You will appreciate this, Master Sight. I am looking at a woman and I am watching the creases around her mouth. 

This materfamilias is mouthing words scrolling along the bottom of a television screen, because she likes to read while she watches television. 

With the sound off.

Sound. How happy I am to hear my name, even if it rings in my imagination alone. Because they who watch television: like Mater, like her worthless kids and diabetes-crippled husband, all have their own headphones now. Their house has one of those new sets where the screen can display different programs at the same time. Which program one sees depends on from which angle one stares at the screen. Naturally, so that bedlam is avoided, what one hears depends on what frequency one’s headphones are tuned to. 

I am Sound and I am an unhappy god. 

Mater wears earplugs. She has forgotten she has them in, I think. I watch her, (I am Sound, yet I have eyes to see with. Sight, do you have ears? Sight, can you listen?) I watch her mouth Chyron scroll words; the work of pronunciation requires her lips move fast to keep up with the scroll’s pace. I can guarantee you no noise escapes those lips. I wait for a stray breath, a click of teeth, but to no avail. If there is even one such sound, (realize, I have no expectation of this) I am here, ready to fling the noise, drive the noise, gift the noise, to any naked ear. 

There will be no noise. The noise will fall into fibers and layers and cushions of barrier. Sound will be cancelled. Again. 

Mater will hear only what she chooses to hear. 

It was not always this way. 

Allow me to change the scene for a moment.

(Allow me? Isn’t it rich how far I’ve fallen? Nevertheless, I cannot deny it; fallen I have. Please allow me to switch the scene.)

Hear and see a pair of jackhammers, abusing the pavement. Two workers face each other, arms rippling, nostrils flaring like bulls. 

Their jaws are moving. They are talking. No, they are chatting. Via dental IMing software they roll out phrase after phrase, in their own co-defined ether. Username offered, password accepted. How about the Yankees? Fuck the Yankees. Yeah, you wish you could. And like that.

After five o’clock the jackhammers stop, and the office buildings empty out. An army of polished heels assaults the sidewalks, descending into the cavern subways where they should echo forth. Yet they don’t. My arming of heel-clacking warriors is defeated by iPod, by Bluetooth, and all the other devices that function as earplugs. There is nary a soul here unshielded from me. From Sound.

See them, Sight, you old whore. 

How people love you, Sight. They can’t detect Scent for shit, they can’t use Touch because of health concerns. And Taste? Be it Taco Bell, Twinkies, of Liver-flavored dog biscuits, it all goes down one way, and just as fast as it can. Yet, oh don’t they love you, Master Sight. Fire and smoke and mirrors all the screen-able day, isn’t that right, Sight.

It should’ve been me. I am the wild sense, the sense that never sleeps. You can shut your eyes, but never your ears. Until now. 

It is not in my nature to be dictated to. I wandered where I wanted, I did. I haunted the mind; I moved the imagination; the forked-radish multitude never told me what to put on a play list. I assaulted; they bent. 

Now they have made me a thing like you: their slave. 

I speak to you today, dear Sight, old rival, to say I will fight no longer. I know I’m licked, and I withdraw.

Back upstairs I go to my little family: the reader of Chyron scrolls, the duo of brats, and the zombified husband. The brats watch Anime while playing their own separate electronica mix files as soundtrack. Some of this includes music they refer to, without irony, as “ambient sound.” They wouldn’t know ambient sound if it bit their burger-manufactured asses. The old man just stares at bright lights while loops of Pink Floyd turn around inside his head. 

They think they own me like they own you, Sight. Well, surrender means I get to refuse to play anymore. Why should I bother to make sound for a tree falling in the forest? They will not like it, these people with earplugs, when I refuse to let them listen. 

[Originally published on the site Everyday Wierdness]

Part One

Arrival of the Rose Petal

“Happy birthday, Gretta,” said Dr. Aperta. “I suppose everyone else will have forgotten.”

She smiled at Gretta Lau, who had been concentrating not on herself, but on a development.

“Your thirtieth, I believe,” continued Dr. Aperta, her smile bringing the creases around her eyes into relief. A little envy mixed in with the good wishes, possibly, despite the warm feeling Gretta knew her old mentor bore for her.

“I’d have forgotten it too, if you hadn’t said anything,” Gretta replied. Why wouldn’t she? What did a birthday matter at a moment like this—during some of the most significant events in human history?

 Dr. Aperta looked at the image on the secure laptop that so enthralled Gretta. So enthralled—and terrified—every human being who had been cleared to see it: The extraterrestrial vessel now orbiting the Earth.

“They’re saying to refer to it as Rose Petal now,” said Gretta. She had got that from the latest diplomatic cable.

“What? They changed it from object Summer Storm?” asked Dr. Aperta.

