Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

  We sorted the printouts by size in mounds and counted them, plugging the numbers into the sim and stepping through different possibilities for shelter design. There was a scaling problem—at a certain height/diameter ratio, you had to start exponentially increasing the number of tiles in order to attain linear gains in volume—but how big was big enough? After a good-natured argument that involved a lot of squinting into phone screens against the intense glare of the high sun, we picked out two designs and set to work building them.

  Pug’s arm was pretty much back to normal, but he still worked slower than me and blamed it on his arm rather than admitting that he’d picked a less-efficient design. I was half done, and he was much less than half done, when Blight wandered into camp.

  “Holy shit,” she said. “You did it!”

  I threw my arms around her as she leaped over the knee-high wall of my structure, kicking it slightly askew. She was wearing her familiar sleeveless overalls, but she’d chopped her hair to a short electric-blue fuzz that nuzzled against my cheek. A moment later, another pair of arms wrapped around us and I smelled Pug’s work sweat and felt his strong embrace. We shared a long, three-sided hug and then disentangled ourselves and Pug and I let fly with a superheated sitrep on the Gadget’s astounding debut performance.

  She inspected the stacks of tiles and the walls we’d built thus far. “You guys, this is insane. I didn’t want to say anything, you know, but I never bought this. I thought your gizmo”—Pug and I both broke in and said Gadget, in unison and she gave us each the finger, using both hands—“would blow over on its side in a windstorm, break something important, and end up buried in its own dune.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I had nightmares about that, too.”

  “Not me,” said Pug. “I knew from day one that this would work. It’s all so fault tolerant, it all fails so gracefully.”

  “You’re telling me that you never once pictured yourself finding a pile of half-buried, smashed parts?”

  He gave me that serene look of his. “I had faith,” he said. “It’s a gadget. It does what it does. Mechanism A acts on mechanism B acts on mechanism C. If you understand what A, B, and C do, you know what the Gadget does.”

  Blight and I both spoke at the same time in our rush to explain what was wrong with this, but he held his hands up and silenced us.

  “Talk all you want about chaos and sensitivity to initial conditions, but here’s the thing: I thought the Gadget would work, and here we are, with a working Gadget. Existence proofs always trump theory. That’s engineering.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I can’t really argue with that.”

  He patted me on the head. “It’s okay, dude. From the day I met you, I’ve known that you are a glass-half-empty-and-maybe-poisonous guy. The Playa will beat that out of you.”

  “I’ll help,” Blight said, and pinched my nipple. I’d forgotten about her pinches. I found that I’d missed them.

  “I hate you both,” I said. Pug patted me on the head again and Blight kissed me on the cheek.

  “Let me finish unpacking and I’ll come back and help you with your Playa-Tetris, okay?”

  Looking back on it now, I think the biggest surprise was just how hard it was to figure out how to get the structure just right. If you fitted a tile the wrong way in row three, it wasn’t immediately apparent until row five or six, and you’d have to take them all down and start over again. Pug said it reminded him of knitting, something he’d tried for a couple years.

  “It’s just that it’s your first time,” Blight said, as she clicked a tile into place. “The first time you put together a wall of Lego you screwed it up, too. You’ve been living with this idea for so long, you forgot that you’ve never actually dealt with its reality.”

  We clicked and unclicked, and a pile of broken tiles grew to one side of the site. As we got near the end, it became clear that this was going to be a close thing—what had started as a surplus of tiles had been turned into a near shortage thanks to our breaking. Some of that had been our fault—the tiles wanted to be finessed into place, not forced, and it was hard to keep a gentle approach as the day lengthened and the frustration mounted—but some was pure material defect, places where too many impurities had ganged up along a single seam, waiting to fracture at the slightest pressure, creating a razor-sharp, honeycombed gypsum blade that always seemed to find exposed wrists above the glove line. A few times, chips splintered off and flew into my face. The goggles deflected most of these, but one drew blood from the precise tip of my nose.

  In the end, we were three—three!—tiles short of finishing; two from mine, one from Pug’s. The sun had set, and we’d been working by headlamp and the van’s headlights. The gaps stared at us.

  “Well, shit,” Pug said, with feeling.

  I picked through our pile of postmodern potsherds, looking for any salvageable pieces. There weren’t. I knew there weren’t, but I looked anyway. I’d become a sort of puzzle-assembling machine and I couldn’t stop now that I was so close to the end. It was the punch line to a terrible joke.

  “What are you two so freaked out about?” Blight said. “Just throw a tarp over it.”

  We both looked at each other. “Blight—” Pug began, then stopped.

  “We don’t want to cover these with tarps,” I said. “We want to show them off! We want everyone to see our totally awesome project! We want them to see how we made bricks out of dust and sunshine!”

  “Um, yeah,” Blight said. “I get that. But you can use the tarps for tonight, and print out your missing pieces tomorrow, right?”

  We both stared at each other, dumbfounded.

  “Uh,” I said.

  Pug facepalmed, hard enough that I heard his glove smacking into his nose. When he took his hand away, his goggles were askew, half pushed up his forehead.

  “I’ll get the tarps,” I said.

