I’ve Changed
God only knows truly the scale and scope of my mutations
even I can't help but reel, at the sudden abject horror
of a newly discovered wrinkle, accompanied
by my own further weathered eyes, shaking quietly in the mirror.
Look close.
See the spark of early years now duly faded,
where the black Irish blues have gotten gray around the iris
I've changed, and I can feel it
the divide between what is and what was then is growing wide,
and there are shadows scrambling on the ledges of the cliffs I've left behind,
forever leaving.
I see them in my dreams still, harkening me back
and I go to them, feeling the startling and familiar pangs of memories left unchecked
these animals run the grounds untended, emaciated predators of the mind
a speciation of fear forever hungering for my willful, present, attention
But I've changed.
#Poetry
Asgardia
“I’m sorry,” was the gist of it, given by Officer Jayna Stal, an RKA employee completely unknown to the crew prior to the transmission. Sergei Kremena was looking down an atmospheric curling of clouds above the Bering Sea. A five-inch thick glass window kept him from falling, falling, falling. Losing track of the horizon nauseated him, so that he looked down at his tablet once more, pressed play to watch her mouthing the words again, “I’m so sorry, Commander,” rung in his ears. He saw RKA command room was nearly empty behind her, save for three or four frantic individuals, half in casual clothing, working like mad to some unknowable end. Likely tying loose ends he thought, trying to save what precious little information there was to steal away. He regarded Ms. Stal with a sort of sick appreciation, for at least letting the crew know.
The treaties were breached, and the nuclear codes of five nations compromised. A perfect storm, she said, had rendered politics useless and mutual destruction eminent. NASA and SpaceX were gone; the RKA and CASC had been evacuated. He lost the horizon again, felt uneasy. The subtle buzzing of electricity swelled in his ears and made it hard to think. Dovno, drysna, shit! His blood quickened as Jayna Stal closed her eyes, reaching for the camera, for the switch to shut him off. The last words he received were this: “I’m sorry, Asgardia. You won’t be coming home.”
Five miles every second, he thought, using both hands to turn his back against the porthole. He pressed lightly with his feet, propelling himself forward with no resistance. Everything moved slowly in the station, he noticed, but the station moved at 27,600 kilometers an hour. 16 rotations a day, he would watch the earth go by, and not once had it lost its luster. Kremena was the first to receive the news, that the world had gone to hell and that the second revision of the ISS would consequently become a $340 Billion dollar grave for four international scientists trapped in space. He felt the air, the space between the fabric of his jumpsuit and the hairs on his chest. He heard the blood beat heavy in his ears, and felt the atmosphere close around him as he pushed his way through the cabin, floating swiftly away from earth.
The ISS v.2 (Codename Asgardia, land of gods) would have been considered a wonder of the world if it were meant to last forever. The de-commissioning of the first International Space Station eight years prior signaled a significant jump in space exploration technology. The first Zarya module provided enough storage for short missions but required constant resupply in order to maintain the necessary resources for long term assignments by a fully manned station. The Zarya II (Later renamed DAWN) made six months of supplies for 5 astronauts a reality, effectively tripling the size of the original while maintaining the same structural weight and integrity through the use of lightweight composite materials developed in a collaboration between MIT aeronautics and the Material Sciences department at Stanford. The material advancements made Asgardia an attractive possibility for private companies and nations interested in sending their best scientists into space to perform cutting edge research. The new designs were made public, and it was funded for billions by private corporations, citing potential development in space mining and tourism.
When all was said and done, Asgardia hung above the earth like a jewel suspended in glass. Two massive rings, each constituting a generous 33,080 square ft in living and work space, rotated stoically on either side of a white cross of modules and couplings, different laboratories and system conduits, each a dedicated organ to the whole of the station, a space-faring ecosystem consuming sunshine to churn out hourly reports on everything from universal background radiation to the efficacy of protein transport in microgravity. In order to make all of this possible, the Solar Wing Arrays, just outside the habitation modules had to be completely revamped, a feat accomplished by NASA’s own Dr. Laura Penn, Chief Science Officer. Once completed, Asgardia produced roughly 1MW of power feeding 6 Tons of Lithium-glass Batteries, capable of operating the station’s main computer, an IBM Supercomputer affectionately named by the crew, ATLAS, something of a little brother to their own quantum computer Watson back on Earth. At an incline pitch of nearly 51 degrees, Asgardia orbited the earth in vacuous silence, welcoming the sunrise every 90 minutes of the day. The final transmission came on April 2nd, 2036.
Kremena and Yang
A bomb had gone off inside her head, short-wiring the connection to her extremities, ultimately breaking her clipboard into two uneven pieces. The faces of her siblings flashed in her mind, and then her parents. Her whole family was back on earth, and he was telling her that they’d been evacuated, that they were probably safe somewhere, like a bunker underground. 2.6 billion people in China, and how many bunkers? The reports she held hung tenuously from the clip and fell apart as she clenched tightly with her hand.
Frustrated, she searched her mind for the words that would express her contempt for everything, the rage she felt for the world around her, the feeling that made her stare knife points into the man in her doorway. The coldness in her look said that she wouldn’t be consoled, and that she didn’t want to be. The only thing she wanted right then was to scream into the man in front of her, the Russian with his consoling voice, to fill him up with curses and watch him burst into a thousand bloody pieces. Her hand cramped beneath the pressure of her own tension, and gave way as Sergei moved into the lab, an arm outstretched to grab a hold of her.
“I know you’re upset,” said the engineer. “I’m not trying to make you feel better---you would have found out either way.” He gestured to the tablet stuck with Velcro to the wall. “The RKA was empty, as far as I could tell. That officer, the one in the video– she said that U.S. was gone, same with Beijing.” The two of them leaned into the contour of the cylindrical wall. “The fail safes were compromised, and no politics. Nuclear holocaust.”
