Light on Fire

a novel

by Adam Rothstein

Published by Adam Rothstein at Smashwords

March 2011

Copyright 2011 Adam Rothstein

Light on Fire by Adam Rothstein is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For more information about this license, please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

The author very much appreciates paid purchases!

for more information, visit http://www.lightonfire.net

If you purchased this book without a cover, or binding, or pages, you should be aware that this book is non-physical property. It was published as a “non-corporeal electronic media entity” by its author, and neither the author nor anyone else can be held accountable for dimensional slippage, nor the resulting non-permanency within the physical plane of this “unreal commodity”.

Chapter 1 - Try to Draw Them

I'd like to talk about them a bit, if I might.

Stay as long as you like, of course. But I hope you don't feel obligated. I appreciate you coming over to visit. There's a certain loneliness—well, not a loneliness, but a idleness. A loose little bit of anxiety, nothing much to speak of, only a small knot in the stomach. There is a bit of something, that keeps me from getting things done. I stand up, and walk around the room, and sit back down. I pass hours in this way. It is nothing that can be fixed, not something that I am looking for, never being one to ruminate too long on small matters. And yet whatever it is, is resolved instantly you walk in the door. All of a sudden I have purpose, a partner in conversation, and a second side of a dialogue. All of that build up can be released. Not a reservoir spilling over, but simply a resumption of the normal flow. No more stagnancy, but traffic is once again passing. The spectacle is over, and we are back to business as usual.

And so I appreciate you coming by. I hope you don't think me a bad host if I begin to take the conversation away on this course. I know you came to my home for certain reasons. You have your interests, and I have mine. But as long as you're here, you might as well stay awhile, and let me show you what I've been working on. It is, after all, related. In a way. I'm retired—yes, you know this; I'm no longer the Angel I once was. Rank and certification gone, along with the old department, the mission statement, and the cases, the files. But this doesn't mean I've lost my taste for it. I haven't lost my skill. It doesn't mean I haven't been working a few projects, merely as a curiosity. Just a few things, following up, reviewing, and so forth. A little bit about them. Hear me out, and I believe you'll be interested.

You know whom I mean by “them”, of course. It isn't a technical distinction, and I suppose it's fairly unprofessional. To reduce the parties in question to a mere pronoun. A generalization, and barely that. Only a step above a loose gesture, and a grunt.

But there is no point in using jargon, when we both know whom we're talking about. Them: those that are, out there, in the world, as it were. Not us—not you and me. The poverty of pronouns, yes, all well and good, so noted. But here we are, and there they are, and they are them, all of them, as they are, as we see them. Yes? There are so many, and they are all over the place, it is difficult to refer to them generally in any other way. They move in such different ways, and all the time changing, shifting their direction and the mechanism by which they move, their rotation, their alignment, their connections and so forth. As they move, the space between themselves and others among them grows and diminishes. I hate to use such generalities—but confronted with such a mass of them, this chaotic scene in front of us, I have no alternative, do I?

I would draw a picture of it for you. But in trying to keep them all straight for long enough to scratch it out, to get a sense of the distances, of the different vectors involved, to map their basic layout, I would only get confused and mess up the paper. Naturally, I'd try flipping it over to start again, if I hadn't already marked that side with a previous problem. If there was a blank side left to stain with scattered pencil and ink lines and scratches, then I could begin from the beginning one more time, perhaps starting from a different side of the problem, with different variables and using other dimensions to illustrate exactly what we are trying to talk about. I'd use this metaphor, and that analogy, and any other logical technique in my wide range of rhetorical... I mean of course, illustrative devices.

But inevitably, that effort would fail too. My un-drawn maps and diagrams regarding them, about whom I wish to speak, will remain only scattered clouds. A whimsical dream of pure explanation. The lines are all blurred. None of those beautiful aspects of a schematic sketch. No clearly shaded areas to identify materials' composition according to widely-known drafting standards, scales maintained accurate to measures as stated in the legend, the multidimensional shapes reduced so cleverly to the flat form of the page. No, nothing ever so very pretty, certainly nothing anyone would want to look at for any period of time. More of a stain, a residue of thought. Some things about which I had some ideas, but then moved too quickly to find the pen, and my wrist dragged across the page, smearing the only guides I had. With this mess left in front of me, and your confused face across the table from me trying desperately to grasp what I am talking about just outside of the space between us, out there, amongst the rest of it: that is all of them.

At this point I am forced to stop and think for a moment, wondering if there is perhaps a better way to go about this than with all of this waste and these mistakes, and your growing impatience, for which I gladly apologize. But there isn't, and so again I pick up the writing tool and bend close to the desk, holding the page still with my free hand, pressing down hard against the straight edge—I'm trying to draw it out, please, just give me a moment. All this for a simple picture. I try to illustrate. If I was going to write about it, it's different again, and not so much like drawing. With it's own difficulties. More complicated. I won't even get into it. Pressing ahead is the best way. Let's just get it done.

