Unseen

”Please don’t try to stop me. I’ve already decided,” she said. She stood at the railing, her curls tugged by the wind to cast a halo of sun-illuminated frizz around her. Her hands were tightened at the banister and the toes of her faded tennis shoes, two sizes too big and meant for a boy, gasped into the emptiness beyond. She did not raise her eyes from the abyss of city in front of her, but if she had, no tears could be seen. Her voice was as calm as the summer day she stood within, if only for a moment longer.

 “I know,” Death said as it took its place beside her. It was but a shadow. If the girl had taken her eyes from the pavement far below, she might have seen a gray man, or a svelte woman, or a grinning child, or many other things. She could have seen her dead grandmother, or an angel, or even God. But, she did not take her eyes off the void, and so she saw nothing.

 “What? Have you come to watch me do it?” she asked. Her voice wavered between honesty and snark.

 “No,” Death responded with honesty.

 “I’ll do it, you know,” she pleaded.

  “I know,” Death nodded.

 The girl let go one hand suddenly so that her body jerked forward into the void, and Death did nothing. Her hair streamed around her face, obscuring her vision. One of her feet slipped. She could no longer see the abyss, but she could taste it. She could feel it, calling to her as it streamed through her outstretched fingers. The wind offered her its longing embrace, begging her to fall. But she didn’t.

 Her heart thudded, and her breath came in gasps. The cacophony of humanity below continued, uninterrupted.

  “You really aren’t going to stop me,” she said quietly, suspended over the world by one hand and one faded sneaker. It was not a question, so Death did not answer.

 She took a deep breath. “Who are you?” she asked, not altering her position.

 “Death,” Death said, and she knew it to be true. Perhaps she had known it all along, but with those words, her grip sagged on the railing. Her knuckles were no longer pale, but returned to their dark hue as blood rushed in. Her fingers slipped, untangling from one another so that each may have its separate place on the cold metal of the railing.

 “So, I’m really going to do it this time?” she asked.

 “Yes,” Death said.

 “And what happens then?” she asked, breathless.

 “You die,” Death said.

 “And he can’t hurt me anymore?” she asked.

 “You will be dead.”

 “What about my sister? What will happen to her?” she asked.

 “Your sister will no longer have a sister,” Death said.

 “Will he hurt her too?” she asked.

 “He already does,” Death said.

 She cried now. She did not sob noisily or dramatically, but snot and tears commingled quietly on her face. Her hair might have concealed it from an ordinary observer, but Death saw all. “And you already know I’m going to do it,” she whispered.

 It was not question, so Death did not answer.

 “Can you check in on her, once I’m gone?” she asked.

 “I’ll find her once but only once,” Death said.

 “Can’t you find him then? Right now?” she asked.

 “I find all, but I do not choose the time,” Death said.

 “He’s always telling me he’s gonna kill me. He’s says just one more time, and he’ll get his gun, and then. Then, it’ll be my time. But— but, I can choose my time,” she mused. Her shoe slipped, and the girl hung from one hand, hundreds of feet above the ground. An involuntary sound of terror escaped her as her hand squeezed tightly to its last escape, but she controlled herself. One of her shoes slipped off in the momentary struggle and preceded her toward the ground.

 If she looked up, she might have seen Death. She might have found his expression curious. She might have seen the philosophical inquiry as to why a young girl might manage to control the path of a being as old as time. She might have seen the impatience there of a death in a slow drama, when she hadn’t the decency to die as quickly as she should. She might have seen the listlessness of one who has seen civilizations rise and fall, and taken each prince and pauper in turn, so that each death is nothing new, even when they do not occur exactly when they should. But, if she had looked closely and observed carefully, she might have seen the deep melancholy of Death’s existence epitomized in waiting upon a girl to just let go. But she did not look up, so she saw nothing.

 “Can you hold my hand?” she asked, her eyes trained to the fateful path of her shoe until it met the sidewalk below. Someone looked up and pointed. “It won’t be long.” She closed her eyes.

 “Yes,” said Death. So, Death held her hand, and she let go.

 If she had opened her eyes, she would have seen the world pass in a blur. She would have seen the awestruck faces of passersby as a girl, like a shoe that was two sizes two big, fell swiftly and inelegantly to the sidewalk below. She would have seen the onrushing gray abyss come up to meet her.

 But she did not open her eyes, so she saw nothing.

 She felt only the wind in her hair, the sun on her back, and Death, hand in hand.

