Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.
20090830
20090829
20090828
Channels
Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.
Channels are trenches they
dig in your brain, my
sensitive, censored
bobble-head friend. You can't
expect to work through them
and emerge sane out the
distal end.
Humphrey and the Pie
Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.
Humphrey came by and he
ate my apple pie. There
was no end and no beginning
to Humphrey's ravenous eating,
although it was instantly gone
after the unfolding petals of
infinitely slow eon blooming.
Humphrey was eating it before
he raised his fork and after
his last swallow, supraluminal
thinking whacking out the
continuity of temporal
apperception. Damn. I
wanted that pie.
20090827
What This Wild Pain is Cajun
Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.
what this wild pain is cajun that simmers
sliced heart in hot peppers and cayenne
gamy taste with the fat melting off
when you leave me like this, a blanched
lobster stranded on tide edge rocks where
pigeons foul boardwalk sculpted art, claws
click, tapping when water comes cruel loosely
lapping like derelict angel kisses: adieu!
The Sleepers
Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.
I am every man, an infinite regression
of mirror men who watch from over my shoulder
and out of the ageless generations of
humanity's deluge. Metempsychotic tides
inform my broken decisions, and yours,
archetypal wrestling matches and politicians
touring America from flag-festooned caboose platforms,
and berserker soldiers racing into open wounds
that smell of pus and gangrene. I am the collective dreams
that spill and chain out of Cain, wondering
how things might have been different
had Abel prevailed.
We sail on our little boat by night
across a dark sea, sensing
rather than seeing the hungry whales
not too far below the keel. Our bodies are broken,
our corpses half-decayed. Our king is slayed, and we're
cast up on the dirty strand to confront dawn's onslaught
naked, with no weapons or talismans, but only our
feeble wits and imagination. May God
have mercy on the sleepers.
20090826
Serpent's Belly
Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.
I have been surreptitiously fed a
soporific for years, like Hamlet's old
man with a not-so-subtle drug, this cruel
tranquillizing poison poured into my
ears. No. I have been a participant,
much too willing, in the debasement of
my sensibilities. And now a bright
beam has at last penetrated the damned,
conciliatory clouds, and unless
I wish to submit to terminal shame,
I must seize this moment, retarded in
creativity, but I'll hear no more
the siren calls of lethargy, and I
shall rise. Have I been a blind fool in the
vibrant land of the sighted? Or have I
suffered occasional unwitting, mad
hallucinations, auspicious glimpses
of elevated consciousness in the
land of the sleepers? Or shall I once more
succumb and be another creeper, or
shall I stir, and go, go, go? Go on now.
I have climbed out of this last trap. I hear
those cursed voices fading away, fading
away; God, let them fade! Fifteen lost years in
the belly of a cosmic serpent. Let
me rise, ye gods, ye incarnate dream-fixed
figures. Let me light this Promethean
flame with a fire stick and bow, and blow this
false nether region of mundane forms to
Kingdom Come. Let's get the hell out of here!
20090823
new novel fragments
Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.
He lay in bed, quietly reading. Striving to turn the pages quietly, as though Isabel might hear a page turn upstairs. He'd been hearing her moving around upstairs for some time. He knew she wouldn't stay home long. He'd stay in bed until after she'd gone.
He could place every creak of the floorboards overhead. He could easily track her progress from room to room as she moved about the house as quickly and as light-footedly as she could, hoping not to wake him.
He smiled at the thought, since he'd been awake for almost three hours already.
Eventually she would sneak out of the house and go away somewhere to one of the places where she passed the monotonous hours of her life.
She would be gone until about five o'clock, he knew, when she would suddenly reappear with her arms full of groceries. A riotous rush would ensue as she set about cooking the evening meal.
About an hour and a half later his father would come home. Not too long afterwards, they would all sit down together for dinner, not exactly as a family, but at least as adults together. Civil.
She would have very little to say about her day, speaking in only the most noncommittal of generalities. His father, too, would have very little to say about his day. Isabel, Bill knew, neither understood nor cared what it was that her husband did at work, other than teaching and dealing with boring departmental politics.
Isabel was tediously predictable.
They would all be pleasant and hushed together while they ate. She was a good cook, but the tensions were obvious enough to everyone present, arising from her secretive ways and obvious dissatisfaction with her life and with her husband's life. And Bill felt that his father must feel terminally cut off and isolated from his wife. By now the old man must be well accustomed to living whatever life he retained when he was at the university.
In addition, Bill knew very well that he had added a new element of complication to the strained truce that was their domestic life together. He didn't really care. He hadn't moved in permanently. He was only visiting for a brief time. Anyway, he had a right to be in his father's house. Isabel would just have to tolerate his presence for a little while.
Just as I have to tolerate her.
It had been harder the first few days. His father was out of town on business when he arrived. At first Isabel had put on a show of being an accommodating hostess, but that didn't last long into the second day. Bill didn't mind at all; in fact, he preferred being alone. Solitude was why he'd come here anyway. He needed time to not have to deal with anyone.
But Simon and Gabe found me, he thought. Well, they're just passing through on the way to
Truthfully, though, he was looking forward to seeing them this morning. It was just blind luck that they were making this trip when he happened to be in
I'll have to be ready when they call, he thought. I'll get up as soon as Isabel leaves the house.
He had the lamp on that swung out from the corner and was reading in bed. It was Ulysses. He was not quite half way through the massive tome. He was in the episode identified with the Cyclops, a complex and seemingly discursive, almost surreal scene in a pub with J.J., presumably an avatar of John Joyce, and the all-seeing narrator, all "says I" this and "says I" that, and the bigoted citizen, opinionated, all-knowing, caustically, chronically, toxically anti-Semitic, and poor lost Bloom himself, forever slightly out of place, out of focus, miscast, the partial outsider never fully trusted, always somewhat mocked, dubiously effeminate, flowery bloom, bloomers, his exuberant runaway focused fascination with more cryptical particulars forever mistaken for pedantry, never exactly connecting with the subject under discussion, not exactly, slightly disconnected, slightly tangential, never adhering to strictly superficial social niceties, always scraping off the foam as it were and looking just a little bit deeper into the dark amber tides of Guinness than was socially acceptable. Poor Leopold Bloom, empathic to a fault not tolerated by his society or any, more intimately connected with the problems of day-to-day Sturm und Drang than any of the cast of thousands of the better adjusted and less conscious Dubliners ever could hope to be. A man like Bloom could never identify with the brutal, self-deceiving monochromatic modality, the terminal tunnel vision of the xenophobic citizenry. The Fenian. All of it puzzling. As complex as true-to-life life itself. Polymorphic and mutating. Shape-shifting Proteus. Difficult stuff to read.
He looked up at the clock-radio where it was situated on the corner shelves. It was just turning to eight o'clock. She should be about ready to go, he thought, just a little bit testy. She'd been moving about in the kitchen for a few minutes. Her actions were so predictable, and probably she didn't even know this about herself. Almost certainly not, because it was one of the things she sniped at his father about.
Effective, technical people are always very structured. They have to be. That's the only way they can be effective in technical endeavors. Extreme attention to detail.