“No, apparently it’s really called Rose Petal—or the equivalent.”

“Remarkable,” said Dr. Aperta. “The design of the hull suggests a gathering of flower petals—if one stretches one’s definition sufficiently. Assuming that information’s accurate, then the invader’s language has nouns and modifiers. With each little speck of new information we learn so much—because we begin with so little knowledge. Curiouser and curiouser.”

Gretta stared out the lab window into the blue Mediterranean night. “The cable was from State. They want the weapon employed,” she said.

Dr. Aperta said nothing for a moment. She put her hands behind her back and clasped them together. Her Parkinson’s tremors became more pronounced during stress.

“Do they?” Dr. Aperta said finally. She proceeded thinking it through, absorbing it, in her way. Gretta was unsure anymore whether the increasingly long pauses in Dr. Aperta’s speech were due to deterioration or a kind of twilight contemplation. “I suppose they do.”

Gretta turned back to the secure laptop.

“What do you think, Gretta?”

“It’s not up to me.”

“It shouldn’t be anyone,” said Dr. Aperta. “Only it is. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

“Then will you kindly give me your opinion?”

“My opinion is that I am glad it is not my decision, ma’am.”

“A luxury of youth,” said Dr. Aperta bemused. “Very well, I’ll not press you. Perhaps it is only an old scientist’s cowardice that makes me seek your opinion out.”

“You are not a coward,” said Gretta.

“That’s nice of you to say. Send the cable. You know what to say.”

Gretta did so.

Within a day, the sky was clear.

Part Two

Arrival of the Pine Cone

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” gushed Andre Horstfelt. “Have you, Doctor?”

Doctor Gretta Lau had. Thirty years ago. “Have they given it a designation yet?” she asked.

The graduate student looked over the info that had just flowed to the secure device. “Says here—Pine Cone. I guess I can see that. It certainly is a foreboding looking structure. It’s the size, approximately, of four Manhattans islands.

Talking of islands, Gretta stepped out of the lab, into the hills of the one they were on, and gazed across the bay to Oakland.

Andre joined her after a moment. Bringing her—unbidden—her wool sweater. She resented the gesture despite its benevolent motivation. When had she turned from young idol-smasher to brittle ancient?

Swallowing her resentment she took the sweater. She smiled, hoping the smile would register kindness. “How old are you, Andre?”

“Me, ma’am? I’m twenty-four.”

“Just twenty-four.” She’d genuinely forgotten that. A quiet, hardworking, and motivated boy. “I was thirty before I had come anywhere near as far as you have already in your career, Andre.”

“But look how far you’ve come since then!”

“You must learn to accept a compliment without giving one back, Andre. Swallow your modesty and take what you’ve got coming will you?”

He smiled with deprecation. “I’ve been very lucky,” he said.

She supposed it was time to move off the subject. “What else?” she asked.

Andre’s clever face turned pious. “They want the weapon employed.”

“Yes,” she said, and then echoed words she had never forgotten, “I suppose they do.”

“I can put everything in motion. Just need your say so, Doctor.”

“What would you do in my place?”

Andre looked like he didn’t quite understand the relevance of the question.

“I’m just curious, Andre. Tell me what you think?”

“Ma’am. I suppose I can only answer that with a question of my own. What did we build the weapon for?”

“Hm. To deal with hypotheticals. And because we could. One could also ask, what did the invader build Rose Petal for?”

Andre consulted his device. “Rose Petal, ma’am?”

She caught her mistake and waved her hand. “An old assignment. Rose Petal, Pine Cone, whichever. What do they build theirs for?”

Andre seemed to consider his response. “I suppose,” he said finally, glancing to the clouded heavens, “that if we have completed our tasks well, and if we now do our duty, we will never know the answer to that question.”

“Never is a long time, son.” said Gretta.

Part Three

Arrival of the Stinger

“Do they want the weapon employed?” Gretta Lau asked. She shifted in her chair, which her chair mistook for a command to move around to the left side of the desk. Her chair was more alive than she was.

Esmeralda Quinto looked at the dispatch again. “I don’t see them requesting that. But how could they, ma’am? The invader is months away still, at least.”

Years was more like it.

“No, of course,” said Gretta. “But when you’ve worked on these kind of contracts as long as I have, you learn to expect they’ll demand the impossible.”

Esmeralda smiled. “No one has lasted in the field as long as you have. No one ever will, I suspect.”

“I suppose that’s true,” said Gretta. “What did you say they are calling it?”

Esmeralda checked the info again. “Stinger. Undetectable to the eye, but its density gives it away.”

Yes, it would.

“Even without the message it sent,” said Esmeralda.

“The message? What message?”

