There was room for one more at the bar, and at a nod from the chef he took the seat gratefully. One often had to wait, stamping feet to ward off the cold. The chef slid the amuse-bouche before him as he unfolded his napkin, and it was exquisite in appearance: a translucent carpaccio of walrus blubber sprinkled with snowflakes. The snowflakes were not unique, in fact they came in precisely two shapes, one sprinkled on the left side of the dish, the other on the right. They made not-quite-imperceptibly different crunches as he ate them. It was touches like this that had made the chef’s name when he was but a young man just arrived from Nunavut.

For his first course the customer ordered a cube, thick and meaty. It was peasant fare, but here elevated to fine cuisine. The chef’s assistants trained for three years in the rituals of icemaking. They knew intuitively what temperature of water to use, how to swirl it through the fourteen squares of the traditional whalebone tray, how to tap the sides to dislodge bubbles. One of those assistants now brought the chef a steaming tray, fresh from the freezer, which the master raised overhead and brought down with a single practiced motion onto the stone slab before him, then raised slowly to reveal the unbroken cubes. He then sorted through the cubes with the point of his obsidian knife, whisking the thirteen imperfect ones onto the floor. The remaining one he slid onto a plate and into the toaster oven behind him.

Twenty-five seconds in the oven grilled the outer layer of the cube to perfection, liquefying a thin sheen of pure water across its surface without defacing the deep-frozen insides with cracks. The customer took it in one bite, seasoning it only with a tiny pinch of sea salt, then sucking appreciatively. (He never chewed, of course: you might hear starlets and pop idols crunching their ice at trendy bars on Melrose, but here such behavior would get you ejected permanently.) The ice in his mouth was frictionless, spinning with every slight touch of his tongue, endlessly reconfiguring itself into new shapes as it melted in his heat. The meltwater had the slight mineral tang of true cube-ice, reflecting both its origin in a remote New Zealand spring and the subtle influence of the seasoned whalebone tray, infused during its months-long deep freeze.

While savoring the final drops, he studied the chalkboard for the daily specials. He was startled to see qainngittunga on the list, as this delicacy was only very rarely found, and its availability in summer was practically unheard-of south of the 49th Parallel. Despite the ruinous expense, as a connoisseur he had no choice but to order it. He was not sure he had pronounced the name quite correctly, but merely ordering this challenging dish was enough to ensure the respect of the staff.

With a single grunt of approval the chef knelt and reached into the hidden freezer beneath the bar. His thickly-gloved hands reappeared cradling a cylinder of ice three inches in diameter and a foot long, which he placed on a small polar-bear rug placed on the counter by an assistant. The ice was a pure, intense blue, mostly clear but punctuated by thin dark layers. It was a core sample that had been painstakingly extracted from thousands of meters below the surface of the Greenland ice sheet. (Such drilling is forbidden by international treaty, but there are limited exemptions for scientific research, and some of the resulting cores do find their way out of geology laboratories and into restaurants.)

Using a small handsaw with a diamond-studded wire blade, the chef quickly sliced off a section measuring a perfectly even three millimeters thick and gently lowered it onto a plate of red pumice, then handed it to the customer. He did not garnish it, nor did the customer apply a grain of salt; nothing was needed. The customer merely raised the plate to his mouth and slid the disc onto his waiting tongue.

The experience was indescribable, transcendent, as it had been once before on that memorable evening in Svalbard. His tongue was covered by the freshly-cut side of the ice (this was essential), which had been sealed inside the glacier, untouched, for a hundred thousand years. Through those ages the intense pressure and cold had distilled every essence of the microscopic bits of dust, sand and pollen that had drifted onto the surface so long ago. He tasted a world where mammoths roamed, and saber-toothed cats. He tasted the smoke of his ancestors’ cave fires, the ochre with which they painted the tales of their hunts.

After a long interval he swallowed. Nothing was left now; the ineffable vapors of impossibly distant pasts were already consumed. Before, in Svalbard, Lena was with him and the sensations had lived on in echoed reflections in each others’ eyes — I felt it, did you feel it too? — but that was the past, and on this day he was alone. Two years ago was no less remote than the Ice Age, and Lena was no less dead than the Cro-Magnon cave painters.

After a dish such as that, there was only one thing left to order. He gestured, holding up nine fingers, and the chef bowed deeply in response. A moment later a waitress appeared with a small brass tube the size of a rifle shell. She unscrewed the end, and tipped out a small crystal onto a silver dish. The customer gravely accepted the dish, and she bowed and retreated. In a reciprocal gesture he bowed his own head and gently lowered the tip of his tongue to the dish. As the water of his saliva made contact with the entropically-enhanced synthetic crystal packing of the water molecules in the ice₉ — an arrangement not found in nature, stable enough to remain solid at room temperature — its molecules too attached to the surface and froze, leading to a wave of crystallization that in two seconds had swept through his entire body and frozen it solid.

The staff quickly folded him into his voluminous sealskin robe, lashed it tightly shut with rawhide, and carried the stiff bundle into a remote corner of the basement. (But not before removing his wallet with tongs; the bill he left behind was quite considerable.)

Listen: Did you ever play Shock City? I’m not trying to change the subject; hear me out. I played the hell out of that game when I was twelve, and I always wondered what was inside all those buildings you couldn’t get into. There were only eight buildings with working doors in the whole game, with all kinds of things to explore and enemies to stalk in each one; so if you could somehow get into the other hundred or so buildings, what would be inside them? Could you play them too?

I know, I was pretty dumb back then. I didn’t understand the way the world works.

Finally someone told me about a hack to get into any building. It exploited a bug in the hit detection: you had to run at a corner and jump right at it. If you got the position and angle just right, you’d slip through the join between the two walls and be inside. People were using this as a cheat to get into the higher levels early, but all I could think about was the “secret” buildings. By then I had already covered my bedroom walls with hand-drawn maps of what I thought their insides might be like. I booted up the game and ran straight for the Library — I knew it was full of maze-like miles of dimly-lit dusty stacks and cavernous reading rooms, through which I could pursue my quarry of mutant beasts.

