After Mind

by Spencer Wolf

  “Remember my bioship?”

  “Yeah,” Meg said. “What about it? You still going out into space?”

  “Definitely. I figured out its power.”

  “Potatoes?” she asked.

  “No. Space dust. It collects packets of organic space dust thrown off from the stars, combines it with quanta of water . . . I’m still working on that . . . and it pumps out unlimited bursts of energy.”

  “Last I checked, it’s pretty frigid cold in space,” Daniel said, prodding the rearview mirror. “All that water isn’t going to turn to ice and crack the skin of your ship?” They passed a road sign for the head of a trail.

  Cessini thought a moment then leapt forward in his seat. “The bioship’s whole body is filled with organic magnets, microscopic, nano-scale magnets, one in each cell of its skin. I’ll call them—dark magnetocytes. Right! All coils from electromagnets generate excess heat. But the ship’s magnetic cellular structure will generate its own heat. Like animals at the bottom of the ocean. But the ship’s not warm-blooded, it’s magnetic-blooded. And the heat that’s not used in the skin gets ejected out the back funnel of the ship. If you were out there, you’d see it as a vapor trail and a distortion of space.”

  The deepening lines at the edges of Daniel’s eyes flexed up as he looked in the mirror. It must have been pride. Meg even turned around from her seat for a smile and high-five. “Nice. Way to go.”

  “But all those individual magnetic cells are going to have voltage spikes,” Daniel said. “You’ll need a large microprocessor, a mainframe to control them. To direct all the magnets so the ship doesn’t spin out of control.”

  Cessini sat back and crossed his arms. That was an invitation to victory. “Easy,” he said. “Like the bellows lamp by my bed. Colossal squid have a large torus or donut-shaped brain that wraps around their central spine. That’s the kind of mega processor you’ll find in my bioship.”

  “Donut brain? Magnetic blood?” Daniel repeated, skeptical.

  “But you want to know what the best part is?” Cessini added. “When the ship comes in for a landing, guess what?”

  “It squirts out ink?” Daniel asked.

  “Right! Before arrival, so the artificial gravity of the magnets don’t get mixed up by the gravity of the planet, the ship dumps all the magnets out of its cells like black goo.” He backslapped Meg on the shoulder and they laughed. “You’d love it, Dad. Donut brains and coffee for breakfast. Like black meconium in your cup.”

  Daniel burst. A reinvigorated creative mind was infectious. “I take it you like your new school?” Daniel asked as he caught an infrequent, but open grin.

  “I do,” Cessini said. “I think I really do.”

  Daniel stopped the car at the gravel trailhead for the mountain path. “Then you know what that sounds like to me?”

  “What?”

  “A piece of a puzzle just fit.”

  “Totally,” Meg said as she gathered her backpack gear, ready to bolt from the car.

  Cessini grabbed the strap of his day-pack and pulled the handle of his door. He paused before his foot reached the gravel. “Dad?”

  “What? Have a good time,” Daniel said. “Try to come back with some friends.”

  “Are you sure you’re not still angry about the fire?” Cessini asked.

  “You mean the one that ruined our lives as we knew it?” Daniel asked, then turned back and gripped both hands to the wheel. “Go on, Meg’s waiting,” he said, then threw the Jeep’s engine into reverse.

  “Does that mean you still are?” Cessini asked.

  “No, I’m just fooling with you. Actually, I was laughing about it just the other night. If you think about it, you did the same to me in my shop as I did to my father before you. Perspective, I guess. Kind of makes it all feel crazy okay.”

  “I guess,” Cessini said. But somehow the hard truth in Daniel’s eyes robbed from his smile. Maybe the grant of his forgiveness didn’t quite last as long as it should.

  Meg hollered from the curb, “Ceeme, you coming, or what?”

  Cessini stopped at the side of the Jeep. His new Rockhopper XPS bike and Meg’s Trailmaster were mounted on the Jeep’s rear rack. The front wheel of his bike still spun from the drive up the hill.

  Meg went to unstrap hers first, but Daniel jammed on the gas and sped out of their way. Cessini held her back by the arm. “It’s okay,” he said as the dust settled down. “We can walk, instead.” The staked wooden sign at their backs read, Low Impact Trail. She wasn’t quite ready to agree.

