Return to the Labyrinth

[Note: this has been poorly received. Too boring, evidently, with (still) clumsy scene transitions, and (sheesh) too many big words.]

Leon Jordan traced the steps back from the office and through the waiting room, mindful of any unexpected topology that may have developed since he came in. Concentrating on his gait, he did not think to suppress the furtive roving of his eyes as they inspected his immediate geometric environment, not that there was anyone in the lobby to notice. Furthermore, Doctor Reide's business was laid out in a simple, open fashion (positively a requirement for Leon's patronage), which, judging by the dust, hadn't been jogged out of shape for many years, and this patient was more willing than usual to stake some faith in the permanence of it. Most of his attention gravitated to the door at the end of it then, the entrance to this little burrow in space he'd allowed himself to tumble into, and it loomed larger with each of Leon's measured paces. He pushed on, the portal growing before him, menacing.

He held his breath and closed his eyes as he passed, but once outside, nothing seemed changed. His shoulders fell back to their customary slump, and he crookedly wandered his way out of the little town, back to his tidy ditch by the bridge.

Leon Jordan was a homeless man. Unlike perhaps many homeless men, he was sober and relatively well groomed, keeping his brown beard and hair as neatly trimmed as could be managed with a mirror and scissors. The requisite ragged coat and stocking cap of the hobo adorned him in their season, but a memory of dignity and cleanliness still hung about his person. The children in town were aware of his nervous walks through the streets twice a week, but he was not quite strange enough, and perhaps not obviously defective enough, to suffer their taunts. Ultimately, there was something that was just ignorable about Leon, and, truth be told, he didn't notice others much either.

He had been visiting Dr. Reide for about a year, having discovered the practice during his last desperate search for himself. The biweekly appointment was not a particularly drastic move in Leon's twisted chess match with his environment, but the necessary journey through well-defined portals like the office door was always handled with high caution. If he were careful enough about his trips into town, he reasoned, he'd merely untangle whatever path through the cosmos he'd strung together for the visit, and return, at the end, exactly at his launching point, the little gully by the culvert. And as tracability went, Reide's office was better than, say, the post office where Leon picked up his Social Security check every month. The old doctor never had any other clients that Leon could tell, and the course remained as immutable as possible in his absence.

The session that day consisted of its usual mixture of boredom and alarming possibility. Reide, a pallid and squishy old man with a senile grin, didn't offer judgments, and didn't push his client through any horrifying trials of behavioral therapy or drugs (also inviolable requirements for Leon's business), but most typically meandered his way through a conversation on the topic of Leon's unusual notions, frequently entertaining their veracity. Though most of the cost of the therapy was covered by taxpayers, Reide frequently didn't even remember (or maybe didn't bother) to charge at all for Leon's portion, (which, while not strictly one of Leon's precepts, was a nice touch).

"So, a knot hmm?" Reide had been saying, "A knot, you say. Your life. I like this metaphor."

Leon felt he needed to talk to someone about these issues, and Dr. Reide, though paid for it, was someone. The visits were his closest thing to a regular friendship, and outside of the occasional terrifying trips to the other places where he needed to transact life, the closest thing to a professional relationship as well. The old man was Leon's last tenuous link to a lost normalcy.

"It's not just a knot," Leon said. "Everyone's life is a knot. But mine is different. Something went wrong with mine, and I don't think it was my fault."

"...like we're twisting our way through space, eh? A knot...do you think you can unwind it?"

Leon was not prepared for the question. "Untangle it? I don't know."

"Tell me about the doors," Reide went on, turning to look at Leon for the first time in their session. He parted his tobacco-blemished lips in an inarticulate smile.

"Again?"

"Please."

"Well, look, so life's a knot, right? And here we are stringing ourselves along like that guy in that maze story."

"Theseus? Hmm."

"Yeah, so here we are like Theseus, dangling our lives behind us like rat's tails. We're spinning out these strings, and we're tangling them up in all kinds of stuff. If you go through a door and then another door, it kind of gets knotted up around the jambs. If that door manages to go away before you get back into it, then you're in trouble. You can't unknot it then. If it were somehow possible to find your way back through all of the portals you go through in your life, then you'd make a perfect circle from birth to death, but it gets tangled up instead." Leon's brow was becoming slick.

"A knot in four dimensions, eh? And you can't go anywhere..."

Leon sweated, eyes wide.

"But isn't this the case for everyone? Everyone goes through doors. Are yours different? And isn't the damage done? How do you know?"

"It's different. Yeah, it's like that, but me, I'm in the wrong place, you know? Something happened. Wrong door or something, like Scooby Doo running into one closet and coming out across the hall. But I came out in a whole different building. I'm in the wrong life, dammit, and I'm stuck here."

"I don't like that metaphor nearly as much," replied Dr. Reide. "Are you sure the knot as bad as you think it is?"

Leon stood up, the chair clattering behind him. "I don't know, maybe we could get up above the maze somehow, and make some sense of all that played out twine. If we didn't tie ourselves down to it. Maybe if it was unfolded in just the right way, and we were looking at it from just the right angle, it would all work out, you know? It would make sense."

"Interesting." Rising with effort to meet his client, Reide extended his soft bloated hand to Leon's wiry one. "I think that that is enough for today. We should continue this thought of yours in our next session." And with that, Leon was out through the horrible door, and on his way back to where he lived.

As Leon attended the usual tricky navigation back to the bridge, he was conscious of all sorts of unintentional portals, anything that managed to bound the world on four sides and through which he could pass. He never understood how people managed to wander through life unaware of the maze that is circumscribed directly over their heads. Apparently they were unimpressed with the dangers of passing through archways, doorways, and the ubiquitous warren of power cables on their winding journey through the day. Every one of these holes was a door (and could be the door), and who knew which one (or how many) Leon himself had crossed to get attached to this miserable plane, away from his lamented life. And who knew where the next portal would take him?

As he trudged along his route to the bridge, entering the spare, dry countryside, there were fewer and fewer of these potential egresses. He constantly checked the space overhead to acknowledge every one of those inadvertent doors that could lead him down a rabbit hole, and he carefully re-navigated his way back through those few he'd been forced to pass on his journey in.

Slowly, Leon made his way along the highway until he got to the culvert where he made a home, his private shelter from the wind, with its little fire pit and his meager possessions bundled up neatly next to the concrete. There, he slept in a bag that came up to his chin, supposing that if he ever fell into the hole of it, he could readily re-emerge. He had a smaller collection of things on the other side of the highway, for when the wind blew the other way. He never considered walking through the pipe to get there.

He nudged his bags aside, and pushed himself up against the abutment, shivering in his heavy coat though it wasn't particularly cold. No, it wasn't supposed to be like this. The doctor's talk of old stories was, like so much else, a source of intense discomfort to Leon. It took him back, dragged up memories of things lost and once taken for granted. When the fall came, it had been very quick. Everything stopped making sense, and the trajectory of his life was suddenly aiming much lower. Over the course of a month he'd changed from a promising young man into a nobody, a man afraid to take a step through the next door, tied to the bridge.

His sister, to whom he'd been close, and his beloved fiancée Sheila stopped noticing him. They did not question his existence exactly, but they managed to ignore it, acknowledging him only if he got in the way. He'd checked into a hospital, during which time these alleged loved ones left town without warning and returned no calls. He had been rational, but not healthy. He could not work, and the staff there had arranged a life on the dole as soon as possible, and then encouraged his release. He had been uncomfortable moving around the building, but was judged independent and harmless enough to avoid being an expensive ward of the state. Leon walked away from the building and in matter of several days, began the marginal existence in the bare, open spaces he had been living ever since.

He had been an imaginative child, and had read greatly before whatever transition had doomed him to his present state. In his exile, he'd at first tried to pass the time with novels and magazines, but he soon developed a deep suspicion of literature. Stories, though none of them were a physical reality, were nonetheless portals of a kind into all sorts of alternate worlds. The casual entrance into these fictional universes (and even nonfiction painted stilted substitute realities; he hated it even more than the obviously made-up stuff) seemed to make light of the drama of his life, as though the author were having a joke at Leon's expense. He'd stopped reading altogether before very long, as his dementia became established and routine. Yet he was convinced that he was not insane.

The Labyrinth had been favorite story of his youth, back before he'd known to be afraid of the idea. He still remembered some of the other stories too, and the doctor's conversation had brought to mind one of the ones that had haunted him. There was something unusual about the characters, he recalled--they were robots or something--but they were the same sort of mocking fairytale people as the Theseus and the king of Crete. This king (king robot) had had a magic box built for him that would take him to all sorts of wonderful alternate realities, full of beautiful women, fabulous riches, and splendid food. But there had been some fight between the king and the constructor (or maybe it was a bet), and the man with the box sent the king into a world that was indistinguishable from the one he left. When the king tried to come back to his proper world (there was, of course, a magic box in the new place as well), he again found himself in a duplicate of the original one. The king couldn't find his way out, and he couldn't catch the bastard who put him there.

For the millionth time, tears studded the corners of Leon Jordan's eyes. Like the king, he was stuck here, too. Good Lord, but look at him. He didn't even have the balls to sleep under the bridge like a self-respecting bum. What the hell happened? He needed to step back, to look at his life from a distance, but he couldn't break the bonds. Propped against the bridge, he sat thinking, head in hands. He'd tried to do it before, and his resolve was lost at the first challenge. He knew, however, that this life was surely going to kill him—soon--if he didn't find his way back. It was getting harder to move at all.

It was two days until the next appointment. With something like a spark flickering in his well-worn neural pathways, Leon began waiting, trying to think of a way out.

#

"So even if you could untangle it," Reide was saying, "would it matter? There are still going to be so many crossed points, hmm? And you can't even get to them because they've already been made, in the past." He was more engaged than usual today.

"Well, I think you really helped me to it on Tuesday, Doc. Just like you said, if I could lay it all out right, then maybe I could see it. Like if you have a pile of rope that looks all knotted up, but when you pull it apart--you know, unkink it, straighten it or whatever--you can see that there are really only one or two real knots that can't be shaken out. I know it's more complicated than a tangled cord, but I think my life is like that. If I shake out the tangled-up parts, then they'll be less confusing, and I'll be able to see where I crossed over wrongly."

"Interesting. Difficult when you are the rope though, I'd think. Hmm."

"Yeah, I'm gonna have to walk my way back to it. But I'm pretty sure that some of those kinks are easier than they look. A twist here, a shift there. Maybe I can find the right door if I can see past all that extra clutter."

"And cross it, Leon?"

"Well, we'll see. We'll see."

#

Walk his way back. He'd known for years, he supposed, that he'd have to go back the way he'd come. It sounded easy in the office that morning, but those strings were pulled awfully tight. The forbidding concern had always been the number of minor passages he'd have to worm his way through on the way, not all of which could be reproduced thanks to the passage of time. Maybe it would be enough to look only for the biggest twists, and find out whether or not they were invariant.

Leon inhaled sharply and looked at his sparse possessions, at the worn space near the bridge. He could be making the tangle worse, but, he reasoned, he was going to die anyway, and that would be true in any hell he'd encounter from this one forward. The worst he could do was hasten it, and even that was better than sitting here. He stood there, hunched in his green coat, and his eyelids fluttered wetly. He was afraid of death, but it would be better than coming back here. He straightened and put a shaking leg forward, followed by the next.

Since the multiverse had gotten the best of Mr. Jordan, he'd gone almost nowhere that he couldn't retrace. During his hospitalization, and even immediately after his release, Leon did not make it far from the orbit of the ward. He tried to consider the turning points that had driven him out of the hospital's gravity well, and the vagueness of them stopped his stride. Impossible... He looked back up the highway, and thought again about death.

Swallowing, he advanced his mind to slightly more recent memories. He'd stumbled out of town in the middle of the highway, he recalled, aimless and desparate, until he found the culvert and simply stopped walking. He recalled that his stomach had been cramped, as, in fact, it was now.