Instead I hit the corner and bounced off, of course. The instructions said to be patient, so I backed up and tried again. All the good skills took practice. I got into my best gamer trance state of endless repetition and fine-tuning of reflexes. Finally after an hour I made it: instead of the bounce I got a split second of mangled polygons warping across the screen, and then … nothing. The inside of the building didn’t exist, and neither did the insides of its walls, so it was as though there were nothing there. I could see the streets and buildings on the other side. But the building’s floor didn’t exist either, and there was no ground under it, just a yawning abyss of pure electric video blue that I fell into like a rock. I had about ten seconds to turn and look up: the universe was a void with nothing in it but a few square blocks of street-plan dotted with empty building-shaped holes. It receded into the distance, and then I reached the outer boundary of the world and snapped into the death screen.

Yes, I do have a point. The real world is like this too. The things we think are solid are fakes; there’s nothing inside them. The things we can’t open up are hollow, infinitely-thin shells around nauseating blue.

I know what you’re about to do. Everyone does this when I explain things. “I refute it thus!” as you hit a wall with a rock. You’ve got a hammer in that backpack? Even better.

Yeah, that support pillar looks pretty solid right there were you decided to hit it. With realistic bits of fractured concrete inside it, right there. Or over there, yes. Don’t you get it? You were meant to break through there. Just like I was meant to go into those dozen buildings but no others. You’re playing the game the way you were meant to, and it’s a very good game so the limitations are fewer, the glitches are harder to exploit.

But with the right skills, the right mind-set, I can find the places that weren’t meant to open up and make them open up anyway. And now that I’ve learned, I can’t un-learn it. Everything I do is wrong.

I can’t find my way back to the right doors. I don’t want to live out here in the cold underneath a fucking highway overpass with brain-damaged junkies. Present company excepted. I had a job and a place to live and friends. But I can’t get back to them: they’re part of the painted-on scenery now. They’re not real objects, they’re texture-maps. The street level doors open onto blue abysses. So do the windows. I’ve tried them all; then I gave up. I almost fell into them, any number of times, had to grab hold of texture that looked just like brick or paint or wood on one side and didn’t exist on the other. Vertigo made me sick and I threw up into that upside-down sky and watched it fall out of sight and vanish.

The former friends just repeat the same list of canned lines in random order, like any good NPC. Mostly “You look pretty bad, man” and “You really need to get some help”. It’s pathetic.

The last time I tried to get inside, I ran into a corner. Yeah, you’d think I would have tried that trick earlier, but you try ramming into the corner of a building in “real life”. Explain to your hindbrain about cheat codes when it sees a wedge of brick looming up. Even after psyching myself up I’d always swerve aside at the last second.

But I finally managed it. What do you think happened? I fucking knocked myself out on the bricks, that’s what. I came to a while later — this was in a back alley so no one had seen me. My face was covered in drying blood from this big gouge on my scalp, and I’d knocked this tooth out, but no serious head injury.

So I lay there a minute, feeling like shit, gathering up strength to move. Then I looked at how I was lying, and saw that my right arm went right into the wall and disappeared at the elbow. A clipping error. I could still feel my hand, but it wasn’t touching anything. I sat up slowly, the arm came loose with no resistance, but it just … ended there, in a smooth flat cut at the elbow. And I pulled it toward me and looked at it and there wasn’t anything inside me! Just an oval hole into a blue void.

I was too afraid to touch it with my fingers. Still am. I found a curl of rusty wire, unrolled it and stuck the end of it in. It just went straight into my arm without resistance, no matter how I wiggled it around inside. On the other side of that hole I didn’t exist. I got all four feet of wire into there, then lost my grip on the other end and it fell all the way in and disappeared … I didn’t feel it hit anything on the way down.

Of course you don’t believe me. Ha! No, whatever I’m full of, it isn’t shit. Alright, I’ll take the bandage off the stump and show you. It’s not paint. Sure, try sticking your fingers in and wiggling them. Fun, huh? Not so fun, huh?

You know about phantom limbs? I can still feel my forearm and hand. They say it’s because the brain centers that controlled them are still there, and want something to do, so they make up sensations. But like I said, I couldn’t feel them touching anything, just touch the fingers together and to the palm, make a fist and feel that. … Only now, just this morning, I can feel something else.

It feels like hard plastic. In my mind’s eye it’s shiny black. Its contours fit my grip perfectly. It’s got buttons on it, and a joystick. I’m going to try moving it now.

This is a sequel to my story Ozone. I’d wanted to write one for years, but didn’t have any inspiration about what happened next. Then last week the ideas in here came to me, and I realized that they fit neatly into that story-world. But the ending only came to me today, after I’d started writing the story down.

I got these ideas while watching my son explore glitches in the notoriously buggy game Pokémon Blue. I would love to have him read this story, but I know it would give him nightmares for weeks…

Take from the manual of monsters
Painted with three crude beasts, that sheet
On which I enumerated his stats once,
And spread it so as to cover his face.
If his bag remains, rifle his hoard
To see who gets his precious +6 sword.
Light the lamp to run away faster.
The only emperor is the dungeon master.

{ after Wallace Stevens }

The men on the TV gesticulate about some crisis or other; I can’t tell what, because the sound is off. They look angry — at me, at all of us, at themselves. Small text crawls across the screen above and below them. The TV men look very tired, too, as tired as I feel, and perhaps lost and afraid. I feel such sympathy; I would like to turn up the volume and learn more of their situation. Maybe I could ask one of my friends to.

Madeline is staring out the window. The window is next to the TV, it is filled with blackness, and speckly stars, and dim reflections of us. It’s night-time. Madeline’s gaze intersects mine somewhere near the empty center of the room. She is looking very intently into that blank space, at nothing I can see, and it makes me worry what might be out there. She is counting something; I know what that is, at least. I watch her lips move — she is up into the millions now. Some of us have nervous habits, some of us aren’t taking this ordeal so well.

Charles is still crying. I say “still” because my sense is that he’s been doing it for a long time. He cries with the slow understated pace of one who can keep it up indefinitely. He is on the floor, arms around his knees, rocking slowly. I am embarrassed to say that I can’t remember why he is so sad. Whatever he may have lost, he still has this room, a warm shelter from the night outside. He has us. We are his friends, if I recall correctly.

Junko remains calm, amidst the angry TV men and the crying and staring and all.