  THEY CAME. FIRST IN trickles, then in droves. Word got around the Playa: these guys have 3D printed their own yurt. Or igloo.

  Many just cruised by, felt the smooth finish of the structures, explored the tight seams with their fingernails, picked up a shard of cracked tile to take away as a souvenir. They danced with the Gadget as it blew back and forth across its little tethered paddock, and if they were lucky enough to see it dropping a finished tile to the desert, they picked it up and marveled at it.

  It wasn’t an unequivocal success, though. One old-timer came by, a wizened and wrinkled burner with a wild beard and a tan the color of old leather—he was perfectly naked and so unself-conscious about it that I ceased to notice it about eight seconds into our conversation—and said, “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Well, I was just wondering how you turn these bricks of yours back into dust when you’re done with them?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Leave no trace,” he said. His eyes glittered behind his goggles. “Leave no trace” was rule number eight of the ten hallowed inviolable holy rules of Burning Man. I suppose I must have read them at some point, but mostly I came into contact with them by means of Burnier-Than-Thou dialogues with old-timers—or anxious, status-conscious noobs—who wanted to point out all the ways in which my Burn was the wrong sort of Burn.

  “Not following you,” I said, though I could see where this was going.

  “What are you going to do with all this stuff when you’re done with it? How are you going to turn your ceramics back into dust?”

  “I don’t think we can,” I said.

  “Ah,” he said, with the air of someone who was winning the argument. “Didn’t think so. You going to leave this here?”

  “No,” I said. “We’ll take it down and truck it out. Leave no trace, right?”

  “But you’re taking away some of the desert with you. Do that enough, where will we be?”

  Yep. Just about where I figured this was going. “How much playa dust do you take home in your”—I was about to say clothes—“car?�
��

  “Not one bit more than I can help bringing. It’s not our desert to take away with us. You’ve got sixty thousand people here. They start doing what you’re doing, next thing you know, the whole place starts to vanish.”

  I opened my mouth. Shut it. Opened it again.

  “Have you got any idea of the overall volume of gypsum dust in the Black Rock Desert? I mean, relative to the amount of dust that goes into one of these?” I patted the side of the structure—we’d started calling them yurtgloos.

  “I knew you’d say that,” he said, eyes glittering and beard swinging. “They said that about the ocean. Now we’ve got the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. They said it about space, and now Low Earth Orbit is one stray screwdriver handle away from a cascade that wipes out every communications satellite and turns the Lagrange points into free-fire zones. Anywhere you go in history, there’s someone dumping something or taking something away and claiming that the demand’ll never outstrip the supply. That’s probably what the first goat-herder said when he turned his flock out on the Sahara plains. ‘No way these critters could ever eat this huge plot down to nothing.’ Now it’s the Sahara!”

  I had to admit he had a point.

  “Look,” I said. “This is the first time anyone’s tried this. Burners have been changing the desert for years. They excavate tons of the surface every year to get rid of the Burn platform and the scars from the big fires. Maybe we’ll have to cap how many robots run every year, but you know, it’s kind of a renewable resource. Dust blows in all the time, over the hills and down the road. It goes down for yards and yards. They mined around here for a century and didn’t make a dent in it. The only thing that doesn’t change the world is a corpse. People who are alive change the planet. That’s part of the deal. How about if we try this thing for a while and see whether it’s a problem, instead of declaring it a disaster before it’s gotten started?”

  He gave me a withering look. “Oh yeah, I’ve heard that one before. ‘Give it time, see how it goes!’ That’s what they said in Fukushima. That’s what they said when they green-lit thalidomide. That’s what they said at Kristallnacht.”

  “I don’t think they said that about Kristallnacht,” I said, and turned on my heel. Decades on the Internet had taught me that Godwin’s law was ironclad: as soon as the comparisons to Nazis or Hitler came out, the discussion was over. He shouted something at my back, but I couldn’t hear it over the wub-wub of an art car that turned the corner at that moment, a huge party bus/pirate ship with three decks of throbbing dancers and a PA system that could shatter glass.

  But that conversation stayed with me. He was a pushy, self-righteous prig, but that didn’t mean he was wrong. Necessarily.

  IF YOU’RE A BURNER, you know what happened next. We kickstarted an entire flock of Gadgets by Christmas; built them through the spring, and trucked them out in a pair of sixteen-wheelers for the next Fourth, along with a crew of wranglers who’d helped us build them. It was the biggest Fourth of Juplaya ever and there were plenty of old-timers who still say we ruined it. It’s true that there was a lot less shooting and a lot more lens-polishing that year.

  The best part was the variation. Our three basic tiles could be combined to make an infinite variety of yurtgloos, but to be honest, you’d be hard-pressed to tell one from another. On our wiki, a group of topology geeks went bananas designing a whole range of shapes that interlocked within our three, making it possible to build crazy stuff—turrets, staircases, trusses. Someone showed how the polyominoes could be interlocked to make a playground slide and sure enough, come the summer, there was a huge one, with a ladder and a scaffolding of support, and damned if it wasn’t an amazing ride, once it was ground down to a slippery sheen with a disc-polisher.

