Behind the Counter

I am on the wrong side of the counter.

It's a fast-food joint. I am training. It is presumed I know something. I am pretending to be a transfer who only needs catching up with local procedure. Maybe I'm writing an article on the life of a burger flipper.

Someone is showing me. Here is this, and there is that, and, watch out, it's hot. All this product goes in this cage and this other sits over here. A bell rings. That means that over there is cooling past where it should in relation to this over here.

It's all unrecognizable. What is all this "product"? I can't ask, or they'll realize I don't know. Which is the point of asking, but it means I ain't qualified if I don't know. Dumb is it's own retard.

This is Lifer Slim here. He's telling me about that over there. He's the that over there go-to guy. A lifer is over the age where you are only passing a summer. The kids laugh at them, and the lifers retaliate by making them do stuff. Slim is a nice one, though. You can tell the kids like him. He sits over on the counter out of sight with his lunch. (Brought from home, I note.)

The young girls set the tone. The customers like them and so do the lifers, so the boy kids do too, because the girls generally brighten up the place and everybody smiling is better than everybody not.

So it goes.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to mime acts of others, although it all makes no sense to me.

The Good Ship Lollygag

We are on a fabulous Holistic Health Holiday cruise aboard the Good Ship Lollygag to an exotic island. The ship enters a river, and passes through a narrow inlet into a lagoon.

The water here, we are informed, is excellently ennobled with arcane ingredients and ancient healing elements. You must drink it. Go on. Here's how. And the tour director sinks his face below the surface and comes up gulping and smiling. So do we all. You think we didn't want to be healthy?

Back aboard, we are spirited into tango lessons. Here's how, the entertainment director tells us. And he hops on one foot, then the other, and so do we all.

After a little while, I notice I am no longer able to see color. I wonder if this is healthy.

And now, proclaims the attendant, we should all go to the bathroom. He is smiling as well, and he troops off, us behind him, where we divide at the twin doors.

Later the cruise ship is impounded and the crew arrested. It is reported that the scheme was gold smuggling. That was one of the prime ingredients in the water of the lagoon. So they had their customers absorb the water and then condense it on the dance floor and then let it run into filters set up for the occasion. The company was able to collect a sizable amount of gold that way.

But wherefore did they not simply filter the gold from its natural watery habitat? Ah, there's the glub-glub. In the lagoon there were certain parasites, bacterium, impurities the cost to cleanse which would've been prohibitive. And yet here were some millions of volunteers a year willing to freely offer kidneys and pay them for the privilege.

Also, as we were all dedicated alternate medicine freaks, to report our health troubles after the cruise would've been a betrayal of the faith. We did not even relate our renal rumblings to potential new sailors on the Good Ship Lollygag. Needless to say, each pilgrim to the lagoon ever after, in the homeopathetic tradition, diluted all future participation down to nothing.

But here I am, back on land, running beside the sea as those health nuts will. I pass Beth, the stalwart of the doggie beach where we used to run Scoob and Maya waketimes. I had just passed others I knew, and they had told me there were surprises, the rangers were bringing around to every little group certain treats. It's good to keep communicating, said Beth.

Yes, I said, and told her of the wakeful time Chico and I went to the hills above Allende to secure pot for fun and profit. And Badman Jose worked on a chicken farm, and he did not understand generally, and we did not understand him specifically, and it was a circumstance ripe for disaster. I don't know where I draw my allegory sometimes.

A janitor with a South Pacific accent now seems to be telling me I must help a relative apply to enter a VA hospital. I cannot understand him, and he is growing impatient with my incomprehension. I look through folders in my office now, but cannot find what I think he said, Ramu, because I suppose he didn't say that. He shows the file and we stride forth.

Here's Ramu now. I set out to do up an ap. (This was my waketime job.) I must take his picture. I have a tiny camera the size of a large signet ring. It isn't working. And now out here in the field, a private and dark neighborhood street, I have desks and cabinets to take back to the office. I can just handle this, maybe, but there should be another way.

Wait, there is help. Other family members of Ramu. Good, let's go. Now Ramu is a canine, and he's tied up, but uncomplaining. He's lying on the ground, and looking at me expectantly. I will free you, guy, don't worry. I will take you home.

Cloud Perforations

It was a state school, not the least prominent but not far up from the one that was. He was a physics prof. He said to his classes first day, "I want you to consider clouds, but not quite clouds yet, but the perforations within them. I want you to think of those openings as pre-existing.