(It is rather crowded in here, I admit. We used to have a lot more room, but that accident damaged the rest of the house and we had to board up the door. It’s OK, we all fit here in the living room, it could even be considered cozy! I don’t think it used to be a living room; though; maybe a spare room or cellar? But something is wrong … though I can’t remember what.)

Junko is going through the first-aid kit, a swirl of sterile wrappers and bandages and surgical steel implements. Her gaze terminates there, right in front of her.

Alan continues to speak loudly in his deep voice. He looks us all in the eye, in turn. He’s our leader (did we appoint him? Or did he seize the role?) and we should pay more attention to him. I will try, though his arguments unfurl like a scroll that runs behind me into the past where I can’t see it. He has a voice that is accustomed to speaking in arguments, in bullet points. He is saying that:

• We were Chosen.
• We have to stick together, even in our dire straits.
• We cannot disappoint our true leader.
• We cannot become confused by the lies of the TV men.
• We have a glorious destiny, and it’s coming up soon, if only we can hold on.
• We are all very disappointed in Alison.

If you ask me, Alan sounds like he’s nuts. His wild beard and red eyes don’t help. But I have to admit that I’m short on context here, in my post-accident diminished capacity, and I could be misinterpreting. All I can do is watch and learn. (And forget, and watch again, and learn again…)

Alison is struggling. Did I list her already? But she is small, and nearly exhausted, and Dave is large. Did I mention Dave? Alison’s gaze goes everywhere, darting like a laser-pointer. Her eyes are mad. Her hair flies around her head. Dave focuses close by, on his grip, keeping Alison from getting loose.

Alison is yelling. “—Fucking tyrant, I want out of this cult, I am opening that door and leaving! Yes, I know what’s outside! Fuck you all, it’s better than this shithole, better than lying here day after day afraid to do anything, no room to stretch out, just waiting for it to come closer! Get your goddamn stinks away from me! I want to go outside! Outletmeoutout —” Alison is on a short conversational loop, and it really only takes a few seconds to absorb the gist of it.

Alan also says that:

• He has the highest respect for our mission.
• None of us can be permitted to jeopardize it.
• The Titan king Saturn has seized the throne and castrated his father.
• Saturn = Kronos = Time, and time has abandoned us. There is only this moment, this endless moment in our cramped room. We must escape, we will escape, but not now. We must stay tight together, packed in our shell, for leaving now will expose us to the hell that is outside. Let one of us so much as open the door, and it’s all over — the cold of the outside will devour us, we will fly apart and never be together again, the TV men will laugh and say they knew we would fail.
• We must remember our true destination.

Junko hovers before him, a gift of a scalpel gleaming in her thin fingers. Alan curls his fist around it. (Did this happen before? Did I watch this already?) Alison screams … Madeline counts, her lips moving … Charles sobs. Alan reiterates that:

• Alison in particular must remember our true destination, not the false one
• … and the importance of staying true to it
• … and this will help her remember—

Dave holds Alison very still, all but her screaming mouth, as Alan carves the letters into the flesh of her forearm: M — A — R — S.

Drops of blood swell into red spheres and break free for Junko to vacuum up tidily with her little suction device. Alan finishes the third stroke of the lightning-bolt S and Junko sprays the whole with cautery fluid, stopping the bleeding.

Alison has stopped screaming now, her noises are softer, her gaze has rolled up within her skull. Dave maintains his grip. Charles tries to crawl through the floor, or is it the wall? Madeline continues her soft breathy counting, one second per second into the future without end.

Outside the window the stars are rolling now. Inside, a few small objects not fastened down bump their way along the wall, following them. The swirled orange sphere rises majestically from the windowsill, its famous rings glittering. It doesn’t fill the frame, not yet; I can still reach my hand out and cover it. But it grows larger, I remember that now. Every day, in every way, every 86,400 of Madeline’s metronomic counts. Don’t let her stop, or we’ll hang suspended here forever more. Don’t let her continue, or the titan will devour us, his children.

• Where are we going?

Alan’s fiery eyes burn into mine. My mouth is dry. My mind is empty, a broken vessel, a stuck record. I look desperately at my arm for clues, reading the large unfriendly letters written there in white puckered scar tissue.

“Mars, sir.”

[Written for Thing-A-Day 2009. Inspired by a claustrophobic dream I had a few months ago. Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction … no matter what the TV men say. Now shut the curtains.]

“… I try to write a poem I wouldn’t want to sleep with. Would kick to the curb, wrap my thumbs around her slender neck and snap. This one’s still babied, blinking, wondering if it wants to be a skirt or a tire iron. Licking the perimeter of opened envelopes for a tiny bit of sweet. My nouns go awry every time I stop paying attention. Fall pretty like dimes on the sidewalk. My friend Melissa, whose name means bee-like, has a theory about systems. For every change in variable, the outcome shifts toward constant decay.”
—From Brief History Of Girl As Match

The news came by way of a fast rider, who galloped into the village square on a sweaty horse of athletic stature, and had no sooner swung himself down than vanished into the house of the mayor. He emerged half an hour later, more calmly, holding a jug of beer and wedge of cheese provided by the mayor’s wife. The children who had been anxiously monitoring the door instantly swarmed around him to ask questions, while the adults (whose attention had been more surreptitious if no less anxious) feigned calm as they slowly moved into earshot.

“What’s the news?” cried Lin the baker’s son; or rather, of the dozen voices that called out the same question, his came through the loudest. “Are the beasts rising again? Has the castle fallen?”

At this, some of the smaller children went silent. Our parents tried to keep such dark news from the ears of the younger ones, though gossip carried it to them anyway in more or less distorted forms; and several times in recent months I had seen children crying with the fear that the dark beasts of fairy-tales might be encroaching on our village. It was no idle fear, for I knew that they had been sighted in the high mountain passes. My parents had told me: I am small, yes, but old enough to know about the world, the bad as well as the good. My father was among those who searched the woods last month for little Lana, and though her body was never found, he told me and my mother of the blood-soaked forest clearing, the dark runes scratched by claws into the caked dirt.

The rider could not immediately reply, being occupied with a mouthful of cheese; and by the time he had washed it down with some beer, the adults had made their feigned-casual way toward him, so it was to them that he addressed his reply.

