A Christmas Carol

I got on the train at Stansted, and was determined to watch a movie on my phone; it was an obscure version of A Christmas Carol by Dickens, but I have to admit, I was somewhat jealous of my privacy, my ability to just watch that movie and be left alone; that’s all I wanted. It was snowing lightly, and I could see lights out on the towns and houses; I’m a geometry teacher, so I especially noticed the triangles of the lit-up trees, and the places where colored lights, green and red, or perhaps red and blue, would go around a house or a roof, and make rectangles, parallelograms or rhombuses. But as I said, I wanted to focus on this movie, and I put earbuds in and turned it on directly.

My car had maybe eight people, but at least six of them were like me, watching or listening to their phones, self-absorbed. Near me was a child being ignored by his mother; she, too was on the phone. The child had dark eyes, and a sad face; he mumbled something, but, even when I took out my earbuds, I couldn’t hear him. I went back to my movie.

Now in my teaching job, I had a mentor, Mrs. Hathaway, who had died seven months earlier, but whose memory remained on my mind, because she had taught me so much. But now, to my surprise, from the back of the car, came a woman who looked exactly like her. Now I say exactly: she was homeless, ragged, much older than the Mrs. Hathaway I had known. But she was exactly the same person; I could see it in her soul. I panicked; the Mrs. Hathaway I had known was dead! I knew it, and I had even been to her funeral. The woman in front of me, as I said, looked exactly like her, except that she had aged maybe thirty years, and lost everything she owned. She walked right toward me, and looked me straight in the eye. I had taken out my earbuds in amazement as I simply watched her, and tried to show no emotion at her ragged appearance. But she said only one thing, “Listen to the children!”, turned on her heels, and went back to from where she came.

Now, as a teacher, I listen to the children a lot. In fact, I have a way with them; they tend to tell me things I don’t even want to know. They tell me about abuse in their home, and about violence; sometimes I don’t quite know what to do with the information. I try to focus on their skills in geometry, but I can’t help but know them as people, and it breaks my heart sometimes. Ah, but I say this to justify my actions on this weekend. Now, I simply wanted to watch my movie. It was not my fault that I didn’t hear what the little lad mumbled, the lad who was with his mum, who was being ignored, who was clearly troubled by his world. It was my day off, and it wasn’t my place to get involved in his problem anyway.

At Bishops Stortford the mother and child got off, and the homeless woman too; she was long gone, leaving me to wonder about what she had said. Several of the people who were still on their phones remained in the car, and stayed on their phones; now a man with a little girl got on the car, and walked over and settled near me. I had my earbuds out again, but I’d really have rather watched my movie. Nevertheless the girl spoke directly to me, right away, in front of her father, who could hear every word she said.

 “You shouldn’t ignore little children,” she said. “You grownups are always busy, always on your phones, and I can see that,” she said with a sweep of her hand, indicating all the other people on the car. “But it’s not the kids who have trouble in their lives that grow up to cause trouble. It’s the kids you ignore. You shouldn’t ignore them!”

Now this advice cut me to the bone, because in fact it sounded very much like something Mrs. Hathaway might have said, about watching out for the quiet kid, the one who gives you no clues about the pain he or she is in. But in fact, I hadn’t ignored this girl; in fact, I’d let her talk, I’d kept my earbuds out of my ears, in order to hear her advice. The father gave me a benevolent smile, as if to say, I can’t control the kinds of things my daughter says, and we fell into a kind of silence.

London, I must say, was quite pretty, with its Christmas decorations on many of the houses, and towns decorated on their streets. The train passed through Sawbridgeworth, Roydon, Hoddesdon, Broxbourne. The light snow turned into slightly more substantial snow, and we could see the snow building up on the yards of the houses. The Christmas lights reflected on the snow. When I put my earbuds back on, the performance was somewhere in the middle of the Ghost of Christmas Past, with Tiny Tim, and Cratchit, and those characters, though I had trouble remembering them, and in fact I had trouble concentrating. I wanted simply to be distracted, to be in my own world, to not be bothered by people on the train. The little girl sat and stared straight ahead, as if she were disappointed that I had not followed her advice, or at least talked to her.  But I didn’t want to. It was my day off. I wanted simply to be left alone.

Now at the Tottenham Hale stop, this little girl, and her father, got off, and now another young lad, about the same age, holding hands with his mum, got on, and, to my surprise again, walked right toward me. What is this, I thought, that they would walk right toward me, like this? And that his mum would clearly be ok ending up wherever in the car this boy would choose? Nevertheless that’s what happened. Again, my earbuds were out at the stop; I was available. I sat and watched them approach. I was hanging on until the Liverpool Street Station, and had nowhere else to go. I was not about to leave, just because this boy walked up to me.

He, too, had brown eyes, and was very cute, and was probably just a touch wealthy. He was not like the poor boys I was watching, when I had the chance, in the production of A Christmas Carol. He was well dressed, well scrubbed, and very polite.

“It’s not about money,” he said. “This time of year, everyone’s all about the money. You spend this, you spend that, you spend some for the poor. But it’s not about money.”

He then went on to talk about how he and his mum were going Christmas shopping in the center of the city, or some such thing, and it was clear from what he said: money was not a problem in this family. Nor was it really, for me. I had a teacher’s salary, which was not great, but it was adequate, and it afforded me a nice flat, a decent life, the ability to go to town once a week. I wondered why he said this. Did he think I thought it was all about money? Yes, I’ll admit, there are times when we all think that. Money’s all that matters, and all that. But I was not especially bad that way. If I wanted money, I wouldn’t have been a teacher.

The boy squirmed a lot, as young children do, and the train lurched into Liverpool Street Station. The boy and his mother got up to get off; I too was getting off the train, for a connection somewhere, I don’t remember. I’d been unable to finish my movie, too distracted by the situation. But this is when the third child approached me.

She, too, was a little girl, and she was holding hands with her mum; they were walking alongside the train as it stopped, and we were all going our respective ways. She stopped directly in front of me, and looked straight at me, as if she’d been looking for me, in the station, and knew, now, that she’d found me. In the background was one of those guys with bells, and a santa hat, perhaps a former alcoholic, out there ringing the bell to get donations for some poor children.

“Life is short!” she said. “Some people, you will never meet them again. You see them here, or on the train, that’s it, after that, they’re gone! If you have anything to say, say it now! Now’s the time! That’s why I’m telling you this! I have to go, bye!”

And she, too, turned on her heels, being dragged along to her mum, shopping somewhere no doubt, leaving me with my earbuds still dangling, a movie unwatched, wondering what, if anything, I could have said. I in fact had nothing to say. Leave me alone, was all I wanted to say to anyone, all day, and yet I knew now that, on this day, that was not going to happen.

I knew, now, that I had failed these kids in one way, though I had heard all three of them, really four, if you count the very first one. I had my earbuds out, and, as the old lady had advised me, I had listened to the children. I hadn’t ignored them, or refused to listen, or turned away. Yet I knew they were right; this world they lived in had too many people on their devices all the time, and I was like those people; I’d come to prefer my devices. And for what? What were we really getting out of them? Nothing, really; we got nothing that was better than an exchange with a young child. It was a dark and silent world. It was still snowing, and everyone was in a hurry; I put my phone away now, having things to do.

e pluribus haiku 2017

a thousand original haiku

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New Children of the LIght

by Maurine Pyle
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On Kindle Soon

From the book description:
"Why should we care about the Millennial generation? Managers, the military, and religious leaders are all asking themselves how they can adapt to this generation who represent the largest work force. So far no one has been asking the Millennials how they see things. New Children of the Light can serve as a window into the lives and minds of young people coming of age in the twenty first century. I have simply asked sixteen young Quakers to tell us who they are and who they want to become."

Maurine Pyle is a good friend of mine, so I helped her produce this book. It includes two of my boys, and I recommend it.

Mannequin Challenge

& 20 short stories you can't put down

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Marfa Lights

Marfa Lights

I was coming back to New Mexico on an Amtrak, from a family reunion near San Antonio, and I was bored. It was a hot summer day, but the cars were air-conditioned, and some people were playing cards in the club car. I asked if I could join them, and they welcomed me. They had only three and needed one more anyway, though they were just playing gin rummy, and not for money.

The guy that owned the cards, I’ll call him Dr. Bock, was a historian of some kind, and was going to Las Vegas. Perhaps we worked at a university or something; he was a little older, established-looking, with a well-trimmed beard and well dressed. His cards were “presidential” – each one had some American president on it, except that there were less than fifty-two presidents, so there were a few other people on there too, including Ben Franklin and Sacajawea, two I remember. It made a kind of bizarre game of gin rummy, having three aces, and having them be Washington, Lincoln, and perhaps Roosevelt, but history wasn’t my specialty; I’m an English teacher.

The young woman who was playing was very sharp. She introduced herself as Micaeya, or something like that; she had a kind of olive skin and very long, well-braided hair. As we talked it seemed perhaps she was a student in Tucson, going back from New Orleans. She was quite pretty but young, compared to the rest of us, even to Tony, who kind of had his eye on her.

Tony was the fourth guy in the game. He was tall and intense, and dark flashing eyes. As I said, he seemed to like Micaeya, but it turned out to be more complicated than that. It turned out he hadn’t wanted her in the game, and really wanted the game to be for money. And also, as it turned out, she was quite talented, and was winning; this made him steadily more uncomfortable. So the relationship was already complicated. But that’s the way these things are. And, he was considerably older, maybe thirty or more. I had no evidence from her, really, that she even considered him. She was smooth, friendly to everyone, and winning steadily, and she had plenty of time to look at the scenery, which was stunning, in its wide, empty, desert-like West Texas way.

