“It would not be until darkness had taken indisputable control over the land, until the flames of the bonfire created an unreal world of shadows, until tequila and mescal untied men from their somber selves.”

― Warren Eyster, The Goblins of Eros

My Hovercraft is Full of Eels

Willard Waters had an undergraduate degree in accounting. He thought of himself as being an accountant’s accountant. After spending a couple of years at a desk staring at a spreadsheet to the left and a calculator spewing a long spiral of paper tape to the right he decided to go to law school. Now he was still an accountant’s accountant but he was also a lawyer’s lawyer.

He rode the foundation’s car service into a sketchy run-down industrial part of town that he had never been in before. The car disgorged him on the sidewalk and drove off. The driver knew a favorite burger joint nearby and would wait there for a call.

Waters looked at the rusty hulking warehouse in front of him and found the heavy steel door. Off to the side was a button and a small speaker. He frowned at the sign on the door:

Sacha Row
Sculptress Extraordinaire
“My Hovercraft is Full of Eels”

“What the hell does that mean?” Waters mumbled to himself. He smoothed the fabric of his expensive suit, adjusted his tie, and pushed the button. Almost immediately a voice crackled from the speaker, “Com on in, it’s not locked.”

He tugged, the door squeaked and gave way, opening into a dark, vast space filled with smoke. Waters coughed and entered. He knew the smoke wasn’t tobacco. Some sort of a massive sound system spewed out the deafening beats of overamplified electronic dance music. As his eyes grew used to the dim light the first thing he saw was a massive, lumpy pile of grayish clay heaped up in the middle of the room. He knew that must be the sculpture in question. It didn’t look like it was very close to being finished.

Waters looked around and spotted a group of three men sitting on a huge overstuffed couch. On a table made of a big wooden cable reel sat a massive hookah and a collection of plastic bongs filled with dark water. A galvanized five gallon bucket of ice and studded with bottles of beer leaked a puddle of water onto the concrete floor. Two women stood in front of the men, eyes closed, dancing to the pulsing rhythm of the loud music.

“Are either of you two Sacha Row?” Waters shouted at the dancing women. They ignored him.

“Sacha? Naw… She’s in the back,” said the guy in the middle of the couch.

“You wanna talk to her?” said the guy on the left.

“Sacha! Some guy out here wants to talk to you! Sacha!” yelled the guy on the right. He had quite a pair of lungs on him… he was able to out-shout the music.

“Jeez, Doc, I heard you the first time, who’all is here to see me?” Sacha said as she walked out of an office at the back of the space.

Waters felt his jaw drop and a warm pit form in his stomach when he saw her. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. “Sacha Row?” he managed to choke out.

“That’s me!” she said as she walked directly up to him. On the way, past the ice bucket, she leaned over with incredible grace and pulled out a bottle.

“Ms. Row… I am a lawyer and a forensic accountant here representing the Wintringham Foundation concerning the sizeable grant you received for the sculpture commission. The schedule is vastly past due and,” he said gesturing at the mass of clay, “the product doesn’t seem to be in a deliverable condition.”

“Well, first, call me Sasha, please, and second… well, great art can’t be rushed.”

“Umm… Sasha, we have noticed that you have withdrawn the majority of the funds allocated for bronze casting has been withdrawn… prematurely…”

“I’m not sure if either of us are in a mood to talk business right now… So, here, have a swig,” she said as she handed him the bottle. He realized it wasn’t beer – but some sort of cheap Mescal. In a trance, Waters raised the bottle. The liquid burned like liquid lava and he coughed as he swallowed. Sasha grabbed the bottle from him, stuck the neck into her mouth and tipped her head back. Waters watched as she held it there with the bottle sticking straight up, upside down. He was the worm sink slowly down through the clear alcohol, into the neck of the bottle, until it disappeared between Sasha Row’s lips. There was a gulp and a pulse in her throat… and the worm was gone.

Willard Walters was hopelessly in love. It was no use. He also realized that Sasha knew it too. He took another big, deep burning drink.