“The castle stands! And our King and his Princess are well. I bring news to the towns on this road — good news! — that a Hero has appeared, yonder in the Meln valley; and that he is even now crossing the pass and will be traveling through your village by nightfall.”

At this, pandemonium broke loose — an actual Hero had not been seen in our village, or in the entire valley, since the days of my grandparents. All those present began shouting with glee, or asking further questions, or speculating on the significance, or in the case of many of the children, picking up sticks and dashing about to do imaginary battle in the guise of this Hero.

I walked off toward home. I am a quiet type, and I knew that reflection, and some words with my parents, would profit me more than any attempt to decipher the present babble.

—2—

Everyone knows who Heroes are: they feature prominently in the history of the land, as well as in less trustworthy legends and tall tales. At times of crisis, when invaders or rogue magicians or monstrous beasts threaten the land, a Hero will rise and defeat them all.

“But who is this Hero?” I asked my father. “As a knight, or a master of martial arts, wouldn’t his name be well known? Why did the rider not tell us the Hero’s name?”

Father chuckled as he tied off the fletchings on an arrow, which he deposited on the pile accumulating before him. “You haven’t been attending to the full histories; or the old man’s not been teaching you all of them. A Hero’s not known beforehand, not as a Hero at least; two or three of ‘em may have been warriors, but most came out of nowhere, were cowherds or shopkeepers.

“Don’t you be getting ideas, though!” he warned me in mock earnestness. “Even before, they all showed skill at combat.” Involuntarily, I drew my withered right leg beneath me. “That’s not your path, son. Your eyes are as sharp as your mind, and you’ll make a fine craftsman. Too many are the young men who’ve mooned away their strongest years waiting and hoping in vain for the guise of the Hero to drop upon them.”

“Did the real Heroes know what they were, before they began their quests?”

“That’s a matter for the philosophers at the Court. Which is to say, if they had foreknowledge, they never told anyone about it; and Heroes on their quests not bein’ overly talkative, no one’s heard their stories of how it happened.”

Another arrow dropped on the stack. My father no longer had the strength to draw a hunting bow, but his skill as an arrowsmith was still legendary, in a small way, in the valley. The ones he was finishing now were of the highest quality: he was using the finest wood for the stocks, and taking the heads from the small supply of obsidian he had obtained at great price from the rock-men of the mountains. These arrows were clearly a gift for the Hero.

As if reading my mind (or the direction of my gaze), my mother came up from behind me and said, “Tom, we must all work today to prepare for the Hero’s arrival. I am taking the cart to Benners to buy jars at the market; and you must use your famous eyes to find jewels.” I blushed a bit; not so much from her praise of my jeweling skill, as from the way she implicitly included me in that “we”, meaning the adults — I could hear the children outside, my sister among them, still playing their mock-Heroic games, and last year I might have been among them (as a lame yet fearsome sorcerer, my favorite role), but today my parents considered me a man.

“Then I’ll be off to the field!” I replied, and pulled myself to my feet.

—3—

The gem field was some way out of town, and as I walked along the path with my staff and empty bag, I thought about this strange business of Heroes. It was true, I realized, that the histories old Magrew taught me were (intentionally?) vague on the origins of the Heroes, and though several bore the surnames of prominent noble families, I could not recall if those titles predated them; perhaps they were bestowed upon the family in gratitude afterwards? The Heroes themselves never stayed around long after their quests were done — a typical history ended “…and Larq was carried from the wreckage of the Witch’s castle, and spent some days recovering, after which he and his deeds were fêted at a great celebration at Court; but the Princess’s hand being offered him, he declined politely, explaining that he had (unspecified) duties and unfinished business to undertake in the far West. Though he left well-supplied, and carrying his weapons of fearsome power, he was never heard from again, and is presumed to have met his end in that unknown land.”

I recited the entire history to myself, actually, and it lasted me all the way to the field. Once there, I needed to focus all my mental energies down on the grass, and below it to the dirt, looking for the minuscule gleams.

Beneath this field, and one or two others of which I have heard, some unknown processes within the Earth give rise to small semi-precious gemstones which, unlike their kindred that the rock-people mine from deep shafts, are pushed to the surface. They can then be collected like pebbles from a lakeshore … but only if one can see them. Their appearance is hardly distinctive, as they emerge covered in a dark tarry shell; and one can discern them only by the subtlest clues of shape, or a minute gleam of color where a corner is scraped clean. I am one of the best stone-hunters in the town, and even I can collect only a handful in a few hours’ slow traversal of the field, which is all that my eyes (and back) can stand.

—4—

I was returning from the field, with seventeen stones in a sack my reward for the headache I now endured, when I met the little man. (In all honesty, I was sitting beneath an oak tree taking a rest. Long walks are difficult for me, even with my staff, and the sun was hot. But I was not idle: I was cutting the shells from the gems with a pocket-knife, letting their colors and facets tumble out into my lap.) I looked up when he addressed me by name:

“You must be Tom, son of Roger the arrowsmith? I can tell by the fine hoard you have there!”

I looked up, and made to scramble to my feet, but he showed with a wave that I might remain sitting.

“That I am, sir; has my father sent for me?” But now that I looked at him, I realized that he was neither from our village, nor from the valley, nor anywhere nearby; for his appearance was unlike that of our races. His hair was pitch black, like a cat’s, where ours is brown or blond; and his eyes had a curious narrow shape, though they showed no suspicion or anger. On the contrary, they twinkled, and a great welcoming smile spread across his wide face. I had no choice but to smile back at such jolliness.

“Not at all, Tom! Your father trusts you will make your way home when your job is complete.” He settled himself to the grass next to me, cross-legged. “I merely asked him for directions as to where I might find you; for I have a small job for you to do.”

“You do me an honor, sir!” I replied, for I thought it best to assume him to be a figure of some importance. He was clearly a traveler from a far land, and my father had thought well enough of him to entrust him to meet with me on a lonely road. Moreover, the small man’s clothes were of an unfamiliar foreign style (collarless tunic, narrow pantaloons) but quite clearly cut from the finest cloth, something with the drape of linen, woven of stitches too small for me to see. “May I be of service to you? May I offer you some of these gems?”