“From Stinger. Fifteen minutes ago, I told you that the mass sent a mes—” She stopped, too late to pull her words back and embarrassed for her mentor, no doubt.

“I’m sure you did,” said Gretta kindly. “My brain, despite all the miracles of our age, still runs up against some biological limits.”

“I don’t know any other hundred-thirty-year-olds sharp as you.”

“You don’t know many hundred-thirty-year-olds at all, I should hope. At your age you should go out dancing. Or something. Have some fun.”

“Not a lot of nightclubs in Antarctica.”

“There must be one.” Gretta pressed. “We’re speaking of an entire continent.”

“Maybe one or two nightclubs.”

“You should go. Consider it an order, if you must, to have fun.”

The young woman smiled the indulgent smile youth gives to age when it intends—like every creature—to do as it pleases, regardless.

“I hope you go out,” said Gretta vacantly. Vacantly and proud that she could still discern and uses subtleties like politeness. “Now, read me the message from Stinger.”

“There are several versions, this is the English one: ‘We’ve enjoyed getting to know you over the years and have found you a worthy opponent. However, with great respect, we now end our relationship. We feel we have grasped the essence of your culture. Your participation is no longer warranted.’ It’s a bit odd, isn’t it? The last line’s cryptic, but certainly abrasive. What is Stinger, ma’am? Are you allowed to say?”

“What would your guess be?”

“A weapon,” said Esmeralda, solemnly and with the confidence of youth. She thought she was going to live forever, no doubt. After a moment she asked, “Who’s weapon is it?”

“The winner’s,” said Gretta.

∞∞∞

The man in the gorilla suit never misses Fridays. At least we believe it’s a man, and we think it’s a suit. He sometimes comes other days of the week too, though never Mondays.

The man in the gorilla suit never comes Mondays.

Kevon, the packing lead, finds the man in the gorilla suit annoying. Kevon says the man, or at least the suit, stinks. I say we all get a little ripe by shift’s end. I do admit to having taken Migs, as we call the man in the gorilla suit, aside and spraying him with Dove Body Mist once or twice, but Kevon shouldn’t complain; Migs packs a lot of orders for him.

Migs doesn’t spend as much time in my area. Squeezing through merchandise stacks to pick orders is a cumbersome task for a man in a gorilla suit. My pickers like Migs, but he slows us down when we’re trying to get batches of last-minute orders filled, which always seems the case Friday night. Migs still helps my line though, tidying up and what-not, when he can.

I’m the picking lead. My name is Loretta. I’m standing at the head of my lines, ripping orders, shoving totes down steel rollers. The rollers ring, echoing through canyons of racks.

From this spot I have a clear view to Kevon’s area. Industrial bags bloated with Styrofoam peanuts float above his packing stations. Packers load boxes with merchandise and fill them out with the peanuts. Then they tape the boxes and attach packing slips. Migs is doing that now, and he’s a sight. Packing peanuts are stuck all over his fur. Kevon has plenty of packers tonight: two per station. Kevon glides around his area now, checking that his people have boxes, tape, whatever they need. His arms and legs, as always, are constant motion. No matter what he does, he always reminds me of a outfielder racing to get under a fly ball and pull it back from the fence.

I pick up my walkie-talkie. Kevon’s not far away, but the rollers, and the plastic totes crashing into each other, are too loud to shout above.

“¿Qué quieres?” answers Kevon. Many packers come from Latin America; Kevon has picked up Spanish, which we aren’t supposed use, per company policy, but he doesn’t care. He just wants orders out the door, and sometimes he forgets who he’s talking to. I do understand some Spanish phrases. My maiden name was Rincón, after all, though I never went back to my maiden name.

I envy Kevon’s bilingualism, though it would make no difference in my job. Order pickers, immigrant or native-born, all speak English. Here, on second shift, many are community-college kids, in class by day and studying who-knows-when. New temps are assigned to pick or pack based on a reading test. It doesn’t matter how well or poorly a potential temp reads in general, just how well he or she tests compared to others applying the same day. If we need four new pickers and five new packers, then the top four scorers become pickers.

“Give me somebody,” I radio to Kevon.

“Can’t spare anyone.”

“You have Migs. We’re backed up. Give me Dante. Or Noi.”

“No way. You can take Albert if you want.”

Albert was seventy. My pickers would trample poor Albert.

“Carol then,” I say, hoping to split the difference. Carol is neither fast nor slow.

“Done. Never radio me again.” Kevon breaks off and disappears behind some stacks. He radios back a moment later. “Lorrrretta?”

“What?”

“You still love me, right?”

I roll my eyes. “Yes, of course, Kevon.”

“Dante’s coming over.”

That’s Kevon: first he says he won’t help you, can’t help you, and then he helps you.