When I told them I was from New Mexico, Micaeya told about how she’d gone to visit a roommate in Roswell, and it was full of alien signs: balloon alien at the car dealership, alien pictures on the windows of the café, alien dolls sold at the gift shop, that kind of thing. This is well known in New Mexico, where towns seek to be famous for something, just so they’ll get a few visitors in a year; this was working pretty well for Roswell, though the kind of visitors those alien museums attracted made folks wonder, of course.

Tony, in a kind of one-upping way, told about how he’d worked for Atari in El Paso at one point, and they decided to throw away a million ET video games in a landfill in New Mexico. It was generally considered to be the worst video game ever made; they’d been stuck with a million of them, and didn’t want them; and Tony himself was partly responsible for getting rid of them. This, he said, was back in the eighties, and he knew there was some interest in digging them up now, if only because they were so bad, or because they’d become a cult item in the intervening time. It was a bad game, though, he maintained. People kept getting stuck in various worlds, unable to get out. There was no way to win.

His story, for some reason, reminded me of a time I was in Iowa, and just off the interstate, I’d stumbled upon an Edsel graveyard. Some guy had collected maybe twenty of them, and left them in an apple orchard, and these apples were falling on them, and then rotting on the ground nearby (it was maybe November) – and the cars, too, were returning to the earth, beautiful in their own way. Edsels were rejected not for being bad, or not working, or trapping people, but because they were too good – their fins were too fancy, and they incorporated a space-ship kind of look before people were really ready for it. Similarly to the ET game, though, they were rejected – many of them had to simply sit somewhere, unused.

The Amtrak rolled into the tiny town of Alpine, which Texans know as the gateway to the whole wide, vast, dry Big Bend region, but which, from this train at this moment in the middle of the day, just seemed like the most remote, isolated place on earth. The town was almost deserted, but several people got off the train, and a few got on, and I’m sure the arrival of the train was itself a big deal in some quarters of the town. Micaeya made a snarky remark about the town, like, she wouldn’t want to get stuck in a town like this after dark, and that was understandable, given that she was black, and had long braided hair, and had plenty to fear. I maintained that you never know, because this is true; not wanting to make assumptions about Alpine, before I’d even met anyone in it. A better generalization about Texas is that in some of these towns they’d rather kill you than look at you, and will, but in most, they are friendlier than you can possibly imagine. But I kept my mouth shut. After all, I’m a white male, and they might treat people like me quite differently from others.

Tony, all this time, kept his eyes narrow and concentrated on the game, which he didn’t tend to win, no matter how much he tried. He knew the southwest quite well, I could tell; he knew, for example, that where there was White Sands, just north of El Paso, there was another White Sands, just like it only smaller, down south of Juarez, on the other side of the border. Yet he was not Mexican, not even a part Mexican; maybe something else, like part Indian, or part Arab perhaps; I couldn’t quite make it out. And I don’t ever ask, or make assumptions based on names like “Tony”. I can tell you that, while the game went pretty smoothly, he was the only person who truly cared whether he won or lost; the presidents, the scenery, the town, these meant little to him. He hated it, though, when Micaeya referred to the presidents as “dead white men” as if they were legion of ghosts, come back to haunt us.

Now it was the historian’s turn to tell his story, as now we were going over a wide river valley, and this seemed to get his attention. I use the term “river” loosely, in the West Texas fashion, because most of these rivers, even the Rio Grande, rarely have water that you can see, except in the rare cases when it rains; this one, however, had this enormous valley that followed it down to the Rio Grande, no doubt, and there was not a road in sight. The train crossed this huge bridge, and we could see nothing but wide West Texas valley on both sides. The memory sticks with me, though the name of the river, if it even had one, escapes me.

It turns out that Dr. Bock had been doing research on the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico, who now live in nineteen villages outside of Albuquerque. He had stumbled across the idea that one whole family of these people, who comprised maybe seven or eight of the Pueblos, had actually come from the Caribbean. The person who had made this claim, a native of one of the other Pueblos, had language and other evidence to prove it, but, according to Dr. Bock, he hadn’t gotten very far with it. You could go all the way to the Caribbean, as he had, and you still wouldn’t find much that would really prove it.

But if they had, he said, one would have to make several assumptions. First was that they’d followed rivers like the Rio Grande, or this one, that presumably had real water at the time. Second, they’d come in large groups, as he’d mentioned that their language, like that in the Caribbean at the time of Columbus’ arrival, had separate features for men’s language and women’s language. And finally, he was talking about maybe 1200, or 1300, a time when travel wasn’t really so easy. Did they know where they were going? Did they have a sense of where these rivers led to? He was engrossed in this world of the ancient people, and seemed to know a lot about them. I knew nothing about them, though I was glad we were off the topic of ET video games.

Being from Vegas, he said, he was used to modern people leaving all kinds of stuff in the desert – old neon signs, fighter planes, ET videos – even nuclear waste. But he’d come to admire the people who came and went without a trace, mentioning, on the side, the petroglyphs, which could have been theirs – and he felt that that was wiser and more respectul.

I should mention that at some point this woman, about my age, came through the train, and stopped at our table, for some reason, to start talking about the Marfa Lights. Now we were near Marfa, but of course in West Texas, “near” can mean four, five, seven hours away – but what she wanted us to know was that at night, they swirled around and put out a show worth coming from miles to watch. It’s interesting, sometimes, that landscape that seems totally barren and empty, with miles and miles of rock and useless land, was actually home to interesting things. The Marfa Lights, she said, was among them, well worth your time.

I’d heard this, having spent time in Texas, but it was broad daylight; the sun was shining brightly; and I considered it a kind of distraction. I was interested in Dr. Bock’s apparent knowledge of the ancient people, whereas I had very little experience, or interest, in the supernatural. As the woman left, I’d made it clear, more or less, that she hadn’t sold the idea. Why should I go to Marfa? I had enough problems. One of those was transportation connections in El Paso.

At some point, while Dr. Bock was talking, he seemed to catch Tony cheating at cards. Now how you’d cheat at gin rummy, or even why, when there was no money involved, was a complete mystery to me. I never did figure out exactly how he’d been cheating, but there was no question; he’d won the last few hands, whereas, he’d lost most of the earlier ones. Perhaps he’d had aces in his sleeve (and in that case, it would have been Lincoln)? Alas I had been scanning the West Texas landscape, looking for a sign, any sign, of where we were; no luck. We were coming into El Paso, that’s all I knew.

Micaeya supported him, visibly and verbally; she too had seen it, or at least sensed that something was up with him winning all the time. Whatever it was, they had both seen it, or at least were sure it had happened. They were mad. Whereas neither seemed to mind losing a single hand or two, as I didn’t mind, they did mind losing them, especially losing several, because of cheating. It had spoiled their game. They demanded that he admit it and apologize. Dr. Bock took his cards back and counted them.

At this point I excused myself, having to gather my possessions to exit the train at El Paso. An argument about the winner of a card game seemed particularly pointless, like a terrible video game, and I just had no stomach for it. But as I came back through the train I saw Dr. Bock being escorted from the train. How they had concluded that he was at fault, I’m not sure; perhaps he’d said something suspicious. At this point, Tony and Micaeya were nowhere to be seen. I was getting off the train anyway.

Funny about the stuff I remember: the Lincoln card, with its bent kind of look, when they finally tracked it down; the jostling of the train at the very end there, as if slowing down made it unsteady; the woman who’d come along and told us the story about the Marfa Lights – and how they had never been successfully explained (thus, according to her, making Marfa right up with Roswell as a place that was likely to have experienced, or to be experiencing, extraterrestrial visits) – and finally, the complete and total disappearance of both Tony and Micaeya, right at the time poor Dr. Bock had to go off and explain himself at some police station. His fight was not my fight; whatever he’d done, I hadn’t even seen it, yet I at least felt a little guilty leaving him there alone trying to explain himself. There was a mystery there – some information that I didn’t get – but I wasn’t going to get it, and if you can read this and shine some light on what actually happened, I’d like to know. Something must have happened, I figured, right as I was leaving. Perhaps he had lost his temper and cast a blow, or maybe they had hauled Tony off separately, and needed him for questioning.

In any case, the Lincoln card was left there on the table, and I grabbed it. I was well aware that a deck of fifty-one is useless, as is a single card. But now I have this souvenir, and from that, I tell this story.

As for what actually happened, they do have cameras on these trains, especially in the club cars. But the movies those cameras make don’t show card cheating, or expressions on people’s faces, and besides, after a while, they erase them all, and start over fresh. El Paso is an interesting city, tucked up on the mountains facing Mexico as it is, but it’s way too busy for me, and I didn’t want to spend any more time there than I had to.

4-17

Butter Churn

Butter Churn

So I’m sitting at this table with other musicians, and some of our audience, after our performance at a small mountain café, in a tiny town in New Mexico not far from El Paso, and I find myself a little impatient with their conversation. I’ve been working at a high school down in another town, down in the desert, and during the testing period I’ve found myself with some time on my hands, and started reading a ragged book, one of many biographies of Jack London. Here’s a guy who goes to Alaska, like I did, but he found out a lot more, about dogs especially, and he made a pretty good living off of it, and he walked around perpetuating this rugged image of himself, and he writes prolifically.