“Bless you, son, but no — quite the contrary. Those gems you hold are for the Hero, and you must scatter them in the grass of your village for him to find; for he is not a prince to be offered gifts, but an adventurer who expects to make his own discoveries. I do, however, have a different task for you that relates to this same Hero.”

Here he paused for dramatic effect, and I could not resist asking breathlessly, “Then do you know this Hero? Have you seen him? What adventures have befallen him so far?” Immediately I blushed, for I realized my naïve enthusiasm showed me for a child. But the little man took my words seriously.

“I myself have only seen him from a distance; we have not spoken. It is not wise to interfere with one who is under the geas of the Hero. Extremely powerful forces are at work upon the one so chosen, and direct meddling can be dangerous; extremely so, since the penalty for a Hero’s failure can be a grave one for the entire land.

“But over many centuries, those of the order to which I belong have studied these Heroes, and found that their success can be aided without harm, by quietly preparing the way for them. You are well-studied, says your proud father; do you know the history of the Red Lord’s uprising?”

“I do, sir; it is a sad tale for us, though an ancient one, for it was here that the Red Lord demonstrated the power of his alchemical apparatus, by summoning a cloud that filled our valley with caustic fumes and killed half the inhabitants.”

“Quite true. But did not the Hero Xander use an enchanted claw that sprang across a great distance to snatch the alembic from the Red Lord’s very grasp?”

I thought carefully, reconciling the timeline of the legend in my thoughts. “Sir, he did; but that was in Meln, on his second encounter with the Red Lord, for earlier he had not yet acquired the claw from its ancient resting place beneath the lakebed.”

His smile widened further, if such were possible. “Indeed so! You shall be a scholar one day, I foresee; perhaps of our order. Let me cease evading my point: Had Xander not failed to discover the entrance to the caves when he first explored the lake, he would have obtained the claw before first meeting the Red Lord here, and could have used it during that meeting to save this valley from its gruesome fate.”

I nodded slowly, understanding coming to me. “Does your order, then, provide such assistance to newer Heroes, without their knowing it?”

“Precisely, Tom. We consider the overall strategy of the threat facing our land, which they cannot so easily see, and make certain subtle changes to guide them.”

“Is the welcome that our town is providing this Hero part of such a change, sir?”

“In a small way, yes. A well-fed and -provisioned Hero is a more alert and successful Hero, one might say. But I am actually here to work a more significant change.”

At this, he stood and opened a sack that had been lying behind him, from which he pulled a metal box. It was not a large box, nor was it ostentatiously decorated, but when it emerged, it did something to the quality of the sunlight, the temperature of the air, the sounds of insects around us. All the hairs on my arms stood up.

“This is a chest that we obtained, at great effort, from the ruins of an ancient temple. I should not disclose its location, even here where none can overhear. We are confident that the Hero who even now approaches will explore this temple, to obtain the chest and its singular contents. But we also know that the location of the temple is such that he will most likely reach it only after a dangerous encounter in which he will have great need of the artifact in this chest. Do you follow me?”

“I do, sir. You wish to give the Hero this chest so that he will survive the peril.”

“Precisely. But, as I have said, we cannot merely give the Hero gifts, for he is under a great spirit’s control, and such interference would be quite dangerous to us all; as dangerous as knocking the elbow of a monk while he copies a manuscript, perhaps upsetting his ink-bottle across the unfinished story.

“No, we must bend the story’s arc gently, letting the Hero discover this great treasure on his own. There is a small limestone cave by the stream behind your house, is there not?”

Blinking at the non sequitur, I merely nodded.

“Excellent. I am told you have explored this cave in the past. Please take this chest and deposit it at the back of the cave. If you can, bury it halfway in sand, and take care to brush away your footprints as you exit.” In saying this, he returned the box to its sack (causing light, air, sound and skin to return to normal) and placed it in my lap.

I knew this for a test, not having missed his reference to a potential future for me in his fascinating Order. In dreamlike slowness, I took hold of the sack, looked him in the eyes, and assured him that I would undertake this task.

“I knew you would. We watch many things, in my order. You have our great thanks; and should our tasks this year be successful, with the Goddesses’ blessings, you may hear from me again. My name is Mi-Mo-To.”

At that he gave an odd little bow, smiled again, and walked off down the road at surprising speed.

—5—

So awhirl was my mind with speculations that the walk back seemed to take only half its usual time, despite the extra weight of the sack slung over my shoulder. It was a harsh familiar voice that awakened me when I entered the village.

“Tommy! My good man, is that a sackful of rubies you’ve scratched from the dirt with your cane? Come, sit and dice with us, and we’ll soon relieve you of that weight!” It was Roger, an idle young man of twenty, sitting at a table outside the tavern. Roger had some talent at gemspotting, but used the proceeds for drink and gambling, and imitated as best he could the look and manners of a city dandy. I believe it was his vanity that kept him from actually moving to a city: there he would be lost in a crowd of his peers, while here in the village he could feel important, and unique, and attract an equally idle clique of hangers-on.

Several of his companions laughed coarsely at the joke, and I turned red. His reference to my lameness had not gone unnoticed, by me or by them; I was a frequent butt of their jokes.

“Look, we’ve made a new game!” said Lenny in mock invitation. It was true: on the table were more dice than usual, some of odd shapes, and a sheet of parchment with a sort of maze drawn upon it. On the maze stood little whittled figures striking heroic poses. (Even his worst enemies, a title for whom many competed, were forced to admit that Lenny could find fame as an artist, were he ever able to apply himself to the work.) “It’s a game of Heroes! And I’ve made a figure for you to play!” Here he produced another figure, of a gnarled cripple balancing on crutches.

The roaring in my ears drowned out even their laughter as I limped away.

—6—

I went straight to the stream, bypassing the house and any inconvenient questions about the sack (or my tears). Where it turned a corner there was a small gravelly beach, and behind a stand of bushes, a narrow hole. Through this I pushed first the sack, and then myself.

Most of the village children knew about this cave. It was actually rather new, unblocked a few years before by the cracking in half of a large boulder. The idea of a cave was terrifically exciting, of course, but there was not actually very much inside the cave, apart from darkness and an unpleasant dank smell, so it was less popular than one might expect. I was fairly confident the treasure chest would be safe until tomorrow, especially as the children were today in such a state of Heroic fever that the cave would hardly cross their minds.