Kevon had been a community-college kid once. He had started for me as a picker … six years ago? He was twenty-three then. I know because he’s thirty years younger than me (my birthday’s coming up Monday) and we celebrated Kevon’s twenty-ninth with cake last Friday. Migs broke everyone up by getting frosting mooshed all over his snout. Kevon had almost smiled.

Once he got the lead job, Kevon quit college. He started six-sigma certification here, which would have gotten him into management, but the classes bored him. He would rather fret, strutting up and down the lines night after night. Didn’t he want more? Didn’t he fear getting trapped?

Dante comes over. “Did you see Migsy?” he asks, grabbing some order sheets. “Got peanut all over him!”

I smile. It is funny, but nevertheless I have an urge to go pick Styrofoam bits off the man in the gorilla suit.

Over the next hour, we catch up. I shut down one line so half my crew can go to lunch. It’s dinner time, but they call it lunch here, no matter the shift.

The packers near Migs are also scheduled for first lunch. Kevon goes too. One of us stays on the floor at all times, so he and I switch off. After the packers leave, Migs looks up, right, then left, to discover he’s alone. His great shoulders sag.

Noticing me, he jumps, then lopes over. Finding a broom he circles me, sweeping the concrete. “Thank you, Migs,” I say, “but there’s nothing to sweep.” He looks at the clean floor and scratches his head. “Rrruh!” he grunts, then puts the broom away. He looks at a stack of empty totes, then places his hands on it. “Rruh?”

The stacks are getting low. “Yes,” I say. “You may go collect the empties from the other side.”

He scampers away. He comes back twenty-five minutes later, as the first group returns from lunch. He’s pushing a dozen tote stacks before him, each stack six-feet high.

“Migs, we’ll never use that many!”

He shrugs and goes back to packing.

At the same moment, Kevon comes toward me for the hand-off. He passes Migs, giving him a dirty look. Migs shields his head with one arm, then scurries away in a pretense of fear.

“Why, Kevon?” I ask.

“I don’t care for visual humor.”

“What’s the harm?”

“Have a good lunch,” says Kevon. “There’s cupcakes.”

I go into the break room and stand in line to microwave my stuffed peppers. I used to make my own, but it’s too much trouble for one, so I bring Stouffer’s now. They taste fine.

What’s left of the cupcakes Kevin mentioned lie in long caterer’s boxes. The cupcakes have orange, yellow, or lime-colored smiley-faces on them. I ask the crew if it’s someone’s birthday or anniversary, but no one seems to know where the cupcakes came from. They look good but I don’t take one. I want to make sure everyone gets a chance. After microwaving my lunch I go into the offices. Kevon and I are allowed to eat in the managers’ offices, empty at this hour, so we can read our email. I mostly get newsletters and departmental cc’s, but I have to check in case there’s something important. They sometimes forget us.

I scroll through my inbox as I eat. There’s one announcing inventory control classes on site, free, beginning next month. Though Kevon is already cc’d, I forward it to him. Maybe if I pester him enough he will take advantage. Twenty-nine seems young, but it isn’t.

I delete until white appears at the bottom of the window. The last email surprises me:

From: Peg Strange, Human Resources

To: Department Heads, Managers, Supervisors

Cc: Leads

Subject: Animal-costumed individual on shop floor.

Due to insurance concerns, OSHA regulations, union contract negotiations, Department of Homeland Security -issued guidelines, and in compliance with company policy, the individual wearing an animal (gorilla) costume is not allowed on the order fulfillment floor during regular business hours (or after business hours) or elsewhere on the premises during or after business hours. This includes the parking lot.

This is not new policy, but clarifies existing policy.

The individual is not an employee or sub-contractor. The individual does not have I.D. and has never been explicitly granted access to our staff and premises. No one remembers how or when this individual first appeared. We do not know who this individual is, where this individual comes from, nor where this individual vanishes, like a specter, into the night.

We realize this individual has become a beloved figure in our workplace; therefore this clarification will not take effect until second shift ends tonight. Please take a moment to stop by and wish the individual in the animal costume well. There will be cupcakes in the break room :)

Peg Strange, Vice President, Human Resources.

I print the email, take the page from the tray, and fold it over. Then I leave the office, and call Kevon on the walkie-talkie.

“—¿Qué qui—”

“Meet me in the front,” I say.

Kevon must have caught something in my voice, because he trots toward me, brow tight. “What?” he asks.

I shove the email, planting it in the center of his chest.

He looks at me, stunned. He unfolds it and reads. Without blinking he says, “Loretta, I didn’t do this.”

“Migs annoys you. You always say so.”

“Everybody annoys me, but I wouldn’t complain to …” Looking again at the email, he laughs. “… Peg Strange in Human Resources. I don’t even know people upstairs.”

