The Streets Are Paved With Gold

Before I emigrated to this city, I was told "The streets were paved with gold", and they were right!

It's not high quality gold - like a half a karat gold - and not the whole street, just the yellow line down the middle.

What you think when you hear that over in the old country is that you can just dig up the street and use it for currency if things get tight, and things always get tight. 

Trouble is, everyone else has the same idea. When you dig it up, the department of Public Works comes and fills it up again, so really, that depresses the price of gold quite a lot. Plus, there's a little tax on it, like a property tax that goes up the more the streets have to have their gold refilled.  So, it's like finding a quarter on the sidewalk. 

Good luck finding anything for a quarter. 

It doesn't take a genius to figure out the real money is in the Public Works Department. Sure, there are laws restricting access to the street filling gold material, and it follows the chain of provenance just like criminal evidence does. It's actually pretty tight. But at every transition point, every transit point, there's a possibility of expropriation. And the gold gleaners have a pretty standard routine: dig up the streets in a particular pattern so the Public Works gold paving trucks will follow a predictable route, and grab just enough gold when it's exposed so it's under the "shrinkage" limit. Then you have to take it home to a home smelter, and that has to be hidden from the thermal detection vans that prowl the streets. It's one of those situations that quickly becomes more trouble than it's worth. 

So, the City Council recently decided that the positive publicity of "gold in the streets" is not worth it, and they actually lose money on it, so last month they started replacing the center lines with painted yellow ones like other cities have. It's actually a lot more visible than the old gold center lines. It means faster traffic, though, because people used to be more cautious and curious around the gold in the street. 

Remediating the street was a municipal task, so it went to the lowest bidder of course. They got a slightly higher quote than they wanted, but the Council signed off on it, and it was finished up last week, except for getting some of the specialized trucks off the streets that were parked there. 

My rock hunting niece called me yesterday with some very interesting information. She was walking on the way to the bus, and while crossing the street she heard some ticking in her backpack. It turns out she had turned on her Geiger counter by mistake, and to make a long story short, the yellow lines in the middle of the street are full of depleted uranium waste. So basically, we decided to replace the inert street gold with material that turned the whole city into a Superfund site. 

Surreptitiously peeling off some stickers on the remaining trucks, it turns out the real paving company, run by the mayor's cousin, has had many judgements against it and is forbidden from operating in the state. 

This story is still breaking, but there doesn't seem to be an  upside to it. Depleted uranium is pretty useless unless you want to poke a hole in a tank or something. It'll either have to be dug up or coated with a layer of lead and real yellow paint, which doesn't sound like a good solution. Online, people are posting how much they like the new, brighter yellow lines and for them, that's the end of the conversation.

Meanwhile, the other city attraction, the Fountain Of Youth, is being shut off after a study concluded that the water therein doesn't make you any younger. 

Message in a Bottle

 Message in a bottle

Aug 13, 1979

Valentine Basilevich Glass, native of Vyborg, accountant in the bureau of administration of the Leningrad Parks of Culture and Rest, lead a number of unrelated lives. Whereas most people were trapped by the web of Soviet bureaucracy, he reveled in its complexity and quirkiness, finding in the course of his work numerous loopholes which he impressed in his memory, an unconscious act much like anticipating an annoying scratch on a phonograph record. Over the years he had become sensitive to these flaws, as a barefoot man can feel the grain of the wooden floor or the hot and cold spots in a mattress. He played the system with the knowledge and confidence of a blind pianist in recital. 

He had an upright piano in his flat, and the F sharp over middle C had a defective damper that was a characteristic of this piano from his mother’s day. Yes, an "Etude in D" would have a drone throughout, as would B minor fugues, Lieder in A, and Elegies in F# minor. A short chromatic run in an otherwise diatonic melody would send less sophisticated people running with their hands clasped tightly over their ears, the diminished fifth being too much of a reminder of the inadequacy of a seven tone scale.  

