Harmony

We all are wearing neckties.

Not the common sort, but more like the western swing version, with intricate knots at the throat and swirly loose ends. Men and women wear them, and children, too.

These are gadgets rather than sartorial items. They perform wonders to shape and enhance the larynx and nasal cavities in effect. The result is, all the men sound exactly like Vaughn Monroe and the women like Deanna Durbin. It helps our music that hardly anyone has ever heard of either of those singers. The stars no longer own their sounds, any more than Henry owns his Ford. We are all either Vaughn or Deanna.

And so music in our community is by casual singing-in-the-shower, but you hear it everywhere; street, store, or park, by everyone, for all have the precise same talent and sound. It's true democracy, as all voices are created equal in our town.

There is a background soundtrack in the stores and broadcast on the street and into the park. It's the instrumental for some musical of long ago, and in school we learn the parts. We learn the parts to old musicals and nothing else in our schools. For we need nothing else. The grass is as high as an elephant's eye. I just met a girl named Maria. I have often walked on this street before.

And so Tonight will swell up, and all the Marias will tune up. There is no bashful voice in our town, for we are all the same. Anyone who would dress and go outdoors would freely sing to the wind. We're like that, in our town.

Illusory Duplication

You sail across a great sea, then a lesser sea, and you dock. Then you take a road through a city, then a country lane, then a path, then you climb.

Up high along the ridges, you can see the hawks swoop down below, and clouds come right at you. There is a well marked trail, but what if you go over the ridge?

You find crags and nestles, is what, and no marked passing of humans, so you continue, and the brush is thicker and there is heat now, dry heat, and so bustles in the hedgerow.

Until you are clear in the valley, before a river and beside it a village like a watercolor from an amateur artist. I mean, there are all manner of styles along the river front, there are ancient adobe cabins and there are two-story gabled farmhouses with stitched Tudor paneling, structures of brick and mortar and stone and tin. Sometimes the houses are begun and then trail off, like a slipping away life, an incomplete picture.

This is a lost, forgotten, unknown land. It's not on any rolls in any government office. When there's something needs doing, I begin to understand, somebody just does it. There are no uniforms anywhere. They have a vigorous trade, duty free, with the outside world because they have a deep-water port nobody but certain shipping lines know about. Over the hill, this is considered wild country, uninhabitable.

There are no names here. No signposts; not on the city or the streets or the stores.

No language that I can understand. When two men encounter, they both give that quick jerk of the jaw up and to one side that says, it's a hard life, ain't it? You bet it is. The only sound from them is the workingman's moan, more like a yawn, "Whoa-ho-hoah." Women smile and nod noncommittally and they laugh with a pleasing lilt. I think of an old Buffy St Marie tune, a verse of it going

Merry Christmas,
Jingle Bells
Christ in heaven and the devil's in hell
Hearts they shrink; pockets swell;
Everybody know and nobody tell

and I always used to wonder. But ... but, if everybody knows, then what's the point of the telling?

I stop in front of an old frame building, peer into the show window. I stand like that for a long time.

Inside is Clayton's, the grocery store of the neighborhood where I grew up. I am astonished. The layout is the same, and the products on the shelves look as if they might be canned goods from the fifties, last century. It's identical to my memory.

From here over a rugged mountain and up a long path and a longer road to a highway to a bayside city and across two oceans and then three mountain ranges after you hit ground and a desert in there too, you'll be where I started, so it is impossible anybody who had been to Clayton's could ever have preceded me here. Nobody could have walked in my footsteps. Yours neither.

What I mean is, what I'm seeing clearly in this old replica of my childhood experience could not be. I blink. It just could not be. What did they - maybe design it from a photo in a magazine? There was never a picture of Clayton's. Of course not. Why take a picture of a small-town market? It would be like the mirrors in the Borges Library of Babel; why an illusory duplication during infinity? When it is going you think it will be ever thus and when it isn't, well, you have much more to miss than Clayton's.

I try the door. It's locked. I look around. Nobody on the street. But then, who would I ask? And how? There is not even a language.