“Now, Willard,” Sasha said, “We’ve been using the money for a little ongoing party here… and we don’t see any reason to stop. Don’t you agree?”

Waters nodded. He took another drink. He stared at the hookah on the table. But one thought suddenly pushed into his consciousnesses.

“Sasha, you know that no matter what I do, they’ll send someone else.”

“I know. They’ve sent others before. You are not the first.”

“But what happened with them?”

Sasha Row merely gestured at the three men on the couch.

“If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.”

― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

One day he said he picked up a “warning.”
“What did you do?”
“I dunno.”
“Did you forget to raise your hand?”
“Nope”
“Did you break a rule?”
“Yeah, that’s it. I must have broke a rule. If you break a rule, you get in trouble. I got in trouble, so I must have broke a rule.”
“Do you remember what rule you broke?”
“Nope.”

He went on to say he didn’t like it when somebody was in trouble
“Cause the teacher STARES at us!”
A demonstration was made of the teacher’s stare, eyes narrowed, brows lowered, forehead slightly knotted.

It was pretty scary.

“As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”

― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, the Whale

Emprise

The thing is, in an isolated tiny town like New Solace, thrown out there lonely in the ice cold windswept plains, there weren’t very many opportunities to meet someone that you might desire. Anyone was lucky to find one. Stan and Emilia were lucky, but there was no other choice. Since they were infants, born on opposite sides of town yet less than a mile away, seven days apart, it was assumed they would grow up to be a couple. Not because of any imagined or real compatibility of their personalities, but because there simply was nobody else.

They married the day after they graduated from high school. Neither of them had ever seen the ocean so for their honeymoon they went to a warm, humid coastal town and decided never to go back to New Solace, even if it was home and they were needed at harvest time.

Stan found work stocking the shelves at a hardware store and Emilia worked in the grade school cafeteria, making huge pots of mashed potatoes and gravy. “Gravy?” she’d ask the children in front of her as they moved through the line with their trays with the already-filled ladle in her hand. They would make fun of her accent that had floated a thousand miles down from the far north. She came home from work hours before Stan and one day, she was waiting for him in front of their apartment building.

“Come walk with me, I’ve bought something,” she said. They had always been very proud of their apartment, although it was too small, cheap, and rundown… it was only a block from the ocean. There was a litter-spoiled bit of beach and a small marina – as cheap and rundown as their apartment. Emilia led Stan to the marina and asked him to close his eyes.

“What? I don’t want to fall off the dock.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got your arm.”

They walked out over the water and then Emilia let Stan open his eyes. There was a moldy looking sailboat, resting at a slight angle in the water, tied to the Marina with old, greenish ropes.

“What do you think?” she said.

“What does this have to do with us?”

“I bought it,” she said, “While you were at work. Don’t worry, it was a great deal, we can afford it.”

“But what?”

“It’s a Catalina 22, a very common boat. We can fix it up, parts are available and cheap. We can go on an adventure.”

And that’s what they did. Stan was very handy with tools and had a nice discount at the hardware store where he worked. He scraped and painted and varnished and replaced. It was a lot of work and took almost a year but slowly the boat began to look like a shiny new vessel. Emila wasn’t very good with her hands and she figured her part was the planning stages. She was constantly looking up destinations and strategies. After consulting a bulky thesaurus she announced they would name the boat “Emprise.” Stan made a note to himself to look word up and see what it meant – but he never did.

“I think we need to sign up for sailing lessons,” said Stan.

“Naw, we don’t need that.”

“I think we do, they are available at the yacht club,” said Stan.

“Why? All that stuff is available online.”

The boat was gleaming, supposedly seaworthy, and almost finished. Stan took a few days off for the final touches. The afternoon was warm and he was exhausted when he fell asleep in the small cabin. He woke feeling the boat moving in an odd way and stuck his head out up and looked around. All he could see was waves. The sails overhead were out and Emilia was at the tiller grinning from ear to ear.

