Based On A True Story

A Perfectly Lovely Ride

It’s a perfectly lovely night to go for a drive. The air is cool outside, which is a relief after such a hot day. Back home is still full of the air from the late afternoon heat; the cool night air won’t seep in until three, four in the morning. In my car, speeding down the freeway, the air gushes in and I’m soaking it up. Right now it’s wonderful, but I have work in the morning, so I’ll need to be home before three or four in the morning, and the cool I’m enjoying now will make the stifling heat of my bedroom that much worse when I return. More importantly though—at least for right now—right now, it’s wonderful.

But hold on a tick— I don’t remember starting the car. I was in my underwear, sitting on the couch beneath the ceiling fan, just sweating and hating life. I stepped outside and it was nice, so I sat on the porch, still in my underwear—it was late so no one would see anything—and life was great. Then the mosquitos started eating me. That’s when I decided to go for a ride. But I don’t remember going back inside and getting my keys, or getting dressed, (I’m in shorts and a t-shirt now), and I don’t remember starting the car….

It’s quiet outside— it’s quite inside too. It doesn’t sound like the engine’s running. I can’t even hear the tires turning over the pavement. The only sound is the wind whistling by, like I’m falling. The ride is smooth, too— too smooth. The speedometer, tachometer, engine temperature gauge, and fuel gauge all read zero, and the dash isn’t lit up. I feel for the key in the ignition, but there’s nothing there.

Now I see everything with fresh eyes. The road is dark out ahead of me. It’s because my headlights aren’t on, but it’s not only that. The streetlights aren’t lit, and there are no headlights from the oncoming traffic, no headlights in my mirrors, no taillights from the traffic ahead of me. I ease up on the gas, but nothing happens. I take my foot off the gas completely, but I don’t slow down a bit. I touch the brakes and nothing— I press a little harder, but still nothing— I stomp on the pedal, putting it all the way to the floor, but nothing happens. I turn the steering wheel this way and that, but it makes no difference. I pull the parking break. None of it makes a difference. Nothing I do makes a difference. I’m not in control.

Miss Crachen’s Camera

By day, Miss Crachen was a second grade school teacher; by night she was an inventor, though not a productive one. She would give up on an invention once she saw that it would work, being interested only in the surprising, not the obvious. Having the keen mind that she did, one able to quickly see the implications of things, this meant that she didn’t often get to the point of even building a prototype to test. The problem was aggravated by the fact that Miss Crachen was arrogant—an affliction not untypical amongst people with keen minds—and so tended to trust the fullness of her understanding too much. All her life people tried to correct Miss Crachen’s arrogance. They would tell her, “You think you know everything, but you don’t. You think ‘this’, but actually it’s ‘that.’” Unfortunately they were always wrong. “This” was, in fact, “this”, not “that”, so their attempts to correct her arrogance only reinforced it.

Miss Crachen would receive an idea for an invention while cooking, or cleaning, or taking a bath, or on the drive to or from work. The idea would fall in her lap all on its own, and she would pick it up, she would look at it, examine it, turn it over, take it apart. When she could see the whole thing, hold it in her mind all at once, she’d throw it away. Once she’d eaten the flesh, she would discard the rind, and meanwhile five or six fresh, ripe ideas would have fallen into her lap.

Then, one morning, while buttering a slice of toast, an idea came to her for a very high-speed video camera, and this proved to be a very difficult invention. An artichoke, with not much flesh, and difficult to eat. It was difficult enough that it kept her wrestling with it. She couldn’t simply devour it like lesser ideas, and so she turned out an actual prototype— not her first, but one of only a very few.

Miss Crachen estimated the time resolution of her camera at roughly one trillion frames a second, or, to put it more precisely, she estimated the time between two successive frames was close to a trillionth of a second. This is an important distinction. There are what seem to be very high-speed cameras giving that kind of time resolution, but while it may be sort of fair to describe them as capable of capturing a trillion frames a second, you cannot honestly say that the time between two of their successive frames is a trillionth of a second. They work by capturing periodic phenomena, a laser repeatedly firing for instance, at slightly different moments, and then putting the frames together, kind of like stop motion animation combined with time-lapse photography. It could take minutes, or hours, or more to capture a thousand frames, whereas Miss Crachen’s high-speed camera was straightforwardly a high-speed camera, and if it ran for a second it would capture a trillion frames.