An American Fairy Tale

Once upon a time,  A village burned.  Ever since Prometheus passed along the idea of making fire to a caveman somewhere at the dawn of civilization, human beings have enjoyed burning things. It started with wood, moved on to your neighbor’s wood, and then the natural progression was to set fire to your neighbor as well. Prometheus would have rolled in his grave if he’d ever been allowed to die. But this fairy tale takes place before the Catholic Church had gotten its world renowned reputation for burning people in all sorts of ingenious and incredibly creative ways, when the concept was still on the cutting edge of brutality and not something that happened on a day to day basis. Burning villages was still an avant-garde art-form that only the most cultured artists of the era had tried their hand at. The most talented among these was a man named Atilla the Hun, who had reached the forefront of his field slowly and methodically. Like most fools, what he lacked in talent he made up for with endless practice and quite admirable tenacity. Through sheer force of will a man who is inept at a task may slowly become a master.  That is also an accurate summary of the human race’s plodding and asinine progress through the last ten thousand years or so.

 But that is not the point of this fairy tale. This fairy tale follows in the same classical tradition as the immortal and universally hallowed morality tales of the great Greek storyteller Aesop. It is a homage, if you will. Which is to say is to say that its message is about as subtle as a brick flying out of the back of the truck in front of you, smashing through your windshield as quickly as it takes a grumpy old man to complain when you change the channel from yet another NCIS rerun, and near instantly pulverizing your skull so completely that when the paramedics finally show up to scrape your lifeless husk out of your 1973 Oldsmobile Omega, the grizzled 20-year veteran paramedic actually gags a little.

 This is one of those kinds of fairy tales.  Once upon a time,  A village burned.  A young man stumbles from the ruins. He is covered in ash, and the softly moaning wind blows his soot stained shawl up against the side of his body, revealing his hollow chest and the bones of his rib-cage. If you’re having a hard time picturing this, imagine him looking a bit like like a character from Loony Toons who’d blown himself up chasing a roadrunner, but admittedly it’s a lot less comedic considering the boy’s circumstances, which are as follows:

 Two days before, he had gone out into the wilds alone on his first hunt. This was the right of passage into manhood for this particular village, in which when a boy reached the age of thirteen, all of the older men in the tribe forced him to go out into the nearby forest alone covered in nothing but what amounted to a tattered sack. Sometimes they gave them a stick, too. He had three days to kill an animal of some sort, preferably a big one that tasted good, then bring it back so the village could throw a big party and eat whatever the boy caught. After this set of arbitrary conditions had been met, the boy was thought to have become a man, and everyone congratulated him for slaughtering the animal and not getting killed after they had all abandoned him in the woods. It was a sort of proto college fraternity hazing ritual, basically. The French anthropologist who first studied this practice, Arnold van Gennep, christened it “rite de passage” and so ever since anthropologists have called this the “The Rites of Passage Tradition”, but everybody else calls it “Fucking Retarded.”  On the second day of his rite de passage, the boy returned with a promising deer only to discover every single person that he had ever known was dead. If you actually took the time to trace the modern Gregorian calendar all the way back to when the boy came back to find that everybody and everything that he’d ever known was on fire, you would find that it in fact occurred on a Monday, which anybody probably could have guessed anyway, since it’s without a doubt the worst day of the entire week.

 He hadn’t stayed in his village long after he had returned to find it burning, only pausing to take a broken sword from what was left of his own home. He didn’t bother gathering any food; he didn’t plan on traveling much. This was because the young man had decided to kill himself. The burning village had been his home his entire life. He was born there, and he had once expected to live a long life, start a family, and eventually die there surrounded by friends and loved ones. That was obviously off the table now. "Up in smoke”, if you will.  Like many suicidal people, the boy also developed a certain inexplicable taste for irony and the macabre. The shattered sword he carried had been passed down from father to son for generations. He supposed now that since his father and brothers were dead that it now belonged to him. His plan was to travel far enough away from his old home so that he could no longer see the flames and billowing smoke rising from what was left of the village, and then take his broken sword from its sheath and slit his throat. There was a cliff outside the village, and for a time he stumbled toward it slowly like a zombie from a bad horror film, but he never got there. He kept looking back on the life that was behind him, and each time the fires in the distance reflected in his eyes. Eventually he stopped and sat on a rock, and sadly watched as his future slowly turned to ash. It would be a disservice, I think, to call what he felt sadness. Nor would it be accurate to call it the mind-numbing torturous emptiness that sucks at a person’s chest like an open wound, which we name despair. It was a kind of peace, maybe, but not the kind which gives us grace in times of trouble. If there were any word to describe it, perhaps it would be resignation. Yet even that is a disservice to the countless millions that have died by their own hand. Who can say what is in the mind of a person who is about to take his own life? They silenced their own voices before they could tell us their stories– their thoughts, whatever they might have been— are gone now forever, hidden from us as though behind the reflective sheen of a darkly tinted two-way mirror: from the outside looking in, impossible to understand, and from the inside looking out, impossible to explain.  But don’t worry. The boy did not die. Well, he did eventually, of course, but not like that. This isn’t some horribly-ending German fairy tale, after all, but an American one. It’s right there in the title.  The sun would soon set in the west. The boy took his sword from its sheath and placed it alongside his throat. The steel was as cold as something that’s really cold, and a drip of blood slowly began to pool at its point.

