hindsight

Some time ago, the army built a tower in the middle of a spread of wild hills. The tower looked out to the sea, and when the army had finished with it, they filled its hollow innards with a gun.

Thirteen men were sent to look after the gun. They examined its parts and counted its pieces in case any went missing during the night. They signed their names on its dance card with chalk, and once they even fired it, with much pomp and gleaming ceremony, though it was only a test and the ammunition sunk into the sea.

Mostly, they waited. They imagined what it might look like to see a ship lumber over the horizon, how it would feel launch something through the air and be unable to stop it from crashing through metal and glass and the crisp bones of men. They listened to the radio and heard reports of a war so far away that they sounded like stories that someone had made up about a place that didn't exist. They polished. They cleaned. They counted the pieces of the gun.

If it weren't for the men, the gun would have been invaded by dust. Its innards would have clogged and rodents would have taken it for a home. It would have sunken to obscurity, been fractured and abandoned. Instead, it was riddled with time. Slow time, bored time, the kind of minutes that stretch out so long and so thin that they manage to hold nothing in them. It flaked off the men while they drooped in the sunlight, made drifts and piles that collected in corners and shored up walls. It accumulated like dirt while the men waited for something that would never happen and that gave them nightmares of guilt when they dreamed that it had.

Eventually, the men left and the army took away the gun.

The tower stayed and the hole where the gun used to be was flooded by rain. Water weeds and algae took up residence. A family of newts lived and died and left behind enough eggs for several generations. Time sank to the bottom of the newly made pond where newts swallowed it absentmindedly and grew into exotic specimens with plumed tails and delicate fingers instead of feet.

The newts are so still that they might be dead or sleeping. It's the time that makes them sluggish. They only remember to move when an unfamiliar shadow mars the reflections above them. Then they jerk their absurdly long and complicated tails and propel themselves until they forget where they were going.

If you watch them long enough, you may see them eating time. It's an uncomfortable sensation, to witness their flat mouths and triangular tongues closing around another person's minutes and hours. They seem to be unaware that they are even doing it, and the lack of expression on their amphibious faces seems to indicate that the flavor is unremarkable.

Every once in a long while, a newt will look up from its meal. Its entire body spasms and it streaks around the pond like something possessed, unable to stop itself until it runs into exhaustion and sinks to the bottom, too tired to lift itself to the surface to breathe. Sometimes it drowns.

It's difficult to say whether the newts understand the things they feel when they consume these more dangerous flavors of time. Do they savor the taste of memory (which is easily mistaken for time, but much harder to discard)? Is it, perhaps, a matter of honor, a dare? Maybe they select carefully, down beneath the stagnant water. They pick up pieces and discard them, searching for something that is different and beautiful and terribly, horribly fine.

from a bluff overlooking a beach

He decided it was the flatness that he missed the most. When he looked at a picture of the ocean, he had it all there in front of him, and he could appreciate how nice everything was without having to worry about all the empty water that would be happy to drown him, and all the empty air that tugged on his poor, flimsy skin so he felt naked, naked, naked, even with his clothes still on him.

"Start small," Dr. Limic had told him. "Five minutes a day. Two minutes, even. Your unusual tolerance has been a lifesaver for us, literally, but it isn't normal and you have to face the possibility that it may, eventually, run out." The doctor would lean against the outside of whatever compartment or container or "future habitation environment" they were testing him against and tap the smooth walls appreciatively. "I don't know how you do it, Jack. You have no signs of stress, and you're not hiding them either. For all our machines know, you might as well be lounging next to a pool in Monte Carlo."

Jack had never been to Monte Carlo. He had never really thought about it either. The name had always sounded like something you'd call a brand of aftershave. It made him think of clean, shiny people who went around smiling all the time, and didn't do honest work for a living. Someone like himself, for instance. He pushed his nose into the folds of his smoothly shaved arms, but he didn't smell like anything now, not even soap.

"Better for the electrical readings," Dr. Limic had explained when he pasted on the sensors and receivers for the first time.

They brought him in with a few of his coworkers and some other people from the sanitation firm across town. Individuals who were used to small spaces, they said. People who have mastered the natural tendency to panic, when the luxury of space is taken away.

Jack supposed that made sense. They had spent more time than not climbing through pipes and tunnels and shafts. He couldn't remember if he had ever been troubled by the sensation of space pressed thin between himself and the inside of a maintenance tunnel. If he had, it had been a long time ago, and this was easy work. Lollipops from a blind kid.

