This is a story fragment. And a not very good one at that. This is often how fictional stories are birthed. Trial and error. Organic evolution. Someday, I might just have a really great short story about the Chilena mining acident of August 2010. We'll see, I suppose.
And when you lose control, you'll reap the harvest you have sown.
And as the fear grows, the bad blood slows, and turns to stone.
And it's too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw around.
So have a good drown, as you go down, all alone -- Dragged down by the stone.
Pink Floyd, "Dogs"
Let us not lose heart in doing good, for in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary.
Paul of Tarsus, Galatians 6: 9
One Day at Copiapo: Not So Long Ago
"People like us, who believe in physics, know that the borders between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." This highly enigmatic saying, which by all accounts is from the work of one Doctor Albert Einstein, came to my thoughts -- like a sharply painful brain-freeze, from a long drink-in of ice cold water -- when the accident first cropped up in all the news media. That is, of course, digitally, breathlessly, by many means and media, all around the known world.
Los 33 -- the thirty-three, en Espanol (which is such a beautiful and mythical tongue to which to listen) -- is how it, the jaw-dropping incident in rural Chile, El Copiapo, the rumored cave in a deep, deep down in a human-bored mountain mine, so extraordinary and perilous accident came to be labeled. But to those with true insight recognize that it was not an accident, as the event, was labeled, at all. A cave in? On the los 33? No, not in reality. But it was a spectacular if pain-inducing illusion, was it not, generated with such seeming ease by those mysterious outsiders who provide illusions and tricks of the mind and heart, in the margins of our personal and communal limited frames of reference, that are, well, spectacular and, in the end, wondrously compelling.
It all began like the sum total of human experience, in wide-angle. One sunrise and sunset cycle, that flows toward another, Day, night, then the hints of sun-up again. Yet every once in a while thihngs grind down to a halt. Someone, somewhere, fiddling with the undoubted process.
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Karma Comes for a Visit
Some moments are experienced, some things seem readily to have occurred, but some -- the most compelling ones -- are at best sensed as they unfold, through intuition, and known barely, darkly, or sometimes starkly, in the aftermath and fallout deep in a person's heart.
One long Sunday not so long ago, around 4:00, when the sun at last had emerged -- a glimmering ray at a time -- from behind seven, mystery-bearing days of unfettered, ominous, gray cloud banks, like a sliding-by umbrella sweep of wrinkled slate, I began to feel anxious and dizzy, as if I were angling down, down, toward some limbo beyond my ability to comprehend. The monotony of a light but persistent rainfall, tedious hours and hours of it, had ended, like a curtain swishing closed from east and west. Momentarily, I believed that I discerned (wrong, that was) that I was sliding beneath, without clues of bodily discomfort -- but with a rising tide of nerves -- toward some subterranean, yawning-open zone, so far unexplored by me, of desperately seductive drowsiness.
As so often happens, I had been sitting, with some apparent ease in the untrained eyes of casual observers, in the room, in this dank apartment, that most people would refer to as the family room -- but, you see, there is no family to speak about. Not any more. They are all gone. As in vanished, certain observers say. Someday, I may join them. But, for now, it's just me, I tell everyone. One of the last things that I could remember hearing (while dropping down) was a peal of hearty laughter, canned soundtrack style, from the show on my TV. It was a story about dogs, the house-pet kind. Then, there was a little buzzing sound from the TV monitor and I imagined that the picture went gray and blank.
What rose up into my sleep-surrendering mind, at that moment, was a flicker of memory: a callous, high-pitched teacher, a man hated by all students alike (or thereabouts) was lashing me verbally me, the student, for an erroneous answer in my Physics class, long ago, telling me that I was certainly no Einstein. And then I think I dimly beheld some thin and pointy arrows of sunlight pushing down through my slightly-parted velvet curtains, only to crash like sharpened pieces onto the carpet. There is this dream-like thing that I started, a fugue that had something to to do with past or the present. I remember clearly a mask of Medusa staring at me, it's snaky head winding around the doorframe, black as coal eyes, but improbably translucent.
