“The Man Named Dirt”
*
Out on the packed ash at the End of Time there was a grove, a baby forest as spectacular as it was impossible. Above, the light of the cosmos glow-growing–stellar furnaces and nebulae and all other luminous matter somehow feeding the forest the light it needed.
Eye will show its end to you: we approach from above (where I discreetly hovered). The whole was a hole, or really a pit, a bowl dug in the ash to hold rich soil. Coffee dirt, wet and musty and sweet. Perfect soil. On a low hill by a burbling spring that feeds the network of permanent-ephemeral ponds–a great Coast Red Wood. The great tree looms three-hundred-past-three-hundred feet over the next tallest, another Red Wood. All around them grow clusters, rings, or random placements of every kind of smalle-not-lesser tree. Beneath them ferns and bushes and vines and moss and mold and mushrooms. Below that, every kind of crawly and burrower that sustains the above. It rains randomly, the deluge of spring on certain parts of Earth. Jungle rain, gently intense and precisely what is needed to sate the life below.
This was where the author walked in peace a long time ago, not the garden but one of them. And if Eye am new (I am), I exist on a plane where “new” and novel can’t ‘be’ so causality can be sustained in your realm. In short: ‘roll with it’, mortal.
So I’m posted above god’s forest, looming like a creep when a storm gathers at a place-of-peace outside of time in this place no storm as ever touched. When the wind whip-ripped branch and bough from sacred tree after precious tree in a protected place until the great spine of that Redwood groaned and howled–calling out in desperation in its own and only language–Eye knew wrath would be the response.
Your old books and biblical depictions of hellfire and brimstone don’t do the cold anger of judgement justice. I witnessed a thing wreathed in flame and composed of the same, walk-stalking through the forest.
As Eye followed at a fearful distance, god approached-as-flame the men–the mortal men–at the altar at the base of the great tree. They’d come to a place they had no business, wearing the robes of faiths they placed no faith in, to breathe life into a golem they stole.
Golem’s are legit. Murder is not. Kidnapping is not. And Eye have heard from a friend-of-a-friend that god does giggle at witty blasphemy. But these men, these mortal men came to take-and-drain the spark of creation from the forest and to make a slave. That’s not blasphemy so much as creation-the-act profaned.
God responded, speaking in flame.
*
FRAME: EARTH(0x7C0). PITTSBURGH, PA-(SPECIFIC INTERSECTION (3 YEARS PRIOR))-CHICAGO, IL.
*
BEFORE (CHICAGO)
A few years ago in Chicago a not-yet-strange thing happened: a semi-retired judge told his daughter a set of stories about a man named dirt. A nasty pandemic was still on and vaccines and treatments were over-the-horizon. There wasn’t much to do for these two but be alone with grief. The two were not well, and neither was anyone else. The whole thing, the long bed time story the man told to literafiguratively keep death at bay (or try to), was a play on a story his grandfather had heard from someone who had learned it at the knee: a golem story.
It’s not a mundane miracle, that’s it’s own specific thing. The technical term might be something like ‘asynchronous narrative symetry.’ That’s what we’ll call the phenomenon by which the Judge told his daughter a story that came to actually be elsewhere and else-when. “Roll with me” as you did with that eye and imagine Einstein ‘swinging the doors of perception wide’ for a while. It’s a question of perspective or frame of reference (if you prefer).
See, the Judge would sit by his daughter’s bed while they grieved the mom. And when she couldn’t sleep, and he didn’t care too, he’d tell-retell his version of the tale whose original seed sat on another continent and lost in tribulations individually forgotten (or erased).
And the very bright girl and the very tired judge, both with same slouch and almost-identical nose (the one this author and all A-series mortals wear on our faces, whatever their color, culture, creed or even species (them that have noses)). They would sit together until she fell asleep or he did or both while he unwound the story’s string toward a set of events that would happen more-or-less the way he told it, later, near a place on this particular Earth they call Pittsburgh.
