II.

I was inside, it was dusk. The sky’s light was just beginning to turn that early-evening gray. I heard a rumbling, and then a thunder like a vast sheet of tin being shaken up and down. I ran outdoors to the front of my house, which was a little house with a roof like an upside-down ‘V’ with a little patch of very green grass in front of it, surrounded on either side and behind by other houses shaped exactly the same, those surrounded by an indefinite amount of same-shaped houses, in no particular arrangement as far as I knew. In front of my house there was a shed-like building and in front of that a set of train rails.

Things were starting to fall from the sky. Shiny, even luminous, yet clear blobs no more than a few inches long began to rain down at first slowly. I looked up and saw a gray blanket of turbulent, rolling stratocumulus clouds. I looked down at the ground and saw the transparent blobs starting to collect on the green grass of the ground. I tried to step around them as I walked out into my yard. I had brought my camera with the intention of photographing these things.

My neighbors didn’t seem particularly alarmed but I had a growing sense of fear. This is an invasion, I thought. That thought crept through the back, hidden part of my mind, made it’s way into the front. I tried immediately to suppress the next thought that snuck in to my consciousness, which was: these things are going to kill everything on this planet so that they can use it for themselves.

The things continued to rain down with increasing intensity and I continued to try to step around those that had landed on the ground with increasing difficulty. I may have stepped on a few as I opted to return to the inside of my little house. I stared out of the kitchen window, looking at the sky, looking at the houses around my little house, looking at the ground, wondering what to do next.

A report of some sort came through the wire, finally. This wire was either a T.V. or radio news program I overheard, or a thought that came directly into my head. The report was this: scientific analysis of the “creatures” (I am still not sure whether they were in fact “alive” in the sense that humans, or jellyfish, or even protozoa, are alive) showed that these things were unable to continue their existence (or “live”) after having come into contact with water. I felt my worry diminish as I knew that 71% of the Earth was covered with water. I felt a little more relief as I realized that approximately the same amount of the human body – my body – was made up of water. Whatever might have touched, stung, infected, or infiltrated my body would not survive. And most likely I, and most of the rest of the population of the world, would survive.

I’m on the phone. Overlapping voices through tinny microphones and electric blips. Coworkers in cubicles in monotone phone conversations. Newsfeeds and fluorescent light, passing blurs of pastel rectangles and superficial techno-atmospheres.

Birds. A flutter of wings. Crescendoing to the impact and the shock of…

Silence.

Just the air, softly rushing by.

In truth you leveled too much pressure on me:
With this mourning by proxy; These words are not mine.
With all of the pain I have kept inside
While I am the messenger for others.

Each man must mourn in his own way:
Just as grief must be shared,
It must also in the end be a solitary thing.

Add to this list:

• Whenever you see that commercial with the stuff that you dip tarnished silver into and it instantly cleans it, you just have to have it, even though you have—at most— like two things made of silver to clean.

• Wearing pajama bottoms with leather jacket

!

EXPLOSION. A tiny point of light in the black black void. A sudden instance of time where there was only timelessness. Exploding out with all of the pent-up energy of the universe, a billion-trillion-zillion suns galaxies universes. All white all light everywhere. Exploding outward at the speed of light the speed of time itself. Beyond power beyond energy. White white light everywhere expanding in all six directions all eleven dimesions simultaneously. Expanding expanding engulfing everything. Nothing.

PAIN!
What? Black… where the fuck am I? AH, THIS HURTS. Goddammit mutherfucker shit. Son of a fuck. You fucking douchebags. How the fuck in hell did I get here? Shivering. It’s fucking cold. I am fucking cold and clammy. And my whole body hurts. Huh?

CLANG!

OW! Huh? … What the … WATER? UHhh… How the fuck did I get in here? Some kind of hyperbaric … no, hyperbole … no, no, stupid, uh, uh … sensory deprivation tank! Right, that’s it! I’m Shivering, freezing. How the hell did I get here? What the… you motherfucks put me in here…

Slam! CLANG!

