novella/story collection ..

The odd grace of

the incomplete

Jeremy Hight

A piece of yellowed paper fell out of a homemade book , it was like a smelly pressed flower some lovestruck teen would put in a favorite passage at 15 when they discovered poetry. The page was actually made by the author and snuck in to as many book shops as she could as she realized a year after publication that this was the ending. This was in 1953 and it fell out decades later to a floor in a dorm while a television blared.

At the end of a book on economics an author had actually planned an instructional short story you could piece together by reading through lines in the main text in a different order. He made it as a sort of odd esoteric economic map. It to him made a deep point. The publisher quietly erased it from the manuscript before publication.

This is a mis-step , an error, a hollow dead end, an arrow making an ill formed arc, a poorly timed overture, that vessel that made sense as an idea but sank away, a wretched, wretched failure.

I want to show you.

The above text was found on a pile of papers in an attic that had been sealed up when the earthquake hit and cracked that dull old seal. Who knows how many others are scattered around towns and cities rotting away in such a tiny exile. Why should anyone care? On one hand there may be some historical significance right? An artifact of some other age or place ? No, it is rarely ever that. Could it be the value of something that another person can finish? No, that is the worst idea in the world to think of in this regard.

Timothy felt a dock slip slowly into cold waters. He was not standing in
the mist and rain watching the tides. He was not sitting smelling the
rotten wood along a place long abandoned to decay and decline. No, Timothy
was sitting in his room thinking of a girl. Her long shiny hair. Her
honey eyes. Her soft lips. The way she laughed and her lip curled just
so. Timothy was sitting by his lit lamp after dark in his room. He had
something in him that he told no one . It was nothing dark nor criminal,
nor of that girl. He at that moment just had come to realize that she was
not interested in him and was clearly falling for another boy. No, poor
Timothy , he felt in metaphors.

This was found in the papers of a penniless man who died of starvation in 1917. He had started several novels amidst obsessively re-reading the same old books alone in the house he inherited from his long dead parents. It has notes in scribbly pencil in the margins but time and mildew have rendered them incomprehensible. When he was found dead curled in a corner this paper was on the table in front of him. This is all we know about it or him now. Even this account is surely all of these years later unreliable.

I have a collection of failures. I have spent 35 years traversing the globe to find them. I am a curator, a collector and yes a neurotic obsessive in many senses of those words in this regard. I once collected works by famous artists and writers. It got boring, like fishing in a lake overstocked to absurdity; there is no pride in that, no risk, no accomplishment, at least not to me. I must explain that I am the grandson of a great great man. He will be left un named. I have had a lifetime to live under the shadow of those 11 letters and to cower under their weight.

We in the family all have had comforts from his vast fortune, don’t get me wrong, but that shadow , it is longer than years, huge, a black mass. Here I sit writing this with him dead 30 years and still it all pours out.

I collect failures. My study has horrid sculptures by a great master he thought were destroyed, manuscripts of one of the great playwrights that are of that period when he drank himself to death, I have a few paintings by the young untrained hands of future wealthy men with names outsized and no longer mortal. It takes so much more time to find the wretch than it does the beauty queen; I confess I have paid many people huge sums and went on long rambling journeys to acquire these things. They mean more somehow, these curious, oddities, addendums to the things that just worked and had time riding shotgun with them with all of the related momentum and advantage. There is something even more to the others I have not yet mentioned, the unfinished works I rounded up, some by greats and others by those with no name or one forgotten. Here is another :

Mel Sanklekowski is at the airport again. He is nearing the ticket counter. He does this twice week.

“Another beer” he orders sitting on the slightly faded stool to a grimacing familiar countenance, a mass of scowling comtempt held in check that pours it from the cheapest tap and walks a few feet away. Mel drinks it down staring at the walls. Then another. Then another. Oh yes dear reader, he is heading to that ticket counter. Patience you. Mel is sloppy now, belligerent but not as much as two days ago. Thebartender wishes he could wish him away. Flick him like a fly. Others are not so kind. Mel tosses his coins down and does a shot. He falls from the stool. The crack is his head hitting the floor. He is unconscious but not from that fall. The ticket has been punched. Wait you, this will come clear. He drools and mumbles while the bartender has the bouncers from the club next door toss him out again.

Mel may soil himself again but he is heading down the aisle now , those temporary narrow portals, toward the door, toward the flight. Almost away. A light cold rain falls on the sidewalk but Mel smiles to the stewardess, feels the warmth of the cabin...looks to his seat , ah yes a window...Bermuda this time. As planned..

This was the first paragraph of a 214 page unfinished book. The man went on to do other work of note (not writing) including an invention we think nothing of but use on a daily basis. As best as the seller could recall (his daughter) this paragraph is all that was left after he had tried for 7 years as a young lab assistant to really instead “make it” as a writer. She told of one night watching him burn each page one night one at a time in a bbq pit as fireworks ironically shot across the sky on the 4^th of July. She could not remember what year it was. The text may have been horrible or amazing, we will never know. The thing that grabbed me was that this thing both sustained him for a time, and maybe, just maybe shuttled him into something else. His daughter was surprised anyone would want it as he was a man of science, a self confessed failure at writing. I treasure it in a way I frankly can’t ever fully explain.

There are many others, in fact some are either complete short stories or non fiction accounts, sometimes I can’t tell. I only know that I bought them in some boxes from a man closing a diner who had a tenant above who collected odd things and claimed once in a strange drunken ramble to have ‘collected the toenail clipping of a dozen other lives”. The boxes had old yearbooks, photos, baby clothes, a tube of toothpaste with a brand I had never heard of, cups, a dirty fork still with a piece of unidentifiable food on it, a plate with a dried bit of blood or sauce, a wrapper to a burger with a diary entry on it in pen, a page about some wild weather ideas with a stain on the corner, a couple of name badges flimsy and sad with broken strings and cracked corners with names rubbed off, a polaroid of a booth in a dark room and a hint of a man horribly out of focus, a pile of broken glass shards and no rhyme or reason as to who they all were from or were at all.

I burned my most valuable painting one night while sitting nude in my pool late at night. It curled near fetal as the flames had broken its shape with their seemingly random force; the thing died before my eyes and as stupidly decadent as it was it seemed like the right thing. I sat on the steps in that bright moonlit night as the smoke curled up across the waters. you see I placed the thing(it is just a thing after all, as all things are..), a Picasso on a plank of wood to float in the water like my own little private titanic. I would never do this to the random things , the un-named objects, the failures or the unfinished pulled from those boxes. The ashes of that painting caught a brief little nothing summer breezes off the desert and swirled.

It spread across the waters in little pieces, from one thing with some ridiculous provenance to a bunch of little airborn particles, published chapbooks by an author of poetry about cactus , photo essays by someone sent out to 50 rejections that later gave up altogether, the collected works of insert name here. There was something to the way the little things lifted for a bit , then fell.

There is a grace in things. These shards come from boxes and are from things never to be published by names never to grace a book , lit magazine or anything of the sort. I know this as it took years to collect these things from families in cities hundreds of miles from me or the pool that once held those ashes.

Let me show you a few.

First is one from a box recently found left abandoned in a condo in New Mexico...

The fog in June is a coward that way

by John Eziklias

This room stinks of that old elegance that made a lot of sense in the 70’s; naugahyde that squeaks in big booths sunken into the walls. The dim light would make a lot more sense if I was having a torrid affair or plotting some sort of crime instead of just sitting waiting to meet a client. No, I am here in the shadows nursing an iced tea and a salad that looks like a burger had a seizure and the toppings slid off.

The music seems to be coming out of the mouth of a chipped wooden owl on the far wall. The best I can tell is that the easy listening music has never stopped being piped in since before some people driving by outside were born. The slop comes from that crappy wooden statue facing me with its almost judging, lazy painted eye. Thirty minutes ago I wished I could glue all my stale giant croutons into a little ark or brick and hurl it at the tired old bird’s red painted mouth. Now I want to rip it off the wall or just leave.

I think the old man that went to the next booth when I got here sunk into some naugahyde quicksand. I have not even heard a peep in I don’t know how long from his little shadowy corner, not even the clink of his knife on his plate any more. The couple kissing behind me when I walked in have fallen into some soft corner as well. There is a stain on my napkin. Just saw it. It is almost shaped like a horseshoe.

My wife makes me take pictures. I am not talking sweet tourist shots or pics of food to show to relatives. No, she makes me make artifacts, alibis, proof. It drives me crazy sometimes. My lettuce has wilted now, drowned in blue cheese dressing. A sad little death. It is 2:27 in the afternoon on this Tuesday (my phone thankfully has a strong little light). I have been waiting since 1:30. I am starting to think that I am being stood up.

She makes me shoot photos at times like this. She wants time stamped little images shuttled off to her while she waits at home whenever I am away from the office. It was cute at first, sort of charming and I assumed more playful teasing. That was 3 years ago.

I think the old man just passed gas. At least I know he is still here and I am not alone. She is surely already tapping a finger on a countertop waiting as is. It is too dark. This room , this place, this crappy restaurant, it was the idea of Sarah. She is a client. I am that antiquated thing in this digital age you see. I am a talent agent. Sarah is one of those people that wait tables and once in a while get a spot dancing in front of toilet rolls in a commercial for 10 seconds then back to the grind and the dream.

Sarah loves to wear sexy boots that go above her knee. She wears lipstick that is deep purple even when she is in flip flops. Sarah has nails painted in crazy colors. Sarah has eyes that shine when you talk to her. Sarah is my client. Sarah also is 50 and 3 times divorced. My wife would make me take pictures even if my client was a break dancing poodle or a cat.

Sarah kissed me once. Once. Her lips lingered on mine a bit too long as we said a professional good bye. She caught me off guard, I swear I saw a tiny reflection of me as she zoomed in for it. The tiny tingle of something soft was just instinct. When I kissed back it was like some reflex. And she had those boots. I mean I am not dead. But that was the one time, the one little island. She is late. She chose this place. I can’t take a shot and have big news to tell her so I really can’t leave here. I am screwed.

The music now has crackled away into static. A loud pop. Now it is back. So many small details to observe when there are none. I have other clients. Against my stomach’s protests I have elected not to have any appetizer, main course or dessert now. My last 3 croutons are pushed in a corner together with the white napkin laid over them. This little diorama will be my companion till she gets here. I will know her from the click of those high heels, or the smell of that perfume. She also has one or the other or both. I swear I can spot the sound of her boots at lunch time on approach like a specially trained dog by now. The news is something she may love or may not like. I really am not sure. Once she wore gloves, soft satin, like in old films, she ran them through my hair from behind thinking she could surprise me, trick me, get a rise out of me, but I knew. That day I had to tell her that the roles in the dog food commercial and soap opera she tried out for had called to turn her down.

Another ten minutes have gone by. My wife just sent a text. No words, just a bunch of letters. It may be a scramble like on a game show or her anger this time. I really don’t know what to make of it. She just sent it again. Same odd sequence. I mean if I shoot a pic here it will come out like the lens cap was on during an eclipse. Well, that is an exaggeration but you don’t know how she gets. She has me send pictures to prove I am where I said I would be. Alone. She wants me to send pics of things too, lamps, candles, menus, proof. She sometimes sends me pics too. Things. I have to guess their significance fast. Or else.

The waitress looks like a walking shadow. Kind of a relief to see her face emerge as she nears the table. Not that it is one of those that is a light or anything, her simple tired features withered a little when I said I was not ready to order. Her uniform looks like it is from a time capsule from old photos. She looks about 26. Something about those eyes though. Hmm. A presence even behind that tiredness of someone who hates their job in a slow place. Wonder if she sings..

