Vignettes

It's a little after sunset as a car slowly winds its way through a lively suburban neighborhood pausing only for the stop signs meant to save lives but not time. The fading light above still holds enough color to illuminate the kids riding their bikes in the streets and those still at play in front yards. The din of mothers calling them in for dinner echoes in the street as porch lights beckon them home like moths to the American dream.

The car finds its way into the driveway of a sensible two-story house near the end of a street and the driver turns off the engine. He sits for a moment in this newfound silence. The pleasant hush of social purgatory. Even the jingle of the keys seems jarring; unpleasant. With his work behind him and his family ahead, he finds this solitary moment comforting. Lingering for just a moment longer, he exhales the tension of the day and exits the car.

With a friendly nod to a neighbor also arriving home, he continues up the walkway to the door. With key inserted, he pauses for a breath and then steps inside to begin the next half of his day. The door shuts and the porch light comes on.

The beacon of a man once again living on his own time.

Excerpt from Chapter 14 of In Our Time. Charles Scribner's Sons. 1925.

Maera lay still, his head on his arms, his face in the sand. He felt warm and sticky from the bleeding. Each time he felt the horn coming. Sometimes the bull only bumped him with his head. Once the horn went all the way through him and he felt it go into the sand. Some one had the bull by the tail. They were swearing at him and flopping the cape in his face. Then the bull was gone. Some men picked Maera up and started to run with him toward the barriers through the gate out the passageway around under the grandstand to the infirmary. They laid Maera down on a cot and one of the men went out for the doctor. The others stood around. The doctor came running from the corral where he had been sewing up picador horses. He had to stop and wash his hands. There was a great shouting going on in the grandstand overhead. Maera felt everything getting larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then it got larger and larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then everything commenced to run faster and faster as when they speed up a cinematograph film. Then he was dead.

She worked in Guerrero, a few streets down from Julian's, and she was seventeen and had lost a son. The memory made her cry in that Hotel Trébol room, spacious and dark, with bath and bidet, the perfect place to live out a few years. The perfect place to write a book of apocryphal memories or a collection of horror poems. Lupe was thin and had legs long and spotted like a leopard. The first time, I didn't even get an erection and I didn't want to have an erection. Lupe spoke of her life and of what for her, was happiness. When a week had passed we saw each other again. I found her on a corner alongside other little teenage whores, propped against the fender of an old Cadillac. I think we were glad to see each other. From then on lupe began telling me things about her life sometimes crying, sometimes fucking almost always naked in bed, staring at the ceiling hand in hand. Her son was born sick and Lupe promised La Virgen she'd leave her trade if her baby were cured. She kept her promise a month or two then had to go back. Soon after, her son died and Lupe said the fault was her own for not keeping up her bargain with La Virgen. La Virgen carried off the little angel, as payment for a broken promise. I didn't know what to say. I liked children sure, but I still had many years before I'd know what it was to have a son. And so I stayed quiet and thought about the eerie feel emerging from the silence of that hotel. Either the walls were very thick or we were the sole occupants or the others didn't open their mouths, not even to moan. It was so easy to ride Lupe and feel like a man and feel wretched. It was easy to get her in your rhythm and it was easy to listen as she prattled on about the latest horror films she'd seen at the Bucareli theatre. Her leopard legs would wrap around my waist and she'd sink her head into my chest searching for my nipples or my heartbeat. This is the part of you I want to suck, she said to me one night. What, Lupe? Your heart.

"They're made out of meat."

"Meat?"

"Meat. They're made out of meat."

"Meat?"

"There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."

"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars."

"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."

"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."

"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."

"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."

"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat."

"Maybe they're like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."

"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take too long. Do you have any idea the life span of meat?"

"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."

"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads like the Weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."

"No brain?"

"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat!"

"So... what does the thinking?"

"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."

"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"

"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"

"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."

"Finally, Yes. They are indeed made out meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."

"So what does the meat have in mind."

"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the universe, contact other sentients, swap ideas and information. The usual."

"We're supposed to talk to meat?"

"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there? Anyone home?' That sort of thing."

"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"

"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."

"I thought you just told me they used radio."

"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."

"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"

"Officially or unofficially?"

"Both."

"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in the quadrant, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."

"I was hoping you would say that."

"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"

"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say?" `Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"

"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."

"So we just pretend there's no one home in the universe."

"That's it."

"Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you have probed? You're sure they won't remember?"

"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we're just a dream to them."

"A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's dream."

"And we can marked this sector unoccupied."

"Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?"

"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotation ago, wants to be friendly again."

"They always come around."

"And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the universe would be if one were all alone."

In the tunnel I noticed I had a choice of three. While I thought it very kind of them to offer me this, I do wonder if they realized what a dilemma they were sending to face me.

The trouble was, if I looked at your reflection in the left window I missed the actual image of you and your reflection in the right. And if I looked in the right I had the same problem but the other way around. At first I thought I should probably settle on one of the mirrors as they were soon to disappear, but that idea quickly wilted, and my attention was drawn back to the center, occasionally checking on either side. I must say I did question the authenticity of your nap a few minutes before. As the train left Loughborough I suspected it could've been a device to avoid conversation. I'd barely considered this for a moment, however, when a heavy breath and a gulping sound that I decided would be too embarrassing to fake led me to conclude that your nap wasn't fraudulent.

I found it difficult to concentrate on anything else as you slumped beneath your coat. Delighted that we'd waited until this hour to travel so the evening sun got its opportunity to skip across those sleeping cheeks, but unnerved by the prospect of being removed from the opposing chair to yours. I knew it was reserved but hoped that whoever had reserved it had fallen over.

It looked as if today I'd be safe. The train wasn't too busy but I did take a moment to recall the time when I was less fortunate.

I remmebered it with a chilling vivivity we were on the way to Brighton. I knew it was going to be his seat as soon as I saw him on the platform, unzipping, checking, zipping, and rechecking things. Something about his face suggested that he had for years had a mustache and had not long since removed it. He wasn't going to think twice about disposing of me, especially considering then he'd get the chance to sit with you. Though his hiking boot-march through the carriage was rather revolting, it wasn't this that made my hands tense up into sour claws of nausea. It was the way he said it.

"You're in my seat."

No "excuse me," no polite uncertainty, just the rigid, hideous fact. The thud with which it landed expelled all my preparation. Before I remembered my plans to pretend to be asleep, deaf, French, or only sat there because someone else was in my seat, I was walking to find another vacancy.

I ended up dwelling unhappily beside a girl with a boys bum. I knew that because she walked too far past when she returned to one of what I thought to be two empty seats when I sat myself there. I fidgeted until our reunion on the platform, where you brutally informed me "That man was really rather pleasant, actually."

Today I thought I'd better make sure that couldn't happen again and I pulled the ticket from the top of my seat. It took a few attempts and the facade of hanging a jacket to finally complete. I was terribly cautious. There's a threat of punishment for such deeds by fine as far as I understand, but those shackles were at the back of my mind as I crushed the reservation in my hidden fist. Folding and squeezing as if it were that beast on the way to the seaside.

Fortunately, there was no retribution. If anything the train got quieter as the journey continued.

And so in the tunnel, unable to decide, my head flicked through this trilogy of angles, angel after angle, until we were out the other side. My frantic twitching no doubt caused the man at the adjacent table to narrow his eyes at the very least, I imagine.