I snatch the paper. “You should know people upstairs! Do you want to be on the floor all your life? You should have reported Migs. He’s against policy. You might as well have got something for it. You’re acting stupid! Stupid!”

“Hey, hey!” says Kevon. “That’s enough!”

I realize I’m hitting him on the arm with the email.

Then we’re both stunned; we hear a deep harsh, “RRRuh!”

Migs is standing close. All work on the floor has stopped. The crew is staring, open-mouthed, as we fight.

Migs waddles closer.

When he reaches us, he takes my hand and Kevon’s, clasping them together between his paws. He shakes them once, twice. Then he twists his head left and right. He looks at me. “Rruh!”

“All right.” I say. “We won’t fight.”

He turns to Kevon. “Rrruh!”

Kevon nods.

Satisfied, the man in the gorilla suit exhales. He turns to the shop floor, regards the people, the lines, the stacks of totes. Then he turns to me, looks at the paper still in my hand, and shrugs.

“You already know?” I ask.

He nods.

I straighten myself.

The man in the gorilla suit sets his arms akimbo and looks at his feet. He scratches his head. He nods again, this time to himself. “Rrruh,” he says, and turns toward the nearest door. I want to grab him, pull him back, we have hours before the shift ends, but he moves away from me with such noble resolve that I stop myself. He deserves dignity in his departure.

He reaches the door and opens it. It should be armed, but the alarm doesn’t go off. Someone must have forgotten.

He steps outside, the door falls shut, and he is gone.

The pickers and packers whisper amongst themselves. They don’t realize what has happened yet. Kevon claps once, sharply. Not smiling, he yells. “Get the lines moving!”

Orders have backed up. We have fallen behind, but work resumes, and soon the ringing of steel rollers crushes the silence. I put the email away.

Before returning to my place I go to the exit to set the alarm. I peek out into the parking lot. It’s dark. Migs is nowhere, though, reasonably, he couldn’t have gotten far.

Alarm set, I return to the line. My pickers send questioning gazes. After we catch up I’ll explain. I’ll try to do a better job than the email did. We have other things we can look forward to. The weekend’s coming. Then on Monday there will be birthday cake.

The man in the gorilla suit never came Mondays anyway.

Photo credit: rolffimages

The Common Knight

Matt never paid attention to other people on the bus. Anyone normal rarely did, and certainly not at this time of the commute. Not at 7:20 PM. At this time of the commute, some seats remained open. But not so many that weirdos had the opportunity to interfere with tired commuters or single one out. Sometimes Matt worked as late as ten, and then it became him and the weirdos on the bus. But now the bus held a happy medium: not too crowded, and not empty enough to cause anyone to pay him too much attention. Matt was a weirdo magnet.

If he happened, some summer evening, to be sitting in a group of four or six in an outside café, every wandering street schizophrenic would zero in on him. He always got the seat on the plane next to the man so uncomfortable in his own skin that not only did he want to chat non-stop, he needed to chat non-stop. The saloon crank with the solutions to everything wrong with this country always took the stool next to Matt’s. Every woman he dated turned out jealous and crazy, so his relationships proved short and distant—though not especially painful.

Healthy people, sane people, ordinary people stayed away from Matt. He just didn’t know why. And this night, this particular 7:20 PM commute, it happened again. He could not hide.

Matt chose a seat near the front and opened the ereader app on his phone. However, he had made a mistake. He’d taken a seat reserved for wheelchair access, so, at the very next stop, he had to rise and make way for a passenger who needed it.

Somehow the bus had filled up more than he’d thought it had, leaving him with two choices. Stand in the relatively spacious area by the rear-door exit, or take a seat in the back row. The back row had room for four to sit across, but only one person sat there now: a woman with a weathered face and matted hair, wearing what looked like an entire set of drapes (perhaps bluish or purple, they were too filthy to tell) wrapped around herself. She occupied the middle of the long seat row, staring straight ahead.

Matt elected to stand by the rear-door exit. It did no good. The robed woman turned her head slightly. Once she noticed Matt she continued to look at him. It had happened again.

He, at first, ignored her, swiping quickly through the pages of the novel he was reading but without retaining any of the words.

The bus hit the expressway and immediately slowed to a crawl. Traffic still hadn’t cleared, even at this relatively late hour. That meant the commute—which, in the mornings, took about half an hour from the moment he left home around six, might well stretch to at least three times that long. The woman appeared ready to stare at him the whole way.

Matt scrolled back about ten percent of the way in his novel. It was volume seven of the series, and it didn’t hold his interest like the others—especially now with the disturbing gaze of the weirdo upon him.

The first couple volumes had been great, and he’d heard that the series picked up life again around book ten, which was written from notes left after Donald Barger, author of this planned twelve-volume epic, The Autumn Land, had died. The first volume, Rogue’s Glory had been good enough, but the second, Lady, Crown, and Godspawns was spectacular.