More iced tea , sure. Why not. It tastes less like water from a rusty tap now anyway

The old man has quieted again I keep wondering about him, listening. Really just nice to know someone else is here. The couple must have left. The quiet footsteps of something either saccharine or you know what. It is now to the point I usually would have left, angrily burned some tire rubber and even left a nasty message. I could cancel her. I really could. Could stop contact and leave. The worst part of sitting too long is not so much the cramps for me,but the nagging sense that the body needs to move. Another text. A single word. No clue. A plate just broke somewhere in the kitchen, heard it. No, I really don’t, not at all. Fifteen more minutes. That is it.

Sarah. That kiss. Let me elaborate on that little thing. I had not eaten all day. My lack of sleep surely factored in too as I remember. She swept a polite gesture into something soft, plush, the smell of leather against her citrusy perfume and like a twitching finger my body responded. That is all there was or is. It lasted no longer than it takes to pour cream in your coffee. And no one knows but us. There is no us.

Wait. I hear wooden pegs on the ground. Approaching. Don’t smell the perfume though. Can’t quite…She is coming this way. Glasses. Indoors. Fast steps now. She is coming closer. Long coat. Closed. Red lips now emerging in the bit of light slightly curled …..there is that instinct again..that lizard..that cave man Stomach is curdling. Boots. Conservative. A bit scuffed. Not the drama Sarah usually brings wrapped around her pale legs, not the familiar of my wife either. She is standing at the edge of my little booth now. She is just standing there. Now she is walking away.

A photo. My phone is buzzing to tell me of it. It is a picture of me. I am wearing the same shirt. My expression is accurately annoyed and yet that little bit of hope or whatever it is called. But that can’t be…. My hair looks the same. The guy must not be me. She must have shot a pic of another guy in a white shirt with short graying black hair in a dimly lit room. It has no time stamp. She must have cut that off. That can’t be me. He looks so timid and lost, a few inches shorter than I am. Yes. That is one of her little tricks. Look at that poor bastard. He is this little melting candle of a man.

The old man is making some faint noise now. Like a gurgling creek. Ah, now I hear a fork on a plate. This is so strangely comforting right now. A few more sips of this rusted pipe tasting iced tea and then I am gone. Another picture is coming…….It is of me again…alone…

That is enough. There is some money on the table. The room is now shrinking behind. Good day solitary old man and your meat and bread. Good bye shadows and stink and a wasted 78 minutes. I just looked over my shoulder and could swear I saw the waitress crying with something in her hand. Don’t want to know. The kitchen smells putrid as I am passing it and its vapors and stink. Ok it is not that horrid but you waste time under 3 kinds of stress and see how that lunch tastes and looks in a dull dank room someone else sent you to. I see the cars are wet from some little freak summer rain shower. There are little beads of water like that timid weak dew in June mornings here from the fog that burns to death at each noon till the real heat comes.

The fog in June is a coward that way. The clouds are already evaporating. Pathetic. Now it just will be more humid as that heat comes right back. I must fight the urge to hit 80 mph on this little ancient alley of a street. The sun is back out and the tiny meek blob of cloud like today has little time left before completely burning away. My phone is buzzing another text or picture. I am, for now, for once, immune. I will swerve at trash cans until the light and when I have to turn back into the main streets again. The old man must be a masochist to eat at that place. That thought is now too burning away clean, wasted. I could hit a can and crush it , bend it into something else, at least in the impact, the bend and release as I pull my broken bumper clean away.

News is always good. The world will always spin on the same axis and the seasons will forever fit like sweaters on shoulders, and photos in frames. There is no chaos Virginia , Sarah or Elaine. Yes honey, things are fine

here is one that came in a bent wet box shipped to me from the guy's sister...he never told anyone he wrote ...

They only peer in

by Eliot Rimson

Their voices had just bounced around each other as though they were stumbling in the dark.

Andrew once worked at the city dump.

This fact had come to be something he hid away inside. It was not the best line to pick up a girl or impress her parents over dinner He got the job while taking a few classes at the local junior college and it was easy. His finger hit an oversized red plastic button that triggered the crushing of cars into neat little metallic bouillon cubes. The station wagons, pinto wagons, junkers and sports cars all made the same basic shape when utterly destroyed. There was at times something pleasant about this to him in a way that flitted across his brain quick as crickets into scrub brush. He sometimes lazily watched the jetting blasts of the eternal flame as it burped out methane from the rot and ruin below. He read pulp novels and magazines while waiting for any questions from people dropping off things that once had some clear use and purpose.

Being a small town, he mostly waited around, killing time while still on the clock. Little games emerged and his mind began to spin on about that one man that had boxes of all of the things of his family to toss en masse, like nothing more than toe nail clippings. He tried to not think about the cubed cars. He tried to make music in his head to the pulse of the methane blasts and crunching sounds around him during his shifts. He ignored the nagging sense of comfort that was emerging in him despite the tedium, hit away the tendrils of that phd he had dreamed of, the degree he had still not gotten , of science as a whole despite that award back when he was a kid, that little certificate mom had somewhere.

He wondered toward the end of his tenure in this putrid little land about places to build on ,on how you could “reclaim” lots of land and places that to some may as well have been called refuse. The thing about it was that the place just as he was moving toward quitting had come to fascinate him.

He once made the mistake of sharing this excitement at a party with some college friends. One of them was recent class buddy Mara. They both needed to take a weight training class and when this came up in conversation had decided why not take it together. She was 2 years younger and the sister of his buddy Nate. She spent most of her time in the class drinking coffee from a beat up old thermos and tuning out. When the coach/teacher came by though, she would lift more weight than many of the boys and would always work harder than anyone with amazing feats of what seemed to the teacher as diligence and focus.

Here is an example of a typical day in class=

Great work Hill 60 year old impossibly tan and muscled man slightly grinning (for once)

Thanks coach..feeling it today amazing smile, even more so for the fact she was not “feeling it”

You could follow this example Andrew disdain dripping from that old tanned crab of a man

She would then reach behind a bench and sip more coffee from the beat up old thermos. She had a lot of old things: machines, calculators, tools, books, weird toys… She kept waiting for Andrew to ask about them. He never did. He always talked about garbage and history and would ask her questions, but usually would cut her off mid sentence to blurt out more of what he was excited about. Andrew would try to work out as best he could but had little muscle and sometimes found her really attractive and would lose focus. He figured she had no idea of any of this. Mara actually had been reading a lot about archaeology and of lost languages, but no one ever bothered to listen so she kept this to herself.

Andrew showed up to pick her up for this one party and she was wearing a dress. She never wore a dress. She usually dressed more like an auto mechanic or Amelia Airheart somehow but with big cop boots or motorcycle boots. Andrew was stunned and although she moved in it like someone stuck in a bag at first it was amazing that she would wear something so alien. And she looked great.

“…you look nice….” Nerves. Awkward sweating all of a sudden.

“thanks.. oh ha..yeah…never wear these things…thought what the hell” sweet smile.

“oh uh…yeah cool deal then” car put in gear nervous tapping of finger

“mind if I” fumbling in purse

“oh yeah..sure…uhm….so let me tell you about work today” avalanche commenced

She rolled down her window and pulled out a long cigarette holder, really fancy and dramatic and placed her cigarette into it. Waited a few seconds. Andrew oblivious talked on about an old man dumping cans and a car smashed to a cube. Mara leaned a bit toward him. Waited a bit more, the long holder intentionally languid on her red lips, lips that usually have no lipstick at all. Coughed. Tried best pose from old film she could think of then gave up. She lit it herself , her arm absurdly stretched to reach with her cheap bic lighter, to her totally killing the look she thought he would like or at least get a kick out of as he had told her before about watching so many Mae West and Marlene Dietrich movies on tv. She smoked while he told the stories and then when they arrived had already put the telescoping holder away, even thought of maybe toning down her make up a bit or just taking it off like a regular Friday night , maybe time to shift into one of the guys mode again. She was disappointed and had briefly been thinking this would be the in to get past his friendship and awkward silences or long monologues about trash and cast offs. Also, it never seemed to occur to him that she not only understood him but collected old things herself. Maybe the party would loosen him up. She walked in with him curious as to what the night would hold and trying not to think about what just happened. Andrew walked in thinking about garbage and beer.

Andrew hours later stood by a sliding glass door at the house party, beer in hand, Mara next to him and had turned excitedly at the question of what are you up to from a guy named Jim who he used to go to parties with and said:

“did you ever think of how archaeologists see artifacts as indicators of layers of the past, of time even in a way? A pot, a tool, a piece of tile and yet we throw things away all the time, mementos, that bowling trophy, the heirloom that is just too scuffed now, those clothes so painfully out of style that a few years later cycle back …so in a way you could do a dig in a trash dump and move back in time…”

The looks to Andrew ranged from he farted to wow maybe my friend is a little closer to tin foil hat town than I want to visit letting him know that this was again the stuff that he could not share. Unfortunately, as other times before, this realization came just that little too late. He drank more of his beer and shifted back to what was to later become rote, of talking about current events, the latest crazy and or drunk and or drug binging celebrity and grabs from an assortment of funny stories of other parties or other dinners with the people he was with. He never let them see those drawings. That he knew was too much.

The rest of the night was ok, some beers, talks about current events, jokes , the usual. Mara seemed to brighten to Andrew when he complimented her lipstick and vintage calculator button purse that she had made. Later Mara drifted off to play poker and Andrew hung out with his friend Bill talking about work.

Mara on the ride home had already hurriedly wiped her makeup off on a burger joint napkin and chatted a bit about some book she read and mostly listened to Andrew. He talked about how what we throw away tells stories and how things change bit by bit like this. Andrew came to her street and then house and dropped her off in mid story about a fascinating thing he read once. He thought the night went well. She seemed a bit distracted as she opened the door in front of her house. Andrew wanted to kiss her earlier, figured he would do another time, would wait and then it would be easier, not so awkward as it felt, maybe she would give him a clear signal, maybe there would be mistletoe or a bet about kissing made that would open that door. He did not the little plastic tube thrown to the ground , cracking on impact, a little artifact and now just a ruin. After a few hang outs she just kind of stopped talking to him and he wrote it off as another person who did not care about it; life being as it was to just be it seemed, like a suburban curse. He did not see those looks she gave him in the car that night, long warm or quick smoldering gazes as he rattled on about garbage and never once turned his head.

That was 1988, it is now 2004 and boy wonder is a grown man. He thought about grad school. Many times. He got a phd application and for years at random intervals would get the itch and would literally pet it like a cat, then put it back away in its drawer. When he got a second job back then surveying plots for a somewhat crooked developer he actually saw something one day, something odd that resonated in some seemingly dead part of him. The house was torn down. That one day back in 1988… He found something. He did not tell this story at parties or to anyone. There was a house. Door wide open. The strangest part was that everything was in place as it had been from a day decades before. And those papers..

The kitchen of the little blue house had been the oddest carnival of sights. The recipe laid out on the sink yellowed and stuck now to the ugly old tile, the stain that must have once been a spill or who knows what, the ice box now just so much geometry and a few boxes of long putrified and dried vegetables , the absolutely terrifying can of salmon marked 1938 with a bulge the size and shape of the fattest black widows fat belly. The stove, clean as a whistle amongst the gloom of a corner with bags of newspapers.

Andrew and two other men thus came into the little house to find a living room left not just intact, but like a mundane time capsule. It was bizarre, unnerving and completely unexpected. After a few steps in the tiny entry way they found such odd sights as a television guide open to August, 23, 1958 on one of those brown t.v trays people once used to gather families or alone around a beloved show or evening of the “idiot box” droning away. There was even a pencil next to the page.

The crew were three men, 2 of which had started the tiny company, if it even could be called that, 15 years earlier as an idea from a drunk poker game. The idea of surveying as a team would mean not working for their sketchy bosses and dwindling work could perhaps be met with their hustle and drive spent on their other “activities”. The kid as they called Andrew was the one outside person to be hired on the only outsider and they knew one of his relatives to check him out.

