Trafik

by Rikki Ducornet

  “I suppose,” Quiver says sadly, “collapse was inevitable. After all, everything she and her husbands experimented with was isolated from its realms, its tribes, and from itself. Everything they touched was made singular, was made lonely, without roots or context. Just as I—”

  “Are you weeping?” Mic asks, revolving around her like a little planet as is his wont. “Oh! Quiver! Oh! Dear Quiv!” As he revolves, Mic gathers speed, warming the two of them. This warming is beneficial, and although they both imagine Mic’s tendency to revolve when Quiver is down is the outcome of a profoundly united and spontaneous gesture, he is, according to the experts, in fact, wired to behave this way. In any case, the gesture reestablishes the bond between them. It activates her adrenals and his top rotors.

  MARZIPAN TEA

  AM LOCUS behind them, and on their way to Gladiolus, they are briefly detained in a nautilus glitch. Coiled into a flat spiral, its segmented crystallized chambers separated by ditches, they are made to wander until colliding with a tearoom occupied by angels who are up to no good. Not only are they lounging on antique rugs like sluts, they are sharing their karaoke machine and marzipan with archons. Mic takes note that the angels flash their naked dorsal palps and the archons are dressed in dubiously harvested ostrich skin jackets. Their horns are stained scarlet; their bitter lips are black with bile.

  You are on your way to Gladiolus, the Atlas informs Quiver and Mic directly, just as they are ejected from the glitch by a sudden (and most welcome) mesoblastic detonation. The planet has an accessible atmosphere with a crisp, dry mouthfeel and a clay body. Gladiolus is known for its one outstanding gladiola—the largest blossoming flower in the universe, which, to the despair of botanists across the galaxy, has toppled over.

  GLADIOLUS

  In the beginning, Mic had been wired to the dialects of bees whose symphonies echoed the intimate embrace of space and time. Quiver awakens to the sound of star litter fizzing and popping. She has been dreaming of bees, has often seen them dancing in the Lights. Mic is occupied in his favorite spot beside the perpetually humming ice machine. It is exciting to be surfing the rings of a new planet, now visible, bathed in its sun’s early light.

  The Wobble lands without incident on a hill of white clay. “Looks like a perfect terrain for the rover,” says Mic. Off he goes to fetch Walter Thicke from storage. They set off in an unexpectedly smoky atmosphere beneath clouds the color of welts. Wire birds agitate the air, snatching up flies. These give off a metallic shine, their keys held tightly in their paws. Because the birds are made of wire, Quiver comments she can see the flies’ attempts to escape.

  “There is no sound as dismal as the sound of a trapped fly,” says Quiver. “It is the sound of hopelessness,” says Walter Thicke. “It is the sound particles and quarks make trapped inside an atom. How eager they are to get out!”

  “How can you possibly know this?” Quiver, in a bad mood, complains.

  “Because it is how I feel,” he answers. “How I feel parked in storage.”

  Unsettled by this revelation, Mic attempts to mollify Walter by asking him what he thinks the birds and the flies are made of. Walter’s Rolodex has a good handle on minerals and the languages of the Outer Galaxies.

  “The flies’ little feet, the birds’ beaks—these are made of Fistula Green. The planet is—as so many in this galaxy— rich in Cataclysmite and Fistula Green. The surface is of white clay; it is all clay,” continues Walter, “but for the—”

  “Cataclysmite,” says Quiver impatiently, “and Fistula Green.”

  “You have stolen my words,” says Walter, sadly. Just then they see the locals parading toward them, their faces, feet, and hands made of fired clay. “The clay is local,” Walter Thicke hastens to tell them, “and their felt bodies are stuffed with toxic seeds. The one with the big belly supported by a truss of some sort is Top Rancor—a senior official. We have no alternative but to submit to his demands.”

  “But they are dolls!” Quiver erupts. “Their features are painted on! Their forking eyes are lifeless!”

  “Yet they are fixedly looking,” says Walter. “Yet they can see.”

  “And their brains?” asks Quiver. “What are their brains made of?”

  “Snow,” he tells her. “Their brains are made of snow.” He now proves himself invaluable as, without introductions or snacks, they are bludgeoned by Top Rancor’s endless discourse; it boils down to this: They must obtain their permits at once.

