Seek!: Selected Nonfiction

by Rudy Rucker

  The way Arf finally died was that he figured out a way to escape from the deck where we always penned him up. I'm still not sure exactly how he was doing it, maybe he was squeezing under the railing and jumping down to the ground. On January 31, 1995, Arf broke out and ran away, and while he was deafly crossing a Los Perros street a car hit him in the head and killed him. He was thirteen and a half.

  I used a pick and shovel to dig a four-foot-deep grave in our backyard, the deepest hole I've ever dug. There's a lot of big rocks underground. Having lost both my parents in the last couple of

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  years, it felt kind of cathartic to be digging a grave. I got Arf's body from the Humane Society and laid him down on the grass next to the grave. I cried a lot. Arf looked about the same, except his tongue was hanging out and one eye was open and one eye was closed, like a dead creature in a cartoon. His fur was as orange as ever. I clipped off some bits of the fur, and then I put him down in the hole. Audrey and I threw some wildflowers from the yard down in there with him, and then I filled the hole up. We went inside and listened to "Old Blue," a song by The Byrds about losing your dog: "Bye bye, Blue. You good dog, you."

  Unpublished. Written February, 1995.

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  Island Notes

  Tonga

  We took Reno Air to LA, Air New Zealand to Honolulu, and Royal Tongan Air to Nuku'alofa, the largest city in Tonga. We had to wait four hours, midnight to 4 AM, in the Honolulu airport. The whole trip took about twenty-four hours door to door. We skipped July 16, 1996, or only got a couple of hours of it, because of the dateline.

  The Honolulu air terminal buildings were open to the breeze. We lay down to rest on a smooth concrete bench under some huge tropical plants, just outside the terminal building. Yodeling Hawaiian music played softly. I stared at the leaves tossing in the gentle breeze, thinking about chaotic motion.

  The Tongans use fans woven of palm, handheld fans with feathery fringed edges that shed off vortices. A vortex is like a boulder. You hit a boulder and it breaks into smaller rocks; shock a vortex and is decomposes into a passel of smaller vortices. You can't just make the vector curl disappear anymore than you can get rid of matter.

  I was annoyed by the voices of the drunk New Zealanders, the Kiwis. They sounded so aggressive, so plucky, so manfully squaring their little shoulders for the next obstacle to be fox-terriered through.

  Duty Free Liquor = Kiwi Cultural Center.

  A giant clam with crenellated shell lay on the bottom. Rising up off the side of it was a bumpy staghorn coral. The clam and coral made a wonderfully unbalanced composition, something nobody would ever think of designing, yet something with a beautiful inner logic. One single fish lived in the branches of the coral.

  I found a giant lofa bean. I felt a little guilty about making off with the giant bean, and tried to hide it in the knapsack, but it wouldn't fit completely; it peeked out at the top. In a snack bar I put my hat on the knapsack and the waitress thought the pack, bean and hat were a baby. Odd, that. Audrey took the backpack to the post office.

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  Rudy and the lofa bean.

  (Photo by S. Rucker.)

  "That bean is getting us into trouble," she said when she came back.

  "What do you mean?"

  "A woman asked me where I'd gotten it."

  "Was she mad we took it?"

  "No, she just wanted to know where we got it, so she could find one. She said it was used for Tongan ceremonies."

  "I stole the ceremonial bean?"

  At the hotel desk the girl told me that, "If you let it ripen and get brown, the lofa bean seeds can be used for - dancing." I surmised that she meant castanets.

  "What a beautiful green color our lofa bean is, Audrey." Audrey was tired of talking about the bean, so I began riffing to renew her interest. I wondered out loud if it might be the larva on an alien centipede. After all, the bean's vine had seemed to hang down from nowhere. Like Jack and the Beanstalk.

  "What if it splits open and eats my brain tonight, Audrey?"

  "It would get a small meal."

  The elevator in the Foreign Ministry building had a marble floor.

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  It was the only elevator in Tonga, and it was manned by a man in a tie and a blue serge skirt.

  "Hello," I said.

  "Malo e lelei," said the elevator operator. "You must learn to say hello in the Tongan way. Malo e lelei."

  On the way up to the hill where we would find the bean - this was "Mt." Talau (131 meters high) - we encountered an old man walking down the dirt street. His shirt had several buttons missing, many of his teeth were missing as well, and he was carrying a small aluminum tub holding a big steak of fish flesh. He struck up a conversation with us, talking about his sister in California. His name was Lata Toumolupe. He invited us into his house to look at his shells. We took off our shoes, sat on his couch, and he brought out his treasure, his little plastic bag with tied handles and some paper in it wrapped around his shells. Such shiny nice shells, like he'd gathered them and played with them for years. I took a big whelk, two brown cowries and two tooth cowries.

  "It was so touching, him offering us his treasure," said Audrey outside. "You should send him something nice."

  View from the porch. A volcano in the distance, a papaya tree, other trees with little fruits like lanterns, translucent and green when young, red when ripe. Inside is a black matte octagonal seed. The waves beat, little waves, more like lapping. The waves lap. Wind today. Lassitude, we nap all the time. So relaxing here.