Not like Leopold Bloom. With Bloom it's an artistic, emotional thing. With Dad it's an anal-retentive, technical, scientific thing. With Isabel, it's mostly a matter of self-esteem, and a fragile ego. Surely she has no idea of that.
He finished the right-hand page, turned it over, inserted his book mark, and lay the book down. Three hours of James Joyce was plenty.
He lay still, looking around the room at the crystalizing glow that filtered in through the curtains on the high window at ground level. Joyce's language and images and characters and voices rang on in sing-song in his head. His thoughts slid backwards abruptly and he was back in the castle with Estella looking up at him, her blue eyes shining, with dreaded dirty blonde hair in kinky strands tumbling out of her green and red and yellow knit cap, holding up the little Tupperware bowl like some kind of sacred religious chalice. Verily, like the Holy Grail, and offering him. . . .
No. I must not remember that. I must not think of it.
Deliberately he dialed further back in his head, back along the weeks, the months, to the last day of finals. Those were memories he liked, that he much preferred remembering now.
He had come out of his last final, his last semester of calculus. He remembered the washed-out sky and how quiet it was outside, like a strange anticlimax to the drama that was finally concluding. He could feel all the formulae he had forced himself to memorize, or almost to memorize, spilling out of his ears, and good riddance to them, because he was never, never going to use them, never again.
Another sunny afternoon in
Everything Bill owned, which wasn't much, he'd moved out of the dorm this morning and into his prehistoric 1988 Yugo. Now that school was over, really over, it was time to relocate to an apartment. The Castle Arms was a cheap, run-down apartment complex probably built during the 1950s. It took the unpromising shape of a three-story white stucco castle, complete with rounded corner towers and turrets and a permanently lowered drawbridge over an empty moat that collected trash and rainwater and would doubtles prove infamous for breeding mosquitoes.
He was feeling morose in about six different ways. He hated calculus, and he knew he hadn't done well on the test, but at least he would never have to integrate a formula again. He hated most of his classes generally, and he could not see a future ahead toward which they were guiding him. He had serious doubts about the biology major he was pursuing. He was depressed because all his friends were gone, and he was dreading living in a castle and working at a musty old bookstore this summer. And so on.
His thoughts were dark and gloomy, like a character out of Dostoyevsky, he imagined. It was so lonely suddenly, and he resented having to play the role of the last man standing. He was tramping across the quad with his hands in his dark, torn jeans, his eyes downcast, and he almost stamped blindly right across a girl who was sitting there by herself on a little woolen Mexican blanket. He checked himself abruptly and stared down at her or, rather, he found himself glaring at her, because he was in so foul a mood, and when she looked up at him, surprised by the near-collision, and saw the strange look on his face, her mouth broke into a bright smile and she laughed up at him. Her laughter instantly dispelled his gloom, and he, realizing how foolish he must look, laughed too.
He'd seen her many times over the last few years; maybe they'd even been in a class or two together, he couldn't remember. Certainly he'd never talked to her before. She was a very small girl, probably just under five feet tall, a hippy, a flower-power girl, an Earth mother child, the kind he would never have paid any attention to, with her cloggies and her plastic beads and her strange yellow-blonde dreads under the Rastafarian yarn hat, with her freckly face impossibly white, with her transparent skin and her wide smile bespeaking openness and warmth and vulnerability, just like Janis Joplin, he thought. In that very moment, in the slanting afternoon light and heat and damp closeness of the rising humidity, he knew. He knew. And although he was dressed all in black and imagined he must look something like the dismal, world-weary figure painted by Caspar David Friedrich at the sea of fog, it seemed to him that in the brightness emanating from her smile all fog must dissipate, and the heavy dread of a dull, poisionous summer began to lift.
She laughed at him again. "Are you just going to stand there staring, or are you going to go ahead and trample me flat?"
He smiled. "I'm sorry. I didn't see you there."
She looked around at the empty grass sea surrounding them in the quad, and then she looked back up into his eyes. "Really?"
He was grinning foolishly, he knew. "Do you. . . .I wonder. . . ." He wasn't quite sure what to say, and he wasn't sure he could find any words that he needed. "Would you mind if I sat down for a moment? I haven't been having a very good day."
She moved over a little on the blanket.
"Of course. But you'll have to introduce yourself. What kind of a girl do you think I am?"
That's how it began.
They were a strange pairing. Obviously. He was the mystical, metaphysical, dark philosopher, and she was the easy, light spirit, drifting along, happily superficial. He quickly learned that her name was Estella Thompson. "Estella, like The Star. You know, in the Tarot."
He wasn't familiar with the Tarot.
She fished around in the big orange bag that she toted around. It was decorated with microscopic plastic beads and tiny reflecting bangles portraying three cats with extremely long necks and giant, searching, saucer-shaped eyes. Out came her Rider-Waite deck. She pulled back the lid and tapped the cards out in her open palm, cheap plastic bracelets jangling around her wrists. For a long moment she looked directly into his eyes where he sat next to her, her gaze not flinching. He noticed how light blue her irises were, like a glassy kind of frosting, the kind of frosted light blue color that you saw, for example, in the eyes of Siberian huskies, only hers were surrounded by perfect circles of extremely dark, penetrating navy-sapphire. She continued to look at his eyes, and then she studied his hair, which was too long at the time because he seldom bothered to cut it when he was in school. It was hanging almost to his shoulders. His hair was silky-black almost to the point of being dark blue. She reached over to stroke it between thumb and finger and pushed it back over his shoulder.
"Hm. Your Significator must be the Knight of Swords, I think, although maybe we'll change that later. But that will do for now."
She looked down into the deck of cards and began fanning through it. He continued to stare at her face as she did this. He couldn't help staring. He had never seen someone so pretty as she was. He wondered how he could never have noticed this about her before. The sun was behind him and falling over his right shoulder on her face, and he could see how long her lashes were, blonde lashes, almost transparent. Tiny, faint reddish freckles all over her forehead and eyelids, spilling down her cheeks and across her little button nose. His thinking by now was not clear, not at all coherent, but somewhere the thought formed that he could not believe that he was here, and that some improbable lucky thing was happening to him. He could not really follow anything that she was saying or doing with the cards. What she did though was to locate the card which she'd called his Significator: the Knight of Swords. The card showed a knight armored in plate mail on a charging horse. The horse's eyes appeared to be rolled back in its head, and they were dashing across a high, windy plain, the grim-faced knight with his sword drawn and held aloft as though charging into battle, or coming to the aide of some unseen person in dire need of rescue or relief.
My Significator?
She lay the card down on the blanket between them and looked up. He was still staring at her face. She blushed and looked down quickly, handing the deck of cards to him.
"Now shuffle them. Not like a hand of poker! Divide the deck and lightly recombine them in clumps."
"Like this?"
"Yes. That's fine. Do it as many times as you like. But it's a little different from shuffling a regular deck of cards, because it makes a difference if the cards fall right side up or upside down. So every time you cut the deck, make sure you turn one of the halves around, like so. This will get them shuffled while altering the vertical orientation. Upright, or reversed."