I don’t write prolifically. For one thing, I play music too. And also I have ten kids, and there are these kids around all the time, and they make a lot of noise, and make it so I can’t even play music enough. Once in a while I come out here, way out in the mountains, on winding mountain roads full of elk, where these folks play music, and I play with them, if I can, and they give us dinner when we’re done, which in my case is a chile cheesburger, really good. One of the musicians is a gospel singer, an excellent musician, too, well known in Texas and other places as well. The bass player is the local auctioneer. The banjo picker is a taxidermist. He can tell you how, if someone runs over a cougar, he can make it so it’ll hang on the wall of the barbecue restaurant. Or how some big elk head he mounted, with antlers and everything, looms over the propane guy’s shop. He stuffs them and mounts them, when he’s not playing the banjo, or running the cowboy church. That’s what he does.

It’s a spring night; leaves are budding on the trees and things are beginning to smell nice everywhere, especially since nature starts right the minute you get out of the café and across the road, where there’s a fresh-water river, rare in the southwest. There are elk and deer all over the road, but most of all, things are turning green and coming alive again. In the café they bring us our food, and the conversation turns to chance occurrences with, say, buying some old thing at a garage sale that turns out to be worth $30,000. The wife of the banjo picker, it turns out, is an antique dealer. The gospel singer says, when that happens, it’s the grace of God; he doesn’t care much for the money itself, or getting something for nothing, but does care a lot about the grace of God, it’s a common topic after our performances. The auctioneer has a twinkle in his eye, as he has some experience in this field, where some old dusty thing at an estate auction turns out to be worth a fortune. But he’s a little reserved about what he knows, because what he really wants is for people to come to his auctions, and bid on stuff, and perhaps turn over to him their aunt’s estate when the time comes. He doesn’t want to give the wrong impression, let us think he knows too much. He recently hurt his back; apparently he was moving some piano, and he didn’t even get all that much money off of it, he said, so he probably should have just refused, and made them wait until some young guy would come along and move it, but he didn’t.

My mind wanders a bit. The other day I was at the high school and got sick, and lost my balance. I started lurching in the hallways, worrying that the security guards, who were everywhere, would suspect I was drunk. In fact I was sick, not drunk, they could even test me if they wanted, but I was having trouble walking a straight line, a lot of trouble. And that triggered memories, being totally unhinged from the ground, in a fog, unable to keep my concentration on a straight line. It was not a good feeling.

Jack London, he’d write these stories about people dying in the woods, or dogs turning on each other, or some such thing, with extreme weather, or whatever he’d make up; he seemed to have no trouble coming up with things to write about. I find myself scraping the barrel looking for interesting things to write about. I’m reading about Jack London and the Arctic, and Jack London and his unhappy marriage, and then I get to the part where he’s taking a lot of morphine, and they can’t figure out whether he’d killed himself or just was getting careless treating his own pain which was becoming unbearable, in spite of everything. I’d actually lost a little interest in Jack London back at the point where he married somebody he didn’t love, but then, after a while, I figured, you never know about that kind of thing, how can some biographer tell about who loves whom and under what situation? A lifetime of being sorry he did it, yes, you can understand that, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t love her. Maybe that biographer was simply mistaken. And I say that partly as a romantic, one who could look at someone and in an instant be more in love than ever before. That makes me dangerous, of course. My wife worries about me.

All of a sudden, a memory overtakes me, and I think of this time I was a schoolbus driver, out in the country, in Iowa, lurching along and hitting all the potholes in the gravel roads, gravel dust flying everywhere behind me. Rural Iowa is quite beautiful, all green with corn, but I had no time to even look at it. The older kids sat not on the seat, but on the seat backs, way in the back of the bus, because they liked the adventure, the risk, the thrill of the bus bashing them back and forth, but there were some very young kids, the small ones, and they sat in front, scared to death, knowing both that the road had steep ditches right at the edge, and that I was not from around there. I tried to control the rowdiest of them, tried to get them all to sit in their seats; I had to tell one kid to never show me a knife again, not when I was driving, because I had to concentrate. I took my job seriously. I hit a chicken one day; I wasn’t the best driver. It was not the kind of thing you could take for granted, read a Jack London book, or daydream. It took all my concentration. It was hard, and I was not born to be so regular, so dull, so consistent.

At the café, the story turns to a certain butter churn. The antique dealer describes it. Somebody had this antique butter churn in their foyer for what, twenty years, and decided to sell it. It was estate sale time, time to get rid of the antiques. Some guy comes over and buys it for a few hundred bucks. But it’s attached solidly to the floor. They take a hammer to its base trying to get it loose so the guy can take it home. They pound at it from all directions and finally they crack its base, and out comes a hundred gold coins or more; apparently the grandfather, long gone, had been hiding them in there. No wonder the thing weighed a ton! Full of gold coins that dated back, what, a hundred years or more, back in the age of gold coins, and they don’t even make those anymore. The family that’s selling it has to split the value of the coins with the guy that bought the butter churn, because, they figured, it was half his at the time when they found the coins. But the coins way outvalued the churn itself, which was just your standard run-of-the-mill antique butter churn.

Again, my mind wanders. Not into the money, the $30,000, the gold coins, really, or even a butter churn, which I would recognize as a nice antique, pretty to have around, but it’s not like I’d make my own butter, or ever even did. On the contrary, I’m a writer, and sometimes a fiddler, although on this night my string had popped and I didn’t have a spare, and I was stuck just singing a few old songs, western songs, instead of my usual bluegrass fiddle. As a writer, though, I’d read the Jack London book now, and read it carefully, even though he’d married someone he supposedly didn’t love. And there was this other book, a book by writers about how to write, where writers told about writing, and how it healed you, and how the topic of a biography was kind of a victim, and how to write well and such. It had this chapter by some writer where he said, write the stuff that only you can write. That was his main advice. He could have written that in one sentence, but instead he wrote a whole chapter, because that’s what they needed, chapters. But that was his advice, and it stuck with me. Why I thought of it now, I have no idea.

So this one morning, in Iowa, it was foggy, the fog sat on the cornfields, and the kids were stone silent, having perhaps had some wild party the night before. The gravel roads wound around in their maddening way. I was out of sleep, having hitchhiked to Des Moines the previous day, and worked my usual night job; I’d had to go to Des Moines, or near there, to pick up an old ’50 Dodge truck which I’d bought from an old guy. All of a sudden, the gravel, the fog, and the steep ditch, and I’d blacked out, and flipped the bus; it landed upside down in the cornfield; the littlest of the kids landed in my lap. Everything was all right, in the end; nobody was seriously injured. They tested me for alcohol and everything, but that wasn’t the problem. I was sober. Out of sleep, maybe, irresponsible, maybe, but drunk, no.

The mountains are so beautiful, with their fog, their rain, real water coming out of them, the pine smell, and I remember sometimes the time I’d jumped a train, sat on top of it backwards, and almost got hit by a tunnel – after I’d gone through, and lived, that was my first experience with God’s grace, the school bus was the second. The wonders of the mountains, with the grass, the flowers, the elk, the deer, but you have to stop to appreciate them. You can’t go looking at them while you’re driving, or even while you’re on a train.

The mountain roads I drive on up here are precarious – on the way to work, steep cliffs on either side, hairpin turns, swerving this way and that, going down at least 5000 feet each morning to work and back up in the afternoon. The mountain cliffs have boulders that occasionally fall on the road, or on the cars, if the drivers aren’t lucky; I imagine sometimes, that these rocks are messages being dropped by the ancient people, who obviously lived right here, where there was access to water, deer, elk, caves, green stuff, everything they needed. Not a whole lot of money to be made, out here, they didn’t have corn, or soybeans, or all that stuff those Iowa farmers were making a living on. Out in this small town, these folks are ranchers, except maybe the musicians themselves, who seemed to be generally of another mold, maybe the only ones who aren’t ranchers. And I’m not sure how these folks, our audience, make it ranching; there’s so little rain, so much danger, so much to spend money on. Cowboy songs, and gospel, and just about anything else, they like their music; they are actually pretty open-minded, great people. They’ve been nice to me, even when I lost my string, humiliated, unable to play; they liked the entertainment, living way out in the country, they were appreciative. As a musician, you have good nights, when the bluegrass comes right out of the fiddle, everything’s on time, everything works. As a writer, the same is true, sometimes things flow, they go right on the page. Then you have other nights, and don’t play very well, or can’t find anything to write, you could get a million bucks, still not have anything to write. I’m not Jack London, I don’t do it for the money; I work for money, and play music and write when I can. I watch out for rocks when I drive up and down the hill; out in the mountains, I watch out for the elk and deer. I try to keep my eyes on the road. I don’t like losing my balance, or lurching this way or that. I’ve got memories of steep ditches and cliffs, being upside down, kids in my lap.

But I’ll tell you, there are a lot of stars out here at night. You want God’s grace, there it is, they’re all out there. You have to pull over to see them, of course, you don’t want to try to look up, and drive at the same time, the roads are too narrow and wind around too much, too many animals on them. Just pull over and get out of the car. Then you’ll feel like I do: the world has at least put me here, still alive under these stars, still able to write another story. And tonight, this is it.

(4-17)

Spring Forward, Fall Back

One of Jocelyn’s problems was that she tended to ignore the time altogether; she blotted it completely out of her mind. She wasn’t late deliberately, like some people, just to get attention, or to make everyone wait for her, or because she needed to be late to have enough adrenaline even to show up; it was more that she forgot about it altogether. She was just as likely to be early as to be late, but she was mostly likely to not even be thinking about it at all. She’d try to aim for the appointed time, and then she’d simply forget about it, in the process of arriving where she was supposed to be.

