068: Grandmother’s Future

July 28, 2010 – 12:22 pm

Looking back, he attempted to resolve a two thousand year old grandmother whose heal he’d seen rise and disappear over a cracked and wormeaten threshold.

Maybe she’d held a bird in her hand. Maybe she’d called and the sons and daughters had dashed off and out of ear shot to frighten her or make her believe even more in ghosts. Maybe there had been weeds erected like wires in the porch cracks. Had she approached down that hallway he remembered whose far, sunlit portal had seemed so remote and blurry. What is the distance between one thousand years and yesterday?

Dragons, she’d answered.

Everyone has experience high winds, everyone has a sense of death when wriggling in the claws of a giant bird who’s swooped in to snatch at the screaming village children, everyone has suspected poison in the pools that appear after the clouds have broken against the mountains, and everyone has waited for that thing to appear out of the woods just moments after the leaves have rustled. Everyone will fall in love.

Expressions for which his father had his own answer. Brief, reasoned, accompanied by charts. His grandmother had refused to weep. Instead, she had taken and burned his papers in the fireplace. She turned to his crazed smile and said, That’s how I make ash.

You don’t see a bird in your hand, he said. What you have is dry rook wings in a jar, a waymark at the edge of the world, or the echoes of love, which reminds me of night. When you imagine it in Russian, it’s yellow; in Spanish, it’s red; and if you happen to speak Mongolian it will become yakbrown and it’ll scuttle off like a victim of poorly planned transplants. You know the ones, the ones with an arm where their ear should be.

Such was the father’s calculation. But he had his own calculation. If you were a monument, you’d attract a thousand violations, not too few bird splats.

God, his father said, the irony of what you say.

When the mule fell in love and forgot his work, she herself hoisted the yoke and sounded the ground for heartbeat, sowed next and next year’s suppers, dreamed the graves of her children (the knowing know why). When the frogs erupted in the shadows, she watched the sun enlarge like a bloody eye, and was that a purple star smashing against an orange to make what my son calls gas?

He cut his hand making a sandwich. Yes, he heard, she made her own bread, but god how it tasted like wood, god how it churned up the plague in our guts. How had it come to him in these foreshortened years, tinkling chips onto the plate, that the birds were smaller and not a dragon had been seen in these climes for centuries? Out of that blurry distance, he saw her emerge, that two thousand year old, smiling grandmother, young and lovely, and this her future.

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067: The Carnivorous Pigeons

July 27, 2010 – 8:36 am

Henry told the story with a rush of arms and fingers under an animated and electric sky, soon to drop water on us. Later we’d hear about trees falling, crushings in the streets, but that’s only sidebar.

“I found him in a diner, where she said he would be,” Henry informed us. “I went in and hid my face with a paper. I drank some coffee and watched him. He also had coffee, and as she’d said, he raised the cup with just two fingers. He watched out the window, as if knowing he was being followed.

“But then something amazing happened. When he stood to leave he appeared of smaller proportion than when I first encountered him. It was a phenomenon I’d never experienced.”

“What do you mean he was of smaller proportion?” Lucy asked.

“Simple,” Henry said. “At the table he was a man somewhat more than six feet five, as she’d described him, a massive and imposing man. She said: look for a man about six foot five. He’ll have a narrow beard, eyes like a squirrel’s, and very large hands, so large he’ll use only two fingers for a coffee cup. But, as I said, when he stood up, he had became a man of about 5 foot seven or so. He took a last sip of his coffee and now he held the cup in his palm.”

“That’s pretty amazing,” Lucy said. She looked at me. I shrugged.

Henry went on. “Following procedure, I departed the diner before he did. I waited outside. I smoked a cigarette to avoid suspicion. He went down 3rd and I followed him keeping some yards back. He turned down 6th and when I turned down 6th I saw a man who had shrunk to the size of a child. But it was him. Oh, yes, him, little more than three feet high with his beard and his rain coat. These items had reduced in size also, which I found doubly amazing.”

“Which I find unbelievable,” Lucy said.

“As did I, believe me, but there he was, child-sized, skipping down 6th, growing smaller still like a man becoming more distant as you watch him on a lin toward the horizon. Little more than the size of turkey, he turned the corner of 24th. I had to hurry. As you can guess, I was growing distressed as the target was outsmarting me and might even have escaped. I hurried. I whipped around the corner on Wall street, which is narrow and these days really used only by taxis. I whipped around the corner.”

It was at this point that Henry slowed down and took a sip of tea. Lucy and I watched him. He drank slowly. Maybe he was listening for thunder.

“Well?” Lucy said, “What happened?”

Henry said, “It was amazing. I found a small set of clothes on the sidewalk, crumpled, wrinkled in place as though simply stepped out of or as they would look if a human body immediately shrunk to nothing within the folds. But what was even more amazing was the pigeons, Lucy, all the pigeons.”

Lucy said, “Pigeons?”

“Yes, pigeons,” Henry said. “When I turned the corner, I saw the clothes, the only remaining evidence of his existence on the earth, and, yes, numerous pigeons, which I found pecking at his linens and the flaxen remainder of a beard.”

“Pigeons as in bird pigeons?” Lucy said.

Henry said, “As feathery as they come, yes. I learned later that this affliction is more common than you’d guess, that about thirty percent of our population is slowly being eaten to nothing by carnivorous pigeons.”

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066: A Collection of Hatreds

July 26, 2010 – 8:50 am

Ortiz’s party was successful only as art. Friends had flown in from Chicago, Amsterdam, Buenos Aires. He knew it had all been about orientation.

A tall man, bald, with a gray right eye and the words en unión y libertad tattooed on his wrist, stood with a glass of white wine in the kitchen and said, “I’m going to cut you. A poem on a black steel surface.”

Ortiz smiled with embarrassment and went into the living room with a tray. He felt like something cold, something that lives in caves, deep under and cold, sightless.

They preferred the couches and the television. He’d forgotten about the strife between the states. His girl friend had to yet to arrive. Who’d know what to do.

When Morrell saw Giselle with a large orange shrimp in her fingers, he sat at the farthest left, and Giselle offered Ortiz a look the Saracens must have observed on yore battle fields.

“Lines, it will be lines. I use surgeons’ instruments, acids for dissolving through the hard surface–parallel, perpendicular, and a caretaker’s circles,” the bald man said. With his wine and his cheese and his height and that strange gray eye.

Ortiz felt like someone had taken a razor to the skin between his fingers. He’d arranged the rooms of his loft from memory. White paint for Glen the Celt, black leather for Morrell. He didn’t ask who’d brought the bald man.