He got the hang of it, squatting on his knees on the blanket, mixing the cards as she instructed him.
"Are you going to tell my future?"
"It's not like that. Well, not necessarily. Not exactly. Some people use them in fortunetelling. They can be used that way, but it's more interesting to let them tell you their own story. Try not to have any expectations in mind. Be open. The cards may speak to you about the future, or about the past, or about the present, or about other futures or pasts or presents other than the ones you're living in."
He frowned with his eyes.
"You'll see," she said. "Some people compare it to Jungian psychology, treating the cards like they represent archetypes embedded within the psyche. In that case, casting the cards is more a form of psychological analysis, or assessment, than fortunetelling."
"Is that how you see it?"
She shrugged.
"Sometimes. It could be. There's not a single answer to the question, though. The world's more complex and interconnected than most people think." She held out her hand and he passed the thick stack of cards back to her. "Now cut the deck."
He did, and she placed the top half on bottom. She set the deck down to the left of the Knight of Swords on the blanket, picked up the top card from the deck, and turned it over, placing it directly over his Significator. "This is what covers you. This. . . ."
He looked at the card. It showed a nude woman kneeling at the edge of a pool, her bended knee on dry land, her other foot seeming to be standing on the surface of the water of the pool itself. She held a pitcher in either hand and was pouring water from them onto the ground and into the pool. Although a sunny blue sky was behind her, she was surrounded by a cluster of large stars, including a big, bright golden star just above her head. At the bottom of the card was printed: THE STAR.
"Is that you, Estella?"
"As a matter of fact, yes. I use the Star as my Significator."
"So you're on top of me."
"Yes." She looked up at him, beaming. "Or maybe. The Star is the central issue affecting you. Your. . . .primary focus, or what's going on inside you right now."
"Maybe?"
She shrugged, and laughed.
"The Star indicates the power of positive thinking," she said, pressing on. "Optimism. Are you feeling optimistic?"
"I wasn't when I came out of my calculus final."
"But are you now?"
"More than you can possibly know," he said, and it was like letting out a long breath.
It was true. Absolutely true. His black spirits that had dogged him were simply gone. It was remarkable that it could happen so quickly and with such utter totality. He was feeling something that he had not felt in a long, long time. He felt good.
That was how he came to meet Stel on the last day of finals at
He heard the side door off the kitchen being pulled closed upstairs. It pulled him out of his reverie. Isabel was finally leaving. His eyes immediately went back to the clock. It was 8:37. He lay motionless in bed, his ears straining to hear the confirmatory signals. A few minutes later he did: the grumbling whirring and the big louvered steel panels curving up against the ceiling of the garage, and then the ignition of her car revving to life. He heard the car backing out of the garage just as he had heard his father's car leave the house almost exactly two hours earlier. Shortly the garage door closed again. Faintly and far removed, the Doppler-distorted departure of Isabel into an unknown world of foggy potentiality well out beyond this cave.
* * *
This time it started with memories of all the books that Stel had brought into the castle with her. That was a little ironic, he saw in hindsight. Stel was bright, but she was not a bonafide intellectual. She was one of those people who found more comfort, and a certain amount of security or estimation of self-worth, in owning and surrounding herself with books than in actually reading them, and although she was familiar with the authors of the books she owned and hauled around through life, she seemed less versed in the contents of the works themselves.
Their lives together in the summer had quickly settled down into a. . . .pattern. He was still reluctant to call it a routine. Whenever they were sequestered together behind the bulwarks of the castle walls they were almost always engaged in passionate love-making. That was what was so brilliant about their chemistry. Their souls each seemed to dissolve mutually, naturally and completely, into one another. The sex was effortless and of unending possibility. Acts of elegantly insouciant imagination, their entwined bodies far, far ahead of the mind, so that whatever remained of individual consciousness was simply drawn forward, magnetically, or through a strange gravity, like the way a comet's tail unfolds inevitably behind the solar plunge of its icy nucleus. It was an unstoppable energy, insurmountable, overwhelming, until both Stel and he were reduced to fortunate passengers only along for the ride, gone in a profound, ineluctable chemical reaction. It was not ribald or raunchy in any way. Their love-making was always a profound and strange and mystical experience. It felt sacred, connected with the numinous in a way that was all too familiar to him, although he could never explain it to her. It was territory he'd explored before, plenty. After they were together for only a few weeks it was already nearly impossible for him to remember a time when they could ever have been apart. Those earlier years felt to him like a dream dreamt by some other person. Numinous. Yes. They were together in a realm of filmy veils ballooning in secret summer breezes, peeking though to arcane realms were regular people ordinarily did not venture. He'd seen glimpses of it before, but only from the distorted vantage of a hyperacute neurological storm. This, though, was something holy transpiring in the real world, and there was nothing for it but to let go of all natural, reflexive hesitancy and restraint and dip in, dip in, dive down deep in. Swim down in it. Submerge and go with the flow.
The other part of the summer's unroutine routine was more conventional or orthodox, but no less a matter of transcendence as far as he was concerned. This aspect of his life took place during the times when Stel was not present. Times when he was at his job at the bookstore, or back in their regal apartment alone. Then, in every possible instant, he was voraciously devouring books, either the ones she'd brought with her, or others that he'd rooted out in the dim, musky-murky bookstore. And, similar in a strange way to their hours of intense love-making, during these times he was still not in charge of his own intellect, but an eavesdropper on the inspired brillance of masters. Most of the time he felt ego-absent, gulping down the intoxicating and imaginative lifestories of others. . . .Shakespeare, Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce, Pynchon, Whitman, Eliot, Conrad, on and on it went, on and on, from Moby-Dick to Edgar Allan Poe to Allen Ginsberg to On the Road and William Burroughs and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (one of the ones that Stel had made it through completely, and several times at that), and from Stephen Crane to The Death of Ivan Ilych. He read Kafka late into the night, and The Sound and the Fury over the course of three very vivid days that reminded him somehow more of immersing himself in Apocalypse Now than in "Heart of Darkness." For a few weeks he dipped down into Roger Zelazny, and he savvied and grokked the Amber books as well as the claustrophobic, benighted jewel that was Creatures of Light and Darkness. He was, he thought, assembling a database from which a craft might one day emerge. While at work he read a good deal of Shelby Foote, picking and choosing his way across the years of American self-destruction, and he learned how economics always trumps morality. He dipped down into Frankenstein,
That was his summer, a season submerged in sex, in which two souls devoured one another with a sweetness of inexpressably heartbreaking tenderness and human-to-human connection, and in literature, in words and ideas, a summer of absolute, high-energy expression flooding in from the outside so fast and so completely and continuously that he never found himself alone and unbeguiled for any more than the briefest moment here and there when he might contemplate how to put into words of his own this experience of sinking down selfless into all these virtual lives of others.