  Mic and Quiver are given a pail and a shovel. Obtaining permits entails being led on leashes across a mournful landscape to a specific bank of clay at the bottom of a steep ravine, at the far side of an outcropping of slick hills. Having supplied themselves with clay, they are made to go at once to a workstation at an indeterminate distance, manufacture their permits in molds supplied for this purpose, fire them in a kiln fueled by dry thistles that they must collect themselves and artfully bind together.

  Once the kiln has cooled, they unmold their permits, carry them to a certain obelisk, and, standing in its shadow, attend yet another discourse on the need to carry their permits—each the shape and size of a good-sized brick— with them at all times. Any false move on their parts, any nicks in their bricks… will be punished by having their permits hurled at them from a tidy distance.

  Next they find themselves forced to submit to an imbecilic litany of petty denunciations:

  You have arrived at Gladiolus, a sovereign state, without permission, nor have you requested a permit, despite the fact that upon Top Rancor’s obelisk, it is inscribed without ambiguity that those who set foot on the white clay of Gladiolus must carry a permit exactly as one carries one’s face at all times. All visitors, prior to their arrival, are required to study the laws and be prepared to arrive wearing rush brushes on the rims of their hats so as to be recognized as aliens. Should these precautions be ignored, the visit will be brief and tedious to the extreme.

  Having said this, Top Rancor loses interest in them and takes off in the direction of the obelisk. (Walter Thicke informs them that Top Rancor leases a penthouse apartment at the very top.) They are now prodded and poked down a path in a new direction. Walter Thicke, who has stood by all the while, is made to stay behind.

  “I want to ride in Walter Thicke!” Quiver shouts. “You cannot—”

  Even though the dolls cannot open their mouths, nor do they appear to have teeth, she is silenced by being bitten on the cheek.

  It is not long before they see the first cage. Sturdy enough, on the verge of unapproachable, it is woven of an abrasive grass. Coming close, they are made to look inside. They see a doll holding a grass cage on its lap, a smaller doll within holding its own caged doll, who holds a cage. They are given a magnifying glass and, inevitably, the caged doll’s doll holds a caged doll on its lap, its own doll caged, and so on. Turn by turn, every one of the dolls stares at them fixedly, with widely spaced and uncannily sighted eyes.

  “I hear their heads,” whispers Quiver, “swarming with flies.” For this she is ferociously poked. The dolls are so fearsome they can do nothing but follow them up one mournful hill after another to examine cages containing more dolls, to gaze into the cages with their magnifying glasses, to feel the flies swarming within their minds ever more loudly—as meanwhile the sky above them changes color, turns a rotten tangerine, an abraded yellow, and Fistula Green—the colors of a bad bruise. They progress farther with no refuge in sight, nor consolation, rudely poked and prodded all the while, more cages coming into view, and after that yet more.

  As they reach the summit of yet another hill, the sky yawns with such amplitude it swallows itself. There is nothing but darkness all around them. They stand in this darkness until stunned by a terrific knock to the head; they are abandoned, sprawling on the white clay, as the stars of that dreadful place watch them from the yawning that has released them, pressing so forcefully down that had Quiver and Mic been aware, they would not have been able to stand or, for that matter, roll over
or whisper.

  I cannot say how long the night lasted, but when it was over they awakened packed into Walter Thicke, whose motor was quietly purring. They returned to the Wobble at once where Walter was decommissioned and tucked into cargo. Dolls in cages, Quiver ponders, her mood so dark she can barely think. Dolls in cages all the way down. Something incomprehensible, yet also familiar. A memory from which she is fleeing. It was like that on the Moon, she recalls with a shudder. When the children were all vanishing within themselves.

  REMEMBER

  “Remember,” Quiver asks Mic, sometime later and deep in the middle of nowhere, “when everyone was listening to Brains on Plastic?”

  “I loved Brains on Plastic!” Mic cries enthusiastically. “So twisted!”

  “I hated Brains on Plastic. So sick, Mic! But I was crazy for Brains on Bees.” Upon reflection she adds: “We must take better care of Walter.” And then, walking to the middle of Home Free, Quiver surprises Mic by singing the Brains on Bees classic:

  Helium

  Breathing helium

  alive as anything

  in the real air.