  The next year, there were whole swaths of Black Rock City that were built out of dust-bricks, as they were called by that time. The backlash was predictable, but it still smarted. We were called unimaginative suburbanites in tract-house gated communities, an environmental catastrophe—that old naked guy turned out to be a prophet as well as a crank—and a blight on the landscape.

  Blight especially loved this last. She brought Maya, her daughter, to the Playa that year, and the two of them built the most amazing, most ambitious yurtgloo you’d ever seen, a three-story, curvy, bulbous thing whose surfaces were finely etched with poems and doodles that she’d fed to the paramaterizer in the 3D-modeling software onboard her Gadgets. The edges of the glyphs were so sharp at first that you could literally cut yourself on them, and before the wind and dust wore them down, they cast amazing shadows down into the gullies of the carve-outs when the sun was rising and setting, turning the wall into a madman’s diary of scribbles and words.

  Maya was indifferent to the haters. She was fifteen and was a trouble-seeking missile with a gift for putting creepers in their place that I was in absolute awe of. I watched her fend off the advances of fratty jocks, weird old dudes like me, and saucer-eyed spacemen dancing to the distant, omnipresent thunder of EDM.

  “You raised her right, huh?” I said to Blight.

  Blight shrugged. “Look, it sucks to be a fifteen-year-old girl. All that attention, it just gets in the way of figuring out who you are. I’m glad she’s good at this, but I wish she didn’t have to do it. I wish she could just have a Burn like the rest of us.”

  I put my arm around her shoulders. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, that sucks.”

  “It does. Plus, I don’t want to get high because I feel like I’ve got to keep an eye on her all the time and—” She threw her hands up in the air and looked angrily at the white-hot sky.

  “You’re feeling guilty for bringing her, aren’t you?”

  “No, Dr. Freud. I’m feeling guilty for regretting that I brought her.”

  “Are you sure you’re not feeling guilty for regretting that you feel guilty that you brought her?”

  She pinched me. “Be serious.”

  I wiped the smile off my face. “Blight, I love you.” I’d said it the first time on a visit to her place just after the last Burn, and she’d been literally speechless for a good ten minutes. Ever since, it had become my go-to trick for winning arguments.

  She pinched me hard in the arm. I rubbed the sore spot—every time I came back from a visit to see her, I had bruises the size of grapefruits and the color of the last moment of sunset on both shoulders.

  Maya ran past, pulling a giant stunt kite behind her. She’d spent the whole Burn teaching herself new tricks with it and she could do stuff with it that I never would have believed. We cheered her on as she got it into the sky.

  “She’s an amazing kid,” I said. “Makes me wish I’d had one. I would have, if I’d known she’d turn out like that.”

  Maya’s dad was a city manager for a small town in Arizona that was entirely dependent on imported water. He came out twice a year for visits and Maya spent three weeks every summer and alternate Christmases and Easters with him, always returning with a litany of complaints about the sheer tedium of golf courses and edge-city megamalls. I’d never met him but he sounded like a good guy, if a little on the boring side.

  “Never too late,” Blight said. “Go find yourself some nubile twenty-five-year-old and get her gravid with your child.”

  “What would I want with one of those flashy new models? I’ve got an American classic here.” I gave her another squeeze, and she gave me another pinch.

  “Nothing smoother than an automotive comparison, fella.”

  “It was meant as a compliment.”

  “I know,” she said. “Fine. Well, then, you could always come down and spend some time when Maya is around, instead of planning your visits around her trips to see her dad. There’s plenty of parenting to go around on that one, and I could use a break from time to time.”

  I suddenly felt very serious. Something about being on the Playa made it seem like anything was possible. I had to literally bite my tongue to stop myself from proposing marriage. Instead, I said, “That
sounds like a very good plan. I shall take you up on it, I think.”

  She drew her fingers back to pinch me, but instead, she dragged me to her and gave me a long, wet, deep kiss.

  “Ew,” shouted Maya as she buzzed us, now riding a lowrider playa bike covered in fun fur and duct tape. She circled us twice, throwing up a fantail of dust, then screeched to a hockey stop that buried our feet in a small dune that rode ahead of her front wheel like a bow wave.

  “You’ve gone native, kiddo,” I said.

  She gave me a hilarious little-girl look and said, “Are you my new daddy? Mommy says you’re her favorite of all my uncles, and there’s so many of them.”

  Blight pounced on her and bore her to the ground, where they rolled like a pair of fighting kittens, all tickles and squeals and outflung legs and arms. It ended with Maya pinned under Blight’s forearms and knees.

  “I brought you into this world,” she said, panting. “I can take you out of it, too.”

  Maya closed her eyes and then opened them again, wide as saucers. “I’m sorry, Mom,” she said. “I guess I took it too far. I love you, Mom.”

  Blight relaxed a single millibar and Maya squirmed with the loose-jointed fluidity of wasted youth and bounced to her toes, leaped on her bike and shouted, “Suck-errrrr!,” as she pedaled away a good ten yards, then did a BMX-style front-wheel stand and spun back around to face us. “Bye-ee!”

  “Be back for dinner!” Blight shouted.

  “ ’Kay, Mom!”