So from where was he fleeing? He'd been so hungry, and even though he had a few dollars, he couldn't make himself go through the door of the diner. He closed his trembling eyelids, and smells came to him. He did not remember the name of the place, but it didn't matter, he thought he could remember the where. He followed the double yellow line back toward town, waving at the few alarmed motorists who noticed him at the last minute.

The sun shone on Leon's back as he strode into the parking lot, evoking a memory of contentment. It must have been that feeling of security that had brought him to this place in his hungry desperation. He hadn't thought about it for years, but he'd spent countless Saturdays here with his family eating meatloaf and chicken soup and liver and onions (where else could you get liver and onions?). He'd spin around on the stool with its cracked red Naugahyde cover while his sister giggled and his father smiled tolerantly over his coffee. He remembered walking in with them all, the sun warming his shoulders just like this, and there had been the same sense of possibility, the same sense of the future unfolding before him. To his surprise, he began skipping across the parking lot like a ten-year-old before catching himself in the present.

He slowed past the entrance, and kept his steps well away from the long arch of the awning, stomach lurching as forced himself under the power cable strung to the northwest corner of the edifice. His more recent dinner was growing clear in his mind. He reluctantly crept around to the back of the restaurant and into the three-sided fence where dumpsters were still concealed. The fumes of rotten food were overpowering, but he willingly let them invade his senses, probing for whatever memory the odors would elicit. He had no intention of eating, but he felt his stomach rumble in sympathy with the past.

He could feel the cold metal rim of the dumpster on his (then ample) waist, and his shoulder hurt after wrenching open the broad plastic lid. He felt the shame at the ridiculousness of this, at the intense awareness of the cartoonish way his legs were bicycling above him as he rooted for scraps head-down. He'd been delighted to uncover some sandwich crusts, and managed to choke down a half calzone after picking out the cigarette butt. He felt his gorge rising again at the memory of the nasty thing, tasting the ash and glad of it. He shivered against the side of the metal box, much as he'd done a decade ago, trembling pale, yet unwilling to vomit up the precious nutrition in his gut.

Leon hunched over in sympathy with his former self. He did not expect the vision of the past to be so strong. It was too poignant, he thought, too real to not be true; he'd untwisted one loop of his wildly knotted life. Listening to his feelings, he walked away from the dumpster with his eyes closed, feeling a lifetime's worth of resolve crammed into his fractured psyche. He recalled his tentative steps toward the diner, pacing back and forth in cowardly widening loops from the hospital parking lot, where he'd spent several hungry days afraid to move and unwilling to reveal himself to the staff. Even with his eyes shut, he thought he could remember the way.

What would Dr. Reide think of this, he wondered.

Leon did not find out immediately. Before long, he'd found the hospital insecurely boarded up, with placards over its windows and charred fire pits in its weedy parking lot. He spent the better part of the afternoon tracking a circuitous and intuitive path (often with his hands over his eyes) about the environs before pulling off a board and ducking in, ears perked for the voices of the past.

He missed his next two scheduled sessions with the doctor, and when he came in days late, Reide betrayed no indignation at his client's absence, nor at his unscheduled appointment.

Leon, however, was a changed man.

"Doc, I swear I could hear her voice. Ten years gone, and the phone was gutted who knows how long ago, but I could close my eyes and there was her telephone voice in my ear. I could feel the plastic handset and smell the hospital smells too." A frown passed over his face. His conversation with Sheila had not been fulfilling. She had responded to him, but did not encourage conversation. It had been like talking to an uninterested stranger.

"In the old hospital, eh? Where you once stayed?" Occupying an abandoned building was evidently unrelated to the doctor's sense of professional ethics. "Do you feel you're crossing over, Leon?"

Leon's frown deepened. "No. I don't think so at all, but everything's coming to me so clearly now. I'm pushing the strings around and seeing the problem, but not untying anything. Not yet."

"The knot of your life's gone wild, it seems." Dr. Reide revealed his infantile grin and chuckled wetly. "That shouldn't be possible in real space, of course, but maybe you'll find the crossing point and tame out that twist, eh? That would be something."

Leon looked helplessly at him.

"Took your metaphor a little too far, hmm? I'm saying I think you should keep this up, Leon. Even if you can't reduce this thing to something more normal, doing something about it is clearly good for your mind. You're done with the hospital, now? Good. Get back where you left off, and keep searching out your path. Maybe you'll even get where you need to go. And Leon?"

"Yes?" Leon sat bemused at the shift in the doctor's personality. He'd become direct, eyes unglazed, possibly even thinner, and the vaguely incontinent smell was gone. The old man had never given Leon direct advice before.

"If you do find your way back, make sure you stop and say hello to whatever crazy old Doctor Reide lives in that world, eh? I'm afraid I will miss our conversations.

"You should get something to eat, too," he added, rising to give the younger man a pat on the shoulder and a gentle nudge out the door. "Good luck."

Outside the office, Leon felt in his pocket for any remaining cash. Probably foolish to think he'd stop needing that, even if he did manage to return to his own reality; these planes of existence seemed indistinguishable outside of Leon's own experience of them. Nonetheless, it felt time for a last grand meal. He'd been haunting the old hospital for several days, hardly seeing the dank abandoned halls of the present, and though he'd revisited any number of meals, he was fairly sure he had not, in fact, eaten anything. And navigating through the hospital was a remarkable milestone at any rate. The doc had been right about that.

On his way out of Reide's office, he sometimes stopped at the convenience store down the street. He liked it because it had a drive-through window and he didn't have to walk in. It was Leon's habit to walk warily up to the window, order his groceries, and carefully carry them back the way he came. (They were also gracious enough to cash his checks.) He'd indeed eaten little that week, and he splurged on two warmed burritos and a cola. He devoured the first burrito at the window, and, flashing a smile at the familiar clerk (who ignored it), walked back around nursing the second and sipping his Coke.

Calling Sheila had been the first thing he'd done at the ward, and, save finding his way out the door, was the last thing he'd done on his visit this week. He made his way back to the entrance now, where he left off, anticipating now that intense sense of…place to direct him to the next point up the hill of the past, and ultimately to the forbidden crossing at its apex. Leon was excited.

As he ambled his way back through the shifting labyrinth of his own making, he considered how easy he was finding it to negotiate the path. As his confidence grew, he realized that he'd spent most of the last decade cowering in one place, and he looked at himself with a growing sympathy, as though he were someone else, some other poor wretch. He'd have to go to his apartment from there, and he realized he could probably navigate it quickly, having shivered in his room most of that time, desperately trying to phone the loved ones who now treated him like a stranger, too frightened to go to work, too scared to go out and buy food. By the time he'd willed himself to make the hopeless trip to the ward, he'd already learned to count his steps and watch out for hidden passages.

He sat on the stoop of the old hospital door, a battered and happy hobo, finally looking, without that intent gaze, like the more typical variety of crazy. The building still echoed with old voices, though more distantly, and he could hear the intercom crackling and the gurneys squeaking somewhere back in the past. A lonely ghost trudged toward him from a more recent memory, waiting to be mirrored by the Leon of the flesh.

He'd wait till the morning, he thought, and hopefully no one would be home. He hoped they had not changed the place too much. Full and confident, he curled up there on the concrete, wrapped in his tattered green coat, head pillowed by a skinny arm. He watched the sun set over the trees, and drifted off into dreams of mazes and monarchs, of heroes and strings.

He woke shivering in the shadows, and sat leaning against the pillar, his tread upon the step in his ears and the cool brass handle of the door (now gone) on his hand. Leon sat for a time listening to the fading din of the past as he awaited the proper time for his next step deeper into it. At around 10AM, he rose, and paced the younger, cleaner Leon backwards on his nearly forgotten trek. His apartment had changed less than the hospital had, a unit in a series shabby building projects, blocks of brick sprouting from untended rust-colored earth. Early model cars were parked here and there on the cracked lot, some on blocks, and some of these perhaps from Leon's time. He followed his shade toward the old address. The current tenants had strung Christmas lights across the entrance and without passing under, Leon carefully unhitched one end and dropped it before attempting the regular door.

He found the entrance locked, and with regret he broke the window to release it from the inside. He dug out his small dirty wad of dollar bills and placed it guiltily on the counter as he passed.

Leon looked into the kitchen as he entered the place. Very little had changed. He breathed deeply of dried spaghetti sauce, of dirty clothes. It was like looking into a college dorm room--he'd been so young. His ghost seemed to spread around the apartment, and he looked at the pattern of it motions. He realized that it was not just a simple loop--there was a skinny thread out, yes, and the one he followed in, which seemed to have lost some significance, but he found that couldn't precisely pin down any single line in here. He could, however, read the shape of his past motions as though they were filling out a space defined by probabilities. Closing his eyes, he could sense this blur of his old perambulations. He reached his mind out to the pattern, and tried to make his body take up the same space.

Panting, Leon found himself on the sidewalk. It was the afternoon, he saw. He sincerely hoped it was the same day. He felt his arms. They were fuller, he thought, taking up more space even though they looked the same. Maybe it was progress. He realized he was kneeling, and rose and looked behind him. An apartment he recognized was there, but it held little mystery. It was merely a place he used to live.

He stood there and did his best to cast his mind back still further. Sheila sprang in there, and he felt a dying, nearly dissipated anger. There must have been a fight, and though he had no clear memory of the event, he could sense the emotions that decorated his way home from it. A simple line again, and he could sense it, but he could not reach his mind back to its origin. No choice but to follow, but the incompleteness of the thing bothered him, especially after his journey through the house. He felt urgency.

He turned his body to the old complex, and closed his eyes, dropping his chin to accept the fear that had given over from anger. Occupying the same space as the young Leon, he began to walk in reverse, his face watching the old complex fade backwards in decreasing terror. Distantly, he heard horns and shouting, but his mind was more and more occupied with a woman, anger at her uncooling and fear of the future undawning, a sense of presence returning as he fled toward the source of his argument. He was mumbling strange syllables to himself, English, backwards.

The fury grew, and memories of the conversation sprang to his mind, though not with the feeling of simultaneity that his walk produced: he was remembering remembering them. He was muttering loudly now, hotly. He pushed out his fist and then pumped it back. "!taht ekil em teart t'nac uo--"

Leon halted, abruptly. His head was cool, suddenly empty, and time was going forward. He opened his eyes, no longer able sense what he had been following, nor any emotional resonance at all. For a moment he stood blankly, and then the old fears returned, crashing upon him as he turned timidly around.

He was in the shadow of a tall building, somewhat below street level, in a decorated little urban nook. He'd been following a sidewalk ramp downwards for several turns, and was now standing before a little cavern of leaves. Leon stared at the opening. The walk continued into it, and the twining branches were the soapy green fronds of two rows of overgrown boxwoods that were flourishing in concrete planters on either side of the walk, their branches tangling densely overhead. The late afternoon sun lit the entrance of the tunnel such that an arc of illumination, brilliant white on the cement, framed the first couple of steps inward, leaving the rest of the hole in a dappled inconstant shadow. At the end, about thirty feet away, was a wooden door with a carved handle. He had no recollection of it at all.

It was the most frightening thing Leon had ever seen.

As he gaped at the leafy corridor, it seemed to stretch and snap back, like a cheap horror movie special effect. Two weeks ago, he could not have imagined such a place even in his nightmares, but here, he could feel the import of it weighing on his shoulders, and again that feeling of haste.

He would not go back. He squared his shoulders to the cave mouth, filling the bright arch with his shadow, smelling the leaves. As he stepped in, the path again seemed to stretch out before him, more palpably, and with a desperate holler, he charged at the receding door. Legs pumping, he chased it farther, farther. He would not go back.

#

Sheila Thomson had not been to this town in ages, and she did not precisely understand why she had stopped so early to spend the night when there was still such a long drive in front of her. The hotel had a quaint little back entrance though, and she liked that, a little garden path with a wood door. She was hovering by it now, unsure whether to go outside for that walk or wait just a little longer, when she heard the odd handle rattle. She hesitated, gathered herself, and opened it. A familiar face greeted her.