  There we are

  in the nowhere

  when

  something familiar

  throws us to the floor

  again

  our gums bleeding

  for lack of something

  or other

  that’s not here.

  Not ever.

  LINGER LONGER

  “What’s that pretty galaxy just a stone’s throw away?” Quiver asks as they sail past what appears to be a fog of crushed bone.

  “Elictpic,” says Mic, quick as ever. “We are fast approaching its hottest star, Meander. Meander is made of meat, Blasterite, black marbles, and Bitumen. Its two planets are Linger Longer and Glass Ceiling.”

  “Linger Longer sounds nice,” Quiv murmurs dreamily. “It sounds like a place with a spa.”

  “Linger Longer,” Mic informs her, his Swift Wheel flashing orange, “uses its beard—”

  “Forking unbelievable! I see its beard!”

  “—to snag everything in its reach and stuff it—”

  “Forget it. What about Glass Ceiling?”

  “Shaped like a snow globe …”

  “A snow globe?”

  “A glass ball with a flat bottom, and in the middle—not sure what that is in the middle.”

  “We shall stay clear of Linger Longer’s beard! Wow!” says Quiver. Mic performs a sudden and magnificent wing over, a masterful fork over, a peerless fair shake, coin toss, and grand slam.

  “Why?” Quiver moans, her face in her hands. “Why is our universe so scary?”

  “Walter Thicke blames the angels,” says Mic. “Told me they are nothing but fops. They live on marzipan and have the minds of moths.”

  “I suggested he join us in Home Free,” says Quiver, “but he prefers to spend his time in cargo with my abandoned Zanx Fixer—a very recent encounter although they have shared cargo for an age. ‘We both go bonkers over the same stuff!’ he told me, visibly excited—and boy, did he get into it! Linguistics! ‘Isn’t it interesting, Quiver,’ he said, ‘that on Agiato, they toss their carefully preserved baby teeth into the air, letting them fall where they may; that the reading of the teeth is said to be like reading the liver. On Agnoetae, they act similarly with the empty shells of snails, and on Annona, they boil wooden alphabet blocks in wine and set them on the floor. On Aristippus, they speak only during courtship—if in a manner familiar to us—but once they are wedded they clam up—although some are said to be fluent biters. On Barbaros, they communicate by means of artfully gassed atmospheres and intercalating molecules. The wee folks on Bandergap toss nano-electrical lattices at one another. And! Guess what, Quiver,’ he said to me (and never have I seen Walter Thicke so excited!), ‘some languages are glottological and some are powerful defoliants!’“

  SOMETHING UNIQUE AND UNSCRUTABLE

  Time in the Wobble goes nowhere. Quiver loses track of it. Often it seems that all that had transpired on the Moon long before she and Mic had become a team based on Elsewhere, has only just happened—it is all so vivid in her mind. Whenever she tells Mic about the Moon, these memories are further heightened. This cycle she tells him about a crop of pocket infants all unable to sustain a kiss. For them a loving glance caused the greatest anguish. All their lives they remained cloistered, the walls, ceilings, and floors of their rooms faced with wadding. They grew slowly toward puberty—a destination about which they knew nothing and would never know anything—entertaining themselves with soft and softly murmuring robots in pallid colors. These were shaped like cubes, pyramids, spheres, and stars. Not long after adolescence, the children’s marrow became infected with something unique and unscrutable.

  It was during this time that Quiver left for Elsewhere. By then Base was the size of what had once been the Bronx. Not long after, Noise obliterated Earth and her moon—its impact such that even Elsewhere had been buffeted as a sound they had never heard before crowded their ears—a sound Mic recalls that brought to mind a monumental glass bell filled to the brim with tacks and struck with a tuning fork. A submerged lake surfaced in response—Mic, too, remembers this. Elsewhere, shortly thereafter, was ringed by a seething gumbo of everything—the very rings Mic and Quiv would mine for their serviceable amalgams of Indiana limestone and the rest—including the occasional brass doorknob and a waffle iron.