He did “the bit” the Chuck Berry bit to buy time to remember, to recall the barest bit of a story told to him when he was young and had pneumonia-gravel and peanut-butter-thick snot in his lungs. Every breath was work.
“Way up in the woods, past some evergreens.” Dad, a real story. “I assure you, this is all very real. Way up in the woods, past the ever greens, There lived…” A boy? She’s cross-armed and angry. “No a girl. Named Jacqueline.” Really? Dad roars: “And she could play the guitar just like a-ringing a bell.” Dad! Stahp! “Ok. Ok.”
And silent-lightning strikes his spine when he sees the angry-eyed smile, the amalgam of he and a ghost. The expression is a rare and precious thing these days. It’s an ember he’s trying to turn full-fire, in a snowstorm, though it be June. He blows on the spark with the words that come from somewhere to him on a vector from some-when–from family and to future literafigurtively.
The hairs on his neck stand, and the story comes to-him-and-through-him to be re-told: “Alright. Alright. It’s in the woods, in the special place, not the Earth or even on the Earth.” In space? “Yeah, sure, but so far out in space that it’s way back in the olden times.” What?
She leans forward. Dad rubs his hands over his face, reaches for a cup of cold coffee he’s for some reason drinking at twilight. “Yeah it’s future technology-and-ancient-magic, and it’s way up in a forest with evergreens.” Dad, don’t. Please. “I’m not! Ever greens and jungle trees and every kind of green thing out in the driest desert, the first desert, so far out that we’re just a star in their night sky.” The girl’s expression suggests a mind blown. “And their night sky is all the stars that have ever been or will ever be.” What? “Yeah-huh. Wanna wave out the window at them?” And they do wave. And the kid hops back in bed, not-at-all-tired.
The light he sees in his kid’s smile and between words from somewhere drags him through that coffee that tastes like something other than ash for the first time in a long time. He unwinds the story-thread for the child late into the night. The one about the bad men who sneaked off to the edge of space, past space even, to do bad magic to make a man, a slave, out of clay.
By the time he’s done with the months-long bed time story, on their Earth there’s news of a vaccine. There’s a light, it’s over the horizon, but it’s there. And his daughter is alive, and he is present. But the ghosts that sucked the air out of the place were not present any longer.
NARRATIVE ‘NOW’ OUTSIDE PITTSBURGH
In the now-as-you-know-it on an Earth that’s not supposed to have a hex designation any more. There is the clatter of metal-on-metal as something somewhere in the old foundry falls to a new resting place. The structure is not stable, hasn’t been safe for a long time and Jane knew better, that she shouldn’t go to the industrial place she’s exploring (again). She felt drawn by a shitty-week of no-good boring days of the sort that can drive a person mad. Jane felt drawn to the place where she took the picture of the tree growing toward the hole in the roof–the border-battle between rusted metal and moss and growing, grinding vines.
‘It’s like my haystacks.’ She told the friend who knows where she is before she went to the weird place that’s literafiguratively falling back to nature–the foundry she used to write poetry about in school. It was “ruin-porn” capital-R-romantic stuff about nature eating industry in the silence after humanity. There was a great machine, the factory itself, and the forest ate it bit by bit. Amen.
She giggle-cringes at the old poems now in the re-reading (because she’s done a lot of reading in the intervening years about a lot of things). She wept when she learned that arsenic is forever and the half-lives of various nuclear remnants. And she wants to cry when she reads micro-plastics jokes on social media. She wants to cry walking down the street sometimes and other times she feels the need to flee as if death is on her heels or her soul will fall out if she doesn’t run with it balanced on the tip of some part of her ethereal but real.
Like a properly sane, or sane-proximal person, she holds it together. Jane tells no one about her leaking soul. She just smolders and smokes and snarks and loves people in that way a certain kind of ‘exhausted-by-people’ person loves other people (at a distance and with a lot of breaks). Today, she had to get away, so she grabbed the old digital camera and chased her soul here, to the foundry and the border between rust and moss, cement and soil.