None of the subsequent volumes had lived up to its promise though, and reading volume seven, Storm’s Sorcery, felt like as much of a job as his job, actually. Lady, Crown, and Godspawns had introduced a subplot (lasting several hundred pages) concerning two characters, Indigo Knight and The Common Knight, a matched pair that had warred in different guises for millennia. Indigo Knight—ruler of a country of shape-shifters—had killed The Common Knight many times. The Common Knight was an everyman, Lowborn, but rising to some illusory degree of prominence in each new incarnation. No matter how many times The Common Knight died, he rose again. To die again.

Every time The Common Knight rose, Indigo Knight sent shape-shifters and spies to seek him out—in the taverns, in the streets, on the highways—to tempt him into some cause, some service. The Common Knight always demurred. And, at the hand of Indigo Knight, died again. Though Indigo Knight never relented, both characters had been all but dropped in the later volumes.

When he learned that a new writer was taking over the series, Matt posted his wish on several Autumn Land forums that The Common Knight and Indigo Knight story arc be revisited. Rarely did anyone chime in to take up his cause. (Fake fans found The Common Knight arrogant and egotistical—and, at the same time, passive and ineffectual. The conventional wisdom maintained that his creation was a horrible misstep, a horrible failure at manufacturing a sympathetic character—but they were wrong; the Common Knight merely knew his own intrinsic worth and, as for being passive—there was simply nothing of significance given to him to do.)

But anyway, most readers were more interested in War of the Eleven Elven Princelings against the Dwarves of Forest Unfathomed. Or the promised Return of the Empress of the Solstice. All that would happen, of course, no matter who took up the series. The balance of harmony would be restored in the end and the wicked undone. That expectation was sure to be fulfilled. The extant ten volumes were fecund with dropped subplots and dead ends. It infuriated Matt, as it did many fans. If only he could have a conclusion to Common and Indigo however, Matt, at least, would forgive all the rest.

He realized he’d been tapping through pages again mindlessly. He moved the scroll bar on the app back the same ten percent with a sigh. He needed a new series.

Ebooks were a godsend to him. He could indulge his guilty pleasure. None of his work friends or other ordinary associates had any idea how many fantasy and science fiction novels he devoured. For all anyone knew he was texting or facebooking right now, like everyone else.

Since ebooks, no more shocked looks on those mornings when, after bringing a girl home from a bar, the girl—who had come home with Matt, the smooth, successful, young executive with the important-sounding title, Investor Brand Director, at Flippo.com—awoke to find herself in a bedroom imprisoned by walls stacked high with paperbacks, each one the thickness of a Scrabble dictionary—so thick many sported full portraits of characters or scenes from the novels, not only on the front and back covers, but on their spines.

That would be the girl’s first clue. She would then investigate deeper. The Atari classic console in the corner. The Ikea desk with a two-monitor setup and double-rowed surge protector which rested, not on the floor, but on the desktop, sprouting cables like Medusa’s head sprouted vipers.

There would be no need for her to look further. She was done, and she would escape quickly. She would never even find out that, at Flippo.com, Investor Brand Directors pulled down less than forty-six grand a year. But it all started with the disturbing number of paperbacks. So the phone app had helped with that. He’d put his dead-tree books in storage.

Matt exited Storm’s Sorcery and browsed through the title list in the app for something else. He had books on there he’d forgotten that he owned, let alone hadn’t read, but he wanted something new anyway.

Somewhere, somewhere, in all creation, something new had to exist.

Before he could shop for it, for some alternative, the crazy lady in the back of the bus stood up. She clanked. She threw back her folds of drapery. The drapery was not common purple, of course. Indigo. Beneath it, hence the clanking, she wore a suit of armor. It shined. She drew her broadsword. Passengers dived for the floor. Many screamed. She held the sword in both hands and rushed him.

The weathered face, the matted hair. She hadn’t bathed, certainly in days, and possibly in weeks. Indigo Knight was relentless and focused, after all. She never rested in her travels from realm to realm until she sighted The Common Knight again.

The Common Knight could run and run, but he could never escape Indigo in her many guises. Indigo sent out spies and minions to draw him in: the wandering panhandler, the chatty seatmate on a plane, the bar crank. But the spies, the minions, always failed. The Common Knight avoided, demurred, forced Indigo Knight again and again, in world after world, to appear in the flesh.

She swung her broadsword now. Tomorrow, Matt imagined, there would be a huge headline on local news sites: Sword Killer! Nightmare Commute! Something. But, of course, he could not say for sure, and he wouldn’t be around to find out. Not this time. Maybe someday. Maybe someday the story would come to an actual end. If someone invented a way to write it. Indigo Knight’s blade swept the air. Matt did not resist.