In that odd living room they found many other little scenes, artifacts. There was laundry still folded neatly next to a basket. The toothpaste sitting on the bathroom sink was a brand not one of the men had heard of. The shampoo had a drawing of a moon rocket and was next to a dull , filmy residue where a bar of soap once had been left. The men walked in and at once were fascinated and troubled by this place, this odd collections of things of some moment in time and a past before all but one had been born. The smells were not too horrible which was the oddest and most disturbing thing to Andrew. At 23 he was expecting rancid smells and mold. He instead only found a mini swamp in a fridge. Otherwise it was all still as though the man would come back, 1958 flipped back on like a light switch, the chair occupied by a bored man looking curiously at these visitors/intruders in his small home.

There was no body. There was no hint of foul play. There was nothing but what you saw. The steady climate had also done weird tricks to what remained and the topography and isolation had somehow let no one notice this place , let alone that anything was amiss. The oddness of the man who proved to be its owner also would come into play. The light afternoon breeze wafted in through the open door as it surely had for 30 years. Somehow the couple of hurricanes that came through these parts had done little either. The typical afternoon sea breeze blew in across scenes that looked like the owner would pop out from a shower and politely wrapped in a towel say “hold on a minute guys”…or whip out a shotgun. This was not to be the case. That realization was the oddest thing. This was 1958 in the minutia of a life and a day and it was 30 years in things evaporated and it was right now, the intruders stepping around each feeling a bit dirty somewhere inside in a way hard to explain.

“Did you see that tv guide?”

“yeah it even has a crossword puzzle part of the way done…elvis….hula hoop….crazy man”

“shouldn’t it smell worse in here?”

“is this trespassing? What happened here?”

The reason no one came to the little house was that the man had no close family or friends after all those things that happened. The house was paid off, he had made those ideas briefly really work. The research scientist was supposed to be on a leave working on a project but had been fired, a man had even thrown a box of vacuum tubes at his head with malice and the rumors had venom in them. His name was Richard Ellenbrook. Andrew and the others saw it in the little corner of those absurd tv guides, on some bills from companies no one had heard of and on some books he had apparently published on meteorology and climatology along with the stack of papers. 17 letters. 6 vowels. 11 consonants. It was a name that may as to the 3 men have been a talking spider, a piece of moon dust that glowed and sang, an alien, strange thing, nothing more.

Richard Ellenbrook was many things. Scientist, Inventor. Pioneer. He also was that other list of things, the much murkier one: cheat, liar, manipulator, poor loser, to some a man who lost it in isolation (but later to others to be seen as a tesla uncredited beyond his known works). A boy at age 7 working with forecasting with pinpoint accuracy for his father and neighbors. A prodigy who had mastered calculus and iambic pentameter both with equal mastery at 9. Admitted to MIT at 14, phd at 17. The inventor of the core of hurricane forecasting and modeling. These things Andrew later came to learn. The man been rumored to have been on a huge team project but had become more distant,erratic, possibly from stress or from being forced to work on a secret project for another country or for working on something on his own.

Ellenbrook has also become very much another Ambrose Bierce , bitter bierce, el gringo. One day he just walked away. There is no record of his death or any correspondence after 1958. His house to the conspiracy theorist type could indicate being sucked up by aliens from mars or any crazy theory, in fact check some of the many home brew web sites people have up just for these things. . In the worst way. The vanishing man. Not the scientist. The odd ideas that people balked at. Not the inventions and hard work. He has since become a man that has been overshadowed by himself. The blogs about his supposed whereabouts glow bright like christmas lights around the outer rings of the internet's very fringe.

Andrew once wrote a 12 page paper examining cultural aesthetics, the slow progression of ephemera as dissolving such overblown concepts as “era” and “generation” that focused on garbage and things tossed away as needed over time filling in these gaps. It had an audience of one, himself and he threw it away soon after completion. He also had taught himself physics and won an award as a kid. These things he did not tell anyone anymore.

Andrew really liked that girl at the party years before who in that odd moment made it clear to him that she was not into him. He had hung out with her before a bunch of times before and a few times after not counting the times with their other friends. Even a few times meeting for dinner. The sting of that and his always being the kid at work and never seeing anything like that house proved too much by the time he was around 27. She surely only humored me he was sure of at 25. She never liked me he had burned in his mind as he turned 26.

By 27 she was gone in his mind. They all were, all of his friends of that time. It was if they were never born, just part of a toxic morass, a half formed swamp made of those years, no longer of faces, moments or limbs. The drive to California felt cleansing even as it also felt a bit desperate and led to working a job and living in a simple, dumpy place. He was away. He was somewhere else.

Andrew now sits in his bedroom in his small apartment in the dark with just the glow of his monitor and a small lamp. Andrew works odd jobs in construction , maintenance and freelance in basic web design he picked up easily on the internet from free tutorials. He also has other things going. He is working on a secret project. He has been working on it all these years. It may finally simply be time. That man that walked out in 1958. He was on to something.

The problem is this: who will believe a man who has nothing but blogs and comments on videos and message boards? Who will believe what he has found? Who will believe the words of another man who erased himself, that likely insane mental breakdown fall from grace collapse that left laundry in the south Florida breeze to just walk away? Will anyone believe it is not a fake before any of this is an issue? Andrew types away , transposes, works at calculations , thinks he gets those lost notes , it is all seeming to make sense now where before it was just those first few lines…those wild ideas…that long awkward toss of genius.

Andrew has a roommate , they have a shared living room and kitchen. The young man is a part time student who also works random jobs. His roommate tolerates him, leaves him alone, is gone much of the time. The set up is near ideal for Andrew as he clicks away. The young man is out for the weekend at his girlfriend’s. Andrew still prefers being in his room like this, a tick , a quirk , it is what it is. Gone is the 23 year old boy. In his place is a 39 year man. Gone is the surveying work as the kid and the dump. In its place is working as far across the country as possible and whiling away the hours at work to get back to the big project.

Two conferences are in town this weekend. Andrew has even registered for one. This is the first time ever that he has actually made this step after staring at countless entry pages on his glowing aging desktop’s screen. Much to his surprise, the topic so closely relates to his big project that he tried submitting an abstract (lying about a master's degree). They liked his abstract, were quite enthusiastic actually. He was surprised that they did not care to check and find that he had no credentials though, also that he actually never completed that bachelor’s degree, was 3 classes short and lied to family and friends to get them off his back so long ago. When asked what his affiliation was to put on his name badge he checked “independent researcher”.

That damn man in Florida who erased himself was onto something, something still not seen. His work was unfinished, downright sloppy, incomplete and even scattered and wrong in parts. Andrew has spent 16 years fixing them though, making them solid, just right. He lost count of the number of edits. Ellenbrook’s papers that now sit in a drawer in Andrew’s messy bedroom may have been onto something big. The problem is they are incomplete. Also , the problem is their ambition is one of those strokes that ice skate on the line between a huge leap that would change the game and those time worn steps down into the morass of madness, the order of a break from reality and its drawings and flawed math.

As best as Andrew has seen, the man was onto ways to see storms form in pure data as flawlessly as to predict with an accuracy still unseen; some sketches depict amazing computers and wireless that no one in 1958 could have had clues to. Others were farther out, wilder, of things some still see as impossible. Tantalizing. Incomplete. Richard Ellenbrook just at some point walked away. Andrew has spent much of his life since that day trying to fill in the blanks. As of this week, today actually, he might just be done.

The conference is tomorrow, the first one.

Andrew falls to sleep as an odd little storm pulls the remants of a hurricane into showers and even a few thunderstorms across Los Angeles. The little low on its own would be nothing, just a swirl and the ruins are only moisture but for a few hours will bring an almost zombie rain in spots across the city. Hurricane Luis had reached cat 4 off southern baja, had been powerful, a beautiful thing to behold even with its dangerous power. It also then had the potential to do more,. Grow stronger still. A cluster of dull clouds is all that now no longer even qualifies for that name , it is pulled into lightning by a little nothing. Andrew bolts awake, a dream crashing inside, closes the window, surprised to see big drops.

Andrew sleeps all night restlessly. At one point he has a dream that is awarded a nobel prize. In another he is laughed at as a fool and run out of a town. In another brief one he is a bear lost in a field , tired, hungry, then in a zoo inside a drug store in 1962 during a hurricane in South Florida then a single vacuum tube being pulled out of a box. He awakens many times out of nerves, others from thunder rolling really hard.

In the morning he is a blur of showering, dressing, going obsessively over minutia , spiling milk on a tie he last wore when he was a boy. At noon he gets in his car and heads off to the city center and whatever awaits. The papers sit in the backseat neatly bundled and packaged. He must not mess this up.

Andrew sits in his car on the 10 freeway. It is a warm-ish day, a mish mash of the tiny bit of humidity from the hurricane remnant that by 3 am had beaten itself effectively to death on the face of the San Bernadino mountains and the almost cool air east of that little nothing low spinning a tiny bit of low cloud off the coast in feeble decay. The rain is all over the news , that freak from last night, but he has no radio. The traffic has come to almost a dead stop. The music from a dozen radios make a dull soup of noise amidst the occasional pointless impotent honked horn. Andrew is going to be late. The thin mid level clouds look like hollow space craft or , well, thin cylindrical clouds. God I hope it won’t go that way Andrew thinks looking up at one cloud slightly rainbow hued near the sun. A bee hits his windshield with a small motion and hesitates then flies off. The traffic lurches suddenly up to 7 mph. A woman screams at a driver in front of her who is texting with head down. A dog pants with wide red open mouth in a van. Andrew hits the gas with the light touch so familiar on Los Angeles freeways, the at least we are not standing still pump. Two radio stations play the same song in passing cars with one distorted on old cheap speakers. A mini van of mid 80’s vintage passes playing dvds of 2 diff old cartoons at once for the two kids in back seats. Andrew is in the slowest lane again. Murphy’s law. The pile of papers in the back seat shifts ever so slightly. The manuscript. Finally. The traffic just as soon as it began to move hovers back to a stand still,the phantom of moving over again for another spell.

An hour has passed. Andrew is a full 4 exits closer. Today is the conference. Andrew sweats in his rarely worn shirt and tie. His c.d player has not worked since when the last president was in office, his dash is sun cracked , but he is moving now. The manuscript is 274pages. He is not sure how much he had to add any more. The little weird clouds are gone but one heading over the hills. The convention center. 5 o’clock. Booth 24 . Check in at front desk at door. These facts loop in his sweat dabbled head even as he has them written down in his notepad in his faded brown leather fanny pack. A car crash sits in the middle lane behind him shrinking in the rear view now. The cars looked almost fused together, the metallic blooms of front and end sculpted into one ugly ruin with 8 wheels. It is 4:03. Andrew turns up his non working air conditioning to welcome in the slightly cooler stream of air as he spots a car pass him with a huge “the weather is a corporation “ hand painted sign in the back seat. Oh boy

Parking lot is full. Amazing. Another car with stickers about star trek , star wars, haarp and aliens all at once. Yep. Andrew is only 10 min late. He rolls up to the parking attendant in a little booth with a huge “Lot Full” sign in front of it with an old E.T doll stuck to it. The attendant is sweating profusely, looks about 18, bored out of his mind and has a little name tag that reads “Paul.” He also has clearly thrown or dropped said name tag on the hard pavement by the big cracks and chips in it.

“so uhm..the lot is full sir” shrug. Sweat bead.

“oh uhm…so..where do I go then? I drove all the way and..” slight panic. Irritation. Eye twitch

“ you have something important to tell people and the world needs to know …” dead eyes. No emotion..sweat in eye.

” yeah….but this is really..uhm..you know…uh” panic. Dread.

“ different..an exception..look man…there is a lot over there…turn around and make two rights..they don’t care…their business went under and it is vacant ok?” pointing scrawny pale arm with now clear badly drawn tattoo of what looks like a clown on a pogo stick. Slight look of are you a crazy one or just a garden variety.