Our lips move while I trace the lines, and we talk about them now together, repeating their names, and the words that draw them up together into little knotted ropes of sentences. The labels and legends are so much tighter than the lines, even when the borders overlap and my ink runs under the ruler, and... well damn it, but once again I've put down my hand before it is dry. I'm no draftsman, that's for sure. No architect, either. I just try and explain it, as best as I can. I'm a technical writer, maybe. I type up the manual that will tell others how to actually do it, and sketch the illustrations some other skilled hand will create. It's a tough job, but I'm the best there is, damaged drafts and ruined pictures aside. I was the best. In the high point of my career, at my apex, you couldn't compete with this Angel. Not even a bit.

To do it right is difficult. I could describe them wrongly so easily. You know what I mean, I think. It's easy enough to group them, to split the great mass with the hand and forearm, dragging their little seed husks to one side of the table or the other, dividing, and then again the other way. Sorting them back and forth, picking out the ones that stray into the wrong piles and replacing them with their alternating counterparts of like and unlike, labeling, naming, placing and replacing, grouping and ungrouping, gathering and separating across the vast plane on which they all live, and I might even make some progress, you know—get somewhere, as it were, maybe begin to see some patterns emerge. But this bores me, really. Anyone with a single hand, and a finger or two, can reach in and pull a line through the middle, and we can pretend it matters, fool ourselves into thinking that we understand. But still, we keep calling them, pointing with that single finger, and saying, yes, them. Seed husks. Nothing really changes here.

They're all spread out. That's the problem. We look at them from here at the table, gazing down into the darkness spread over the earth. They are camping in the dark across the plain of the continent, and they might not even be able to see each other at all. They might be more lost in the fog than we are, their sight from the surface an even more opaque barrier than ours up above the street. Their little fires might be blinding their vision. That's how they camp—with their backs to the dark, eyes made small in the light like the dance of the little blue flames. They shield themselves from the darkness, wrapping themselves in the tent of light coming down from the central pole, hanging thick like the edge of a dream. They roll in it, they burrow, they pull it over themselves to ward away the closeness of the bushes and the trees never too far away from their backs.

Not so much a dark forest though, not anymore. Times have changed, as you know. The land has changed, and they have changed with it. But even in those wild, natural times they never had good night vision, and this is why they sit facing the fire even today. They'd rather look at the light and the heat than sit staring into the gloom at what they can't see. They pull close to the camp fire, and away from each other. So many little groups, each with their tiny little lights, spread across the dark. They fall into the low parts of the valleys, the river basins, the places between the trees, the caverns that form in the rocks. The small bit of light that they have, sinking into the earth like water into sand. They're all spread apart, pulled together and away from each other, trying to hide from the dark in the dark, as it were. It's only from up here, from the vantage point of this apartment, that I can see all the little lights, flickering in the soft breezes that blow across the continent in the dusk. From here, I can tell you about them. Though I hope you don't mind my rambling. I'm not as young as I used to be, and I'm in less of a hurry. My hand is a little less steady, and I throw away a few more drafts in the process.

Everything will end okay. No really, I assure you. Please don't look at me with such a face. It isn't as bad as all that. This isn't that sort of story. The sun comes up in the morning, much as it always has. Each one of them down there on the plains will wake up in their own time, and they start wandering around, looking for each other, and they will start to look for those seed husks which they collect to both hoard and trade, to both decorate and arrange, to eat, and to stew, decant, and distill, to drink and let the natural oils seep gently into their brains. They aren't entirely unaware of the process, and that is what makes them so interesting. It makes them so tantalizingly difficult to describe, it makes them, as a group, so unique, in their own way. My messy drawing, my circular conversation, my attempts to appeal to your curiosity, even as I verge on losing it completely. This is all part of what makes them special. I believe it, anyway. And if you look out my window, you can see that while we've been talking the sun has already come up tomorrow morning, though you've only just sat down with me. And so I give you no promise, no prediction, no portent, and no passage behind the curtain, to the backstage of the show, to the inner workings of what I do. Both the night and the sun are already here, scattered across the plain, and, well, I don't need to draw you a picture. But the night is young, and I enjoy the company. So if you wouldn't mind me talking for a bit, I could tell you a bit about them, and just as well save the ink.

Chapter 2 – These Mundane Times, Those That Need a Soundtrack

Among the other things that we could say that Elvis will do, he watches the network, and he watches the television, looking for clues. He has his suspicions like most of them do, but no precise questions. Maybe, on one of these channels, someone will show him a piece of it. If only just a hint, some sort of clue to set him in the right direction. Towards that thing, always just out of view. In the meantime it's entertaining enough. Perhaps the television is the one that is more entertaining and less informative, or maybe it's the other way around. So many channels, so many sites, so many places to look. He can tell, and he can sense it: they know something that he doesn't. There is a mystery out there, though none of them might be able to grasp the entire thing. If only they would share what they know, those little bits. Then he could put it together. He is smart enough, that's for sure. If anyone was going to be able to assemble it from the pieces they will distribute, then he is the one. But they won't give up even a single piece, or at least not the right piece, not the one he can use to get it all started. Nothing that would have the effect he's looking for. It simply doesn't exist.

