel, and not onto the tracks, without attempting to escape in either direction even when the train pulls away in a gust of foul air, A. experiences something like my rebirth, complete with all my memories.
*
A male in his midtwenties or so boards the train noisily, sits down noisily, bends forward glowering, shoving potato chips into his mouth challengingly, unheeded music blasting in his ears. He chews with his mouth open, invading that end of the car with his presence, his noise, his smell, his chewing.
Two men sit opposite each other, total strangers. They pay no attention to each other, but they chew gum exactly in sync.
This one taps his finger twice. The one next to him parts lips. The next one over coughs and turns his head. The finger tapper sniffs and hitches up his pants. The one next to him blinks twice and jerks head slightly. These causal sequences reverberatingprocess through the humans and link them in a modularfidgetingprocessor.
An hour comes to seem like a sort of a person. There’s the big, blowsy, looselipped slob; a young black man eating white mints elegantly from a bag; the greyhead, his hair canted back up his skull, looking like a woebegone old wolf; two boys quietly eating their ice cream cones; hooded eyes, talking sideways and a sly grin turning her lip, an Asian woman with bobbed hair and cantaloupe breasts; a woman whose face is distorted with food, eating her sandwich with her eyes turned up as though she were playing a solo on it; the pale fat woman who will stand there by the door rattling her bag with an unconscious air of entitlement until someone vacates a seat; the morose girl who sways against the pole like a bit of flotsam bumping against the pilings of a pier; a hispanic woman with large brown staring eyes sitting in total, feline repose, in a shawl of blue and earth-toned zigzags; the porter making faces at intervals, like someone with a fresh injury that’s being dabbed with disinfectant; an Egyptian grinning from ear to ear, grey hair slicked and thinning, round sunglasses, so engrossed in rubbing lottery tickets it takes him a while to notice one of his shirt buttons is undone; a pale middle aged woman with watery blue eyes who seems completely composed, but then her face splits insanely and she gnaws her nails with her teeth like a methodical caterpillar devouring a leaf; that woman who won’t stop licking her fingers; a man who looks lost, six foot three inches 250 pounds and dressed like a nine year old; a man with shrunken cheeks smacking on hard candies, his little hat; a man who, bobbing his head, never escapes his manhood; everyone in the car watches as the baby girl in the stroller spits up, without a sound, into the napkin her father holds out for her.
The actresstissue of distinct contrasts, distorted reflection in the metal panelling, an elongated face with flashing teeth in red lips, the arched eyebrows and brilliant eyes, very brown, very white—triangular eyelids, the slightly oldfashioned upsweep of hair above an aging brow. With her eyes closed, mouth moving, rapt in memorization, she’s highlit her lines in pink marker, she shows the extra care that people who are almost beautiful often take with their appearance.
“I like to go home, put the nice jeans on...” One construction worker says to the other, swaying his hands over his thighs.
“I’m a lonely man, I don’t do nothing!” the other says in a moment.
This one is spindly with his Roman hair cut, straight nose, a tapering jaw and lips that betray what they will look like when he gets old, the upper one tucked in and the lower one drooping, the gap in between like a seagull in flight, carrying The Socialist Worker.
A half-old woman in half-shade sunglasses dressed too modishly. The false word “odorguard” is visible through her plastic shopping bag. She fumbles with the cards in her wallet, counting change from her bag into her purse.
A baby makes a Greek tragedian face, but doesn’t cry.
A man steals peeks at an aristocratic looking, beautiful young black woman. Both of them rest with closed eyes. Sitting practically next to each other, they’re like a sleeping couple in bed.
A middle-aged Asian man boards the train. As the doors close, he throws back his shoulders, still standing just inside the car, looking around the way a professor at a convention might scan a hotel dining room for c
onvivial dining companions. When he finds a seat and permits himself to drop heavily into it, his shoulder bag accidentally slips down his arm to the floor. He looks at it for a moment, as if he were delighted at its initiative.
Adolescents with hideous metal mouths shove themselves, not listening to their own incessant chatter.
Ugly, aging face. Gestures are ugly, not faces. Holding her jaw a little askew, lips parted, make up and perfume and hair dye.
A stern mother and a child that simply will not be serious.
“Sit down, Sally!” The woman says sharply.
The little girl sits down. Then she gets back up at once, beaming, saying “Yes!”
There are bewildering reflections dialling across the glass. A pane and then a gap and then another pane at an angle to the first, and windows of the next car opposite in a similar configuration. A man stands silhouetted against the sky through the windows in the door behind him, which are full of clouds and also reflected, two of him, two sets of reflected windows, and the street, and the bridge, all superimposed on the profiles of the riders in the car beyond, and now, in a shift of light, my face appears again, only inches away, looking at me. What does it want now?
The windows of the train are starred with rain, popping and trickling, clear and then dark by turns, falling from clouds of cooked chicken, turning the window into a theater of water. I criss-cross the city in a glass shit. They vanished like dreams. Today in the park, the skimming birds, the women on the grass, the green lake and shimmering trees, the glory, and me a part of it, but only very scarcely.
From here, just now, I can see into the empty floor of a passing high rise, and people are in there leaping, bounding virtually from one side of the building to the other in a single jump.
My loneliness is so unreal it no longer finds anything to do. I sit here miserably without being able to say what I want. Now with joy I return once more to my practice. Perhaps it’s only to be able to think that someone is thinking of me, and to have someone to think about. Spinoza would say: first, you remember her, and this memory gives you pleasure. However, upon then realizing that she is gone, your pleasure is abruptly checked, and this induces pain.
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