“oh ok……” Andrew turns around and sees in the rear view the kid slowly shaking his head as he heads back to his little shack. This is now clearly not looking like what he had hoped for. The humidity is still ridiculous even with no storm and the walk will be brutal. But who cares about that. This is not looking like a place full of nasa badges. Not at all.

The small lot is almost full. A skinny weird looking kid with greasy hair is playing some kind of board game in a lawn chair with his exact counterpart as a woman. A car has hundreds of dolls and stones across it and the words “the truth is out there painted surely a thousand times along the spaces between stones. A sweet elderly woman smiles at no one in particular as she parks an aging tiny station wagon just beside Andrew. The pile of papers. The years. That house in florida. The amazing thing about storms. These things make him open the door, kill the engine. Smile back. Feel a bit of adrenalin amidst it all.

The pile of papers. Now put in a binder. Why did I not do this before. Sitting in hot car with old woman still smiling, board game played by people my age. I thought I did this already. What. Can’t even read the notes there. Ah ok, these are good, ok just put pages in. Stop obsessing. For once. Those little gnats inside. Ok half done. What is that diagram doing there? What did that equation mean? Ok , good, more pages, ah, good stuff. Almost done. Wait. …..

An hour has gone by. The woman has long left to go inside the coliseum blocks away. 3 vicious rounds of risk have been played. With doors open Andrew has wasted an hour he will never, ever get back. The sun heats him like the one that brought the rains in Florida those years before, like the one that the man wrote about in pages about hurricanes. The conversations blocks away chatter on about space crafts, machines, lasers, mind control, after life avatars, and yes some science. Andrew shuffles through a pile of paper. He has found something. Something he did not like. Did not let hit him in 16 years of obsessively tinkering away. It is irretrievable, irreparable. No knowledge of garbage, methane , storms or anything can take this , fix it. The text is only 2 lines long. But he failed to let is seep in. pg 224. Paragraph 4

Inside the auditorium , the conference, the place he supposedly has waited all these years for, the lunch break will begin soon. An opportunity will pass. A man has come from Deep in Mexico to see the presentation on a panel that has a missing chair. He will leave unhappy and unnoticed. He also will have known the answer to those 2 lines.

Andrew stares at the page. More time is to go by. His text has become no longer a mystery or an unfinished great notion, masterpiece, a work of genius by some stranger that needed his hand. It is a pile, a heap, a beast failed by a tiny scab. At least to Andrew. He will drive home slowly as cars speed by. He will awaken in a day and will never see 2 things. 1 he never has truly tried in his life 2 the lines were not wrong ..just to him

That house in Florida was torn down. Apartments were built after the condo plans failed. They never got enough tenants and too were abandoned for several years. They then were raised to make a lot. An empty, nothing , a maybe someday to be built into maybe something grand marked spot. If Andrew had actually followed the man into Mexico he likely would have never found him. He could have died there in a freak accident or in old age still chasing this ghost. But these narratives, these tethers of possibility, at least something more than his underachieving, were plucked every time he talked himself out of it. He also never chased that girl, the one at the party, she really liked him, any fool could see it, why else would she have listened to all the other stories of worms and methane and cars left to rust? He could have finished that degree , even a masters, a phd in fact. These phantoms long waited for him, still do, but will not come into a single atom, second or anything; Andrew instead will drive home at a steady speed. Will post a few vague unhappy comments in a blog , will watch a video of hurricane behavior and will sleep into another day.

The odd thing about time capsules is that they so often come up as mud. The sad thing about burying things intentionally is something so often seeps in, decays it all. The car pulled up in that one city was rust, the papers in so many come up as a wet nothing. It was the same with that safe and Capone’s money. Time wins. They only peer in to the see the time capsule, not the ruin.

That metallic desk in that house in Florida had been cluttered with piles of paper, random bits of old newspaper clippings, a glass with a residue of what appeared to have been decades ago milk, a magazine that was turned to a photo of an actress thought at one point to become famous, important, something. The refrigerator was stocked for meals during research. All the usual rot and ruin were long gone. Richard Ellenbrook had just walked away, yes, but only to Andrew. He so wanted it to be this way. It made a hero and legend out of failure. It made the man’s story also wide open. No conspiracy theorist takes a closed case to their perpetual mental prom of obsession , nor do they take a few known details to the submarine races. Ellenbrook was to watch that panel and would have spoken to him. He just stopped publishing and hated the internet. He did disappear himself but in that closed set way, to just move from who he had become and his life to somewhere quiet. This silence left like that long gone florida mold that dried to dust in that fridge behind him was to Ellenbrook nothing, a lost shadow. To Andrew and his ilk it was the cloud of secrecy, the “hallmark of genius” , the mad scientist wiling away beyond the realm of mortals and closed minds. Richard Ellenbrook moved away.

.Andrew’s old, soon to be lost acquaintances had found the house not him. They stopped talking to him after a few years of occasionally checking in with him to see how he still had not changed at all, spending more and more time at home and they moved on. It is like the crowds when they pry open an old buried container one of the guys once said. The expectation is always better than what you ultimately find inside.

Here is one more from that sad little box of things...to me these seem to connect...I am no writer but see what you think..look of me..directing again...like those paintings again..curating toe nail clipping from other lives....please just read...

I Was the Vapor Trail not the Plane

by Eliot Rimson

He had this crazy paper he somehow snuck in. I listened intently as he started out with a long intro that frankly made a lot of sense. It was scientific, it had lots of references and was a lot of overview about the history of the field leading into his area of study. He wore the nicest suit I had ever seen. It was yellow/orange and perfectly pressed, not a wrinkle and had a really interesting cut to it. His hair however was a bit greasy and looked like he cut it with scissors. It was when he got to his thesis that it got strange. He was proposing something that basically was so out of any field of study in the field that it seemed to a few of us to not even be from science fiction, a dream any of us recalled or a comic book; the thing about it though, the cruel wicked anchoring thing about it was by the end it made sense.

Let me give you a little background about me. I am a scientist. I have a phd and all the shiny credentials (dormant as they may be at this point). I have written many articles and a few books. I was chair of that panel that that man snuck his weirdness into. At one point I was the most famous person in my field. My field, mind you, had about a thousand people in it so to me that is like being king of the playground in 1^st grade or the best at cow chip flipping (no offense to the purveyors of that fine sport as well as the warriors of lawnmower drag racing). I am a tall man, 6-9 in bare, bunioned smelly feet. I am now a man in his 80’s. I am also, to some, a phantom. I will explain this later.

The conference was in Chicago. It was many decades ago. The hotel I was staying at was nice enough but I was used to the warmer weather of the south. The snow showers were stinging as I walked from my hotel out to the University and conference hall. I remember that well even now as it hinges on some weird corner of what came later, like a tile, a nail. The campus was huge and full of tiny snow drifts amongst students bundled to nearly appearing to be giant worms walking upright to the occasional frat boy in shorts and tennis shoes surely trying to prove his manhood to someone. It was, to them, just another Tuesday. I asked one of those bundled creatures “where are you from?” and heard “mmmphhhhh”. Then she took off her muffler revealing a pretty face with tired eyes and quickly spat out, “San Francisco” and rushed off, fading away into white.

I finally found the hall by asking around as the worthless little map I was provided was horribly designed (I also have a degree in cartography and did some work in that area too) and not only was wrong in scale and some icons but blew away in the first big gust as the snow began to intensify. A cocktail napkin would have been just as successful in the 40 mph gusts. It could have been written on in grey crayon too.

The large entry room was warm, marble tiled, oddly ornate and full of students dressed in suits with crooked little badges. I picked up my name badge from a boy who looked 12 but was a first year graduate student. He knew my work and pointed me to the room down the huge hall where I was to chair the panel. I looked out the front windows and saw it was snowing hard. So far from Florida.

Ok, enough of an old man rambling. You don’t want a blow by blow account of every step I took that day. I could describe every bite of my sandwich I had that day though, every crunch of the lettuce in the side salad, many more bits of detritus; that is how much of an impression he made on me.

The panel was called “Data Analysis Tabulation Processes and Methodologies”. A dry title to anyone not into weather I am sure, but to us a hot topic then. There were 4 people presenting. He was last. His presentation had a title that gave no indication of what was to come; “Statistical Analysis of apparent inconsistencies in Convective Cells and related phenomena”. He stood up to reveal that amazing suit on a giant of a man; he towered over the podium like he was to at any moment crush it with a pinkie finger. He began his 30 minute slot (which I later memorized from a tape an acquaintance made of the talks) with:

When updrafts rise they are known to pick up solar heat bouncing back, they are known to lift moisture high into the upper atmosphere above the freezing level in stronger thunderstorms which brings hail. We also know that clouds are not water magically defying gravity or up there on buoyancy and air currents alone; tiny bits of grass, leaves, insect wings and legs and soil float in those air currents and the water condenses like dew in the morning when you grab your paper. The thing I am reporting to you today is something else. These reports provide evidence of an exceedingly rare phenomenon. This phenomenon will be diagramed later in my slides and mathematical data at length.

The cumulonimbus being the tallest of clouds, born of the strongest rising motion, can release destructive downburst winds curling out from the rain shaft, it can also with dry air below bring virga only, that tail of lines drawn as though of pencil with instead wind hitting below, fanning fires, making dust storms. We also in it can debunk the fairy tale myths of hundreds of years of lore. The rains wine colored in many tales are not magical, not fantastic. Nor are the rains of frogs or fish or a million living crabs scurrying amidst outdoor weddings miles from shore. The colored rain is simply airborn silts and soils mixing with the other airborn particulates in water droplets that eventually fall as simple old rain. The Sahara a few times a year brings this to south Florida as well as Spain and Portugal. Nothing more to it.

The frogs and other creatures have been the subject of not only countless moments in magical stories but of woodblock prints, paintings and legends. This too is nothing more than simple science. A waterspout picks up creatures from the water and as it comes ashore and dissipates, they fall. The creatures are actually sometimes cooked after the fall by happy hungry observers. There is no mystery to any of these things. My latest research, however, is a bit different.

At this point it all seemed interesting, a nice take on language within a Meterology paper, a concise debunking of frivolities pinned to hard statistical data. But then he continued, hair flopping more excitedly on his head as he paced back and forth and continued with.

Case studies. One is a student in high school with a scholarship for college in that fall, one is a reporter with 20 years experience, the other is a Mathematician and trained sea captain. They have one thing in common. Let’s return to updrafts for a second. So, they lift up vapor and can mix with ash, smoke, pollution and particulates. Check. Rain drops form on floating bits of material. Check. There is much to this field of science that is yet to be understood, Check. Ok, here it is. They each heard bits of audio fall from a storm. Snippets, muffled among the thunder, but falling, undulating, one case repeating as it moved eastward at different volume levels. They heard conversations dropped from the downdraft amongst the rain and wind.

This was the point when we all were thinking that this was a train sliding off the proverbial rails. This was madness. A break from reality. A delusion born of sleep deprivation and isolation. To use his words “nothing more”. His greasy hair flopped around like a drunken jellyfish on his head as he spoke, thick clumps of shiny black hair doing slow serpent dances as he began moving around the area behind the podium as he spoke. This would only intensify. His amazing suit may as well have been a wad of old grey gum to all of us in the room as we were both fascinated and horrified by this bizarre work we were hearing amongst papers about rainfall rates near cities, cloud enhancement debunking data and statistical analysis methods for better tabulation drizzle data. I had to as chair make notes to prep questions when he was done. I just stared. He continued on with:

The reporter’s article published Aug. 4, 1952 included this section (shown on the slide behind me) “I was staying on the farm first built in this town out of the kindness of Farmer Joneston as my car was having trouble and it was late. I awoke to rolling plains thunder and spits of rain. It was a dry high based storm, I could tell by the lightning lighting the high based clouds above the farm and by the little batches of big fat rain drops. I went out to watch as he had given me a key if I needed to go before morning for some reason and as I headed out the back door of the farm house the wind was warm and the drops cracked like eggs on my head. I looked up waiting for the next lightning to light the night sky when I heard something else. It seemed to grow in volume from a muffled vague ruffling to what grew into some sort of clarity. I must say here that I am not crazy, was wide awake, was not drinking and have thought long and hard about even writing about this. Ok, here goes. It was voices. Yes. Two different voices that as they grew louder were of an older and a younger man, both with a firm almost grave tone of voice, one was saying something of a warning to the other but I only could make out a few words amongst the wind and my disbelief. The words were these: hill, wound, you can’t and something that sounded like bandage. Then it seemed to move east away fading into quiet and then nothing.