She was searching for that place in the structure, to take that tree’s picture again. She had just climbed over a portion of wall bullied over by a tree, a tree in turn partially crushed by an I-beam ceiling support fallen to firm cement. She was listening for crazies, squatters, critters, her friend’s tin-foil hat text “d00d…there’s drug labs and gangster shit out there.” Yeah. Right. Sure.
Above. Directly above, clay man falls from firmament to Earth, toward Pittsburgh (rural-roughly). The being is red clay mixed with the coffee-dirt from a grove outside time. The body glows in re-entry. Clay wreathed in flame, as a rock from space or junk or clay in a kiln. There’s something of the spark of creation in there too, but no one witnessed that bit do its thing–no author or eye or narrator (other than perhaps the author).
10,000 feet and falling faster than any train, freight or otherwise. The being bearing the aspect of a man asks “What am I? Why am I?” At that point in the story, the girl giggled for the first time in months. In reality, three years later, that’s when the golem plows through the roof of the old steel mill, craters the Earth, and shudders every rusted bone of the abandoned industrial site.
Exactly as the judge unknowingly foretold, the young woman would meet the golem. Jane who explores places abandoned and sometimes the kind one shouldn’t and sometimes the places where bears are (so you gotta be brave and prepared). Jane who always has her camera. She sees, in full and glorious I-shit-you-not reality, a naked man plummet through the roof of the abandoned foundry to crater the floor quite deeply–not 20 yards ahead of her, and quite near her photogenic tree.
“What the fuck?” She’s tap tapping, snapping still photos and filming as she walks up to the hole.
“What the fuuuuuck?” Long-wheezed from the man in the hole. He’s repeating his first-phrase, unaware of the meaning, but lucky to have stumbled on the power of swears to diminish pain. She leans her camera over the hole that smokes first, snapping pictures and assessing before peaking at the clay-man baked to brown living flesh in the fall.
He crawls, still smoking, out of the hole. Jane-the-urban-explorer even helps him once the shock shakes off enough to do so. He’s tall, she’s short, his arm draped over her as he learn-remembers how to walk–this is “baked in” knowledge. “Thank you.” He’s already talking, a quick study–where study is processing the knowledge engraved in the clay that is he-and-him.
The roof of the building that is shaped like a giant barn decorated with smoke stacks and a powerhouse has (yet another) hole in its roof. This is the heart of the whole place, that looks like the letter “I” from space three barns intersecting to make a letter before being left to rot.
Let’s get you out of here. “Somebody wrote on you.” He’s dazed talking to the tattoo on her shoulder.
“Yes, dear, more walking.” Jane is peering up at the heavy beam above them dangling by a bit of metal she cannot see but believes to be entirely too small.
The naked man-golem is still talking at her tattoo–the prismatic thing, the space scene that’s sun faded. “Did you ask them to write that? Or did they just cut it?”
“Good god. I paid someone. I asked for this.” And she’s breathing easier with the I-beam of Damocles behind them, the thing freshly waiting to fall. The man is heavy. She’s whip-chord muscle and curves, and half-carries him a long way toward her exit and her old pickup truck outside.
The two take a knee, take a break to breathe. They don’t see the feral dude tweak-peek around a half-collapsed former-machine far behind them. They do hear the shouts of “Hey!” (some elsewhere-accented). Jane and the golem do see the gaggle accumulating behind them– the mismatched camo worn like jammies on the self-styled insurgents and their Slavic-gentlemen friends with Kalashnikovs.
“Ohfuckohfuck” Oh fuck? The golem turns. Oh. “Let’s go. Let’s like go, go.” And she’s limp running while he remember-learns what legs do (with greater urgency).
The goons start running after them and barking at whomever disturbed their “base” (drug lab, it’s a shitty drug lab). There’s the clank and clatter of idiots shooting from the hip on the run. A bullet, by the grace of probability, snaps over their heads. The golem snaps-stands-straight, scoops her in his arms.