The first test was conducted in her living room. She set up a tent around her couch and smoked several cigarettes inside it, then she fired a laser mounted on the armrest of her couch and filmed its progress with her prototype camera. She filmed for only 125 millionths of a second but captured over two hours worth of footage played back at a hundred frames a second. Once the test had been performed—a fraction of a blink of an eye—Miss Crachen eagerly played back the result.

Miss Crachen had thought it would be cute if she were in the frame for the test, so the first thing she saw on her laptop when the video started playing was what looked like a still photograph of her smiling face. After several minutes of nothing happening, a little fleck of red appeared on the right side of the frame. Miss Crachen cheered the little fleck on as it slowly—agonizingly slowly—stretched out, but she ran out of enthusiasm when the beam was as long as the breadth of her thumbnail.

She could’ve quit watching at that point—the test had been confirmed a success—but she felt the diligent thing to do was to watch the whole video, to see with her own eyes the red thread of light’s journey across the frame. She took down the tent, microwaved a bag of popcorn, and made herself comfortable on the couch. For forty minutes she watched the video play only out of the corner of her eye while she snacked on popcorn and dinked around on her phone, but then something in the video moved suddenly, catching her eye. She looked from the little screen to the bigger one. She saw her face frozen like in a photograph—as before—and she saw the laser rolling steadily onward—again, as it had been—but over her shoulder she saw the zipper on the tent being undone shakily, in fits and starts, but swiftly, as if it had been filmed at normal speed. When a crack of a few inches had been made in the tent flap, in they all poured like baby spiders bursting out of their egg sac, swarming over every surface and blackening the very air: Monsters.

The sky got darker, but not like at sunset. The sun wasn't setting, it was shrinking, smaller and smaller but always still definitely the sun, until all at once there was night, Venus was out, the streetlights were lit, and only a wispy, hollowed out skeleton remained. It hanged there for about a minute, and people set off fireworks because people are obnoxious. Then a new sun grew out of the bones of the old one, and everything was possible again.

And not a Sole for Miles

Halfway across the river, fifty feet of water beneath me, and I don’t think I can swim another stroke.

The It

If you see it, you’ll always see it. You’ll try to ignore it, knowing as you do how much easier it is to get along if you don’t see it, but ignoring is seeing, and it will be so much harder to get along.

The Good Samaritan

“What’s your birthday?”

“May 9th, 1969.”

A dental assistant is going through the usual routine with a new patient, a forty-eight year old man, clean shaven with a buzz cut, red hair flecked with white, a bald spot on the crown of his head, and dressed nicely with a pastel blue button up shirt, black slacks, a leather belt and shiny black leather dress shoes. He’s sitting in the dentist’s chair, reclined— the cuffs of his pants are hiked up, and the dental assistant can see even his socks are nice dress socks, dark blue argyle. But the man isn’t nice, she can see that clearly enough. Not to say that he’s mean, but he isn’t nice as in nicely dressed. This dentist’s office mostly gets poor people, people on state insurance. The man may be nicely dressed but he’s actually a bum, one that’s been taken in by some religious do-gooder who’s gotten him cleaned up, dressed up, and on state insurance, amongst other things. Their hope for him is that, if they can get him on his feet, he’ll be able to walk, so to speak, but unfortunately they’re wrong, in this case. The man may be kind, and gentle, and clean, as in not a drug addict, but he’s been on his feet before and each time winded up indigent. He’s dressed nicely but his face is weathered and he has the mannerisms of a prey animal, so nobody would be fooled.

“Are you taking any prescription medications?”

The man shakes his head no.

“Are you currently experiencing any tooth pain?”

The man again shakes his head no.