  As Quiver recalls these things, Mic, double tasking, attends to her every word, sometimes interjecting: “I had no idea!” or “I remember that too, Quiv!” He is steeped in an investigation into sound, including big noises, and their place in the universe. “Just listen to this!” he exclaims the instant Quiver grows quiet, “These are the words of the mystic Sin the Androgyne:”

  Just as the Initial Manifestation of a universe begins with a terrible roar, so are Endings heralded by an ear-piercing din. If Silence is Virtue, then, the cosmos, its rocks and races, its tribes, mansions and slums, its caged tigers and toddlers, its bathtubs brimming with the bones of innocents soaking in lime—is depraved.

  “What if there is no intrinsic meaning to the universe?” Quiver whispers it.

  “Well,” Mic replies, “that would explain everything.”

  A LUSTER

  Once again and for the last time, Quiver returns to the Lights. A floating brain, a cohort of toxic dolls, a stalking tattoo, archons and angels at tea—the senselessness of her destiny in an incomprehensible universe has her wondering, What is it all about? What am I about? I suppose I am about my longing, she decides as she runs the familiar path. My longing for a lover and for a home. And Mic shares in this longing. This longing is our shared aboutness!

  She thinks that living in the Wobble is living in a robot’s world, not a human’s world. No wonder she feels so out of it, so unfit, so alone. So forking grumpy all the time. Her world had been taken from her long before she was released, squawling, from her pitiful envelope hanging from its wire only to be hooked up to a robot in a fur jacket with a rubber nipple. “I need a planet I can walk on,” she says out loud. “I need to wake up in a morning to a sun’s light, and sleep in the dark of night, beneath a familiar moon and stars I can recognize and call by name.”

  Running eases her heartache, the thrumming in her mind, her chronic perplexity and surging impatience. And then something flashes between the leaves for one bright instant in time. She recognizes a luster tattoo of a kind ubiquitous on Elsewhere during her last furlough, when she and Mic had delivered a stunning collection of crystalized Melanogasters—the very crystalized Melanogasters essential to the successful acceleration of cytovect fiber torsion pendulum turntables—one of their more successful assignments.

  Quiver takes off away from the path and into the trees. It is she—the fabulous elusive creature, the redhead, a luster riding the jade of her left shoulder, flashing as if in extremity, as if signaling a disaster, but there is no disaster—only a significant message indicating
that she is not alone in the seeing, but that she, too, is seen. As Quiver runs, her own luster—a dragonfly—responds with a soft gleaming in concert with the other luster, a crazy cat luster that changes color until their colors coincide—the redhead’s gold crazy cat and her own dragonfly, now both gleaming, warm to the touch and pulsing. Quiver is submerged in a sweet incandescence as her wrist is gently seized by another hand.

  And now they meet; they stand face to face. The redhead’s eyebrows are trimmed in the manner called mothwing— once popular on Elsewhere when the band Soma Cosmic and its lead singer, Semiconducting Metallic, had inluenced intergalactic fashion. Her eyes are green, no, they are violet; they are a violet green speckled with chalcedony. Her heart leaping in her ears, Quiver dives into those crazy eyes as the redhead takes her chin gently between her hands— how soft they are!—and kisses her, causing their lusters to flare up and incandesce. Before vanishing the redhead whispers:

  “See you on Trafik!”

  THE ENDOCYCLIC QUASAR MASS

  Eager to proceed, Quiver awakens with expectation. But before they reach Trafik, they must surf the Endocyclic Quasar Mass, a tumultuous region unsettled by a throng of transgressive stars that—despite a flashing and most attractive appearance—are, according to the angels, “of corruptible nature, crooked, anarchic, and treacherous.”

  “But that’s nonsense,” says Mic. “You and I know that the stars are without will or self-awareness; without agenda or purpose. Space, just as the oceans, has its rogue waves, riptides, tsunamis, and whirlpools. I am about to roll us a barrel and make us a hole to slide through. Hold on, Quiv!”

  Already she can feel the foam faceside coalesce and compress, how backside the thruster labors against an unfathomable absence, feel it vibrate so violently it threatens to chew its own teeth as then in under a quik, they are scaled down to the ultramicroscopic, eyeballed by the busy slit of a split atom. It is tough! thinks Quiver. All this travel, all this expanding and contracting! All these peculiar places and questionable encounters!