"Oh, there you are Bill. I'm so glad you're here. I was going to take a walk, but I thought I heard shouting out there. I'm feeling a little uneasy for some reason."

"I didn't hear anything, honey, maybe it's just the hometown ghosts. Didn't you say you almost married a guy from here?"

"You know, it's the strangest thing. I can't even remember his name anymore."

Her husband grinned, "Well, William K. Thomson can have that effect on a woman, I've heard."

"Not funny, Bill. Let's go out the front door. This place is really giving me the creeps."

###

The Pale City

[Note: this has been poorly received--characters and setting too icky.]

Ma Rat poked her nose out of her nest of fluff and ancient tatters and sniffed the air. Men, she thought, or maybe the city was burning again.

She heaved her rag-strewn bulk from the bed, shedding bits of cloth and paper in the darkness, a grubby phoenix ascending from the midden. She scurried naked, all breasts and dirt, to the old steel door and flung it open to reveal a reluctant trickle of twilight from the crack of the hatch above. She ran up the old gray steps and pressed her face to the narrow breach in the rusty panels. There was no mistaking the wood smells. Maybe her husband had returned.

Rat scampered back down and looked over her hoard. She scratched herself and smelled her hand. The timing was good for this.

#

For the thousandth time, Tuan Macks contemplated life and the future. This was no career for the aged, he thought, but with no children he knew, it was unlikely he'd be taken care of when he became too feeble to guide the cart. For the thousandth time, he wondered if it would have been better to have reared some sons to take over the operation. But then he'd have to stay in one place long enough to raise (or at least acknowledge) them, and he shuddered at the crippling orthodoxy that infected the insular little hamlets he knew. Tuan could not live in places like that. He longed for freer times to be spent with people, back when the world was young and alive, or back when real men fought with valor against legions of vampires in the fresh ruin of the past. But if the valiant times were gone, at least there were open spaces to roam, endless miles of them. He sighed, and patted the lead horse's neck with a weary arm before turning around.

"Mick, Sancho, Kwak: it looks like we're on the outskirts. If you want to, we can stop here today."

"Hey, we know where we are, jefe," Kwak, the spokesman, said. "We can go another couple miles."

Tuan doubted that Kwak or the others had a very good idea of their location. (No, this business would definitely die with old Tuan Macks.) You could sight ruins peeking through the trees at nearly any point along the ancient crisscrossing ways that ran west of the river, between the city and the towns that clustered about the haunted fields of Skunaplant. They were all largely identical but for a few desolate landmarks known to travelers. Few of the derelict stonescapes were populated, and even in the heart of the Pale City you could come to the same conclusion. But in there, there was almost a civilization in there, if you knew where to look.

He wondered, again for the thousandth time, what in the lord's name drove people concentrate together like that. Even the white savages couldn't stand to be apart from one another for very long. He looked back at his staff. Hayzeus knew, Tuan couldn't get completely away himself.

"All right then," he said. "We'll keep it up to the next big crossing." That would be a large one, great broken monoliths, and Tuan thought they were quite close to it. The trail had recently widened from a dry rutted thing to a huge brushy boulevard, with those wide, soft chunks of ancient paving stones still dotting the surface.

With a sigh, he plodded forward. He had not gone ten steps when he stopped, patting the nearby Kwak in the chest. "You recognize this?" he asked, wrinkling his nose.

"Recognize what, jefe?"

Tuan shook his head. "There are many things to see, Kwak. Earlier, I was wondering if you remembered passing this place earlier in the springtime, but--"

"Of course I remember."

"...but now I am much more concerned about something else. Can you spot it? Any of you?"

No answer. Naturally.

"Can you /smell/ it, maybe?"

Mick laughed. "Couldn't hold it in, eh jefe? Right here in the road?"

Kwak glared at him. "No, you idiot, I've been talking to him all this time. And only savages..." He trailed off.

Hope after all? "It could actually have been any time this afternoon," Tuan told them calmly, "and I don't see signs of a crowd. In fact, bad as it smells, this thing already looks pretty dry." He poked it with his toe. "I think we'd better turn around and set up camp a couple miles back, just in case. Get our signal fire going there. We need to let 'em know we're here, but I don't like seeing 'em this far out."

Sancho, who was just catching up, punched Mick's shoulder. "Try not to step in it," he said.

#

The smoke smelled fainter than usual, too faint for this calm wind. Ma Rat wondered how far away her husband was, whether it was, in fact, he. Maybe the smell would get stronger, closer. Maybe it was nothing, but she was not comfortable with this change.

She cracked the squealing hatch, and poked her head out cautiously. She would have to ask some questions. The others tended to shrink from her, shying to the other side of the avenue when Rat trundled by, and normally, this was her preference. The skinny pale men would sneer toothlessly at her sometimes--even the smaller ones who could have been her sons--but the women just ignored her as they went about their own scavenging. They did not like being her second, feared her glamour, and resented that Rat was the key to their relative prosperity.

Rat lived differently from the others in the city, and in most ways better. Peering past her strands of dirty yellow hair, she often watched her fellows prowling through the streets after pigeons and other prey, which she rarely resorted to catching. She saw them rushing back from the woods with nuts and fruit, fighting over a fish, or coming back from a far raid, painted with mud and crazed with corn-fed bellies. By contrast, Rat was able to subsist almost primarily on the food her husband brought. Hunks of salty meat and desiccated hardtack were kept in a corner of her dark, dry hole, allowing her to spend days on end in that warm den, suckling her litter, or sleeping alone, depending on the season. Sometimes food showed up on her step of its own accord, and what Rat didn't eat, she stored that too.

When she wasn't curled in her lair, Ma Rat prowled the dark and crumbling corners of the city, hunting for treasures. It was, indirectly, her eye for these things that had bought her status, snagging valuable glass, metal, plastic, and innumerable pretty trinkets that were used by unknown people abroad. She alone had charmed one of the black men with those baubles, arranging them just so on the walk in front of her den. None of the others had thought of it then, preferring to watch with fright or contempt from the shadows as the strange men rooted through the old stone for the shiny bits. And it was true that Rat alone had brought the man below, where, it was said, she not only grabbed his seed but had stolen a piece of his soul as well, acquiring a fraction of his power.

None of which would happen again, if something was wrong. Her unease was growing. She pushed the rest of her body through the crack, and then jumped on the ancient metal hatch until it clanged shut. She darted away, looking for other urbanites.

#

"Hey, jefe, you going to finally take us in to meet your secret lover this time?"

Tuan smiled into the fire. "It's not a lover, Kwak," he said. "I think you know that. But the savages won't allow more than one of us in their downtown at once." Neither statement was true.

Kwak fidgeted his large hips uncomfortably on his stone as he considered this. "What's it like?"

Tuan's smile broadened. No lies now. "Do you know, it's not much different than the other ruins we walk through--bigger than most of 'em, more imposing, I guess--but the real difference is what you can feel. You can sense the eyes behind every corner, watching you. Every now and then, you see something moving around a corner, a rag fluttering maybe, or a naked ankle. I think half of them don't wear anything all year, but unless you got a guide, you don't see nothing."

In the shadows, Kwak's own eyes floated, disembodied. Sancho made some grunting, thumping noises under the wagon behind them. He was a notorious snorer.

"And it's a small price to pay. They don't value the stuff in there that much themselves, but they know we want it. And it's hard to find these days if you don't know where the stashes are. I remember Old Joe telling me that he would pluck it all out himself when he was young, but it kept getting harder every year. I don't believe a lot of the stuff he told me, but that was probably true. It was certainly hard to find anything when I was a boy. It's a lot better having the savages do it for us."

Tuan didn't tell Kwak how he had found his clever yellow Rat on one of Old (and by then quite infirm) Joe's ruthless and dangerous errands. Fortunately, he'd been carrying a cider jug he'd stolen from his then-jefe. It was the start of a profitable relationship, and was, not coincidentally, Joe's final year of business. Kwak and the boys had it much easier under the current master.

"Do you know, jefe, I don't like waiting without you. I like the other guys well enough, but..."

"You're a good man, Kwak," Tuan said, meaning it. "Let's see how this year works out, OK? Maybe we can think more about how the trade will continue when I'm gone." He'd have to retire somehow.

Kwak jerked his head at his boss, horrified.

"I'm not in a hurry, don't worry." Well, not that sort of a hurry. Tuan sighed and looked back at the wagon. "What do you say we wake up the two idiots over there, huh? I'm tired."

Kwak smiled, Tuan could tell because a few broken teeth had joined the white eyes, and he pulled on Tuan's outstretched hand. The younger man stretched, and trudged a few paces beyond the wagon, uncinching his belt. He stumbled, recoiled.

"Mick? Oh you idiot…" Kwak dropped to his knees and prodded the form on the ground.

Tuan crept up to peek over his shoulder. Kwak held up a bloody hand for him to see by the firelight. Tuan couldn't see his pained grimace, but he could sense it.

"Go over there and check on Sancho, quick."

The younger man bowed lower to look underneath the wagon as Tuan hustled to its side to unlash the bundle of weapons with trembling hands. He glanced back at his lieutenant, who shook his head in alarm.

"Well, get over /here/, then!"

#

Rat jogged first to Egg's nest, which was not far from her own. It had been several years since Rat had pushed the little one out, but unlike the rest of her brood, skinny Egg spoke to her mother occasionally. Rat liked the girl more than most people. Egg was smart.

Rat looked up at the entrance to her daughter's lair. The girl used a rope to get into the high opening, which she pulled up after her when she was home. Rat followed the path of where the line should be, all the way up to the corner of the opening, where she saw eyes flashing opalescent in the moonlight. Before Rat could call up to the watcher, the clumsy ladder of rags and scraps trailed itself down to the street. She clawed herself up it, hand over hand, short legs scrabbling on the pitted surface of the wall.

She pulled herself over the edge, and could see Egg's luminous forehead floating skull-like in the early moonlight. She could smell the musky otherness of the girl, the dry decay of her nest somewhere behind, invisible in the gloom. Rat sprung back to her feet and regarded the young woman as best she could.

Egg took a step forward, and pale cheeks appeared beneath the smooth arch of brow, pale shoulders as well. "I knows what youz wants, Ma Rat," Egg said quietly. "I knew youz knew."

Rat nodded. She certainly suspected.

"The mens say don't..." Egg stopped and spat. She had no children, but she'd been caught several times (hence the rope). She continued more forcefully. "Mebbe youz know, but I tells you anyway. The mens gunna kill your bargain. Theys gunna kill your husband. Try to take his glammer."

Rat opened her mouth to speak, but her daughter interrupted.

"I think youz knows who. Who's the stupidest man you know?"

Rat smiled evilly, not expecting Egg to see. She had her own suspicions, but her daughter had not exactly narrowed it down.

"Yah. Incher. He's jealous of youz for long time. He hates your power." Egg clutched her own rags more tightly about her. "And I hates Incher. Nasty tooth. He tries, but he can't make me not speaks. I knows youz ferreal, youz has the ferreal glammer."

Rat did not dispute this.

"I tells you where Incher is, but youz gotta promise to keep him away. Kill him mebbe. Mebbe he never touches me again. You do this Ma Rat, and I tells youz where he goes."

Yes, she would have to do something. They couldn't afford to have stupid Incher sabotage the exchange. It was good for everyone. Stupid man.

#

Kwak and Tuan stood back to back near the fire, listening. Kwak held his spear trembling before him; the older man had recovered the atlatl, but did not linger for the arrows, which would be no help in the dark anyway. He could use it like a club.

"Do you think we should move, jefe? I haven't heard anything for a while."

"They can find their way in the dark a lot better than we can, Kwak."

"But we can't /hide/ here, jefe. They'll see the fire. Why do you think they're attacking us?"