“While you were asleep, I decided to take ‘er out.”

“Where are we going?”

“I figured we’d do a loop, find an anchorage for the night.”

“But you don’t know what you’re doing!”

“It’s simple.”

But it wasn’t. Emilia wasn’t even sure how to read the compass – it wasn’t nearly as stable as it was in the instructional videos she had watched. The wind kept switching directions and getting stronger and stronger.

“Did you check the weather?” asked Stan.

“Why? Not a cloud in the sky.”

“There is now.”

They never found an anchorage and had to sail blindly into the night. In the pitch blackness the wind and waves rose and rose until they were caught in a full-fledged storm. The hot rain poured down and the warm sea flung itself up until the boat felt like it was being ground to pieced between the two and propelled by the wind over the edge of the world. Stan was beyond terrified and resigned to death several times. Luckily, in the darkness he could not see the eternal grin plastered across Emilia’s face and he would misinterpret her whoops of joy as cries of terror.

Stan woke to the morning heat of the rising sun to the confusion of feeling an odd texture under his body. He realized it was sand and he had been thrown onto a beach next to the broken sailboat.

“Stan, wake up!” Emilia was walking around, seemingly no worse for wear.

“We’re on an island,” she said. “I thought I’d let you sleep. I’ve been walking around, and it looks like there’s a house a bit down the shore. There’s smoke coming out of the chimney.”

Stan had never felt such a weary pain in every bone as he hauled himself up and walked with Emilia to the house about a mile from where they boat had floundered.

They knocked on the door and an older woman answered right away.

“Come on in, I have some coffee and breakfast,” she said as if they were expected.

The woman was Alice and she had lived on the island for ten years, five alone, since her husband has passed away. They walked together down the beach and looked long and hard at the boat but it was beyond salvage.

“Shame,” Alice said. “It looked like such a nice little boat. Can’t be helped, though.”

“But what can we do now?” asked Stan.

“Well, for one thing, you can stay here as long as you need to, or want to. I can use a handyman to keep up with repairs, the yahoos that come out from the mainland are all useless or thieves. There’s plenty of room. Plenty to eat. I can use some company.”

“Sounds great,” said Emilia.

“But we were looking for an adventure,” said Stan.

“But, you see, there are more ways to have an adventure than to go off across the world,” replied Alice.

“The haft of the arrow had been feathered with one of the eagles own plumes. We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.”

― Aesop

Hummingbird

There was this old, old guy – he was my neighbor and my landlord. I rented half of a duplex and he lived by himself in the other half and owned the whole thing.

We used to talk in the back. It was a covered carport back there and I set up all of my weight lifting iron under the overhang by the alley. I’d spend a couple hours each day out there jacking steel and he’d waddle up when I was finishing for a chat.

He talked about how his wife and kids were killed in a car accident years ago. He said they had a really nice house but he couldn’t stand living there because it reminded him too much of them. He sold it and bought the duplex, “So that it would bring in a little money.”

I think he bought the duplex because he was lonely. Fine with me, I didn’t mind the chat and the rent was cheap.

The old guy was weird. He kept the yard immaculate. He had this ancient aircraft-carrier sized car that he hardly ever drove. It sat there so long that one day when he decided to drive it to the station and put some gas in it he came back in a panic.

“I’ve forgotten where the gas cap is!” he told me.

I looked at the model and year and went to the internet.

“It’s behind the left rear brake light, the left when you are facing the front. The light swings to the side.”

He was grateful for the help and amazed that I could find that out on my phone.

He was always buying hummingbird feeders and putting them all over the back of his half of the house. Some looked like bulgy flowers, some like bottles, some like dishes. He’d fill them with sugar water or red powdered stuff he bought. He did this for years and never, ever saw a hummingbird. It was crazy.

Then one day, I was pumping iron and he came out all excited. He could barely contain himself.

“I saw one,” he said.

“One what?”

“A hummingbird.”