Glass, who was brought up not only with a strong atonal influence, but with a long line of experimentally tuned instruments, improvised melodies that made use of the inadequacies of the instruments he had available. His apartment was cluttered with wolfish violas, creaking clarinets, a harp for which spare parts were unattainable,  a harmonium with a leaking bellows. Each he played with varying proficiency. He was the opposite of the perfectionist musician – who had to polish his instruments with certain cloths and varnishes, and could only play within certain temperature ranges – for he played old and new, cheap, broken unsallied Instruments as they were, always finding the voice of each, and highlighting its uniqueness. 

He could tell, even in a recording, that a the piano's linkage was sluggish in the lower registers, and that Sviatoslav Richter (or whoever the soloist was) usually discovered this too late and altered his style midway through the movement.  It was this kind of sensitivity which enabled him to discover all the spies in his department. 

So, what seemed to be a toleration of the insane systems of the Soviets was in fact a fascination with and exploitation of its numerous flaws. For example, he created a number of employees on paper, he obtained visas for them, identifications for them, leaked certain information to the spies that he knew to flush out more spies, and occasionally called upon his minimal acting talent to impersonate them.  A mainstay of his technique was suggestion – an assumption planted months ahead of time in many peoples minds, and anecdotes odd enough to be propagated beyond any of his known contacts, in phone calls, "wrong numbers," asking for one of these characters with qualifying adjectives and bits of information which are easily taken, by means of their accidental nature, for truth, and letters to organizations that he knew were being monitored by certain people as pet projects, and by misinforming tourists, the most gullible of information sources. 

And the amazing thing was that it was all done out of his own perversity, as a hobby, and was not suspected even by the Americans, whose  operations lacked in quality which they made up with quantity. 
Let it be said that his defection was a consequence of this perversity: not only did he leave, he did so in such a way that he was expected back after a few months. Part of his cover was his fluency in Finnish and his rough Finnish features, for his trip took him from Vyborg to Helsingör to Visby to Uppsala, a route logical enough for a Finnish professor on sabbatical. From Uppsala he went west to Malmö, across the Øresund to Copenhagen. He showed up in theatre orchestras, atomic protest rallies, left one of those cryptic classifieds in the International Herald Tribune, and made his way to Paris and Avenue Foch, where a huge apartment was waiting for him. The sizable Russian community in Paris provided him with much material. He traded art to support himself, some of it forged, and a good number of it under one  or another of his many names.

Still, to enter any bar with a vacant piano filled him with an urge to test it, to run it through, to find its flaws.  His private jokes got to the point where he would become a different character depending on the flaws he found in the piano, whose various tics and attitudes would be complementing the instrument’s inadequacy.  It determined how deaf he would make himself, how short tempered, how somnambulistic, how languid, or how Polish, Finnish, Swedish, Parisian, American or Farsi his French would eventually tumble out in. He created pools of character into which his admirers and detractors alike contributed their streams. 

Some days, to aggravate some Parisian paper tiger, he would feign left-handedness in a way that caused discomfort to all in a subliminal way,  or walk with a limp with an ease  that made onlookers proud to see a man who so nonchalantly overcame his handicap. The little impressions, popularly thought to be uncountable in one's assessment of another's character, he had discovered could be enumerated and controlled, and he required at most four tics and an anecdote or two to establish a lasting reputation. He never ceased to be amazed at other peoples malleability, their willingness to be exploited and manipulated. The more he thought about it, the more he realized how much time they spent fooling themselves, about the nature of their hierarchies, their habits of exchange, their definitions of power and impotence, the desirability of their goals, about the nature of inspiration and impressions, their Mana-filled Tiki's, their unspoken taboos. They expected to hear the same things over and over again, reinforcing these illusions. Their aesthetics and politics, popular or unpopular, all were based in the system of hot and cold mattress spots, pointers toward hollow symbols, clear and yet confusing choices. Glass played hypocrisy as he played faulty pianos. It only challenged him, never offending him. He had no contempt for other people, as he had no contempt for poor instrument. It made life interesting for him. 

Glass was uneager to express his convictions, as doing so necessarily treads on many exposed toes, and besides, it was to his advantage to keep his marks uninformed, and he was forced to acknowledge that he himself had to bow to the symbolic actions, even if they were conducted at a different level with different symbols. Yet, how much suffering could be eliminated by the simple realization that one's own values were not universal? How many lives would be saved by a demystification of money, monogamy, and policy? How much energy could be saved by realizing that one has two feet and warm blood? How much guilt could be dismissed when one realizes that reproduction is as natural as sneezing? 

