the way out, I check one of my experimental stations. Day 10 for the mold garden, if I haven’t flubbed my count, and a good crop of cottony mycelium growing on the Little wedge of papaya; thousands of light-gray spores so it resembles mouse fur. In the other mayo jar, beginning liquefaction of a freestone cherry indicates the presence of larval maggots. Some things are running smoothly and right. The speechless things.
Mrs. O. is folded into the cement bench by the office, waiting for a cab. Her feet dangle in the air. She looks ready to turn to powder inside, and seeing her just now, for some reason I imagine small birds spit-roasted over an open fire. I pick her lumpy red handbag up out of the petunia bed.
“Took no notice when I put it down,” she says. “Been fasting and I’m just a bit lightheaded.”
“Fasting?”
“Fruit juice four times a day. I needed to move out all the starch that was clogging me up.”
Mrs. O. is planning to spend the afternoon at her breath alchemy workshop with Master Han. Self-healing, she explains, is the only kind that works, but at the same time you need to be guided.
“Master Han believes in reeducating the brain by tracing how a person moved in infancy from prone to standing up. He tries to discover gaps in your movements supported by the endocrine system. Glands can reflect mind states, you know.”
“You want to save the cab money, I’ll ride you over.”
She grins and runs her knuckles up my arm. “You’re a good New York boy, anyone can see that. Generous. No, you go ahead your way. I like to talk to Mr. Suarez on the trip and I brought him kugel.”
One of the lumps in her bag, cold starch. So I leave her there by the petunias with the sun sparking yellow on her stainless steel cane.
I head west out of town, a squirrel’s jawbone swinging from my rearview mirror on black thread. I picked it from desiccate remains near a convenience grocery, just a few feet beyond the asphalt apron in a snarl of sticks and paper. Kneeling there, smelling the exhaust of cars left running for the quick-stop shop, I tugged at the small worn teeth and they came away in my fingers. I head west toward itching thirst and the air force test range. The matinee violins are still with me, but the tempo has slowed.
The topography of space operas. Except for what my three thousand pounds of Detroit steel displaces, the air is motionless. But something in it seems to bend the light, angle it into my face so that even behind my defenses of tinted glass, visor, and hat I must squint. As I go straight and hard down the blacktop I pass a million invisible roads of lizard, millipede, coral snake, tarantula, giant hairy scorpion. Scattered plants are spiked or spined or even venomous. No escape from this landscape, its inaudible ferocity.
Now begins the barbed fencing, the fat red lettering of NO CIVILIAN ACCESS Bleak buzzard acres you could prospect for spent casings and pilots’ bones, where the shallow soup holes are poisoned with radon and sulfur. Far off, below the rusty red foothills, I sight a line of sheds. Hard glare on metallic roofs, and tan smudges that must be plywood nailed over doors and windows. Haunted barracks, maybe a nerve gas depot now, heavy drums all sealed away. Another mile of fencing, AUTHORIZED PERSONELL ONLY, a corroded and de-tired Jeep—human earmarks more ominous than forlorn. And somewhere it can’t be seen, so Opatowski says, they’ve built a replica of Saudi oilfields for paratroop maneuvers, and a dummy target range of silos.
I pull over to consult my map. Nothing ahead, for thirty miles at least, until a place called Holy Smoke. But not the tiniest blister in the black line that represents the road, only the name floating above it. A cartographer’s prank? Holy Smoke. I’d rather try for it than turn around.
A good twenty minutes without billboard or marker before I find a turnoff. A crude wooden sign says: THIS IS NOT A ROAD. That’s good enough for
Mrs. O. is folded into the cement bench by the office, waiting for a cab. Her feet dangle in the air. She looks ready to turn to powder inside, and seeing her just now, for some reason I imagine small birds spit-roasted over an open fire. I pick her lumpy red handbag up out of the petunia bed.
“Took no notice when I put it down,” she says. “Been fasting and I’m just a bit lightheaded.”
“Fasting?”
“Fruit juice four times a day. I needed to move out all the starch that was clogging me up.”
Mrs. O. is planning to spend the afternoon at her breath alchemy workshop with Master Han. Self-healing, she explains, is the only kind that works, but at the same time you need to be guided.
“Master Han believes in reeducating the brain by tracing how a person moved in infancy from prone to standing up. He tries to discover gaps in your movements supported by the endocrine system. Glands can reflect mind states, you know.”
“You want to save the cab money, I’ll ride you over.”
She grins and runs her knuckles up my arm. “You’re a good New York boy, anyone can see that. Generous. No, you go ahead your way. I like to talk to Mr. Suarez on the trip and I brought him kugel.”
One of the lumps in her bag, cold starch. So I leave her there by the petunias with the sun sparking yellow on her stainless steel cane.
I head west out of town, a squirrel’s jawbone swinging from my rearview mirror on black thread. I picked it from desiccate remains near a convenience grocery, just a few feet beyond the asphalt apron in a snarl of sticks and paper. Kneeling there, smelling the exhaust of cars left running for the quick-stop shop, I tugged at the small worn teeth and they came away in my fingers. I head west toward itching thirst and the air force test range. The matinee violins are still with me, but the tempo has slowed.
The topography of space operas. Except for what my three thousand pounds of Detroit steel displaces, the air is motionless. But something in it seems to bend the light, angle it into my face so that even behind my defenses of tinted glass, visor, and hat I must squint. As I go straight and hard down the blacktop I pass a million invisible roads of lizard, millipede, coral snake, tarantula, giant hairy scorpion. Scattered plants are spiked or spined or even venomous. No escape from this landscape, its inaudible ferocity.
Now begins the barbed fencing, the fat red lettering of NO CIVILIAN ACCESS Bleak buzzard acres you could prospect for spent casings and pilots’ bones, where the shallow soup holes are poisoned with radon and sulfur. Far off, below the rusty red foothills, I sight a line of sheds. Hard glare on metallic roofs, and tan smudges that must be plywood nailed over doors and windows. Haunted barracks, maybe a nerve gas depot now, heavy drums all sealed away. Another mile of fencing, AUTHORIZED PERSONELL ONLY, a corroded and de-tired Jeep—human earmarks more ominous than forlorn. And somewhere it can’t be seen, so Opatowski says, they’ve built a replica of Saudi oilfields for paratroop maneuvers, and a dummy target range of silos.
I pull over to consult my map. Nothing ahead, for thirty miles at least, until a place called Holy Smoke. But not the tiniest blister in the black line that represents the road, only the name floating above it. A cartographer’s prank? Holy Smoke. I’d rather try for it than turn around.
A good twenty minutes without billboard or marker before I find a turnoff. A crude wooden sign says: THIS IS NOT A ROAD. That’s good enough for
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