 “Evenin’, traveler. I think I know you.”    The young man spun wildly towards the source of the voice. He was especially quick to move the blade from his neck. Human beings still have a shred of modesty burned into them, even when they are about to kill themselves. The sword fell to the ground almost instantly in a quick jerking motion of his arm, a thoughtless reflex action, like the legs twitching on a dead cricket, and he assumed a position and posture that insisted wordlessly that “Oh. Hey. I had just been standing around with a sword next to my neck.” and that people doing this particular activity were as common as sneezing or starting inane  conversations about the weather. He’d just been thinking, that’s all. Sword? No, I hadn’t had a sword held to my neck. You must have seen me at a bad angle, and gee, isn’t it nice out today?  “It’s harder to kill yourself with someone watching, y'know. Makes people feel ashamed, because something in them knows it ain’t right.”    The young man stared at the the new arrival in disbelief. Anybody living today would have recognized what was standing before him as quickly as they would recognize the Coca Cola logo. Here is what the boy saw:  The stranger wore a white button up shirt, and a rugged brown leather vest, with a sort of cloak thrown over it to protect him from the elements. He wore blue denim jeans. His boots were of an odd design. They were tall, brown, the tips were pointed, and there were odd circular metal rings hanging off the back of them which were ringed with spikes. He wore a belt that had a sheathe for some kind of weapon on his right and left leg, but they were not swords. Instead of having a straight handle like that of a sword, these had a strange curved handle made out of wood. Behind the man, the sun setting in the west  gleamed off the blue steel of the two weapons he wore on either hip.

 Most importantly, he wore a hat the likes of which the boy had never seen before. It had a wide brim that circled the man’s entire head.

 “Howdy,” the mysterious stranger said. For some reason he was squinting so hard that he looked like somebody who was staring straight into the sun, even though the sun was at his back. It was the sort of weather-worn face you couldn’t ever imagine having smiled.

"Who’re you?“

 The squinting man shrugged casually, and a brown cylindrical object suddenly appeared in his hand.  He put it in the side of his mouth, and casually walked over toward where the boy was sitting alone on the rock. The boy wasn’t frightened by this. He was in a place beyond fear now. He wasn’t even afraid when the mysterious stranger sat down next to him, reached into his pocket for a small box, made a quick flicking motion, and fire appeared in his hand as if by magic. He lit the tip of the thing in his mouth with his magic fire, took a deep breath. After a moment he breathed out a cloud of smoke with a sigh that sounded like it was weary with the weight of a thousand troubles and a long and profoundly annoying 62 year Hollywood career.  "Are you a god?” the boy asked.

 The man sat there for a long while before replying, seeming to ponder this as he stared off into the distance. The sun was getting lower now.  “‘I 'aint no god. I only been here just as long as people have been around to think me.” His voice was as rough and gravelly as asphalt. He took another long drag of his cigar, exhaled. “Kid, y'know, each drag burns different, but in the final moment, they all become wind.”  The boy told him he didn’t understand.

 The stranger nodded toward the broken sword on the ground, which had only so recently been up against the boy’s throat. “That 'aint no way to die.”

 The boy shook his head. “I don’t have anything left. Why not do it?”

 At this, the stranger took the cigar from his mouth and gestured toward the setting sun and the burning village in the distance.

   “Kid, you been lookin’ at the wrong thing out there.”  The boy looked. He saw the life he had thought was his future burning. But then he saw something else, beyond, further in the distance. It was smoke, but not from the burning village. They were campfires, thousands and thousands of them.“  "That’s them,” said the stranger, “the ones that burned your village. They’re out there waiting for you to go fight them.”  The boy looked down at his scrawny body. “But if I do that, I’ll die.”  The stranger took another long drag from his cigar, exhaled, and watched the smoke as it billowed away into nothingness. “Like I said kid, in the final moment, they all become wind.”