The man had a good point, and a good question. "I don't want to abandon the wagon," Tuan said.

"We could take the horses at least."

Not a bad idea. Tuan had some warehouses, could maybe re-establish an inventory from there, and the horses were difficult to replace. But starting over was a young man's game. "Let's see if--"

The rock missed Kwak and rebounded off the wagon with a crack. A second rock whizzed past Tuan's ear. The old man stepped backward. A third struck his thigh and he fell to one knee.

Kwak bounded over amid the thumps and hisses, grabbed his boss, and dragged him from the firelight toward the trees. A couple more rocks could be heard crackling the leaves, and then there was silence again.

"You all right?" Kwak asked in a low voice.

"I hope to Hayzeus I am." He rubbed his leg, and stood shakily. "They're probably clever enough to go around the fire. Won't be able to see 'em. Watch out from the sides, I think."

"You think they're smart enough to surround us? How many you think they are?"

"Probably. A lot. Shut up, already." They heard a twig snap from the direction of the camp.

"Move," Tuan hissed, and they did. He grabbed the younger man's shirt and limped behind him. They avoided the road, and as their eyes adjusted, they could see the faint shadows arced by the moonlight through the trees. Shadows on their left, Tuan noted. They were heading toward the city. He did not tell Kwak.

Go ahead and burn the wagon, he thought. Kill the horses. If I can't come back here, I'm finished anyway.

#

As she darted along, Rat worried about her husband: a fire, too far away; a plot by Incher. Her husband was a capable man in his way-- he held amazing knowledge that was completely outside the sphere of the Pale City--but he was like a child against the low scheming of her urbanite clan, and she admitted grudgingly that her enemy possessed a certain shrewdness, if not wisdom.

Rat liked to think she understood a little of both worlds. As a child, she had developed a habit, to a greater degree than most of her peers, of observing the dark visitors. She would follow the men into their stashes in the buildings, and she mentally catalogued the items that most fascinated them. Soon, she began gathering similar items on her own. The black men were not very good at searching, avoiding the narrow dark places as though afraid of them.

The men, with their size and in their groups, were intimidating, but there were sometimes young ones that came around too, and often these were sent after the more dangerous artifacts. She was fascinated by these boys, who were older than she but appeared more childish, and by one in particular. Even as the other boys disappeared from season to season, he kept coming back.

She began to assemble likely items on her walk in front of her burrow. When her husband first saw her, she was sunning herself there, watching her youngest stack up a bunch of milky white bottles and knock them down again. He had first been amazed at her hair, then her body, and then at the junk that the kid was playing with. He showed her the clay jugs he kept his own water in, which broke when she dropped one, and she could still remembered the sound of the tinkling shards, still found it funny. He showed her a smaller jug as well, one he handled much more carefully, and the water inside had a powerful spell in it that made her throat burn and her mind reel.

Lately, some of the other women had begun placing collections of crumbling bric-a-brac on the walks in imitation of herself, hoping to draw in a black man of their own. Ma Rat wished them luck. Her husband visited them as well, but always bought less, and offered less for it. With few other visitors, Rat's status had grown as the sole bringer of trade. She knew, even if the other women didn't, that these strange men still wanted the same things as any other men, no matter how much they talked, or how nicely they touched.

Her husband usually came down from the north, along one of the old ways, far from the river. Egg confirmed that Incher was planning to intercept him. The wind ran in complex patterns around the ruins, but it was Ma Rat's impression that the fire smells were coming from that direction as well. She hunched closer to the ground, and increased her pace. The moon would rise a hand or two before she got to the source, she thought. She hoped it would be time enough. She hoped that this resistance didn't extend beyond Incher's own little cadre of fools.

#

Eel worked his hands along one of the clasps on the large wooden cart, feeling out the mechanism. He'd already accidentally released the catch for the horses' bridle, and the animals had bolted away when his partner started banging on the other side of the wagon with a rock, as he was still doing now. Large nasty beasts anyway, he thought, though one of them would feed four handfuls of people when he caught it. At any rate, they seemed lazy and loud, and Eel figured they could always get them later. Maybe, if he could discover the magic behind it, he could force them to walk themselves back before he killed them.

Even more than horses, the food inside the cart was extremely valuable because it could be kept forever. Incher also placed a high priority on whatever magical things the black men carried with them, including (and maybe especially) the enchanted water that they peddled in exchange for junk.

There. The thing caught, and dropped. He lifted the lid.

"Stop your banging, cracka," he said.

A balding, dirty moon rose up over the top of the wagon. Eel winced at the oozing white crater just over its right eye. How had that thing not killed him all these years? The man must have some powerful glamour, but Eel couldn't fathom where he'd have obtained it.

"Youz open it?" Pigeonshit said.

"Yah. No glammer in the metal thing after all. Youz just pull it here."

"Gots bottles?"

"Bottles is Incher's. Incher smells it if we tastes."

"But we gots to find it. He wants that before any other magic."

"Yah. Let's find summa those foods too. Then we finds those other mens." Eel sighed. Taking the wagon was easy. Keeping track of everything else was more difficult.

"Youz gonna have a bite?" Pigeonshit asked. Incher wouldn't approve of this either, but Eel saw no reason not to compromise. They already had killed two of the men, probably enough, and they had the wagon. And he doubted the little hunchback could smell ham.

"Yah," he said. And maybe he wouldn't miss just one sip from the bottle either.

#

Tuan blundered in thick underbrush behind Kwak. His partner was hard to see even in the moonlight, just one silhouette among many, a competing shadow creeping across innumerable lonely gray slabs. They had somehow lost the minor trail they had been following, and still had not found the main road. Worse, they were still going basically south but now with an eastward bent, toward the river, trapping themselves. Tuan's stomach fluttered and his feet lightened. He stopped walking and breathed deeply, waiting for the urge for flight to settle.

"Moon's looking pretty high now," he said, making no effort to soften his voice.

Kwak--Hayzeus damn his young body--was still going strong. "You say so, jefe."

"We're far enough away, I think. We should start getting back on track."

A shadow in front of him shrugged.

"After we rest."

A sigh in the dark. "You want me to keep the first watch, jefe?"

"I'm not young anymore, Kwak. Just give me an hour."

The shadow grew larger, crunching twigs. "Not a bad spot anyway," it said. "Nobody will see us in the brush."

Tuan thought it unlikely anyone saw them anyway. If the savages had been making an effort to follow, they'd be caught by now. And what did it matter at this point? Without ceremony, he dropped to the ground, not hearing whatever the young man was mumbling as he closed his eyes.

Much too soon, he opened them. The shadow was shaking him, and not gently. Something was scraping his cheek, and he could feel Kwak's breathing. What in the Goodbook's name had he been eating?

Kwak was hissing at him. "Gets up, stupid man!"

Tuan opened his eyes and turned. "Get back, K--"

Instead of Kwak's shadow, he saw a protruding gray bulge of a forehead, followed by an angular nose, followed by a single gray tooth, jutting at him like a spear. The face, sucking in and out, was emitting a foul exhalation. And it was smiling under a matted beard. Tuan tried to push himself back on his elbows, and found that the creature was sitting on his legs.

"Youz mine, glammer boy."

#

The smell of wood smoke and more was burning in Rat's nostrils. There was, she knew, an inimitable scent to burning hair, one that she loathed. She hugged to the ground and moved faster, habitually feeling with her hands and feet for loose branches, for stray debris, for anything that would give a report of her presence. Suddenly she stopped, lifted her head and cocked it sideways. Yes, that was a man's shout, but not a close one. Not her husband's beautiful deep voice either, but a barking grunt that sounded familiar in another way. She put her head down and moved in the direction of the noise.

She could hear the men shouting and laughing before she could see the firelight. As she got closer, she could see their bodies as flickers through the trees. The flames were blazing dangerously high. Rat felt contempt twine its way into the knot of her other emotions. She bellied herself to the ground, and inched up quietly among the laurel.

On the fire were two misshapen logs that sent smoke billowing blackly into the night sky, and she could see luminous forms hopping about erratically in front of it. The men--for all their noise, there appeared to be only two--were crashing about like they were sick, delirious. She recognized the feeling, but these two were as stupid with the fire water as they were without it. (The glamour of that liquid only made you a silly version of what you already were). Rat felt red blood pumping behind her eyes. Incher would die for this.

She spied a large rock not far away. She slithered over and closed her hand around it, granite, she noted, and prized it easily from the ground. She moved around on her elbows, coming up behind her husband's vehicle. She was quiet, but she didn't need to be.

#

Pigeonshit sat back down on the log, contentedly splaying himself out before the fire, grimy finger circling around in his ear. They would have to find some more things to throw on it. People burned, he found, and wood, but not rocks. He could see why the black men liked this stuff. It was warm. What was there to be afraid of?

"Hey cracka," he said, "youz thinks we can keeps a bottle for us two? /Win/ us some womens instead of taking them? How many's there again?"

Eel danced over, and held up two dexterous hands, lots of fingers. He giggled.

"Hey," Pigeonshit said. "Don't forget the jug."

"The jug!," Eel screeched and then whirled around and lurched clumsily back to the big wooden cart. The glamour infected the smaller man quickly, Pigeonshit thought. Not fair. He wasn't feeling a thing himself. He needed another pull.

"Hey Eel," he shouted at the wagon. At the sound of his name, the smaller man spun and dropped. Pigeonshit heard a wet cracking sound. "Youz breaks that jug, I kills you myself. Never minds Incher." He pushed his body to a sitting position, and kept going forward. Maybe the glamour was getting to him after all.

"Youz better not--" Pigeonshit stopped. Before him strode a woman, glowing red in the firelight. Her teeth were bared, and the jug was in her hand. She walked to him cautiously, jug raised, liquid sloshing inside. Unbelievably, his own feet were slower than this, and he discovered that he couldn't gain them. He looked up at her arm: it was raised high, but it was moving sideways somehow, and not quite distinct. "Ma Ra--"

#

Rat spat on the man's prostate form. For once, the white pustule on his forehead was invisible amid the blood and broken clay. She breathed deeply of burning death, and her head began to feel hot again. She kicked the man, who didn't groan. She hoped he wasn't breathing. She kicked him again.

She looked at the fire. One man was only in it from the waist down, face mercifully undamaged. He could be tumbling from a door if you ignored the lower half of him. She looked down at an expression of frozen surprise, lidded eyes opened wide, mouth agape. His lips were heavy and his nose was broad and flat. Rat did not recognize him, but a friend of her husband's deserved to be mourned. She yanked a filthy rag from Pigeonshit's body, and placed it over the burning man's eyes.

She inspected the arm of his partner, who was not so well preserved. The hand was huge, with rings on it, and the few patches skin which were not blackened by the flame were nearly as ruddy as her own. She breathed deeply, hope and anger wrestling in her mind. Where was her husband?

She fanned out, scanning the ground for signs, uncaring of the noises she made now. Eel and Pigeonshit had made a wreck of the place, but here, she noted, something had crashed through the bushes coming from the camp, moving northward. She dropped to her knees and crawled along the trail, feeling and watching. The track was wide for men, but she did not think her husband knew how to move through the trees. She felt a moon-shaped print under her hand, and then another. Not men, then, but the beasts that pulled the wagon. Could her husband be on top of one? She had better check for other paths.

She circled wide around the stinking fire, light enough from the high moon and from the flames. Nearly opposite the horse track, she found her own serpentine path, where she had shimmied inward. She crossed this, thinking that her husband could only have walked toward the city or toward the river. She got her face closer to the ground and moved.

Not ten steps from her own trail, she found it. Two men, with boots on. Her hand shook as she pressed it into one of the clear prints. Heading south, and clumsily. They could not have gotten far with their skills. She hugged her palm to her breast and scurried after them.

#

The savage had a hump, Tuan noted, which he swung widely when he walked, but it didn't slow him down. Tuan was uncomfortably gagged, and his hands were tied tightly with the scraps of his own shirt. Right now, since he had been recently cooperating (he was too tired not to), the humped man led him by the bonds. Earlier, it had been by the hair. He did his best to keep up. At least this person he could see.