His obsession, combined with his creativity, up to now only found expression in his private journals. He kept one in each of the seven or eight languages he was proficient in, translating from one to the other, and refining his thoughts through translation. This way everything he wrote got a second look, and he could guard against his own capacity. His art now juxtaposed established symbols against each other, eroded rules of composition, sought to make the picture plane dirty, to show Madonnas engaged in scenes not reported in the Gospels, he specified that still lives be hung over windows and mirrors to drive in the point that the world of life is not still. But he found that as an artist he could not be taken seriously by enough people to cause any real change. He doubted he could cause these changes even if he had the power of the Church, for he knew how deeply rooted one's personal system of values could be. He realized that the only chance would be in early indoctrinations, but how to instruct without becoming a catechism? He had learned at the keyboard of a broken piano. But what more common means could he use to turn the masses from passive participation to critical and adaptive production? So little thinking was required by a culture which pretended to provide choices when offering only dead ends.

I will leave Glass where he is and tell you know how I have manipulated you throughout this story. I started with the name "Glass", which I selected for the numerous puns and connotations it could have, and a wholly ridiculous job in a wholly foreign environment in order to create interest in the character:  as a rogue, imposter, sly fellow, multilingual, and multinational.  The plural-ness of his character, shown to be a farce and a manipulation, is an attempt to show, through a process of identification, the plurality of Everyman. A long part of the story was devoted to comparing the limits of culture to the limits of flawed pianos. I regret that I could not work in the idea that even music itself, as codified in the West, was restricting and constraining  Glass's artistic forces, and that the theme of "Tema con Variazione" were themselves variations. Perhaps you recognize in Glass's art similar designs of the modern art movements of this century, and perhaps that art is clear to you now. I hope that you will realize that all symbolic transactions are based on tacit assumptions which vary from culture to culture and indeed need no culture to mother them. Observing the flawed glass of culture should help you respect and identify it.

Dust and Shavings

 2014-09-29 01:56:04-0400

                                   Dust and Shavings

The weather was beautiful, but I brushed the pine cones off of the car hood and set off on the 10 hour trip to visit my father's old buddy Richard "Rivet" O'Day. O'Day wrote me a few weeks ago to say he'd found some memorabilia of my father's in the back of an old filing cabinet in his garage, and a few other things he thought I'd like to see. I felt like I needed a break from Amy anyway, so I gassed up - I always carry a few extra gallons in the trunk - and off I went.

Driving through the night is the best way to get to the middle of the desert.

I got into Rivet's at about 10AM, and I was hungry. He lived in an adobe-like dwelling with pair of Army surplus quonset huts and a few tin shacks in the back. There was a working oil rig there too - repurposed to pump water. Rivet was a clever guy with tools. He borrowed a lot of them from work and had quite a collection of precise milling and drilling machines, toolmaking equipment, tiny welding torches, and testing equipment. He was a bit of a fanatic - all his kitchen cabinets have brass labels on them describing the contents, engraved using the classic engineer's Leroy typeface.

We shared  breakfast burritos, served on turned anodized aluminum plates, which he had made out of recycled travel cases used by some missile salesmen in the early 60s.

The design of his house cleverly kept the dust and sand out, which was good, since it was downwind of some former nuclear test sites. Solar cells, recycled from some failed government project or other, and a geothermal system he had drilled himself, kept the house pretty cool. "Your car will be happier in the garage," he said, and pushed open the door and a second door, which helped keep the inside cool. I drove in while he switched on the lights.

The garage was filled with finished and unfinished projects. I'd visited here years ago, but now I could really see how densely this room was populated with all kinds of machines. I remembered the smell of oil, acetone, and metal dust. He had presses and wire-making tools. He had a small crucible with a centrifuge in it. He has a few barrels of scrap metal shavings. A few tires were dissolving in vats and the reprocessed rubber was dripping into some glass jars. Nothing was wasted.

