by W. E. Gutman
“I should have never plucked it. I should have never set eyes upon it,” I heard myself wailing as my eyes now strained against the milky glare of day.
Somewhere at the edge of a gray town, a cookie-cutter copy of a thousand gray tank towns, on a gray street senselessly named after some tree or flower, deep inside a gray room adorned with mementos and frozen glimpses of time misspent, the self-probing continues. I’m not in Paris or in New York but in a grim, far-flung gray tank town in the middle of nowhere. I’m out of range of the ultimate cause so I seek answers in the gray dancing shadows on the ceiling and hang on to rapidly dissolving shreds of graying memory.
America. Fifty-six years spent chasing after the same dream, lurching from a brief state of wonderment to one of frustration, disillusionment and anger as I stumbled on the desiccated fragments of discredited myths and embalmed fiction, trying to fit in, hopelessly out of step, out of tune. Yes, I’m a restive stranger, an untamed renegade, ill at ease in my own skin, an interloper in a realm I do not fully fit in, outwardly housebroken, inwardly raging and defiant and aching, treading unfamiliar waters, lost in the blinding light of day. Fifty-six years: Two billion heartbeats pumping life into an out-of-soul experience, each pulse adding to my estrangement and perplexity.
The poppies are now in bloom. I scan the high desert mountains that surround me, dwarf me, fence me in and deny me the privilege of a horizon line where freedom looms.
Somewhere in the distance, a car rumbles by like a great booming wall of sound.
In Dranomos, I’d quickly learned, neighbors had no tales to tell. Ghostly, furtive, aloof, poker-faced, they seemed to live like me -- hermits in a wasteland of topographic banality and cultural sterility, un-ordained monks who live in self-created cloisters where time, frigid winters and long periods of lung-searing heat and drought mummify the body and scorch the soul.
It would be a while before the doves began cooing at the advent of spring but by then I knew that the wind, the heat, the unbearable sameness of it all had rendered everyone insane and that I would escape a similar fate only by fleeing from this morose, howling desert. What I hadn’t reckoned yet was whether I’d make my getaway trussed in a straightjacket, screaming as the wind added its voice to the sinister chorus of evil laughter, or carted away on a gurney inside a body bag.
Last week two lizards and two field mice drowned in the pool.
Yesterday, I retrieved a dead bat.
On cloudless days, as the sun begins its slow westward descent, an inscription -- a name -- materializes, as if fashioned by some spectral hand, at the bottom of the pool. It reads HILLARY AN. I would later learn that Hillary An, a former tenant, had drowned in the pool. Some say it was suicide. The wind, they surmise, had driven her mad.
Early this morning, my old friend Guy died of leukemia. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered, as he had instructed, from the top of a mountain where eagles nest. Guy thought birds are the reincarnated souls of men freed from their earthly shackles.
I turn my gaze heavenward at a searing, implacable sun. Then I look at my shoes, caked with brown desert dust. I remember the damp slippery clay by my mother’s grave.
TIME FLIES
Time is what hinders everything from
being given all at once.
Henry Bergson
It began with a premise, a subtle hypothesis of stunning magnitude: When positive and negative gravitational forces are set on a collision course at retrograde absolute speed, the theory asserts, the impact creates a void inside which time can be frozen -- life extended, you hear -- perhaps forever.
So the Foundation approved the grant and a team of biophysicists and geneticists from the Theoretical Physics Research Institute and two eager Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit flies -- a male and a female -- went to work to test this astonishing concept.
The flies were placed in a biotronic accelerator, a state-of-the-art synchrotron developed by the Institute’s Entomo-Ontological Laboratory.
Temperature constants and reverse wavelength spectral illumination were maintained throughout the project.
Three seconds later, the fruit flies mated with great eagerness. The first pupae hatched forty seconds later.
On the fourth day, or three hundred thousand fruit-fly generations later, fifteen offspring matured and exceeded their natural life expectancy by twelve hours, the equivalent of four human years.
Early on the twelfth night, sixty-six flies outlived their earliest progenitors by five hundred and eighteen fly-years.
A male and a female were removed from the accelerator and released outdoors on the seventeenth day. Six thousand fly-years had elapsed and all memory of an earlier life, of a once uncontrolled and free existence, had since been erased.
Disoriented, dazed by the sudden foreboding vastness around them, the flies climbed erratically toward the limitless expanse. Feeling the sun’s breath upon their wings, aroused by some anomalous threat, they flew toward each other, met and clasped briefly in mid-air before imploding and vanishing without a trace.
The rest, having lived six million years in human-equivalent age, were destroyed on the twenty-first day with massive isotopic concentrations. Their potential life span can only be expressed in astronomical terms.
Immortality? Easy. It’s all neatly packaged in a self-nullifying theorem. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would have been proud. But involuntary confinement and loss of selfhood is a high price to pay for immortality.
And so, Project Fruit Fly was scrubbed. The Institute issued a carefully worded summary report that no one bothered to read and which was subsequently consigned to a dark and dusty vault at the National Archives.