“I can only assume the worst.” She whispered softly. Her tears were perfect orbs, tiny and scattered like a halo of jewels beneath the white LEDs. “My family is gone.” Her breathing became intentional, collecting herself as best she could. Steadying her mind against the worry, she pressed a palm to her eyes and cheeks.
“We’ll be gone to if we don’t get moving.” Sergei pulled the Cyclab’s tablet from the wall, navigating the file system with a stylus. He pulled up three documents, and her face went white as she looked at the statistics. The first document detailed an unmanned supply mission, a ground-controlled capsule on its way into Asgardia. The second and third were supply readouts, for oxygen and water, respectively. Liu was terrified. “I-If the shipment is unmanned, then that means that no one---“
“Da,” he said gravely. “6 weeks of water and air, that is if this fucking flying brick doesn’t smash us into pieces in 3. Get up, call Penn and Winters. We need to get off Asgardia.”
Penn and Winters
Dr. Laura Penn made her way to the Biology Laboratory in Hab-bay B, stopping briefly at the kitchen to grab a snack. Rather than eating complete meals, Laura Penn mostly ate small portions, usually high in protein or fatty oils, at even intervals throughout the day. A dehydrated bar of teriyaki beef was her current protein fix, paired with a multivitamin and a cocktail of nootropics, to keep her sharp. She’d drifted from DAWN to the Bio-lab carrying in boxes of soil shipped from the Amazon rainforest. Each sample of roughly 300 held a particular strand of soil-dwelling fungus, which it was thought might just be able to survive in the vacuum of space. “It’s a waste of time and energy,” she’d explained in an email prior to delivery of the samples. “Soil is a living organism itself, and even if the mycelium lives, the soil will die in space. At the end of the day, what you’re looking for is a material that can withstand the vacuum of space, but that material is not mushrooms.”
She spoke the words to herself as she carried the boxes, slightly pleased with herself in saying it, as though she knew better because she did. It was a subtle satisfaction that she had earned, having done well over 400 materials studies on the ISS, and in Asgardia. She mused to herself about how moving in space could be misconstrued as falling, and whether her pushing the boxes of dirt down the narrow halls could be equally seen as dropping them. Near the cross section between Asgardia’s two rings, Laura quickly grabbed onto the case, catching a support bar bolted to the wall with the other hand. Steading herself, she pulled herself lightly through causeway to the labs in Hab-bay B. At the entrance, she felt her weight shifting to her feet, allowing her to stand upright against what used to be the wall. Once she set the case down on the floor, she stopped to check the chore off of her list of daily tasks.
“Winters!” echoed dully through the Hab-bay, mixed with the sound of quick footsteps skidding slightly against the floor. Dr. Penn was gaining speed, almost running, through each and every module before arriving at the Rec. “Winters!” she gasped, pushing through the heavy plastic curtains as she said it, exhausted and annoyed at how unwilling he’d been to answer.
Winters sat silently across from the exercise bench, back bent over against the wall, with his elbows clutched around his knees. Laura tried to regain her breath and doubled over, looking up at him from beneath her tightly knotted bun. She pointed to the monitors, “What are we going to do?” she said. He didn’t look at her. His hands and ears were colored red, except for the white spots where his knuckles clenched against his neck and face. He’d seen the reports: the shuttle, the water, the air, and the RKA transmission---there were no words. Two years earlier he was on the team that designed that shuttle and routed the plan. He knew that without ground control it would inevitably veer off-course, just enough to miss the dock, and unfortunately not enough to avoid a collision.
“I talked to Yang and Kourdakov, and---“
“I don’t care,” he said bitterly, still pressing his palms against his head. His mind was racing, but his senses were slowing. She was offended.
“You don’t care?” she raised her voice with an almost mocking portamento. Her tone was pregnant with an air of disbelief, as though he’d committed treason. Before she could continue on, he looked up to her, wiping away tears as he stared fixedly through bloodshot eyes.
“Stop,” he said. “Don’t say one more thing, because if you do, I think you’ll see me dead before whatever scheme you’ve hatched can come to light. I’ve got it figured; you’ll pick apart Asgardia for food, solar, even water if you’re smart. You’ll pack that into the Soyuz, a ship built for delivery mind you, not retrieval, and run a sortie for re-entry to whatever’s left of the planet Earth, is that it?” He didn’t give her time to respond before he started again. “I don’t know what life was like for you back on Earth, but I had a father, a mother, a wife, and daughter. Where are they now, can you tell me? Of course not, because you don’t know.” He picked himself up off the floor, standing nearly to the ceiling. “Nobody knows anything, and all we have now is time to figure things out, but let me make one thing clear: if and when I feel like taking part in any plans, I’ll let you know. Until then, I’d appreciate if everyone could just leave me alone.”
Again, the words were missing and the cabin was lost in the silence of surrounding space. Captain Winters left Dr. Penn feeling unsure of herself for the first time in years, and the stark reality of their situation crept in with the feeling of one person staying and another person leaving.
The Plan
It was 3 days before all the gears of the re-entry plan really began to turn. Sergei and Yang had begun work calculating a flight plan for the Soyuz Supply Shuttle currently docked at PORTAL-1. Though both were skilled navigators and mathematicians, the work was slow-going. It was important that they preserved the delicate social balance they’d established, and that meant taking numerous breaks and sharing the workload evenly.
“Bozhe, why?” Sergei mumbled under his breath, sifting through a pile of flight calculations. Yang was across the room, swiping her thin pointer finger in small movements on her tablet. Sergei looked up. “I can’t finish this,” he said, “The weight throws everything off; even if we did get the math right, the margin for error is astronomical.”