This was especially painful when her date, Devin, got angry at her for being at least twenty five minutes late at Starbucks; they were going to a musical that night, and he’d had maybe two or three coffees already, waiting for her. He assumed she did it deliberately, he said, since twenty minutes was about the line where a person doesn’t even have to keep waiting anymore. You couldn’t call or text? You didn’t know you were late? When you’re stood up fifteen, he said, you still wait a few more, but you’re already mad. When you’re stood up twenty, then you’re steaming mad and you might as well leave.

Well go ahead and leave, she finally suggested, flustered; she was embarassed at ber own irresponsibility, and admitted to him that she’d been doing this for years, couldn’t help it, and it was all her father’s fault. She was a flawed person, she realized, a good fashion designer, but a bad time manager, but she hadn’t meant to hurt his feelings or make him angry. She ordered a double latte as she told him this, because she figured if they were late for the musical, they might as well be a little more late, but somehow they should settle this before they walked in. She was genuinely apologetic. It all seemed kind of random to her. Fifteen minutes – was this some kind of cultural agreement? Was he mad because that’s what people do? She liked Devin; he was smart, good-looking, not worried about money, able to drive, not gay – all of those were good in Jocelyn’s book, judging men the way she did, being single in Manhattan. She knew him through a friend of hers, Laura, at work, and she’d said he was a nice guy. But, whatever his strengths, he couldn’t make her care about time. Time wasn’t even real. Fashion was real. Migraines were real. A double latte, that was real, or the mink on that woman’s shoulder, those were real. Time wasn’t real.

Devin, it seems, already had had at least three coffees, and he was agitated, though he tried not to show it. This fifteen-minute thing, it was what he’d learned, what he expected, it was the way he read it. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe her when she said she didn’t care about time. Well, maybe he didn’t believe her. How could anyone not know they were fifteen minutes late? Or twenty or twenty five? And not text or call? In a world where everyone was pressed for time, where time was money, where making somebody wait was robbing them of precious minutes, especially here in New York, even if you didn’t care about money, it seems you’d at least notice that other people cared a lot. He, in fact, cared more than most people, and he was especially irritated that tonight was the end of Daylight Savings Time, when everyone, by misguided social agreement, set their clocks back one hour, for no good reason whatsoever, as far as he could figure. It was more than a pet peeve to him. He had researched Daylight Savings Time; he had written an article for a national magazine, and the essence of that article was that DST, as he called it, and the conversion to it, cost Americans millions a year in lost productivity. He became angry whenever he thought about it, and he was well aware that at midnight, well after the musical, wherever he ended up with Jocelyn, he’d be thinking about it. They’d get a free hour tonight, and give it back later in the spring; to him, it was an hour to complain about, even though no one was complaining in the fall, when it seemed like you could sleep in.

Jocelyn got her latte and turned to walk to the seat at the small table Devin had picked out and sat at. It was a delicate balancing act, bringing this latte to this table without spilling it, still all the while smiling at Devin and hoping his feelings weren’t too hurt, being forced to watch her with her latte, when he’d already had three coffees, and they were already late. At that moment, to Jocelyn, there was nobody else in that Starbucks, only Devin, nobody else counted, and she badly wanted Devin to forgive her and go on with the evening like it was not such a big deal to go along with your date’s random time schedule. She thought about her father, who had worked at the atomic clock in Boulder; he was a specialist in establishing the perfect conditions for that clock to be exactly precise, and when she’d asked him about it, he’d always give a scientific lecture on those conditions, what made clocks precise, and why atomic clocks were so much more precise than other clocks. It was his own special lecture, and much as she’d loved him – in most ways he was a great dad – in this respect, his scientific lecture would trigger a response in her, a response which made her deliberately ignore time, whenever she could.

Now Devin was involved in a conversation that had started well before Jocelyn arrived, with a guy named Stan – tall, thin, balding, intense, and by himself – and this conversation had to do with Fall Back and Spring Forward, the general name people used for gaining an hour in the Fall, and setting your time ahead again in the Spring. It was socially acceptable to bring it up, to complain about it, to resent changing one’s clocks, so this is what Stan had done, and when you say this to Devin, as he learned, you’re in for an earful. Devin was explaining how America lost billions because people couldn’t function as easily with an altered clock. He was the expert on how this hurt everyone, and could give you many reasons why even gaining an hour was bad. It upset people’s internal clocks. People were an hour late or early for church and other meetings, nationwide. Stan told him he could always move to Arizona, which, as a state, had rejected it, and refused to participate, but to Devin, that was ridiculous, you might as well move to Tahiti. Jocelyn, while walking and balancing her latte, watched them talk in their animated way. Just in the few minutes Jocelyn observed Stan, she observed an edge in him: he was looking for a fight. Or maybe he was looking to irritate someone. He didn’t seem like your average guy, having a coffee to unwind, or coming here for a few minutes to think.

Jocelyn settled her latte on the table and started drinking it, allowing this conversation to continue without interruption. She thought for a minute about the musical, Midnight Hour, which they were about to see, and which was being performed on this evening without any awareness, apparently, that they would be picking up that very hour, as 2:00 would simply turn into 1:00 in the middle of the night, and everyone would relive that hour. Devin was telling how in the history of DST, it was usually done at midnight, but had been changed to 2:00 for reasons of convenience. It was possible that this musical was based on an earlier show or movie by the same name; Devin wasn’t sure, but he was pretty sure it had nothing to do with Fall Back or Spring Forward; that was entirely a coincidence. To her, musicals, On-Broadway or Off-Broadway, were opportunities to watch how people were dressing: what they wore, how they wore it, how it fit on them, etc. Fashion was her world. If they were late, she would see less, as people would not be standing around; she’d have to rely on the intermission to actually watch people. This was more fun for her than the musical itself, and was what she’d looked forward to.

Eventually Devin tried to give Stan hints that their conversation was over, and that his date with Jocelyn was started. Jocelyn was almost done with their latte. The musical was about six blocks away, six blocks of busy Manhattan traffic. They could take a cab, but that was ridiculous; the weather was actually nice, and this was unusual for Manhattan, which was often pretty grim and cold in October. They agreed to walk, and set off.

The six blocks to the theater were along a busy street with signs, shops, businesses, and a large subway stop. Devin admired Jocelyn, proud to walk with her; she was quite beautiful in the night, with a light purple dress, earrings, and a hat. He was still irritated, though, about her explanation about the time. What bothered him most was the idea that it would always be like this, that every time they were to meet at seven, she’d get there at seven twenty-five, or whenever. He tried to enjoy the moment, and think of the things he admired about her. She was fashionable; she was clever. The streetlights gave her a regal bearing.

Jocelyn also enjoyed the evening, and being with Devin; he was well-dressed, handsome, smart, and sensitive to her pace. Unfortunately, it was here, in about the first block, that she first noticed a migraine headache coming on. This was almost always trouble, because there wasn’t much she could do about migraines. She blamed them on stress: stress from her job, stress from trying to look good, stress from just walking Manhattan streets, which was always somewhat of a risk. On this evening, she blamed Stan, who had intruded on her peace with his edge, and his general unhappiness with Daylight Savings Time. Here she actually agreed with him: that people’s universal acceptance of a ridiculous time custom caused all kinds of stress; but, his agitation, intruding on her latte, and on her experience with Devin, that must have triggered something.

Perhaps it was the anxiety generated by the musical itself. They arrived, got their tickets, and entered, still with barely enough time. Jocelyn glanced around and didn’t see anyone she knew. The musical was doing well; the auditorium was almost full.

The migraine really took off when the musical started. It’s not important how well it was performed, or what the plot line was, or how good the music was. It was well done; it was performed as well as could be expected; it set up an intense drama that was to unfold later in the evening. But the musical, with its actors and actresses reaching out emotionally to the audience, began to make Jocelyn feel hopelessly trapped in her seat. She still felt unresolved tension coming from Devin, even as he sat and tried to enjoy the performance. The characters, to her, all struck her as unreal, insincere, and exaggerated. Of course, that’s what actors and actresses do; they are in the business of being someone besides who they are. But on this evening, it bothered her greatly, and her migraine was escalating to the point where she could barely even listen to the words they said.

She calculated at one point that it had to be close to intermission. At intermission, she would simply have to excuse herself and go home. That was the problem with migraines – you couldn’t beat them. You could take medication, you could go home, you could withdraw from the world, but you couldn’t actually function, stay at a musical, understand and enjoy it. You just couldn’t. She’d have to make that clear to Devin.

When the intermission came, she did just that. Devin agreed to come out to the street to discuss it with her, if not call a cab. She urged him to let her go home. Much as she wanted to watch people, see what they were wearing, and analyze whether it worked or not, she couldn’t; her head was pounding. She explained to Devin how serious migraines were and how hopeless it was to try to fight them or to survive the evening. Devin, watching her, knew she was not lying. He was, above all, a gentleman, and would not only call a cab, but also pay for it. What could you do? He hadn’t decided yet whether to go back into the theater, after she was gone, and watch the rest of the performance; to him, the evening was about Jocelyn, not the musical, and he was somewhat adrift without her. He was suspended there, on the curb, in the night, his arm out in the hailing-a-cab position; she waited on the sidewalk. And just at that moment, Stan came walking up the street.