Morrell at the far left, Joseph beside him, Mary nearby, Glen’s whereabouts at the moment unknown. One of them had tuned the television onto a distortion that appeared on and off the frame and with very little volume. He’d prepared the display table with his new designs watched over by Mary’s photographs, carefully arranged and summarily ignored. He’d considered orientation but had forgotten the histories. Morrell’s disparagement, Giselle’s syntactical emphases on the phone.

In the darkened hallway he remembered what she’d said: “I never want to see him again.” And then there was Joseph who would never forget the sound of his grandmother’s agony before the gas, an agony expressed at dinner tables by a father who coughed blood into the toilet, so said Joseph.

An erected puzzle lamp cast concentric dot arcs on the wall, and while he picked up empty cups, Ortiz marked the bald man’s head that interrupted the pattern and reformed it into a peaceful halo. The bald man said, ” . . . turn you into plates, lines, a euclidean experiment. Acids, silver edges. The broken skin of metal.”

A voice echoed. Glen’s voice saying, “If Joseph is from Chicago, then Chicago can bake to death in the heat.” But Ortiz couldn’t remember why these words approached him now. Law suits or divorce or ancient war? Yes, did that explain the slam of the front door moments ago?

Surreptitiously, he arranged the spent cups in the sink. His girl friend had yet to come. Who’d know what to do, what to say. The quiet behind him was like a room full of amputees. He heard footsteps approach. A familiar voice said, “Acids, lines . . . ”

“Very well then,” Ortiz said, “call it A Collection of Hatreds and be done with it.”

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065: The Many Daves Reality

July 25, 2010 – 9:55 am

Yes, I persist with Ruiz and Erasmus, who are time travelers, but more on that later.

In fiction, they could be time travelers. They could be cross dressers; they could be anything the story requires. Indeed, we could muck up the method of telling the story, which brings in the notion of narrative, with all sorts of wizzy ideas, such as temporal exploitation.

Ruiz imagines a man named Dave. A filmmaker will make a film of Dave reading a book. This will involve closeups and the film will end with an image of the book Dave is reading. But what Ruiz imagines is a multiple of Daves. If one watches the film closely, one will notice that after a few seconds of capture that the Dave in the film becomes another Dave, though it will be difficult to detect. The viewer will think that the Dave reading a book after five seconds is the Dave that started at one second. But it’s not the same Dave, but another Dave. The first Dave, let’s call him 5 Second Dave, is replaced by 10 Second Dave. 5 Second Dave is really a Dave from 200 years into the future. Through some time distorting apparatus of the future, he returns to a time twenty years prior to the film and places a camera in the future filmmaker’s field of view, thus prompting the filmmaker to think to himself, “I want to be a filmmaker.”

The viewer will think that 5 and 10 Second Daves are one Dave and that the Dave at 23 Seconds in indeed Dave, also. But this is not the case, Ruiz continues. No, the camera goes for a closeup but the man behind the book is not a Dave but a stand-in for Dave, because 23 Second Dave has two objectives: he must move through time and somehow cause 5 Second Dave to decide to move into the past and provoke the eventual timeline presented in the first part of the film and thus eventuate the arrival of 10 Second Dave who will appear to a man 400 years in the future and pay him to take his place before the camera as he must move ahead a thousand years and prevent the destruction of a bridge in China, which depends upon a button being pushed by the great great great great et cetera grandson of 5 Second Dave, who can only appear on the scene depending on the actions of who we might term 23 Second Filmmaker, who’s reaching down at some moment in time for his lover trapped on a ledge below him. He lowers the camera strap; the lover reaches; they will make love soon and produce important freedom fighter offspring in the future.

He says, “Grab it. It’s almost time for 10 Second Dave to move into the future and I must capture his stand in. The audience must not know that Dave is not behind that book. If I don’t make it there just at the right moment, the faith of the audience will be shaken and I think that that bridge will crash killing the future freedom fighter’s mother.”

Ruiz thought this might work pretty well. Now he’s imagining the audience. The audience by watching the film will never know what’s happening in reality as the film is a mask, a fiction; they will see Dave reading a book and never guess how busy he actually is.

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064: Suggestions of the Human

July 24, 2010 – 9:19 am

While the cat and dog picked through fallen leaves, Ruiz and Erasmus drank coffee at a cafe’ by the sea. Erasmus told Ruiz about his sister, who was a filmmaker, and a film she’d begun that suggested the space of human drama.

He had snap shots, old photographs that he placed on the table one by one, as players do with cards. The first photograph rendered a closed door, the frame lit dimly from behind. The next, a kitchen sink, a candle darkly illuminating, ten a snuffed candle that artfully captured the smoke from the wick by something vaguely floral in the background. In yet another photograph, dark liquid filled the bottom of the sink.

“Is that the same sink?” Ruiz asked.

“Yes,” Erasmus said. He continued to lay down the photos. In another photograph, Ruiz saw a bathroom sink followed by what might have been the same sink but with the taps flowing. In another he saw what he took for a circular sculpture in which a ball traversed a concentric, inner orbiting channel. In the final photograph, a candle flame appeared flattened, which indicated some disruption, the air of a fan perhaps or some passage that hurried the air across the surface of the flame. He thought, Perhaps a ghost, and dismissed the thought.

Erasmus said, “My sister’s objective was to take these images and produce a film that bore evidence of intense human contact in a lived environment. Furthermore, the objective was to mask the human so that the audience would never see man, woman, or child, but the images had to be edited in such a way to suggest an ordered set of events, and finally, leave the audience with a sense of foreboding, that at a final climactic capture, some momentous event or action had taken place.”

Ruiz said, “In other words, from this arbitrary collection of images, your sister had to produce a vivid climax through indirect means. The film, therefore, is the evidence of indirect human activity without ever capturing the human form or those actual events that caused them.”

“Exactly: no dialogue, no direct human presence. Yet, dialogue, human shape, and, best of all, human drama in context would all be suggested by the manipulation and arrangement of these very forms.”

“I must see this film,” Ruiz said. “You must show it to me.”

“Impossible,” Erasmus said. “My sister never completed the film.”

“Tell me,” Ruiz insisted. “Why was the film never finished?”

“Because she disappeared before she could finish it. Taken away. It was ten years ago. They entered her house; all evidence pointed to several bastards. They entered her place quietly and just as quietly departed with her.”

“It’s insidious,” Ruiz said, shaken by this news and the horrible memories it brought back to him.

“You remember those days, the days when all the artists that could be found were taken. My sister: yes, she had cats, she collected rare plants and displayed the work of her artist friends, especially those who worked with stained glass. She loved to cook; she kept her place clean; she was a teacher of children; she used to laugh at my naive predictions of a future of peace.”

Ruiz tried to imagine Erasmus’s sister’s final moments, the theoretical film, the spaces she once filled with candle light and laughter. He watched the cat and the dog play in the leaves. He listened to the sound of water on rocks below.