“Hey! Put me down!.” She feels the man shake as rifle rounds riddle his back, reaches instinctively for his chest. She is shock-frozen when the man flexes the bullets from his body. When they snap from his stone-flesh with equal-opposite force and trajectory–dropping two goons. It’s then that the dangling beam falls from the ceiling, seemingly of its own accord and nearly crushing the goons that scramble for cover and nearly shoot each other.
“Holy shit.” Jane clings to the man sprinting. “The door. That door.” Jane points. He bodies the thing open. “The truck.” She points. He sprints, now graceful. With speed. He’s about to toss her into the bed, “Whoa. No!” Instead, he tosses her, with perfect aim through the open drivers-side window with only an “oof” (for she landed on the keys in her pocket).
The truck shakes when the man golem leaps into the bed. The vehicle shimmies and coughs to life and reeks of French fries. Jane guns it, stands on the pedal and boogies down the road while the men with guns stumble-run out to shoot at them with the terrible aim of men high on their own supply.
*
SPECIFIC INTERSECTION FULCRUM (END-OF-TIME/ELSEWHERE LEVITATING CROSS-LEGGED ABOVE A BEAN BAG)
Was it prophecy? Did the Judge predict the golem’s coming? And if a tree falls in an impossible forest at the End of Time, does it make a sound? I don’t know. I really don’t. And whatever claims that arrogant little divine-snitch floating eyeball makes, it doesn’t know either. It’s just a broken machine that tends to the other broken machines (where ‘tends to’ is mostly just being a voyeuristic creep).
Here’s what I do know: there’s a lot of weird in the worlds that make up the fabric of the multiverse. And every kind of person has a purpose. I don’t know much about yours, but mine I’m semi-certain of: A-series mortals are built to spill their guts and die and whither and die right when the world’s about to.
We do other things, allegedly, maybe. That’s what the madman, said. He pulled me through my wall one lonely midnight. He told me a great deal I should not know while we flew in formation over packed ash with other A-series. In one night, one dream, we flew forever-past-forever over ash and dunes and the physical ghosts of every kind of place a person passes through to find the remains of a train station.
There, in the aeons before I would awaken in my bed, nothing but un-answerable questions in my head. There, we A’s gathered around a pool of light, a portal to a span of time on Earth(0x7C0). There gathered, a few-score A-series did pray and plot and scheme to save a child, one of us, an A so that she could facilitate the saving of others
It’s there I learned the prayer to the absent god and met the me(s) of apocrypha.
Verily, we got extremely high, and they said unto me:
We fell through and found a garden in need of tending, The old cosmology ending, locust’s rending the very fabric of life and “so it goes” nihilism is no kind of answer. Especially when the questions are armed and dangerous.
We, ourselves, and all the illuminated A’s used to try to save whole worlds, guns and broomstick’s blazing. But they kept burning down. So now we wait and meditate and pray for those who would prey on the meek because we read and think and plot and scheme.
By then I’m sweating and nodding and smiling and high as a mortal man has ever been when the she-version-me grabs me by the face by the beard and stares into my soul from behind aviator shades.
What we do now is as subtle as it is good and noble, yes? Sure? My god, you look just like 0x54. What’s more, you’re on the dream team or team of dreams and we’re going to read this kid’s line and nudge it toward life, yes? That sounds lovely, actually. How…Shut the fuck up and pray and read and roll joints and pack bowls for the rest of us till the alarm clock calls you back, boring and corporeal.
*
KEPPLER 22-B, JERVOUS BAY
*
Eye cannot convey their name for their world to you in a written language. I’m dancing it, all the syllables, as Eye write this. The name is quite a lovely little shimmy, but you can’t see me dance or hear me hum it. This is Keppler 22-B, an ‘Earth.’ That word translates, in a lot of the oldest tongues, asany place that can support life-that-signifies.
Blue, a historically significant octopus, floats there in the alien ocean that is her home with her parents. They are gathered with a large crowd to watch the launch of a rocket pod carrying supplies to an orbital “Wet dock” where her cephalo-people are building the ship that will carry her, though she knows it not, to Earth.