Now it may just be a crazy idea, but Elvis thinks it has something to do with music. He is pretty sure. Even though he doesn't know what “it” is. All good secrets have something to do with music. Elvis is predisposed to music, and this might be why he thinks so. He hears it everywhere, and at times that others would forget that there is music. All the time. All the time. Constantly playing in the background, bass line cycling over like the hum of a hidden machine in the walls. The drums steadily knocking against one's shins, reminding him of their presence. Guitars and lyrics spelling it out to him. Reading him the lyrics to the songs, while he tries to fall asleep, and if he manages to sleep, still intoning the vocals when he wakes up, still droning with electrical distortion when he fails to wake up, failing to have fallen asleep. The songs, the songs, the songs. The music is a soundtrack to itself; the motion of the rhythm is the scene and action rolling forward, the focus of the lens, the point of the bow that makes the wave. The ever-present sound in the background of restaurants, stores, living rooms, cars. Those mundane times, those that need a soundtrack. In life defined by music, everything is always on camera, you are never not on, the music is the underlying force, timed precisely to the frame rate like some sort of supportive, underlying structural dimension. It reminds you to answer questions posed, to feel particular ways in response to the manner in which others act, to always follow up a fight by falling back in love. To resolve it all by the end of the last act. And all these mundane times, these endless channels, these were all part of the music. If we weren't supposed to be paying attention, then who was playing this song? It was a pulse to whatever it was, beating steadily, quietly, inside. And then the music would fade out as Elvis changed the channel, and then it would come back in for the next program, with a different but not quite unfamiliar variation, and then we all being again.

What ever it was that this young man was after, he might already have seen it, but just forgotten. Elvis forgets enough. No different than anyone else his age. He forgets what his mother tells him. He loses the names of the bands that his friend Elmo tries to make sure he remembers, both of them acting disappointed when he inevitably draws a blank under questioning about the hallmarks of a particular subcultural series or pattern. Questions, answers, everything in between: Elvis has never had a head to hold them. But he remembers the music. He can hear that rift going over and over, stuck in his head from the moment the sun rises, stumbling out of the darkness, until he finally let's go again at night, fade out and return, diminishing return of chords, the last echoes of the track spinning out across space in the space between his ears, obscured by low clouds, into the sparkling static clicks of the end of recording. Maybe it even keeps playing when he sleeps. He never thought of that possibility.

He gave up on the idea of the perfect song a while ago. It would have been an easy solution. A single tune, like a magical incantation. A panacea, the locating of the soul in the pineal gland, the transcendental seat and throne of the universe. He tried to find it for some time by this method, listening to his dad's old records, scanning the back television channels, the really obscure network sites, listening to stuff without names, or track lists written in languages he couldn't read. He even went to the local library, dusted off old magnetic tapes with formats, speeds, and widths of tape that were an incomprehensible math analogy, and listened to the classics, or what they said were the classics. Fragments of sound bent to fit crooked shards of shattered and obsoleted media, as if one of these artifacts might have a clue to what he was searching for. To see if there was something other than the many-threaded roots of everything that came before. The cycles, the scales, the verses and choruses. It only went around. There was no beginning, no kernel, it seemed. Damn.

And so he tried to write it too, sitting at his keyboard, trying it all out. Not that he would be the one to write such a thing, but maybe if he tried enough chords, he could find the beginning of what it was that he would find somewhere else. Something different than the band with Elmo and Electra. That was all good, but this would definitely be different. It would sound oddly-shaped, with progressions and a time signature no one wanted to listen to. Something unpleasant, and yet musically correct. If only he could feel the edge, get the sense of it, the hint of the scent. But he didn't. It sounded like crap. Couldn't even hear the beginning of it. Probably doesn't exist. But he knows there's out there. It has to do with the music, and he's not going to stop listening until he starts to get a sense of what it is. Couldn't stop anyway—doesn't really have a choice. That's the sort of thing it was.

No. Who was he kidding? Only himself, he guessed. It was a fantasy. Music doesn't mean anything. Elvis was smart enough to figure that out. The lyrics are just a distraction, a way of selling it to the stupid, the sentimental, the superstitious listener. It's the greeting card, and the fortune cookie. The way popular music sounds new. Nothing new in the whole fucking world. They give it a title, and you might as well never have heard it before. But they weren't fooling Elvis—he could remember a rhythm and a melody like dogs know their own piss. He could see what was there—the beat, heavy as concrete, cold as the air. It burnt into him, and the rest of it would break off and away. Whatever that meant. Whatever anything meant. Elvis clicked through the television channels, looking for something. Another search term, looking for results. Looking for anything that didn't have any music already burned into its surface like a scar.

Maybe he was only after distraction, after all. He felt persecuted by distraction, pestering and harrying him, pulling him away from that deep concentration through which he tried to get closer to “it”. Perhaps he was only fooling himself. All the time he searched for the melody, he was trying to get away from it, to not have to worry about what it might mean. Or the reverse—if that was the metaphor he was using. He couldn't remember what was supposed to mean what. He wanted just to hear a little pop music, and not have to think for a while.

It was so hard, having to think. Having to talk, and do, and play, and work. There never seemed to be an end. Or a beginning really, and again this was the same problem. If you don't know when you've begun, how can you tell if you are behind?

This was the bare bones of it, the beginning of the problem, the end of the answers. It was frightfully minuscule, missing something, only partially there. It was huge and overpowering, like a musical apparition, let loose to haunt within his ears. There was something that the music was trying to tell him, bouncing back and forth on an oscillation course inside of his mind. He didn't know what it was the music was about, or what it was trying to be, but he knew he had to find it. It was the only thing for him to do.