. . . Which, adds up to: I never saw them this time. Though I briefly (felt) their presence as I sank down, right adown like melting fluid in front of the sunlight streaks. I had just laid aside a book I cherish, The Mutiny of the Elsinore. I had already unsteadily begun to prepare myself for a social call. The three had come back to me, for me. Short of stature, manifesting as stick-like ectomorphs, bony arms, slippery translucent body coatings, and hands that felt like hooks. Big cartoon eyes, lids up and lashes unblinking, were appliqued to their faces. -- And clipped little dog-like tails, twitching away like off-point metronomes of little Yorkshire pups. The threesome,barely sensed, just . . . materialized.. Such an honor, I dreamed smirkly. All this, for little me? I was ready to sluice into battle, hard. But I was caught hard on the shoulder, and felt paralyzed, by one their grappling hand hooks. Something metal and ugly, that I didn't even know was there, like a razor-honed bullet hard-stabbed me in the trapezius. A set of eyes stared back at me, then, skittered to the left and away-- disembodied, the animal from my doorway?, a Latino man . . .
Faux peals of mocking laughter, and as the trained dogs barked on the television like the on-call actors they were, and as I felt a flicker of fear as I was succumbing, losing all control as if paralyzed by stingrays, without strength, into that deep morpheous trance, they had slipped through an short dark seam, a foamy little invisible crack between here and there that had formed in the dusty but sun-brightened air.
If you had been there, well, here present actually, you would have seen me in a chair, and you would have seen the television monitor blot out to gray, and you might have sensed the sunlight streaks coming in through some curtains, but no body would have strode through the door. As has happened at previous times, they had come on the scene -- materialized in a moment -- standing there and staring my way . . . Well, standing here. And, as I recall, the trio, with their non-muzzled and hungry demeanors, like gray shadows emerging -- materializing --silently from the darkness of the margins, was not in a pleasant or sunny Sunday mood. Havoc, cry havoc now, was the silent scream that boomed in my head. Then, all was blankness, a paralyzing flat line.
Sliding into the Future Tense
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'Cry havoc. And let slip the dogs of war! -- Wm. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
One of his wizened old uncles once told him, suddenly, after back-to-back-to-back shots of Old Crow whiskey, that dreams sometimes behave like your impudent family members. Like the unwanted and uninvited, like the drunk and disorderly, they have a manner of showing up when least wanted and saying more than they should, and often in an uncomely manner at that.
Einstein's theorem is what he had been considering all day. That would be Einstein the scientist, not one of the bagel-making brothers. He had marveled how things -- the theory -- must have suddenly jelled in Einstein's fertile mind: even at the subparticulate stratum of the slightest sunbeam, everything is always in bustling, perpetual motion. Always. But relative. A stunning insight that could not be denied -- like Medusa's terrifying yet beautiful visage. A horror show. As kids are given to say today, it must have rocked his, Einstein's, orb.
To Be Continued
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The first in-dream sensation, as far as I can recall, was a pang of reluctance. I stood, hesitantly. I was outside, unwittingly, of a large, shuttered and sharply gabled building in an outlying metro area -- like Washington D.C., home turf of political illusions and landscape of perverse paranoid dreams. It would, I sensed, take some heavy knocks on the main door to get some attention. That is, if I knocked at all.
My first knocks on the imposing door were, I confess, rather timid. Taps might describe them better. No reply. Knock, knock, . . . knock (more firmly this time). Nothing. Now, I'm getting flushed. Mad. "Come on," I yell, pounding a fist on the imposing door. I am certain that I am expected. And, more, that it's expected by some authority -- I know somehow -- that I will get into this mystery house of sharp gables
Then, my heartbeat quickens. I focus on a gaping black entryway. The door was open. I looked into a deep dark hallway. Then I looked back. There was no one behind me. The door had opened wide. Just like that.
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