“Then you must make the film,” Ruiz said. “I can assist.”

But Erasmus had his eyes closed. He seemed to uttering words to himself, sad poems he knew by heart. Ruiz watched him and took a sip of his coffee.

Or with subtle changes near the end:

While the cat and dog picked through fallen leaves, Ruiz and Erasmus drank coffee at a cafe’ by the sea. Erasmus told Ruiz about his sister, who was a filmmaker, and a film she’d begun that suggested the space of human drama.

He had snap shots, old photographs that he placed on the table one by one, as players do with cards. The first photograph rendered a closed door, the frame lit dimly from behind. The next, a kitchen sink, a candle darkly illuminating, ten a snuffed candle that artfully captured the smoke from the wick by something vaguely floral in the background. In yet another photograph, dark liquid filled the bottom of the sink.

“Is that the same sink?” Ruiz asked.

“Yes,” Erasmus said. He continued to lay down the photos. In another photograph, Ruiz saw a bathroom sink followed by what might have been the same sink but with the taps flowing. In another he saw what he took for a circular sculpture in which a ball traversed a concentric, inner orbiting channel. In the final photograph, a candle flame appeared flattened, which indicated some disruption, the air of a fan perhaps or some passage that hurried the air across the surface of the flame. He thought, Perhaps a ghost, and dismissed the thought.

Erasmus said, “My sister’s objective was to take these images and produce a film that bore evidence of intense human contact in a lived environment. Furthermore, the objective was to mask the human so that the audience would never see man, woman, or child, but the images had to be edited in such a way to suggest an ordered set of events, and finally, leave the audience with a sense of foreboding, that at a final climactic capture, some momentous event or action had taken place.”

Ruiz said, “In other words, from this arbitrary collection of images, your sister had to produce a vivid climax through indirect means. The film, therefore, is the evidence of indirect human activity without ever capturing the human form or those actual events that caused them.”

“Exactly: no dialogue, no direct human presence. Yet, dialogue, human shape, and, best of all, human drama in context would all be suggested by the manipulation and arrangement of these very forms.”

“I must see this film,” Ruiz said. “You must show it to me.”

“Impossible,” Erasmus said. “My sister never completed the film.”

“Tell me,” Ruiz insisted. “Why was the film never finished?”

“Because she disappeared before she could finish it. We don’t know what happened, why she left suddenly, or even if she’d been taken. They might have entered her place quietly and just as quietly departed with her. Or, for some mysterious reason, she decided to merely disappear.”

“It’s a strange story,” Ruiz said, shaken by this news and the horrible memories it brought back to him.

“You remember those days, the days when all the artists that could be found were taken. My sister: yes, she had cats, she collected rare plants and displayed the work of her artist friends, especially those who worked with stained glass. She loved to cook; she kept her place clean; she was a teacher of children; she used to laugh at my naive predictions of a future of peace.”

Ruiz tried to imagine Erasmus’s sister’s final moments, the theoretical film, the spaces she once filled with candle light and laughter. He watched the cat and the dog play in the leaves. He listened to the sound of water on rocks below.

“Then you must make the film,” Ruiz said. “I can assist.”

But Erasmus had his eyes closed. He seemed to uttering words to himself, sad poems he knew by heart. Ruiz watched him and took a sip of his coffee.

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063: Human Time

July 23, 2010 – 11:28 am

Is space a number of protrusions, elements of perception that appear then disappear when we pass them? I started a book a few years back on the notion of memory and space, until a dog and a cat entered the villa and threw everyone’s timing off.

People in the villa lived according to what might be termed human time. We’re used to spatial realities expressed as measurements of human-oriented duration. So, when the cat and the dog appeared everything changed. Ruiz, for example, had to wake up earlier than he was used to to see to the dog’s needs. And for Erasmus, things were no better. The cat would eat everything in its bowl, thus requiring Erasmus to fill it. This action took about thirty seconds and so at the end of the day when Erasmus counted up his human seconds, he found himself thirty seconds short, which he blamed on the cat.

As for the dog, Ruiz, who found that he could understand their language with minimal effort, tied a rope to the dog’s neck and took the animal for a walk in the morning and in the evening. Ruiz learned that the dog was telling him that he needed a walk when he found the morning paper had been turned into seaweed and he found shreds of it in the dining room and kitchen. But, the day after the first two walks, the paper turned up in the kitchen whole, smelling of ink and paper and not like brine or dead fish. This activity, however, took up to an hour: thirty minutes in the morning and thirty minutes in the evening.

But Ruiz found advantages. On the second morning dog walk, he discovered a breakfast spot that looked over the rocks and the sea. He was served at the table by a woman named Alba. She brought Ruiz eggs. One one side the plate she put the eggs. On the other side of the plate she put a watery hot sauce. She even brought a plate of egg whites for the dog, who ate the egg whites, licked the plate, and then watched the morning waves crash against the black rocks below the cafe.

Ruiz asked Alba, “I didn’t ask for hot sauce: but I love hot sauce on my eggs: how did you know?”

Alba said, “Men who walk dogs early in the morning like hot sauce with their eggs. Everyone knows this.”

On the way home, Ruiz encountered bushes he’d never seen before. He even wondered what they were called, especially the ones floated over by great red butterflies. The dog walked quietly beside him. The dog often turned its head to collect the movement of birds into his memory. The colors of several of the villa houses were a more vivid blue and white in the rising sun. Orange and purple flowers spilled out of window baskets. Ruiz breathed in an intense smell of water, water from hoses and cans. From somewhere he heard bells he’d never heard before because he’d typically sleep later into the morning.

At home, he untied the dog. The dog went to a corner and curled himself up, becoming taciturn shade under a cold lamp. Ruiz went into the kitchen and looked out a window and across the way he saw Erasmus seated at a table outside his own kitchen. He had coffee. He had the paper folded onto the table top. A cat was stretched across the paper. Erasmus was stroking the cat and seemed engrossed by the animal’s ears.

Ruiz thought about how everything had changed; how everything had slowed a bit, moving one slot out the typical motions of things. He felt the urge to call out to Erasmus, to ask him about that cat, but he didn’t know how loud he should make his voice. The volume of his voice might be too high or too low for tenor and feel of the morning. So he left Erasmus to his cat, dressed for work, made for the illuminated tunnel into the city, and envisioned mornings to come and the taste of eggs and hot sauce. Maybe tomorrow he would ask for toast.

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062: What Happened After Ruiz Repaired the Stem

July 22, 2010 – 10:47 am

“Exactly,” Ruiz said.

“You mean, how we won’t know how we got to the edge of this roof, as how we got here has yet to be told.”

“Yes, and how now everything is flowing as it is not meant to flow.”