It was too late to be asking questions like these, to be thinking these sorts of thoughts. Elvis leaned back into the couch, and manipulated the channels, and tried not to think, and tried not to look too hard.

Chapter 3 – What Particular Interaction

Electra was another one of them who was awake. The peril of insomnia is the recognition that it is there. The specter of future fatigue, blinding white pearl of sun in a dark room. She got out her better vibrator and brought herself to a completely satisfying orgasm. Shutter of hips breaking through the anesthesia of a long day extending itself into the darkness. Hormonally rich, but effectively weak. Letting the piece of plastic fall to the floor, where it dutifully switched itself off in a quick purr of silence, she tossed and turned in the bed, getting the blankets knotted around her legs and arms. With all four limbs she pushed herself up off the mattress, arching her stomach up and flinging legs and arms outward to throw these bonds off of herself, flinging the blankets back, re-layering them, and she lay back down, turning over again, pushing her extra pillow between her legs. And still, she couldn't quite drift off, pushing back through the dark haze to nothingness.

She lay on her side with her eyes closed, and thought about the chemicals she had imbibed that day, wondering what particular interaction might be causing the insomnia. It could have been any number of suspect molecules. The anti-anxiety meds. The vitamins. Acetaminophen? Caffeine? Maybe it was the alcohol, three quick drinks on the back steps as many hours ago, relaxing enough, but within the steady sipping, were hidden flows of depressants released in waves of molecular barbarian hordes, assaulting her body's need for natural rest. Maybe it was some combination of empathogens. The lysergic acid analogs. The scaled down, smoothed out synthetics of tryptamines. Tetrahydrocannabinol, and the pesticides and fertilizers that always came along with it. Or even an opiate, or lack thereof, a neglected chemical feedback loop keeping her awake rather than closing the circuit into sweet, blissful sleep the color of pale smoke.

Electra knew her molecules well, dancing and jumping in atomic steps as she swirled them in her test tubes. But the brain chemistry was a foreign ritual. Organic chemistry was her hobby, and self-medication was her habit, but neuroscience? Another language, unfamiliar music. The inner workings of neurotransmitters and the release of various glands were points of dialect emphasis that a non-native audience would miss. She had tried to read neuroscience books before, to understand the catalog of receptors and binders as she did lists of known drug interactions and side-effects. She could almost understand, as if it was another life, perhaps; but she bumped through the brain with her native chemicals like a tourist with a phrasebook, stumbling on pronunciation, flaying all semblance of grammatical precision into a chopped and stretched mincemeat of communication. She was simply there, in her brain. All the time. She had none of that beautiful perspective with which she could visualize carboxyl groups forming from components under catalyst, as if by the magical will of her suggestion. Her molecules poured in the gray area of her brain like unloaded passengers from a tour bus, diffusing through the blood, setting off on osmotic capillary molecular benders, staying up all night to drink in the local bars, to slur along with the music they sang, united with the local nervous system by the common human language of inebriation. All people love all peoples in the drunken dark.

But when the sun rose the next morning—her chemistry was but a stranger once more, swearing unfamiliar across quiet balconies and squares, looking for a sort of morning coffee that one just couldn't find in this country. Travel was great, the world was an open book. The brain was an exotic oyster of salty decadence, the aphrodisiac meal, a simple half-shell luxury hinting at the promise of that storied pearl, somewhere within. But there was nowhere like home. No, nothing quite like it. And the fact of insomnia, the tragedy of molecules, was that there was nothing like a test tube in real life. No smooth glass tubing, filled precisely with the molar quantities of life, the precision measurements of the pipette, the reactive magic of the proper temperature, the familiarity of logarithmic concentration calculations. The filter paper, her brain, the cycle of night and day—it all tore just a little too easily. It was all too easy to blame the drugs. Everyone always wants to blame the drugs for the bad things, and never give them any credit for the good things. This was not a willful optimism on Electra's part, nor even a refined idealism of her drug synthesis hobby. You just couldn't fall back on xenophobia. The problems weren't the other lands, their people, their language, their food, or their liquor, or even the post-colonial influx surfing the tide of a good exchange rate and investment in hotels. For everyone, the problem was at home. Because in the end, there was no such place. And Electra knew very well what was causing her to stay in this half-awake, uncomfortable state.

The basement apartment that Electra called her home was dark. It was night, but might have been at any time, the lack of windows an all too-common latter day myth, the old story told across many cultures of the kidnapping of the sun. An old tale, just a new setting, and one more cheap apartment.

Electra looked at the familiar expanse of the space she called her own, blue light shining from her computer, blue light from the television stand-by light, blue light from the digital display of her drying oven's timer. All of it the same blue shade, a brilliance of LED as if from the bottom of the ocean, harvested from the living chemicals of phosphorescent creatures, a life alien to light, and yet evolved to create a replacement in its absence, in imitation of what it never knew. The blue shine curved through the clear bottles and glasses, set and standing on any available surface in Electra's room.