Stan stopped just long enough to find out what they were doing, and Devin, having told him, agreed to go along with Stan to another establishment, after the cab was hailed. He had nothing better to do; he’d decided that the musical was pointless without Jocelyn. He was not much invested in the musical’s idea of “The Midnight Hour.”

In the cab, Jocelyn looked through the hazy barrier between the back seat and the front, and asked the driver what he thought about Fall Back and Spring Forward. The driver had enough English to understand her, but he mumbled his reply so she really didn’t have much to go on. He apparently was going to simply work an extra hour like everyone else. Her migraine was already quite intense; she no longer cared about maintaining a conversation or watching the streets, besides making sure he was going the right route.. She was glad to notice that he knew where he was going, in taking her directly to her apartment.

At home she did what she usually did when she had a migraine: she buried herself in her bed, pillows over her, and tried to sleep. And she did, eventually, fall asleep, in spite of the migraine.

It was only later, through Laura, that she found out what had happened to Devin and Stan; they’d been beaten up in a bar. Devin was hurt a little less than Stan, but both were pretty bruised up, according to Laura. She didn’t really know the details; Stan had taken the hit, and was more seriously injured, while Devin, just standing behind him, had been knocked over and hit his head on the bar, had passed out for a while, or something like that.

Now the astute observer might ask several questions about the time; perhaps they had lost that very hour that by rights everyone else had just received. It was, apparently, around that time when bars close, and everyone gets a little edgy, that time when fights often happen. But remember, Jocelyn didn’t care, didn’t even think to ask about it. It was not even really part of her awareness. So for that reason, we’ll have to accept a lack of information.

She was, however, a little set back by the news. True, she had already given up on Devin. Things hadn’t worked, she had decided; if they did, it might have turned out differently. She tried to rationalize it. He was stupid to go off with Stan. You walk into a bar in Manhattan, you never know what will happen. Maybe he should have stuck with the musical, where at least the musical’s version of the Midnight Hour was inevitable, you had some idea how it would turn out, and it would be over, sometime in the elevens, spilling out onto the streets, with cabs all over the place. Instead he had gone to a bar, gotten in a fight, fallen back, lost an hour. What’s gone is gone, and you can’t relive it, you never get it back.

3-17

Mannequin Challenge

Mannequin Challenge

Cassie got all excited about the Mannequin Challenge – she was a teenager, but there wasn’t much to do in her small town, and this seemed like an exciting thing to come along, for everyone to participate in. The idea was simple – everyone would meet downtown, party for a while, get ready, and then a siren would sound, and everyone would be entirely still for as long as they could. It was a kind of internet sensation, and a social phenomenon at the same time, so that especially appealed to her. They would try to beat the world’s record for both participation – in percent of residents actually doing it – and, in length of time, though that would be harder; one generally remained frozen for the length of the song “Black Beatles,” but there was some town in Georgia that claimed they’d held perfectly still for over six minutes; Cassie didn’t think they could do that in her hometown, Alamogordo, New Mexico. She figured they’d be lucky to hit five.

Cassie was only vaguely aware of the meaning of the Mannequin Challenge – in fact, though it seemed to mean something to people nationwide, it meant virtually nothing to her, or to any of her friends. The siren blew, you were absolutely still, you saw how long you could stay absolutely still, and that would tend to shock people who came upon the scene. It would be as if they had happened upon downtown Alamogordo at the very moment everyone was frozen still, as if the ice age had descended suddenly, or the wildest of movies had come true. It sounded really fun to her, so she solicited all her friends to come to the downtown on Saturday morning, at about eleven, for this event. The siren was scheduled to go off at noon. Preparations were in full swing. It was the talk of her high school.

Of course, she had many other things going on that Saturday, as she did most Saturdays. She had a dance class early in the morning, and she had this boy, Seth, who liked her, and who wanted her to come with him to get a new phone, one that could track anything, he said. Seth was a little geeky, she thought, but cute, so she led him on, but she didn’t think she would go out to that phone store with him on Saturday morning. A whole crowd of people that she knew well were involved in the Mannequin Challenge, and the preparations were drawing everyone in. She had a friend, Makayla, who was dressing up as a cactus, and she had plans to play music, even in a cactus costume. Why? Because that’s how she wanted to spend a few minutes, absolutely still, in downtown Alamogordo, taped for posterity on the social media channels. Another friend, Jonas, was a fire-thrower. He knew how to juggle those sticks that were on fire, so that he wouldn’t get burned, and it was all very impressive.

What had upset the situation, really, was that her mother knew a guy in their church, by the name of Frank, who had committed suicide on Tuesday; it was now Friday, and people were still talking about it. Her mom had been very upset about this, and it caused an upheaval in her church, Cassie could tell, because her mom had been on the phone non-stop with a lot of the people from the church. It was a church where everyone knew everyone very well, and Cassie had grown up in it; she’d of course known Frank, at least a little. She had that kind of familiarity you have with anyone you see every week for many years. She didn’t know much about him; he was a tow-truck operator, maybe, or something, and his wife went there to the church as well. If he had kids, Cassie didn’t know them, but she wasn’t sure, and judging from her mom’s phone calls, maybe there was a girlfriend. So now every time Cassie went to her mom for some supplies, to help with the preparations for the Mannequin Challenge, her mom was busy, and didn’t even want to talk about it. Her mom had no time for the Mannequin Challenge. She was going to the service on Saturday morning, and she wasn’t sure she could even give Cassie a ride to dance class that morning, though she would try to find her one.

At school Cassie ran into Shelby, an old friend of hers, who also went to the same church, though less regularly, and she was a total wreck. Cassie promised she would spend some time with Shelby, and they would talk about whatever it was that was going on. Cassie was also trying to figure out if this boy, Liam, would be at the challenge. All the while Seth kept texting her, trying to get her to go to the phone store. Forget the phone store, she thought to herself, but she was nice to Seth, and kept just putting him off. She thought she was just too busy. Meanwhile, she asked all her friends about Liam. Liam, it seemed, knew everybody. He could be doing anything. But it was extremely important to Cassie that Liam go to the challenge. She kind of had a thing for Liam, and she was afraid of making it too obvious, but she really wanted to know if he’d be there.

When she finally got to talk to Shelby, after school, it turned out that Shelby was upset about Frank too. Shelby knew Frank a little better than Cassie did, it seemed, and it hurt her that people were saying mean things about him. The big problem at the church was that it was assumed that Frank would go to Hell, since he had committed suicide. It could be a judgmental community sometimes, and they didn’t take kindly to those who had fallen away. People didn’t know so much about the girlfriend, Shelby said, but she knew a little, and she thought people were being too mean about Frank. They were hurt that he’d just killed himself. It was possible, she said, that they didn’t know the whole story.

Cassie tried to make Shelby feel better by getting her more involved in the Mannequin Challenge. It would be fun, she said, to all dress up, get ready, and sit absolutely still, somewhere in the downtown, for a few minutes or at least as long as we can, everyone together, the whole town. Cassie was sure this would be the most fun she’d had in a long while. Shelby said she had to go to the memorial service for Frank, which would be that Saturday morning at 9:30. Shelby wasn’t sure she’d make it downtown by 11, but she said it sure would be fun and she would try. Cassie could see that she’d been crying. In fact, as she looked at Shelby, it looked to her as if Shelby had been crying for days. Why would a teenage girl be so upset about a tow-truck driver? Shelby, she knew, had had some other issues in her life. Her mom had got divorced. Her older brother was always in trouble. Sometimes, when she talked to Shelby, she got drawn into Shelby’s problems.

That night, there was a gathering at Makayla’s house to get ready for the Mannequin Challenge. At dinner Cassie’s mom said she could go, and her mom would even give her a ride. In the morning, her mom said, she couldn’t give her a ride to the dance class. But she could go to the Mannequin Challenge herself, since downtown was an easy walk. She didn’t have to go to the service, only her mom would. At Makayla’s house, four girls prepared costumes and talked excitedly about the challenge. Makayla’s mother commented that in the state they were in, it would be almost impossible to sit absolutely still for three minutes, no matter what the situation. But they were up for the challenge. They speculated that the best possible situation was to be situated such that they watched something they liked, or wanted to look at. Cassie fantasized about Liam. If he was there, she resolved to be looking at him, when the siren was finished.

Saturday dawned bright and clear in Alamogordo; February was dry and cool, but not too cold. Cassie was brimming with excitement as she walked downtown. All her friends were there, and Makayla’s cactus costume was fantastic. Jonah was already throwing his sticks. It was almost noon and several food vendors were busy cooking delicious things and selling them. Cassie herself had wavered about what to wear; she considered wearing something plain, in respect to Frank, but in the end dressed in her usual, casual but fancy, tight jeans and alluring sweater. She was still hoping to see Liam, but still hadn’t learned much about his whereabouts. And all morning Seth had been texting her, telling her he’d bought the phone, and was walking downtown. Come on down, she texted back, I’ll be there. She was in the middle of a tremendous amount of excitement, talking to various friends, when Shelby arrived, breathless. Cassie went off to the side to talk to her; Shelby was upset, because apparently, the pastor, or whoever had run the memorial service, pretty much said that Frank was doomed. Hell was for people who committed suicide and other sins; the scriptures were clear. People at the service were cruel and thoughtless, though Shelby, and she was upset. Cassie thought of her mom for a moment; her mom was not that judgmental, she thought. But as Shelby and Cassie were talking, the siren went off.