The sailors on the boat were a crew of 10. They all heard these words: gold, hurricane, fire, down, armada, Aruba. This fell during a dry thunderstorm of the coast of Texas. They were all on deck together in a dead calm as it also was a very high based storm. Here you see slides of their stories in 4 different newspapers and here are the drawings and notes of the captain who also was a mathematician of some note before he tired of it and returned to merchant work in the gulf.

The teen awoke just last year in Orange, California. Here are photos of him from the newspaper articles on his story with a corroborating account by a local meteorologist who could not give his name but was noted to be a well known local figure. The boy’s name is Jeff Ellings and he was up late studying when a warm rain with occasional thunder seemed to ease but then he heard what he thought were kids playing outside at 2 am. He ran out to see if they were ok and what in the world the parents were thinking allowing this. He walked for blocks and the sound never got closer or farther….he then realized it was undulating, rolling like thunder but of a young boy and girl. He heard sentences fairly clearly at one point in the loop of audio. Here is a tape of what her heard ‘I could make out certain words but they were in Japanese, the words translate to the wooden house is in flames we must run and the horses are running in circles , scared. He had read a few books on Japanese out of an extra credit project and a wish to teach English overseas while in college.

There are a dozen others. Here is the hard part. The thesis of it all. The first voices were soldiers. The second set were sailors in a galleon sinking on fire. The last were Japanese children. The pattern shown behind me in my data analysis shows that each case was a dry or semi dry higher based thunderstorm with a long reach downdraft. Each was a storm that had peaked and was in dissipation stage.

He produced photos, graphs, diagrams, math equations and a growing overview of how this was just science, data analysis, nothing more. This was in the early fifties so much of the later weirdness we now call weather was not even on our radar yet. He was a lone odd voice amongst the early days of radar and pre satellite images, really prehistoric times in comparison. This made him all the more odd and surreal in that suit with this wild thesis of his. The weirdest was the way he was actually convincing. He also seemed to have no tone of excitement or even interest beyond cotton dry research and data findings about the whole thing. He was suggesting that at times it can rain human voices somehow carried aloft. This was by far the wildest thing I had ever heard. This broke so many rules of physics and weather and yet he droned it all out in that flat tone like it was just simple facts; he had evidence and a an overview that actually by the end of his 30 min slot was really making sense to not just me.

Sailors for years were scared to speak of “St Elmo’s Fire” as to not seem insane; it is simply a heightened electrical field near impending lightning channels and is now basic knowledge in high school meteorology classes. Fighter pilots also never dared speak of seeing huge balls of plasma shooting high into the outer atmosphere like gooey bombs of fire above some storms. These sprites and jets are now studied in most Meteorology departments. Ball lightning has been noted to ooze out of televisions like crackling jellyfish during thunderstorms sometimes to pop like a soap bubble and other times such as the well documented incident back in 1638 in a church, to explode like a bomb killing 5 people. It was sci fi till that one plane flight where it crept along the floor in the plane on the one scientist’s trip to a conference, true story. Now it too is moved from crazy to cooled science. One noted physicist in the 1980’s published a paper arguing they are mini black holes, talk about weirdness right?

A hurricane in 2005 formed in waters too cold and too far north and hit Portugal. No one has explained that one and it was on the news worldwide. Even I knew of it way out here. Lightning actually partially rises up from the ground, the leader charge, few know this outside of weather folks but it is basic to us. A famous photo in many books on weather sold in stores in the 70’s had a man posing smiling by his truck in Texas; he had a tiny bolt of electricity about 4 feet high rising from his head …another much thicker rose from his truck ..others from two small trees behind him; meanwhile a bolt “struck a tree behind him. He was simply lucky. Rock paper scissors. He got lucky and his leader was not met in the channel to complete a circuit. Weather is weird. Science is weird. This man was weird in what he was saying but how were we to know he was not onto some breakthrough like these other odd things?

I wrote no notes. I was fascinated. This began a journey for me.

I am sitting right now in a place 10 thousand miles from where I grew up. I am typing these words on a typewriter not for affect but simply as it is all I have. I have no contacts back there. I have no mailing address. I am sitting at a tiny little table made of stone. I left one day on a whim, an impulse small and clean as a fish on a line. It could have been “buy milk” or “do another crossword” or “ do the dishes “ but it was “leave”. I got up and left. That was 1958. I opened the front door into the south Florida humid sun and just kept going. I had money in my wallet and in my bank account then. That was all I needed.

Walking led to a crowded city bus, to a shiny cab, to a packed newer model commuter plane, to the plan of a year of traveling around the world living in hotels (burned a huge research grant on that and surely pissed off a lot of people as it was for a team on hurricane research not for me). This “year” ended at hotel room with blood red curtains and my thinning wallet laid astride an overly comfy pillow as only 5 months of boredom, fits of depression and a realization almost iron clad as a mathematical equation or logic set : nomad = ghost=adrift=unmoored=transitory=ducking something…I wanted none of this, I just wanted a transition.

I then took a sketchy, rust patched old ship, then another even more beaten by the years, then a small boat possibly run by drug runners, then a few impossibly brightly colored ancient buses, and another month had gone by. This led to a donkey(yes, a donkey, he was a sweet animal and it saved money), a tired older horse, a carriage left behind by a failed circus with a driver who was a random guy in need of any money, a terrifying high mountain bus full of crooked eyed old women and finally an old car that careened down a high mountain with me just able to scramble out on a high Andean road to here. “HERE”. “NOW” I cannot say more of them and will not. They are just place markers. The irony is that it is pretty cold here right now. Kind of like that distant Chicago.

The man made a lot of sense. His last 10 minutes were not the usual summing up, ending too early or running out of time like the rest of us; it actually built like a story, an arc to it full instead with numbers, stats, charts and his narration of their interconnections. He finished to me with almost a crescendo and my foolish almost platonically smitten self had no questions for the 10 minute discussion and only one note. The note read “wait, could this be possible?” That was it. To my dismay there were only two general questions, one dismissive and mean, the other about dull details of his last graph.

After the panel was done, most people left to lunch with a look of bored annoyance or the blankness of total dismissal. I have come to know these looks well, but that is another story, well for no other time as I will never tell it. A few of us gathered around him and asked lots of questions, each getting a calm, articulate, logical answer. I went with the tiny group with him to lunch and we learned more of his background. He had been a meteorologist for many years doing research on electrical conductivity and ionic charges in thunderstorms (lightning is a combination of positive and negative charge ) and had a phd in electrical engineering and 2 master’s degrees in Meterology. He also told us of how he had been stunned by those findings he spoke of and how it changed his interests and frankly made lightning seem pretty unsweetened oatmeal dull in comparison. He calmed and his hair eased its earlier dance as he calmly loosened his tie and ate his sandwich, talking all the while.

I left that afternoon before giving my talk. Who cares I told the kid at the door as I left…his confused face shrinking behind in that huge entry hall. I chaired a panel. Did my part. This guy risked his career today. He just did the same as that reporter he quoted. I realized as he spoke that I had frankly never done such a thing. I had never considered it nor had any wilder ideas like that. I left lunch with the feeling that I also never would. I walked out improperly dressed into what had become a ferocious snowstorm. I did not care. The stinging needles were almost pleasing in that moment.

I welcomed any icicles to form on my nostril hairs hard like antennae on a crab in a shell. I welcomed ice fields on my eyelashes. I had room and board ready for each bit of snow that that clung to my foolishly worn khaki pants. I reached my hotel honestly disappointed that none of this came to pass. I went to a heated room and mini bar and it was like being punched in the face. Comfort. Familiarity. A womb of it. How familiar. The snow was framed by a thick paned window away to a feeble like moving painting of a far off concept as I changed into dry clothes and watched the room’s tv.

I should probably fill in some blanks here, scotch tape some sections, glue some of this old man’s ramblings/confessions here. I originally planned to mail this to several people when the day came to purge some of this ancient bile, nice pretty stamps on the outside envelope. Now I don’t even have those addresses anymore, lost some in luggage that plummeted down that Andean hill, others to the years and not caring any more.

I came back from that conference to a research job. I returned to a top end tv, closets full of clothes and 20 tv dinners in the refrigerator. I returned to the place that 3 days before was just stuff. At first it was just that usual dull returning from a short trip sense of the alien, then something rote, then something I kind of held in a deepening disdain. That brilliant, odd brave man soon faded back into academia, tucked in like a fold of butter into a bowl of cookie dough. He did not seem to have lost or gained a single thing from that crazy speech and amazing ideas. This infuriating and sad information dribbled my way over a long period of academic journals and letters from my few acquaintances.

Statistics are cold. Graphs are over-simplifications of massive varied data just to place information. Numbers are ice. He had been lost in these things as though he never spoke. At least he wasn’t raked over the clichéd coals for it, but I began to wonder if that at least would have shown that people reacted, cared, made the effort it takes to roast a carcass, to destroy something. He just went on with no ripple at all. Ignored. I was hoping however that this was temporary and he was onto something more with it, a book, a research grant, maybe, just maybe, my dream anyway, with a wilder notion to stun us all.

I, on the other hand ,was coasting on an earlier period of work that had perfected radar signature study as well as a method of better studying ship reports for storm position triangulation (this was the 50’s). I headed a 12 person team (each man had better ideas than me). I trained 2 young guys who had better dissertations than mine by a million miles. They carried notepads with them taking notes of my safe lizard like machinations and observations as though there may fart out greatness or a ladder to fame shown in some string of errant words. They even once did this was while we were at the urinals and I was babbling about obvious aspects of cloud formations.

I was really just so much ballast and inertia. This gnawed at me more and more over the next 3 years (the man spoke in 55). I basically filled my clothes with an efficient, smart man who likely was past his peak in a life of work that was lucky as a lottery winner in its timing and money. A talk on one panel I went to around that time that I went to to see a physicist speak spoke of how it may be possible to run gliders on the air streams behind jets as they break the sound barrier and how it also might be possible to use this for space travel behind rockets. I did not enjoy it at all. I was the vapor trail behind a jet, not the plane and definitely not that cloud that briefly forms as a barrier is broken.

That man may have had a mental breakdown that I saw science in. We may have been seeing the artifacts from a breaking in him, a break from reality filled with numbers and grand pale theories like Nash and those others. There is often that possibility. Those wild notions may have been on their own as valid as auras and pyramid power (look it up if you don’t know) but with all of his words and drawings and numbers it seemed so much more. The thing about theoretical science and research is that it does have a “fringe”. The wilder ideas are of what is possible, could be perhaps proven to cool into textbook chapters; cold fusion anyone? String theory out your window? But it also nears the mirror side sometimes of schizophrenia, of obsession, of science fiction and sometimes just plain balloon juice/road apples/bullshit. He at least took a chance on that stuff. He congealed something tangible and eventually tantalizing and seemingly quite plausible out of newspaper clippings that made a “leading scientist”(me) wander off in the snow frankly pissed at his life.

Need to pull out that scotch tape again here though dear reader, like what is the point, how is this tied to an empty house in Florida, a stone bench, a man erased, of other ideas, of weather?