It wasn't all antique either, he had a well organized cabinet of computer parts and breadboards, logic scopes, and a few not very out of date computers.
Over a desk on the other side of the room, where some kind of tachometer was installed, was a 1952 pinup calendar. Miss November has just dropped a wrench. Miss November was my mom.

"I'm still working on a few things," said Rivet, "That's how I found your fathers's stuff. Here you go," and he handed me a wooden box. Inside were a hat and coveralls, which I remembered seeing him wear in an old photograph. A box of index cards, a screwdriver set, some papers that looked like contracts or discharge papers.

"That's a nice car you have," he said looking back at my restored Luxia Panther. It looks like a typical car at inspection time, but the whole body is customizable, and I like to replace pieces of it with different styles and colors. Its unique propulsion design lets me cut in up to four separate engines when I need the power. "Just like your dad. He loved cars almost as much as I do. Come back here for a second." He walked to the back of the hut and let me out the back door to the other quonset hut. As we left, the lights went out automatically.

The other hut had four doors to get through. It was clearly more insulated and the last door was especially heavy. Inside, several vehicles were seen covered with drop cloths. Hanging on the walls were a lot of drive belts, bent metal tubes, glass blobs on shelves, and old cans of various oils.

"This one's 'The Shaker'," Rivet explained as he took off the cloth from the closest machine. "It has no wheels, it vibrates the bottom to move around, The top moves in the exact opposite direction, so you never feel it. It has a side effect of tamping down a pretty usable road!" I could see it also had a kind of weed-whacker device underneath to help clear a path.

Another cloth came off. "Stilts," said Rivet. Telescoping legs with a magnetic connection between them could assist your running by growing longer the faster you ran. "You don't want to trip while you're in this thing," said Rivet, rubbing his chin, which I noticed was just a bit asymmetrical.

"Look up," he said and pointed to a kite with sails that could unfurl for more power, "He made this when it was tough to get gas for the motorboat. He also used it with roller skates."

"And back here is something I always think about and I'm hoping you'll take it off my hands, since you like cars."

Under the closest tarp was a pretty snazzy looking '58 Buick Estate Wagon. "Solid," I said as I banged on the hood. It was a kind of a dull bang.  Peering through the window, I could see that it had a few extra controls on the floor. The back of the wagon was filled with something squat and cylindrical. "This thing is still ahead of its time," said Rivet, walking over to a cabinet to get its key.
It looked OK for being neglected for a few years. There were a few dead mice under the rear bumper. There was a strange sand-blasted look to the trim.

"Did Hess ever tell you about this car?" asked Rivet.

"He said he had built a car once when I was working on that Ford Fairlane in high school, but otherwise no."

"Well this is the car, then." he said, trying the key. A vigorous honk made us jump a little. "Electrical's working apparently. That's a good sign."

The door was a little stiff, but the lights came on. The dashboard lit up, and where the radio would have been was a small group of dials and switches.

"There was a problem we were working on that needed some extracurricular activity," explained Rivet. "Atoms for Peace was a dangerous failure. But we figured the main problem was that we were using atomic energy for unnatural purposes. Explosions happen when the chain reaction in not isolated in a vacuum or magnetic bubble. So we figured out what the tiniest mass could be that would sustain a reaction and then isolated it in a magnetic bubble in a vacuum. The trick was to machine permanent magnets in precise shapes that are the inverse of their 3d field structure. You have to make a lot of these shards and they are pretty small. The two geometries cancel out, leaving a magnetic bubble, with a little magnetic lens on one side. That's it in the back of the car." He pulled a release and the hood popped open and rolled back. "We replaced the V8 with these twin plasma turbines. A stream of ions spins the turbines over here, and are re-compressed on the other side.
We had to rebuild the gearbox because the speed was too high and we couldn't fine tune the plasma stream safely. So we invented this continuous ratio gear system based on hyperbolic conical gears carved in what we'd call a fractal pattern today. The rest of the car is pretty standard."

"So, are you telling my that you and my Dad built an atomic car in 1958?" I asked, picking my jaw up from the floor.