 This time the boy understood. He picked up his shattered sword and stood up. Before he could start walking toward the horde amassed on the horizon, the stranger put a hand on his shoulder. “Figure I’ll go out there with ya’, and besides, think you could use a horse.”

 The stranger worked his magic again, and two horses were there so quickly it felt that they’d been there all along, just out of sight. He and the boy mounted up on the horses and turned them toward the fires of the army in the distance.  “Better to go out like this”, said the mysterious stranger to the boy, “and keep on fighting, for the rest of our lives.”

 “For the rest of our lives,” the boy agreed.  And so they rode off into the sunset together, and they kept on fighting, for the rest of their lives.

Husk

  The door is almost open. The bolt, rusted over and now covered in blood, has been moving slowly, perhaps an inch now judging by the gash left in its wake. Beyond this I do not have a way to measure the passage of time in this place. There are those who say that time is nothing but an illusion, and that the the flow of the outside world viewed through the narrow lens our senses gives us an image of the world akin to the slides of a moving-picture. Our interpretation of these images from one moment to the next we deem time, but the universe cares nothing for our perceptions. There is no time, only movement, and without a conscious observer perhaps not even that. Here in this cell the outside world has ceased its movement, and in the darkness we cannot even see ourselves unless a dim glow comes in from under the bottom of the door. The horizontal movement of the bolt marks our passage like a timeline moving towards a foregone conclusion, and when it at last passes over the threshold and the door swings away from us it will have played out its history from beginning to end.      At night I have had troubled dreams. I think the door I sleep next to is responsible, or rather what is on the other side of it. I feel our gaoler beyond. At night I see him sitting hunched forward in a tattered white wooden chair, hair hung over most of his face so that I can only clearly see his mouth. At times he speaks words of great importance to me that I forget when I wake. Other times he cringes and heaves as if crying or laughing. Mostly he smiles at me, more telling than words. I will meet him soon. Other nights in my sleep everything is white and blinding, with another man looking over me in anticipation, or boredom. Far away I hear strange sounds: a man breathing in ragged gasps as consistent as a metronome, a far away synthetic chirp, words spoken in a language I do not understand.      We operate in shifts, bashing the bolt further toward home until our hands are too ragged to continue. I have just finished my shift for perhaps the last time. Thankfully the old woman and her family have quieted down and now seem to be at peace. They have not been much help, but at least they have calmed somewhat.      I hear a faint dripping, drops of chilled water falling unseen in the pitch black cell. There is a glow of aquamarine light on the other side of the door that spills from the narrow slit at its base, and for a moment I see a drop silhouetted mid-fall against the grey stone of the cell before everything returns to black. I hear the resulting splash but I cannot see it. Why am I here? I think I can remember most of it, but when I try to skip to the end there are parts of my memory missing. I feel their presence by the shape of the hole they have left behind in my mind, like a man who can see the shape of the final puzzle piece, but cannot find the piece itself. Something dark and awful happened.  Perhaps if I tell myself the story from the beginning then I will remember it all.      Jacob and I, fools that we were, decided to hike among the Alps and set aside the worries of the world,  at least for a little while. We trekked uninterrupted for three days before we arrived at a place not on the map, a valley where there should have been none. There was a stout little wood cabin there, its chimney spewing smoke into the sky. We had just decided to investigate the cabin when we heard a gunshot in the distance, off within the forest the cabin bordered. An argument broke out between us. I -being the cautious one- suggested we do not travel towards a gunshot we know nothing about, but Jacob would hear none of it. Unneeded harsh words were exchanged and we separated, I going to the cabin while he went into the woods. He agreed to come back to the cabin by nightfall.      As I walked toward the cabin the valley around me was frozen into silence. There were no birds singing, no insects making their shrill songs. The mountains loomed down over me as if in anticipation, huge and silent, their sheer cliffs weeping waterfalls of freshly melted snow.      Other than the smoking chimney, there were no signs of human life around the lone cabin; the sparse garden had been left mostly unattended. When I reached the door I realized the absurdity of my position: I was a lone traveler passing through an uninhabited area, and I was about to knock on a door that had perhaps never seen a visiting traveler. Knowing nothing else to do, I reached out and rapped my fist on the door. I felt an odd sensation that I was being quietly observed.    I looked around awkwardly and stood there for several minutes. As my hand reached to open the door myself, it suddenly swung open to reveal an aged woman. She looked frightened and her eyes were red and puffy.     “Who are you?”      “My companion and I heard a gunshot and…“ I paused a moment, and decided honesty was the best option, “…we quarreled, and he chose to investigate the source of the sound while I came to the cabin.” I said, instantly feeling like a coward as the woman eyed me, “He will return before nightfall.”     “Come in quickly. I do not know your friend but let us hope he returns as he predicted.”      Confused, I asked her what she meant.     “This morning my husband told me the same thing your friend did, and he has yet to return. Inside, quickly, it is not safe. I will explain best I can.”     There was a warm fire inside, and to me it seemed as if it had been stoked in excess, as if to fully light the cabin against the gathering darkness outside. I moved to sit in a chair facing the fire, and the woman moved to take the chair adjacent mine.      “My friend… is he in danger?”     The woman stared into the fire for a long time, the flames reflected in her dour brown eyes. At last she spoke,     “Two nights ago, I was out with my daughter in the forest gathering berries and talking. She is just learning her letters, you see, and my mother had taught me the alphabet by having me memorize little poems for every letter, and I sought to do the same for mine own daughter…” Here she paused, and her eyes glistened. Outside it began to rain  “She was right next to me, her hand in mine when,” here she lost her composure, and let out a heartbreaking sob. Not knowing what else to do, I placed my hand on her shoulder, hoping to console her in some small way. After a few minutes she could hold back the tears, and continued her story in ragged bits of of words.  “It happened so fast… she was there next to me… then it was upon us… I ran! Damn it all! I ran and she was gone…”     After this I could get no more out of her, and seeing as I could do nothing to help her and her sense of loss, I moved over to the window that faced the forest, looking across the expanse as the sun passed behind the mountains, waiting for Jacob to return. Before long I could see nothing outside but shadows and the rain falling in torrents. Suddenly I heard the woman’s voice behind me, brave now, and without emotion,    “My husband left to go and find her, and kill the beast if he could. Last night we heard my daughter’s voice coming in from outside… we thought that she may yet live. I know she does. Perhaps my husband will return with your friend tomorrow and all will be-”      There was a loud thump against the stairs leading up to the porch of the cabin, and my head jerked toward the sound. There was another loud thump, and then a wet scraping sound, as if something heavy was being slid across the wooden boards of the porch. I moved toward the door and then something primal within me stopped me from opening it. My eyes flashed to the curtains, revealing nothing of what was outside. Lightning illuminated the world on the other side of those curtains for half a heartbeat, and the silhouette of something flashed before me. I took a step away from the door, my face fixed in a shocked look of horror. Something heavy and wet made a sickening splash just outside the doorway. I heard then a voice then that chills me to the bone, even here locked away in this cell and far from such things.      “Mother, I’ve come home now. Could you please open the door?”     I did not move, I did not think, I became completely silent, stirred by instinctual forces set in motion before the first man made the first fire or looked up into the sky. I moved my head slowly toward the old woman for some explanation, but her horrified visage was answer enough. The thing I had seen silhouetted by the lightning beyond the curtains was no man. The shape had been almost as large as a horse, and the vagaries that the flash left behind in its wake left much to my imagination.    In a male voice this time:      “Magatha, I found  our Cindy. Open the door so that we can be together again. We miss you so much.”     I looked again to the face of the old woman, who silently mouthed “No”. I nodded, and moved back another step from the door.     Then something happened that I do not understand. A third and final voice came from whatever was on the other side of the door. It was hidden from me until now, but I can recall it once again, the final missing puzzle piece. It was Jacob calling out to me.     “Erasmus! Open the door quickly, before it gets to us!”    Something brave inside of me stirred at his voice, something beyond reason. He was my friend, I had to save him. I rushed to the door, unlocked it, and swung it open wide to reveal… NO!     And then suddenly I was back in our dank and dark prison cell, along with all the others that are imprisoned here. How long have we been here? How long has it been using us?     “Jacob! No! The door, it’s not what you think! This isn’t where we think—”      No! I’m too late! He has the door to our prison unlocked. I can see it opening now to reveal a blinding, blessed light that is engulfing the entire world… there is an instant where the light illuminates the old woman, her husband, and their daughter huddled together. They all have smiles on their faces.  I see Jacob’s outline in the doorway and then,

Nothing.

Throwaway People

If only the packaging design could change the contents.

 Far away, in this place called China, which is known, vaguely, by most US citizens as a kind of generally bad place full of Communists, dog-eaters, and some kind of big wall or something, there is a Child.