  I walked from our hotel to the village of Toula on the Vava'u island in Tonga today, went past the palm-frond huts, up a little hill with a graveyard, down the hill to the sea and rocky beach. Brittle sea stars were everywhere on the shallowly covered rocks, most with two or three arms in a hidey-hole and the other arms out snaking around. "Thank you, God," I thought. "Thank you for making the world."

  Coming back through the graveyard, I saw a thin young woman with a pack of children working on a grave; sweeping it with a stick broom and burning the rubbish in a small fire. The woman made a gesture I hadn't seen yet in Tonga. The woman held her hand palm up, slightly cupped, with the fingers stiff and outspread and then flipped the hand down towards me, a bit as if sowing seed. The gesture definitely meant go away, rather than come here.

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  As I walked back down the hill into the village, the children came after me, friendly and laughing, three or four girls and a boy. I asked them to catch a pig, but they wouldn't. The boy, about four, had fun poking my backpack with a long, rather sharp stick. The girls asked my name and had me spell it for them and then they danced around me saying, ''Rudy, Rudy, Rudy." Wow, I thought, that's me. I'm really here. It felt almost like being awake in a dream.

  The town of Neifu under the moon, with the barking dogs, the grunting pigs.

  Fiji

  Now we're near Vuna village, on Taveuni Island in Fiji. Diving today on the deep outer wall of the Vuna reef. It felt like being on the steep slope of a mountain. Over and over, looking ahead, I'd barely notice something disappearing. I think it's feathery polyps pulling themselves *zip!* back into hidey-holes in the coral. They're almost like that old idea of mine about there being very fast forms of life that you never quite see, or only see as a flicker from the corner of your eye.

  A pig tusk. Beach shells with cockroaches in them. A pocketful of baby acorns. A triton shell. Coral. Giant clam shells. A reef pearl.

  It was pouring rain. I sat in the large common room of Susie's Plantation. Coconut palms. Orchids. Dark red ginger flowers. Orange flowers. The locals laughing and talking out in the kitchen. Such peace.

  A lion fish. Red and black fins, long. They turn white from the tip inward when hassled. The clown fish live in anemones, and swim out of them at you. The anemone is pinkish, tan, fleshy. The tips are darker ball shapes. At first I thought the clown fish were friendly, but it turned out they were territo
rial, being aggressive. Looking closely at some of the larger ones, I could see that they have rows of jagged sharp teeth top and bottom inside their clown smile. I thought of the line from Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," "You never saw the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns/ as they did tricks for you."

  Snorkeling across acres of soft coral today, all alone, like exploring a new planet. The soft coral was fat and chubby and changed from clump to clump. It was like turning a parameter in a fractal generator and seeing a series of shapes. Pale purple, lavender.

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  Three teenage Fijian kids took Audrey and me to see some lava tubes. These were horizontal tunnels just underground. One of the boys carried a big machete. Audrey started joking nervously about cannibalism. "Yes, eat white people," said the boy.

  We took a long bus ride around Taveuni to the Bouma waterfall. The bus was Indian-made, a SHREEDHAR MOTORS product. The virgin forest by the second Bouma waterfall seemed like rain forest, though another tourist termed it "low jungle." All the trees had lianas on them (a liana being a climbing woody tropical vine), and epiphytes (a plant such as a tropical orchid which grows on another plant upon which it depends for mechanical support but not for nutrients). Life upon life upon life. Like a reef! A place where there's so many ambient nutrients available that all you really need is an anchor spot. So you attach yourself to others. A granny cottage in Silicon Valley.

  The lower Bouma waterfall is a high cascade, maybe 100 feet, going into a pool. It's not huge. I swam out into it, as I approached the 20 foot wide shower I felt fear - the cascade seemed pretty strong and I couldn't see through it. The location of the heaviest part of the waterfall shower wandered about as a chaotic orbit on a strange attractor. The heaviest part of the torrent was almost too much, really hard, and it pushed me under. Where the waterfall hit, the water was so agitated and foamy that you could hardly float in it. Dense mist was rising up. I swam through the core three times, thinking of a hole to the Hollow Earth.

  Story idea about the Christmas tree worms. "It's a combination of the two most perfect forms," said Onar. "The triangle and the helix." Tiny little balls were forming on the altered Christmas tree worms, silvery little spheres like glass mirror-balls. "Edem mutata resurgitur," continued Onar. "Do you know it? The inscription on the tomb of Archimedes, beneath a drawing of a logarithmic spiral. The same, yet altered, I am reborn. Now imagine a quaternionic spiral. That's the Christmas tree worm."

  A little piece of coral with a tiny zebra-striped angelfish. Fish of a heart-stopping, mouth-watering neon blue. Fish-shaped fish. Like an aquarium, but untransportable.

  Diving at Yellow Tunnel, a reef in the Somosomo Straits off

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  Taveuni in Fiji. The guide drew a chalkboard picture. The little Fijian guide Lui swam ahead across the top of the reef, using his hands on the coral. I swam after him as if into a gale-force wind. Kicking as hard as I could, an inch above the reef surface. Lui went further and I gave up, drifting back.