She fastens a cuff around his left wrist to measure his blood pressure. She instructs him to uncross his ankles, which he does, then she places his hand over his right shoulder and starts the machine. His blood pressure is on the high end of the normal range. She raises his chair, and he jumps. She apologizes for startling him, and explains she’s going to take some x-rays. She leaves the room for a moment and returns with a lead vest that she drapes over his torso and shoulders. She prepares a film for the first x-ray, wrapping it in plastic.

“Open”, she says, and the man does. He has no teeth. In place of teeth he has bits of gravel, shards of glass, screws and springs embedded in his gums, which are oozing bright red, fresh blood.

The Pittsburgh Press, Pennsylvania, September 29, 1928

The Nehalem Pyramid

At first the pyramid over Nehalem was a little black chip in the sky. It had probably been there for weeks before anyone noticed, but once it was spotted it was only a matter of hours before everyone in the town knew about it. Which isn’t saying so much— only two hundred some people live in Nehalem. And, just being a speck floating up in the sky, it was forgotten before long, around the time the local paper ran their story on it.

“Is it getting bigger?”, people started asking a few days later, necks craned, squinting into the sky. Someone in town with a telescope made a time-lapse of it, and indeed it was gradually getting bigger. The local paper wrote a follow-up to their earlier story, which included the time-lapse video. The story quickly went viral. Journalists and tourists and ufologists started flooding into the town.

The pyramid got bigger over the summer and took on a definite shape to the naked eye. By September it was big enough that for two hours at midday the town was wholly in its shadow. The population of Nehalem grew along with the pyramid. People came from all over the world to see the it, this impossible thing. All these people came with their money in hand, and a lot of folks in Nehalem—not a wealthy town by any means—found themselves suddenly flush with cash. The military also came to town, with their scientists, to understand the pyramid and mitigate the risk it might pose, but the scientists managed only to learn that the pyramid was made of iron and the military, with no understanding of the pyramid, had no plausible means of mitigating anything.

For lack of any better idea, the town was evacuated. No one was allowed within a mile of it. There was a lot of grumbling about it, but only few people ignored the order to stay out, a group of tourists from California, and they all got caught and spent the night in jail. For a month the pyramid didn’t grow, didn’t do anything. A rich Silicon Valley venture capitalist, who had taken a keen interest in the pyramid and was used to bulldozing with money anything in his way, bankrolled a lawsuit against the government to get the ban lifted, and in mid-October it was.

People came flooding back into Nehalem, eager to have what they had been denied. There was some worry that the pyramid would start growing again with all the people returning, like one had something to do with the other, but the pyramid went on floating there as it had since the start of Autumn.

For the remainder of October the skies stayed clear, but the rain had to come eventually, and when it did the cloud cover meant no one could see the pyramid anymore. Sometimes a dark square could be seen through the clouds and remind the townsfolk the pyramid was still there. The tourists had left—taking their cash with them—and the military had become such a fixture that they went unseen. Everyday life in Nehalem resumed.

Cigarette Paper

I ran my fingers along the surface of her skin gently, careful to touch but not press. The feeling was that of real skin. Her skin. So much so I got carried away. I applied too much pressure. A flame rippled out from my palm. It burned through her like through a cigarette paper. She curled and twisted and lifted off the bed. Bright light, a wisp of smoke, and then it was over. I gasped, and my gasp scattered her ashes around the room, so that if you looked you wouldn’t have seen she was there.

Smiles and Nods

It’s twelve fifteen and a woman is waiting in a busy coffee shop for a man she doesn’t know named Scot. He was supposed to meet her at the door but when she arrived she found no one, understandable considering the rain. She looked for Scot inside, but since she didn’t know him she was only looking for a man that seemed to be looking for a woman— that is to say a man who has an appointment to meet a woman for a job interview. This will be her third in-person interview for this position, a receptionist at a small software firm, and she was hoping it would be her last.