The two of them had run the numbers for a direct representation, that is, a flight “without notable incident.” Liu Yang laughed a bit, swiping again, looking over.
“I don’t know why you’re so surprised, we’re basically telling ourselves we need to predict the future,” she pushed away from the wall and joined him at his workbench. “It takes 90 people on government salaries working every minute of the day to make a flight successful, so why the hell do you think the four of us will just plan it out?” She smiled in a way that was infectious, and it put Kremena off guard. She continued, “Don’t bother trying with it. Either we die in space or have the slightest chance in re-entry, it’s not like there’s some better alternative we haven’t figured out yet.” She picked up Sergei’s tablet and handed it to him. “Here,” she said. “Play a game of chess with me, I’m tired of losing to ATLAS all the time.”
In the storage bay, a Portuguese cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” was playing from a wireless speaker. Penn had taken inventory of the food and first aid supplies the crew might need to survive on Earth. ADD Surviving on a planet riddled with nuclear destruction was almost comically foreign to her, and she laughed despite herself when thinking about it. She’d been grateful to obsess slightly over the possibility of survival, depending on the landing. With her spare time, she thumbed through the digitized library of congress for wilderness manuals and science fiction to keep her thinking about it. One book in particular, Wilson Tucker’s The Long, Loud Silence was a favorite, detailing a combination of nuclear attack and pneumonic plague. She considered packing the whole Bio lab into the shuttle, just in case a disease had broken out but knew her imagination was getting the better of her, and room on the shuttle was at a premium.
“Queen Bitch” played on the speaker as Penn loaded a pallet with three solar panels, charge controllers, and an inverter for the power. At “Eu tô querendo mudaaaaar, daqui,” she spun herself around, singing and almost cracking her voice. John was in the doorway.
“God! John,” she flailed in the air a bit, quickly pushing herself over to turn off the music, “Give a little warning next time?” she laughed, and so did John.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “What’s that music from?”
“My favorite movie, The Life Aquatic” replied Penn. “Do you recognize it? It’s Bowie”
“Yeah, I knew it was familiar” He smiled uneasily, and rung a hand around the back of his neck. “Look, I’m sorry about before. I know I haven’t been totally present with everyone.”
She moved to him slowly, unsure, placed her arms around him and pressed herself against him. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s been hard for everyone.”
A moment passed while they comforted one another, and for a second the two of them felt hopeful and alive. He gave a relieved sigh and a toothy smile, which she returned with a chuckle. “I’m ready to work,” he said. “I’ll move everything into the shuttle. I spoke with Sergei; apparently, Yang’s figured out how ATLAS can guide the re-entry." He gave a confident smirk. "We might actually stand a chance of getting back in one piece.” The two of them looked over the survival gear, the hazmat suits, the stacks of food, the random electronics, equipment and gauges of wire. John looked down slightly, then again to the pallets and crates. “But, what if there’s nothing left to go back to?” he asked, and for a moment again a quiet was between them.
The Escape
“8 minutes to detachment.” Liu Yang’s voice had a tinny fuzz to it in the speakers with the helmet of their space suits. Liu Yang and Captain Winters began exchanging checks for the port release, going over every possible gauge or button on the infinitely complex controls in front of them.
“Lock in visors,” addressed the crew, and “Visors locked,” was the response, in unison.
“Auto-retract timer set, switching over to internal power,” said Yang. The lights of the panel blinked in a clandestine wave across the console. Above his head, Winters lifted the cover on a switch and flipped it. The sound of a valve opening filled the cabin, and the outer fabric of the space suits was pulled tight in all directions. “Cabin pressure regulated. Three minutes to detachment.” Their nerves were of red-hot steel, hairpin triggers ready to bend and fire at a moment’s notice. The blood rushed to their chests, an autonomic response to fight or flight, pumping sugar and oxygen through the heart, gut, brain, and lungs. “Detachment in T-minus 5…4…3…2…1…”
There was a quick shake as the Soyuz separated from Asgardia’s docking arm and the lights of the shuttle cabin cycled on, then off again. Sergei and the others felt the force of gravity push them hard into their aluminum bucket seats, and through the bullet-proof windscreen the only thing that could be seen was the dull grey-blue of Earth’s hazy atmosphere. For each of them, individuality dissolved within those moments. There was no up, no down, no left or right to be felt. The air in their suits tingled with bodily electricity, and their follicles stood on end. An adjustment came in from Asgardia, a starboard rotation of ten degrees, enough to split the sky into a perfect light and perfect dark.
From behind the arc of Earth’s atmosphere, the crew watched the sun’s blinding light come streaming in from the horizon. Along the edge of the Planet’s surface, sunshine diffused itself in a hot white glow that tapered off, illuminating the heavy cloud cover over some indiscernible land mass. As they flew on, the altitude was dropping by miles every second. “Engaging retro-thrusters,” called out Yang, whose voice was shaking almost as much as her hands within the shell of her pressurized suit. The thrusters engaged, pulling everyone forward against their harnesses, and again the altitude was dropping heavily by the second. Another rotation from ATLAS and the horizon was laid out flat in front of them, rising to fill the view.
The shuttle dove into the Earth’s atmosphere, pushing through a thick confluence of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and other gasses, rushing against the heat shield of the shuttle. At roughly 50 times the speed of sound and lowering, the outside temperature of the shuttle reached nearly 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit, igniting the air around it like a chain reaction through the sky.
