Trafik

by Rikki Ducornet

  “If only we had the adequate vehicle!” she had said at the time. “We could go off to Barometer Miles and find ourselves a cozy chrome yurt. We could go to … Trafik!” It was at that very moment when they had had it, that Base dropped the project. Sent them off to mine asteroids. A thing they had done diligently, if with uneven success.

  SURFING THE ENDOCYCLIC QUASAR MASS

  They are surfing the Endocyclic Quasar Mass. Mic chirps into service and rolls over to Food Face. He sees a dog—he knows it is a dog. He has seen the stars walking their dogs on Zircon-studded leashes. This dog is looking wistfully out the galley Space Eye. A dog of “medium size,” he reports to Quiver as he hands her a foaming neuropeptide smoothie. “Spotted in the manner of a Holstein-Friesian, some sort of fire truck dog.”

  “But, just what is a Holstein-Friesian?” Quiver wants to know.

  “A cow once eaten in such quantity, the terrestrial atmosphere went brillig—an old-timey word coined when grilling and broiling ruled culinary culture.”

  “And what is it, then, to broil and grill?” Quiver asks, still only half awake.

  “The flesh was seared,” Mic reports, “beneath or upon flames.”

  “Flames in the galley?” Quiver ponders, yawning. “Why? Why when Food Face will do the cooking cold?”

  “There was no Food Face then,” says Mic, deep into his investigations. “Oh! And listen to this! When Hydrant 3 landed on Titan and proclaimed, Tis brillig, he was referring to the density of the atmosphere and the mood of the moment. Earth’s atmosphere was like that near the end.”

  The dog unglues from the galley Space Eye, turns, and lopes toward them, whimpering.

  “What can it possibly want?” asks Quiver.

  “We are multitudes,” the dog tells her in a voice at once a rasp and a groan. “I am but the first to hatch.”

  “Dogs do not hatch!” Mic says with conviction. “My Swift Wheel states this clearly!” He sees a bit of trash on the floor and, always fastidious, picks it up and tosses it at Sweep. A pod of some sort, or cocoon.

  “Hmm,” mutters Quiver, now awake. “Something’s going on.” A quik later, a second dog appears, exactly like the first. It, too, gazes out of the galley Space Eye wistfully. In another quik or two, three more dogs manifest, all pressing against one another in their attempt to look out the Space Eye. The floor is now littered with pods, and the galley Space Eye is hidden behind a crush of medium-sized Holstein-Friesian spotted fire truck dogs.

  “Bloody delirious!” Quiver howls. “We need an immediate ID on clonal tags NOW!”

  “Got it,” cries Mic. “I’ve deployed reprogramming trajectories!”

  Quiver dashes about Home Free looking into every corner to locate the stowaway pods—none larger than a pineal gland. Erect and flashing, having charged the specific antagonistic receptor magnet, Sweep is up to the task, nabbing pods in the laundry, in the optical pantry, clumped like grapes in corners and hanging like bats from the fumevap. Instigating a temporary quark well above a speedily contrived and fatal attractor, the pods are sucked up and sent tumbling to another dimension entirely. However, the hatched dogs remain, pressed together and gazing into space, whimpering and whining mournfully.

  “Is there somewhere you want to go?” Quiver asks them, gently caressing their furry shoulders.

  “Dolly’s Dream Dog B and B in Tuscaloosa!” they whine together, their complaints rising and falling like the wind.

  “Tuscaloosa, Alabama?” Mic asks. The dogs all begin to yap excitedly: yes! YES!

  “But surely! You must know! Earth is gone! It’s gone! It’s been gone for generations!” Quiver cries out. “GONE! Forking unbelievable!”

  The dogs’ moans fill the Wobble with what can only be described as a brillig mood. They are now pressing together with such conviction she shouts at them to stop, afraid they will smother themselves. But the dogs ignore her and continue to muscle against each other, pushing and shoving with such force they coalesce into one vast indissoluble animal—a magnificent Holstein-Friesian cow. “Just look at the caliber of its tailward breach!” Mic shrieks.

  The cow begins to groan. Or is it, Quiv wonders, a bleating? A whinnying? A gabbling?

  “It must be a mooing,” Mic reports, “for mooing is the sound a cow makes.” (In all her time spent in the Lights, Quiver has not once met up with a cow.)