Sometimes the tusked, verminous face turned back to him, sometimes angry, sometimes smiling, always calculating. Now and then, it spoke.

"Ma Rat's power, and all those foods. I gunna take it from you, little man."

His Rat's enemy, then. She had never introduced him to this one. Tuan shut his eyes thinking what horrible things this creature could do to her. He stumbled.

"Ah! Up, up!," filthy hands groped in his direction again. Tuan stood and waited for them to clutch his hair once more, but the savage only yanked the bonds on his wrists, and pulled him stumbling along once more.

"Faster, faster, little glammerboy," the toothy face said. Tuan was tiring of the nickname.

They had quickly found the old road (it was less than a hundred paces away), and with aching legs and mouth, Tuan tried to distract himself by picking out his normal route. As they walked slowly along, the ruins grew more concentrated, and Tuan could sometimes sense the ponderous presences he knew were about him. The eastern horizon was beginning to turn gray as they passed the place where he usually found Rat. His legs were burning.

They kept walking for maybe another hour, when the monster in front of him suddenly stopped and let go of his wrist. Tuan dropped instantly to his knees and sucked air through his nose. He closed his eyes and tried to treasure the moment of stillness, to pretend that the savage wasn't reaching for his scalp again even now.

And he wasn't. After a pause, Tuan opened his eyes and looked up for the man. He could see quite clearly now, and though he couldn’t yet view the rim of the sun, the tops of city's white towers were glinting with reflected morning light. One was particularly close, and he looked up its height. The impossible building gaped broken holes at him like a smile. He thought of Kwak, probably dead.

He still did not see his captor, and turned around to an even stranger sight. He had come to the downtown of the Pale City many times and had seen many shattered wonders, but none like this. All of the others were gigantic rectangles, built with unknown skills true, but still basically like overgrown country houses, conceivable. Here, old gray stone curved elegantly up over him like a pregnant belly, trees tickling its base like pubic hair. He felt like an ant looking up at an enormous egg, and he stumbled backward in fear that the thing would roll onto him and crush him like a hope. He bumped into something more giving than stone and jumped, fatigue forgotten.

The savage swatted him in the head. "Stupid glammerboy, too stupid to runs." The face was even more repulsive in the light. Its horizontal tooth was yellow, he saw, more diseased than threatening, and it shaped the mouth into a permanent sneer. He wanted to scratch his cheek where it had touched him hours ago.

The face was smiling. "I lives underneath," it said.

#

Rat still followed a trail of two men, but only one of them was the same. There had been a struggle, and although she had followed three distinct sets of prints out, she could only identify two of them now. Often, she recognized the stamp-and-drag gait of a barefoot track, which was frequently obliterated by the erratic shuffle of the shoes behind it. The latter were probably dragged along against their will, Rat thought, which bought her time.

As the light grew, it became increasingly evident that Incher and his captive were headed to the heart of the Pale City. The morning sun was kissing the ground when she followed the tracks off the highway--easily, because they departed at the expected point. It was enough evidence. She lifted her aching shoulders and elevated her pace, jogging straight to Incher's nest.

She hustled through the trees to the shadow of the great square spire, and then sprinted through the trees and brush to the shadow of the giant clam. She stopped to catch a breath as she surveyed the situation. Incher lived down below the curve of the thing, where there was access to some warm underground rooms. She had been there once, against her will, when she was very young.

One last breath, and she moved to the entrance she remembered. She pressed her ear to the stone, listening carefully. She could pick out a muffled thumping, and also a sound like someone scraping metal against the wall. Creeping inside, she heard a voice as well, the high-pitched lisp of her adversary.

The source of the thumping sound soon became clear, for Incher had not taken the time to pull her husband into the deeper levels. Up here, the black man's legs twitched feebly as he lay bound next to the wall. Incher was scraping some sharp bit of metal on the stone floor, as though he were about to fillet a mouse. Rat felt her blood flowing hot in her temples. Her husband! She scooped up some dusty gravel and hurled it at the little monster.

Incher twitched his head in the direction of the assault. Then he cackled. "That all youz gots, Ma Rat? Your glammer found me mebbe, but I kills him anyway."

Rat growled.

Incher glared at her, "I'm gonna take your glammerboy, Rat. I'm gonna take his seed myself, gonna cut it out. I don't needs youz. We just /takes/ the foods now."

The wrongness of this was self-evident to Rat. There was no glamour in the exchange; it worked because both parties brought something to it. Some of the men understood the concept of the bargain. Incher did not. She looked at the little man with hatred, remembering his clammy body, his motile lips moving on her like earthworms, but not tasty. There had been no gloating then, only insecurity in his little black eyes. And later, gratitude.

Oh, he needed her.

"My mens are /taking/ what we wants, right now." As he spoke, his tooth bobbed and threatened like a solitary tusk. "We don't /digs/ for it. Youz stupid womens..."

She narrowed her eyes, lowering herself into a crouch.

Incher cackled. "/We's/ gonna bring foods this ti-- Aah!" He gripped his cheek where Rat had raked him. She showed her own teeth, clean and white, and circled him, shoulders high. She was larger than him, she thought, and faster. There was no end to this man's stupidity. She jerked her head to see him flinch. When he did, gratifyingly, she swung her other hand in a wide arc, catching his opposite cheek with her fingernail. She rushed at him.

#

Tuan's legs hurt. His wrists hurt. His mouth hurt. He was afraid, and he didn't want to be here. Laying on the hard floor, waiting for death, he pretended he was running away to some rich life of ease, legs ineffectually flopping about like a dreaming dog's. It would be nice if his Rat were here. He'd have liked to have seen her one last time. He thought he could hear her voice. Growling?

Rat was angry, and he could hear that other voice, that freakish little man, shouting at her. He hated that voice. That man was going to cut off his...

Tuan struggled up to consciousness, pushing his legs more forcefully now, forcing his body up the wall to a sitting position. It /was/ Rat, and Hayzeus help her, she was fighting. Did she know he had a blade?

Tuan watched her dive at the man, aiming with impressive force at his waist, but she didn't see the sharpened metal pulled back for a swipe at her. Tuan kicked furiously, grunting through his gag. At the sound, Rat looked his way mid-charge, and dropped further down to knee level. The hand went high, scoring her back, and Rat tumbled into the twisted man's feet, knocking both of them down, scrambling.

Tuan tried to scream through bruised lips and a filthy gag. He tried to push himself up to his feet, but overbalanced and landed chest first on the dusty floor. He heard a few hits land, but much more ineffectual cursing and tumbling. Rolling onto his side, he came face to face with the man, who shrieked and lunged at him with the blade. Tuan watched Rat pounce, seemingly from nowhere, on the outthrust hand, but then the little man rolled her over and her head crashed hard on the ground. He straddled her and held the shiv high over her still body.

Tuan's eyes widened at the scene, recalling the story of Hayzeus's sacrifice of lesser gods at the roots of the Tree of Life, but with an appalling reversal of roles. He could see the shadows of hell gathering behind the man. He closed his eyes and heard the sickening, liquid fall of the blow, followed by silence.

He heard his name. "Tuan?"

That voice. So he was now joining the rest of the dead. No surprise.

"You all right, jefe?"

Tuan opened his eyes to see Kwak's gap-toothed grin. The man was waving his bloodied spear. "Your lover runs pretty fast, but I got here in time."

#

Kwak rubbed his hand over his curly new beard. It went nicely with his skin, he thought, adding to his dark mystery. But now, days' walk from his familiar civilization, he desired no attention from /these/ locals; they weren't really his type. He strode along without company, leading only one of his horses, and carrying only some token sample wares stuffed into the saddlebags. Back at the peddlers' post, which was now a permanent camp complete with a stockade, his three assistants waited for him to return with the city women that were in charge of trade. It was an outgrowth from Tuan's method, and Kwak also preferred not to share the secrets of the Pale City's heart with his employees.

He trudged along the path, noting how well-established the trail had become since the first year of his return. The savages must be maintaining it, he thought. He walked along through the cleared scrub, admiring the ancient hands that had built these sprawling, sweeping structures for the sole apparent purpose of travel, but finding no fault with the more recent effort either. Up ahead he could see two forms, and he waved at them. The smaller one was quickly coming his way.

"Uncle Kwak, carry me," cried little James, running at the big man's knees to be hoisted with a giggle at the last moment. Tuan, richly bearded like his protégé, but in gray, clasped the younger man's shoulder affectionately.

"Looks just like his old man," said Kwak. He pinched the boys cheek, who scrunched up his shoulder and made a face.

The former peddler shook his head. "They think he's some kind of holy child, you know. I never should have told them the old stories. I think it was Egg that spread them around. She thinks she's a prophet or something."

"How does Rat take all of that?"

"I think she lives for it, actually, and I must admit that it helps business."

Kwak laughed; he couldn't complain about business.

"The place is really growing up, Kwak. Wait till you see it. We've almost got a civilization going down in there."

###

Foundations of Reason (a crappy poem)

[Yeah, poetry. Don't get used to it.]

strung along like a child's toy train wreck or
tenement clotheslines
flapping and fraying exposed in
the wind
our thoughts chattering specters fluttering around
skyscrapers
like bits of litter spiraling unsettled in
the updraft
born from hot sidewalks and the burning blocks of
the human depths
a glint of clarity in the conductor's eye as he careens toward
the wall.

Part 2: Anger

[Part 1 (sloth) here. This is not autobiographical, but it resonates a little.]

he wakes up at 4am, as usual, and stares at the ceiling thinking, choking on his thoughts. she is warm next to him, sleeping the untroubled sleep of the guiltless, if not the blameless, all knees and elbows, uncomfortable, uninviting. he replays conversations over and over in his mind, old ones and imagined ones, and falls eventually back into a restless sleep to the tuneless score of internal chatter. when the alarm wakes him a couple of hours later, he's unsure how much rest he managed to squeeze out of the wee hours. not much, he thinks, judging by the way he feels.

it's early enough that no one else is up. he glumly pours cereal into a bowl he had to wash, picking his way through the night's castoff cutlery. there is no milk. fucking perfect. he drops the cereal, bowl and all, into the overfilled trash. that one's his job, but so is everything, he thinks. he roots through the nearly empty fridge and settles on some cold pasta, eating a clammy handful, just enough to absorb the coffee a little. it looks like a pbj for lunch too. he can't exactly afford to be going out.

there is the boy still. thank goodness for him. he walks into the dark room and kisses the sleeping forehead before he leaves.

it's a long drive to work. you have to make sacrifices for the family of course, and the city schools are unacceptable. today, in this weather, the commute should be a good hour and a half. he flicks irratably between competing dj prattle. the music, when he finds it, hearkens younger times, happier ones he concedes, but on the commute, and at his age, it sounds tired and small through the tinny speakers. he turns it off, watching brake lights flash on and off ahead of him in an endless line. get out and abandon the thing, he thinks. fuck them all. but wherever would he go? how would his family eat?

fifteen minutes late for the morning meeting. he vaguely listens to the week's sales goals. he remembers hiring this person, what a sniveling little bullshitter he was then, and thinks with disgust that he hasn't changed that aspect since he rose up through the ranks, but has added some dimensions of petty tyrant and patronizing chum. his ample stomach churns dark roast into his esophagus as the pissant discusses how the accounts will be allocated this week. more sales required to fewer customers and, of, course more time talking about it. there will be another meeting this afternoon.