“You mean the incident with the leaf and how your day will begin with the reapplication of the leaf on the stem (of course, after you tore it off or remember tearing it of) and how everything after that is really an occurrence that happened prior?”

“Exactly,” said Ruiz. “Which is why our experiment is troubling me, as I experienced a small break, a crazy inversion that I have yet to disentangle.”

“Or 2016,” said Erasmus. “A cannot sue 1910. He doesn’t even know that there was a farmer. He has no idea that B will even be bitten. If he did know this, then the spacetime theory would come into doubt.”

“Or 2016,” said Ruiz.

“That’s obvious,” Erasmus said, a chirping and twitting downdraft of sparrows curving off of a higher ledge above them. “Because the bite is years in the future. It could be that years before the bite, the dog was in a sense prefigured by a lucky set of events, such that if we had a machine that could read both the past and the future, the dog bite could have been examined separate from A, his wife, and B altogether. Here’s what I mean. In 1910, a farmer raises Shepherds. One of those pups demonstrates a habit of biting hands. Indeed, we can imagine that pup biting the hand of a boy on the farm and that this pup will grow up, have puppies, and those puppies will grow up, and eventually, in the distant future, one of the later puppies, who carries the hand- biting gene, bites B on the hand. But this kind of logic or causal chaining is heavy with guesswork. We know for a fact that B couldn’t have been bitten prior to 1910 as he was bitten in the year 2017.”

Ruiz said, “You miss the point. The point is that the bite did not cause the attraction between A and his wife. Nor did it cause the rain on that night, the rain that pattered on the rear wind shield that A’s future wife would watch as the love was being made. Which is the mystery. We ask, why didn’t the dog bite cause the intimacy?”

“A beer like this is always good on a hot afternoon after work,” Erasmus says. “The flaw in your example is that you left out the actual cause of the bite. Did B provoke the animal, as children sometimes do?”

“A better example,” Ruiz said, “would be cause and effect. Prior to B’s birth, A met his wife and they had sex and B was born. C becomes a fever or the dog that bites B on the wrist. The bite on B’s wrist can’t happen before A and his wife are intimate even though in a film or another form of narrative, the audience might experience the bite as analepsis, artfully rendered as a growl, a snap, and then a scream, and the audience wonders what’s just happened, and then the scene shifts to a scene in the back of a mid-sized sedan at Lover’s Lane.”

Ruiz is dangling his feet over the street below the roof of his apartment building. Erasmus is sitting beside him. Below, not far below but far enough, the wind is moving through the tree leaves. They both have beer bottles in their hands.

“That’s just a process of reordering,” Ruiz said. His ankles are fine. At work, he sits most of the day. He watches how Richard and Henry follow each other in the correct order at the coffee machine. “For example, A might be the father. B is his son. C may be the cycle rider they saw standing on his seat as the rider rode past them on the street. While neither A nor B are specific events, certainly an order of time and space may be inferred from their existence and that C, the passing cycle rider in this scenario, is dependent upon the collaboration of space and time.”

“Nonsense,” said his friend, Erasmus, who’s just got off work and whose ankles are killing him because at work he must stand for hours on end. “Just put C before A, like so.”

Ruiz, however, is wondering about leaves. He’s wondering about fingers. He’s wondering in what cases can we reconsider time as intrinsic to space. He’s not happy with the way things have turned out. He’s thinking: “If A comes before B then C must follow A and there’s just no way of avoiding this basic narrative fact.”

Time and space are intrinsically linked; in other terms, they are a continuum. This discovery, which formed a basis for Einstein’s special relativity, is not so obvious. Space time or the space time manifold was not a new idea for Einstein. Luckily Einstein had Minkowski to provide mathematical assistance. Luckily, Philo of Alexandria was on the case, too, surmising that if the deity created space then time couldn’t be neglected. Then there’s Lorentz, Maxwell, and Lagrange. Then there’s Ruiz and Erasmus.

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061: withdrawals

July 21, 2010 – 2:12 pm

Can spaces overlap? This is somewhat of a break from a growing logical ploy on my part. But consider the question anyway.

One of the reasons I enjoy thinking about space is that space is, in a word, everywhere. We can go from the designed to the natural space, the small to the large space, the interior to the external space.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “But still.”

I say “but still” nothing.

There are certainly many sciences that treat space empirically. Physics and chemistry, for example. And there are certainly numerous theories that attempt to describe physical reality and speculate by drawing descriptions of the possibilities of those theories. M-theory, Smolin’s fecund notion, Tegmark, and others. Critique for all this, of course, has to do with whether some of these notions can be tested. Under what conditions might the fecund universe theory be tested as this depends on the phenomenon of black holes and what happens after they collapse.

I’m smart enough to know that fiction is not a means of making valid, empirical predictions about the physical nature of space, but fiction has proved a wonderful method of dramatizing based on speculation and prediction about said space. The representations of space in fiction might indeed be accurate metaphors of sound knowledge or sound predictive insight.

I find it fascinating, for example, to consider the notion that the objects, events, and phenomenon of other universes might poke their way into our own. What would be the possibilities? What if that person you’re talking to on the phone is really a being from another universe and it just so happens that you have the same name and appearance as the person she knows in that other universe and that the timeline she’s on runs near parallel with your own and ever so often this person leaks or pokes into your universe. The reason that this is not problematic is that you so closely resemble her friend that the difference escapes her. Thus, when you’re at lunch with Betty or Jean and you say, “Lucy has always been just a tad bit off” you are actually making a scientific observation.

In another case, you drive by a phone booth. Maybe you’ve entered the phone and made a call. But this phone booth is often a phone of another universe, and this is why when you try to phone Lucy, sometimes you get the incorrect number. Most of the time, however, this phone booth is “of your world” and works as ordered.

Another way of expressing this is to consider a room in an anonymous house. You’ve never seen this room but can imagine it. It’s a bathroom with a shower. The room is dark and clean. The people who live in this house are at work and don’t know what goes on at their place when they’re out. It’s fun to imagine what might go on there, what might be happening beyond the typical: it’s being robbed or a wire is sparking behind a wall or from beneath the refrigerator, a mouse emerges–these would be too typical. In this case, and often, a man appears in the bathroom accompanied by the enormous forces of multiuniverse connectivity. These enormous forces take the form of heat energy, distortions of spacetime, and strange acoustic disruptions, which may or may not be dangerous in proximity. One moment the room is quiet (or we suppose such, as we really don’t know what goes on in a room when no observer can act as witness). The next moment, a man from another universe suddenly appears in the shower, glimpsed momentary and engaged in whatever he’s doing in his own universe at the time: running, dancing, eating, speaking on the phone, or, most likely, installing wall paper. Light bursts in the room and the man appears. He appears to be laying wallpaper. Then, just as abruptly, he withdraws, and the room is quiet once more, still and clean and dark.