She detested colored glass. Colored glass lied, and made you think the contents were other than what they were. A dangerous feature, a bad habit of the Lewis Carroll school of drug experimentation. Too literary a perspective, too unsafe for chemistry, too bent towards a childish DRINK-ME attitude without dosage strength consideration, MAOI interactions, impurity concentration, aging, volatility, or chemical decay, not to mention human error—no way to see if what was in that kooky brown bottle still was what you thought it was when you labeled it in such a state that you can barely now read the symbols scrawled in crayon on a twisted strip of masking tape. Colored glass had that hip, old-fashioned apothecary chic, all right. All the way to the ER. Just one more thing that can go wrong always does. Electra only cooked chemicals with clean Pyrex: clear and transparent. If light or UV spoilage was problem, there were cupboards for that. Into the mini-fridge, or the medical cabinet she and Elmo ripped off the wall of an abandoned luxury home on the burnt-out street of dreams. They mounted it in her closet with spare flat-pack furniture mega-store hardware and the ribs of a broken rack-mount amplifier case. It was her own amateur basement apothecary, but with all the rigor and scrutiny of a government research lab. Cheap, mauve finished-basement-style carpeting finished the look. Electra was one of the sort of hobbyists who took her hobby, ultimately, quite seriously. Not just because since age 13 she had been engaged in feeling out molecules with the recessed appendages of the brain barely clinging to the tops of speeding double-stacked freight train doses of organic compounds, but just because if she was going to do something, she might as well do it right. Coded notebooks, research-grade chemicals ordered online just like the pros, and the twin molecular tattoos, one of oxytocin, the other of good old lysergic acid-25, done in silver and black inks, drawn with care on each of her small breasts. She reached into her shirt and let her fingers drag across her breasts idly, through the slight blue glow passing through the cloth. She felt next to nothing.

Self-applied sex, for all of its merits, was not the foreplay to sleep this evening. She leaned over the side of the bed, and found the independent blue glow of her phone, and picked it up. She pressed the button code for Elmo, and the phone rang, and rang. She hung up. She pressed again, this time for Elvis. She heard the click of the connection, and then the tune of his ring-back tone, pounding gently, with a few shrieks. Somehow Elvis had been able to record a pirated tone of a experimental minimalist raga composer as his ring-back, though he'd never told them how. Elvis picked up, and she heard the raga click directly into the music on the other side, which quickly blared down to a minimum, though the ultrasonic tones of his old tube television still made it through.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” she answered, or spoke, if he was the one answering. She wondered what music was audible to him, playing from his phone when she called.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing. Can't sleep.”

“Yeah. I'm watching TV.”

“You can come over if you want.”

“Okay. But let's go out somewhere.”

“Okay.”

She let the phone drop to the bed, and thought about the vibrator again, but let it go. She pulled on her jeans and hoodie. She made sure her stuff was in her pockets, and put in her headphones. She pressed play without seeing what was on the track list. Electra opened the door and walked up the back stairs, to the back yard, to the back alley.

Chapter 4 – Like Public Jerks

The lights of the city were shining brightly enough, but they were distributed. From a height, say, of an airplane traversing the continent, the city would pour out in its geological river basin like a glowing slick over the dark sea of heavier-than-air flight. From the pillar of a skyscraper, the light would appear to be emanating from the entirety of the surrounding terrain, and yet for the person lucky enough in loneliness to be standing at the top of the building in the middle of the night, looking out at an aquarium world of all of their fellow human beings that they could not see, it would appear that the viewer was certainly in the thick of the light, in the column of a cold bonfire sending convective supplications skyward towards the heavens. But there are no skyscrapers in this city.

The metropolitan area had the character of its geography—an excess of land metastasized growth outward and not up. Collapse of farming, coupled with a captive, true-believer audience of the homeowning ethic. A capitalism of least resistance, of a generalized drywall enthusiasm rather than the pride and ideology of steel and glass. It is one of these cities—yes, and still there, despite everything. Maybe growing, maybe shrinking just a little bit, but riled and living, a chorus of black ants, singing with the soles of their many feet. From the ground, where the denizens share a certain extra class of density, all the light passed overhead, shining upward through the thin haze, leaving only a modicum of illumination, and sending the rest directly up into space.

The light might have encased the city in a glow, if only there were a few more eyes out at this hour, glossy corneas off of which the light could reflect, intensifying in brilliant echo, in the way that light will. Or perhaps if it had rained recently, that wet, precipitant enamel would hold that light closer to the surface of the earth in its wet blanket. But, on this night, the city was a web of shadows, each space wasted in the uneconomical deployment of vanishing points becoming its own small vacuum, sucking on the ambient air just enough to purge any light hanging around without a purpose. The city was a dark place, efficiently drained of the copious light pouring from wooden street lights and nocturnally vacant businesses.

But, as a city, a lack of visual indicators hardly meant that this place was empty. In the dark, in the soft woosh of night sound stretched through the valley, over these short homes and offices, parking lots, flat-roofed commercial monoliths and extended multi-lane avenues, the people breathed into the night as they slept. And those that didn't sleep moved, rolling across their terrain in a daylight of activity, their own clocks wide-awake and functional.

“They all got bellies fulla eye jellies,” Jeremy said.