  Cessini had seen the height of the mountain during his descent from the air only weeks before, and afterward from a distance through his classroom window at Rose Bay. But as he walked close through the bush, the mountain offered up two paths. Not trailheads, but a split for his mind. One path led to a veritable richness of Eden and another was in deliverance to a less fortunate hell. Taking one or the other all came down to which face of the mountain the water broke from the clouds that day. His rain jacket was packed just in case, and the chosen path of the more moderate eastern front ahead offered the lesser pain for those afflicted by the trouble of their own skin.

  Future member of Spud’s bushwalking club or not, Meg was along for the ride, and so together, they walked side-by-side up the wood-chipped break through the trees.

  A crisscross of trails under a canopy of eucalyptus rose from the lower slopes of the bush. So far they had it all to themselves. The driest of warming spring winds blew from the northwest over the organ pipes and columnar cliffs that brushed their faces fresh with awe. The low humidity of the air was foiled only by the specter of sound nearing ahead. A waterfall poured its deadly element somewhere up on the trail.

  Meg glanced back from her few steps ahead. He was still good to go. The green was different from the trails of Minnesota, but the pleasure of the free-flowing organics of nature was the same. As rivulets trickled under light wooden bridges, he left a few more worries behind and hopped the odd tenderfoot stream.

  Meg yanked the shoulder strap of his pack and pulled his more apprehensive gait along. “Hurry up. They’re going to be waiting.”

  Ahead, a possible drenching persisted, but from where among the echoes?

  “Don’t worry so much,” Meg said. “Keep telling me about your spaceship if it helps. Now come on, let’s go.”

  He shifted the pack on his shoulder and skipped ahead to catch up. “Slow down. Don’t run.”

  Meg turned and, running up backward, opened her arms wide apart from her chest and yelled, “Come on, I feel great. We’re fine.” She hooked a left through the trees, and then followed a signpost with its winding arrow for “Vale.”

  He hurried to keep her in sight, running into the breach of the echoes.

  She stood still at a clearing ahead. Her breath was labored. Two bicycles lay ditched on the ground. Their riders were already off and deep in their outdoor play.

  The waterfall was upon them. Cessini stopped on sight. It was the two-story height of their old data center warehouse in Minnesota. But something was different, not so frightening up close.

  Spud dropped his rock into a pool at its shore and came running. “You two see the Octopus Tree?” he shouted.

  Only one other boy lumbered about. It was the arm-wrestler from class. Behind him, the fall’s cascade over moss-covered rocks was pure and without mist.

  “Oh, you’d love the Octopus Tree,” Spud said. “You should go have a look. It’s just over the hills. We’ll go on this trail. Can’t miss it.”

  “Is it on the east or west side of the mountain?” Cessini asked.

  The arm-wrestler minded the edge of the pool as he towed a long, broken branch.

  “You remember Tenden, me mate from class?” Spud asked as over-officious host of the bushwalking club.

  Tenden, the arm-wrestler, planted himself square at their front and humphed.

  “Sure,” Cessini said. “I’m Cessini.”

  “I know that,” Tenden
said as he stripped off a line of eucalyptus leaves from the branch through the squeeze of his fist.

  “This is Meg,” Cessini said. “She wanted to see the club, too.”

  “Excellent!” Spud said. “The more the better. Now we got four in our club.”

  “Four?” Meg asked, and smiled.

  “Yeah. Five, if you count Pace. He ain’t here today on account of some race he’s running.”

  Tenden pulled Spud away by a grasp of his shirt and stepped ahead in his place.

  “Hey!” Spud objected.

  “No, I’m telling ’em,” Tenden said, snarled. “A few years ago, some nutmeat tried to cut off one of the limbs of the Octopus Tree to see if it would grow back. Like a real octopus. Idiots. It didn’t. Rangers had to trim it back surgically to save the whole tree from disease and bugs.” He emphasized, “At its wound!”

  “I got it,” Cessini said. “They catch him?”

  “You see any cameras around here? They put a fence around the tree so no one could hurt it again. But then neither could we play on it anymore, for that matter. You understand? You check it out for yourselves anyway. You’ll like it.”