The physics of this is beyond us. But we also don’t know whether the man knows he’s appearing in a shower stall. We don’t know whether he will always be transported back to his own universe. We also don’t know the likelihood of the man’s appearance at the same moment that one or more of the inhabitants are taking a shower, but it would be fun to imagine what would happen if space and time worked in favor of such an occurrence.

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060: The Knife

July 20, 2010 – 9:04 am

Do spaces absorb sound? A birthday party would be a case to consider. The partiers gather, parents, children. The wrapping paper’s crumpled. It falls between the arms of the furniture. The pets wander in and out with castoff and twisted ribbon.

There are many quiet thoughts under the reverberations of the real. The room is unaware of what’s happening on the inside. But some rooms have seen the child grow into a man or a child grow into a woman. Some rooms have encased more than twenty years of change. You can seek it out but there are few metaphors on the walls, which may or may not be bare, but nonetheless the room in the morning after the party is still vibrating, reminding people of the day before, those walls decorated with small, white iconic ships, crumpled paper on the floor.

Cars pass on the road outside. Soon, the moon will rise and deer will follow the day-before path into the woods. The children troop in one by one. The parents have gathered and begin singing. The children take extra minutes and dash back to the trampoline after the cake’s been eaten and their parents return to interrupted subjects.

Cars pass on the road outside. Soon, the moon will rise and deer will follow the day-before path into the woods. He remembers a birthday many years ago. He remembers his father taking the empty cake tray to the kitchen. He remembers his mother’s smile as she sliced the first wedge with the chef’s knife and carefully laid it on a plate and went to the next. He remembers the extra minutes, the trampoline, laughter from the house.

He briefly recalls the wall paper, the white ceiling. His own walls are painted yellow and in the morning the windows throw squares up that glow white. The children troop in one by one. The parents have gathered and begin singing. His son is standing by. He’s holding a knife, a silver knife, and he smiles at the memory of the knife as he holds it over the cake.

The parents sing and the children sing. His son is watching as he divides the cake into its intrinsic fractions and slices, forming the first piece, remembering the knife, this long-lived knife, which has appeared out of all these years, the same song, the same knife, the same walls painted yellow.

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059: Time for Bells

July 19, 2010 – 7:49 pm

I often think about how spaces shape human experience. I read a lot about the subject of space (I write “a lot” to lend this writing a colloquial flavor).

Sometimes I consider how digital interface can be extrapolated to inform physical spaces. (Or the other way around.)

The spaces we build are complex. To build them often takes long years of study at the University. But why complex. The have acoustic qualities, for example.

Pedestrians, for example, might carry a cup of coffee to a wide median and sit in a garden and watch the traffic on either side go by (to write “go by” is not a grammatical nicety, but “go by” does have acoustic quality). In this case, the coffee drinkers would have to drink their beverage amidst the noise of automobiles, maybe even trucks and motorcycles. (In this case, I’m avoiding the subjects of smell and watery eyes.)

Th solution, of course, is to install structures that will slow down traffic (speed bumps, for example, or expensive-looking, multi-colored cobble stones) and make passage through this space anomalous, special, or privileged, or something to avoid by drivers or a means to some significant end, such as nearby parking.

“I’m going to park and grab some coffee. I’ll join you,” Henry says.

You, who are drinking coffee in this median garden, this special place, this destination of city dwellers, say, “Okay. Don’t rush.”

The road is divided from the cafe’ garden by a walk about ten paces in width (soon, trees will be planted, which is another way to slow down traffic and ease the noise). So, you had to yell over the rose bushes to Henry; you had to yell past a couple walking their Dalmatians. This is a busy space; it’s a space that’s acoustically sensuous.

But you’ve just come home. (Don’t worry, this is just a time shift: it’s to an hour in the past). And you understand acoustic sensuality. You even like the way acoustic sensuality sounds, so much so you’re looking for an opportunity to deploy the word in conversations at parties. As a music lover, you can block out the other instruments and listen only for the percussion. You’re a skilled listener. You’ve listened to every layer of your favorite music.

You’re also a gifted reader. You disassemble the metaphors of poetry–even the most complex poetry, the more complex the better–quickly–wood=skin; moon=insanity; a fungus cupped in a tree hole=ingratitude or political infiltration.

You understand acoustic subtlety. You close the car door, turn the key, and open the front door. You walk in and run your finger nail across the cold stillness of a bar chime you keep in the foyer and say, “I’m home.” What light there is there; what crystalline octave to the many noted bells and how the sound accumulates in that small space like a mountain of crumbling salt and then diminishes to sparkle and 1 and a two and the minimal measure of the sharpest sharp thing.

Soon you’ll be having coffee with Henry. That entrance was an hour in the past. You’ll soon be at the median cafe’ and you’ll watch the slower traffic over the orange and blue cobbles and the couples walking their dogs, and the hummingbirds, maybe even butterflies, and you and Henry and your closer companion will point and say, “Time for wine, time for beer, time for bells.”

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058: On Parents

July 18, 2010 – 10:39 am

I once saw my parents drive into a wall of sheet rain. I remember my father’s hat, my mother’s wig, I think the dog was watching out the back but I don’t remember growing up with a dog. The rear lights of the car disappeared into the gray thickness, this odd tempest which cut the street in two. I stood in the sunlight, where it was bright, hot and quiet. They disappeared into the rain wall, where it was deep gray, storming violently, and cold enough so that the thick falling water spattered like oil on the hot pavement.

They returned wet and laughing.

I also saw my parents drinking lemonade on the top of a balloon. They waved to me when the ropes let go and they rose high until they disappeared into the clouds.

My brother came up behind me and said, “I think I’ll be fifteen next time we see them.”

My parents threw tremendous parties. Policemen would come with cases of beer. Men would come with shovels and dig two big holes in the field in front of the house. Into one hole they’d put a cow. The other was for a pig the size of a small car. They’d heat stones in bonfires and bury the cow and the pig and cook them under ground. The mariachis would come. Friends would let us aim rifle bullets at distant cans and when the pig and the cow were raised, the meat was distributed on platters the size of the hoods of cars. My little sister ran to one of the tables. She grabbed a handful of napkins. One of the napkins got loose and in the breeze and the cooking smoke it tumbled over the grass like a rabbit until it became a white mouse then a grain of sugar and then an atom. The mariachis played until the sun came up. The silverware bore evidence of nibblemarks.

My parents held hands on walks through the mountains. They said, “Try this” and my mother father would share a forkful of whatever it was and they’d grin at each other and say, “Tomorrow’s the big day” or “Eddy’s in trouble” or “Deep sea diving could squash us but that’s not really murder.”