It took 5 complete rotations around the Earth, with minor path adjustments along the way, to arrive at landing speed. The air strip they would land at was chosen via satellite imagery, a tremendous patch of green between the Kyrgyz Steppe and the Siberian Taiga, the long abandoned area of Chernobyl. In the final stage of re-entry, the rudders engaged in airbrake as the parachutes deployed behind the shuttle. The guides that would normally give direction to the runway were long gone, and they had to go entirely off the instruments. The runway was long, but the speed was still too much. The rudders were pushed harder, and a final emergency parachute was deployed. A jolt from the force pulled the nose of the shuttle downward, all the while Winters and Yang were arguing about whether to drop or to pull out. Nearing the end of the runway, the landing gear dropped, and the starboard axle broke beneath the weight of the cargo. The large pierce resistant tires gripped the tarmac at an angle as the heavy shuttle twisted the telescoping starboard motor arm 50 degrees. The small difference in weight distribution shifted everything in the cargo bay just slightly so that the shuttle seemed to heave itself upon the starboard wing, driving it into the ground. Pieces of ceramic and aluminum flew up into the air as the craft carved a deep outward-curving gash in the tangled wilderness surrounding the concrete landing.
The world seemed to stand still as Penn and Kremena closed their eyes, pulling themselves internally away from the physical reality of the crash outside. Digging further into the ground, the starboard wing stopped dead against some blockage in the soil. It threw the shuttle immediately on its nose, which sent the heavy fuselage into a roll.
“Brace yourselves!” Winters screamed into the intercom, as the cracked and broken pavement of the runway came to an end. The crew lifted their hands and grabbed the harnesses as the shuttle tumbled through the grass and over railings. There was noise; a horrible shriek of twisting metal and blunt-force trauma to the craft. A symphony of dying frequencies was ringing in Sergei’s ears as he came to, hanging upside down from the stretched harness that held him in his seat. He heard the sound of burning cinders, the whistling of the wind outside. The cabin lights flickered, on and off, on and off. He heard the others breathing in the coms. Outside sound of bugs chirping filled the cool night air. Above the wreckage, a flock of birds squawked, ousted from their nesting trees.
Asgardia
The land of Gods hangs in the sky
No Man's land
2038, twinkle in the night
screams across the blackness
like a fast-moving jet among the stars
5 miles a second, 17,000 miles an hour
roughly estimated
too fast for one to keep track of
just slow enough to appreciate its crossing
Asgardia
Nation of Intersectionality
and Internationality
star-bright gravity-riding home
to the world's brightest minds
a testing ground for future thought
turned future tech
to save us all,
and move us on to bigger brighter worlds
and guide us with its shadow
Land of the godhead
manifest corporeal earthly destiny
the bringer of the obelisk
of Kubrick's monolithic Jupiter mission
home to the vacuous silence
and manufactured atmosphere
ineffectual climes
closed-loop molecular economy
prolonging the inevitable
The when and where Asgardia falls
on this planet or another
and the way we look when it does
will be what determines everything
My Poetry
My poetry's just bones
dusty from the closet that never got cleaned out
dressed up in a moth-bitten evening gown
No rouge for these sunken cheeks,
no need,
because there's an allure that can
and should only be attained
at the opposite end
of the spectrum of beauty
My poetry's been wasted
in the kitchen doing dishes for too long
to know it's any good to anyone
and now it's drinking on a mattress without sheets
still working up the courage
to go out,
and be that one night stand
that some beautiful stranger can't help
but sink their teeth into.
The Dragon Speaks
THE DRAGON SPEAKS in a voice that overwhelms, confounds, and then destroys. “Build! Work!” cries the foreman! A boy cries from the scaffolding, is shushed and pulled away by an older man. Another worker lies dead and bloody, crushed beneath the stone. The Dragon bellows, and the men are shaken to their bones. “Bury him! Then back to work!” the foreman calls, and lashes break the midday air. “Work, and you’ll be fed! Your duty is to the emperor!”
I am the great destroyer. Bring to me mountains; I will break them into pieces. Bring to me trees, and they will feed my flame immortal. Bring to me men, and I will make them into stone and bones. I am the great destroyer, the dragon of the hills. Bring what I desire, and in return I will bring glory to your name.
A MOTHER COMES looking for her boy. “You took him from me! In Zhonghu Village, 4 months ago, you took him! Where is my son?” She screams in anger, pushing the guards, surrounded by faceless men, soldiers and peasants. All along the stony path, from Dandong to Jinshanling, she’d traced the Dragon’s back. “Not here ma’am,” a man replies. His hands and face were painted black from carrying charcoal along the wall. “Perhaps down there? The soldiers bring in more men every day; they’re sent to move the stone.” He points to the bottom of the steep grade, where tiny men swarmed like ants atop the wall. Large gray bricks are scattered at its end, where the Dragon’s head lies incomplete. She thanks the man for his suggestion, but her hope has reached its limits. As night closes upon her she sees the fires lit along the wall, the largest at the Dragon’s mouth. Her feet are tired from the miles and the weight of her pack, and the threads of her sandals begin to break. Upon arrival to the scattered stones, she looks at the many faces lit by the roaring fire. She sees the dullness of their eyes and the longness of their faces, but there is no recognition. “If not here, then where?” She thinks to herself. She sleeps among the rocks, surrounding by a multitude of strangers. In a dream, or perhaps a nightmare, the voice of the Dragon comes to her.
Your boy is mine- look at my bones. You’ve come to claim what’s long been eaten. See my scales, how they ripple like man’s blood? Ten thousand men have come before you, and now lie buried in their folds. You’ve come so far to look for him, to beg for me to give him back, but your efforts are misguided and uninformed. Run from me little mouse, and you might live to see starvation. Your tiny bones won’t make good stone---your thin blood is not worthy of my fire. Go from me and forget your boy, or be consumed in tooth and claw.