The books. . . .the books. . . .those heavy, heavy books, deeply moving, pulsing between the covers with life, vibrant, human life. . . .the heady concepts. . . .their exalted authors, literary immortals, towering giants. . . .it was all too much, almost. . . .All those writers laboring to produce their indelible images and situations, to touch some raw nerve in the human condition. . . .Was that what it was about? He didn't think so, no; at least, not completely. He thought it closer to the truth to say that many of those novels wrote their authors. They had this hungry thing growing inside and they had to release it in a torrent of words lest it devour them. And now, standing in the shower, washing his hair, his thoughts lightyears removed from his body, he mixed it up; he felt something slipping, and his mind merged those books and their authors and the boundless flood tide of words and ideas with what he'd learned in school when he thought he was learning nothing, when he was trying to find a way to please and appease the father he'd never known adequately when he was a boy. . . .Improbably, impossibly, his mind began mixing it all up with ideas from. . . .from genetics, of all things. . . .
* * *
20090822
Golden Age of Hypocrisy
Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.
They barred and sealed up the door
after the devil had finally gone,
never one word of apology wasted on
the hell that they put everyone through.
They sent our good friend packing
for a single infraction that's
nobody's business anyway, and then they
insisted that we play by their
playground rules.
This must be the new golden age
of hypocrisy,
so I counsel renegade action.
Take the law in your own hands.
But as for me, I'm already gone.
Your eyes are filled with tears
and sadness when you really ought to
be celebrating with a glad heart.
None of us know how the future unfolds.
You were thrown overboard from the
ship of fools where the rules only apply
if the spinner stops on a red square.
These days and nights of peace and music
will twine like flowers through your hair,
and I swear I don't care about the
rumors and innuendo.
This must be the new golden age
of hypocrisy,
but your true friends will not abandon you.
All you have to do is open your eyes and
realize who they truly are.
(comment)
they are not excerpts but pieces of scaffolding. i don't know how you do this kind of thing, but this is how i do it; at least for this one.
20090821
new novel excerpt
Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.
Misty cones of diffuse yellow-white light hung suspended in abyssal silence under widely-spaced lamps frozen at stiff, mute attention along the narrow streets. Far above these neighborhood streetlights, arching above the dark rooftops and unmoving tree branches, the cloudless sky was a perfect black shroud that had been spattered with heaping handfuls of watchful stars, perfect tiny spots of brilliance, hard and unchanging, too cold to twinkle. This whole rural town, like the pale, muted cityglow to the north, was drowned in breathless silence as though it were trapped inside a snowglobe -- only there wasn't any snow.
The advancing sound of regular soft footfalls began to insinuate itself into the slow, cottony inertia of this November morning's quietude. It was a steady trotting pace, and its source soon came into view: an early morning runner out jogging through the magical and pristine world when all reasonable people were home, safe in bed and fast asleep. He came steadily forward with a smooth, controlled tempo, this great bear of a man, his arms freely swinging, white breath puffing, his long, muscular legs carrying him right down the center of the empty street. His physique was brawny but graceful, somehow more suggestive of a dancer than a brute champion. He wore white running shoes and white shorts and a faded maroon Missouri State sweatshirt that had, years ago, featured an enormous bear's head emblazoned across the chest.
The runner's eyes were fixed forward, and his gaze did not wander as he ran. Percival Blake knew his landscape intimately: Gooch Road, Golden Meadows, Paradise Drive, Mesa Drive, Nichols and Firefly, Inman, Butterfield and Foxx, Ballard, and all the rest, Birch and Hickory and Juniper beyond Gregg Road, Crestwood and Pembrook and Paddington to Norton beyond. His feet found a new route through the tangles of this bushy patch of nascent suburbia every morning, but there was no getting lost. It was his landscape and he experienced it like a double exposure, his home, his patch of private sanity hiding in plain sight from the broken world just beyond his skin, a world threatening at every moment now to slip away into unchecked madness, its false idols sculpted from salty sandstone on the shores of a Dead Sea lately called forth to flood a sinful world. The words of a rhyme flashed through his mind in time to his footfalls:
Way down in Zeboiim don't the wind blow cold
Way down south in Zeboiim don't the wind blow cold
Salty statues rise up from the waters
Mobs with pitchforks don't want your daughters
Down in Zeboiim
He was not thinking sharply yet. His thoughts were not tightly focused; in fact, he strove to maintain a deliberately unfocused mind during his morning run. There was no need for that kind of office lucidity. Indeed, he relished this overture to the day before the sharpness and intellectual keenness commenced its preliminary incursions like rosy rising light in the East, tentatively lighting up higher cognitive functions. Plenty of time for that later. His morning jogs were intended to prime the circulation, to enhance and steady his breathing in time to the metronomic pumping of his thick, powerful legs, like a mental stretching exercise to help rouse his brain. He considered this constitutional to be a spiritual yogic practice. Steady on, steady, heart and arteries pulsing with rich, oxygenated blood like a firebox and its attached boiler tubes, arms pumping, legs pumping, driven by continuously cycling piston rods. Running smooth. Perceiving the world as through a biconcave lens where all light beams diverged, out and away, out and away, dimming all. Allowing no preconceptions to take hold and demand particular primacy or salience. Diverting. All ideas and conceptions diverting. This exercise was, as he saw it, a useful method for achieving perspective, or at least reaching outwards for perspective. Nevertheless he found during the last few months, to his irritation, that certain images persisted in intruding on his uncentered awareness as he ran. They would start to coalesce among the unexamined roots of his consciousness, and as they threatened to rise up he would force them back down, repress them. Sometimes he had to pick up his pace and run a little bit faster than he preferred. The extra exertion usually did the trick, and after a block or two he would drop back town to his normal pace and stay there at least for four or five more blocks before it became necessary to repeat the process.
Around him all the houses were like lonely hulking sepulchers widely spaced along these young streets: gloomy, black, slumbering skulls capped by enormous silvery-white roofs uncognizant of the passing night. They might as well be houses sheltering frightened Jews, maybe, with blood-smeared transoms over massive doors, fearfully sheltering down in place and awaiting the black breath to pass them by. He knew that black breath; he could feel it in his own lungs as he ran, no matter how cold the night. The houses were black mounds centered in silvery-gray plots of an elfin land newly recovered from the surrounding untamed countryside. Civilization unscrolling at its subconscious periphery, expanding, encroaching on wild lands of weeds and small rodents and insect intelligence, of cricket chirps and plantive bird calls, paving over all with straight lines and Euclidian exactitude. The stars above him were hard white points or judgmental eyes; no, they were not white; they had color if you only paused to notice. Dimensionless points, that was how they were seen if they were noticed at all, not roaring, chaotic cauldrons of seething nuclear fusion, squeezing down new heavy elements down lifespans that reduced human history to a meaningless blip. How deceptive the common view. How myopic and egotistical. These blessed, cold, quiet, black nights when the sun's chariot disappeared roaring on the far side of the planet brought the relief of lethargy. Forgetfulness. Narcotic indolence and the blessed stupefaction of the senses pervaded this neighborhood just like all the other tombs of a nation of sleepwalkers who had been uncomfortably jolted from their dreams of dreams. How thankful they were to crawl back into the coffins of the night, to deaden the senses with alcohol and television. He saw it every evening when he came back home: the silver-gray glow of the reassuring sedation. Soma delivery devices. Like cigarettes. Drug delivery devices. The blessed euphamisms by which horrors may be muted and swallowed like tepid tea. Satisfactorily bland, thank you. Night, night.