I walked lightly to the back wall of the cave, and dug a little hole into which the chest halfway fit. Then I smoothed out the cold sand, and walked backwards to the entrance, using a frond from a bush to sweep the ground smooth. I looked back at my handiwork, and saw the chest shining in the darkness. To my dark-adapted eyes it lit up the little cavern, transforming it into a fantastic lair. We had never brought fire in here! So I had never seen the small stalactites hanging from the ceiling, with crystal-ball waterdrops sparkling from their tips. I saw answering sparkles in the sand, and knelt to uncover a green and a blue gemstone. I turned back to the entrance, and next to it I saw a drawing on the wall, in an ancient style, its red ochre outlines depicting a man with one leg brandishing a sword in one hand and the severed head of a beast in the other.

I swept at the sand some more, to cover up the inexplicable tears that fell there, and stepped back out into the world.

—7—

Throughout the remainder of the afternoon I sat at home, which being not atypical of me, caused no comment. I had acquitted myself well at the gem-field, and after admiring the flash and color of the stones, my mother placed a few into the ceremonial new guest-jars beside the hearth, bidding my sister to scatter the rest in the grass before the houses. This task little Elsie undertook with great seriousness, having just that year learned that it was the adults, not fairies, who scattered the sweetmeats in just this manner on the early morning of the spring feast.

Visitors came by to gossip with my parents, and as there was only one topic of conversation that day, I learned much of the troubles besetting the land. Beasts of formidable size had waylaid travelers in Ordon and were making the countryside unsafe at night. Some of them were said to have language, and carry weapons in their mutated paws. Ours was not the only village to have lost a child, and some of the aftermath was considerably more shocking than a mere pool of blood. Great towers of fire had been seen in the south, and what appeared to be birds of enormous size circling them, though no further details were known, as traffic from the South Road had dried up completely, to the dismay of innkeepers. There were dark rumors that one of the southern lords (a clan that were always fractious) might be behind all of this; from there, the conversation drifted to complex recountings of Court intrigue that I could not follow. My mind drifted, too…

—8—

The door burst open, awakening me from my reverie and halting the conversation between my parents. A tall, slender figure stood outlined in the doorway by the light of sunset, then stepped inside. The Hero was clad in green, his tunic mud-stained and scratched. A cap hung down behind his head. His sword he held unsheathed, the point trailing unnoticed on the ground.

He grunted an acknowledgment as he surveyed the dim room, but observed none of the formalities of an entering guest (which in any case would have begun by knocking, as Elsie was constantly reminded.) His eyes shone large and bright, and more so than clothing or weaponry announced his singular role: he was, quite clearly, a man possessed, one driven by a spirit in the service of superhuman feats.

My father cleared his throat; he had no doubt expected a more formal entrance, but picked up his script where he could. “Sir, your presence in our home honors us. How may we —”

But the Hero did not need to be asked; abruptly he lunged and ran his sword through one of the guest jars on the hearth, which shattered most spectacularly. Elsie shrieked and hid behind Mother; the rest of us merely started back. The Hero knelt and, with a heartfelt “that’s what I’m needin’”, grabbed the small red cake that had been stowed in the jar and shoved it into his mouth.

This was all quite wrong, of course, though if you are unfamiliar with our customs you may not recognize quite how wrong. A visitor, of whatever rank, must knock and ask permission to enter (which must, in turn, be granted.) An honored stranger will be offered guest-jars by the lady of the house, which he will ceremonially toss onto the hearth and then pick up the small gifts from among the shards, this symbolizing his acceptance of hospitality and the breaking of the walls of formality between guest and host. Then all can speak openly, using the at-home tense rather than the more formal cross-rank speech.

But instead, while busily chewing (and despite his appalling manners, I could well imagine the hunger that impelled him), he went on to destroy the remaining three jars with swipes of his sword. Two held green and blue gems, which he approvingly shoved into his wallet. The third was by mistake empty, however; he glared at Mother, who cast down her eyes and turned red.

“Any more cakes?” he asked when his mouth was clear. “I’ve got room for two or three more, after that hike from Meln. Not a bloody thing to eat on the trail, unless you count the heads I hacked off the wolves that came after me — ha!” He accepted two more of the heart-shaped cakes by shoving them into his mouth. This did instill in me a certain form of respect, for those cakes were extremely rich and filling, and I could not imagine eating more than one at a time.

The Hero dropped into Father’s chair while he chewed, and an uncomfortable silence reigned for a few minutes. Elsie emerged from behind Mother and ran to rescue her dollie, which had been thrown across the room by one of the sword-blows, and which now leaked stuffing as Elsie ran outside in tears.

I felt an unaccustomed (yet explicable, I trust) rage growing in me. This young man, though undeniably a Hero, upon whose mighty endeavors the safety of village and kingdom must depend, was just as undeniably a lout. He lacked any form of manners; he cared nothing for us as people, seeking only to get what he needed. His smirk at Elsie and her wounded dollie told me most eloquently that he saw all of this as a game. Hero? He was no better than Roger and Lenny and their lumpen companions. We were just part of an idle story to him, little figures he pushed about by rolls of dice. Could the fate of Hyrule really depend on such a thug?

“Right. Now, I want information. There’s news of some tough beasts and beast-men gathering south of here, and the equipment I got’s seen me through a lot so far, but it’s nothing to what I’ll be needin’ from here out. I’ve heard tell of some enchanted item in this valley, though the tales leave a lot to be desired in details. Ye know what I mean? Got any clues or local tall tales?” He ran his gaze between us.

That gaze was bright and sharp and almost impossible to resist. I felt impaled on it, on an arrow of Fate shot from the Heaven of the Goddesses. If the fate of the land depended on him, then so did his fate depend on me at this instant. My part, clearly, was to pipe up and inform the Hero of the mysterious cave that had opened up recently, which he would not notice on his own but whose location I would explain to him. This would complete the task entrusted in me by the mysterious little man; would return the weight of Fate from my shoulders to the Hero’s; and would perhaps influence my own fate directly, if the little man’s Order were pleased at my performance.