"1961. It was a used car. It was bought as the family car when you and your sister were born."

"But this is insane? How many patents did you take out?"

"We were using the government's patents for some of the milling and refining. The shape of the core is remarkable, and is a tribute to your father's love of origami."

"So this thing works?"

"Yes and no. It doesn't have a reverse gear in the usual sense. The gear design didn't allow for it, so we just put it in neutral and pushed it where it need to go. Also, we were afraid to take it up over 150MPH."

"150!!?"

"Even that was a little suspicious. But then we had to figure out how to slow it down without causing damage to the gearbox, since the turbines spin at a constant 50,000 RPM speed. Incidentally, the gyroscopic effect of those turbines makes for an extremely stable ride. You actually have to tilt them when cornering. There's an extra pantograph welded onto the steering linkage that does this," he continued, pointing to the metal scissors-like contraption.

"So this thing works?" I repeated.

"Let's see," said Rivet, settling into the driver's seat. "Hop in. Hey, look!"
Under the front passengers seat was a plastic rattle. "This belong to you?" he chuckled. Then he turned the key and a vibration started, slowly building into a whine.

 "We scraped up enough U-238 to last 200 years. This system is very efficient because it's a closed system. When you shut it down, it really just recycles the alpha particles back in a  loop. You can't really shut it off. In a sense, it's been running since 1961. Sometimes the lens gets out of alignment and you can hear the turbine go down from a slightly sharp "B" to something like a "G flat". When that happens, you have to refocus it, with this red knob here."

"OK, into neutral so we can back it out." I noticed that handles had thoughtfully been added to the trim. I grabbed one and pushed it back. For such a heavy vehicle, it was surprisingly easy to move. Rivet opened the back of the hut with an old TV remote.

"How can this be safe? I mean, in an accident, wouldn't there be some concern about, oh, ground zero on Route 66?"

"It's been in accidents. Not bad ones. There's a cage you can see right here and we put in seat belts taken from an old DC-3. There were no radiation leaks, you can check with the Geiger counter dial."

The dial was pointing to a green segment.

By this time we were out in the open. We pointed the car toward a distant box canyon. The fins and tail lights really put me in a space-age mood.

"OK, ready to roll!" said Rivet, adjusting the rearview mirror and pulling my door shut with a back scratcher. From the mirror hung two fuzzy mushrooms. "Your Mom made these," he said.

"Did she ever ride in this?"

"Oh yeah. She drove it in a friendly little race we had. A bunch of dragsters wanted to prove something. You'll see, the way the car accelerates is pretty unusual. It was kind of a surprise to them."

He stepped on the clutch and pulled back on a gear lever. The car inched forward, accelerating slowly. Very slowly.

"It takes about 30 seconds for the gear to build up to speed if you don't want to tear it apart."

Since the hood was off, I could see the twin turbine block starting to glow. Sand blowing onto the block was melting on contact.  I wondered if this was a bad sign. Rivet seemed unconcerned.

I was pushed back in my seat as the car continuously accelerated.
Rivet eased back and we could see that we were cruising at 125 MPH.

"These tires are special too, they spread out for better grip at high speeds. Also, the rubber is like memory metal, it grows and shrinks when we want it to."

A puddle of molten glass was building up on the exposed engine block. Rivet saw this and turned on something like a windshield wiper that scraped the glass into a metal bucket on the side of the engine.

Rivet took the car on a wide turn to point back to the hut. The car heeled over to correct for the terrific speed.  Gearing down the engine, he glided back to the quonset hut. He turned it off, and the turbines wound down.

He dangled the keys in front of me. In my mind, I was redesigning the gear system to add in the reverse my father had left out. I took them.

I took it out for a spin myself. It took some getting used to. There's also no way you can't feel like a space age rocket jockey knowing you are going that fast in a heavy car with fins on it. I felt like honking the horn.  But when I pushed the horn button, I found out, what it really did was tilt the turbine up and immediately the car left the ground. Crazy with fear, I tried unhonking the horn, whatever that is. Something I did got me back down, and decided quickly I had had enough for the day.

I'm happy to say, the brakes were in great shape after all this time.