On he ran, up the rise of low hills, down the far side, through a perfect young American suburb. So clean and uniform and immediately replicable and comfortably forgettable. Expedience unencumbered by charm or character. All practical and formulaic. Cut it out of this corner of America and replace it with any other corner. Unnoticable switcharoo.
The sleepers inside were equally interchangable middleclass workers. Well-fattened and generally satisfied. Their complaints about their bosses were rubberstamp. Many of them were bosses, grousing over the rubberstamp complaints of their subordinates. Day into night into day into night into day into night.
The double exposure. The snowglobe world, and the land of the dead.
White asphalt shining in starlight. Low white curbs holding back a low flood of uniform green-brown winter-dead lawns. Uniform mailboxes on upright posts and basketball hoops overhanging long cement driveways. White propane tanks on the sides of low rolling mounds. A few big red trash bins out curbside in anticipation of the morning's garbage pick-up. Brick facades and white steel garage doors and far-spaced streetlights and young trees tethered to the ground lest the spinning planet fling them all into the oblivion of outer space.
Coming up over a low rise he noticed an unusual lump mounded up by the curbside ahead. His pace slackened and he trotted over to inspect the discovery. His footfalls slowed to a walk, then he stopped. He gazed down into the ruins abandoned there.
A dead cat.
It was dark in color, dark gray or black. It looked like it had been big in life, but it could be that it was bloated. But there was no smell of death, and it would not be long left dead on these streets. Probably it had been killed during the night, he thought. He saw how matted the fur was on its crushed back legs. Yes, now he saw the wetness from the blood. A fairly recent kill. It was dead, though, not still lingering on. It was lucky that way at least.
He straightened up and looked around. The same dead houses he'd been running past. No one stirring. He thought of some child whose pet wouldn't be coming home. He recalled that stabbing pain from his own childhood. Then abruptly he recalled an incident in Bethesda. It had happened near their house. He'd come outside in the early evening to get the newspaper, and he saw the car coming down the street. It was odd because the car was veering steadily across to the left side of the road. He saw the woman behind the wheel of a shiny tan and cream Ford Bronco, probably in her mid-forties, he thought, with her left hand clearly visible directly in front of her face, heel of her palm firmly anchored to the steering wheel as though she were using it as a gunsight. The car whooshed past, coming back to the righthand side of the road, its tail lights vanishing beyond the corner, and then where the car had been he saw the cat. This time, though, it was mercifully already dead.
Gone to cat heaven. Is there a great spiritual paw waiting to reach out and snatch away his feline soul? Or is it just another portal to be crossed? Like the Hindus believe. How many days before transmigration? Forty-nine? Something like that. No one here to read the Tibetan Book of the Dead over another cat left dead on the side of the road. They must find their way without a spiritual guide. But a cat must not require the same spiritual guidance that a human being does. How many sins can a cat commit during its life? It's certain to ascend to a higher spiritual plane. For us it's less certain. A human being can rise or fall. In fact maybe the higher you ascend, the more likely you are to fall. What goes up.
Standing there staring at the dead cat in the darkness. He looked up and around. So silent without his running. His breath was coming back. The houses nearby frozen and sealed over like all the others. It's the unspoken thing in microcosm, he thought. The absent hand of God. Where. . . ?
There was no time for that kind of introspection. This was an era of crisis. Immediacy. Take action. Take charge now. We'll worry about everything else later. But now. . . .
He looked back down at the dead animal. What troubled him was the thought that the children whose cat it was might discover this useless relic in the morning when the sun came up. What could be done? He did not relish the thought of hauling off the body himself, although maybe he could stop by in the car. Not that he realy wanted to do that either.
Then he remembered the bulky cellphone in his pocket. It was heavy and always in the way and he never thought to turn it on, but Isabel had wanted him to carry it. He took it from his pocket. Battery probably dead, he thought. But it came on when he held the button down. What's the number for information? he thought. Not 911. It's 411. Answer any question. Help on the way. He punched the number in and shortly was forwarded to county animal control. No one there after hours. Leave a message.
He found a mailbox and read off the address, stressing that they should try to come early before any children were up and about. Maybe they would understand, he thought. But although they might understand, he knew they wouldn't make a special trip. Another dead animal. A low priority call.
He shut the phone off and put it back in his pocket.
Nothing to be done.
He looked to the east. Was there the slightest hint of paling in the sky? No, he didn't think so. It was still too early. But it would not stay early. He should start back for home.
He returned to the center of the road. He pushed his sweaty-cold hair back from his eyes and turned around the way he had come. He made a few rolls of his fists in the air and pumped his legs in place a few times before leaning forward and resuming the run.
His stride was disrupted. It lacked the effortless, unthinking simplicity to which his limbs were accustomed. Ripples had spread across the smoothness of his mind and they began breaking up into more complex patterns. The yoga was over. He was slipping into a daytime kind of awareness. It occurred to him how differently the mind comprehended the world at different hours of the day. Why was that? Perhaps it was connected to hormones. Adrenal flows and ebbs. A mind, or an ego, was itself a spectrum, made for different perceptions depending upon the angle the sun made with the zenith. Strange. To be a continuum of different personalities spread out over the clock, blending into each other so that you did not even notice how many people you truly were. But sometimes you were shocked in a certain way, or you saw things that came at the mind like a prism, breaking up your thinking, redistributing the ego. He was not seeking thoughts, but he felt thoughts beginning to rise and compete for his attention. Morning coming on too soon, maybe squeezing in more time now that would be stolen away at a later hour.
A woman who intentionally runs down cats. What has to happen to a person to make her that way? And it was strange she was a woman. Men are violent. Many more men are in prison than women. Why? The dance of testosterone. Jiggling dancing molecular dance across receptors and synapses. And women give birth and must protect the next generation. Wired in like it or not. Feminism takes no account of molecular biology. Politics. And no matter what neuroses your mother suffers, she remains your mother. The original protector. Protectress. From the threats of the world.
Running. Running on.
The images came back, and he could not repress them any more.
People like birds, spreading their arms, leaping into the sky. Where was the hand of God?
Maybe God was there. Maybe they saw him smiling gently, beckoning, encouraging, dispelling fear, come to me, come to me, before they stepped outside, stepping across the jagged broken glass threshold, putting feet down into an open sky waiting just outside the black smoke and flesh-eating flames of the burning towers.
20090818
News Corny Zea maysland Cryptic Culprit Savage Intoxication Unidentified Finally Is
Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.
Slug sample tests done by the Cawthron Institute
on the vomit of one of the dogs was also found in
a sea slug. Now identified as tetrodotoxin, which
is. . . ? Also, sea slugs came to contain the
toxin of Auckland's east coast and Coromandel
beaches. Dead sea slugs simply slimy only at
Narrow Neck, not to be confused with Great Neck,
New York, inasmuch as the issue could be localized.