He triggered the joystick, sending his chair lurching down the street. He wasn't speaking to anyone in particular. There wasn't anyone around. The night was dark, and the streetlight's glow showed an emptiness, a vacancy, a public space. Cars would pass by Jeremy's moving chair, they on their road, he on his own, but they moved at odd speeds, either faster or slower than the way they drove in the day time, the time of night and quality of light affecting the way that acceleration functioned. They moved alone, with destinations in mind, but without the flow, the mass of traffic that gave them purpose, the slow and steady paving of the will that turned a walk into a march. Jeremy's chair moved just as it did during the day time, seemingly perpetually at half-charge, struggling slightly as it mounted each curb.

“They try to see with their stomach, and that's why they vomit.”

The old man sneezed, and his chair staggered alternately back and forth without losing any forward momentum, as he spasmed and then regained his grip on the controls. The joystick was not as responsive as it used to be, and was loose in the ball joint that connected it to the panel at the end of the arm rest. The spring still delivered it back to that middle position, in which the chair would find that halted, electronic stop. But only a finger or two leaning their slight weight onto the control, laying over the top of it, pressing it down like grass in the wind, were required to send the chair into a static direction of progress. The road, the sidewalk, further down the street.

“Don't watch TV. I try to tell 'em, don't watch TV.”

The garbage was out in certain neighborhoods on certain days, as is standard. The actual distribution of this scheduled, controlled, measured littering was a mystery to the citizenry, even though it was as easily observable as walking on the sidewalk, or on the edge of the street if it was one of those neighborhoods that did not have any sort of specifically paved walkway. But this was a pattern of which few observed in entirety. Jeremy followed the pattern himself, alone, motoring on quiet electric wheels to these neighborhoods. And over these cans and the bins he maneuvered his body, out to the side of his chair, over the rims of low dumpsters and semi-cylinders with plastic tractor wheels, looking beneath the bags that did not smell too badly or dripped fluid. Jeremy filtered through the discarded possessions of a city. There was much garbage in the city, but there was only one Jeremy. Of course, there would be others just like him, borne by their own bicycles, buses, cars, and even trucks, to inspect the refuse, and to sort the elements of this disposed society. Despite the negative significance and pariah values the majority appended to this task and its product, there was value in it. And that was more than enough to send humans fingering through it, picking up, inspecting, selecting, and then throwing away once again. This was, like most, just one more modern variation on a category of time-honored human profession.

Jeremy, however, wasn't quite the recycling and salvage professional in the same way as others who made the rounds. He profited from certain things that he collected, the stray bottles and cans that he returned into the mainstream ecosystem of deposit, and perhaps the odd bit of electronics that might have some value in parts. But his appreciation for the refuse was scattered and inconsistent. If anyone was to follow him for an evening, though no one would, they would, at least potentially, feel confused at the interior logic driving this man to select certain items out of the trash and annex them to his person. The plastic bags that hung from the sides of his chair, the basket in front and the duffel bag that had been fashioned into a large camel-hump in the rear, were filled with the most abstract collection of goods. Empty containers, of course. And a few electronics, old VCRs and television remote controls stacked in the storage area underneath his seat. Pieces of media—books missing half of their cover, or tapes and discs scratched and battered. But there was also an amateur painting of two cats, signed as Prudence and Princess on the back of the canvas, their glowing blue eyes starring out from behind the seat back of the chair, peeking out into a world that had only recently condemned them to die in a landfill or incinerator, but then in a twisted bit of salvation as torture, rescinded the sentence and delivered them into the purgatory of Jeremy's possession. He had several vases, some cracked beyond all repair, propped upward in the basket on the front cross beam of his small vehicle, and in the jagged mouths of these wailing souls were stacked straws, pipe cleaners, and pens, multiple bouquets of synthesized plastic color rendered monochrome in the night light of the city. A collection of headphones were coiled around the upper end of the arm rest like bangles, the raw and rusted metal holding the earpieces apart along their arc in the old-fashioned style coming together in the low light to look like frayed rounds of ribbon. There was a bag full of shoes: flip-flops, low-rise sneakers, and even one lonely red heel, each shoe without its mate, pressing their toes and tongues against the translucent plastic, shadows of lost children collected at the administration desk near the entrance. Slug low over the front of the chair was a motorcycle helmet, in the small skullcap style, which did give Jeremy's mode of transportation a bit of an edge, if nothing else. A nested selection of plastic flower pots was tucked in the top of the duffel bag. As he rolled over the yawning gaps in the sidewalk's pavement, the clink of a fraternizing army of mismatched silverware echoed from the depths of his things. Magazines, coiled tightly into tubes and stuffed into paper bags, added considerable weight to Jeremy's mass. What made these items so odd, is that they would never be used, at least not in the way that we might most easily imagine. The magazines were never read, not by Jeremy or anyone else. He didn't need so much silverware, and he was hardly a gardener. His one pair of wide, white sneakers rendered a deep gray by his travels were his only pair of shoes. He had one pair of headphones around his neck, and even though these might not have worked, the visible copper wiring spidering out from the collection on his armrest did not serve as spares.

And the rest? What was it for? Such questions did not have answers. They weren't phrased in the right way. That was a question that just hung in the air, muffled by confusion, the stuttered uncertainty vocalized in silence. The motion of Jeremy's chair, however, as it wove through the pattern of trash output and input along the edges of the traffic zones of the city, was constant and thorough.