In a culture already preoccupied with your art (particularly music) this younger generation of much-longer-lived creatures has fixated on your popular music. Blue is part of that baby-boom, but barely older than a baby-girl. She’s a bright one though, literafiguratively, She’s smart and a bright blue with vivid gold (usually) rings, and she’ll deepen in hue as she ages and grows while her intellect only burns brighter. But right now, she’s a small fry enjoying a day with her family. She’s holding ‘hands’, two of eight, with cephalopod mom and eight-armed dad.
She’s listening to “Major Tom” on her ‘headphones’, and she’s getting good grades in school, and it’s been some weeks since she’s punched anyone (not even a fish). Even if she had a good reason to punch them? Nope. No punchings. She controlled her cephalopod temper. Behaved herself. Now, she gets to be part of the “race.”
On your world, some of you gather (or at least did) to watch rockets or Shultzie shuttles fart-flit to low orbit. They do the same with greater excitement. Cephalopod enthusiasm for space exploration is at an all time high. There’s been an unrelated baby-boom, though some speculate it is related to contemporary human pop music because of how crazy ‘these kids’ are for your music. Your Rock’n’Roll, and hip hop. Beats hit different at something you’d call “hull crush” depth.
Of course they’ve got their own octopus-fuddy-duddies. Old timers who put eye-to-FTL-telescope and “ear”-ish organ to aquaphone. These are the ones that have personally perceived the nitty-gritty of what else humans get up to. They’re the core of a political faction more cautious in their appreciation of humanity. And the old timers don’t care for that “vulgar” dance-language so commonly associated with this new music.
But every cephalopod is proud of their space program. They’ve explored the brine of under-ice oceans on a dozen moons in their system. Today, another pod. Another launch. Another crowd gathered to see it off. Like breaking a bottle on a ship’s bow, a “good luck” ritual (if such rational and wise and logical octo-people believed in luck).
At the comfy middling depth their civilization prefers, away from the from the cities and pod-farms tangled in kelp-forests. Away from shore, just before the depths and industry and energy production. That’s where the launch will take place.
Below them, far below off the lip of a continental shelf where the geothermal and the industry sit, there’s a rocket pod. The pod is held in place by great arms atop a bubble of some pressurized gas (let’s call it air) that will propel it upward-ever-up at great speed.
The arms release with no fanfare, initially. Feeling the vibrations, the racers in the crowd swim up and ready to sprint. Blue, being swift and well behaved is among them. The reward for all racers is the chance to leap above the surface just in time to catch a glimpse of the rocket in flight high above, with its engines lit and racing toward the permanent clouds. The ‘win’ is to get to see the rocket carrying a collective dream (not everybody’s dream but most seven-to-eight-legged folks’ dream) into space. Her parents, each gripping a leg give her a squeeze and a nod, and the little thing jets up to what I guess you could call the “starting blocks.”
The great arms below release, and up comes the thing, the rocket spinning to facilitate its graceful accuracy and picking up speed. As the holograms count down the race, the mass of the approach pod and its speed shimmies the water, blurs her vision. Blue is excited, shaking excited, but she times her start perfectly.
The first few seconds of the “race” are forever-seconds–stretched long past long, Between the ‘adrenaline’ and sheer joy of sprinting, Blue believes, only for a bit, she is as fast as the rocket. After the pod passes, still sprinting, blue dares to peek. She’s keeping pace, almost, with grown adult cephalo-people. And and after the finish, that leap above the surface of the sea, the “official” reckoning places the little phenom as the first child to the surface. She is the winner in her age range and well beyond. She has the privilege of watching the rocket fly a long while before it breeches her home planet’s permanent cloud cover bound for space.
The payload, gently deposited in orbit at a dry dock by an observatory, is the engine of a great ship. The thing is skeletal-yet but acquiring the appearance of the body of a great wasp.
*
END FOUNDRY 2