IN THE MORNING there is only smoke. She awakes to the hand of a young guard, maybe eighteen years old, pushing softly on her shoulder. “Lei?” She asks, the name of her son, wiping the sleep from her eyes and lifting herself on one arm. The guard speaks to her in a conciliatory tone. “No, ma’am. My name in Yin... You shouldn’t be here.” Her story, for perhaps the hundredth time in recent days, is told again. The soldiers took her boy, and she’d come looking. She notices the sympathy in the soldier’s eyes. While he speaks to her he gives her food, but what he says comes as a grave and unfortunate truth. “You have no food, no shelter, and no money. You’ve come very far, but now where will you go? Zhongu Village is much too far, even by horse; I’m afraid that you’ll surely starve before you reach it.” She wants to cry, but there are no tears. “Your boy isn’t here,” he says, consoling her, “but there’s still work to be done; I can’t speak for what lies ahead, but I know that there’s food paid for duty to the emperor.”
THE WOMAN IS put to work, closing the distance between the horizon and the Dragon’s head. “Bring to me mountains,” is the voice in her head as she carries the heavy stones, and she wonders if the others can hear it too. “Bring to me trees,” is the sound of her axe as she breaks down willow for the rigging and the lifts. The voice echos through the bamboo forests, intermingling with the sounds of fleeing beasts. “Bring to me men,” is the sound as years go by on the Dragon’s back, and new faces come in, as soldiers, slaves, or young men brought from Xiantian, but none of them familiar.
IN HER DREAMS she hears the faint and steady crackling of the forest, all in embers. The mountains are black and rising all around her. The Dragon’s voice sounds, “Work, and you’ll be fed!” and she begins collecting smoldering charcoal with her hands. Through the smoke-filled trees she sees the clouded outlines of other people, bending over in the flames. “How many of us are there?” she wonders, and she turns to find the wall now rising high above her head. There, hanging from a rising side, a boy is screaming desperately for his life. “Lei?” She calls to the boy, but the name is nothing but an absent breath. “LEI!” she screams as the child falls down, the air leaving her chest entirely as every piece of the world turns black.
SHE WATCHES the men as they control the fires. Overnight, the Dragon’s head became a black cloud spreading outwards from the ring of stones where she had slept. Now bright red flames spread along the edges of the ash, creeping slowly and destructively atop the hill. New faces, blackened from the smoke, lift her body from the embers. Four bricks high, and two bricks deep. She watches the new workers bury the dead and pick up where they left off. She notices the young faces as they lift her up, and stack the stones. How long have I been here? She lets her mind wander as the youngest of group comes to seal up the wall. She looks at him intently. The round curve of his chin, the softness of his eyes. The young man places the final brick; the sun is pulled away, and there in the dark she knows. My boy, I’ve finally found my boy!
Melting into Pink
Morris was junior investor at Brooks-Douglas. He was 43 years old, tall and slim, with muscles that couldn’t be seen beneath the felt jackets and cotton suits he’d wear to work. He’d been in that position - junior investor - for years, working 9-5 Monday through Friday, crunching numbers, making projections. He was good at it; as a matter of fact he’d obtained a highly analytical mind from all his years, and was arguably the most talented investor in the whole firm, though one might not know it judging by his disposition. Every day Morris would come into the office with a slight hunch in his posture, as though he were walking in from the cold, even during the summer. Beneath his felt hat he’d held a constant frame of imposition, a frown that hinted at a glum and rueful disposition. He wasn’t trying to have an image about him, but in middle age the frown just seemed to settle in his cheeks, hung beneath a delicate nose and resting on a close-shaved chin. He wasn’t an unattractive man; he oiled his gray hair and wore expensive suits, but still there was that look of disinterest to detract from everything else. Over the years he’d tried different tactics to make himself seem more congenial: a feather in his hat, forcing smiles at coworkers, or putting up photos of long-estranged family members on the edge of his desk, but none had the desired effect. He took to wearing pink ties, the kind with prints of roses or paisleys on the silk; the feathers and the family came and went, but as for pink ties he’d come to own a reputable collection.
Five days a week Morris would come into that office, hunched over slightly, place his hat on a rack and sit down at his desk, hammering out financial documents that would constitute men’s livelihoods, reduced efficiently to numbers and graphs. Now and again a colleague might look at those graphs and think “Damn, I never would’ve figured that out.” and they might say something in the break room like “I mean, you saw it right? It’s a shame that Morris isn’t much of a talker, ‘cause if he was, he’d have made partner ages ago.” In fact, Morris felt no need to be a senior investor. It was early in his career that he’d realized his life had a sort of double meaning, that he only worked his days to make it easy to live on nights. He didn’t care about the job, even though he was good at it, because it didn’t constitute a sense of “being”. The weekend was his one great love, offering the romance of another life. Come Saturday, Morris’ office would dissolve like sugar in hot flood of lights and music, and he would feel the universe align. She would shed her felt and cotton skin, revealing someone whole and new, confident and smiling, unequivocally alive. “The Queen!” they would announce, and she would strut into the spotlight, a vision of silk and feathers, big eyelashes and pink everything shining brilliantly on stage. A wave back to the band signals a theme, and she moves a smile just close enough to the microphone, cradled gently in the other hand. The piano vamps on two chords. “We have an excellent show for you tonight, folks. I know you like this song, so I hope you’ll sing it with me.”