He died the next day. He collapsed on his front walk going out to get the mail. I was at work, a neighbor saw him. They said he was probably dead before he hit the pavement. I guess it was good he snuffed it out front like that – if he had died in his sleep God knows how long it would have been before anyone would have checked on him. I know I wouldn’t have.

Still, I felt bad. I read about his funeral and thought about going. I was nervous because I figured there would be nobody else there. He always talked about how he had nobody left. Then I decided to go anyway. There was a handful of us… the lawn guy, the neighbor, his lawyer, some strange woman standing off by herself….

It was a graveside service. As they lowered the coffin, we saw it. It was amazing. It was like a cloud or a column of smoke, but multi colored. And it moved on its own. Flowing and pulsing, changing shape, growing round then stretching out. The lawyer said something about “Murmuration.” I had never heard that word before… I thought it had something to do with the sound (now I know better, I Iooked it up) which was more like a high-pitched buzzing that a murmur.

It was on the news, it was in all the papers, someone shot a video and it went viral. There were interviews with experts, professors, zoo people and they all were perplexed. Nobody had ever seen hummingbirds behave like that before. Literally millions of them had come from miles and miles to form that huge cloud.

“I have never seen hummingbirds cooperate in a social way,” one expert said, “Especially when you take into consideration that there were several different species involved.”

None of them made the connection that the birds were in a changing formation, a performance, over the cemetery.

The lawyer told me there was a will and that the old man had left me the duplex. I’ll rent the other side out, and get the lawn guy to keep the landscape up really nice; he gave me his card at the funeral. I went next door and collected all the hummingbird feeders and moved them to my side.

I have to make up barrels of sugar water now. Hundreds of those birds show up every day.

“My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that’s it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I’d loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.”

― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

The Meano Tower

Theo crawled through another long plastic tube, suspended high in the air. It was too narrow for comfort, designed for people much younger than him. He paused, slowed by something that smelled bad, stale, rank. He wondered what it was until he realized it was him. Theo had been crawling through the maze of tubes and little rooms for so long that he had sweated through his clothes and stunk in the still air of the tubes.

It seemed like a long time ago that he had brought his two kids to the newest craze in children’s amusements, the Nossos Adventure Labyrinth. They paid at the door and were given matching numbered wristbands.

“It’s a safety feature,” the scrawny teenager in a bilious uniform said, “A child can only leave with an adult that has a matching wristband.”

Properly labeled, they all walked through the gigantic cube to the entryway at the center. Theo marveled at the complexity of the overhead mass of interlocking passageways, mesh-sided rooms, and aerial ball-pits that rose high and filled the place. Everything was hung from the ceiling, high above, by thick steel struts. It shook with the weight of children moving through the construction. There was one entrance at the center where kids were pouring through the plastic arch and several exits at the end of brightly colored slides disgorging children, who would run to the center and repeat.

His two kids disappeared into the massive throng and Theo retreated to the “Quiet Room” off to one side. It was glassed-in, elevated, soundproof, and guarded by a sign that said “No Children Allowed.” This was the retreat from the insanity for harrowed parents – Theo realized that this room was the attraction that drew the adults – the ones that paid for everything.

Theo settled into an overstuffed chair, let out a sigh of relief, and began thumbing through a magazine that sat on a side table, “Luxury Yachting.” He knew he would never own a yacht, never even have the opportunity to be on a yacht, but he could dream. His relaxation was interrupted by a loud rapping on the window right next to him. Startled, he realized that his kids, Daevin and Icobod had piled up all the foam exercise pads, climbed on top, and were beating on the window.

Aggravated, Theo walked down the stairs from the Quiet Room and demanded an explanation.

“You need to climb into there with us,” said Daevin.

“We’re scared,” said Icobod.

“The kids say there is something in there,” continued Daeven.

“They call it the Meano Tower,” said Icobod.

“That’s crazy, go back in and play.”

“Please, dad. Come in with us. We’re scared.”