I remember a hill, more like the tail end of a mountain leading down to a cliff’s or escarpment’s edge, steep and stony, with boulders rising from the grass, localized stands of bare trees whose twisted limbs flung about in the wild air like giants in quick sand waving at their saviors. Looking down this hill, you could see the tops of clouds. There was something threatening about this place, something dangerous. Worse, the stones, the grass, the trees seemed aware of our presence, their awareness taking the form of a desire, a desire to reach up and grab and tear and toss what was left into the raw and distant depths beneath of the cliff’s edge. The lean of objects and the tilt of the environment dragged at my shoulders and ears.

My mother said, “Let’s drive down and see what happens.” My father, of course, had already started for the car, an old Buick not in any way equipped for this place.

I stood frozen. My mother and father took me by the arms. I pulled back, so that my heels dug into the ground.

“Come on,” they said. “We’re going down. It’ll be like the roller coaster just a hell of a lot scarier.”

I remember shouting: “I don’t want to go. I didn’t ask to come here. I did not give my permission.”

My parents loved to laugh and so they laughed and dragged me to the car whose front end was pointed downhill, I think at what must have been a near 30 or 40 degree angle.

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057: On the Philosophy of Mind

July 17, 2010 – 8:56 am

In the West we like to see the human brain in two parts: the physical organ of the brain (which is a part of the body) and its properties such as thought or the things we think about, which is derived from what might be termed the philosophy of mind, examined by Plato in his Phaedo. For Rene Descartes, thinking and writing many years after Plato, the mind was res cogitans and immaterial. But he also figured that the mind interacted with the body in a such a way that mental acts could “cause” physical acts; I believe the opposite formula is also valid. In a word, the mind interacts with the body. Importantly enough, for Descartes, there are 1) physical substances, bridges for example, and 2) mental substances, such as the images of the bridge we imagine in our thoughts. This is the essence of what we call Cartesian dualism.

I would never argue for or against this method of thinking about the human lifeworld or Lebenswelt, although the consequences of such a framework are interesting. Within the philosophies and sciences of the brain we have another interesting framework or metaphor from which, we might argue, the philosophy of mind is simply a piece of the puzzle. I think it’s older than dualism, but I may be wrong. It’s been known for a long time that in the West Reason is considered a master over Emotion because Reason considers the observable facts, whole Emotion is fragile, reactive, and bound to race off into the woods like a rabbit. In Biblical terms, Reason is masculine, Emotion feminine. Adam is Reason; Eve is Emotion. In other terms, Emotion is The Artist, Reason, The Scientist. Reason is Physics, a Hard (a masculine attribute) Science; Psychology is Emotion, a Soft (a feminine attribute) Science. Of course, all of this comes with Qualifiers and may have absolutely nothing to do with actuality.

Another way of looking at the mind is via the metaphor of the left and right brain. Right is the emotion side of the brain (the soft side), left, the logical (the hard side). We see this metaphor played out in fictions: The X Files, Star Trek, The Simpsons, A Good Man is Hard to Find, and Paradise Lost. All of these fictions play with the narrative of mind/body interaction.

Then there’s a question of Billy, however, Billy whose story derives from an archived video submitted for scholarship to the Examiners, which was a group formed many years ago by the President to understand why things break. A few seconds after the events depicted in the video, the recorded bridge collapsed. Witnesses at the scene, which included Billy and Billy’s father, were apparently shaken as their vehicle had just cleared the weakest portion of the structure.

Collapsed bridges are no laughing matter. There were several recorded bridge collapses at this time. But the question was raised despite this evidence: were Billy’s fears warranted? His father had asked, “Do you understand.” Billy had repeated to one of the officers at the scene, while his father stood by (his father had been instrumental in saving many of the people trapped by steel and concrete), “I understand.” The officer had asked, “Son, what did you see?” But Billy answered every question or observation with, “I understand.”

I was admitted into Billy’s room reluctantly by the Director, as he claimed that Billy could only see visitors for short moments, as he was in a fragile state. I entered the room and found Billy, an old man now, shuddering in his chair and staring at a blank wall. His was a special kind of tremor. Just visible within the material that cloaked him, a small vibration, the kind of interesting motion to his chin, lips, and knees, even his eye balls, that suggested not just a muscular suppression of internal pressure but also a methodical or learned method of restraining himself from shrieking against the things that had or might still threaten to injure or kill him.

“One time,” he said, “I was standing at a window, the window of my father’s pastry shop which faced the traffic, and a car from the street crashed through. And so, I face only hard walls.”

“Statistically speaking,” Billy told me, “very few people are killed by lightning. One day, while walking with my mother, I felt something tug at my arm. The next thing I know is my mother’s screaming and driving me fast to the hospital.”

I asked Billy how extensive were these occurrences, these breaks in the statistical likelihood of things disordered or breaking? He said, “Oh, it’s not what you think. Not everyday.”

The Director told me, “No, not everyday. Which, of course, was the issue with our Billy, who, as you can see has lived a long life albeit tortured.”

His records were clear. An airbag had released as he’d clicked in the seat belt. It had been his plate that had come with a small chip from the porcelain in his sandwich, slicing his tongue. The doctor had claimed that yes, it had been his lunch out of all the millions that had been stored in a poisonous plastic bag. The baseball had fallen out of the glare of the sun to knock him in the eye. Out of all the millions it had been his luck, out of all the millions his plane landed and as it parked at the terminal, a huge rending noise could be heard and the wing fell to the macadam.

“Then there was the case of the exploding gas can and the incident with the mower blade,” the Director told me.

Out of all the millions, perhaps billions, Billy’s roof was taken lifted by storm while the neighbors looked on, their own roofs secure and stable, thus verifying the notion of the unlikely or the probable.

Billy was, ultimately, a case prover, a being that brought comfort to others. As I departed the facility for the last time with my notes and my evidence, I got into my vehicle with a strange sense of security, a strange sense of comfort that I knew made no logical sense. I knew I would make it home safely and soundly; I knew that the bridge that would take me to my side of living would remain standing: Because so many things had already broken or become disordered for Billy, who shuddered in his room, wondering when the roof would collapse or a meteor would fall out of the sky to strike him clean from the world, reason told me that the bridge would stand for me.

But then I found error in my logic, and at this I felt a strange shudder in the foot that I used to depress the accelerator: what if I had been driving behind Billy on that bridge?

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056: Lucy’s Finger

July 16, 2010 – 10:36 am

I told Lucy that I had a less than perfect relationship with her finger. I’d never write anything about Lucy that I wouldn’t say to her directly. I said, “Lucy, I have a less than perfect relationship with your finger.”