Melting into Pink
Morris was junior investor at Brooks-Douglas. He was 43 years old, tall and slim, with muscles that couldn’t be seen beneath the felt jackets and cotton suits he’d wear to work. He’d been in that position - junior investor - for years, working 9-5 Monday through Friday, crunching numbers, making projections. He was good at it; as a matter of fact he’d obtained a highly analytical mind from all his years, and was arguably the most talented investor in the whole firm, though one might not know it judging by his disposition. Every day Morris would come into the office with a slight hunch in his posture, as though he were walking in from the cold, even during the summer. Beneath his felt hat he’d held a constant frame of imposition, a frown that hinted at a glum and rueful disposition. He wasn’t trying to have an image about him, but in middle age the frown just seemed to settle in his cheeks, hung beneath a delicate nose and resting on a close-shaved chin. He wasn’t an unattractive man; he oiled his gray hair and wore expensive suits, but still there was that look of disinterest to detract from everything else. Over the years he’d tried different tactics to make himself seem more congenial: a feather in his hat, forcing smiles at coworkers, or putting up photos of long-estranged family members on the edge of his desk, but none had the desired effect. He took to wearing pink ties, the kind with prints of roses or paisleys on the silk; the feathers and the family came and went, but as for pink ties he’d come to own a reputable collection.
Five days a week Morris would come into that office, hunched over slightly, place his hat on a rack and sit down at his desk, hammering out financial documents that would constitute men’s livelihoods, reduced efficiently to numbers and graphs. Now and again a colleague might look at those graphs and think “Damn, I never would’ve figured that out.” and they might say something in the break room like “I mean, you saw it right? It’s a shame that Morris isn’t much of a talker, ‘cause if he was, he’d have made partner ages ago.” In fact, Morris felt no need to be a senior investor. It was early in his career that he’d realized his life had a sort of double meaning, that he only worked his days to make it easy to live on nights. He didn’t care about the job, even though he was good at it, because it didn’t constitute a sense of “being”. The weekend was his one great love, offering the romance of another life. Come Saturday, Morris’ office would dissolve like sugar in hot flood of lights and music, and he would feel the universe align. She would shed her felt and cotton skin, revealing someone whole and new, confident and smiling, unequivocally alive. “The Queen!” they would announce, and she would strut into the spotlight, a vision of silk and feathers, big eyelashes and pink everything shining brilliantly on stage. A wave back to the band signals a theme, and she moves a smile just close enough to the microphone, cradled gently in the other hand. The piano vamps on two chords. “We have an excellent show for you tonight, folks. I know you like this song, so I hope you’ll sing it with me.”
The Aloha Bowl
I looked through my mom's old stuff a lot as a kid. I enjoyed it, digging through her boxes, finding relics of the past. I'd look through piles of old cassettes, 8-Tracks, and records that she'd packed away, just to see the pictures and words of their packaging. I'd find journals and photo albums and collections of old sunglasses; they were secrets, aspects of my mother that'd been hidden away. As far back as I can remember I've been a compulsive looker. I've always learned more about people through their things than from their speech or from their actions.
***
It was the beginning of fall, and I'd come from halfway across the country-- Phoenix, Arizona to the small town of Judsonia, Arkansas-- to spend some time sifting through her collected history. It was my intention to find some fuel for my writing, and her collection had grown inexorably since I was 7 years old. In fact, it had grown so much that with a dedicated hand I could lay its contents across the whole state of Arkansas and back. Don't misunderstand; it wasn't like my mother was hoarding or harboring any ill-natured neuroses that I can think of. It was just that she'd had three children, and more stepchildren, and honored their achievements in the form of storage space. I said that I was looking for something, but more fundamentally I was there to weed out less important items, to reduce her wealth to bare essentials. It would be a sensitive process; every piece of neon clothing, every messy finger painting was of exceptional importance in its own right, but we both knew it was time to let go of a few things.
"Pat, where did you move the box of my Army stuff?" Mom was stepping between boxes on the other side of the living room which had been converted to an archive after my arrival. I dragged every box out of storage, stacked and spread them out in a haphazard grid on the dusty carpet. There were three boxes that I labeled "ARMY", filled to the top with papers, letters, notebooks, uniforms, badges and pins, detailing her time working as a linguist in the United States military. "I want to find my Russian courses," she said. I've written about it before. My parents were both language experts for the Army when they were in their 20's, and Mom was at the top of her class. Digging through the second of those containers, would reveal that she earned the highest possible score on each of her military entrance exams, and was given her choice of several demanding jobs in military intelligence. She told me once that she was sold on being a linguist because the job involved spy work. "Pat," She said, "I was flying all over Russia. We were listening to phones and radios, and it was my job to translate whatever was being said. Isn't that cool?" She'd balk at her own self-importance, but I knew it was true: she was a real-world spy. I'd been impressed by that story, even into teenage years; I joined the Army at the same age that she did, with the same scores, and hopes were high for a glimpse of the spy life myself. "In the corner," I said with a right-handed gesture, the left still digging through a container of old binders and files. "I'm putting all the important boxes over there. I might write about that stuff."
It was a tougher job than I'd anticipated; the house was big and dusty, and dimly lit. Mom would come and go, not particularly interested in the process. "I don't see why we have to dig through everything," she said, unpacking a box containing the second half of my Harvard Classics. She'd bought the collection when she was 19, she told me, and sent half of them to me as a care package while I was in college. I don't remember it, but she used to read them to me when I was a kid. She read them all, and on occasion I would talk to her about the stories and their critics. That was something people couldn't know about her by looking. She worked as a manager in a cigarette store in Arkansas. People didn't read books other than the Bible around those parts, and she wasn't exactly used to educated company; nobody in her town would think to ask her if she'd read Tennyson to Whitman or what she'd thought if it. They couldn't know that Christina Georgina Rosetti's Song had been a favorite, or that she'd leave notes between the pages.