 He lives in a city. The name doesn’t matter, because it is like many other cities in that place, the same story repeating itself over and over in so many locations as to make the title of a single of them about as irrelevant as the name of your waiter or what brand of bottled water you buy. He is 7 years old, and walking to work. It’s raining, water leaking from the poison sky like oil dripping from the bottom of a poorly kept thirty year old Oldsmobile. It pools in the gutters of the street, flowing past a dead cat in a greasy torrent, and if you look closely you can see the water is filled with miniature rainbows of color from the oil that covers it in a thin film.

 Even in the worst of places, there is beauty, as long as you know where to look.

 The child steps in a pool of water and over the curb of the street. He doesn’t see the rainbows in the water, we was too busy stepping over the dead cat. The particular factory where the child works is owned by some sort of company that, in some way he does not understand, is involved with apples. He often wonders about the strange paradoxical nature of this company, which, as far as he can tell, makes large amount of white boxes. No apples seem to be involved whatsoever.

 One day, after twelve hours of operating the machine that stamps some English words and an apple on these white boxes, the child decided to walk over and take a closer look at one of them. He turned the finished box over in his hands a couple of times, looking it over trying to discover what it was about these things that made them so desirable. He wasn’t all that impressed. Maybe the white boxes were used to hold the apples. They probably make those at some other factory, he decides with a faint nod.

The white boxes are shipped somewhere else, where other other 7 year old children stamp out sheets of metal or plastic all day. Eventually all of these assorted components are compiled into black wafers which people carry around with them in their pockets. They are astounding devices, a machine that is able to allow you to talk to people all over the world in real time, where you can even speak face to face, like Marty Mcfly does when he travels to the future in Back to the Future 2. They are connected to a vast network that contains the entirety of human knowledge.

Now, some scientists somewhere came up with this idea that we are actually living in a multiverse, that there are are universes out there that exist in which every potentiality is realized. So there’s one where you didn’t forget your morning coffee this morning, or decided to marry one of your exes when you were 18, lived a miserable life of nagging and other nonsense, and blew your brains out at 50 on your wedding anniversary. Things like that. In one of these universe, some fluke caused Leonardo Di Vinci to be transported to the apartment of a broke-ass graduate student that blew a hundred grand on a degree where he learned 14th century Italian. One evening, while the student was finishing his masters degree in Hypothetical Egyptian Skateboarding, he looked up from his thesis: “Could King Tut Do a Sick kick-flip Or Not?”, and there was Leonardo, just standing there and looking confused.

 One day, the two of them were talking about the aforementioned black wafers that have an apple stamped on them. Leonardo was asking what these things were, because he noticed that many people seemed to be staring into them vapidly, even in social situations when they were with their friends and family, or when they were driving their cars.

 “Oh, well, we use them to talk to each other.“

 Leonardo’s confused by this. "I don’t understand, it seems to me that these devices do not promote talking to each other. Sometimes I see people yelling into them, sure. But the majority of the time they’re just sitting there looking at them.”

 "Oh,“ says the graduate student, "you can talk to people like that, too. Look at this:”

 And he pulls the black wafer with the apple stamped on it out of his pocket, turns it to Leonardo so he can show him this new marvelous form of communication people of the future use. Leonardo watches as he types in “hey bro, want to go see the new move this Friday?” and clicks a button.

 "See that, you type in some words, and then you send those words to someone!“

 "So let me get this straight,” says Leonardo slowly, trying not to sound obtuse, “you have a device for real time communication, where you can speak to people all over the world, and yet you choose to send them these "text messages”?

 The graduate student nods. “Yeah, pretty much. You can communicate with friends and people in other ways, too!” he says excitedly.

 He shows Leonardo Di Vinci Facebook. I will not be describing it, as you likely already spend enough time visiting it and communicating with people there already.

 "And look here,“ says the graduate student, "here’s one of some of my friends at the zoo! They’re having a good time, looks like.”

 "Hrm.“ Leonardo looks troubled. "So these people go to places and go out and have fun, and take pictures of it and post it here, to show other people how much fun they had?”

 "Yep.“

 "So they stop having fun for a little while to take a picture of themselves having fun, in order to let people know that they’re having fun? Doesn’t that seem somewhat artificial?”