"Rivet, how am I going to get this thing out of here with no license plate and no trailer?"

"Now that you know about it, get that stuff together and come and get it."

"There's no way anyone will let this on the road!"

"Don't drive it on a road."

"Rivet, this technology - it could have completely powered civilization for the past 50 years!"

"There were already a lot of companies powering civilization for the last 50 years! They liked to talk about 'too cheap to meter,' but where's the profit in that?"

"Can't you just use it to run your house or something?"

"I've already got a little generator like this running the house. It has enough dust and shavings for 60 years or so."

"Maybe you can tell me how to convert it - I don't need to be driving a cruise missile down to the grocery store."

"I guess I could help with that. I'll draw up some plans for next time."

"That'd be great!"

I'm still waiting for those plans.


[repost: edited from sept 16 2012]

Bandanas

2011-10-12 23:22:48-0400

Next to the belts were many piles of bandanas. There was a small collection of miniature log cabins by them, welcome postcards, and other souvenirs. Which should I choose? True - the mouse droppings by the cabins made them an easy item to put off the list. Many of the welcome postcards were water damaged and warped, or foxed. So: bandanas. Some were fairly plain, but others had recipes printed on them, maps, smiling cowboys and horses, crossed guns and branding irons.

I was interested in the branding irons.

When I was a kid I used one at the Lazy 8 ranch, which, as the name implies, has an infinite pasture shaped like a Klein bottle. We lost a lot of cattle, but we found a lot too. Different shapes and colors. Not always edible. Not always what you would call cattle, if you looked at them for more than a second. It was complicated and disturbing, so calling them "cattle" made things a lot easier. We would take turns branding the critters, but sometimes, we couldn't find a place to brand them. We thought maybe taking pictures of them would do, but many were kind of radioactive and didn't show up on film too well. Anyway, it was hard to leave the farm, since it was an infinite mono-surface 3d space with a negative curvature when you came at it one way and a positive one coming the other way. Sometimes, it was all you could do to keep from running into yourself, if you travelled up to the neck. 

I chased a dog up there one day and I haven't found my way back. I hope my folks don't miss me too much. I don't know how time flows out here, but in there, you can fix things like that. You get as many chances as you like. Out here, one mistake and Pfft!.

Fragment: 1979?

He writes with the glee of a man who, having hidden himself in a convenient place, watches a boy write his name with a stick in wet cement, and he, a few minutes later, repeats the action, carefully looking about for fear of the authorities. For the act is an obsession, even if it is as harmless and transitory as a daydream, and his life is a succession of many such acts, driven by impulses and stimuli which which tease and pull, explode and whisper, beckon, hide, and vanish. In the dim semi-consciousness of his half-sleep, the walls of his room are like Jello, and then glass, and then air, weather affects him inside as it does the grass and trees; falling fruit invariably makes him fatter during the harvest; brittle grass makes him rue his awakening and prods his short temper; the thumb-deep mud and cumulous sky mollifies him and gives him hope; if the sand blows about his feet, supporting him in a peculiar way, he walks seaward onto packed ground and stretches in the sun. His towel served as his chair., his bed, his table, his clothing,his comfort, his protection, his shelter, and it was unsatisfactory in all these ways.

Unemployable Feathers

Lakes hold a special fascination for the dry.

The subtle lapping water, often carrying leaves and pine needles with it, the delicacy of the wetness, which is not at all like the pulverizing crush and spray of the ocean, coyly invites one to join it in its gentle pulse. Lake plants, growing richly but stopping inches below the surface, cluster by the rocks and in submerged gardens which can be best discovered with a submerged foot.

There are days when the partched air rattles the cane curtains and dust balls scatter over the newly swept patios.The corners of my mouth hurt. I don't need much convincing. The lake is audible. Water striders are practicing their moves in pairs by the roots of the shrubs by the water's edge.

Most people would prefer cautiously wetting their feet, imagining that the feet would convey a sense of what a more complete immersion would be, but I prefer the whole body approach. I step back. I make sure there are no floating branches or hidden rocks. I slick back my hair. A hot breeze eggs me on. I rise. I straighten out.