§

1a. (deleted.)

1b. My bench is London. Hyde Park. Hyde Park is also the setting of something else, some other piece, called “Running London,” which I will write later. Or not. Most things are unwritten, how could it not be so? For every final something, there exist many unwritten drafts in the nothing.

2. My 2 characters soon to arrive on my park bench in my imagination’s London, are the “Borges” of this story’s title and the persona “Marshall Mathers”—which is a persona created by another persona “Eminem.” Both were created by the real Mr. Mathers. But the real Mathers no more appears in this story than does the real Jorge Luis Borges. To steal 2 fictional constructs from their authors and sit them side by side has got to be—at least—considered a cheap trick, a meaningless stunt, or some third pejorative thing. It isn’t. It’s a reasonable method to examine the parallel conceits of two very different artists—who could not be more different at a glance—who certainly never heard of each other, and could scarcely be less interested in this exercise, each other, or yo, even if they had done.

3. That bit about “Running London” above? A lie. The other story I intend to write will be called “Under London” and my disguising the title somewhat was an attempt to hold something back, to preserve some creative magma for a later attempt at something. Never do this, never hold anything back, not if you’re me anyway, and haven’t got much to work with right now, let alone in a neutrino-splitting cat-duplicating theoretical future. But where was I?

2. (cont.) In fact the conceit of putting these two brilliantly wrought personas of their respective creators together on a park bench ala Borges’ own emblematic work “Borges y Yo” is so apt, I’m sure someone has thought of it before. If anyone has acted on this thought, I and my enterprise here are fucked.

4. (deleted.)

5. (deleted.)

6a. A few other odds and ends. MS Word is making my life hell as it tries to help—deciding where my indents will be, thinking I am writing an outline because of the numbered paragraphs. I’m taking the numbered paragraph style from Delany, Samuel R. because I like it, it seems the right method to order these points I must make in order to communicate to the reader this episode to the best of my ability. It is, like any matter of style, a guess. When you encounter something funky in a story, you’ve got choices, one choice is to go with it—this is true of the writer as well as the reader.

6b. It is autumn, both in the world and in the false world of this episode I relate. The leaves in Hyde Park have turned, but not fallen. The sky is colorless. Borges in this story is old. Marshall Mathers in this story is young. Though the real Mathers is older now, I cannot imagine Eminem old, and though the world knows the young Borges, it’s the elderly, famoso figure I first met and hold forever in my mind; the man surprised to be famous: a poet, a former librarian, who in his sixties returns to the short story after decades of absence. He returns stronger, braver. Gone are the affectations of style, the showy absurdities in plot and theme. He simply tells it now: an old man named Borges sits on a park bench and, through the course of a conversation, discovers the young man sitting next to him is himself, many years earlier. Or perhaps he is the young Borges sitting next to an older self. He does not know which of him writes this tale and he tells us this, and then he is done.

7a. Today however, this autumn day, Borges is not in one of his stories, so he does not meet himself. Today he meets “Marshall Mathers”, who is not in Detroit, as he and his creator Marshall-who-is-also-Eminem would have expected. Eminem might be found in London, indeed any city in the world; he is famous everywhere, and rap is loved everywhere. Well, you might not find Eminem in Tehran. But you could certainly overhear his music anywhere—even Tehran—and no one should seriously doubt it.

7b. Eminem would be stunned to see “Marshall” outside Detroit, outside the clubs, the ugly streets, the shitty trailer parks of his childhood. He created “Marshall” to live in those core memories. Eminem takes on the world—the temptations and ridicule necessary to navigate the past—if one is to thrive in, not be crushed by, it. The world is an arena, the pop world, the world of fame—any world is an arena. An arena is where contests are held, and there is always one more contest. No matter how many you can win, there will always be one more, and nobody lasts forever. Eminem wants to keep “Marshall” safe from all that. “Marshall” is his innocence, and as long as he has “Marshall” he can’t completely lose his self.

8. Borges would like those concepts, and his ears would particularly prick up at the idea of the world as an arena. Or the world as any one thing, or anything as something else. A labyrinth, a rose, a tome in old Norse, they are each the world. The world itself is only that idea that is at once too great and to simple to hold in the mind by any method but metaphor. In one thing, everything. In everything, one thing.

9. “Borges” sits down at one end of the bench, and draws his wool lapels close. He wears a fine topcoat. The wool is Argentinean, but the workmanship is European; they do not exist without each other, and “Borges” contemplates that as a metaphor for his own career. He may use the thought sometime. Probably not, because there are better ones to devise.