This was years ago, of course. She said, “You mean how it points to Pegasus?”

“Something like that,” I said.

She had a habit of getting us into situations that I would classify as dangerous. One time my car ran out of gas at the edge of a lake. Lucy had said, “Let’s follow this road.” She pointed at the road with her finger. I turned. The road went on and on. The needle went down and down. We were miles on that little road to nowhere. I told her, “This is leading us nowhere and we’re running low on fuel.”

“Keep going,” she said, pointing forward. The road, after an hour or so, ended at the lake. The way it ended made me crazy. It just ended. Someone had made this road so that it just stopped at the shore of a lake, no signs, no indication of “where.”

We stopped. It was dark. The water bubbled with the activity of frogs. We were out of gas. Lucy got out of the car and said, “look at the stars.”

My idea of adventure is a pencil, a book, and a chair.

I blamed her finger.

I blamed the poetry she read by a woman who looks like a maniac on the rear cover of her slim, attractive volumes, a woman who looks like a those people you often see at Bluegrass concerts on farms when the sober members of the audience have all departed. Like people who bite into roots moments after they’ve been dug out of the ground, like those people you see in old photographs sitting on camels or wagons.

One of those poems, a favorite of Lucy’s, goes:

Eat stones colored raw
On close looking you will see
The bloody nerve endings of porpoise
Clean cuts through the heart of the mountain
Your feet wet from those distances
Whose measure is shattered glass

And so forth.

Imagine my trepidation then. In The City we had left Marcus’ baking loft, whose party ended early due to the heat. On our way to the station, I told Lucy: “I can hear the sizzle of the digital billboards. And the exhaust is putting dog tails at the front of my skull.” At a corner, we came upon a distressed child, standing against a wall. The little girl was crying quietly and staring through the numerous people and their bags. I tried to push Lucy through, but she stopped instead and asked the child what was the matter.

Lucy turned to me and said, “She says she can’t find her mother. She lost.”

“We should find a traffic cop. Ask her if her mothers has a cell phone,” I said. I wanted to get to the train. I wanted to go home.

Lucy asked the child more questions. The child knew nothing of cell phones. This child was small. She had arms and legs like those of unfed cats. She was red, sweating, and visibly shaking. She kept drawing her knuckles across the skin under her wet nose.

“Ask her where her mother went,” I told Lucy. Pedestrians kept bumping me in the shoulders. I was sweaty, hot, and growing angry. At that moment, I felt justified in tearing one of the child’s limbs off and eating it on the spot.

Lucy said, “We can’t leave her here.”

“Why is she here all by herself?” I said, distressed.

“We need to find a precinct, take her there. We can’t leave her here,” Lucy said, taking the child’s hand, which the child gladly gave up.

I wanted to find the train and go home. The heat from the pedestrian pack, the claustrophobic walls of the buildings which blew the heat of air against my forehead, the road roar of honking and engines–all of this was crushing my eyeballs.

I wanted to tear that child’s arms off and eat them. But I followed Lucy. Lucy for whom all things lost and dangerous is an attraction. I followed Lucy. She stopped at an intersection and pointed to some unknown place in The City distance.

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055: Someone’s Story

July 15, 2010 – 9:32 am

Consider the short film someone . . . by John Timmons. Some of you will know what I’m referring to as “you” as audience may include contributors to a project called 100 Days and “you” will already have “considered” the video, which would mean that I’m asking you to consider it again, forcing a revisitation. Others, which is another “you,” will not know what I’m referring to and will click the link, open the video, and consider it. This member of an audience will perhaps return here curious as to why I asked you to consider the video in the first place. The contributors to 100 Days will either click the link, watch the video again, which is 33 seconds long, or simply recall the video from memory and continue reading.

Both members of the audience might be eating an apple and will find the act of clicking on the link somewhat difficult as the juice of the apple may be running down the side of his or her hand. But this is merely an inference.

The video is composed of sound, which may be a recording of rain. It’s composed of a steady capture of clouds over a greater period of time than 33 seconds. We know this because in our experience clouds change their shape slowly (typically). Therefore, the image of the moving clouds in the video is an illusion. Even so, the clouds are significant to the video in that as the dialogue progresses the clouds thin and nearly disappear (sec 27). But the clouds reform in the video plane’s horizontal center soon after. The video is also composed of two voices, a woman’s voice and a man’s voice, both illusions, also. The woman says, “John, someone’s died.” The man (who’s acting the role of a child) says, “Well, who, Ma, who?” This declaration/response dialogue is repeated. But each iteration of the call and response is manipulated into an echo, so that the final instance of dec/res repeats itself internally to each clause. The final sequence goes: “John, John, someosomeone’s dieiedd.” “Well, who, Ma, who Ma, who who.” The dialogue, therefore, behaves like the clouds as the period of normal experience for each element of media has been altered. It’s interesting that as the dialogue is manipulated, it turns into a form of music, into a series of fluid beats and rhythmic sounds.

Here’s an interpretation: the dialogue repeats because the video expresses the point of view of the man’s voice, who is playing the role of a child named John. The video expresses an exchange between a mother and her child. The mother has kneeled to the child in the kitchen. She placed her palms on the child’s shoulders and says, “John, someone’s died.” Of course, as the mother has said “someone,” the child asks who has died because the child wants to know. The video expresses the child’s internal anxiety not just about death but about the identity of the dead person. This person is, of course, Grandfather, whose place of burial days later is narrated visually in a video called perusals. The clouds are a metaphor for the human drama of life, which fulminates and races, builds and flattens and is continually reshaped by life experiences, and then disperses. But then the clouds return: the narrative of life and death can be articulated as cyclical. The video’s great human theme is the cycle. I’ll show you why this is not really true later.

Or, the mother has entered John bedroom. She shakes John awake. She shakes him gently, as mothers do. John opens his eyes. The mother says, “John, someone’s died.” John, whose conscious attention is still deep in the waters of sleep, asks, “Well, who, Ma, who?”

We hear the sound of John’s voice in proto surreal state. We imagine that John is actually quite alert after a few moments and is scared. We imagine that the mother says “someone” because she wants to diminish the force of the blow.

John, the mother understands, will soon know what it feels like to lose a loved one. He will soon know what death feels like. He will soon learn the lessons death teaches. That the dead person will never be present physically to him again. He will never see that person (or the cat) again and this he will never really understand.

But I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that the video exposes truths, truths in the form of real occurrence. You’re thinking that every element in the video comes from real life. Of course, in real life there is an actual mother who has actually said, “John, someone’s died.” This is entirely “probable.” (More likely it’s possible). But to keep to the logic of induction, I would agree with you. A mother has entered her son’s room. His father was an American soldier or a merchant in New Orleans or an accountant in Haiti or a nurse in Santiago. No longer alive. In this sense, fiction is a displacement or re-placement of truth. I understand.