Auckland regional beaches for sea slug vacations
and vaccinations will continue to conduct solemn
deathwatches for a nominal fee over moribund
pilchards, penguins and dolphins, according to a
formal reading of the Tibetan Book of the Dead,
which are all nationally recognized icons in this
small marine park. We must all be constantly
reflecting on this evaporating treasure lest
through quantum indeterminism it drift away like
all boojums eventually do. Scientists sampling
beachfronts for clues and pretty shells have spent
the day scouring Narrow Neck with two dogs or two
abrasive rocks rather on Auckland's pretty wet
waterfront and assorted rookeries. Cawthron's
world-renowned agencies meanwhile are notoriously
testing samples from the area. A naturally
occurring neurotoxin expert says, because there
are many neurotoxins, identifying the source is
critical in defining precisely where in the
environment the problem scanned the affected
area, collecting various clues of any existing
toxins, and putting out bags over time and
unpleasant faces so if there are any in them, or
around them, or under them, or above them, or
lying tangent to them, or if there is anything
otherwise there, or near there, or far, Dr. Wood
will pretty quickly get a clue, with the result
of their results being resulted in a timely
fashion. "Our experience guides us to begin
researching early to determine problems that
generally do not go away, and it has already
confirmed dog deaths from anatoxin, recovered
and recorded from a number of river system
facilities and fatalities and somewhat watersheds
scattered around Takaka, Wellington, and Canterbury
dog tails in particular. While there, dogs dying
from marine algae before, this is the most likely
scenario with the recent dog deaths, including
frothing at particularly susceptible spies and other
suspicious looking tourists and American movie
producers alleged and so-called moguls, and seagulls,
because, along with neurotoxins, algae-human hybrids
are particularly appealing to dogs and things keep
cropping up most mysterious and vague. They are
most likely to ingest in jest neurotoxin poisoning
within the marine environment would now only birds
sea lions and tigers and bears burning bright, and
others killed in this humane way. If algae is the
now made its presence known, either as storm event
or strong wave action has it up onto the beach,
where zombie dogs unlikely otherwise to be harmful
to humans and certain other mostly hairless
primates, unless surfing board initiatives and many
great white sharks to post warning signs for naked
apes wandering about to authority on algae. It
maintains a significant of its kind in New Zealand,
which like King Kong and the collection includes
several species unique to this, all the world's an
evolutionary stage to link the dog deaths of toxic
material are still required and dog, but known to
dog the authorities, to have caused a useful to our
illicit research. Samples can be in Nelson."
She says dogs are known to emit an odor which,
while putrid, to given they like to eat rotten
smelly it, which we know is often fatal. Not.
The Ass
Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.
Let's talk about your butt: celebrity
fitness trainer David Kirsch on how to
shape and tone your backside. . . .You
stroll alone through the scorched earth
desolation of a war they never teach in
schools. But my eyes can only see the
beautiful reliquaries adorning every
tree and cloud, and the birds that swim
through syrupy atmospheric seas low
above the asphalt shining silver in the
impossibly clear and vast, transparent
morning light, while every flickering
leaf sings to me a thousand songs of
the secret joy they've buried under
what they've persuaded you is life. In
the end Warren thought it had been a
lost cause, but that's only because he
didn't know how Shiva broke the
unmanifest into an illusion of time,
tick-a-tock, tock-a-tick, it doesn't
really matter. And there are no dirty
words, not really, only commercial-
soiled minds, and Jesus rode into
Jerusalem, and when he had found a
young ass, sat thereon. . . .And you
can be borne upon an ass, or you can
fall upon your ass, it doesn't really
matter; it's only a rounded mass of
muscle and collagen and fat, after all.
20090816
Dinner Time
Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.
For love and honey, honesty, compassion,
We make this trip, passing down miles become
Lightyears, past tears of exuberance in
Each other's eyes and battle cries spilling
From faded decades into our ears. We touch
Fingertips to fingertips, fingerprints
To fingerprints, we can't push on any further,
Further. We are temporarily segregated
Consciousness enfolded within fleshy
Envelopes looking for warmth for a little while
Before we hear Mother's voice calling us
Back home.
Chakraslip
Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.
you don't. Now the landscape is a leaden-gray
monochrome, silver and graphite chiaroscuro.
And now the dark wizard elevates his staff, or
axe, and the dragon is split down her longitudinal
axis, peeling backwards with a gentle ripping
sound like cloth being unstitched, or like nylon
parachute fabric being steadily unzipped, and
the piñata bursts forth in a rain of startling
radiance that wells up bubbling, bubbling out of
some unexpected well, expelling its strange
contents across the pinhole vistas familiar since
birth. Now the universe that was previously
shades of gray, shades of gray that you never
even noticed, spills over your shoes in the flow
of resinous blacklight fluorescent colors, jagged
patches cozying up to one another in open
defiance of your ravaged advertising school
sensibilities. Now the aromas of a new Earth
curl up and infiltrate your newly unsealed nostrils,
and you can smell the roots and humus, and
the plants and nematodes and mycelia are
buzzing in the snapping and thrashing network
of neurons that comprise your hastily reknitting
brain. Now you take five to drop some NKM
and dip down into The Book of Life from your
favorite portal (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov),
and the sound and the fury rise like some
renaissance symphonic crescendo as you take
bits and pieces here and there and resculpt a
new Boschian paradise where you bootstrap
yourself and your loved ones into a new tightly
curled neighborhood brane-in-the-bulk, and
now you see it, now
20090812
20090811
new novel: excerpts
Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.
Chapter 2 (excerpts).
"I'd like for us to change the fundamental way that we think about viruses."
Mike Garrity nodded slightly, indicating that he was hearing what was being said. Not necessarily listening actually, but hearing at least. To indicate that a trace of consciousness was stirring somewhere deep inside his skull: a sine pulse beat of minimal awareness. He noticed something like a faint smile turning the corners of Percy's mouth. The old man was looking at him with that strange, detached focus that he had: simultaneously intent on you, but also seeming to be not quite entirely in the same room with you. Mike had got that feeling from Percy for as long as he'd known the great man. It was like a quantum mechanical thing, a simultaneity of presence and absence, here and not here. To be localized and to be removed, all at the same time.
He knew he wasn't alone in feeling this way about Percy Blake. "He's like a cobra smiling at you in that absent way of his, secretly hypnotizing you, looking blissful as the Buddha and carefully not letting his gaze shift down to the clutch of eggs you're setting."
That's how Martin, the lab's newest addition, had expressed it a few nights ago when they were in San Francisco. They were sitting together in a tiny all-night Chinese hole-in-the-wall, come back late from the bars for a little hometown hot and sour soup. Outside the wind was blasting down the dark streets, steep and narrow and running with slick, flickering neon and thin swirls of oil and gasoline. A freezing icy rain had been pattering the city intermittently since late afternoon. Spasmodically. The soup had been peppery-hot: perfect for drying dripping noses and driving off the night's cold from their bones.
Martin had come off a farm somewhere in Iowa, so his metaphor made sense. It was a hick image, but it was true enough, Mike thought. A snake with a hypnotic gaze prepared to go for your eggs. Your nads. Yes. Maintain proper respect with that one. You better not mess with Percy Blake.