  “Well,” says Quiver. “Here we are. I have no idea how to solve this, Mic, and I am going to take a nap.” As soon as she tucks into her hamok, the cow further coalesces, condenses, recedes, and wanes. All that remains is a black spot on the floor.

  QUIVER DREAMS OF ALFA ASTRON

  Quiver dreams of Alpha Astron. He dervishes into her dream exploding with rage. Quasi! he screams. Quasi! He has a large black tattoo on his neck shaped like an egg. Compact and immobile, it is imponderable, sinister, and menacing. Alfa Astron, she thinks, is an archon. He has kept his identity hidden beneath his impressive collection of turtleneck sweaters. In Quiver’s dream, Alpha Astron’s closet opens its portals, its interior unspooling like the hallways on the Moon. A closet like the ones Mic studies so closely, closets having once belonged to Hollywood stars, crammed with tangibles, disguises and stuff, suspended in time and space within a perpetual blizzard of dust. These, when retrieved, transform the body into something transcendent. Alpha Astron’s body, for example, whose influence extends so far beyond the home galaxy it is uncanny, even for those for whom the uncanny is the road most traveled.

  In Quiver’s dream, Alpha Astron’s shalloon turtlenecks, his sharkskin loungers, his spider-silk dickeys and cravats, and his tooled boots and spats are stacked up like mineral deposits in a quarry beyond the sun’s reach. In order to get dressed, Alpha Astron needs the intervention of radio and x-ray emissions. Except for his sock drawer. The sock drawer has its own moon. The sock drawer’s contents have been bathing in moonlight for so long, they are sopping with afterglow. Quiver recognizes some of her own socks long ago missing.

  Still dreaming, Quiver looks up into the Plonk Sidereal Atlas and sees that Alpha Astron’s egg-shaped tattoo has migrated to the glass. Stuck on the outside, it is impossible to remove, considering the risks of entering into the Counter Punctual Velocity Bubble’s plasmic spume. Yet it glowers at the center of the Atlas Space Eye, obstructing all that lies ahead.

  As soon as Quiver awakens, she leaps from her hamok and tells Mic to download her dream. As soon as he sees it, he tells her to return to her hamok at once with a mental image of a wire sponge. She is to return to her dream and scrub Alpha Astron’s egg tattoo off the outer face of the Plonk Sidereal Atlas.

  As soon as she hits the hamok, Quiver falls asleep and begins to dream. In her dream she suits up and exits the Wobble, dives into the Counter Punctual Velocity Bubble’s plasma spume, swims to the Plonk Sidereal Atlas Space Eye, sees the tattoo’s black egg stuck to the glass. The Bubble’s plasma is like a cool, loose jello that, as she approaches the egg, gets warmer and warmer and begins to thicken. The heat rises as does a noise emanating from the egg itself, roaring like a trillion vintage vacuum cleaners. Quiver scrubs the surface until it gives, opening like a mouth. She shoves the wire sponge down the egg’s throat where it is swallowed at once. Quiver looks on as the egg ogres itself, swallowing not only the wire sponge but its own absence until nothing remains but a spot no bigger than the eye of an ant. In a quik that, too, vanishes, reinstating harmonic order.

  Meanwhile, Mic has been on it, targeting the major circuits and simultaneously enforcing a universal putative inhibition. He reconfigures the full array of rehabilitation paradigms. He has flooded the system with an instantaneous ice bath of field-induced saturable Graphene. The Atlas shudders, appears to crystalize, reaffirms transparency. Resurfacing from her dream and yawning, Quiver hears the voice of a diva from the distant past: FKA twigs singing: Water Me.

  ONE MIGHT DO WELL TO MENTION THAT

  Having banished Alpha Astron and in a celebratory mood, Mic, having serve
d Quiver a second breakfast, offers up a kaleidoscopic terrestrial fashion show beginning with a stunning Saharan Berber astride a tasselated camel, moving on to Iggy Pop wearing nothing but a scarlet umbrella, Rihanna in salted almonds at the MET, Cardi B at the Latin Grammys, and ending with RuPaul. Quiver has never been so aware of the staggering extent of Mic’s infinite holdings. Awestruck, she looks on with renewed admiration as he now rehearses his navigational skills, flashing shipping charts of the China Sea, the rail routes of India, the temples of Uxmal, the ancient highlands that once bounded the plain of Babylonia on its eastern side, a map of the streets of Asshur. With something like reverence, he retrieves an image of an expired Egyptian lake named Timsah: “the lake of crocodiles.” Next they visit two Australian caves on a place once called Chasm Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria. She sees porpoises, turtles, kangaroos, and a human hand painted in red and black on the cave walls.