  “Okay,” Meg said. She looked at the height of the waterfall, then Cessini. “Maybe we should go there, instead.”

  “Excellent,” Spud said with a grin, and he ran back toward his very same pool at the base of the falls. “After. Come on, let’s play.”

  Spud and Tenden stomped in their soaked shoes and dragged stirring sticks through the eddied pools of their wonderland. Rocks and ferns surrounded their private spot in the forest; it was an organic, primordial wild. No rainbow mist rose above the clear flow of the falls or broke the blue sky over the highest promontory stone. It was a twenty-five-foot cascade without spray. It was free-flowing water, controlled.

  Meg sat on a mossy rock to rest. She shouldn’t have run so far, so fast.

  “In a minute,” Cessini said.

  The pool of the falls had a sound all its own, but one not too unfamiliar. His heels were pressed tight against a fallen branch, an impromptu border, a playground’s boundary line he would have to step away from to enter. But Spud’s antics lifted his spirits with ease. Water splashed, sticks swatted, and Cessini lifted a heel away from the branch. Then he stopped and returned, taking two steps back over. The red rain jacket in his day-pack would never be enough if he fell to his knees. He sat at Meg’s side, instead.

  She ignored him. She reached into her bag and pulled her winged tablet up to her lap, joining her knees together to use her legs as an easel.

  Cessini tested the dryness of the dirt with his shoe, and then slid down to sit with his legs crossed on the ground. “You know, if I was a computer up in space, I wouldn’t mind all this water. Because in space, water doesn’t burn.”

  Meg breathed in the idyllic garden and through her clacking and clicking, captured its vectors into her tablet. She transferred her new waterfall image into her Sea Turtle Rescue world, and with the rotation of her screen, two turtles entered the next stage of their life, crossing the barrier from sand to sea.

  “But I’d mind,” she said. “Of course water burns in space. You’ve got to get over it. You’re not a computer. You’re a human, like me. Now go, play,” she said and looked at him. “You don’t have to watch me every second. I feel fine. They like you. Now go.”

  “I know why you get tired,” he said.

  “So do I. Because you’re bothering me. Now go. Make some friends. I’ll be right there.”

  Cessini uncrossed his legs to rise, but then sat back on his heels. He stalled as long as he could, weighing the flow of the water with Meg on his mind. The height of the falls was doable, maybe. “Remember when I climbed that ladder and put a baggie on the sprinkler head?” he asked.

  “Pounded my heart right through my chest, yes, I remember.”

  “Pretty crazy of me, heh?” he asked as he tossed a rounded pebble from the dirt into the pool. “Well, memories flow upstream.”

  Spud stood in the water by the expanding rings of Cessini’s thrown stone and looked at him and Meg. Then Spud threw down his stick to its natural float.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Meg asked.

  “We don’t start by thinking from up there at the top of the falls and let a bunch of memories and images flow down here to us, so we can see this here, this now. I think the mind works in reverse. It flows upstream, instead. We have what we know right now and see in front of us and our minds break that apart and flow it up the falls instead to find its source.”

  Meg stopped her clicking, looked up, and wondered at the height of the water.

  “We start here and search back up there for the source of our pictures. Our fear. For smaller bits of this scene. For the look and sounds of round pebbles I’ve tossed before, borders I’ve crossed, ladders I’ve climbed. The pain I know right now down here comes from a source up there.” He stopped and broke her glassy stare. “Everything here leads back to the first packet, the first swirl of a thought. Up there.”

  Spud marched up in a huff, his shoes dripping from the pool. He stomped his demand with his foot into its puddle. He shifted his glance back and forth, then settled on Meg. “You. You shouldn’t get that wet, you know. It’ll ruin it.”

  “I know,” Meg said as she brushed her thumb over the tablet’s screen.

  “That thing looks ancient,” Spud said, with a half-cheek grin. “You should at least put a new processor it in.”

  “I like it the way that it is,” she said.

  “What’s your name again?” Spud asked as his lip twisted the wide disk of his face.