Not that he'd ever known Percy to strike at a student, literally or figuratively. But Percy was a smart one -- too smart, maybe, for MSU. Shrewd. And he was dangerous, surely. Sly as a fox. Someone like Percy Blake didn't have to provide demonstrations of ferocity. He inspired loyalty because of his obvious towering intellect, and out of the professional connections he had, and out of. . . .fear. Someone like that could make you, or he could destroy your career. You just knew that. Looking at him you could tell, from his legendary cold, supercilious smile, always alert, always weighing you, judging you. Measuring you. His cold gaze penetrated directly into your soul.
He's not really supercilious. Or not necessarily. He's not arrogant that way. But you always absolutely know your place relative to him. What kind of a fool would go up against him?
A fool like me.
"What I mean," Percy continued, "is I want us collectively to begin changing the way we think about viruses in the lab. What viruses are. What they do. What they can do. This new approach has been in my thoughts for some time. I want to bring everyone else around, to get us all on the same page. I want to put us on a new conceptual foundation in this lab, say. And I want you to spearhead the effort, Mike."
He nodded again, hoping he looked more pensive than he felt. His thoughts were bleary and unfocused. It was too early. If he'd had any coherent thoughts yet this morning, they mostly were in orbit around the iconic image of coffee. He gazed down to the document he held in his lap, thumbing through it, delicately turning back the sheets. It proved to be one long, fifteen page chart, stapled in the corner. It was, he realized, actually a single very long table stacked up under the brooding heading: VIRAL TAXONOMIC INDEX. Different sections were shaded in light pastel colors, setting out at a glance the various relationships among six broad viral groups broken out by nucleotide chemistry (single-stranded DNA, double-stranded DNA, sense- and anti-sense- strands of single- or double-stranded RNA), and the Retroviridae. An extensive index filled the last five pages. An index for an index, he thought. So very Percy Blake.
It was exquisitely, excruciatingly anal-retentive. No one took virology so seriously as Percy Blake. The old, infamous hair-splitter.
"We're returning to the Baltimore scheme?" Mike asked, turning back to the top page. He straightened the document on his lap and reached back for his latte grande, perched precariously on a cleared edge of Percy's desk. Only tiny portions of the desktop were visible under the mountains of books and stacks of papers spilling across the desk.
"This index is just our guide," Percy explained, his voice calm and soft. "It's like a periodic chart of the viruses. Baltimore is good for feeling your way around regardless of whatever violence it does to phylogeny. It's a focusing tool, just like the periodic table of the elements is. Consider it a gross map of the landscape. But the map is not the new conception I have in mind. In this case, at least, the medium is not the message."
Mike nodded again, savoring another salvo of caffeine spreading from his belly to his bloodstream, signaling the promise of amplifying clarity.
What time does the old guy get up? What does his wife think of all this?
He could guess.
He looked around the office. The room was large but impossibly cramped: his major advisor's littered desk was only a study in miniature of the more gravid chaos whirling all around the room like some violent hurricane of esoteric data frozen in one impossible instant of silence. Being in this room always made Mike feel that he'd stumbled inside some mad wizard's alchemical den. Ill-lit. Gloomy. Dusty. Percy Blake was a latter-day Merlin lost inside his complicated thoughts, oblivious to the physical bedlam roaring around him. The omnipresent technical debris was comprised of stacks of reprints and journals and miscellaneous other materials and notes accumulated in towering stacks and mounds of manila folders on the verge of collapsing and spilling their contents across the room. Other chairs around the desk and near the stuffed bookcases held more piles of books and papers. A number of filing cabinets were pushed against the walls and near the door. He always wondered whether Percy's mind could possibly be organized in so slipshod a manner as his office. There must be some truth to that, but if so, then the office could not be so chaotic as it seemed, because Percy's mind was perfectly sharp, and besides, he could always locate any document he sought within all the piles and mounds awash in the room with surprisingly little effort. There must be some imperceptible method to all this madness.
Unlike everyone else, Percy had never pushed a television set into his office, but a tiny clock-radio balanced high up on the west wall was kept tuned to National Public Radio and was never shut off all day long, although the volume was so very low that Mike could barely follow anything that was being said, and that only if he concentrated intently. The heavy blinds were pulled closed on the east wall but a blinding white beam of early morning light was streaming in. He had to keep edging forward toward the desk to keep the light out of his eyes.
He redirected his gaze back to his major advisor and discovered with a start that the old man was watching him, the usual wry half-smile still on his face. The man's skin was pale, the flesh of his face full and framed by a neatly trimmed mane of blond hair. The dome of his forehead was high. Percy was in his early fifties, but he seemed as physically fit as he was mentally acute. He was tall and muscular, but paradoxically he carried himself with a gentle grace, like an outsize dancer. His eyes were like hard blue marbles, icy and deep. It was his eyes that were most astonishing. That gaze he had, that unnerving stare. . . .it was not reptilian -- the faint smile on his mouth kept him from seeming too cold and remote -- but there was something not entirely believable about the overall presentation. Like Martin said. The eyes and the mouth didn't ever completely match up. You never knew what he was thinking. You never could guess precisely what he thought of you.
Mike swallowed. "My students will like this," he said, nodding down at the index in his hand.
"Students are always impressed by a massive collection of information," Percy said. He leaned back slightly in his chair. "Having all that information in one place always makes them feel that they know all that information without actually having to learn any of it."
Mike smirked and nodded.
Percy raised his hands and locked them behind his head.
"We think of viruses in terms of biology. This is natural enough, for their life histories are intimately entwined with our own. Of course a virus is strikingly unlike a living organism, lacking its own metabolism, as even your students will attest. But I intend that we should emphasize the differences and distinctions even more. The taxonomists tracing viral phylogeny and evolution are right, but those concepts lock our minds in a kind of phylogenetic box that's hard to escape. We end up conceiving of viruses only in terms of their evolutionary relationship to biology. To biochemistry. But there are other ways to approach these bits of free-form genetic code. Code. That's it. That's the key. That's the essence. We must begin to see every virus as a kind of genetic probe. A key to a lock. A special key to a special kind of lock. The phenomenon of viral diseases. . . ." he frowned and waved a hand dismissively before his face. "Trivial side-effects."
Mike frowned.
"You object?"
"Well. . . .Disease is a trivial side-effects? Surely that's overstating--"
"Trivial for our purposes. Our purposes."
"Most of our students -- myself included -- we have a certain vested interest in the medical aspects of virology."
"Fine. That's fine. That's what medical microbiology is for. We're not going to jettison that."
"Well, that's a relief."