I bought that blue house when things were peaking. The nice furniture I purchased when things were past it but I did not know it yet. The fridge was at one time filled only with expensive meats and things back when I cared about such things. Back at work months went by and things were fine, just fine. So much so that I contemplated stealing from a paper from a young phd. So much so that I stole office supplies just to do it. So much so that I held that paper on my desk telling him I was “reading it” to give him “feedback” which of course as I was supposedly somebody, that rock around my neck of past dull being first accomplishments thrilled him. It sat limply on the back corner of ignored things in my study. At first it was to read it. Pilot light lit inside,yep, uh sure I will check it out.

I was first with some radar interpretation advancements, not invented, not dreamed it up, not made it better, just first headed a team among many. The shipping reports was just obvious, so dully, drolly, painfully obvious that no one saw it. It was not inventive at all. To realize slowly that there really was nothing else grabbing me was not even a bother. That man though; he gnawed at me even as the journals few read began to rarely even mention his name.

1955 and 1956 I can describe in a few words really: smile, nod, blather, foam , look awake. There were a few conferences I chaired. A city. A hotel. Some notes to lead questions from the 10 people in a crowd. A plane flight. Meals. There was the hurricane a few us chased in a plane for a study. That pretty much was vomit, look at clouds, vomit, see the equipment fritzing out again. See the storm as a sheared goop of spinning low clouds and a few impotent little showers. Head back. Write a report to justify a grant and all stay up late finessing the details to sound more like something was seen, studied, happened. Published 2 papers that I cobbled together from old work and notes like some laughably shoddy b movie Frankenstein monster.

1957. It began with news from an old acquaintance about the guy in Chicago. He had run into him again. Told him how I was still interested in that talk. He was giving a presentation soon in Miami. I was full of giddy excitement, a sock hopper hearing that elvis was coming to town and remembered their name. My mind spun with possibilities of what that man had been up to, what wild notion he had snared in the name of research and science.

The next month or so, my team co-published a paper on radar signatures. It got notice in some journals and even a few newspapers. Give co author credit to time and timing on that one. It was not revolutionary, not groundbreaking, not even at the level other teams were clearly at. A reporter saw my name. He needed a lead on a science story with local color. Another paper saw the Miami newspaper’s article and picked up on it as did 3 others. To me it was all just stating the obvious, to the team it was stating the next thing and how near it was, to those national papers it was like predicting space cars that ran on spaghetti. They loved how oddball it all seemed, so wild and weird.

I arrived at the conference in Miami full of anticipation, strange jolts inside like errant lightning. It was nice to feel this again. I rushed across the campus not out of any hurry, but that giddy little ember returning again. He is here. I reached the conference hall early. I did not care. He may have something more on those concepts, perhaps it is some sort of convection and echo chamber physics we have never thought of. Maybe the voices are carried bouncing off those tiny bits of leaves and insect wings and the clouds, maybe, maybe. My mind was spinning anew, finally again awake.

I sat in the main conference lounge area drinking coffee for about 20 minutes next to a group of eager young grad students going over a talk on Radar errors. The coffee was mud, old from the morning clearly but was delicious to me. I savored every sip in the little throw away cup as the 20 something crew scrambled over their timing and graphs. No one noticed me. I realized years later in some random recall that their ideas were not only correct but would negate major notions of a few people including me. It would come when I was somewhere in Europe negotiating that failed lost year. In those minutes I just soaked up my own anticipation , gleefully , gloriously an anonymous invisible nothing in a plastic chair salivating over a coming talk by that wild man.

I checked my watch a few times as to not miss his slot and walked in just as he was about to speak. I hate to be rude , but there was to me no one else there, really, no one like an empty room. I grabbed a seat near the back as to not make a tiny spectacle of myself. His hair was short. It was really short. Like a gym teacher or a drill sergeant; it was a boring old crew cut. There would be no greasy octopus dancing on the man’s head as he uttered wild notions this time around. His suit was a generic grey. What happened to the wild piss yellow with the almost sharkskin? Where was the wild colored tie that seemed to whisper of some whiff of clowns or at least a used car salesman with something to prove? He looked different too, hard to explain, not 3 years older, but more robotically precise somehow. These were to me very troubling details.

He was introduced and began to speak at another one of those identical crappy wood podiums.

The title of my paper today is “radar signatures and you” (wow what a generic title…what is this an inspirational speech at a staff meeting in the lunch room?) I am going to discuss the common signatures of hurricanes on approach to land, thunderstorm clusters and cold frontal squalls. (wait..what? ) As we see in slide 1a behind me, the characteristic “eye” can be seen surrounded by an intense core. This “eye wall” can be noted as consistently being a strong rain signature that seems to coincide with the storm’s inner core (we all know this already don’t we? Even I have presented this stuff before, is this all he is shooting for now? Where is the other man? The one in Chicago?).

The core consists of greatest uplift and we can see it as the area of imminent wind damage. In slide 1b the thunderstorm line appears as….

This went on for 30 long dry as dust minutes. He showed a range of images. He made talking points. He discussed errors and machines. It was crashingly accurate, catastrophically concise and informational. At one point I recall daydreaming of a giant hand sucking him into the sky and away and no one really dropping a coffee in shock. It ended with a bow on top with a neat wrap up and summation with no larger point or theory or overview at all. It was like someone reading to you from the last few years of news magazines they had piled on a coffee table as though they had some point to doing so while you were trapped politely nearby in a chair.

No one chatted with him after. Well I did, but more as a parasite than a colleague. There were several questions this time. It was that whole conference game, ask a long drawn out question to hopefully appear eager, engaged and thoughtful but actually be flogging your own findings and research before some people who may bat an eyelash at it and maybe ask you a question instead. It is a passive aggressive , obtusely sadistic constant of such affairs. It is not unusual, normal and to the older salty dogs like me , extremely boring and amateurish. Six young men in suits did this that day after the man gave his dull , deeply erasable talk about something deep in the pocket of established norms and information.

He had lunch with me outside the hall where the free conference food had been laid out. We sat at the end of a long table. He complimented me on my latest team publication. He put down his roast beef and said “ nice work,I really enjoyed reading about it and how stable the data was kept in analysis and summation” I was mortified. He asked if we were hiring. He looked at me with something I did not like rising up in his eyes high above me as the tall man sat across from the table and said “You know if you guys will consider someone like me, I can work hard and will start at the low end position to earn your faith in me “ I was sad. He said his other talk got no reaction at all . With exasperation he explained that:

“I even published it twice which I thought would either get me offers or fired, but it just seemed no one cared either way about it, I after a while just lost interest because of it, I am now working on radar analysis”

I was floored.

He bought me lunch not to chat or reveal some new ideas he dared not speak of yet, but to butter me up and confess that he was sensing that he was never to get to where I was. He had come to accept in the way one accepts their lack of movie star looks or third arm. It was an awkward ,uncomfortable, deadening afternoon. My Elvis was revealed to be your friend’s dad in a button up sweater reading the paper at dinner .

This shaped the rest of the year. Hurricanes were tracked. I won a big award for the old work; after the ceremony I urinated on it and threw off an overpass from my rented car. The girlfriend left. I stopped buying nice meats and just stocked up on frozen dinners, some basic food stuffs and beer. Why waste the energy, why look for some ornate “special “ thing when it is all just fuel to turn to compost? I still had that young kid’s paper. I read it. It was good. It had things he would not realize had been lifted too. It was tempting I must admit. Really tempting since I did not have the guts to go out and smash random windshields, streak a conference with “I am a fraud” covering my hair body in say mustard or tell someone that in reality I have never been original. No, those would be too awkward, too much work. That man in Chicago had been a fetish to me, an outlet, a vicarious outlet of wild possibilities, innovation and risk. The guy I saw in Miami quietly murdered him while meekly wearing the same face.

I had wanted to freeze in that snow. I wanted it so bad but knew I did not have the guts to do it. The warmth of the nice hotel room was a punch to the face of here you are, back in your cozy place in the universe, and look it has snacks. This while a storm rages outside and some man may have just shot a hundred bullets into his career in a way you can only dream of.

One morning I awoke to small high based thunderstorms drifting into Miami from the south east and they were just as he had described. The high decaying thunderheads were laying lines high in the sky of virga, that rain that evaporates before it ever comes close to the ground, eaten by the dry air. I drove after the main one for 30 minutes north up the coast until it came ashore right above me, a few lightning strikes high over the empty beach. It was barely sunrise and it lit the dying thing red orange. I felt one rain drop hit my head. The cloud was shrinking and losing shape as it had lost that updraft that had somewhere at some time sparked it to life, whatever that is for such a thing. It died above me in a few minutes, the virga vanishing, the cloud breaking into a few parts. Then nothing. I must now confess. I actually thought that maybe this might be the time, those voices, that amazing thing the man spoke of, maybe of sailors, maybe some guy in Cuba speaking of the skies pre dawn to fall down to me slow like leaves in a breeze, or in this case a last gasp of breath. Maybe the guy was slumping down a beach just as broken and that shout was to be curse words , self hating words not some grand poetry.

Several things died on that beach that wasted tiny morning. The cloud and thunderstorm was just one.

The next day I left.

Sometimes it is just time. The procession of cars, ships , walking lost and even that ride on that animal's back out of desperation felt so visceral , so real ...it is really hard to explain but it was not the years before, not by any comparison. At one point I even spoke to some woman for hours on a filthy ship deck and she never once asked what I did, and it never occurred to me to bring it up or even think of anything beyond just being a seat on that passage, a vessel. Now in this tiny village, sadly, my past has caught up to me, my old name riding shot gun. One man found something on the internet. He then found others. This dead man spilled out site by site, lie by lie along with the past. I smiled when he told me excitedly that he found science fascinating and asked what I thought of the town's weather. This was a question that he has asked dozens of times before, I have lived here for 20 years and we used to work sweeping floors together. It is time move on again. That man has followed me here, that man that used to wear these same clothes, that mediocrity, that ghost of a man who drifted around florida and the weather like some dull bank of stratus waiting to be eaten alive by an afternoon sun as the hope of becoming a storm, some original turret of promise had faded with time.

May the miles again erase things.

Here is something I retyped as it came badly damaged from water, mold and age. I bought this from a distant relative who got it after this woman passed in a snow storm of some historical note. So I was told anyway. The other manuscripts were well written too but starts and sudden stops in a box of clothes and magazines with covers ripped clean off. The woman apparently was well known amongst other stenographers in her town back in the 50's. This will be the last text I show you. Please read on....

A Few Lost Pages

By Ann Larison

A cold icy morning in Chicago. That whim to not take the train for once. To walk, to break some pattern if even in such a meek tiny way. It brought me to him. Six in the morning and he was fused to a lamp post with ice, his mouth open like words were going to tumble out in cold brief clouds. His eyes were open like he was still waiting for a ride that didn’t come.

His arm and torso had fused to the pole with ice. His hands below the street sign made me think of hamburger, turkey, chicken wrapped in plastic, what my dinners might look like back in the slaughterhouse freezers, flesh and ice. My stomach churned in a little ugly flutter. Those horrible pits that had once been his eyes; they were like sinkholes in the street, just iced over. I wanted to shake it, this stupid frozen meat, this corpse, wake it up to beg it to explain what he had been thinking. I couldn’t get away.

I looked closer and saw more little horrors. His eyes were open sewers, his nose hairs were iced over like the feelers of a crab emerging from the shell, his eyebrows were melting ice in drops dripping across those open expressionless brown eyes in horrid little rivers toward his open mouth. I knew I would soon be running late. I just couldn’t help but stare, couldn’t pull away. You could almost see a thought, some faceless, lost thought trapped in that frozen piece of meat.

In a crazy impulse I put my hand in his coat pocket. There was a bundle, I could feel paper and rubber bands. An image of needles: I yanked my hand out. His coat pocket tore clean off, weakened in ice, the little worthless rectangle of fabric falling to the ground with a key, some bits of metal,what appeared to be a button. It was a rush. I have to admit it. It felt like when I stole a box of ice cream bars from the market as a kid bored over the summer. That strange thrill and fear.