  Mic begins to seriously overheat. His Swift Wheel, on the verge of scorched, is sent spinning at such velocity that even if they are not aware of it (at least not initially) and think there is simply a problem with Walpole’s reverberator, they are now in another galaxy entirely. This is signified by the loud beeping and flashing of the resonator as it attempts to determine a known or familiar (or, at least, applicable) resonance frequency within the sudden exotic configuration. But this leads to further incoherence as somehow Nicki Minaj shows up in the mix singing Starships. On top of all this, due to a dysplastic tear, they are startled nearly out of their wits by a thoroughly unpleasant tenquid shuffle causing their atoms to discompose (if but for a quik in time), which reduces them to a fluid extracellular hyperpromiscuity (cellular decoherence)—in other words their latitudinal diversity gradients are smacked. (They are briefly reduced to soup.) In Quiver’s words: “Wow! Alpha Astron will never find us now!”

  Needless to say they recover, although Quiver suffers an intense inlammatory response to twerking for several cycles after, and Mic’s own photoplethysmography systems now have a tendency to overcram—not that this really matters.

  BETWEEN

  How often, Quiver thinks, how often have I been without access to safety. How terrible it is and yet how familiar, to be forever on the verge of falling. And would it have been any diferent had I gestated in a womb and not in an envelope suspended in a darkened room, rocked by the breathing of a fumevap, the whispers of apprentices moving among us in their blues like ghosts? Sometimes I wonder if my excursions into space are not simply an excuse for leaping off a cliff.

  How often have I been between planets, between worlds, between galaxies—without footing, relentlessly alone, without promise of release, trapped in the web of unknowing, the unending memory of loss.

  Snailed (Mic’s word) in her hamok, Quiver attempts to become as fluid as water. She has read that if she becomes water she will stop feeling thirsty. But where has Quiver read this, living as she has from the start in worlds without books? And what is this she holds against her heart, this person, Quiver, who still manages somehow to be a person although so much has been stolen right out from under her? As you have likely guessed, it is a book she holds, a beautiful book, its cover a gray jade, its title printed in lavender. A book by Julio Cortázar who wrote: Terrible things can happen to us. Who wrote: The revolution is a sea of wheat. A book that is a transgression. A book that had survived The Scouring and, having passed from hand to hand, reached her lover. On the verge of being disappeared, her lover had managed to assure that Quiver could find it. She had proposed a time and place for them to meet in one of the Moon’s many hallways. Quiver recalls how an icy chill had moved through her. How the hall was empty, its air nearly exhausted. She thinks she will always be in this hallway, its blind doors and filthy windows of bubbled glass. She searches for signs. She comes upon the book, hidden beneath a bench. With a single gesture, takes it up, slips it beneath her shirt, sits down as if fatigued, looks at her feet, stretches and yawns and returns to her room.

  Time passes. And then she finds the courage to open the book. Although the text is brief, never has she seen anything so extensive. Alone in the deep silence she takes the first page between her fingers, gently turning it over. She begins to read:

  This way of being between, not above or behind but between, this orifice hour…

  ONCE MORE MIC REFLECTS ON BEING MIC

  Quiver’s lover had been made to disappear. What does this mean, exactly? Alone in his corner beside the humming ice maker, Mic attempts to get a handle on such losses as in her hamok Quiver deeply sleeps. He thinks if he were more “instinctive” he might understand Quiver better.

  Pensive, he considers his own detained erotic life, bewildered as always by his place in the physical world—a man of tin as, unforgettably, he had once been called to his face. A man born of an abstraction, contrived, schematized, then … printed. Printed in parts! Yet, he is, to use Quiver’s words, a thing of brute matter, an embodied abstraction of human thought, a complex whole gifted with a context and an identity. If he is not “human,” still, he is human in so many ways! See how I suffer! he thinks. Is this not human? This suffering?