 "Oh look at this, it’s a picture of my best friend’s broken leg!“

 Leonardo’s education in the intricacies of modern human communication extended far into the night. He learned about the internet, saw youtube, wikipedia, tumblr, and a variety of other places that seemed vastly important to the graduate student. Before he went to bed, Leonardo pulled out his journal and wrote the following:

 "They appear to have machines that allow them to access vast amounts of information about any possible subject, that can calculate vast sums and that could be used as tools to become an expert in any field. Instead they use them to watch people dump buckets of ice on their heads or look at pictures of cats.”

 Now, these black wafers must cross an entire ocean to arrive at the location where they are sold. One might wonder why they would be manufactured in one place, when the intended place of sale is, quite literally on the other side of the planet. If you dug a hole all the way through the entire world from where you are right now, you’d probably poke your head up in a factory for one of these things. And yet, mysteriously, they continue to be made far, far away.

 This is because it is cheaper to ship them halfway across the world than it is to produce them where the vast majority of people actually buy them. Where people buy these magic black wafers, 12 hour workdays, 7 day weeks, paying people next to nothing, and child labor are frowned upon for some reason. So the people in charge decided to just do all that stuff somewhere else to avoid getting in trouble.

 The thing you need to remember is that in this place where the magic black wafers are bought, there is one overriding moral principal: profit. Anything profitable is therefor moral. Anything unprofitable is immoral. Also, profits now are almost always more moral than profits later, but if the profits later are many times the size of the profits now, it may be moral to wait.

 Now, every few years something very important happens. A new magic black wafer is released. They have many important features that make them improvements over previous models, such as having slightly larger screens, slightly thinner frames, and, perhaps most importantly from a marketing standpoint, a bigger number following the product’s name. Around the world, people rush to be the first to acquire these new models. They camp in front of stores. They wait in lines and talk about the weather and how much gas mileage their car gets. The listen to people at Best Buy try to sell them unnecessary additions to the black wafers. They endure all of these awful tribulations in order to acquire the new model of the magic black wafer and then post about it on websites of communication like Facebook.

 As with all things constructed with human hands, sometimes they break.

 Not very far away, in this place called America, which is known, vaguely, by most US citizens as a generally good place filled with democracy and freedom, there is a Man.

 He lives in a city. The name doesn’t matter, because it is like many other cities in that place, the same story repeating itself over and over in so many locations as to make the title of a single of them is irrelevant. He is 46 years old, and walking to the store where he purchased a magic black wafer with an apple stamped on it. The sky that reflects off the gleaming mirror-finish of the skyscrapers is a clear blue, crisscrossed with the exhaust of airplanes. As the man steps over the curb he passes by a homeless man sitting leaned up next to a wall. He doesn’t see him. He’s too busy thinking about the Justice he’s about to deal out, because his magic black wafer is bent.

 As he passes through the doorway, mouth is set, face frozen in an angry grimace that is either the visage of a vengeful god, or someone painfully attempting to pass a bowel movement. He goes up to the front desk, and he says, in an authoritative voice:

 "I need a replacement.“

 And holds up his magic black wafer sideways to his victim behind the counter, to make it clear that it is most assuredly bent.

 "Alright sir. How was your device damaged?”

 He scowls. “I think you guys know why. Haven’t you watched the news. These things are DEFECTIVE. Damn things bend all the goddamn time. I want a new one.”

 "I am aware of this sir. But could you please tell me how your device was bent?“

 "I don’t see how that’s important.” he said guardedly.

 The man behind the counter says nothing. He has discovered that if you look at people and wait long enough, they tend to answer on their own.

 "Well you see…“ he begins, then stoppes suddenly, to collect himself. "my 7 year old son didn’t understand one of the phone’s features.”

 "What feature was that?“

 "Airplane mode.”

 Silence. The man behind the counter waits again.

 "Well, you see, my son put the phone in airplane mode, and threw it off the balcony…“ he pauses here, uncertainly, then finishes, with more confidence, "It Bent!”

 The man behind the counter nods. “Sir, I’m afraid I can’t replace your phone.”

 "WHAT? Are you kidding me? It’s not my fault the damn things are defective!“

 "But sir, you see,-” and here the man behind the counter is caught off guard by a penetrating glare from his supervisor who is standing across the room. He stands and waits like a terrified animal as the supervisor walks over and asks to speak with him in private.

 The man with the bent phone nods approvingly at this new development. A few moments later, the supervisor walks over.

 He’s holding a white box with an apple and some words stamped on it. It’s traveled a long way to be here, from back in its home in that nameless city in China.

 "Here’s your new phone sir, I’m sorry for your inconvenience!“

 The man grabs the box, manicured nails gleaming. He straightens the tie on his Armani suit as he walks back to his Porsche.