Arkansas is an educational desert, and Judsonia is its Death Valley. Not a single institution of higher education for 20 miles around, and so she never pursued a degree. We bonded nonetheless, talking about books, and music, and poetry. She was the creative type, and I've never questioned that my sentimentality was a gift from her side of the family. She deserved time and space to be creative, with other creative people. Year after year I would go through the same selfish process of trying to convince her to move out of Arkansas, get a degree, and get a job that was worth her time, but it was too late to upend what she had built. She'd become structurally incapable of change.
My mother was married three times officially, and two more times in common-law. The first was to my father, after the birth of my older brother, Michael. Following my brother's entry into the world, Mom had to cut the spy life short, resolving herself to be a homemaker-- an Army wife. Anyone who has met an Army wife before could tell you that there's something peculiar in their manners. Usually these women are dependents: homemakers living on a single military salary, keeping the bed warm while their husbands are sniffing out landmines in Iraq, or firing million dollar surface to air missiles in Afghanistan. They're inordinately proud. They talk and talk about their husbands and about supporting the troops, and how great it is to be married to a man that could be killed any day; it's annoying at times, intensely neurotic at others. My mother never wanted to be an Army wife, and she resisted gloriously, only until the reality of three children had set in. It's a shame really, since I'm not an advocate of having children in the first place, and it seems that now is as good a place as any to mention it. While I would love to tell the story of how my mother might have continued a military career, working the linguistical spy game until a promotion and early retirement, eventually becoming an executive administrator for the CIA (as would fit her nature perfectly), that version of things would unfortunately be a fiction. Instead, the laborsome process of carrying and birthing a child had gotten in the way, rendering her useless to the world of war and international subversion.
As they say, one thing dies, and another emerges: three children in exchange for an opportunity cost, the potential of her military career. People tend to contest each other in matters of the heart, weighing the scales of love and ambition to make their soundest judgments, but as I looked over the boxes of stuff that she'd collected, I could only imagine what grand contents might have been packed away if things could have been different for her. Could she have fully lived her life, unfettered and free from the duties of motherhood? Unduly exalted as they are.
Thumbing through a bundle of notes, a thin stack of photos slipped from the bottom of what looked to be a high school composition course, scattering across the floor. They were all old polaroids with descriptions written on the back. "What are these?" I said, straightening the pile. Mom was in the kitchen, humming along with the radio-- it was playing Steely Dan. She looked at the stack of photos in my hands and I witnessed a subtle excitement rushing to her cheeks. "Wow, where'd you find those?" She smiled, "I haven't seen those pictures in years." There was one in particular that stood out: a young girl, maybe sixteen or seventeen, with long brown hair dressed in a chorale outfit, black pants with a white blouse, holding a microphone in both hands, almost like a prayer. She stood on green grass, surrounded by orange and pink, people in bleachers. It was my mother when she was in high school, singing the national anthem.
"Do you know where that was?" She said, sitting down on the living room step. "When I was a little girl, my class went to Hawaii to sing at a choir conference. Well Pat, we did really well, and I was chosen, from like, hundreds of singers, to sing the national anthem at the Aloha Bowl. Can you believe that? You may not know it, but your momma was once a pretty good singer." She was proud, and I couldn't blame her. I was amazed, and I told her so myself. She gave a reminiscent sigh, "You should have seen it, Pat. It was so beautiful, the whole thing. That was the happiest moment of my life."
I'd found what I was looking for. I told her I'd go back to my hotel, that we could continue in the morning. "Ok, sweetheart, I think I'm gonna make some food and watch TV." She was still going through boxes. "OH! Do you remember these?" she picked up a painting of a turkey from when my sister and I were toddlers. "You two were so cute." I was already on my way out the door. "Ok," she said after me. "I'll see you tomorrow. I love you." Those last few words were always sung, ever since I was a kid. She'd put a sweetened inflection at the end, drawing it out, making it personal. "I love you too, Mom." I was out the door to the car park, and I locked it behind me.
***
The sun was going down, and the sky turned orange and green on the horizon. On my way out of town, I stopped at the Safeway. I picked up pink oleander and gardenias from the garden section. It was a special request, and they had to be pulled from the other bouquets. The cashier asked if they were a favorite of my wife or a special gift. I said, "They're Hawaiian flowers. They make leis out of them." I bought my dinner and headed out. I watched the sun go down from Evergreen Cemetery across from the elementary school on Judson Ave. She was in the back, away from the road, a two-minute walk from the parking lot. When I arrived there were pink clouds stretching out, just above the trees-- the flowers matched them perfectly. The bouquet was set down at the marble stone, between two tea lights that I'd lit the night before. I'd brought her flowers every day since the funeral, but today I had a gift. I unfolded the photo from my back pocket. In the light of the sunset I could see her smiling, singing to the world in the most beautiful place on earth. On the back of the polaroid, it read: "Polly, National Anthem, Aloha Bowl 1987." I placed it neatly between the flowers, and called my brother to tell him what I'd found.
The Dragon Speaks
THE DRAGON SPEAKS in a voice that overwhelms, confounds, and then destroys. “Build! Work!” cries the foreman! A boy cries from the scaffolding, is shushed and pulled away by an older man. Another worker lies dead and bloody, crushed beneath the stone. The Dragon bellows, and the men are shaken to their bones. “Bury him! Then back to work!” the foreman calls, and lashes break the midday air. “Work, and you’ll be fed! Your duty is to the emperor!”
I am the great destroyer. Bring to me mountains; I will break them into pieces. Bring to me trees, and they will feed my flame immortal. Bring to me men, and I will make them into stone and bones. I am the great destroyer, the dragon of the hills. Bring what I desire, and in return I will bring glory to your name.