he mans the phones for the rest of the morning, drudging up a sunny voice for the clients and customers. he plays computer solitaire while speaking on the phone. in between, he tries to compose what he'd like to say to his wife when he gets home, but it's difficult to focus on this. the river is roiling, but a decade of throwing stones into the thing has has stirred up the packed mental bed into a silty, turbid maelstrom. he can't much focus on it, can't see a damn thing in there, and instead plays the same words over and over, knowing that there's no real hope of getting them in. 'if only,' he starts. 'i need....' he feels his pen crack in his fist. ink drips on his wrinkled pants

several minutes after twelve, he rises and heads out for his sandwich. though he was trying to avoid it, he bumps into her. he says hi, looks at the ground, and wonders, for the thousandth time, what happened to that chemistry. he knows. it did him no good to avoid the 'temptation' which was probably imagined anyway. later he was desperate, for a friend or for a lover, it didn't matter which. someone to listen, he imagines, and he knows it is asking too much. awkwardly he makes an exit to his perplexed (but unsurprised) coworker. his afternoon's spent with the pissant, and the little bastard is trying to help in his condescending way. focus, he says, be more positive. he knows the guy is trying to care, but then he can afford to when he's had it easy. it's hard to be positive when customers don't like you, and your coworkers don't speak to you and your pissant boss condescends.

there's no point in staying past five, and he doesn't. it's a long commute anyway, and when he gets home, he's too timid to ask about dinner. no time, she's taking the boy to some damn lesson or other. there's nothing on tv, and cleaning up the place depresses him. when she finally gets back he's nursing his second beer, belching chips and dry cereal, and tells the tired kid to shut the fuck up. chastened by the boy's horrified look, he apologizes and gets his hug. he tries to tell his wife about intimacy, and predictably, she gets defensive. is that all he cares about? would it help anyway, he thinks? it's probably too late for that to do much good, though he needs it badly. the rest of the night the couple maneuvers stiffly and silently about one another. finally, at bedtime, he snipes at her and it sets her off, she shouts him back down to silence, and the acid is refluxing like mad now. he shouldn't let her get away with this, not again, but he knows he was wrong to snap and he needs to sleep. if he's quieter she'll eventually stop with the insults. he clenches his fists, the nails digging into his palms.

if he can go to sleep...

Know Your Frayzies

[Not posted to the Slate Fray]

This goes to some of you with cautious affection. Go ahead and presume I mean you.

Hey newbies! If you've been trolling around the Best of the Fray recently, you've been perhaps lucky enough to arrive during a slight remission of the gigantic ego quotient. But if you are sharp, you may have noticed that some names are pronounced only in whispers. And you may have been wondering why no one talks to that seemingly rational and eloquent poster over there.

Psssst: it's because they're Frayzy.

Rest assured that they'll return in force and in form come this fall, hearkening to some vestigial September nesting instinct from those primordial days when the internet provided tides of clueless freshman discovering discussion groups for the first time, when angry lizards were required to do battle against the herds of the ignorant. Though we inhabit evolved times, those reptiles haven't gone away, and some still return to stomp around again, all overgrown now, shitting all over the place and complaining about the stink.

The problem with these massive dinosaurs is that most of them are, in parts, eminently readable, some of them even rather likable, but the smart poster should know how to filter for only the sane portions. For better or worse, they can be highly prolific, spewing so much of everything that even if the fraction of madness they produce isn't really that high, the quantity sure can be. A problem is that the nutty portions tend to bring out the worst in their less-motivated groupies and opponents. Relative newbies can become confused when encountering otherwise normal posters reduced to adulation or froth from having had their bullshit filters overloaded by the Frayzies at some point in the past. Don't let that happen to you. Adjust your settings accordingly.

So who are these people and how do you read them? As a service, I've sorted them for you here in order of increasing required filter strength you'll need to use. You're going to have to find the mulitple nicknames yourself, however, and be warned that the number of them increases with madness.

doodahman (30% whacko) The dood is probably the sanest of the big ego bunch. His My Two Cents column, in addition to being fucking hilarious, is filled with genuine heart, and he is actually capable of some minor self-deprecation now and again, always a plus. He gets some additional points for being the only poster of this bunch with whom I'd drink a beer sans safeguards, for the likely pleasure of listening to him talk, although I wouldn't expect him to listen. That doesn't sound crazy enough? Well, if you follow his MTC thing around enough, he'll sooner or later deeply annoy you with a pearls-before-the-swine stance, and if you dare go outside of the innocuous Dear Prudence forum, his anti-Republican ranting just may get under your skin. He's at his most batshit when feeling aggrieved by other posters, however, responding disproportionately with screaming profanity. It can still be funny.

Hauteur (45% cracked) If you like well-crafted intelligent anti-neocon screed, I must suggest you read Sarvis. If, however, you find Sarv's evident underlying sanity and reason too boring, you can switch to this guy. Hauteur is genuinely a skilled writer--an excellent word craftsman, though he's lamentably compared his essays to performance art, an analogy I can't get past now. Sometimes he really nails the posts though, and you can even converse sanely with him, provided you approach courteously and provided you more or less agree with him at the outset. Like the dood, he'll rally tons of righteous fury against those he considers enemies, and Hauteur's most prominent enemy is the Fray editor himself. Hauteur will occasionally castigate with holy outrage any poster who dares to discuss anything less important than (his) politics, and then spend two straight months doing nothing but whining at length over stars and checkmarks, all with no apparent sense of irony.

JudgeBland (just about half-baked) The man goes by many names, most of them hyphenated or compounded. His style these days is usually that of a sniper, but the content is a head-scratcher often enough, a roll-out flag that doesn't even say "bang," but cites some obscure poetry in French ("je sais pourquoi le clown triste pleure"). I'd consider having a beer with this guy too, but I'd keep some safe routes and emergency codes handy. He takes delight in rattling the posters he finds overrated, and he finds touchy-feely stuff especially annoying, especially if it's of a female version. And don't ask him about the Jews.

Tempo (55% nutters) Speaking of righteous outrage, Tempo eats, breathes, and shits the stuff. All over the place. She is actually sort of a nice, caring person, in the way that your overbearing mother is nice and caring. It's really important to Tempo that your point of view is "correct" by her standards, and that she has some ownership of the local drama, and if it isn't or she doesn't, then she'll cry (often to the editor, who despises her). She is tenacious and probably not worth the price of pissing off, and I most regret putting her on the list, but it's something you really need to know.

Ender (65% mad) I don't know if Ender is nuts or Machiavellian, but I assure you newbies that in practice, it doesn't make any difference. Evidence for insanity: his recent Fraywatch blowup; his apparently random swipes at Dawn Coyote, skitch, gary1, or whoever he's been at most recently. Evidence for sanity: he's just too smart to be pulling off this "as a top-tier poster" self-parody and not be aware of it. Evidence for insanity: he's not laughing at it that we can see. Sanity: Ender doesn't believe that the Fray is populated with real people, just a bunch of D&D characters which the owners may invest too much of themselves in. Insanity: but a lot of us are real people. Mostly, Ender reserves his passion for the other Frayzies, which is good for you and me, but the problem is that here at the bottom of the mountain, it doesn't matter whether it's wolf piss or pig piss: it still reeks. He has some practical things to teach, and can knock some posts out of the park with thoughtful sentiment when he feels like it, but you're probably better off ignoring the guy so you he doesn't drag you down when he goes off the deep end again. The nuttiness seems to come from a boredom that leads to detachment, and the scariest part about Ender is that I see a lot of him in me. Where do you think this post came from after all?

Hey Ender, assuming it's you that's peeking, I've revised this opinion somewhat, especially the video game thing. (They're all subject to revision, after all.) Your biggest "sin" that I see is a fine ironic sense uncoupled with a sense of humor--something I previously thought wasn't possible, and consequently have found difficult to grasp.

Appolonius (70% batshit) Appolonius is a tremendous stylist, and I harbor some affection for the guy for giving me encouragement here and there on these boards. But he's definitely one of the crazier ones, and what's more, he'd probably not deny it. It's just that there's so damned much unfiltered cerebral effluent coming out of him, that that the shit inevitably comes out right along with the rosewater. His posting is probably closer to raw thought than most of us are comfortable admitting, but that doesn't mean I want to read the unrefined product most days, and there can be quite a lot of it to sift through in any case. My biggest problem with Pony-boy is this, however: I served with Jesus Christ. I knew Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was a friend of mine. Appolonius, you're no Jesus Christ.

ghost (80% insane) Never seen a ghost, you say? You are probably wrong. Our ghost is a multinicknamed beast that speaks in loopy prose and addenda. Most of the commentary is a circuitous analysis of other posters, but ghost also likes logic puzzles, and probably sees the Fray as a great big one. It's hard for me to tell you how much there is actually there (is the writing cryptic or just lazy?) but smarter posters than me have found forays into ghost's archives rewarding. Ghost posts are genuinely interesting—in the way that codependency is genuinely need-fulfilling—and ghost may even deign to respond to if you can pass ghost's test by making a passable theory as to what it is that ghost is on about. There is no poster for whom I more relish the fact that the person behind the keyboard is just some (other) bored and bespectacled nerd who cares way too much about this place. The ghost is easy to miss, but ghost's M.O. is infectious and affects ghost has affected the styles of many other posters. You'll be reading the ghost's posts too if you get bored enough.

Denny (85% crazy) Another guy I don't love to condemn, but the amazing quantity of spewage outweighs the handful of nice things he's said to me. Denny is a troll's troll. No Fray poster can touch him for sheer volume or for history or for number of nicknames. Denny, to his credit, at least doesn't shy from being a real person, maybe even he was a real poster once, but unfortunately that person is kind of like that crazy nattering uncle you had, who told war stories he couldn't possibly have been there for, that eventually you learned to tune out and avoid at family gatherings. Not that he can't have a point every once in a while—he tries on a new skin suit every now and again and tries to pull this off—but he can't hold a candle to the brilliant Frayzies no matter how hard he tries, and I trust other posters who've caught him shoplifting from the idea store. He swaps nics to avoid the editor's flush and the eyes of people who know him.

Oh, and lest we forget....

Keifus (___% out there)

Various Essays

1. Logicobabble

I read a fair amount of science fiction. Though overly maligned by the self-appointed literati, there is (like in most genre fiction I'd think) a good deal of artistry hiding in there for those willing to delve into the pages to find it. Biased SF geek that I am,* I'd go on to point out that speculative literature can offer the reader totally unique viewpoints from which explore human nature and all the other things that literature is good for. There is in SF (as in most genre fiction) a range of talents out there for getting these unique viewpoints communicated. Nerdy connoisseurs (ahem) like to twist their panties over the "hardness" of given works of science fiction. This is basically a question of what kind of scientific verisimilitude has the author pulled off.

A SF author at the rock solid end of the plausibility spectrum will violate no known scientific laws, but may speculate on technologies or environments that are workable in principle, but as yet undiscovered. (This is usually dry for my tastes.) In the sandy middle, however, where most authors operate, the behavior of the known universe may be tweaked here and there for the purposes of telling a story, or a broad-sweeping and unlikely technological advancement may serve to prop up the premises of the tale. And that's all fine with me, so long as there's a good story or a clever point that comes out of it. But as you get down on to the soft, mayonnaisey end of the hardness scale, fictional technological devices exist only to advance the plot in an ad hoc fashion, since the author wasn't resourceful enough to unwind the plot using logic or character motivation or anything within his previously established framework of built worlds. Usually these transitions read like a mad lib of smart-sounding words, but when parsed by knowledgable readers make absolutely no sense whatsoever. This disconnected tangle of jargon has a special term: it's called technobabble. If you've seen Star Trek, then you know what technobabble is. It's amazing how many space-time anomolies can be defeated by reversing the polarity of the tachyon field.

Well, you've read the title of my post. Have you guessed where it's going?

That's right, somehow the punditocracy has become corrupted with a steaming, stinking infection of logicobabble. Like technobabble, logicobabble uses a multiplicity of seemingly rational English words, such as may be used in logical discourse, but when analyzed by those who know better, fail to hold together. Like technobabble, logicobabble serves mostly as a convenient and lazy means to get from point A to point B. Like technobabble, logicobabble is employed by hacks not quite bright or motivated enough to concoct a good story from the premises they constructed in the first place.