There was something clenched in his dead iced right hand. It was melting tiny drops. In a crazy impulse I pulled them from his hand. No one was around. The ice cracked off in little pieces. It was a bundle in rubber bands. A pile of burger wrappers, those cardboard coffee cup temperature protectors, cereal box tops, candy bar wrappers. Junk. Refuse.

There was writing on them. Smeary pencils and pens of different dull colors and fades. I looked at the old cardboard of a really old burger container and in blue ball point was:

1.Shoes
2.Jacket
3.Hair
4.Pants

((((plan))))

.got it

It made no sense. He was simply insane. Yes, that was probably it. I took the little bundles anyway. Artifacts of a bored curiosity, what the hell. I put them in my backpack that I brought instead of a briefcase for the walk next to some papers. Whatever. I put it back in the rubber bands and away. As I rushed off as fast as possible to catch up some lost time I only looked back just once. As I moved away he grew smaller and smaller to me, big black shoes becoming ant sized dots, the whole corner just a bit of texture along a single street, a stain in the snow.

I came to work thirty minutes late and it was those minutes at the random corner with the frozen man, I carried those thirty minute throughout the day. Everything was one beat off.

Later that morning after a dull meeting I went back to my office. It sent one of those little crumbs tumbling in me, those little far corner memories. “Rise Rise young lions” went a poem we all studied back in college English class. I can’t picture the teacher’s face anymore, my mind lost the syllables of her short name, the color of the classroom walls, even most of the campus now after 17 years. That poem remains. It used to pump in me at 19, 21... seemed sad and fading when I got closer to 30, started to wipe away. Now it lurks at night clear as light and car alarms.

I worked for another hour or so before lunch and it was smoothly, placidly uneventful. I ate lunch warm in the windowless employee cafeteria in the middle of the building on the 5th floor. I could have done like some others and eaten in my office to keep appearances, that sense of layers and absence that is what management sometimes seems to be veined with. I am tired of that.

I am tired of so many things that it would be like some perverse anti-Christmas list of all the things I don’t want, can’t stand, hate, fear, feel bile and disgust for etc… I feel like I did in grad school that last semester when I looked around the room and at all the styro-foam coffee cups with cute little ironic doodles and messages, the steel coffee containers so sleek that scream student like italics, the little snacks and notepads and at everyone quoting dead French philosophers like it held up gravity and the planets at 2 in the afternoon on a fucking Wednesday. I should mention that I went to art school. Fancied myself a painter of enough potential to take out student loans. Not everyone follows their major after school, in fact some say that 90% don’t. I sit in that majority.

I finished lunch and when back in my office. ice. cracking. that man. It hit me again that it even happened, the tedium had so nicely dulled it into something smoothly unreal. The oddest part that I couldn’t shake was how he was dressed. It was like he bought the cheap piss colored ancient suit to go to some big dance. It was neat and pressed, a matching antique stale piss colored tie wrapped nicely around his neck. His shoes were polished and shined, an effect almost lost in the slush and ice around his feet.

After lunch I sat at my desk. Time crawled. Even more than usual. I made some calls. One was big with a major buyer back east. Oh , right. I forgot to mention to you what I do exactly. Exactly..that word is so specific..how about fog or oatmeal instead.. I work for a company that ships artwork and sets it up for museums and for private collectors that can’t bother with all the trouble. It isn’t a career in art but it is....

When I first started it was after a long dull series of jobs stirring lattes, packing boxes and eventually up into managing small businesses in auto parts and whatever else after fudging my resume to get out of the coffee and bookstore loop as 40 loomed. It was exciting at first, inspiring almost in a way. I thought it might stir me to paint, to do some video art again, to make some kind of conceptual leap inspired by art’s far proximity like a whiff of poetry in the stench of old musty books yeah, I know….

I talked to the client for 40 minutes about all kinds of tiny details and complaints, shiny specific figures to lure him in, dull ugly concerns. I then emailed some of my staff about a Sunday meeting that would be needed as a result. This was about as enjoyable as kicking your dog or gingerly pressing your lips up to a red hot radiator for 5 minutes at a stretch. I remembered the bundle of papers now surely melting in my back pack. I pulled them out to save some important documents and throw them away. I scanned the top one, red ink on a stained napkin:

He had offered me some gum. I said “yeah, sure” then he fumbled with it absent minded for so long that I forgot I had even asked. Minutes went by and I didn’t even want it. He looked more and more lost. It went from a simple bit of conversation then wandered on, mechanical. It was like the conversation had lost its skin, was just bones moving like they do.

Was this a quote from something? Did he carry it with him or was it just in the coat when he bought it used? I didn’t know what to do with what I just read. Should I turn it in to the police? Throw it away. I was panicking a little For a second it felt like I defiled a grave, it was a pang of recognition.
I pulled out another one from the now thawing pile. It was on a piece of a cereal box top

I sat in roses red light and had a sandwich and coffee. There was a picture on the wall. It looked about twenty years old. It was five people smiling in an open field between two groves of huge shade trees. They all had the same smile. They sat on a blanket. The smiles were like they were all laughing at the same joke, that laugh that just lifts out light and easy like the sunshine in the picture. I almost swore I was in front of a heater That would be a good trick. I swear on mom’s grave there was warmth coming out.

Who was he? I thought before that he was insane. I just saw anonymous crowds in white gowns in some huge old building behind barred windows and on its grounds under watch. Now I wasn’t sure. Damn. It had been so much easier. Why did he do it? What was it exactly that he did anyway? Why did he have to be there? Why in my path?

I worked the rest of the day feeling off, distracted. I got emails back agreeing to show up at the meeting when the scheduling was nailed, little glowing bundles of terse words professional and carefully servile in regards to surely ruined dinners, family birthdays warm with out of town relatives and whatever else that now to be wiped clean Sunday would have entailed.

I got out of work in a bitter cold Chicago. It wasn’t even the same one as that morning. I got out fast. Ran the few blocks whenever there were gaps in snow drifts and got to the train station. The light glowed warm orange against a few flurries beginning their fall from the lamps along the station. I had just missed a train and as it headed off I imagined the ride on it home, how much more time I would have to spend in the cold and how much later I would be home. At least 20 ice needled minutes passed me by until another came.

Once on the train I began to get tired in the plush seat and in the warmth. Places blurred by in colors, lights, the rattle of wheels on tracks a constant against the signs and parking lots. It was gloriously uneventful. I napped briefly into an odd dream about an older train station and its wooden benches and waiting, waiting. The dream was dull and seemed like hours. I snapped awake at some random stop and looked at my watch. Five whopping minutes had passed.

The morning walk took an hour easy. I had a ways to go. I looked in my backpack for a bottle of water and found instead the other rubber banded bundle. forgot all about it. It was not as iced as was almost pristine while the other had massed into a plump moist ball for the most part. I plucked out a random bit written in shaky pencil on one of those coffee hand guard things on the side that wasn’t meant to be seen and thus didn’t have the picture and phone number of some surely wonderful doofus real estate agent with a head like a pez dispenser and a smile that even smudged radiated dishonestly like the worst posed pictures can.

I saw a bus pull up. I was late. Two minutes. I ran. Caught the one right after it. Sat next to a woman in a dress I swear was made of drapes. I caught a glimpse of the bus ahead. The oneon time, on schedule. There was a guy that almost looked like me. He got the schedule. It pulled ahead at the lights just the same every time with a cloud of exhaust. The distance between us was two minutes on a watch long. Those two minutes I had lost forever even though I could see the smoke behind it, almost smell it.

There was no asylum anymore., just that piss colored suit, those shiny shoes, a collection of ice on hairs and the quiet before I kept walking, before Who were you in those pits for eyes and that open mouth? I wanted to shake him. Why? Why the hell did you go ? What is this? A journal? A diary? I was so upset I found myself shaking a little as I held the paper in my hand and the train shuttled along warm on its elevated track above the streets. Then just lights, warm seat, my weight and the rattle of the tracks.

I sat half asleep and thought about random junk drawer things: errands, things to fix in the bathroom, the cat’s little bald spots where he licked himself too much and what the hell to do or not do on January 7 , my 45th birthday. It was only November but that day would come soon enough and frankly I didn’t want it. I don’t feel old, it isn’t that.

I just don’t get excited about things on calendars or any thing that is supposed to be exciting and all that. Who cares about cakes and balloons at 45 when it was the same pretty much at 44,43,42,41? I mostly just doodled little meaningless swirls and stared at the blurs passing by. Out of boredom I rifled through my backpack. My fingers touched that bundle of papers again. All right, one more. Why not.

I drove with Him one time to see some relatives. We took all the small roads, the back roads, through desert towns and along the spine of what remained of route 66. I slept sometimes just from the heat. I noticed at night that several of the signs had burned out letters, misspellings along the roadside buzzing meekly and blacked out spots. Out of a need to just talk and something different from the radio and naps I mentioned it to him. He told me that he wondered sometimes if you could make sentences out of those missing letters, business notes along back ways, secret love notes in the buzzing broken signs for motels and drug stores along the 5. Or maybe it was just the miles and the quiet and nothing more. Who ever knows anyone anyway? he asked me , his eyes narrowing into a squint as I let go of something that seemed so interesting a few seconds before. We drove on in silence for quite a while, things just moving. I decided a ways down the road to still imagine it, to make it mine, to try anyway to make what he said disappear.

I got off a stop early by mistake. I thought it was my stop. Everything looked about right. Brilliant me didn’t catch the sign but saw the door open, recognized the usual clot of groggy people massing out in an easing bulge and the escalators. I shuffled and shrugged on through, accidentally elbowed someone and felt a soft cool strange cheek, got a flash of burning pain from a push from behind me in my back and ribs.

I glared back as far as I could in the crush and saw only the usual cluster of strangers. I wanted to yell, scream, sarcastically thank the jerk that sucker punched me or just was so careless with that sharp elbow. I instead said nothing, just turned back around and pushed ahead toward the door like everyone else in that madness of arms and shoulders that makes a crowd.

We eventually all uncoupled as we spilled out of the doors and I headed for the escalator.. I was a third of the way up when I heard the train pull away and caught the name of the stop, pretty much at the same time. One of the letters of the big plastic new station name looked like it was full of dirt or a rat nest in the warmth underground. I didn’t care to stop to see.

I slowly walked toward the shiny escalator and another crumb fell loose, dislodged. It was from an ancient yellowed papyrus of a place and time, more like a stale, brittle little nothing. I recalled the feeling sitting in a room on a Wednesday afternoon years ago in grad school staring at those coffee mugs and hearing yet another discussion of dead French men in relation to other dead French men, of reconsidering and questioning the point of reference through the words of other dead men and it was like being in the wrong body, the wrong eyes. I wanted with every hair, every atom to be working, to be in the real world again, swimming in its details. The talented were few and stood out glaringly as did their actual work ethic. Many people seemed to be just floating through.
It had felt like that this was all there was and like that was the biggest lie ever told. It was a pang of recognition I guess. There was surely far more than this and there surely was far less and it was just stasis, blank, empty spinning in place. I had had enough but had 2 months to wait to get out, it seemed like forever. A girl made a painting as part of her thesis. It was a painting of 2 horses, muscles flexing, manes in an impossible glowing light only a kid in college who never saw horses up close would see as real. The horses were facing 2 different directions, pulling with their tails tied together. The entire crit I wanted to put a plastic knife through it or pour all the coffee from those stupid personal mugs all over the damn thing.

The escalator moved up smoothly and slowly. No elbows, no crush. Everyone was spaced out just so and lifting slowly up in the train station at the same angle of dull ascent. The turnstile was almost entertaining as it banged my arms as I pushed through, my used ticket being swallowed in a little metal mouth and checked off to regurgitate the meaningless stub back in my hand.