But what’s my real concern? You’re probably wondering, if you haven’t already stopped reading. My real concern is this: that story is always hidden and should be kept hidden. Indeed, I would argue this: John Timmons’s video is about the hiddenness of story. I don’t know if it’s a kitchen or a bedroom. Story, however, is its theme, not cycles or death or injustice. In modern fiction, story is a hidden concept (this why the walls of buildings are opaque). It’s never revealed. I argue that only the audience can reveal or feel it. In fact, fictions or non-fictions that provide the story (and their themes) are false fictions, fictions to be avoided. Even Paul Henning knew this, as his series of fictions were about “A man named Jed . . .” The “about” is the hint: “about” reveals subject only. Watch out what waters you step into, reader, as story is a maw with a million teeth.

Yes, I understand your disagreement. You say, “But maybe Timmons didn’t intend to tell a story.” I would respond: “Subtract, therefore, the first two words of your sentence. I never said he did intend this.”

But to conclude:

If you, reader, go back and reconsider the first paragraph of this writing, you’ll note that I asked you to “consider” John Timmons’s video someone . . . . This was a vague request. You will, perhaps, have had a different interpretation of the video. Perhaps you made the elements of the video your own, remembering the deaths you’ve experienced in your own life. Perhaps it brought back to you fond or painful memories. What I really asked you to do is to willfully join me in an act of destruction and theft. Which is death. Which is change.

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054: Grandfather’s Favorite Spot

July 14, 2010 – 1:15 pm

My parents did a strange thing. When my grandfather died, they buried him in a favorite spot in the woods, which is against the current law. The law calls for all dead people to be disposed of by licensed professionals and in plots designated by the state. But my parents decided to bury Grandfather is a favorite spot in the woods.

This is what he wanted, my mother said.

But a few days after my father and mother buried him in a field in those woods, they brought him up and dug another grave near a stand of trees and a pond at the edge of the field.

I think he’d like it better here, my father said. Look, he’ll have a better view. Over there there’s ducks. My mother looked at the ducks and said likely he would enjoy the ducks.

A few days later they dug another spot in a more open area and reinterred him in a hole there. They hooked the casket to the dogs and the dogs pulled him to this new spot. One of the dogs kept stopping to sniff at Grandfather’s casket.

I think maybe he’d feel better watching the clouds pass over the trees, my father said, tapping his chin with a finger. When he told us about his favorite spot, he wasn’t all that specific, my father said. He didn’t mark the exact spot with an X, you know. He really just pointed in this whole general area, saying bury me around here.

A few days later, after sleeping on it, my mother walked us to a place in Grandfather’s general favorite spot near a bench north of which you see an old barn. We dug a new hole. There were two people seated on the bench. They watched us. Both of them were old men, one of Indian origins, the other only spoke Spanish. My mother told them we were making this hole for Grandfather. Both of the men took the shovels out of our hands and assisted with the digging of the new hole and when the dogs finally panted over with the casket and the casket was heaved into the new hole, the two old men said prayers and then left.

A few days later, my father remembered the ducks and the water and said, Father always loved the water. Look how the sunlight works in and out and over the ripples. Look at the stones on the bottom. When I was a kid we used to come here and skip stones and then we’d sit and he’d tell me science fiction stories.

My mother said, Remember the story he always told about Martians, how the Martians used up all their water and then murdered each other?

That was one of my favorites, my father said. He said it was like Animal Farm or worse.

We got the shovels, the dogs, did a little search for the old men but the old men were unavailable, and dug a new grave at the edge of the stream that ran through Grandfather’s favorite spot. I asked whether or not the stream would be poisoned by Grandfather’s body as it degraded. My father said, Shit dies here all the time. You think this is the first death to come near the water? Which made perfect sense to me.

We had a cook out. We had hot dogs, burgers, and salad. We ate and watched the water and the naked piece of ground covering Grandfather. The dogs lay nearby, panting in the shade. Dragonflies jabbed through clouds of hovering bugs. The smoke from the coals drifted over the water and formed coils. Then it dispersed.

I don’t know, my father said. Something doesn’t feel right.

I’d sensed that he would say something like this. I foresaw it, as my father usually puts lots of ketchup on his burger but this time had forgotten it. He’d slapped a piece of bread over his burger and took tasteless, absent-minded bites.

Yes, my mother said. Maybe a tad bit too empty.

They thought about it. A few days later, they decided on a new place near a denser stand of trees, something that looked more like a place where dead people would be buried, something more grand, ceremonial, gothic, you might say, and provided a better view of the stream, the pond where the ducks swam, and the groves that had a medieval, magical light to them because the sun clustered in the grass and the tree trucks were dark and quiet and primal. And so we dug a new place near those trees with the better view and used the stones we found as a means of marking the grave but not in such a way that would draw notice from park rangers or make it easy for wildlife to get at the casket.

The casket scraped one final time over the edge of the new hole. The clammy, grainy wood of the casket passed across my palms. The dogs watched with their flappy pink tongues and my mother and father spoke more final words for Grandfather.

I think he’d be happy with this spot, my father said, least he better be.

My mother nodded and smiled. She had two lines of soil across the right cheek and one her eyes watered.

On the trail to the car, we met a park ranger in his hat and big muddy shoes and he asked my father what the shovels were all about, which was an awkward question.

My father’s answer was immediate and sounded as sincere as I might have sounded if asked whether I wanted hamster hair or sausage on a pizza. He said, I confiscated them from two men in rain coats. Hole diggers, they were, he said. They were looking to bury paint cans and near the pond no less.

You could’ve been hurt, the man said.

Believe me, they were more scared than us, my mother said. Plus, we don’t fear much with these dogs.

Where? the ranger wanted to know, looking suspicious and outraged.

Run off, my father said. Run off that way. Here, take these. We were rushing off to the station now.

My mother wasn’t a woman for lying but said that in this case, and for Grandfather’s sake, the lie was a matter of ethics.

I think of Grandfather as a storyteller and as a man with a favorite place. My father and mother will often say, Remember that story he used to tell or Remember how he used to fish so much or Remember the way he used to always take us to see the ducks and the trees or Remember how we got tired of it all and he had to go all by himself.

I think of my mother and father, too. I see them digging; I see them with their shovels or standing nearby watching me with mine; I see how in all their changes of mind, how they might have been thinking about Grandfather coming here all by himself because my mother and father had grown tired of it. I smell wet earth and clay, and I feel the texture of wet casket wood. I see the dogs drawing the box over the dirt and over the grass. But mainly I think of the grass and the water and the trees, their greens, their quality of light. I think of how they became favorite things for me. I did never return there, though.

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