Cassie remembered her promise to herself, that she would try to position herself so that she could see Liam, if he was there. During the siren, which was about fifteen seconds long, she quickly scanned the whole downtown, which of course was filled with people, many of whom she knew; some she knew well, and others, she simply was familiar with. There were also many people she’d never seen before, and didn’t recognize at all. Suddenly, across the downtown, she spotted him; he was with a group of friends. Cassie tried to arrange herself in a comfortable position, so that she could keep her gaze across the downtown fixed on Liam, and not be too uncomfortable to hold her pose for a few minutes. This required her not to be looking at Shelby, who was immediately beside her, or Makayla, who was nearby, but it gave her a better view of the entire downtown, and the center of it. She fixed herself in the best position she could, and fixed a glare across the downtown at Liam, who, as far as she could tell, was unaware of her, and not looking her way at all. A little to his right, she could see the Mayor, who was running the videocamera from a small elevated platform. He would occasionally scan the entire crowd, but mostly fixed his camera a little to the side of Cassie, where Makayla and many of the more entertaining performers were.

Around the downtown, people did their best to be absolutely still. Cassie could see a good many of them, and she could tell that pretty much everyone was following instructions; they were absolutely still. Probably downtown Alamogordo had never seen absolute stillness, so that alone made it exceptional. Cassie settled into being absolutely still, determined not to be the one that appeared to fidget on national camera, or on a viral social media post.

She had two big problems right away, though. Every second of absolute stillness seemed to take an hour; it was torture. And within half a minute, she had begun to process some of Shelby’s worries about the church and the people who had been so cruel in talking about Frank. It occurred to her that Shelby was relying on her for sanity, for calmness, for perspective, at a time when she, Shelby, was emotionally distraught. For whatever reason, Shelby was suffering a lot, and relying on Cassie. And Cassie had just turned her back on her. Now, the stillness had started. Cassie faced across the downtown; Shelby was out of her sight. Cassie suffered horribly, even in a few seconds, not knowing if Shelby was ok, and she couldn’t turn around.

Then, she had what she’d wanted, a clear view across the downtown, to over where there was an old shoe store, and where Liam was also being still, in a crowd of people. But suddenly, she clearly saw Liam cast a knowing glance at a nearby girl. He had someone with him! Cassie was even more upset. She could tell, even from this distance, way across the downtown, that they were more than just friends. She tried to focus on the girl – who was she? Did Cassie know her? Where did he know her from? Unfortunately, she could remember nothing; she could get no clues. She continued to watch, and they did it again. She began to be too upset to stand still.

And just then, another bizarre thing happened. A lone figure was walking, right into the crowd, head down, unaware that the entire crowd of poeple downtown was frozen still, now in their second minute. This was a young boy, holding his phone, and clearly reading it as he walked, but entirely oblivious to what was going on around him. He literally did not see the hundreds of people standing still, frozen, in the downtown area.

She looked closer at him – it was Seth! He was coming right toward her, and was now almost in the middle of the downtown. The Mayor saw her – he’d diverted the camera, and sent someone to come up to him, fast; he didn’t want this on the social media. The two of them, Seth, and the kid who patted him on the shoulder, alerting him that something was going on, were the only people to break the stillness in the entire crowd, that is, as long as you didn’t count the Mayor himself, who was visibly upset. They moved Seth away from the focus of the camera, and the crowd went another three minutes, more or less, with most people not noticing or not too bothered by Seth’s intrusion.

When it was over, Cassie turned around, and was relieved to find Shelby stable, calm, even enjoying herself. They talked for a while about what happened; perhaps she’d forgotten about the morning service, at least for the moment. Cassie found Seth later, and he apologized profusely. He thought the GPS app on the phone was a really fine thing, and was worried that she would be offended that he’d always know where she was, basically. He was kind of innocent, and geeky, and it didn’t really bother Cassie, so she forgave him. She recruited him to take Shelby out for ice cream, and cheer her up, as they all felt like they needed a little lift. In general, the whole Mannequin Challenge was a success, in terms of the town’s morale; people around them were cheerful, but Cassie was exhausted. Next time, she figured, she’d plan a little better for what it was really like to be absolutely still.

(3-17)

Honey Pot

Honey Pot

Wendy was a Chinese student attending a large state university in Texas. She was sharp, pretty, and sociable, and had many friends, Chinese and American. In her junior year, she decided to live with an American friend, Karen, whom she had met in her apartment complex; they shared a small apartment, not too far from the university. Before they moved in together, they had become friends, talking about boys they had crushes on. Wendy had a crush on a guy named Peter, a Chinese graduate student, who lived in an apartment complex nearby. Karen had a crush on a guy named Brad, a handsome but irresponsible undergraduate.

Unfortunately, soon after they moved in together, Brad and Karen went out together for a short time, and then Brad dumped her unceremoniously. He ignored her texts. He treated her poorly when they met. He made it clear it wasn’t going to work. Karen was heartbroken, and spent almost a month in bed, it seemed to Wendy. She stayed home, ate too much, and watched a lot of television in her room. She was still friendly to Wendy, but she was clearly depressed. Wendy worried about her.

Meanwhile, Wendy wasn’t having much luck with Peter, either. Peter was a researcher in social media, and his project involved what was called “honey pots,” social media accounts which attracted spammers and people who were using social media for illicit purposes. Wendy wanted to learn more about what Peter did and what he studied, as she used social media and was interested in it. But Peter and the people he worked with were very busy, and hard to get to know. She became more involved in the Chinese Student Association, hoping that he would attend, or that she would meet more people that knew him. Apparently, from what she heard, he did have a friend, Ming, who lived in his apartment complex, and who would often make him dumplings, but it was unclear to Wendy whether Ming was a girlfriend, or just a friend. Most of the people she met considered them just friends, but it was hard to tell with this kind of relationship, and she didn’t necessarily trust other people’s judgment. She seethed inside with jealousy. She wanted to be the one who made dumplings for Peter. She wanted to attract his attention, and she set about to do what she could to get in his path, so he would notice her.

Wendy would often think about Peter and his situation, and Karen and hers, while she was out picking up pecans. One thing her Chinese friends had found out was that there were lots of delicious pecans that fell from trees in the neighborhood where they lived, and people in Texas didn’t care about them; if you asked, they would often let you pick as many as you wanted. And pecans had become extremely valuable in China. When they had a friend going back to China, they could put a couple of pounds of pecans in their luggage, and it would be considered a valuable treat back in China. Wendy and several friends happily sought them out and picked them in their free time, and then shelled them, although you could get them shelled very cheaply. This had come to occupy parts of Wendy’s weekends.

About a month after Brad had broken up with Karen, Karen brought a woman named Lee over to the house. Wendy was pretty sure Lee was a woman, but not positive, because she dressed in a very male-like way and acted male. Wendy found herself doubting; she doubted her own knowledge of American males and females, of cultural conventions, of the sounds of voices. But Wendy, actually, had been in the states for several years, was pretty aware of this kind of thing, and still, upon watching Lee, got many mixed messages. Lee was male in many ways, and female in many others. And that was true both physically, emotionally, in every way, it seemed. She was stocky, and had a calm voice. Her hair was short on the sides with a kind of wild top. She had a calm voice that could be either male or female. Her eyes were always calm, with a great amount of control.

They sat down and talked for a while at the kitchen table; Wendy studied Lee a little. Lee was very calm and collected; if she had great desire for Karen, she didn’t show it. Lee was the one who first presented the concept of “genderqueer” to Wendy. This was the rejection of the idea that everyone was either strongly male, or strongly female; one could be in between, or could fluctuate. Lee told about this calmly, unemotionally. Karen was clearly very interested in the idea. To Wendy, it seemed possible, but probably wasn’t true for her. She had always felt like a woman, and still did.

It was not clear to Wendy whether Karen and Lee were having an affair; if they were, they kept it hidden from Wendy. Lee came over a lot, but usually in the day, or on weekends, and Lee and Karen went out together. They were clearly close, and Lee was introducing Karen to a whole new crowd of people. They had friends who were transgender; they’d changed, from male to female, or the other way; they had many friends who were gay, and everyone who hung around with this crowd knew that and was comfortable with it. Karen herself talked more and more like Lee; she made herself look male, or at least ambisexual, and she gave away a number of girlish things, like necklaces and earrings, many of them to Wendy. Wendy and Karen were still good friends. Wendy asked Karen about what was happening one night, and they talked for quite a while.

Karen said she felt it was unfair that society forced you into being entirely male or entirely female, when in fact the reality for many people, herself included, was much fuzzier. She didn’t feel entirely male or entirely female; she felt in between, some days one, other days the other, and a kind of in-between identity was actually what she was most comfortable with. The good thing, she said, about her new friends, was that they were accepting of this. She described gays and transsexuals who felt strongly about their sexual orientation, and weren’t ambivalent at all, as she was, but at least they could relate to the feeling of society pushing something on them that they weren’t. All of her new friends, tired of being misjudged by society, at least had that in common.

After her talk with Karen, Wendy had a long Skype chat with her mother, in which she told her mother the basic details of what was Karen had told her. Her mother was actually very supportive of both Karen and Wendy, and not especially critical, either of Karen’s choice of friends, or of Wendy’s. She said that you should remember that everyone has problems; no one is as happy as they seem. In fact, she said, her own problem was that she had lost any sexual desire at all, and it wasn’t really Wendy’s father’s fault; he was as nice and as charming as he’d always been. She just had reached a point where she just didn’t have any sexual desire. She told this to Wendy matter-of-factly, as if it could happen to anyone.