Invoking the Freedom of Information Act, I requested a copy. The request was denied, first on “administrative grounds,” then for reasons of “national security.” I appealed. The appeal was rejected. I was cautioned not to insist. The warning had the bureaucratic incivility accorded a pesky nobody or a dangerous agitator.
And then one day, not far in the future, the few who could afford their own biotronic accelerator granted themselves life eternal; the many who could not, lived and died serving them.
DEATH & TRANSFIGURATION
You can’t be free to become what you want when you’re starving, sorely oppressed or stunted in your moral growth by a life of endless drudgery [in a society] where the free development of the few is bought at the cost of the shackling of the many.
Terry Eagleton
Across town, two derelicts identified by police as Floyd Horton, 39, and Cecil Glenville, 42, froze to death overnight in their dreams. They were found huddled on a bench at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, on East 47th Street, a stone’s-throw away from the United Nations building. They’d wrapped themselves in newsprint and plastic sheeting to ward off the cold but New York’s bitter winter night claimed them just the same. Their bodies had stiffened and turned blue when they were carted away.
Horton’s remains were cremated free of charge by the City. His ashes, as are those unclaimed by family or friend, now fatten the soil at an upstate experimental horticultural farm.
Glenville, who had a cousin in Connecticut, was buried in a pine box with a plain metal marker at the local potter’s field.
A week later, requesting anonymity, Glenville’s cousin had the body exhumed for reburial at the family crypt in Darien. When the coffin was unsealed, Glenville was found lying face down, his knuckles caked with blood, his fingernails torn off. His eyes were wide open, his mouth agape in silent horror. A crimson crust coated his nostrils and lips.
Cryogenics Unlimited, the outfit that keeps utopians on ice until the elusive Lazarus Factor is synthesized, was called in to inspect Glenville’s remains. Hard at work on the development of an enzyme that offers the dead another lease on life, technicians at Cryogenics Unlimited theorized that Glenville had somehow thawed and slowly stirred back to consciousness like a hibernating toad.
“Realizing he’d been entombed alive, [Glenci
lle] must have suffered a massive heart attack,” read the coroner’s report. Glenville was cremated and not even the Lazarus Factor can help him now.
Floyd Horton, his misery reduced to phosphate-rich sublimates, endows long-stem pink roses with a very special blush.
PAST IMPERFECT
Not to be born surpasses thought and speech.
The second best is to have seen the light
and then gone back quickly whence we came.
Sophocles
If the latest theoretical physics fad has any merit, a moment recorded in time, it purports, is a moment exhausted. What this axiom suggests is that impermanence is reality’s only constant. Only what remains uncreated escapes the shift from potentiality to actuality, from imminence to nothingness. To be, for all intents and purposes, is prelude to the unavoidable end of being.
For “Otto,” betrayed by the laws of probability, mocked by fate and spurned by his maker, being was unavoidably the essence of his finality. Unloved, deprived of a memory and short on dreams, Otto, poor Otto, is no sooner conjured from the dregs of an ancient genesis than undone, nullified and jettisoned into the abyss of oblivion. Were it not for some insightful and long-since forgotten astropaleobiologist, his living nightmare -- set at the beginning of time -- might never have been chronicled.
Unschooled and tentative, tolerated but never tamed, nature turned its back on itself and sanctioned -- some say, “with a vengeance” -- the spontaneous advent of a bizarre and unique life form. Ponder, if you can, an organism so vile, so grotesque, so pathetic in countenance, so tortured and twisted, and so utterly purposeless that it lived less than one Earth spin around its axis. Otto’s sudden emergence and abrupt demise defies the canons of evolution; it has no antecedent, it fits no known paradigm. The very laws of thermodynamics are being upended in the process. Serenely unconcerned, entropy spares the miserable “thing” the passage of time. It is an unlikely act of compassion in a realm of cosmic unconcern.
Discovered in meteoric debris, Otto’s fossilized remains reveal a brutish organism, apparently legless but equipped with a prehensile tail with which it flogged itself and copulated through an orifice doubling as its mouth. Paleontologists agreed that the improbable entity was covered with a scaly, mottled hide, and that its single eye, capable of polychromatic sight, was probably endowed with a gentle, almost seductive expression. Otto is also credited to have been capable of emitting piercing moans so rueful that they all but froze the hearts of those who may have heard it. The Grand Lexicon of Random Biogenic Anomalies confirms the existence of cosmic influences capable of inducing auto-asexual reproduction, though none quite as peculiar as Otto -- as the monstrosity was christened.
The ancestor and sole offspring -- the auto-progeny -- of a freak process that doomed it to genetic irrelevance, Otto is believed to have succumbed from exhaustion brought on by futile attempts to reproduce. Tritium dating has tentatively placed the appearance and virtually simultaneous disappearance of this as yet unclassified phenomenon at 500 trillion year ago.
Otto’s remains were laid to rest and a monument was erected to commemorate the momentous find and incongruity.