Logicobabble has traditionally (in my lifetime) seen its home in the storied caricatures of liberal academics, railing against the androdominion of the phallocracy and all such nonsense. But it hardly ends there. In fact, the degree of logicobabble used by today's policymakers is what I find particularly alarming. The pages of the National Review and the Weekly Standard are awash in the stuff. I present Slate's own Christopher Hitchens as the pinnacle of the art. Lots of words, no real sense.

Logicobabble has been needed badly in those circles lately, since it's hard to get from the previously accepted axioms of conservativism to the current state of affairs without piling on a whole lot of obfuscation. How do you get from balanced budgets to massive deficits? Don't waste your time with logical arguments, just load in a lot of smart-sounding words and cultivate the properly smug attitude of the know-it-all. Is logic keeping you from invading another country? Hell, wave a few vials around, make a lot of pretend arguments, and go in anyway. You just have to reverse the polarity of your integrity field. No real need to cover your rhetorical ass either, just claim that whatever's happening is why you were there in the first place; it's not like anyone can call you on it.

I wish I knew how to make it go away. My advice on the matter is cheap: think; write; reason. Try to communicate honestly, though it may take more work. Maybe this infection of logicobabble can be beaten, if only we can derive the prognostication Re: our self-actualizations.** As Captain Kirk would never let us forget, it's a one-in-a-million chance, but it just might work.

* Even my acronym of choice reveals this: "Sci-fi"? As if.

** Unfortunately for the purposes of this post, it seems I suck at doing this stuff intentionally.


2. How Easy It Is

"How easy it is, how little strength it requires, to do so much good."

Thus soliloquizes the charming but oafish Pierre Bezhukof, about a quarter of the way through Tolstoy's War and Peace.* The quote occurs during his first visit to his estates; two years after inheriting immense wealth, he undergoes an awakening of sorts and sets off to alleviate the toil of his serfs (one of those fine institutions from the ass-end of history). In this segment he gets railroaded by his cunning overseer who happily showcases Pierre shining faces of peons he's helped, while the author takes the time to demonstrate how each of his well-meant reforms have produced opposite the intended effect. It's a brief parable of the failure of good intentions, of faith without deeds, of the responsibilities of those who would govern.

Poor Pierre is getting railroaded by everone--he's a likable guy but with the unfortunate constitution of room-temperature gelatin. Most of the characters in this book (so far) are "the rich," a true aristocracy, and Pierre is both the richest in wealth and poorest in integrity. Yet, I have a hard time drumming up a blanket condemnation of all of these society creatures (due in no small part to the love with which Tolstoy paints them), because they are doing what people really should have the liberty to do--live freely and pursue happiness--they are easy to identify with, even while the cloud of an evil construct social looms over all of them. No it's not a fair system, but they are people too.

So Pierre as an empathetic buffoon, even while he facilitates the depravity of the world. I'd call it prescience, but I imagine it's always been this way. Is Ken Lay a hapless oaf ignorant of Jeff Skilling's; is Ebbers a likable lummox unaware of Sullivan's nefarious work; is George Bush a good man giving into the temptations of an easy life and excused belligerence while getting pushed around by the wily Cheneys and Roves? Maybe, but it doesn't matter much to the serfs, and the boss's failure to govern accountably has likely made things even worse.

But this is not only a screed against the rich, because it's not like these failings are confined to them. What the hell responsibilities is Keifus doing with his comparative advantage of (relative) wealth and freedom from hunger? (What are you doing?) Advancing science? Learning with an open mind? Raising responsible people? Writing out "thoughtful" sermons to a tiny audience? These things sound like hardly a start. The thing is, doing good is not easy at all. It takes work at least, and probably sacrifice. Too easily we settle for the mere intent of compassion, in ourselves and in others. Lazy, privileged bastards the lot of us.

* Probably this is a favorite sophomore essay topic. I promise I will do no worse. Next week I may move up to junior level and compare this novel with Crime and Punishment or maybe the The Great Gatsby.

3. Keifus, and then some

Alt title: I've seen more naked old men in the last three weeks…

Alt title: the great white bulk

Alt title: Oh…a gyyym*

I am not an unattractive man. Or rather, I have always had reasonably good raw material with which to be attractive, were I ever willing to do very much about it, to pay adequate attention and cash for clothing, grooming, to practice being smooth, and so forth. But I find life too short for that kind of crap. Even though I suppose I've traded off some measure of getting laid as a consequence, I'm happy to have weeded out any number of superficial annoying people. (Shut up.) I've come to grips with the fact my personality is essentially sort of dorky, but my physique is a different matter. In that, I've spent seven years in increasing denial.

They say the camera adds 20 pounds. Self-descriptions on the internet subtract at least 30, but I'm being honest here, I swear (quiet you). At 5'11", I have a biggish build that puts me at a natural 190 pounds or so (less and I look scrawny, so shaddap, wouldja?). Unfortunately, I'm now pushing 215, and it's become more than an aesthetic problem. Last fall, I was clued in rather painfully to the fact that I can't casually lose weight like I could in the B.C. days. Trucking my tottering bulk around at top (allowable) speeds on spindly joints was doing nothing less than tempting fate, and thanks to that hubris, it looks like I'll be lucky to pick up my stick again this fall. It greatly annoys me that I have to train to do the athletic activities I enjoy now, instead of just doing them and calling that my training. I suppose I should be thankful that I've thus far avoided hypertension, diabetes, etc, but I ain't exactly getting any younger (shut up!), and there's no point in being in a risk group. So it looks like it's that time again…

I've started working out more times I think more than anybody I know. Sadly, the effort has always succumbed to a pattern of shifting schedules: new semesters, then new jobs, and always new residences, year after year. It's my piss-poor time organization that always fails me--11 PM jogs, 1 AM games, bagging out of work early--none of these things are compatible with adult activities.

But fat takes its toll, and a month ago, failing to suck it in, I finally sucked it up. I joined the early morning crowd, starting the routine again for the hundredth time, but with hopefully more stick-to-it-iveness.*** For several weeks now, I've paid for the privelege of comparing myself with the old man dunlop**** crowd. I feel better beside these sagging speedo-tanned (or all-over pale) specimens, and I'm also still a lot faster and stronger than most of these guys. I'd be happy to let my faux superiority end there (knock it off, ok?), but since I need to proceed to work afterward, a shared shower is inevitable. These men's bathing habits…let's just say I'd have been happy not to witness them. After the chilly pool, everyone's scrotum looks like a wizened pale walnut and everyone's penis looks like a swollen Vienna sausage (but not mine--it's huge--shut UP!). It's not that I'm looking, but it's been burnt unwilling into my brain. I'm still frightened of the sauna.

While I'm at it, let me put a couple of myths about the pool to rest right now. First, buoyancy is no advantage. I do twelve laps mandatory (after the weight room I'm already tired out--shut up) and I'm pausing to suck wind at the end of every one of them. The second myth you chubby bastards may be entertaining is that swimming is easy on the joints. Au contraire: I can't help but keep stretching my erstwhile sprained ankle in uncomfortable ways, and my ancient knee issues still flare like white plasma when my legs push in unaccustomed directions. Meanwhile, the saggy old men proceed--slowly it's true--lap after lap after lap. But I'm faster, right?

If there's anything I've found out about excercise in all these attempts, it's this: resignation will trump resolution every time. All the times I've tried to take it up in the evenings, it's just seemed like just another chore when I got home, and as an optional one, it never worked when the excitement wore thin. The morning is treating me surprisingly well. It's easy to be resigned when my alternative is going to my crappy job. I think it's really going to be different this time (and why won't you just SHUT UP?!)


* pronounced gyme
*** The most annoying word in the language, followed closely by "winningest."
**** [southern accent] My gut "dunlop" overy my belt

4. Alarmed? Who's alarmed?

Today, it was burgers for lunch. It's the sort of grilling weather of which switters would approve, topping 95 degrees and humid, up here in the Northeast. There was something very assuring about the juicy patties rendering their fat to the fire, sending flames sizzling up through the grate as tasty PAHs condensed blackly all about, seared flesh filling my nostrils as I did my manly duty in front of the grill.

Meanwhile, yesterdays news revealed a U.S. cow, downed last year, has been positively identified for mad cow disease. Our beef supply is in trouble.

The government reassurances are ludicrous. This one was caught in the screening, therefore the screening is working, we're told. (Um, how are they screened? Are only the raving psycho cows culled?) There is no danger to humans, since this animal didn't enter the food supply. (Which ones did?!) Where the cow may have come from, is, of course, hush-hush. Bovine Spongiform Enephalitis, or BSE, comes from recycling animals* (and animal feces) as feed, principally from nervous tissue. It's so damn cheap to do use this offal, it's nearly impossible to get ranchers to stop, and producers have lobbied for less strict measures than are in place elsewhere on the globe, where people have actually died. In particular, activists worry about the loophole through animal waste. Feeding cow innards to cows is banned, but it's OK to feed them to chickens, and all right to put the resulting guano back into cow feed. The USDA has already lost credibility with regards to its testing procedures, assuring a negative, then declaring a reluctant positive, months later. And frankly, feeding herbivores shit and entrails fails the conventional wisdom test.

The USDA is so defensive in its assurances to be self-evidently lying. For some cynical amusement, compare their protestations to the color-coded Terror Warnings which are so fervent in their sweaty declaration to the affirmative, that they have also evolved past credibility. Words, or at least public words, have come to mean the precise opposite of what they say. No cause for alarm? Better duck under the sheets. Terrorists are out to get us? Better look at what idiotic idea they're trying to sell.

According to Richard Rhodes in his book Deadly Feasts, one of the scarier things about BSE is that the incubation time is ridiculously long, and the contagion is damn near impossible to destroy; contaminated equipment may well be sufficient to start killing people down the line. Dedicated measures may not be enough to stop it, and reluctant, halfassed ones definitely won't be. You have to cut cows out of your diet today if you want to insulate yourself from a possible outbreak 15 years from now.

Rhodes' book, however, is science journalism, written by a layman. He gives it a good go,** but it's not an actual scientific review. It focuses mostly on the character drama in the BSE research community--the stuff you get from interviews instead of reading research publications. Your Keifus has been too lazy to follow up on the current research, but less than a hundred Brits have succumbed, and the disease has been known for a good while now. That is, far short of an epidemic so far, despite the dire warnings. Similar diseases in sheep and deer have failed to get into people as well, so far as I am aware. I am also highly skeptical about the nature of the alleged contagion itself (Nobel prize notwithstanding), as are many others who are much more informed than I am.

Given the fact that I work with lots of chemicals (toxicological effects unknown), and that I drive like a retard, it's not BSE that's likely to kill me. I feel a lot guiltier about feeding cows to my kids.

But damn, those were good burgers.


*not only a protein-based animal feed, but insulation for low income housing, a high explosive, and a top-notch engine coolant "."

** In particular, he does a good job at examining the skepticism of the community regarding prions--the mystery contagion. And bless 'im, he brings up Langmuir's classic notes (gratuitous self plug alert!) on pathological science, worth applying to damn near anything you read.

5. Shut the fuck up
Somewhere along the line, someone apparently told you that there's no such thing as a stupid question. This was no doubt greatly reassuring to you, and, as a virtuoso of obtuseness, you took it as a challenge. The nuance behind that old saw, which you've unsurprisingly failed to grasp, is that it's something that's said by teachers who are trying their level best to dispel your ignorance, and that it doesn't apply to you now, and probably didn't even apply then either. What your teacher meant is that there is a time and place for stupid questions, and that you should ask them at the time of the lesson, not at the time when you'd be accountable for the knowledge. But you were no doubt the retarded joker that earnestly asked what all those squiggly lines were in your engineering course, the night before the final. And you grew up to be the guy that runs an advanced R&D program in the field, still without getting the deal with all those squiggly lines and big words. If it's not a buzzword, chances are it's not in your working vocabulary (and even then, chances are you don't get what it means).