She’d never met Scot before but she did have his phone number. She tried it but it went straight to voicemail. She tried the woman in human resources also, since she was her contact at the company and since it was her that had arranged the hiring process up till this point, but that also went straight to voicemail. This wasn’t surprising. It’d been this way with everything, not just the interviews. Her applications had disappeared twice and following up on them had shown her right from the start that the people at this company were allergic to phones. She had to take her resume in and physically hand it over to the woman in HR to get anywhere, and then it was a phone interview that she was told was on Tuesday but which was supposed to be on Thursday, and another phone interview that just straight slipped the interviewer’s mind, an on-site interview with a man who had a thousand more important things on his mind, and another at eight o’clock in the evening. That last one took place in the parking lot— the man she was interviewing with only remembered the interview when he saw her in the parking lot as he was leaving for home. They chatted at length about many things beside his car, interminable small talk having nothing to do with her ability to be a receptionist at their company, and if he noticed her teeth chattering from the cold he didn’t mind. Some people wouldn’t have put up with it. People who don’t need a job, for instance.

After fifteen minutes of waiting, her phone rings, a text from Scot asking where she is. There’s a man standing outside, holding an umbrella and looking at his phone. She crosses the coffee shop to let him in.

“You must be Scot”, she says from inside the door she’s holding open for him.

“--— —.—--—— —--— —”, he replies, as if speaking, but instead of words, hissing and buzzing and popping like an arc of electricity rippling through the air. She looks at him uncomprehending.

“…What?”

“--—------, —?”

She smiles and nods like the hard of hearing do and tells the man she’s gotten them a table. The man smiles and follows. “Do you want to order anything before we get started?”, she asks as they pass the line for the register.

“— —”, the man replies, breaking off from her. “--—— —--—— —?—--—----— —.”

“…I’ll be over at that table, over there”, she tells him, pointing to the spot where she’d been waiting. She looks around the room, watches people in conversation, and she listens. There’s a lot of noise in the coffee shop, but she can pick out their words. Then it isn’t her hearing. But she looks at the man in line, watches him order his coffee. From across the room she can hear the buzzing and crackling coming from him, but the cashier rings him up without trouble. Then it isn’t his speach….

After ordering, he waits by the counter, and his order must’ve been simple as it’s handed to him quickly. He joins her at the table, setting down the coffee cup and his phone, which is running an audio recorder.

“--—------—--------——--—--,—----—--— —.”

Again she smiles and nods. She figures he must’ve said something about the recorder. Glancing at his coffee, she sees the lid has “Scott” written on it— two t’s, but close enough. At least she knows she’s talking to the right person. Or, something like talking.

“--—----—--—----—----— —,—------,—--—--— —--—--—--—--—--—----. —--,—--—--——--—------, (— —--—--),—--—------.—--— —--—— —…—--—--— —--—--?”

She smiles and nods once more, hoping that what he’d just said wasn’t a question she was expected to answer, but he keeps looking to her like he expects more of a response than a smile and a nod.

“I’m just looking for a fast-paced team that I can grow with”, she tosses out limply, figuring that whatever he may have asked, that’s a pretty all-right interviewey thing to say, but as the words topple out of her their stupidity rings in her ears and the sad humor of the situation—that here she is, a miracle of life, and this is how she spends her time, and these are the things she uses what may be the rarest phenomenon in the universe, language, to say—makes her chortle, but she catches herself and fakes a little cough to cover it.

He smiles at her pleasantly and says, “--.—— —. —----—----—— —— —--—------—--—--—--—--—--”, and extends his hand to her. She shakes it and smiles. “--—--—— —--—----.—--—--—------?—--….”

He had shaken her hand and stood up, so the interview must be done. Short, but that could be good or bad. Probably bad, she thinks. Either way she’s glad to be done with it.

“Thank you”, she says, but the cafe is crowded and noisy and he mishears her and thinks she said “No thank you.” It doesn’t make much difference. He smiles again, she smiles back. On the way out he gives her a little departing wave. She eyes a chocolate croissants in the pastry case but decides not to waste the money on it, what with her unemployment almost gone, (not that two dollars seventy-five cents is going to save her anyway). Later on that afternoon she’ll get an email from the woman in HR, and to her surprise, it’ll be a job offer. She’ll then return to the coffee shop and buy one of those chocolate croissants, to celebrate. At last! she got a job.

Language may be the rarest phenomenon in the universe, but the job market wants smiles and nods.