…And yet I could not do it. I saw in the Hero all the petty cruelties that had been inflicted on me by other boys; all the unthinking arrogance of the able-bodied (whose easy movement I desperately envied); all the blind unfair randomness of a universe that gave out rewards and punishments undeserved by their recipients.

I said nothing.

My parents uneasily related the usual local legends, including the curious one of a ruined temple of the old religion, whose entrance lay hidden at the far end of the narrow Samer gorge to the south. This one aroused his greatest curiosity, and after quizzing them at some length on the specifics (of which there were none) he headed off into the twilight, kicking the door open with his muddy boots such that the hinges cracked.

—9—

The Hero had left, along the road to the south, leaving a tumult of gossip in his wake. A few other families were as outraged as ours, having been similarly ill-treated in their homes (we had at least been spared from having jars gleefully thrown about at all four walls, and chests of valuables ransacked!) Those who had not personally met the Hero nor experienced his peculiar manners were more inclined to believe the descriptions from histories and legends, and several foolish young women who had only seen him from a distance were swooning at his beautiful large eyes and effortless swordsmanship.

It did not take long for us to learn of his next adventure. Two days later, a merchant coming from the south related news he had heard from a ranger, of a rockfall in the Samer gorge. Great boulders had fallen from the cliff faces at the near end and rolled at high speed down the steep slope; and midway was found the body of a warrior clad in green, crushed like an insect between two of these rocks. His tracks showed he had been desperately trying to outrun the avalanche, but failed.

—10—

I crept away from the crowd, my thoughts in great turmoil, and made for the stream. I rinsed my face, but could not clear away a vision of that ruined, blood-soaked body. I shivered with horror, and with guilt.

I had been avoiding the cave, and apparently no other child had entered it, for the chest was still there. It had waited patiently for me. I knelt in the sand, my heartbeat a crescendo in my head, and pried the ancient lid open.

The chest’s contents were no more than a few pieces of leather, dusty, with sinews sewn along the edges.

No, they were more than that — as I blew the dust off of them, they began to shine, revealing themselves as gold. Gold with the softness of leather, or perhaps leather with the shine of gold. They were sandals, of an ancient design that I had seen in a book, open soles with straps that laced about the feet and around the legs to the knees. They vibrated with power, I could feel it: in my hands they spoke to me, wordlessly, told me of the centuries they had been captive in the box, waiting to run, to leap, to kick…

There was nothing to do but to put them on. I took off my left shoe, placed my foot in the left sole, and awkwardly began to fasten the laces. No matter: they wrapped themselves into place in a blur. I was not accustomed to wearing a shoe on my lame right foot, but I placed the other sandal upon it anyway, and again the laces grabbed tight. Then I stood, without my staff, effortlessly, disbelievingly.

I still needed one more thing, and I now saw what it was, and where. The jewels I had earlier seen sparkle in the sand were not randomly placed, but lay equally spaced, in a line against the cave wall. I reached between them into the sand and lifted out a scabbard. The jewels adorning it were the exact same type that I had been selling to buy food, or trading for arrowheads, but had here been inlaid into fine metal. Two rare orange ones decorated the hilt, which I took hold of, and drew forth the blade — yes, this blade, which I wield to this day, never has it failed me!

I leapt from the cave and headed south.

Figs cover the ground
The children step over them
Or sometimes they don’t

A hug and a kiss
A heart outlined with fingers
And a wave goodbye

To the very end
of the quivering green branch
clings a black squirrel

So much depends on
a red Mario beanie
left out on the lawn.

Yellow leaves dancing
in the air, two stories up
against green windows.

I cannot get up.
I am excused from all work:
Cat purrs on my lap.

2002

Hunting millipedes;
Earthworms and a defunct grub
Are all our trowel found

A caterpillar
tiny … bright green … wriggling
floats by on a thread

The cardboard stove box
lawn parallelopiped
packed with my children

Squirrels found a ripe fig
All the ones I see are green
What do the squirrels know?

With my big pushes
she swings high on blue chain links.
Above, figs ripen.

A huge durian
hidden on the tile rooftop.
Kick it, Mario!

A surplus mouthpart
transmuted into silver
beneath his pillow

Outside the window,
Past my feet and sleeping cats,
Trees are shivering.

2003

Outside: balcony.
Two hundred forty thousand
miles above: the moon.

green surface stretches
’round a smaller volume now:
four-thirds π r cubed

2004

On November lawns
The rain and shade have planted
A mushroom forest

Prufrock 2K4:
“I have measured out my life
In eggnog lattes.”

My Java haiku / Are funny because they’re true / But rather geeky

(Circa 1998)

I got an Object
I was sure it was a Point
ClassCastException

Garbage collection
The unused objects are gone –
Knew you wouldn’t mind

AWT
Peers come from some secret place
So mysterious

Server wants linefeeds
But println just sends CR
The sockets deadlock

“Java For Dummies”
Yee Haw! Are we coding yet?!
When’s our IPO?

Suggested background music: Frost – Steelwound
[audio:Steelwound.mp3]

I dreamed once, in high school, that my fingernails had turned to bone: spongy like the inside of a broken chicken leg, thick and jagged-edged. I didn’t touch them for a week after that, but the lesson didn’t last. I never learn, a fact that has become only too apparent in college.

I kicked open the door and stumbled into the bathroom; the door shut behind me, bringing relative stillness, and I realized how wasted I was. It always comes on gradually, and I’m at a party and there’s loud music and loud people and everyone’s inhibitions are lowering in synchrony and the drinks are simultaneously cold and burning going down — in the hot living room it’s just natural and normal, the way I feel. But after the sudden transition to the cold and silence and bare walls of the bathroom, I sense this bubble of inebriation that I’ve brought in inside myself. It’s a familiar sensation from parties, part of that life-cycle that begins with the ceremonial first drink and ends God knows where.

I sat there on the toilet, just emptying my bladder of toxins but not trusting my balance or aim enough to stand, and picked idly at the paint on the wall next to me with the hand not occupied with the Corona bottle. Dirty looking yellow paint of Cameron’s crappy apartment bathroom, peeling off of whatever was underneath. This was an old building, periodically spruced up by slapping on another coat of paint, and who knew how far down the layers went? The latest-but-one was evidently green.