"But that will no longer be the focus of this lab. Plenty of virology labs out there to keep that eternal flame burning for centuries to come. It's a useful point of view, but it's a restrictive perspective. No. We're disembarking from that train. We're done with thinking about viruses as mere medical marauders. Outlaw code, like Jesse James riding into town one day and laying waste to the respiratory epithelium, and all that. Well, it's not like that, not really like that, not at all. Ease and disease. Dis-ease. That's a loaded concept. A distorting concept for an informational system that has coevolved over millions of years. Not even coevolved. There's an inderdependence in play. Host and parasite cannot be pulled apart like that way. The words themselves betray the bias: host and parasite. So prejudicial, eukaryocentric, but neither host nor virus enjoys any privileged status. That's the bias we're going to resist and eventually, I trust, conquer." His brow furrowed and the focus of his blue eyes suddenly turned inward. "So distorting, concepts of disease, of predation. Parasitism. From now on, we're coming at virus-host interactions from a more. . . .mathematical perspective. Cybernetically. Starting today, we're taking genomes, both host and viral genomes, as integrated, encoded bits of physiology-sensitive information."
Mike listened to this, watching the old man, trying to absorb the concepts. He saw Percy's eyes lift then, gazing into some unvisualizable, nebulous space hanging up near the ceiling somewhere. He considered gulping down the last of his coffee, but it had grown too cold. He looked down at the desk for the tiny space he'd located before and set the cup down again. The blinding sunlight flashed in his eyes: on-off, on-off. He looked into the sheaf of pages in his lap and lifted a page again, another. He stared at it blankly. Physiology-sensitive information. It was familiar material for anyone with more than a passing interest in the field, this systematic organization of viral types. Could he make any connection between what he saw in these pages and what Dr. Blake was talking about? No. Not really.
His mind went back to a story he'd heard on the drive in this morning. Biotech firm announces cloning human embryos for purposes of stem cell harvesting. Somatic cell nuclear transfer. Embryo mining. Predictable political panic. But political on both sides. That's why raise the issue in the first place. Why else? Advance the biotech war. Jostle the front. Not much new here, not really. Only two of eight eggs divided to produce four cells. One progressed to a six-cell stage before cell division stopped. Cells divide all the time. Mitosis. And meiosis. Oh, yes, never forget meiosis. Send in the clones. Fear of Xerox generation. Why? Photocopy humans. Predicted to provoke Bush Administration officials into fit of wetting pants. . . .
Ethical problems. Fear. Rush to congressional hearings. Budget-fudgers debating niceties of molecular biology on the taxpayer dime. Last line of defense against ten thousand rubber stamp liberal eggheads on the march. Elitist intellectuals. Why is the right wing so afraid of intellectuals? The question answers itself. Preserve humanity. Ban cloning now.
"So?" Percy said.
Mike blinked.
"Ah. . . .When you say cybernetic, you're talking strictly about information content. Am I right?"
"That's right."
"So really, if I understand you, you're talking about setting aside. . . .Well, setting aside consideration of life altogether, both in the virus and in the host. Like trying to conceive of the whole system in more inorganic terms. Like. . . .programming."
"That's it. That's exactly right."
"Genetics as programming."
"Yes. It's not hierarchical in the traditional sense. Organ system to tissue to cell to metabolism to nucleotide sequence. It's all integrated with elaborate feedback arcs and no true primacy, but the nucleotides are the entry point for programming, and the virus is the interface."
He nodded.
"Okay."
Viruses as tools, he thought. Like cloning as a tool. Tool, as in hammer or saw or screwdriver. Basic fundamental level. Simple tool. Screwdriver virus. Like that. Good mental picture. Custom stem cells. Immune-compatible starter cells for tissue engineering and transplants. Immune privilege. Cells talking to cells. Shake hands with communication signaling molecules. All nice and friendly. Or rewrite code at the end of viral screwdriver. That's where this goes, of course. If you take it far enough.
The editable man.
He glanced up at the diplomas on the wall behind Percy's head, located the certificate from the NIH. When was he there? A citation from 1978. How's a wunderkind like Percy Blake go from the NIH to the CDC to MSU? It never seemed right to him. Some part of the story was missing. Percy, he knew, had started out working on the immunology of tissue rejection. How did that connect to virology? Major histocompatibility complex. The same cell-surface molecules that present foreign antigen for immune recognition are primary targets in tissue rejection. . . .
Mike imagined those molecules as microscopic mushrooms studding the surface of all nucleated cells. Class I MHC. And Class II antigens were similar, but found only on cells involved in the immune response.
They were powerfully antigenic. That was why tissue typing was crucial, and why bone marrow transplantation remained iffy. But what could they have really understood about any of it back in the 1970s?
Very little, he thought. Next to nothing. Panels of polyspecific sera. Messy almost to the point of incomprehension. He was grateful that he'd never have to deal with the like. Few monospecific reagents back then. Prohibitively expensive. He'd have to go back over some of those old reprints, he thouhg. Wait until the old man had left the office and rifle his files. Not that there could be much there worth finding. 1970s immunology. Well before AIDS. Didn't AIDS create immunology as a discipline? So Percy himself had proclaimed, many times. When was AIDS? Mid-1980s, Mike thought. Have to confirm that, too. . . .
Therapeutic cloning, he mused, his thoughts turning back once again to the story on the radio, and custom cell lines. Immune privilege. Self-antigens. Custom organs grown from custom stem cells, covered with one's own MHC molecules. . . .The body wouldn't reject that. Grow your own replacement parts. No viruses involved, but a similar kind of game.
It all keeps coming back to immunology. Defining the battleline that separates me from not-me. Restriction enzymes chopping up aggressive, pushy invaders. How do you tell yourself apart from your environment? Here I end, and here the world begins. . . . Ahh, the caffeine begins to kick in.
Percy leaned across the desk with another stapled document and handed it to him.
"Here. I want you to have a look at this."
He took it. "What is it?" It looked like a preprint, or an early draft. "Systems Biology: Genomics" was the title.
"It's work I'm doing with a couple friends in London. It's early thinking on the cybernetic approach. I'd like your thoughts on it. It's a kind of spectral analysis of metabolism: moving from causal gene/protein reductionism to what we call 'a dynamic choreography of tandem, multi-element systems over time.' Well, I guess that doesn't explain anything. We haven't found exactly the right metaphor yet. Maybe you can help with that. It's your copy. Feel free to mark it up."
He nodded. "Okay."
"Did you have a good time at the conference?"
He blinked.
"Uh, yeah. Yes. It was great."
"Good. How about Martin?"
"Martin too. I don't know how much he learned. A lot of it was over his head. But it opened his eyes."
"That's the point. You have to start somewhere. He seems bright."
"Yes. I think he is."
"Find any good restaurants?"
"Great restaurants. We found several little places around the hotel. Amazing, really."
"San Francisco has amazing food. We'll have a lab lunch later in the week. Wednesday. No, I've got something Wednesday. Make it Thursday. Let everyone know. I want everyone to bring the most interesting materials they got from the conference, give a little presentation around the table. You know the routine. Nothing fancy."
"Alright."
"How about you?"
"Me?"
"Busy schedule today?"
He shrugged under the snaky assessing stare, cryptic smile, scrutinizing, weighing.
"The usual. Teaching. Experiments. Getting caught up after a week off."
Percy nodded.
"Okay. Let's get to work then."
Mike rose. He reached for his coffee cup. He looked down and saw Percy already engrossed in some other document on his desk.
Meeting's over, he thought.
He turned and hurried out of the office.
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