Theo thought for a minute, looked for a sign that said, “No Parents Allowed in the Tubes,” and didn’t find one – so he gave in. He even admitted to himself that it might be a little bit of fun. They never had anything like that when he was a kid. His father with his famous dignity would never stoop to doing something childish like that and if it was something his father wouldn’t do – then it must be worth doing.

He crawled into the entrance and tried to keep up with his two kids as the tunnels rose up and up. There were little mesh-walled rooms with padded floors and Theo would rest in those, catch his breath, while troops of excited kids moved through in different directions.

Other rooms, connected by the plastic tunnels were full of colorful, hollow, plastic balls. The sign out front said, “All Balls Washed Continuously.” He saw how pipes in the bottom of the pits would suck plastic balls out and down through clear tubes to a central machine that sprayed the balls with water in a big transparent hopper, then dry them in a stream of air before sending them back in a second set of tubes to drop down through the ceiling of the ball pit rooms. It was like a giant circulatory system, with clear plastic arteries and veins moving round plastic corpuscles back and forth.

He watched this hypnotic cycle through the mesh of one of the rooms until he realized he had lost his children… or rather they had run off and left him.

Calling their names he worked his way around and across the tangle of spaces, looking for the both of them. He was also looking for one of the plastic slides so he could get down and out – but didn’t have any luck with that either.

Theo had no idea of how long this went on. Finally, the number of other kids that moved through the spaces began to thin out frighteningly fast, until he was practically alone. He yelled out through the mesh of the rooms but nobody seemed to hear him. Finally, the lights went out, leaving Theo in a dim, dark, panic.

He had no idea where his kids had gone. They could not leave without him and his matching wrist band – though the scraggy teenager at the entrance didn’t seem like the most secure of guards. How could they leave him? How could they not miss him? Then he thought of how complex, massive, and high the place was, how loud, and realized one adult, unexpected in the tubes, might easily go unnoticed.

Theo finally stopped in one of the rooms and gave up. His elbows were torn and pained from all the crawling and he was sweaty, hungry, and out of breath. As he sat there, hunched over, he thought about what the kids had said. What was the Meano Tower? Kid’s imaginations are so vivid.

But then he heard the roaring. And it began to get louder, and he feared, closer.

“I shall remain on Mars and read a book.”

― Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man

Long Fall

Elissa told her counselor that she dreamed of falling – dreamed of it all the time.

“I’m falling from a great, great height.”

“Well, dreams of falling are very, very common.”

“I know.”

“Are you afraid?”

“No, of course not. No matter how far I fall in my dream it won’t be nearly as far as I’ve fallen in real life.”

“You’ve fallen in real life? How far?”

“All the way from Mars.”

“Mars? The planet?”

“Yes, it is my home. I slipped and fell one day and kept falling, through the atmosphere, through the millions of miles of empty space, and ended up here, on earth.”

The counselor scribbled pages of mad notes.

I knew Elissa because she hired me to cut her lawn. She said her neighbors had told her to hire someone to cut the lawn and one of them suggested me. I cut a handful of lawns in her neighborhood, but nobody was like her. Not at all. She told me what her counselor asked and what her answer was.

“Why do you see a counselor?” I asked.

“I feel… alienated.”

“Why do you feel alienated?”

“Probably because I’m an alien.”

She would watch me cut the lawn and get down on her hands and knees and look at the sliced ends of the blades of grass.

“Doesn’t it hurt them?”

“No, I don’t think so. Grass – in its natural state – is designed to be snipped off. Animals eat it and then fertilize it in turn. This sort of takes the place of a natural occurrence.”

“We don’t have grass on Mars.”

I asked her why nobody ever saw anybody or any signs of life on the red planet.

“There are rovers there now,” I said.

“I know. It’s a pain in the ass. We are very shy. Even though we live underground, we have to sweep up our footprints in the dust.”

“Are you nervous about the helicopter?”

“It’s not very big. It’s more of a toy. But someday we will have to do something.”

“What will you do?”

“Something.”

That’s as much as Elissa will tell me. I’m only the guy that cuts the lawn, after all.