  The Big Island of Hawaii

  We're staying near the Kilauea volcano crater. The former lake of fire-boiling lava is cold and black now, a dead hole. The fresh, live lava is far away, and they say that where the fresh lava hits the water it makes "hydromagmatic explosions." Great phrase.

  I struck off walking across a lava field today, walking across a series of layered old flows trying to get to where that fresh, hot lava hits the sea, but it was too far. I turned back after 2 miles. Getting dizzy in the sun - it was like a great asphalt parking lot, but not flat, the surface wavy as the ocean and in spots with big domes like bubbles, cracked and shattered at the tops. Guidebook sez: "The undulating pa'hoehoe looks like a frozen sea." Pa'hoehoe is the name for smooth lava, as opposed to the bumpy clinker kind that's called a'a.

  In the big pa'hoehoe field, the newer lava was iridescent, some pieces reticulated in white. Smooth glob shapes, ruffle shapes, some tossed up and twisted like frozen splashes, and rope shapes with twisting small ripples around them, fractal style. The colors were the dull greens and purples of raku pottery.

  All around the park are steam vents or "fumeroles," fields of them, the sulfuretted steam rising up in the dawn light. Holes in the ground, round deep. It reminds me of Avernus, the underworld in Vergil's Aeneid, of how Aeneas sets a bowl of fresh blood by the hole so he can talk to some wraiths. His ancestors.

  I went back to the fumeroles at twilight, the sun low in the sky. Tall pink grasses. Orchids growing like wheat - purple and white flowers. The sun making stripes in the steam above the fumeroles. Spirits issuing forth, each plume the size of a man or woman, drifting, twisting, torn apart by a vagrant breeze, then forming itself again in the calm. My parents. Close up the steam was humid as over a steam grate in the city. The little "sulfur flowers" around the holes, masses of pale yellow crystals.

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  Today we saw a flower the size of a face-mask - like for anesthesia. One thick white petal and one stamen the size of a banana. Maybe you stick the stamen down your throat like a gag, while inhaling - to be transported down a steam-vent. And there were bright pink flowers blooming down a bud like birds of paradise and the stem was like a gooseneck lamp.

  Now we're at the Kona shore, there's a lot of petroglyphs here - they're ancient designs scratched into rocks. I got a book about them, it talks about the glyphs being in places where there is a lot of power or mana. We walked to an isolated petroglyph field in Pukao, a field of smooth pa'hoehoe, cracked like the tiles of a turtle shell and covered with petroglyphs, many of them with their heads towards Mauna Kea.

  The men on the rock are perhaps projections of the artists, like shadows. I could visualize the 14th Century Hawaiians jumping up in the air, looking at their shadows, drawing that kind of design. A spooky place - now overgrown with introduced kiawe (mesquite) thorn trees - back then it was just lava. Much mana. Scary, a little.

  There was an odd line at the bottom of the sign at the petroglyph field:

  "Those who defile or mistreat the petroglyphs must bear the emotional, physical and spiritual consequences for those and those around them - we can take no responsibility for these effects."

  Nevertheless I tiptoed among the petroglyphs with my shoes off - in my socks - to get a better photo, and felt like I was trespassing, that I had intruded. A bit later, dizzy from the August sun, I branched off on a mistaken path in the woods, and the crisscrossing shadows of the kiawe branches became as petroglyph men, all over the ground, twisting at odd extra-dimensional angles like a square coming up out of Flatland, threatening, nay pursuing me, intent on extracting a terrible vengeance for my defilement of their field.

  Writing this, I hear a knock on my hotel room door. Peer out through the peephole. A petroglyph is in the hallway!

  The jellyfish warning sign at the hotel beach: a big rectangle with a yellow background divided in two by a wavy black water line, a black struggling figure in the water with pointed arms and legs, one arm raised in despair, and all around it are glyphs of jellyfish. The

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  glyphs are hump-bumps with dangling wiggly stuff, they're like question marks with elongated wriggly tails, like brains 'n' spines.

  Two-tank scuba dive off the beach in Puako this morning. It was good. There was an eel garden seventy feet down by the drop-off of the continental shelf. There were about a hundred eels, silvery green, each with its tail tucked in the smooth white sand, and floating erect, wobbling this way and that. A few eels were swimming around free, adjusting their position. They had long slit mouths partly open. Behind them was a huge form slowly moving, a leviathan of the deeps. The sense of mystery, of hugeness.

  I told my dive guide about my idea for a petroglyph story. I suggested that the petroglyph knocking at my character's hotel-room door could be grooved into space, a 4-D bump. Analogous to a Flatland petroglyph which is a 3-D bump in the surface of their 2-D space. The light would warp around the 4-D space curvature of the petroglyph's lines. The guide sai
d, "Is it all the petroglyphs that are after the guy or just one of them in particular? Maybe he has to get a second petroglyph to help him fight the first one? Maybe the first one was from a burial site. The helper-petroglyph might be a turtle."