  And was Quiv’s fascination for the virtual redhead any different from his own fascination with Al Pacino and his marvelous realms, his talismanic gizmos? His toaster! His blender! And if Al’s faucets and the bellhop’s buttons caused his central circuitry to spark—was this his fault? Had he not been programmed to receive, retain, and respond to the erratic, mutable, irresistible weather of human affectivity? Is he not, when gazing at Al’s incomparable face, uplifted? Do not faces, toasters, brass buttons give off light? Is he not—as are so many living creatures—polyamorous? He thinks that if there is a word that describes him, he is not alone in the ways he lives.

  For the first time in a very long while, he recalls his first encounter with a terrestrial music called the blues. He discovered that he was wired to something so much deeper than he had known possible; he reverberated to a voice as pure as the voice of a child, a bird, the wind. A voice that descended into the deepest waters, a sexed voice! Yes! This is what it must have been! That elusive weather, the sexed voice, repeating over and over again, Come to me. And Mic had wanted, more than he had ever wanted anything, to go to him, whoever he was, this “guy” whose heart was in sync with his own core receptor coil. Mic imagined the singer was a guy in a suit, like the guys in what was once called the movies; a guy not all that young, yet loose and tight all at the same time, leaning nonchalantly against a streetlight on the back wall of some mysterious establishment, such as a “bar,” a “speakeasy”—some sort of personal amulet, a chibi chimney stack, gracefully held between his lips, lost in “reflection,” lost in “love.” At ease and intact in his own integument, in a way Mic could never quite comprehend. The guy is handsome—this Mic knew—but how? And why? This dreamy guy was a movie star, something Mic fully appreciated when he first fell in love (!) with the movies, fell in love with a treasure that, made of light, was impervious to the determinism of space and time. And how marvelous, how perfectly apt, that the immortals who loitered, who loosened the knots of their ties, who eternally smoked those chibi smokestacks (assuring that those romantic urban nights were always “overcast”) were called stars! “Al Pacino,” he whispered to himself. “Alpaca Lino, Alpine Piano!” Al Pacino, who in an interview once said: “We weren’t actors. We were lamps.”

  BUT THEN

  Just as Mic was recalling the marvelous guy smoking alone in the dark, singing for someone who would never come, Quiver descended from her hamok with her book, the book she had only recently mentioned, the book she had—until then—kept jealously close and hidden away. The book that had been left under a bench, a book written by Julio Cortázar, who—as so many (most everybody, actually), had been forgotten. “Listen,” said Quiver, and she began to read:

  This hour that can arrive sometimes outside all hours, a hole in the net of time,

  this way of being between, not above or behind but be
tween,

  this orifice hour to which we gain access in the lee of other hours, of the immeasurable life with its hours ahead and on the side, its time for each thing, its things at the precise time,

  to be in a hotel room or on a platform, to be looking at a shop window, a dog, perhaps

  holding you in my arms, siesta love or half asleep, glimpsing in that patch of light through the door that opens onto the terrace, in a green gust the blouse you took off to give me the faint taste of salt trembling on your breasts…

  “Sometimes,” Quiver continues, “I imagine us being between; I imagine what Cortázar calls the sargassum of time is the shallow sea of space-time and its galaxies that we navigate, quik by quik in our Wobble. And sometimes I recall my time with my lover as once we were outside all hours, how our embrace gave us access to ourselves. How we were safe in that embrace. And when I read these words that will always belong to Cortázar and now also belong to me, I imagine that my lover and I met not in a hallway on the Moon, but in a room in a once beloved terrestrial city named Paris, a place I always imagined slick with rain. But no, he tells us the sun is out, it enters the room along with a gust of wind. A warm wind, a green wind. Is it green because the trees beyond the terrace are green? Or is the lover’s blouse, silk, I imagine, green, and so light it moves in the wind, a gentle wind, when she lifts it from her body?

  “Ah! Mic! How could he have known, and so long ago, too—this man named Julio Cortázar, a man who, before he died, you may recall, is said to have looked like a lion— that the animal earth (his words), the vegetal, mineral earth, an earth of rain, of sunlight, of seas tasting of salt, would, after a cascade of catastrophes, suffocate in a slow stillness, a relentless stillness, disrupted only by the rock that continues to fall from deep space even now. A cascade of catastrophes variously named: The Burnout, The Washout, The Scouring, The Scaling, The Noise, and, lastly, The Scattering.”