Jack waited for the panic to catch up with him. He sat in rooms that got smaller and smaller, and then in specialized containers that looked like progressively more alien versions of a cheap sleeper car, or a single seat portion of an airplane.

"I heard they have hotels like this in Japan," one of the other subjects said. "A bed that slides out in a drawer, and a tv that sits between your feet. I heard that, sometimes, people have sex in them, but mostly it's just for sleeping. Too uncomfortable for anything else, I guess."

Jack waited patiently. He wondered if there was something wrong with him because the panic was taking so long to reappear. His fellow subjects left, one by one, most of them looking relieved, although a few of them looked ashamed about the despairing looks the scientists threw after them.

"I can't be sure this is going to work," Dr. Limic said. "We need it to work. This could be the most important scientific project that I will ever have the honor of being a part of. We're only a small element of the whole, of course, but you never know which piece will take the brunt of history when the whole structure is exposed to the world."

They put Jack in a sleek, cream-colored pod. The walls curled around him, and perfectly molded cushions held him so gently that he almost didn't feel them at all. Tubes fed him and cleaned him, and when he got tired of the sleepy warmth, he pressed a button for beautiful pictures to flash an inch in front of his face, or for music to hum straight into his ear, and he enjoyed them until he drifted off again.

"I feel like a baby," he said when he woke up long enough to remember the whole sentence.

"I'm sorry," Dr. Limic said. "It's an unavoidable side effect, I'm afraid."

"No, no. It's not like that." Jack tried to explain about the way his mind was emptying out and the wonder that kept tickling him when he thought about how much room he was going to have in there, but he kept falling asleep before he could find the right words to share the irony of the situation.

"Thank you, Jack. We're finished." Dr. Limic seemed to be having trouble holding onto his pen. It slipped and skittered off his notes and out of his hand. "We've got everything we need, thanks to you, and -- I shouldn't be telling you this because it's supposed to be confidential, but I don't see any harm in a little celebration -- we got it right, finally. We're sending the plans off to manufacturing now. In a month, they'll be ready for the ship."

"That's it?" Jack asked. He thought that nobody had heard him because they were so busy taking the pod apart from around him. When enough pieces had been marked and noted and carefully boxed away, they disconnected his tubes and lifted him into a cold wheelchair. The walls seemed a dizzying distance away. His legs went cold and weak just from looking at that endless stretch of space.

"Of course not," said Dr. Limic. "You've been an indispensable part of my work. I've arranged a nice send off for you."

Dr. Limic's idea of a nice send off was a small house that overlooked the beach. It wasn't Monte Carlo, the doctor said, but I'm sure you'll find it almost as nice. He prescribed time outdoors, gentle observation that led up to unflinching study of the far horizon. You'll feel better for it, he said. It's a matter of health.

Jack set his watch before he opened the door. He dutifully stood ten feet away from his door and looked at the line that made up the difference between the sky and the ocean. He tried to ignore the way a muscle beneath his eye twitched sometimes. He allowed himself to hunch up his shoulders, but he didn't let himself turn around, or cheat by closing his eyes for longer than he would normally blink. Once, he saw a furious light dash straight into the sky, and when he listened to the radio later, he heard Dr. Limic accepting the congratulations of a crowd.

When he had finished his time, Jack would go back inside and shut the door. He had moved a chair into a closet and lined the walls with postcards, and he liked to sit there, holding a small lamp in his lap, until the shaking faded and he could stop thinking about how it felt to have his walls taken away.

from the far edge of a puddle

Do you remember that game we used to play? The one where we lay on our stomachs at the edge of a pool, or a pond, or a puddle.

The point of the game is to identify the things that slide by, on top of the water. What kind of dragonfly? What brand of airplane? Is that a bee, or is it only a fly?

The rules of the game go like this: Don't get distracted by things above or things below. Don't look up. Don't look through. If you, even for a moment, remove your eyes from the upside-down, flattened world, then it is my duty to dip my thumb in cold mud and mark the score on your forehead.

I'm pretty sure you remember the rules. I'm pretty sure since there was that time you told me the story about the millionaire. The guy who thought that, if he could only get on the right plane, he would catch up with the ghost of his mother, perpetually caught on the route between San Francisco and Sarasota. He would wake up from the reclining seat's fake leather embrace, and she would be there, curled up as small as a loaf of bread, on the foldaway table beside him. He would ask her the secret to his favorite cake, which had figs and chocolate in it, both of which now made him cry in a loud and embarrassing way, and which she had never taught him how to make.