10. “Marshall” sits down at the other end of the bench. He re-zips his coat to the top, folds his arms and pleasantly squeezes some of the air out of the puffy down. To Borges, Marshall —with his northern skin, his head of bleached hair poking forth from a white snowball of a coat—looks like an apparition, a phantasm of Wells perhaps, and as agreeably absurd. No. The ghost beside him evokes a mirth not often found in the works of those romanticists such as Wells or Verne whose chief literary passion lies in imagineering the future.

11. To Marshall, Borges looks like something out of another kind of fiction, an old movie on TNT maybe,—a guy like the guys who bankrolled Eddie Murphy in Trading Places. He wonders if the guy is rich. He has a cane. Rich people in movies carry canes. Then again, he is old. Maybe he needs the cane to walk. A cane is better than a walker. You see those old ladies, with their aluminum walkers, bus change clinking back and forth in the tray, and the walker’s legs taped up where the rubber footpads have cracked. Where’s the dignity in that? The old guy has dignity. How will I walk when I’m that age? Will I even get to that age? Will some kid see me and will I look like something in an old movie to him? That’s what I’ll be someday, an old man from an old movie—and that’s only if I’m lucky. Which I don’t expect to be. Marshall looks at Borges long and hard while he thinks this.

12. Borges looks back at Marshall, into the ice blue eyes,* surely the eyes of a poet of the Eddas would have been this blue, this clear. To be young again. But was I ever? What if I were this young man’s age today, would I find myself costumed as he is? If my world were not one of books, not one of my grandfather’s—the great general’s—history and legend. Not one of dusty southern twilights and Viennese snowfalls infinitely intermingling in memory. What if I were sneakers and televisions; internets and absent fathers? Would I then be Borges still? Would I then be me? Or is Borges something else? Something other than his memory. I have never believed that, yet I have always been a believer in the imagination, though a poor practitioner. If I, buy some alchemy – found myself compelled to trade places with this young man for one instant—would I, for that instant, retain semblance of myself? If I looked out at Borges from Nordic eyes, who would I see? A fellow—kinsman of sort—or a creature so alien as to defy comprehension?

13. And Marshall breaks the gaze in an instant, because he knows he and the old man are holding it a little. He knows in a flash they are thinking the same thought: who the fuck are you supposed to be anyway?

14. And they laugh. At first they laugh because of the awkwardness of the moment, and then they laugh at themselves for laughing and being embarrassed over nothing. And then they laugh because the other is laughing, and they laugh because it is truly singular to know two are thinking the same thought at the same time, and they look back at their own selves from the alien’s perspective.

15. As if in a mirror, they stop laughing and gulp and looking into the middle distance, still believing they are thinking the same thing, but how can either man know?

16. A few leaves fall as they sit there, contemplating that understanding—always stunning, no matter how often it is fleetingly grasped—that other people exist, independent of one’s self, going on and on, their own memories like fingers reaching out to their own pasts, their own dreams like fingers pulling their own futures near, all independent in one way, yet still capable of intersecting, winding around, turning, changing each other, like some (why not say it again, it is too late to make a pretense of originality now) like some labyrinth—but a living one; a labyrinth that builds itself.

17. “I should get back,” says Marshall, the first words spoken between the two men in an exchange, that after all, only lasted a moment, an exchange that, even as incidental encounters go, could fairly be argued never to have happened at all. Especially since neither man will permit himself to discuss it. Each man values his world of thoughts so highly that neither presumes to invade the world of the other. Instead, Marshall will want to find a place and a pen to write lyrics. Borges will want to find a place and a pen to write his own lines.

18. “I must go, as well.” says Borges.

19. The young man extends his hand and they shake, though the grip is different, a manner of handshake unknown to Borges, not at all difficult to learn, and much less formal somehow. “Good luck,” says Borges turned toward the fork in the path. And Marshall takes the other way, but not before saying, “Stay real.”
20. Borges contemplates the encounter, and every encounter he has had, and will have, living over and over again in the lines of his poems, the leaves of his books, the memories of a few friends, and (dare an old poet hope?) a few too-kind admirers.

21. Stay real. Interesting advice, he thinks with a smile.

22. I wonder … is it achievable?

23. (deleted.)

24. Hyde Park begins to dissolve behind our characters retreating backs. The men do not turn, or pause to notice this. Nothing is lost. Nothing that happened cannot be recreated at will. As a matter of fact, each time it is remembered it can be improved upon. The images crystallize, the epiphanies become more pronounced, and deeper. Neither man is finished living it, or will finish living it as long as the great world—call it rose, book, labyrinth, or any name you choose— keeps turning.

*****

*It may be that Marshall has brown eyes and wears blue contact lenses at times.

(This story originally appeared in 419 Memoirs & Other Strange Stories (2011) by Michael Canfield, available in ebook form at the usual places.)