I was revealing more of it, picking off the yellow. It actually came off very satisfyingly, not just chipping off in bits but more often peeling in strips that could be coaxed along for a few inches. Amid the thumping of the bass from outside and the thudding of my pulse through my temples, I sat on my little throne and idly transformed this corner of wall. The revealed green was pretty, with a lacquer-like translucent depth to it, and had a pattern of gold lines across it. Fine gold lines, running parallel but then changing direction. Wallpaper? Not making a repeating pattern at all, but something with a strong sense of order. I ran my fingertips across it and felt the texture, the gold lines raised slightly. Smell of ozone.

I hated that smell — it rose in clouds from my best friend Greg’s model train set as the little HO-gauge cars whizzed past the tiny fake trees and bushes made of painted lichen. His little sister Clarisse, whom we alternately played with and tormented, sat with us that afternoon under the particle-board table in the upstairs playroom. I heard the clicking of the trains on tracks above, and the ozone smell drifted down across us, making me feel delirious and sick. I left in the back of my mom’s station wagon with the foreknowledge that something was badly broken, over, gone; I cried all the way home. The next morning at school Greg pointedly switched desks, away from me, next to the cruel boys we hated, and became instantly one of them. A covalent bond. The lens of their attentions focused on me for a long time after that. Next year I came across a diagram of an ozone molecule in a science textbook and instantly vomited across it.

Someone had been banging on the door for some time now. I had yellow paint crud all under my fingernails. Two of them were bleeding. Several square feet of the wall were revealed by my efforts as what suddenly came into focus as printed circuit board: green resin overlaid with thin stamped copper wire traces. Tiny grids of holes marked where IC chips and other components would be inserted. The holes were mostly still clogged with yellow paint, but a few were open and I could discern red lights blinking behind.

The banging continued. I took a deep shuddering breath, pulled up my pants and stepped over and unlocked the door. On the other side Greg lowered his fist and partially relaxed his annoyed expression as he saw me. “Russ, you’ve been in here for like ten minutes, and I gotta take a fucking piss, man, this shithole apt’s only got one toilet, you know?”

I felt a rush of simultaneous terror and relief. Greg and I were, if no longer enemies, hardly close anymore; but there was clearly some bad stuff going down mentally inside me, and Greg could be counted on as an impartial observer, reliable narrator, looking every inch the straight-edge with his buzzcut and Minor Threat t-shirt. “Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?” went the old Adam Ant refrain in my head. I believe I started expressing something along the lines of “Greg, fuck, man, there must have been some kind of bad shit in the punch bowl, DMT or angel dust or something, I’m in here seeing stuff and it’s freaking me out…”

Greg’s eyes swiveled past me and widened. “Russ, what the hell did you do to the wall? You’re taking the paint off? Felice is going to kill you for this.” He pushed me aside and ran his fingers over the revealed surface. “Jesus, this is a PC board, like some kind of motherboard. And it’s underneath the paint? You didn’t put this here, it was underneath all along?” He got on his knees and leaned in close. “Smells like something’s shorting out. Holy shit, there’s some kind of lights in there, behind the wall…”

My heart sank, stomach churned. Was this worse or better than a hallucination? I felt dizzier and reached for the wall to steady myself. Greg, analytical EE major, pushed the door shut and pulled the dangling string to turn off the light bulb, the better to apprehend the blinkenlights.

Red lamps burned in the darkness, pixelated through the grids of little holes in the board. Monochrome gallium-arsenide-red lamps that were far away and huge and opened and shut like eyes. Ozone breathed out at us. I screamed, and thrashed my hands through the darkness feeling for the light cord. The beer bottle still in one hand hit something hard and broke with a crack. Greg yelled, I dimly saw his red-outlined silhouette grab its head, slip and fall. There was a second uglier-sounding crack. The cord finally materialized in my hand, I pulled hard till it snapped, and blessed tungsten-gold light flooded down.

Greg lay with his head next to the toilet. He wasn’t moving. His forehead looked dented, and there was blood. I had no idea what to do, besides stupidly watching the blood trickle toward the wall. Music continued to thump outside, and someone shrieked. The blood had reached the green-peeled wall and appeared to be oozing through the holes. I continued staring.

Greg’s body jerked in a sudden spasm that terrified me, and came to rest with one leg sticking through the wall. It did not appear to make a hole; the leg just went straight into the green circuit board and disappeared. My addled, shocked and now guiltily paranoid brain made a snap insight … and I reached down, grabbed Greg’s body around the waist, and started pushing it through the wall. It went in smoothly, without resistance, clothes and all. The red lights were growing brighter: even with the light bulb on I could see them sticking out in little pinpoint beams, out of the holes and through the smoke-laden atmosphere. I left the head for last, for some reason, and had some trouble getting it through — I found out why after I shoved it hard in the face with my boots, and little clinks echoed on the tile floor as Greg finally and blessedly slid out of sight. There were eight gnarled metal bits of fillings left behind on the tile floor.

I put the pointy lumps in my pocket and backed away from the stabbing red beams, which now had the sparkly diffraction patterns of laser light. I could see red dots projected all over the rest of the yellow walls, and the paint began sizzling and peeling away with a nauseating smell of molten solder and ozone, revealing (of course) more circuit board. Abruptly I was back in the living room, the door slamming behind me, navigating my way through the loud wet darkness out of the party. The lights were off, but with the red-lit afterglow in my eyes I could see everything and everyone in translucent skeletal form and pick my way through. There were some half-hearted gropes at my legs from people whom I might otherwise have willingly allowed to pull me down, but I ran out as fast as I could.

I piss in alleys nowadays. I don’t go inside any buildings if I can help it. Winter’s on the horizon but I don’t think that far ahead, to be honest. I’ve been following you for a few days. What has it got in its pocketses? The afterimages are still with me and I can see all the way through you, see through that coat, see the black shadows of the little mercury amalgam pebbles in the pocket that your finger-bones fiddle with idly. You’ve been through this too. I can’t even look at anyone else anymore, but you’ll understand. Let’s talk.

>N

>|

— Excerpt from Zork IV: Time Considered As A Helix Of Little Twisty Passages, by P. David Lebling and Samuel Delany, which Infocom refused to release in 1988.

(Here’s some context, for the perplexed.)