If only the packaging design could change the contents.

 When he gets home he opens the white box containing his new magic black wafer.

 He posts about it on Facebook. The post gets 9 likes.

 He throws the box away. It lay there sadly for a few more hours, the apple stamped upon it facing upward defiantly. Then it is buried under the remains of a Chinese takeout meal, and is forgotten.

The Lion

Oh that’s right. You need to remember that cat.

It was a slow day And the sun was beating On the soldiers by the side of the road

I’ve watched a lot of Star Trek. I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek for so long that it all kind of blurs into one big long Star Trek inside my head, a gigantic writhing maelstrom of phaser-sounds, Romulan warbirds, and captain’s logs. It’s a big storm of Star Trek, but here and there, there’s pockets of calm –little eyes, black and beady like a rat’s– where I remember things that are really important.

I was thinking about this on the drive back home. It was 7 in the morning, and I was driving my grandmother’s car back home because the Stingray II was in the shop to get the carburetor fixed. From behind my grandmother’s cheap faux-horn rimmed sunglasses, the morning sunlight looked a nauseating warm yellow color, the kind of color you can often see above Dallas in the summer even without sunglasses at about 3PM when there’s an Air Quality Alert.

There was a bright light A shattering of shop windows The bomb in the baby carriage Was wired to the radio

So there’s this guy who’s a robot in Star Trek: The Next Generation. He’s technically an android, but don’t worry about any of that nerd shit. His name is Lieutenant Commander Data. He got put into the show because sometimes you need a robot to make people think about what it means to be human. Him and this  black guy with this weird stuff on his eyes figure out how to save the whole ship for everyone in every other episode, and in return, people on the Enterprise help Data figure out how to be a good person.

It’s sort of weird that a guy who can save a spaceship every other day can’t understand how to be a good person, but then again, being a good person is pretty hard.

There’s one time where they need Data to save something for them, but  it’s not the ship, it’s something else. I don’t remember what. That’s not one of the calms in the Star Trek storm in my head, this is:

It is the end of the episode, and Data is sitting in the captain’s quarters with Patrick Stweart, because this time he couldn’t save the thing he was trying to save, even with that robot brain of his. He’s asking Patrick Stweart why this was the case, even though he had done everything just right and hadn’t made any mistakes at all.

And Patrick Stweart tells him that sometimes you can do everything right, and still lose. That’s not failure; that’s being human.

These are the days of miracle and wonder This is the long distance call The way the camera follows us in slo-mo The way we look to us all

The cat died. I don’t even remember his name. I’d told the vet his name was Tom, so I guess that’s his name. My memory is pretty spotty when it comes to recalling all the details of what happenmed that night because I had an  upper respiratory infection and a nasty cough at the time. The whole night I was basically a zombie who had been animated by eldritch black magics and slaved to his dark master’s will, except instead of being powered by black magic I was being powered by the rum cake flavored coffee they gave you for free at the emergency veterinary clinic.

It was the best coffee I’ve ever had.

It was a dry wind And it swept across the desert And it curled into the circle of birth And the dead sand

The head vet is talking at me and his lips are moving but I’m not hearing any of it, because I’ve already heard it all before. He’s trying to tell me that Tom’s dead as a doornail, but the vet is a good guy at heart and even though he’s had to have this talk with people hundreds of times, it’s still hard for him, and he’s trying to break the news to me without using harsh words like “dead as a doornail” and instead says stuff like “sir, even if you had ten thousand dollars for chemo and all the bone marrow replacements you’d need at this point, it probably wouldn’t help.”

I sip my coffee. I’m looking at the vet, and he’s looking at me, but I’m not there. My mind is off someplace else imagining how much it’s going to suck telling the cat’s owner that I couldn’t save Tom, and the look on her face. I’m thinking about how even after I’d driven like the proverbial  bat out of hell for an hour to take her cat to the vet for her, he was still going to die. I’m thinking about how her own chickenshit brother who lives 10 minutes away wouldn’t help her when it really mattered, because he thought that being dungeon master for his Dungeons and Dragons group that night was more important than getting his own sister’s extremely sick cat to a vet for her because she can’t drive. I’m thinking about Lieutenant Commander Data.

I look down at the floor so the vet can’t see my eyes getting red and puffy. The tiles are about one inch by one inch square and a dark teal color. They are the same color as the ocean was when I was in Alaska: deep and green and cold.

The way we look to a distant constellation That’s dying in a corner of the sky These are the days of miracle and wonder And don’t cry baby, don’t cry Don’t cry