gray street senselessly named after some tree or flower, deep inside a gray room adorned with mementos and frozen glimpses of time misspent, the self-probing continues. I’m not in Paris or in New York but in a grim, far-flung gray tank town in the middle of nowhere. I’m out of range of the ultimate cause so I seek answers in the gray dancing shadows on the ceiling and hang on to rapidly dissolving shreds of graying memory.
America. Fifty-six years spent chasing after the same dream, lurching from a brief state of wonderment to one of frustration, disillusionment and anger as I stumbled on the desiccated fragments of discredited myths and embalmed fiction, trying to fit in, hopelessly out of step, out of tune. Yes, I’m a restive stranger, an untamed renegade, ill at ease in my own skin, an interloper in a realm I do not fully fit in, outwardly housebroken, inwardly raging and defiant and aching, treading unfamiliar waters, lost in the blinding light of day. Fifty-six years: Two billion heartbeats pumping life into an out-of-soul experience, each pulse adding to my estrangement and perplexity.
The poppies are now in bloom. I scan the high desert mountains that surround me, dwarf me, fence me in and deny me the privilege of a horizon line where freedom looms.
Somewhere in the distance, a car rumbles by like a great booming wall of sound.
In Dranomos, I’d quickly learned, neighbors had no tales to tell. Ghostly, furtive, aloof, poker-faced, they seemed to live like me -- hermits in a wasteland of topographic banality and cultural sterility, un-ordained monks who live in self-created cloisters where time, frigid winters and long periods of lung-searing heat and drought mummify the body and scorch the soul.
It would be a while before the doves began cooing at the advent of spring but by then I knew that the wind, the heat, the unbearable sameness of it all had rendered everyone insane and that I would escape a similar fate only by fleeing from this morose, howling desert. What I hadn’t reckoned yet was whether I’d make my getaway trussed in a straightjacket, screaming as the wind added its voice to the sinister chorus of evil laughter, or carted away on a gurney inside a body bag.
Last week two lizards and two field mice drowned in the pool.
Yesterday, I retrieved a dead bat.
On cloudless days, as the sun begins its slow westward descent, an inscription -- a name -- materializes, as if fashioned by some spectral hand, at the bottom of the pool. It reads HILLARY AN. I would later learn that Hillary An, a former tenant, had drowned in the pool. Some say it was suicide. The wind, they surmise, had driven her mad.
Early this morning, my old friend Guy died of leukemia. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered, as he had instructed, from the top of a mountain where eagles nest. Guy thought birds are the reincarnated souls of men freed from their earthly shackles.
I turn my gaze heavenward at a searing, implacable sun. Then I look at my shoes, caked with brown desert dust. I remember the damp slippery clay by my mother’s grave.
TIME FLIES
Time is what hinders everything from
being given all at once.
Henry Bergson
It began with a premise, a subtle hypothesis of stunning magnitude: When positive and negative gravitational forces are set on a collision course at retrograde absolute speed, the theory asserts, the impact creates a void inside which time can be frozen -- life extended, you hear -- perhaps forever.
So the Foundation approved the grant and a team of biophysicists and geneticists from the Theoretical Physics Research Institute and two eager Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit flies -- a male and a female -- went to work to test this astonishing concept.
The flies were placed in a biotronic accelerator, a state-of-the-art synchrotron developed by the Institute’s Entomo-Ontological Laboratory.
Temperature constants and reverse wavelength spectral illumination were maintained throughout the project.
Three seconds later, the fruit flies mated with great eagerness. The first pupae hatched forty seconds later.
On the fourth day, or three hundred thousand fruit-fly generations later, fifteen offspring matured and exceeded their natural life expectancy by twelve hours, the equivalent of four human years.
Early on the twelfth night, sixty-six flies outlived their earliest progenitors by five hundred and eighteen fly-years.
A male and a female were removed from the accelerator and released outdoors on the seventeenth day. Six thousand fly-years had elapsed and all memory of an earlier life, of a once uncontrolled and free existence, had since been erased.
Disoriented, dazed by the sudden foreboding vastness around them, the flies climbed erratically toward the limitless expanse. Feeling the sun’s breath upon their wings, aroused by some anomalous threat, they flew toward each other, met and clasped briefly in mid-air before imploding and vanishing without a trace.
The rest, having lived six million years in human-equivalent age, were destroyed on the twenty-first day with massive isotopic concentrations. Their potential life span can only be expressed in astronomical terms.
Immortality? Easy. It’s all neatly packaged in a self-nullifying theorem. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would have been proud. But involuntary confinement and loss of selfhood is a high price to pay for immortality.
And so, Project Fruit Fly was scrubbed. The Institute issued a carefully worded summary report that no one bothered to read and which was subsequently consigned to a dark and dusty vault at the National Archives.
Invoking the Freedom of Information Act, I requested a copy. The request was denied, first on “administrative grounds,” then for reasons of “national security.” I appealed. The appeal was rejected. I was cautioned not to insist. The warning had the bureaucratic incivility accorded a pesky nobody or a dangerous agitator.
And then one day, not far in the future, the few who could afford their own biotronic accelerator granted themselves life eternal; the many who could not, lived and died serving them.
DEATH & TRANSFIGURATION
You can’t be free to become what you want when you’re starving, sorely oppressed or stunted in your moral growth by a life of endless drudgery [in a society] where the free development of the few is bought at the cost of the shackling of the many.
Terry Eagleton
Across town, two derelicts identified by police as Floyd Horton, 39, and Cecil Glenville, 42, froze to death overnight in their dreams. They were found huddled on a bench at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, on East 47th Street, a stone’s-throw away from the United Nations building. They’d wrapped themselves in newsprint and plastic sheeting to ward off the cold but New York’s bitter winter night claimed them just the same. Their bodies had stiffened and turned blue when they were carted away.
Horton’s remains were cremated free of charge by the City. His ashes, as are those unclaimed by family or friend, now fatten the soil at an upstate experimental horticultural farm.
Glenville, who had a cousin in Connecticut, was buried in a pine box with