But I do not sink. I am repelled like oil off the surface of the lake, as if it were made of rubber.
The force of it bends my nose. I reach my hand into the water to use as a salve. Oddly, I hold a palm full of water like a melted ball. As I squeeze it, it acquires a clay-like texture and weight, which is not unpleasant. I found that I was floating away from the shore, which would be disturbing if I thought I were going to sink, but I rather felt that the situation was under control. The mass in my hand became birdlike. It grew down, a beak, and a tiny pulsing heart. Claws scrabbled at the ball of my thumb. Gently, I released the bird, and blew life into its feathers, whereupon it passed away, flopping over the water's surface. Now I was alone. I also had lost sight of the shore and the sky was a uniform mottled gray.

11/07/07

Variety is the spice of lunch

There was so much food there now, and, knowing much more was coming, Evan didn't know where to begin. Fortunately, the setting of the table helped a lot, for all the flatware was arranged in such a matter as to clue him in to which item should be eaten first. 

A small pincer like device - I see - that can be used for plucking the flesh of this ... claw? And the two thin silver chopsticks - they must be for picking up those salmon eggs - or whatever roe they actually are. A hammer and set of chisels with successively fine points? At the top of the plate was a small pair of reading glasses, which he put on and, sure enough, he could see that some of the food was so tiny he might have missed it. It looked like tiny berries, but they may have been popped blowflies for all he knew. 

 Salt and pepper were not on the table - instead six bottles with different colored powders and liquids were placed nearby, and Evan noticed that there was a different set at the next table. The bright green - was that some kind of ground pepper or was it a seaweed? The deep red - paprika? - or the brown - ox blood? In any case, each combination looked to make for an unusual flavor! 

The air itself was going through courses, as the smell went from cardamom to sesame, to a hickory smoke and - yes - even tobacco. 

 The napkins had been laid in a series, one per course, and each in a different fabric and color. A set of tiny cups made of different metals held aromatic liquids, some to drink, some to dip food in, some just to be there to neutralize the one it was placed in back of. 

 With a ringing of the dinner bell, our host helped ease the proceedings with a short introduction to the meal.

 "As you may well recall, I returned last month from a "round the world trip" that took me five years and three months to complete. I crossed the globe many times and went to all continents to find the rarest and most exotic foods. Never has a single meal had all its ingredients all taken fresh within 12 hours from the five continents, and many other places beside." 

 "We start as the blue whales do, with a bowl of plankton, chilled, with a light sea salt. We end as the bats do, with freshly caught mosquitos from our own special bug zappers. And in the course of tonight's repast, we taste the outsides - hair, feathers, skins, and leaves - and work our way to the bones and entrails, the eggs and sperm, the contents of a ruminants four stomachs, and I even say, the four stages of a frog's metamorphosis. Liquid, solid and gaseous delights are to be presented in a gustatory poem of the senses. You may not be able to partake of all these exotica - the cryptozoans from Antarctica's Dry Valleys may prove too difficult to scrap off of the ventiformed rocks they are concealed in, and the interiors of a sea urchin's spines may not prove worthy of the effort to avoid the poison - yet I am sure that for each of you, at least one of these courses will prove a revelation and a reorientation of your idea of what is fit to eat. Feel free to pass on your untested food to a neighbor, who may better enjoy it." 

 "There is no better way to feel connected with the earth than to partake of it, as it is done not only by far-flung tribes of men, but by the animals they live with and the many forms of life which man takes no account of. " 

 While this was going on, a pressurized tank was being wheeled in, with a spouting black smoker and, surrounding this simulated hydrothermal vent, were teams of tall wormlike creatures and blind shrimp. How are we expected to eat animals that do not share our basic chemistry, that do not even use sunlight as an energy source? This is insane! The plankton that started us off was given in whale-sized proportion. Many of the meats seemed purposely uncooked, waiting for us to either eat it raw or to don the fireproof gloves and thrust it into the earth ovens which had been built in the center of the room. In fact, in the dim light, I could now see that some rabbits and voles were loose in the room, and I suppose we were expected to catch and kill them ourselves, explaining the tiny traps and nooses that also lay in our settings. Over by the far wall were pens of brooding fowl, some of them only slightly smaller than an albatross. From these birds issued a stream of eggs, and also the same was provided by a simulated beach where loggerhead sea turtles had lain their eggs. Yes, I even could make out a gravid platypus. It was going to be a long, challenging night, but a free meal is a hard thing to pass up.