"It is through massive calculation I have determined the chaos theory is correct, in that this is the only means by which I might stand here. However, the incredibly complex labyrinth by which I arrived before you, and you before me, could not have accounted for all the variations in the meagre five billion allotted years. No, we must assign another, darker force. We must determine something is watching."

That grabbed 'em. Then he proceeded throughout the days left in the quarter to demonstrate the arcane ineffable mystery of doubt. And then late in one class a youngster put up her hand.

"Yes, but ... say a Brinks Truck passed by on the interstate outside our window and a bag of cash blew out, or was tossed out, anyway disintegrated and a confetti storm of cash rained down on us here in this class, and only us here.

"Then would we not feel special, as if the product of design, with some force out there selecting us for advancement, whereas all the other classes would be thinking of lunch or the night. Only we would consider ourselves blessed in this universe through the merest chance."

She stopped and she looked at the professor. And he at her. The class ended.

It was the beginning of the Multiverse. All the science journals now are conversant on the multiple universes. And the young student was not even a physics major.

Years later, someone and someone from one of the classes of the physics professor of the almost-lowest-rung state school met somewhere, and one said to the other:

"Say, do you remember that physics professor ...."

"Yes, yes, old Cloud Perforations."

"Yes. I wonder what he meant by that."

Culture Individually Cloned

Jane Frank's Crags and Crevices

We are in a large storehouse filled with androids. They aren't supposed to be anything else, however. They are not trying to pass, like in SciFi movies. They are, actually, there to create your very own copy of an "original" Keating.

He's an abstract expressionist Oprah or one of them likes. One trip to her show, or somebody's, and he's so in demand he must hire the building of streams of stringers; machines to do up his color smears while you watch. Each creation takes five minutes, and that only because of the wait states while the robot pretends to consult its muse.

And so I hand one of the 'droids a canvas. Only, before, I take the brush and I smear it with yellow. A collaborative effort, I say; me and old Keating. I hear murmurs of protest behind a window. So disrespectful; unethical, even. Yes, very.

Niki J and I remove some Keatings from the gallery. You can do that. Just as you can buy the "works," you can take them down from the shelves. A pleasant couple in business dress approaches. I am hung for what to say, but Niki J isn't. She explains the boilerplate you have to use to protect your right to remove paintings from museums and those quaint little overpriced art shops.

They sigh, resigned. They accommodate us. Actually, they are very nice. We walk about with them throughout the art factory. They hear us and offer no argument. Why should they? There are some hundreds of robots turning out these masterpieces. More than twenty times the number we had removed were created out in the factory while we were in the act of taking them down from the gift shop.

I return for my Keating. Wait, what? The yellow is gone from my base coat. They have discarded my in-put. I have, once again, only what everyone else has, just a mass-produced robot-generated assemblyline muck-up.

It's culture, after all. That's the way it goes.

Orange Wire

It is a project which seems simple. Let me see what it is. Why, it is only the hooking up of a modem. I can do this.

It looks like a small roadster. A gleaming sleek metallic swoosh. I open it and see there are many cables, small bundles of wires, myriads of them. All I need do is hook these wires up to my modem at home. This is very simple. Plug and play.

Let me see. There seems to be a color coding scheme. However, the color is all orange. Each of many cables is filled with twisted swarms of orange wire. Yet it is simple. I plug each into the like port in my modem at home, and there you are.

But how will I tell each wire from each? There are many webs of them. I could follow each one to its logical conclusion. But there are miles between this modem and mine. And I cannot move either one.

I could mark each wire, as, terminal one, two, and so. But I would have to mark them every few feet, because I must go far, and I cannot see more than near.

I could just hold one orange wire and walk with it all the way to the other modem, plug it in, and then return for the next. I could do that. But it would take me many trips, and the earth, it is very old.

I am on the phone now, to the realtime owner of the bookshop in my town. He is saying something comforting but not helpful. I wonder if I might call in an expert. I don't want to, because I should be able to set up a new modem. It will bring much data so rapidly. But first we have this of the setup.

A little girl just at adolescence approaches, takes off her jacket; a very tight sweater remains. She snuggles against me, smiles up into my face, says, "My teachers like me very much."

She's like another orange wire. She knows nothing of modems.

Now I am making my way down a mezzanine. I'm holding a tray of chocolates, and trying not to step on pages open on the steps so that very little space remains for my feet. The pages are pictures of saint or patriotic frenzies. Uh-oh. I drop some. I am thinking of retrieving them, and also thinking, what will that do to the confidence in chocolates? And thinking, it's only more orange wire anyway.