This totally confounded Wendy, and she lost a night of sleep after that conversation. It was partly that she had never considered her parents as sexual beings in the first place, much less people who could change, or have doubts about their identity, or not be what they’d always been to her. She was very unsettled, and felt a little unsure about what to do now.

Her feelings for Peter, however, were as strong as ever. She still had a huge crush on him. She still felt totally sure she was a woman, and she still felt he was the man she really wanted to meet and get to know, and she continued trying to do that.

Finally, one night, she got her chance. The Chinese Student Association was having a party and almost everyone she knew was there. Peter was there, and Wendy was pretty sure that Ming was there as well, though she wasn’t sure she’d know Ming if she saw her. The woman Wendy identified as Ming acted like a friend of Peter’s, but perhaps not a girlfriend; it was hard to tell. Wendy proceeded with caution, knowing she was being watched. But she couldn’t resist starting up a conversation with Peter, and getting him to talk about his research.

This was when she heard about the honey pot. Peter claimed that the object of his study was to use social media sites to find people who were preying on normal social media users, and study them - study their methods. He called them “content polluters” and occasionally referred to the different kinds: spammers, malware distributors, etc. His specialty, he said, as she watched him carefully, was harvesting and identifying these content polluters, in spite of what he called “strategic polluter obfuscation.” This, he explained, was their deliberate attempt to appear to be like real people, or real friends, or genuinely social beings.

As Peter talked, Wendy admired him. To her, he was a kind of god, so handsome, so smart, so successful in his research. All she could think of was how to find a way to get him to be hers. Suddenly, as they sat there, she had an idea. She was holding a pecan candy that one of her friends had made from the pecans they had picked. She held it up to him and claimed, right there, that she made delicious pecan candies herself, and if he ever wanted some, she’d be glad to bring him some.

He was a little taken aback, as he’d been involved in explaining his project, and it was hard for him to switch gears. He liked the idea that anyone would be willing to make candy for him, but unfortunately, he didn’t do what she wanted: give her an invitation, or provide an address, or even a phone number or way to get in touch with him. She was still a little traditional about that; she didn’t want to blurt out her own phone number, or social media account, as she considered that a little too forward. Their conversation moved on, and eventually he went off to talk to another friend, who was in his graduate department. She was frustrated. Perhaps she’d made her offer too early, or hadn’t provided the right incentive. To her, pecan candies were delicious. How could anyone refuse?

Wendy was further frustrated, not having his phone number, or an open invitation to just bring him some pecan treats. But she had been serious about making them, and within a week had found a good recipe, bought the ingredients, and made some acceptable pecan candies. She had a little container of them ready for him. Finally she couldn’t resist, and found his Twitter account. She had known about it all along, but simply hadn’t used it; now, she wrote him a quick message saying she had something for him if he wanted it. The message said, “have those treats I told u about - let me know when u want some.” She put his name in the tweet and very little else. She thought it was pretty straightforward – using “u” instead of “you,” but otherwise just a normal message. Later, she would go back and look at the message to see what was wrong with it: perhaps he didn’t like the use of “u”? At the time that she wrote it, though, it seemed like it was just a normal message. She flung it off and tried to go back to her studies.

That night, Karen came home in tears, and Wendy had another long talk with her. It was not clear to Wendy whether Lee was a love interest or not, to Karen, but in any case, she didn’t want to talk about Lee. The group she had been hanging around with was doing very crazy things: having wild parties, going to various bars, doing self-destructive drugs. Karen could see this clearly enough and was trying to get some distance; she had done a bit of this recently herself, but tonight, she’d had enough, and had come home instead.

Wendy studied Karen a little as she talked. Wendy considered Karen pretty, and could see, from talking to her, a sense of stress and self-doubt. Wendy thought she was still upset about Brad. But Karen got mad when she suggested that; she said that was suggesting that all pain had to come from men. She was still determined to have a life that was more free of gender expectations and traditional relationships. In the course of the evening, Wendy heard many new words: besides genderqueer, there were cisgender, gender fluid, pansexual, trans, and a few others. When she heard them she had to ask Karen what they meant, and Karen would have to patiently explain. Wendy was sure that there were people of all genders in China, though she hadn’t known about them, or imagined there were so many names for them. Together they talked for several hours; they made a pot of tea, and she ate several homemade pecan candies listening to Karen talk about her life.

One of Karen’s points, which Wendy found very interesting, was that because society often shunned LGBTQ+ people (Karen made a point of adding the plus), they often went down various rebellious, self-destructive paths, sheerly because of self-loathing, and this was far more destructive than simply experimenting sexually, or being unsure of what one really wanted, which was what Karen seemed to be going through. She said, and she’d said this more than once, that if society let people do what they wanted, and define themselves the way they wanted, everyone would be a whole lot happier. Wendy couldn’t help but think of “society” as Chinese society, with its rigid sex roles; to her, the U.S. already seemed somewhat easygoing in comparison. In other words, Wendy wondered, who exactly was forcing any sex role on Karen? In a college town, almost nobody, it seemed. But Wendy wasn’t a huge consumer of American media, and didn’t expect to fit into American society when she graduated; she was an outsider. She didn’t challenge Karen’s assertion. She was a good listener, and simply listened to Karen’s story of becoming disillusioned with her crowd.

During this time Wendy was almost completely absorbed in her social media accounts, looking for some sign that Peter had replied, but there was nothing. No reply on Twitter; no effort to friend her on Facebook. Nothing. She was crushed. She felt like sending another message, but didn’t. She had already gone too far, she thought. Peter was on her mind a lot. But she had heard nothing from him at all, and it was beginning to irritate her.

About a week later Karen disappeared altogether; she moved out, leaving much of her belongings, but clearly taking what was most valuable to her. She left a note to Wendy promising to pay the rent for the rest of the lease. She was dropping out of school, she said, and going home. Wendy found this hard to believe, but had little choice but to carry on without her, hoping she’d pay the rent. After about a week, she started using Karen’s room for storing pecans.

After about ten days, Lee came over, angry, and demanded to see Karen. Wendy had never seen Lee angry; it had always seemed to her that Lee had been calm and unemotional. Wendy wouldn’t let her in the door; whatever Lee wanted, she’d have to go through Karen, and Karen was gone, she said. They stood at the doorway, neither moving. What surprised Wendy about this encounter was seeing Lee in a completely emotional condition, when, having known her for weeks, she had never seen her express any strong emotion, love, hate, passion, or anything. It was another side of her. And now, it was clear that Lee definitely had strong feelings for Karen. She wanted to see her; she demanded it, now; she wanted an address; she wanted to see her things. Wendy wouldn’t budge. If you give me a phone number, she said, I’ll tell her, and perhaps she’ll call you.

Things were tense, but finally Lee left, and Wendy locked the door. There were pecans all over the house; Wendy and her friends had been using the front room and Karen’s bedroom to store them. From then on, she kept the door locked and kept her eye out for suspicious activity. What few things Karen had left in the apartment, she guarded; she felt like protecting Karen from Lee and from that kind of encounter. When Karen called, she told her of Lee coming over, but Karen didn’t want her number, and said she wouldn’t call it anyway. Eventually Karen came back, with a truck, and picked up the last of her belongings. Wendy studied her, grateful that they were still friends, and gave her some pecan candies.

It was a bad semester for Wendy, not because of her grades so much, but because she never did hear from Peter, and the whole obsession with him seemed to cloud the entire semester. She had felt sorry for Karen, who lost a whole semester as well, and who may not ever come back to the university, as upset as she was. When she called her mother, her mother helped her put it in perspective. Get another roommate, her mother said. Stop fixating on older graduate students who are probably taken, she added. Her mother was interested in the pecan candies, though, and asked Wendy to bring some home, the next time she came.

In fact, the pecans and the pecan candies turned out to be the only good thing about the semester; they were good because, when Wendy and her friends finally did go home, at the end of the semester, people were overjoyed to see them and try them. People came from around their apartment village to try them, as if she had brought home pure gold or the finest of foods.

It wasn’t until much later, back in Texas again, that Wendy found out, from a friend, that Peter had actually mistaken her tweet for that of a content polluter, and “harvested” it. It was not clear whether he actually judged her as a “content polluter” or not, but he’d been so wrapped up in what he was doing, that he was unable to just see her tweet as simply a tweet from a friend. According to this friend, Ming was not part of the picture; Ming had disappeared, and had been gone for a while. Wendy was insulted by the picture of Peter, so engrossed in his study that he couldn’t see Wendy as a friend; it was partly because she had invested so much into the whole effort: the recipes, the candies, the process. But in the end, she followed her mother’s advice. She tried to forget about him, and move on.

His “Honey Pot” study was published, and became well known; it was all over the university’s PR system, and even made it to the newsletter of the Chinese Student Association. Peter had a kind of celebrity, and was known as the “Honey Pot researcher.” Wendy cringed, every time she heard it.

(2-17)

Survival

Roxanne flew into Omaha from Chicago, rented a car there and started driving out on the flat Nebraska prairie; it was about three hours to her destination, which was an old underground missile silo that had been converted into condos for survivalists. It had armed guards; it was plain from the outside, but fancy on the inside. She was one of twenty condo owners there, but she owned hers because her father had died and she had inherited it. She was now coming out to Nebraska to see what it was like, and decide whether she wanted to keep it. She was more than familiar with her dad’s desire to provide for everyone if society as we know it becomes unstable and unsafe; it was an obsession for him, but he was a millionaire, and this condo was his way of taking care of that. She herself did not have such an urge to have a hideaway bunker surrounded by concrete, way out in the middle of the prairie, and she had had some offers from people who wanted to buy it, but she had never even seen it, so she decided to take a trip to come out and take a look at it. Besides, she was tired of Chicago. She’d lived there all her life, and it was easy to get stuck in a rut, especially with friends. She needed to get away.