A MOTHER COMES looking for her boy. “You took him from me! In Zhonghu Village, 4 months ago, you took him! Where is my son?” She screams in anger, pushing the guards, surrounded by faceless men, soldiers and peasants. All along the stony path, from Dandong to Jinshanling, she’d traced the Dragon’s back. “Not here ma’am,” a man replies. His hands and face were painted black from carrying charcoal along the wall. “Perhaps down there? The soldiers bring in more men every day; they’re sent to move the stone.” He points to the bottom of the steep grade, where tiny men swarmed like ants atop the wall. Large gray bricks are scattered at its end, where the Dragon’s head lies incomplete. She thanks the man for his suggestion, but her hope has reached its limits. As night closes upon her she sees the fires lit along the wall, the largest at the Dragon’s mouth. Her feet are tired from the miles and the weight of her pack, and the threads of her sandals begin to break. Upon arrival to the scattered stones, she looks at the many faces lit by the roaring fire. She sees the dullness of their eyes and the longness of their faces, but there is no recognition. “If not here, then where?” She thinks to herself. She sleeps among the rocks, surrounding by a multitude of strangers. In a dream, or perhaps a nightmare, the voice of the Dragon comes to her.
Your boy is mine- look at my bones. You’ve come to claim what’s long been eaten. See my scales, how they ripple like man’s blood? Ten thousand men have come before you, and now lie buried in their folds. You’ve come so far to look for him, to beg for me to give him back, but your efforts are misguided and uninformed. Run from me little mouse, and you might live to see starvation. Your tiny bones won’t make good stone---your thin blood is not worthy of my fire. Go from me and forget your boy, or be consumed in tooth and claw.
IN THE MORNING there is only smoke. She awakes to the hand of a young guard, maybe eighteen years old, pushing softly on her shoulder. “Lei?” She asks, the name of her son, wiping the sleep from her eyes and lifting herself on one arm. The guard speaks to her in a conciliatory tone. “No, ma’am. My name in Yin... You shouldn’t be here.” Her story, for perhaps the hundredth time in recent days, is told again. The soldiers took her boy, and she’d come looking. She notices the sympathy in the soldier’s eyes. While he speaks to her he gives her food, but what he says comes as a grave and unfortunate truth. “You have no food, no shelter, and no money. You’ve come very far, but now where will you go? Zhongu Village is much too far, even by horse; I’m afraid that you’ll surely starve before you reach it.” She wants to cry, but there are no tears. “Your boy isn’t here,” he says, consoling her, “but there’s still work to be done; I can’t speak for what lies ahead, but I know that there’s food paid for duty to the emperor.”
THE WOMAN IS put to work, closing the distance between the horizon and the Dragon’s head. “Bring to me mountains,” is the voice in her head as she carries the heavy stones, and she wonders if the others can hear it too. “Bring to me trees,” is the sound of her axe as she breaks down willow for the rigging and the lifts. The voice echos through the bamboo forests, intermingling with the sounds of fleeing beasts. “Bring to me men,” is the sound as years go by on the Dragon’s back, and new faces come in, as soldiers, slaves, or young men brought from Xiantian, but none of them familiar.
IN HER DREAMS she hears the faint and steady crackling of the forest, all in embers. The mountains are black and rising all around her. The Dragon’s voice sounds, “Work, and you’ll be fed!” and she begins collecting smoldering charcoal with her hands. Through the smoke-filled trees she sees the clouded outlines of other people, bending over in the flames. “How many of us are there?” she wonders, and she turns to find the wall now rising high above her head. There, hanging from a rising side, a boy is screaming desperately for his life. “Lei?” She calls to the boy, but the name is nothing but an absent breath. “LEI!” she screams as the child falls down, the air leaving her chest entirely as every piece of the world turns black.
SHE WATCHES the men as they control the fires. Overnight, the Dragon’s head became a black cloud spreading outwards from the ring of stones where she had slept. Now bright red flames spread along the edges of the ash, creeping slowly and destructively atop the hill. New faces, blackened from the smoke, lift her body from the embers. Four bricks high, and two bricks deep. She watches the new workers bury the dead and pick up where they left off. She notices the young faces as they lift her up, and stack the stones. How long have I been here? She lets her mind wander as the youngest of group comes to seal up the wall. She looks at him intently. The round curve of his chin, the softness of his eyes. The young man places the final brick; the sun is pulled away, and there in the dark she knows. My boy, I’ve finally found my boy!
Space
From Earth we see Orion, Polaris, The North Star, and so many major or minor constellations. As long as I’ve been alive, they’ve been there too, parading in the night sky like pinholes through a paper shade, arranged at jarring angles, like a color by numbers painting or some childish piece of art. I sit in the fields outside my house, tracing patterns through breaks in the clouds. I remember an article that I read online about another star system only 4 or so light-years away from the Earth, and how it said that if we (the human race) were to somehow decimate our planet’s resources, space travel might be so advanced that we could uproot our civilization and move it to Alpha Centauri. Spectacular, I think to myself. But I drift from practicality. What about life? The article told me we’re well beyond the question of existence, so what's the word on what the rest of the universe thinks of our big plan? Are other species looking at us right now and cursing under their breath, saying "I swear to God, if they think they're coming here..."
Who knows.
I'd love to think the people of some far-off corner of the galaxy might have their own constellations in the sky: incorruptible depictions of what life might be, the precursors to life itself. How amazing, that the Earth has been staring at the Pleiades for centuries, just as the life holed up in that cluster of stars might see us too---staring back out in interminable space, thinking about Earth in that same forlorn way. How incredible, that the distance between planets can be shortened with the stuff of dreams.
If it weren't for the cold, I'd stargaze for eternity.