  Meg crossed her arms over her screen, not for privacy, but for resting comfort over her knees. “When I was little, my dad called me Meg, like a memory chip. But then when I got bigger, everyone started calling me Terri, like Terabyte, because it’s bigger. But personally, I like Margaret Teresa. That’s my name and I think it sounds nice. But Cessini and my friends call me Meg. It’s nice to meet you. I’m Meg.” She held out her hand to shake. Spud’s jaw dropped in awe.

  Tenden marched over to see all the fuss.

  “And this is Cessini,” Meg said with a gestured introduction. “But I call him Ceeme. Not Packet like his friends sometimes do. Yes, he’s quiet, sometimes often, but he’s really smart.”

  “Why did they call you Packet?” Tenden asked.

  “Because when we were little,” Meg said, “his dad always made him carry around those square handi-wipe packets.”

  “Other kids washed their hands,” Cessini said. “I used a packet. So the other kids called me Packet.”

  Tenden elbowed Spud. “And we call him Spud ’cause he’s got such an ugly mug.”

  “Aagh,” Spud said with a grunt as he circled away. But he came back for more.

  “I’m Tenden. Tenden ’cause the tendens in my arms are connected three inches too far down my elbow to my forearms. Makes me stronger. Like a lever. Get it? Like a seesaw. One kid sitting out on the end can lift two runts sitting close in the middle. Makes me stronger. Same thing. You understand?”

  “You mean tendon, like with an ‘o’?” Cessini asked.

  “What? No. What ‘o’? Tenden in my arms. Makes me stronger. You understand?”

  “I do. Tenden,” Cessini said.

  “What do you do?” Tenden asked.

  “I don’t do anything,” Cessini said.

  “No, I said, what do you do?”

  Cessini shrugged, and then said, “I boil in water.”

  “Oh, yeah. Good to know. Everybody does that. Don’t they? Come on, let’s go. Time to get on with the club.”

  Meg nudged, but Cessini didn’t get up.

  Tenden turned back when no one followed. “There’s a saying here in Australia that says, ‘The nail that sticks up, gets hammered down.’ Well, you know what?”

  “What?” Cessini asked.

  Tenden puffed up his chest, hunched forward with his arms bent front, fists down, and decl
ared in a forearm’s muscle-flexed roar, “I am a nail! And, from now on, I’m sticking up.”

  Spud rolled his eyes. “No, he’s not. Forget him. Be who you want. Me, I hate water. Haven’t taken a bath in a month. Maybe two. Ain’t gonna, neither. I be myself. You be you. Club is now official in session. Let’s go.”

  “And who am I?” Cessini asked.

  “Buggered if I know,” Spud said as he skipped off to return to the water. He tipped his shoulders back with a roll of his head, nodding Cessini to follow. “Just met you two days ago. You coming, or what?”

  “Six days,” Cessini counted, but then again, what difference did it make as he recognized, on his short list, the will of a friend. Meg pushed him.

  Cessini stayed far to the right of the pool-side rocks as the trickle of white noise grew louder at the cascade. Waves lapped the shore. It was a familiar calming sound, a memory sourced from a sound machine at the side of his bed.

  “Why did you use handi-wipes?” Tenden asked.

  “I’ve got aquagenic urticaria,” Cessini said. “I get hives from water on my skin. Even tears from crying hurt. Pretty awful, too. So, I don’t anymore.”

  “You should move to a farm,” Tenden said.

  “I hurt when I sweat.”

  “Then why didn’t you move to the desert?” Spud asked.

  “The desert is worse,” Cessini said. “It’s dry, but you have to drink more water. My throat would swell. It hurts too much.”

  “So you never shower or bathe, neither?” Spud asked as he hopped the edge of the pool.

  “One doctor prescribed a beta blocker,” Cessini said as they made their way to the bubbled skirt of the falls. “My dad thought they might help, too. But I started not remembering things.”

  “Well, that’s no good,” Tenden said at the wall of rocks. He angled his right arm and muscled up to a first ledge. He reached down with his left arm for a grasp at Cessini’s hand.

  Cessini began his climb and did his best to hide his fear of the flowing water at his side. Spud kept bumping up behind him. With each lag and spurt of his courage up the wall, the three boys bumped like balls of Newton’s Cradle, navigating like clubmen for the climb to the top of the falls.