There's a fog from the bay, and it meets the clouds from the ridge, until I cannot tell either from the other.

Tungsten Under Heat

One who is very refined and most assured and inspires great trust is telling us. It's the same chemistry as heavy metals in solution, she says. Say tungsten. On a lab slide, with heat added and then subtracted.

Little girls suffer the precise same pressures, conflict. She is of a sedate reddish hue and she has a reassuring half-smile. I am trying to write down her name, this one who says the development of young girls is like tungsten under heat.

I write "P - A - T - " but she corrects. "Start with "Niki." And I do, very precise in my penmanship to show her my scholastic alacrity, but I note my finely-chiseled letters must eventually bump up against my prior scribbles. There does not seem to be anything I can do to fix it. Oh, dear.

She says, okay, and takes over the pad. There, now.

Black Christians

I somehow came across old script of mine, in the form of several scrolls, in a dusty box.

Oh, this, I said. This is the compiled concordance we figured out one year. First I saw it and then others helped, and we were able to explain every single incident in the New Testament according to easily explicable quotidian drama, with nary a reference to magical intercession. We did that.

And wrote it down, and some saw it, but most did not. That's always the way, you know, no matter how popular the work may be. Most ignore anything. Those who had not seen the scroll but heard of it referred to us as Black Christians. They heard we were both, but none of us was either.

But, look you here. The scrolls, each rolled and dusted white and laid side by side, drift into a pasty state up towards the other, older end of the box. They are Catalone then, I see, and I taste one, and it's delicious. Niki J says it is. It was a freelance research project, and now it's dinner. I wonder if that's the way it ever is.

Do Dogs Mind Being Dogs?

A band of grey suits lounged on a convertible in the era beyond the colors. The suits were drab and loose, as were the men. They are returning from a party somewhere.

"I wonder..." says one of them, the one called Joe, "if dogs mind being dogs. I mean, had they rather be us, or are they satisfied?" He is musing to himself, lounging in the convertible. One or two glance at him.

This is a troupe which performs what resembles baseball, except it's staged down to the minor detail, and Product Placement is the motive force. They set out in two teams inside miniature stadiums, with a desultory and almost lugubrious audience of passers by who sit in the stands and make no display at the antics on the field below. They are there because they must be somewhere.

The troupe goes through the routine of the game, but it's much more melodramatic than chance would allow. At every step of the way, they emphasize shoes, gloves, a certain coffee. They stop to admire often. The crowd seems utterly unmoved.

It's late in the morning, and Joe has lost his companions. Here he is shuffling down a line of "orphans" separated from their sets. The drover looks back several in the line to Joe, says, "You don't have carfare, do you?" I wonder how he knew that, Joe muses.

"Move over there," says the drover, and Joe does. "Where were you last night?" he presently asks. Joe tells him, at Finley's. "Have you spent too extravagantly? Maybe your estate is above your station?" Oh, no, says Joe. I live in a hotel. He thinks that will do him some good.

He is conveyed back to his station. His in-box has mail from Freir's, with an attachment. Probably a project. No need to bother with outstations, decides Joe. He goes in search of his troupe.

They are rehearsing a new set to demonstrate the efficacy of a training cereal. They seem to like the new bit. "Hey, that's good," says Joe. They look at him without emotion. "Leader wants to see you," says one simply.

Joe knocks on the door. The leader is with someone, barks out, "Come on in." He seems stressed. He is settling something in a field far away from Joe's troupe.

When the other leaves, the leader is angry. "Why do you do something like that?" Joe is stunned. "Like what?" he asks.

"We don't need you here," says the leader, and turns away. Two aides appear at Joe's elbows.

Joe is now out on the street. The aides had escorted him there very quickly. Now what? Joe is thinking. He tries to text Freir's, but the message bounces.

I don't know how I became a member of that troupe. I don't remember when I wasn't there. Now I'm not there, I have no idea where I am.

But his hotel room is somewhere, and that's where he goes. What did I do? Joe asks himself, over and over. And what do I do now? He inserts his key.

It doesn't fit the lock.