He shifted his direction of travel slightly to meet the incline of the opposite curve, and then realigned his vector with the sidewalk. The stones had not been re-laid, not ever, and they gapped at odd angles, and grass grew from between them. Jeremy's chair had large rubber wheels, specially designed to meet such haphazard roadways, which they did admirably, even worn, oil-stained, and pockmarked as the were. The jostling motion of the disability-accessible curb sent his head flailing back and forth like an aerial, bouncing in a breeze. Flailing, and yet with a certain rhythm, up and down more than left and right. As if there was some silent statement in the erratic motion, something to which Jeremy felt compelled to agree, not by force or any particular allegiance, but by the basic logic to it all. As he descended the incline of the next curb down to the street, a plastic bag hanging off the right side of the rear of his seat fell off, scattering items into the gutter.

“Well, fuck 'em all if they don't like a joke.”

Holding the opposite arm rest, he slowly reached down with a finger tip, and finally managed to snag the handle of the bag. He pulled it back up onto the hook from where it hung. Then he pulled out his cane from between his legs, and started going after the items still on the ground. There was a rubber sandal, and an empty soda bottle. There was also a box of crackers, and a bottle of sunscreen lotion. He couldn't reach the lid of the bottle, which had popped off and rolled into the layer of mud building in the gutter, and so he left it. He wiped the white cream off the top of the bottle with his finger, and carefully wrapped another plastic bag around the bottle, and put it in the front basket of his motorized chair. He looked around at the ground under the pooling glow of a light, to see if he'd missed anything. Then he drove off again, lurching into the street this time, rather than the uneven sidewalk. A pickup truck barely missed him, turning the corner.

“Public works, more like public jerks!”

With a few small drops creating glares of light on the surface of Jeremy's glasses, it slowly began to rain.

Chapter 5 – How Could I Just Quit?

After a long career as a worker myself, I've come to develop a certain respect for people who work hard. Any sort of work. As long as you are picking up a tool, and you end up tired at the end of the day. Whether that tool be a pen, a keyboard, a mop, a hammer, a microscope, a stethoscope, a camera, a spreadsheet, a telephone, a truck or a plane. There is just something so liberating about work. Not the job. The work. Attaching that tool to the end of your hand, tuning your mind to a certain frequency, and just going at it. Getting it done. When you turn the mind away again, you look back and there is something there, something that you made. Something exists that didn't exist before, and it's there because of you. The respect, I figure, is watching it happen for others, or at least knowing that they felt as you did. You walk around a wall because if you didn't you'd bump into it. When something exists physically, you notice it, and you take it as real. Same thing with the work. You respect it by treating it as real.

There's work that we have to do, and we call that our jobs. Just plain responsibilities, that have to be done, because the product has to fill a need. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not exactly what I'm talking about. There's nothing good about the product itself. It's the skill, I think. Being really good at something, and exercising this skill. Creating something out of nothing, or at least causing such a transformation to occur, that it might as well be magic to the rest of us. You're hungry, and so you make enough food until you're not hungry any more. Nothing incredible about that. But looking at an empty field, unused, bare—and then visualizing a building occupying that space. And not just imagining it either, but visualizing it with the hands, with the entire body, believing in it so strongly that brick by brick and nail by nail, you start to make it actually exist. There is something beautiful in this, like the blooming of a century plant, or the erosion of a rock face into a natural bridge. Something that happens because someone wanted it bad enough, and took the time and dedication to attune themselves to the task. And leaves an impressive result, just as it should. This was the hallmark of my work for years. I saw things that didn't exist. I looked at them so hard, describing their shape with my hands and my tools, until little by little, they came into being. And when they were there, no one could ignore them. I was the zenith of a particular set of skills, and the top of the organization of my particular department.

When they came to me, and they made their case, I tried to retire. Really, I did. But I couldn't stand the solitude of not working. The loneliness that is non-direction. After living and breathing that magic at the ends of my fingers for so long, I couldn't stand to remove it. And who can? You work your entire life at something, every day doing the same task, mastering it, finding all the tricks, honing your skills, and then you are supposed to stop, and go on to a totally different life? That's crazy. Maybe you stop working because then you can pursue your other talents, or your other hobbies. Well, if you like those better, then those are your work, not the other way around. You've been working at the wrong thing all your life. You've been building some damn tower to nowhere, something you're going to walk away from, and never look back. Of course, I know sometimes we all have to do things that we don't like to do. We've got to pay the bills, naturally. So maybe you have a job to take care of certain things, to fulfill those needs and produce that product, but then your real work is what you want to do for the rest of your life. That's what you want to do, what your body and mind strive for, the skill set they seek to pursue, like water rolling down hill. With your body's natural gravity, and not the other way around. So how are you supposed to fight against that? You tell me.

I'm one of those lucky ones. I got to do what I wanted to do, and I did it well. I was the only one. The head. The boss. I was the best. I was the lead craftsman, for close to five thousand years. Then they tell me, okay, times have changed. There's no history anymore, Angel. It's over. You can retire. Go home to the wife and kids. Take up fishing. Of course they were joking—I'm not married. Perennial bachelor me; not interested in the family life, not one to save up for that particular suburban dream. I've got no yard to landscape. No dog to walk. No boat to wash. Look—I am my work. So how could I just quit?