There's a fine line between admitting ignorance and brandishing it, which, like all subtleties, you insist on blundering across at the expense of my time. Raising a battle cry of corporatespeak or misunderstood technobabble, you wave your lack of knowledge around the room like a sword, heedless of whose head is in the way, least of all your own. You tilt the lance of your naivete at immovable windmills of fact, or worse, against the very real dragons of the marketplace. Fortunately for you, there are lots of other wannabe salamanders out there, and I rest assured that as you waste away my hours, your contemporaries are wasting someone else's, and ultimately you only tussle with each other, or hire each other as circumstances may dictate, while the real dragons ravage and the real windmills grind away. I pity only your minions, and the suckers who don't know you yet.

It wouldn't be so bad if you were passingly aware of your stupidity. If you didn't perceive your brainless irrelevant queries as stunning esoteric wit. If by this improbable attempt to aggrandize yourself, you weren't making the rest of us look so very stupid. If you weren't making us so very ashamed of our entire organization.

But what the hell, it's not as if I had anything better to do with my day. What's another meeting? To you they're justification. What are more squiggly lines? To you, they're baubles of your empire, like great art dangling in the hallways of the nouveau riche. What's another idea lying fallow? You plague me for innovation and then cast it aside uncomprehending. Or borrow it and label it your own, or assign it to someone else.

I suppose it would only embarrass me if you took it to heart anyway. You still boggle that this stuff could be good for the things I proposed three years ago, which didn't seem attractive until you discovered someone who was doing it outside, that you could contract at three times the expense and half the IP, already behind the curve, and now we both must watch this new unlucky scion you're grilling as he struggles to answer you. You, smugly thinking that you've bested someone you don't realize is far smarter than you. Me, uncomfortably knowing that he's awkwardly coming to grips that you're question is nonsense. On behalf of all of us, just shut the fuck up!

Love,

Keifus

Archaeology at Home

As I look at my yearly budgets (yes, I am that nerdy--what did you expect?), I notice a distinct trend: every three months my "home repair" expenditures spike. Like clockwork, four times a year, I find myself jonesing for a project. On this occasion, my long weekend has turned longer, longer, and gradually all-consuming as my family continues on their vacation of sorts, and I stay home uncovering artifacts in the successively ancient strata of my kitchen floor.

It's something that's not failed to fascinate me in all my efforts over the past several years. Digging into the walls and floors invariably reveals some gems of previous occupation, or some brief windows into the minds of previous contractors and amateurs. (Evidence of the latter is in unfortunate abundance in my house, but on the plus side, everything I have attempted has resulted in a substantial improvement.) It can be interesting to discover writing on the insides of walls, and try to determine to what the measurements refer. As I work, I produce similar leavings for the next renovator, from dimensions to clever notes to myself, such as "you installed this upside-down, dumbass," some of them assuming that the next person is myself, on the off-chance that my scrawlings direct me on some future effort.

My kitchen floor had three layers, two of which I removed forcibly; and judging from the patches in the lowest floor, I could piece together where the former appliances and cabinets were, back in the days before the wall was knocked out and the big reformatting occurred. The care we spend on perfecting the details that no one will ever know. And the emotional investiture: for my own patches I tacked down some boards that had formerly been the toy box my daughter helped me paint. Who will ever lament this but me?

Artifacts rise up from all levels of the food chain. The lowest of them are the tiny coprolithic offerings of my invisible worshippers, for whom I exist as their aloof god, keeper of Pumpkin, the devourer of mousy souls. Dog damage permeates everywhere in my house, and a lot of my motivation to feather my nest rose out of an attempt to erase the canine wreckage. Children too have left their mark. I've found evidence of boys and girls from babies through adolescence, from tiny forgotten toys to inexpertly scrawled admonitions of propriety ("my room, keep out") to crappy metal shop projects and even a suspicious corked test tube buried deep in the insulation that I've been meaning to take to work and analyze some day.

I discover that as I've been digging down, I have likewise been planting my own evidence. It's a perspective that I don't relish, as I silently join hands with the many, many humans that have come, and gone, before me.

Some Essays on Music

1. How Keifus Got his Groove

Many people argue that musical taste is a purely subjective phenomenon, but I disagree: there is an obvious and sound biological basis for the art. From the very moment of conception, we've been surrounded by rhythmic thumping and wheezing, sloshing and swinging, beating and resting and repeating. We've grooved from the beginning to the diurnal, tidal, and seasonal inputs that affect our host, and then our own, bodies. We're bipedal by design and walking has its own left-right dipping cadence, in 4/4 time as all marches have always been, alternating a major and minor accent with an inferior pulse in the space between them. We run to a brisk half time, ONE/two/ONE/two, and it's all spelled out right there in the score. Getting cultural, speech has its own rhythm too, and English famously bops about in five-beat measures. Mentally, we have a knack for these simple prime numbers and we sense the multiples as such: the odd times--in three, five or even seven beats--present a special emotional frisson: in tune with our mind but challenging our animal kinesthetics.

But it's not all rhythm, and pitch is natural too. Our aural detectors are an array of miniature resonators, which stimulate our nerves in sympathy to only those sounds in tune with their own natural vibration, or in integer multiples or fractions of that mode. There is a reason harmonics sound good: they are stimulating the same group of cellular sensors but in different proportions. It's like one of those pin arrays that take the shape of solid objects, or like a digital image—each element is evenly spaced but the different intensity of each creates the overall pattern, and our minds just dig that symmetry. Dividing every frequency double into twelve parts was eminently natural,* since twelve breaks down nicely into halves, thirds, fourths, and sixths—harmonics that are easy on the ears—and part of the fun is finding those other, sometimes counterintuitively consonant vibrations that fit together--and Keifus, the extent of whose knowledge of music theory you're reading right now, still appreciates it when it comes together in an unexpected way. Because when it's right, you just know it's right.

Beyond that, it's all about emotional manipulation. Competently constructed music uses these rhythmic and tonal sequences of wrong and various degrees of right to drag you through some labyrinth of feeling, often depositing you somewhere other than where you started. It builds up expectation based on our biologically and culturally wired preferences, and then plays on it. Technical proficiency is not sufficient, and sometimes not even necessary, for producing the good stuff, but emotional proficiency sure is. Whether it's learned or intuited, a good musician can translate emotion into the language of chord progressions and rhythmic sequences and, well, move people.

*Although whoever the genius is who decided to label a twelve note scale with seven letters and then put it on staff of five bars is probably teaching the sytem to Satan's good-time banjo brigade now and for all eternity.

2. More About Music

Throughout my life, I have been slowly triangulating on music as an interest and hobby. This after a long denial of many influences--I grew up around a blugrass band and I was educated on a horn--but neither of these things had much of an effect on me for the first 30 years of my life. My Dad, the bluegrass player, was the same way--it's something about the Keifus genetic code--at early middle-age some trigger was pulled in both of us, and we discovered an itch that positively needed to be scratched. In my case, the bug came in the form one of the several mandolins that the old man built from scratch--the logical expression of his crafty expression and musical urge at a similar age.

Like Dad, there was something I completely missed in my formal music education (through no fault of my educators, to their undeniable frustration). To humans, music is completely intuitive [fray.slate.msn.com], but imposing the formal rules of it can obviate the basic principles. Rhythm is the basis of life, and tone is the foundation of our second-best sense. For so many of us however, formal education squandered this feeling for a poor, unintuitive approximation--a pile of crappy, compromising language, a bunch of words that belie the basics of Getting It.

Unfortunatley, unlike his craftsman father, your humble Keifus blew his edjumication on engineering and the sciences, culminating to date in several papers on the science of acoustics. And I find that the freshman musical formulae are pretty inadequate from the technical angle too. I find it weird that I've angled into music from two technical sides: the boring mechanics on one pole, and the fascinating technical basis on the other; and it's taken me many years for these two perspectives to finally wedge together and point toward the real, fundamental thing. I am loving the hell out of it, even while I envy those who were lucky enough to have the intuition from the get-go.

From the nerdy direction, it's like the many fields in which I've dabbled, in that the jargon slows you down at the beginning. But musical language is really somethihng special. See, I get the language of harmonics: for stringed instruments or horns, that's the primary vibration, it's double, triple and so on. An engineer would call that the fundamental, second, and third harmonic, but in music, these words don't imply multiples, but positions in the ridiculous seven-note scale. So while a fourth may actually be the fourth, a fifth is actually the third, a second is the ninth, and it just doesn't get any better.

Part of the problem is that we hear logarithmically, but harmonics progress linearly. It makes for careful fingering, and we must progress to new strings if we wish to progress up the scale with fingers of finite width. But while the (logarithmic) chromatic scale makes a certain sense, the major and minor scales drive me absolutely batshit. I reiterate, whose retarded idea was it to label twelve half-tones with seven letters? And then put it on a five-bar staff? With slightly more thought, those sharps and flats could have been altogether discarded, and the notation could have been oh-so-much more intuitive.

(And still I wonder by what brilliance it was noted that seven notes Sound So Right, or is it just cultural bias?)

So yeah, I am one of those weirdos that wants to play more, the more I understand. Maybe I'll figure it out eventually. Rock on, dudes.

3. Musical Phraseology

My father has described bluegrass as traditional music played at ludicrous speed.* It's hard to listen to these tunes and not disagree--it's intimidating. For months, I had been trying to get my playing speed up (it's the damn right hand) at the exclusion of most other aspects of the instrument. And while it's helped the coordination, to be honest, I've really enjoyed learning new songs more than I have enjoyed the learning the lightning-fast physical skills.

Two weeks ago, Dad gave me a book that emphasized a more balanced approach, taking the time to stress rhythm playing, melody playing, and (it's about time) an explanation of the philosophies behind each.** (Poor Keifus has always been "book smart.") I like this approach a hell of a lot better than increasing the speed on the melodies I've memorized. In no small part, it's because I feel like I don't suck.

I need to elaborate on that. I've been trying for while now to get a feel for the four- or eight-note licks that fit "inside" a given chord. I figured that if I can get the hang of these bricks of sounds interlock to build a musical theme, then I'm in good shape. I've been realizing the degree to which music is a language.

This is a kickass revelation, because while I am a hack on the mandolin, I am not half-bad at stringing words together to express how I feel. Maybe there's hope yet at getting the hang of this thing.

The truncated alphabet of music, the ABCs, EFGs and their chromatic step-siblings make up the "letters" of music, which, like in language, define the sounds but don't really convey meaning until they are concatenated properly into words. These little melodic strings fit inside musical keys like sentence fragments inside a paragraph, the progression of which forms complete blocks of thought, segments of lyrical emotion. A song is a musical essay (three boring ABA paragraphs to the novice, but so much more to the maestro) placing it all together to convince the listener to get from here to there, from this feeling to the next, to some logical conclusion of sensation. When it connects, it is absolutely transcendent, but you get your share of obnoxious trolls too, irritating jingles that catch in your head and merely inflame your baser instincts. There is some expertise in both approaches.

The problem with my late-life music education is that I am learning it like a baby learns it. I must learn a foreign alphabet (Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, or what-have-you), difficult accents and sounds, and even as I get the general meaning of the words, there's a whole world of connotation and nuance that must be mastered to really get my point across. I'm maybe at the tourist phrase-book level of understanding right now. I can compose, in pidgin dialect, simple thoughts--how to find a bathroom or get a taxi--but I get enough of it to see the poetry waiting for me on the other side. Though I may always speak with the halting accent of a "music as a second language" immigrant, I can look over the horizon to the point when I am, however clumsily, able to express myself, and really, that's all I want.

Keifus

* Not his exact wording, but Spaceballs is a great flick. Dad would approve.

** If you are interested, the book is Dix Bruce's Getting Into Bluegrass Mandolin, the best educational reference I've found yet, by far. In addition to a well-developed approach, it has a CD to play along with, with tunes at both "learning" and regular speed, which is invaluable.