She liked Nebraska already. On the plane some wealthy rancher had started to hit on her and chat her up, and tell her about his thousands of acres and so many head of cattle, and all this stuff. He’d bought her a drink and insisted that she come out and visit him someday on his ranch way out southwest of Omaha, somewhere similar to where she was already going, no doubt. She actually liked the guy, whose name was Roger, but as she talked to him all she could think about was how different he was from the people she knew and talked to almost every day. He was wealthy, yes, everyone was wealthy, and that was a relief, because she didn’t like the feeling that some guys chatted you up just because they sensed you were wealthy. This was not an issue with Roger. But he was also much more direct, and refreshing. He told her almost instantly of his innermost feelings. And he understood exactly about the silo condo.

The idea of having it way out in the prairie would be that it would be easier to protect, and harder for people to come after them and disturb them. Roxanne could certainly relate to this, as she’d always felt vulnerable in Chicago, especially after 9/11, and even walking down the street to a grocery store. If you had money, you could alleviate this, say, by having your groceries delivered, but still, if you didn’t feel safe in your home, it grew on you, and she was tired of that. Out here, she felt safer right away; there just wasn’t anyone else around, except a few people like Roger.

When she got to the condo, they let her in, and a guy named Carl showed her around. Carl was bald, tall, muscular, and aggressive. Carl was the owner and the entrepreneur, and he also clearly liked her, although he mentioned, while he was talking, that he was already married. Carl had bought the old missile silo and had built the condos to perfection, and was very proud of them; he was building even more, having had great success with these. Each condo had plenty of room, and was well stocked, but because they were underground, instead of windows, they had a screen in a prominent place, where a window would be, and on that screen, a picture of the prairie from a webcam outside, so that, as far as one could tell, one was looking straight out at the prairie. Carl claimed that if you watched the screen, you would occasionally see a hawk coming after its prey, little mice or voles that skittered along at the base of the grasses. Roxanne asked him if he could stream in a webcam from Chicago, say the Miracle Mile, with its taxis and horns and street noises. Or, Fairbanks, where they had a webcam that showed extreme blizzards and whiteouts at all times of year except maybe July. She was just messing with him, but he took her requests very seriously, and promised to get back to her as soon as possible.

The silo setup was actually very impressive. It had a gym, and a pool, and just about everything they’d need to keep on going, if the world really went toward unstable. It had a room entirely filled with guns. All twenty owners, Carl said, were wealthy, and were concerned about that time, and the inevitability of that time, when they’d need to get away from it all, and have a safe place to get away. One owner had finally sold his condo, and bought a place in New Zealand, thinking that ultimately, even Nebraska wasn’t all that safe. In a sense, it was using some of their millions to calm that gnawing fear in their subconscious, that whatever they had in their primary residence, their mansions in Connecticut or California or wherever, it wasn’t enough.

She could look at it as a vacation spot, a place where twenty very wealthy people, or families, came to get away from it all, and she could enjoy it as that, except that it was mostly empty, almost all of the time. Carl was here, and he was here a lot, by his own admission, since it was his project, and he was the owner, with the primary job of watching out for the twenty owners and being responsible for their coming and going. He was available, he said, to help her sell hers, if that’s what she wanted. He was also more than eager to hear about her life in Chicago, as he’d been a friend of her father’s; he’d been one of his first investors. The survivalist side of him, the speculation about how society would become destabilized, how people would need to get far away from the centers of power and money, how fortification, invisibility, and remoteness would be keys to survival, were all very familiar to her, as she’d actually heard her father discuss these things with him over the phone, and discuss them with others. There was a community out there, of people who indulged their fears, who did what they thought they had to, to ensure their long term survival.

Carl was very attentive to her needs. He made sure she was happy in her condo, in the day she was to spend there, and kept asking her if there was anything else he could do for her. He offered to take her to town; it was fifteen miles away, a small ranching town, and didn’t have much, but he’d at least show it to her. No thanks, she said, settling in and trying to get a sense of the place. At one point a guy named Dave came around and introduced himself; it was right around the time they were talking about the screen, and Dave promised to try to see what webcams would be available.

Dave seemed to be the only other person around; he owned one of the other condos. Dave also was very interested in Roxanne, and let her know that fairly quickly. Dave was younger than Carl, more handsome, and single. He was a wealthy hedge broker from Silicon Valley, and had come out to the bunker to get away from it all one weekend about a month ago, and simply hadn’t returned to California. He owned the condo, he liked it here, and life was too crazy back in California. He was looking into ways to do his job online, from his condo, so that he wouldn’t have to go back, but he was a millionaire, so he didn’t have to go back anyway. If he was done with California, he could simply sell out on everything, and move out here.

But of course, it was lonely at the silo. Carl tolerated him, and made it possible for him to stay as long as he wanted, but they hadn’t had too many people who actually lived there, and weren’t used to the routine of having people around, coming and going, getting mail, going out for entertainment in the evening. There wasn’t much entertainment. They didn’t know the neighbors. The wide prairie was full of millions of stars at night, but after about a month of starry nights, one began to know the television channels too well. Dave was both too eager to meet and talk to Roxanne, and completely afraid that he was coming on too strongly to her, which he was. She talked to him for only ten minutes, and still got an overwhelming sense of someone who was completely at sea, cut off from his trading world in California, unable to be really happy or stable here, and having millions of dollars and literally nothing to do with it. He had computers; he had toys; he had everything a person could need, except company.

What Roxanne really wanted, what she had come this far to get, was to be absolutely alone, in a completely safe bunker underground, and to feel the absolute silence of being way out away from everyone. Eventually Carl and Dave both left her alone, and let her have that silence. It was late at night, and she was left with the webcam of the prairie in the screen window, and the steel furniture with comfortable leather cushions. She watched the gentle wind in the prairie grasses at night; it was the only movement anywhere. She didn’t actually care about the screen; she would never live here, so it didn’t matter whether it showed the Miracle Mile, or Fairbanks, or the prairie. She also didn’t care that much for either Carl or Dave, though they both seemed to be infatuated with her, and willing to do almost anything to please her. She had been married, for almost twenty years, and was divorced two years ago, before her father had died, in a very unhappy process. Her husband had been wealthy, neurotic, unwilling to have children, and never quite knowing himself, or, to put it better, never quite at peace with himself. This was the thing about Dave that bothered her too. It was ok, to her, to have a subconscious that told you you always had to be safe, you had to have a bunker with guns, you had to take care of the dark future that was certain to fall upon us. But to not quite know who you were, or what to do with all your money, that irritated her.

The following day, Dave came and found her again, and they talked. Dave, of course, claimed he was willing to try new things. He could sell out, in California, and start a new life, virtually anywhere, and provide perfectly well for her, and anyone else, in virtually any situation. He gave her a report on what could be done with the webcams, and all the different possibilities; he was big on technology, and knew that technology made virtually everything available to everyone, even here in a remote bunker. He was bright, aggressive, and assertive; that’s how he’d made his millions. Why was he still single? She couldn’t guess. But it was suspicious, a guy this rich, this smart, still single after all these years.

It was ironic to her that she’d been determined to have a day to herself, completely alone, and yet she was feeling overwhelmed by these three rich men, going back to Roger, doting on her with all this attention. She had broken up with a suitor back in Chicago; he’d come along too soon after her divorce, and wasn’t right for her. At 38, she was feeling a desperate desire for a child, but back in Chicago, the people she knew, even her first husband, didn’t even consider it. Out here, in the fresh air of the plains, it seemed ok to consider it again. But again, the missile silo itself was sealed. Whatever fresh air it had was shipped in. Her walls were concrete, with the one picture of the prairie glowing at her.

The following day she had to leave, but both Carl and Dave came around to make one more play on her. Carl said that although he was married, that would be temporary, and he was an entrepreneur who would be successful the rest of their days. She told him to go home to his family and take care of his business there. Dave, of course, was cheerful, and promised her the world. He could literally take her wherever she wanted, and live whatever kind of life she desired. This was totally unsatisfying to her, so she just told him no, and wondered how many women would be grateful to hear what she had just heard, or to have these handsome millionaires giving them attention. On the plane from Omaha to Chicago, she got two more texts from Roger, who still hadn’t given up, and was interested in seeing her on any conditions.

It was Roger who won her in the end. He made up an excuse to come to Chicago, and spent a weekend wooing her and taking her to shows and restaurants, all her favorites. His overriding sincerity and charm won her over, and she eventually married him and moved out to Nebraska; she bore him a daughter and he was a faithful and loving husband and father. She kept the condo, as she was now much closer to it, but she didn’t go there often, and Carl was rarely there when she went. She lost touch altogether with Dave, though someone said he was in New Zealand, as a lot of American survival fanatics were. If you really want to get away from it all, and you really have the money to do it, you can’t get much farther away than New Zealand. But to Roxanne, the desire for a totally safe concrete bunker, away from it all, just wasn’t that strong. It reminded her of her father, so she kept it. But now that she had a ranch of her own, and a daughter who was growing up on horses, she began to let go of some of the fear that had preoccupied her dad in Chicago. She didn’t need a webcam of the prairie; she already had a real prairie, right outside her window.

(2-17)