Elevator

I heard the doors move before I walked in. That's because I was still facing the hallway, where a torn photocopied sign was telling participants where the Palomar Room would be for a meeting. I stepped in, sideways, and turned to the control panel. 

"There's no 'DOWN' button," I said to myself. 

"Right. There IS no 'DOWN' button," I heard from the speaker of the elevator. 

"Well, how do you get down, then?" I asked. 

"You have to know what floor you came from, first. Then push that button twice. It's a security feature."

"How does this work again?" 

"What floor did you get in on?" he asked, impatiently. 

"I don't know - fifteenth?" 

"So, press the fifteen twice." 

I did. The elevator ascended. 

"Looks like you didn't get in on the fifteeth floor. But it's going there now, and you can get off and try again." 

I was annoyed. Also, the elevator smelled like old coffee. The bell rang and the doors opened again. I stepped out briefly, hit the call button again, and the doors reopened. I stepped in once more and confidently tapped the fifteen button twice. The doors closed and the elevator descended a few floors. It stopped, and two people got on, both talking in cell phones, in a strange disconnected dialogue. My phone rang. It was the elevator observer. 

 "Hi, it's me .. don't let those kids get off the elevator." 

"You mean these two women?" 

"Yes. Don't let them off. You get off instead. And don't let them know I called." 

"How am I going to do that?" 

"Create a diversion." 

"Hmm." 

"I know you'll think of something. Fifteen is where Creative has its offices." 

I shut off the phone. The elevator was slowing. I threw the phone suddenly at the left woman's feet, causing a loud clang. The door opened and I stepped out. The doors closed. The floor indicator lights over the door now showed the elevator ascending rapidly. But from the air being sucked into the door gap, I knew that the elevator was in fact descending to the sub-sub basement. 

 

Cautiously, I called for the elevator. It didn't respond. Walking over to a phone booth, I dialed my phone's number. It was busy. I dialed the phone's answering machine. There was one new message, from the elevator operator. He promised I could get a new phone soon. As I was deleting it, another message had come in. The was from one of the women. 

 "I don't know who you are, but they are taking us out the Mall exit. Gotta go." 

 I passed through the metal detector and out into the lobby. I pushed aside the glass doors and walked over to the side of the building, about 50 feet. A white van was parked by a gray door, idling. The two women walked out of it, strolling and calm. They were unaccompanied. One of them opened the van's passenger door. The other crossed in back of the van to the driver's side. 

 The gray door opened again, and the two women strolled out again. This time more rapidly. Again, they split up and went to opposite doors of the van. 

Yet again, the grey door opened and the same two women got out. The one on the left was holding my phone. I ran toward her and managed to grab it back. As I did, I felt an electric tingle in my fingers. They stopped walking, but didn't look at me. Then they continued to the van. 

The phone had a text message posted on it: GO THOUGH THE DOOR. The gray door was slightly ajar and I could just get my fingers in near the latch and I pulled the door open. A cold, faintly rubbery smelling breeze passed me. The rear of the door had a sign: "WARNING. THIS DOOR IS ALARMED!" Yet I could hear no alarm. Maybe I wasn't supposed to hear the alarm. 

The phone had a new message: "NO, I MEANT THE VAN DOOR!" I pressed on the gray door's openng bar. Instantly a loud whooping noise sounded. I jumped. I ran out of the door toward the idling van. As I did, I had the funniest feeling of déjà vu. I felt my hand on the door bar again, but this time there was no alarm. I ran toward the van again and jumped in on the passenger side. 

"Going Down?" 

Somehow, I found myself back in the hall. The copied paper was still on the wall, with the same tear in it. Although it was hard to believe, I rang for the elevator again, this time noting that I was not on the fifteenth floor, but on 12A. In the elevator, I pushed 12A twice, and exited the building without incident.