As I left the station everything was that weird place between familiar and foreign. I had a little bit of cold drool on my lip from my semi nap. This could freeze I thought as I headed the few blocks home. I used to love the feeling. In undergrad at the University of Chicago we would bundle up into the snow in the middle of the night sometimes just for the novelty of it and to get out of the boredom of dorm life in another snowstorm with the same people all year. In grad school I didn’t have time except once to head out like that and we went into curtains of white in the streetlights. One by one we each seemed to disappear at times as we spread out. To be invisible. I was so sick after that I hallucinated a rain forest one night out of all my snot tissues and soup bowls.

I thought of the frozen guy for a second again. Those notes were more interesting than any of the crap I made the first few years after school before I got busy and he had them on burger wrappers. I took 2 classes alone on how to mount your little treasured crumbs properly and my great works had the equivalent value of a letter of his text on a box top.

It is so hard to assess though. Everything old seems to look like someone else’s after a while. So many thing belong to the other guy that used to use these eyes. There is a crowd of them in old photographs of someone, of older pics of me, one of those other tenants. Whatever. He was some dead guy. He died with that stuff in his hand.

There is this other crowd of people, a fog of them , an oatmeal, a yellowing wallpaper pattern in a city. You see them in coffee shops scribbling away or clacking on laptops loudly clinging to the mythology of some big shot chomping a cartoon cigar pausing to glance and being dumbstruck by some random thing they carried at the ready. They are just part of the furniture, a lamp, an overly gaudy red upholstered chair, those curtains, Victorian just so. If cliches were a crayon box they would be its flashy silver or dull white and we know how much the kid will use those. I am not one them. I am not. At least I am not that...

I passed a closed sandwich place and an all night market. My task part of my brain thought of several details of work I almost forgot, little odds and ends but I rotated them dutifully in little loops in my head for several blocks to not forget. The air was stinging cold now but as long as I was preoccupied I almost couldn't feel it quite as intensely. Little lists of things can dull things nicely. Clip things too.

The streets grew comfortably familiar and the distance home felt shorter and shorter. I passed the sign for a movie theater that had recently closed, the letters for the last film still up but with a few missing, fallen off in the last storm or maybe taken by some of the more devoted or spiteful pimply teenagers that had lost their jobs manning glass candy caverns or robotic ticket punching. The word was that it was to become a chain book store and that they would keep the sign and the front the same, keep the feel, but rip out all the screens and old velveteen seats.

I walked dutifully on and had one of those ridiculous little conversations with no answer in my head.What was wrong with you? Were you so excited that you didn’t feel the ice? Were you wanting to make some one somewhere else feel lost because of you? Were you the only one actually wanting to disappear? To make that moment linger? I heard no answers back and the odd part is that on some level it was very pleasing even as I really wanted an answer.

After a while I just slowed down a bit. At first it was because I was lost, then it was because I thought I recognized someone, then it just felt right. There was the booted car on 3rd street that had been there all month, the orange metal bear trap on a tire now completely flat, the park where all the dogs would run in the summer now coated in early snow and soon in a few hours, ice. “There sometimes is simply nowhere farther to go” some forgotten professor of mine once said in some lost afternoon in some long wiped away crit. It tumbled out like a little lost orphan. It fell out of somewhere.

With no more streets to drift through and the time before freezing not too far off I turned the corner of my street toward home.

My wife had dinner on the table as I was late. My keys thudded dull and heavy in the basket by the door as I took off my coat. She had the heat on high to keep out the cold. As I walked to the kitchen table the light illuminated the tile we put in last year anew and pinpointed each of the cracks growing from the bad job I did with the adhesive. Dinner smelled wonderful, even I noticed that. She was sipping a glass of wine with that look in her eye that has grown to be part of the family lately, something between warm and cold like the house and so much else.

We sat to dinner and she asked about work. . I said fine. What would I tell her? I saw a frozen man dressed in a piss yellow suit ready for a dance in the Chicago winter cold..I just wandered around in the near freezing air on purpose.. I calmly over dinner described the details of my day, my train ride home when I slept awkwardly against the rattling window, my lunch , the meeting and something I read in the paper recently.
She passed me the bread in the neat little basket we got as a wedding present, the wood a little scuffed on the corner. The butter substitute was actually pretty tasty and melted off the steel of my knife onto the warm bread softly. I felt relaxed as she told me about her day teaching elementary school and the pipes wheezed a bit. After dinner we sat watching tv for a few hours then went to bed as a few isolated flurries blew in off the lake, the little flakes almost impossible to detect if not for the streetlights.

I waited until she had gone to sleep and got up and went to the bathroom. I then went to the kitchen and pulled some of those odd little stained and partially smeared papers from his hand mixed in accidentally with a pile of old ketchup and beer stained sketches from school from the bottom of the junk drawer where I tossed them, odd musty smells coming from somewhere in the pile. I laid them out on the table and started sorting through them at first, then rifling through then just trying to piece something together then just shifting them around as it got late.

The pieces of paper and cardboard were scattered everywhere. I spent a couple of hours trying to place them in some kind of order….chronological…..in some storyline…..by the type of ink or pencil…..It was impossible. It was impossible to tell.

I dumped out all the scraps from that man on the floor. A dead sea scroll of another's life..what was I expecting to find..can anyone find? A diary perhaps....maybe a way to actually at least kind of figure that frozen man out. I shuffled the pile for at least an hour and ….nothing.

I threw the little wrappers and scraps unceremoniously away in the soggy coffee rinds and dinner remnants in the kitchen trash like some anonymous burial at sea during war time.

I tried not to think about anything the next day. I went on the train like always, focused on tasks at hand, got it done, sucked it up. Enough walks and enough surprises. Enough faces and facing. At work the next day I selected the date for the meeting. It was to surely form curses under the polite replies all over again. There was one little scrap among my papers. Threw it away.

By the way...the last hard to read scrap somehow fused in some corner of my briefcase by the way was this:

well planned trips away with the young bride to the sunlit beaches of Florida for the weekend, Beer and pizza with the guys at a warm favorite bar to watch the game, dinners out with a new date in a candle lit restaurant with framed photos of nature scenes of mountains and groves of shade trees then dancing. distant flashes ...someone else’s lightning..just confetti..enough..going....tonight....hope to see ..(the last part after this was smeary and illegible)

The employees under me would surely reply in tersely written emails leaking politics and reeking of something more hidden away, maybe even clustered curse word and vitriolic poison phrases pointed my way before fingers discreetly hit erase..

Sun Jan 7. The letters glowed incandescent like little ugly lamps as my fingers guided the little pointer toward “send”. Meetings. No celebrations, no sun, nothing but the dull blizzard of white of a meeting room, dry erase boards, no windows to look at and see those bits of something far, far away.

Coffee, chairs and stasis for all.

It was my job,my choice.

choice, yes ….like breaking off something iced over. like running past the lake and not stopping...

I thought of a frozen man,At least he disappeared himself, he kept going...did that whatever it was ...I deleted the message instead. Gone. Each word a face lost in the snow. At least someone would find something, some afternoon , some moment from what I could erase, could create, at least for someone else, at least for once an action amidst this dull fog of day

That is not the end of that story, it is just where it ceased. She had written more lines it appears many times to white them out , all in pencil. The bottom of the page is torn clean off , not sure if this was her or in transit from Ohio to me years later.

Was it a great Picasso that I burned? No. Was it a valuable one? Name a Picasso that isn’t. It is that name. That man surely could have signed a diaper and it would now be worth a yacht. That thing had been one of the big draws to my collection when other art collector types came to dinner. The play was by Arthur Miller that also did and it was dreadful. There also was the sketch by Newton that I secretly already knew was not only dead wrong in the idea , his quickest of flicks of pencil, but was a fake. I had been duped by it for a lot of money. I came to swap them out sometimes for drawings my nephew did for me for a few bucks and a play I wrote when I was in college that was not even the same topic and was worth about the price of the paper; no one ever noticed.

Over the years I came to bring out works that my nephew made as poorly as possible by my instructions with attached names ever more the impossible and ludicrous, da vinci, tesla, Shakespeare.. I only once in a while caught the crooked eyebrow or two of some doubt among hundreds of guests and visitors over the decades. When I bored of this game and my nephew moved away I had to move to something else. I began to sell the fakes to these people. Then I felt a bit guilty and sold the lot, every last work I ever owned. Like shaving your head after years of being on a soap opera is some dramatic cartoonish fictional man to destroy something, erase it, wish it away into the cornfield.

I once got drunk and broke into my brother’s gallery and threw every item into a storage locker I parked behind in the alley. I filled it with fakes I paid art students to make that were pretty accurate but each had a tiny piece missing: a finger on a statue, a word on a text and image painting, etc. He noticed after 2 days and was furious. I brought them all back . A year later I filled his living room with police tape outlines on his expensive floor and the ugliest giant taxidermy bears and dogs I could find. He was such an arrogant self infatuated bastard, still is. My motive was never totally clear but it was exhilarating. We rarely speak and this is fine with me; he is the mirror of me and the other way around, at least I like to think so.

I first bought a painting that had been erased back when I still thought collecting fine things made me. It was expensive and was not by the one artist most famous for the idea. It struck me somehow very deeply though. There was nothing there and it had been taken away and would never be beautiful or grand, but hey, there it was. This led to buying an empty book written as an experiment by the son of a famous novelist, a horrid photo by the son of a great nature photographer and then more importantly an absolute crashing failure by a young writer that had been dumped by the publisher decades before I found it in a junk shop I searched for rare books once in a while. This was no rare book, worth about a slice of pizza when it came out and was dumped. Everything was wrong with it, but parts were not bad, in fact were rather good, the intro was brilliant, a flash of light for half a page even as it led to total dreck.

This one book was like fishing for diamonds in a pond full of forgotten sewage. There was grace in certain sentences and it was though I had to save it from oblivion, had the urge to tell someone about this forgotten, this “failed” thing. I paid people to help me find others. I bought a new bookshelf made of oak just for them. Another find was a book of short stories by some artist/theorist that attempted to connect to some big idea that failed into 3 great paragraphs, 2 pages of awkwardness but good ideas swimming for air in those sentences and 200 pages of crashing , hurtling obtuse to the point of bordering on gibberish pretention. This went on the top shelf on a little book holder that once held that Arthur miller play.

My great-grandfather helped my father with money and ideas. He worked in a mill until he broke his back and you will never find his name in any book. His son saw to that. His name he forced into newspaper articles a few times literally by gunpoint . His insecurities far outshone his great invention if you actually had to know the man. Soon no one living will. The stories will be the man, and many he threatened or pressured folks to make with him in the most flattering of light. Yes he invented that thing that we use like shoe laces; he also stole half of it from another man but that is neither here nor there anymore.

I collect failures, crashing ill conceived ones to the ideas never finished or simply abandoned over time. There is a strange grace in the glimmer left without completion and the work that has no overbearing provenance of some birth given famous name. To fail is subjective, a naming like that Picasso painting I burnt to a crisp, just the opposite. His name carried on shit is deemed as valid as long as his name holds that ballast. These things I dig for in boxes sent to me are sometimes simply the idea, the one solid metaphor or two or three, that one string of sentences or even a whole text. They may be the toenail clippings , what is shed in a life, but they also are that unencumbered. There is something to this to me, something that I have filled rooms with, would fight a man over till my old body failed in the effort, something so criminally underappreciated in this goddamn world.

These are artifacts. These names were cobbled affectionately by parents for that little hope filled ghost like mass within a mother before it is thrust into this place, not signed on napkins by some arrogant fraud or to a canvas by a name loaded with monetary value and some accumulated weight , the whole affair little different to me now than forgeries and theater make up. These items will forever be incomplete, nothing more than the grace of a sum of parts.

Nothing more. And this will never evaporate until these pages leave this earth in fire, flood or whatever takes us all.