How many planes would he have to take? I asked. We counted two upside-down in the puddle, one American and one Japanese, but we were near the airport and everything flew too low to be considered a challenge.

At least a hundred, you said. But after that, it would be easy. I rolled over to see if you were kidding, because it didn't seem easy at all. The sky was just as blue over your shoulder and the planes were just as low, and then you laughed so hard that your thumb slipped and drew a stripe of slime right into my hair.

Games are really only fun if you remember the rules. Otherwise you could do anything. You could turn away from where you're supposed to look. You could see me curled up right here, the size of an apricot or the size of a trombone; and there would be no translation, no embarrassing linguistic mistakes, even though your country, where things are alive, and my country, where things are dead, have never been able to understand each other, except as a losing game of charades.

If you ever get to meet that millionaire, if you haven't just made him up, please tell him this: Ten words. Fifteen syllables. Three actions and three objects. One negative. Close, but keep guessing. You aren't getting it, so work on something else.

The correct answer is broil the figs; grate the chocolate; don't forget the lemon.

It's a message from his mother, not from me. I just said I would deliver it, if I ever had the chance. Now, don't look away or it will be your responsibility too. You'll have mud on your face and nothing to show for it, except the shorthand for a particularly difficult recipe that belongs to someone else.

the way a december morning looks from a bench dedicated to wallace stegner.

A crow says "blaurk!" I think -- at least there's something of a "b" in there, though how they say "be" with that sort of pointed mouth I do not know.

"Blaurk!" means nothing to me, even though I'm sure that if I swallowed my b's and spat my k's, I might get just the gist of it for the grist and the grimmo.

There'd surely be something in there about the sullen blonde hair that crumples the hills. About that time when all the souls in the world decided they'd rather be birds, and they seeped out of their skins and put on coats of feathers, some of them white for ocean flying and some of them brown for hiding behind leaves. And they all ran fast to the edge of cliffs and ran straight off, expecting the wind to fling up their wings and carry them someplace else. Except they never learned how to fly, so they kept on falling, right into the sea, and their feathers were wet, dripping, and cold.

They took off their wings, and they took off their tails, and they abandoned their porous, tightly sprung bones. They wrapped themselves in coats of long grass, lined with dirt-thick roots and worn from the sun. They told each other they looked more handsome, like animals, or maybe like beasts. But, grass gets caught in fingers. It gets tangled in hair. It sticks in your armpits and itches your neck and if you're especially unlucky it swells up your throat. It never stays as green as you'd like it, or as short as you'd like it, or as lush and long and grey as you always wished it would be.

So they cut it off.

They cut it down to velvety fuzz, and then to nothing at all, and everyone was naked again. They had to put on their underwear, fasten their shirts, pull up their pants, button their coats. They did their best to forget the foolishness that happened. Everyone was almost successful.

The crows have no manners though. They go on saying "blaurk! blaurk!" and sometimes croaking to make the point. They know it's impolite to talk about someone in a language that someone has failed to understand. They know it's very rude. They keep on with it still, like those people at a party who laugh and laugh about something they said while you were in the next room.

from a park bench on a november afternoon

The old man came toward us, assisted by a cane and wearing a yellow parka that hung, in modest and neon swags, over his shuffling posterior. He did not give in to the temptation to look away, but his eyes wobbled on the edge of sliding somewhere else.

"I remember then," he told himself. "Sitting on a bench like there was all the time in the world spilling, like fat and endless cats, into our laps."

He had started looking by accident, and now he had to keep going or risk looking shifty or embarrassed when he meant to be neither. His eyes held firm, and so did his face; and he was proud of himself until he discovered the noticeable pause that had developed between each of his steps.

Then had been fine, he thought. Back then, he had imagined he knew all sorts of things. Things that let him sit on a bench and pretend that he could say one honest story about the person with their shoulder pressed close into his. Not that he had dared to ask, in case he got it wrong. It was enough to have the gold and the blue and the green of an afternoon, a satisfaction to wallow in the thin sun with the knowledge that, if he tilted his head the slightest degree to the side, his cheek would bend the cool curve of her ear.

He put his feet down with care now, humming a little rhythm, just to himself. He could have closed his eyes if he had headphones, made believe that whatever song happened to be on was worth blotting out the world for; but he never walked with headphones on principle, so he kept his eyes open and shuffled past us, until all we saw was his back draped in yellow, and then even that faded around a corner, and he was gone.