… 

YO, ASSHOLES! LET ME OUT!

Nothing.

Sonofabitches locked me in here … hey … wait … I … I can’t remember … shit! … who the FUCK AM I?

Slam! CLANG! … SlamCLANG! SlamCLANG! SlamCLANG! LET … ME … THE … FUCK … OUT! AAAHHHH!

Muted voices: Derm perb lerb slerp … ew. Smmbt ferrt uf uf … BRIGHT! crack of white light.

Bright! CHRIST! My eyes! White light. This coffin opening, more white. Two white blurs moving around in this white place.

Voice 1: … for subject 446beta6dash46 normal one. Temp 36.61 Cee and rising. Bee Pee normal to high. Normal one. Chemical purge complete … response level point nine nine nine normal. Normal one. Trans normal …

Voice 2: Yeah? he seems a bit more pissed off than the other one.

Voice 1: … Eh …

One of you ASSHOLES better tell me what the FUCK is going on, or I am … going … to … fucking …

Voice 1: … yeah … within normal range …

Voice 2: Ya think?

Voice 1: … yeah … well this happens sometimes … sedatives?

Voice 2: Sedatives.

Voice 1: 446beta6 inject pointfivezero, no … inject onepointzero, methlolethloextrazine-D.

Voice 2: That oughta do it. Close the tank.

What? … Don’t Fucking do that you … OWW!

CLANG! Dark.

You sons of fu… bisshrllppp … mmmfffff …

Darkness. No time. A dream.

It was raining. I felt as if everything was brighter, more real. No, that doesn’t really describe it. What I felt was that everything suddenly had a feeling attached to it, like when I was a kid. I was walking down 48th street, lifting my umbrella up everytime I passed someone else and their umbrella. I got to the revolving door on the south side of my building and stopped. I saw a woman smoking, talking on the phone with her back to me. I smelled, suddenly, a rich, sweet cigar smell of a particular flavor that brought me back to my childhood. I hadn’t smelled this since I was ten or eleven years old. A large convention hall of some sort filled with old men smoking these things, and rows and rows of model train paraphenalia, the smell of the oil and slight burning of tiny electric motors. I was next to my dad, who was engrossed in these bits of plastic and metal and brass, or bargaining with some old man with glasses, a large protruding belly, and a vest. I was there but he didn’t really notice me at this moment. I think my mom and brother and sister were walking around somewhere too. My dad was eyeing the model train, or part of one, with a squint that an archeologist searching for some rare stone in a large pile of them out in a desert dig somewhere, might. There in front of me, was a booth with old cardboard boxes of items, wheels, tracks, tiny trees, tiny houses, just like another booth full of boxes of items next to it, in a row of booths, in a hall full of booths and old men haggling over them, and small boys watching and looking for that next, exciting new toy. All of these parts and items’ geometry, again and again, endlessly repeating brass circles, and rods, plastic boxes, wires. Trains, trees, houses, and little people. The afternoon went on and seemed to never end, and I never thought about whether it would.

We Changed.

We thought it was an organic transformation, with no memory of the thing,
A distant past transcendence.

But it was artificial; done with technologies impervious to breakage. No flaws would be recognized. Instead, malfunctions would, if occurring at all, appear as illnesses, natural imperfections, organic breakdowns and the like. Hidden from us was our own past of modification.

W  E   W  E R  E   D  I V  I  D E  D within ourselves.

Now we’re on the verge of changing again,
       of splitting,
                   of fragmenting.

And in years hence, we shall not remember ourselves as we were
(yet we’ll yearn for it all the same.)
We’ll think the division is a natural part of our being.

Aurora

Originally uploaded by Bistrosavage.

Jeff Spiess had always had an adventurous spirit. His parents, Shalom and Barbara Spiess, had been substratospheric energy farmers, coveting the flatulent expulsions of floating bovine entities. Growing up above the clouds he was afforded a dreamer’s sensibility, even if his was a largely solitary childhood.