Signs of Man, the legendary if hypothetical vertebrate believed to have accidentally emerged at an earlier period, are never found. An acceptable theory justifying his advent and arguing his brief and noxious tenancy on a minor planet in the Milky Way Galaxy has not yet been postulated. None is forthcoming.
IN HIS OWN IMAGE
There is no absolute, no reason,
no God, no spirit at work in the world: nothing
but the brute instinctive will to live.
Arthur Schopenhauer
It had never been done. It would never be tried again. Not even in a dream. Here was an unrepeatable chance event that upended the laws of potentiality and defied the very core of reason. Bear with me. Imagine absurdity challenging the sublime. Picture the unthinkable. And yet, against all odds, preposterous as it sounds, it happened: A driving force, heretofore unimagined, the offspring of a staggering abstraction that can’t be annulled once spawned -- nor left unexplored -- burst out of a single, indissoluble vanishing point.
Reaching into nonexistence (or emerging from it?) now ponderable if not fully manifest, suspended somewhere between immanence and dizzying inscrutability (as are all things when first caused), he endowed himself with being. In a single surge of cognition, exceeding his creative potential, he was now his own fait accompli. He had just invented himself.
Free from his cerebral cocoon, fully transfigured from genderless ambiguity to virile causality, he surveyed his completeness. Heeding a time scale of his own calibration, anxious to add purpose to will, meaning to intent, momentum to stimulus, he separated cause from effect, quintessence from character, provenance from possibility, state from circumstance, identity from distinction, metaphor from divergence. In short, he elaborated all manner of paradox and contrariety which would forever set him apart from those who are not, and can never be him.
To avert any confusion between him and the teeming realm his incarnation would evoke, he relinquished form for unquantifiable symmetry; he traded transparency for impenetrability. His geometry would be indivisible and without limit, here brimming with presence, there immersed in desolation so vast that even time would stand still at points unmarked and of his own design.
He then granted himself the capacity to remain unmoved by sorrow and calamity. To justify such dispassion, he endowed himself with ostensible kindness and discernible unkindness, allowing himself to be perceived as possessing equal amounts of benevolence and evil, munificence and heartlessness, genius and imbecility, as circumstance dictated, and depending upon prevailing moods and attitudes.
Now armed with an ego, he gave himself an indecipherable name by which others would know him. Some followed him in silent awe. Others, whose cries were never heard, wept and suffered and died forgotten because pain, by some outlandish precept, is a path out of bondage. His ear inattentive and his breast unfaithful to the throngs who called on him and sought his succor, he was forgotten, in time, like a distant tragedy, like a bad dream.
Cynics suggested that he’d been a figment of his own imagination. Others, with greater forbearance, offered that, in a supreme act of mercy, having lost faith in his own inflated image, using his extraordinary powers, he nullified himself for the good of all.
A great, raging, thunderous roar shook his domain. And the legend, so carefully preserved and perpetuated, was soon forgotten. No one knows for sure whether he was insane or whether those he caught in his devilish trap had lost all reason.
And peace eternal reigned at last upon the remnant few left to ponder the incongruity of being God.
THE LONGEST NIGHT
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there,
wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams
no mortal ever dared to dream before.
Edgar Allan Poe
Smokers rebel. Segregated, sneered and coughed at -- “ours is an unreasoned, even absurd pleasure,” they fume, “but it shall not be abrogated.”
“Smokers may well have the right to smoke,” nonsmokers retort, “but that entitlement deprives us of our right not to inhale their foul exhalations.”
Intoxicated by their own emissions, if not by their disregard for the well-being of others, smokers reject their nemeses’ argument as “capricious and arbitrary.” Citing the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence which, they insist, endows them with certain inalienable rights, they counter that smoking is a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Sensing free publicity, the Environmental Protection Agency promptly sides with nonsmokers in hopes of diverting attention from its own hazy record.
Arguing that the smoker vs. nonsmoker issue is constitutionally insoluble, the Supreme Court recesses for an afternoon nap.
Smokers keep puffing in designated areas where it is still tolerated, thanks to ci
vil libertarians who would gladly lay down their own lives to protect a smoker’s right to die of heart disease, emphysema or lung cancer. Evenhandedness often leads to absurdity.
Fights erupt. Spontaneous demonstrations turn out ugly crowds in cities around the world, all barking savage insults and threats.
In the City of Brotherly Love an angry roar rises from the mob. All heads turn in unison toward the third-floor landing of a once-elegant townhouse. At the end of a rope suspended from a flagpole flying Old Glory, bound together like ham-hocks, dangle the cadavers of a man and a woman caught smoking in defiance of an ordinance prohibiting such activity within city limits. Stirred no doubt by feelings of altruism, anti-smoking vigilantes had rammed a fistful of cigarettes down their throats.
A few bury their faces, horrified or overcome with shame. Others flee the ghastly scene, vomiting in their tracks. The rest, their qualms flaking away like dead bits of conscience, keep looking in mute fascination.