I didn't take it personally, though. When you've been in the business as long as I have, you know a thing or two about inevitability. You can see what's coming—the writing on the wall, as they say. It was no big deal. When you can feel the substance of your work changing, and you're involved in your work as much as I am, you see the jobs passing through and you see how things are different than they used to be. And so you know, even before they come down to your office. I've been around, man. I've seen a lot of changes in the industry. It's not going to be the same forever. Times change. I always knew this day was coming. No problem. And five thousand years on the job, I was able to save up some serious money, with nothing to spend it on. So I'm good. Never was about the dough for me, of course. I just liked the work. I was good at it. My body knew the job, and knew what to do. That's how I could feel the end coming. I could feel it in my hands, in the soles of my feet, in my knees, right where it would get sore after standing on my feet all day long, running around, getting it done. I could tell the day I woke up. "Angel," I said to myself. "This is the last day on the job." I showed up, and what do you know, but I was right. There's no more history. There's no more Angel of History. Pack up your shit, shake everyone's hand, and its home you go. They'll call, they say. See how things are doing, get together for a drink. Good luck everyone. Keep in touch.

So I went home. I drank a beer. I made a list of stuff I'd been meaning to get done for centuries. The next day I slept in, and started the list. I cleaned up. I cooked some meals. I watched some TV. I lived the normal life, off the job. The way everyone else does it day to day, when they're not working. Weekends they call them. My long weekend, set to last forever.

It was relaxing, sure, but it wasn't good. My body knew the difference. It wasn't going to have it. My bones started to get soft. My hands began to hurt. I got headaches, and had trouble breathing at times. I had to find some way to get back into it—I mean, I could literally feel my corporeal essence wasting away. You know what I mean? It was some sort of accelerated decrepitude, some sort of lazy, stagnant palsy. I'd seen it happen to others, and boy, it isn't pretty. I had to do something, you know?

So I went back to work. Not full-time or anything. There's just isn't enough work anymore. Besides, I don't want to be that guy who can't take a hint. So it's just kind of amateur stuff, you know? I don't do it for money. Just to keep busy. My body is too trained to the task, too bent to the talent to stop. Does a fish ever retire from swimming? I ask them. It's just the way it is. The end of history for all time? Yeah right. Well, not why I'm still kicking anyway. It's not a pride thing. Just habit. Indulge an old man for a moment, and just listen to what I've got to say. You don't have to take it seriously or anything. I'm not trying to impose, and I'm not here to beg. But as long as these wings have got a bit a strength in 'em, Angel's going to keep 'em flapping. Just to stretch my hands a bit, keep them in shape. Nothing wrong with a bit of daily exercise, right?

Sorry about getting off track here. I'm just trying to set the scene for you, just trying to describe where I'm coming from. So when I say that I can respect the people who work, you know that I actually mean it. It's serious respect, and not idle appreciation here. Those who go out in the rain, and start setting up the equipment. Somebody's got to off-load the machinery, and tighten down all the bolts. The carnival's not going to set itself up. As I've been telling you, it never has, and never will. Bodies all work the same way, no matter what sort of shape they're in, and no matter how old. And that's how their doing it now, in that field outside of the city.

It's just a little bit of rain, anyway. There's just a little mist coming down over that muddy field now. It's nothing that won't dry up in a few days, when the carnival opens. No time to lose—they've got a job to do, and so they're out there doing it. You know what I'm saying? You get it? They're out there, banging in tent stakes with sledge hammers by hand, the same way it's always been done. Not as many tents now, of course. Trailers is what they use now, mostly. They chock the wheels, or jack them up, and cover over those wheels hanging off the ground with plywood. Portable buildings, made from retired vehicles. They pull out the rides in pieces, like bones that were part of a skeleton just yesterday. They put them next to each other, and they remember the pattern easily. It's no puzzle. All in a day's work, right? Excuse me for a moment, while I just tell you about it.

It's all set to balance, right? Like a giant scale, unfolding one arm, one leg at a time. One piece, and then another. The weight equals, and they can push down one end, and the entire thing begins to rise into the air. Then the next piece. No cranes needed. Lots of greased hinges, pins, and safety clamps. The whole thing comes together. It looks dirty and old, from being carted on the road from place to place, but really the whole thing is top of the line. It's inspected, and checked. There are standards for these sorts of rides now. This isn't your death-trap carnival of old. This is—well, you know what year it is, of course. I'm retired now, you can keep score yourself.

Manual labor, man. Nothing quite like it. They've got power hand tools, and hydraulics, but there are just some things that have to be done by hand. This is a carnival, and you've got to set it up. They'll all disappear into the trailers and trucks, and only a few will stay out to operate it, once they're actually open for business. That's always the way it works. But for set up, manual labor is the key that starts the engine. Hard work and sweat in the rain. Getting those limbs all greased up, running the hoses, and setting up guy wires. These big bolts, big as your wrist, and then you get a massive wrench around it, the size of your leg, and you have to pull, and pull, and slowly it gets tight enough. Thousands of pounds of pressure. Tons of weight suspended. Just geometry and metal. That's all this world is. Just frames, cables, motors, pressure. Somebody had to design the whole thing, some time ago. They drew out the plans, and prototyped parts, and tested welds. But now it's out in the field, and it has a life of its own. A life of gloved hands gripping, boots kicking at the locks and the pins, the drips of water coming down the metal like flows of blood.