Other Aliens

by Bradford Morrow

  Light matter and dark matter: we worshipped,

  we parted green from green.1

  The weight and bignesse of Atomes

  In Cavendish’s poems, the world consists of four “figures” of atoms: Long, Round, Sharpe, and Flat (or Square). These figures, joined in several ways, create the fabric of the world. The “loosest atoms lye” in vegetables, whereas in minerals they are “hard wedg’d in.” In every brain, loose sharp atoms lie, and from those, she explains, “Fancies flye.”

  The weight and bignesse of Atomes

  Atom to atom compared,

  a radius: (the slope between tall and tall)

  acres of hard horizon, yellow bodies,

  distance to a boundary (electron) cloud.

  What petals into the impatient blue,

  what unseen elements knock about?

  A god, a dimensionless quantity,

  a granular number behind all things,

  sculpting its windblown configurations of snow.

  All things last, or dissolve, according to the Composure of Atomes

  Cavendish’s footnotes: *These Atomes are halfe aiery Atomes, and halfe Fiery. *Unless there be Infinities of Worlds; then there may be infinities of Centers, although not a Center in Infiniteies. *The severall Elements are all but one matter. *They are stinted according to the severall strengths of their motion. They trune as they go. A jack Bowle is the marke. (The Duchess said it was “against nature for a woman to spell right.”)

  All things last, or dissolve, according to the Composure of Atomes

  Quickly, then, for they will fly away:

  looseness somewhere.

  Causality, iron-black nails pinned

  to possible worlds. Actuality an indexical,

  like here and now

  (world in which the utterer resides).

  Of Loose Atomes

  “[B]y the standards of any era, seventeenth-century arguments for and observations cited in favour of corpuscularianism were inconclusive, and […] its reappearance […] had as much to do with the charm of Lucretius’[s] presentation, and its appeal to the senses and imagination, as it did with argument, observation, and evidence.”2

  Cavendish’s atoms made more than hunks of inanimate matter. Atoms made heat and cold. Atoms made the sun, and the sea, go round. Atoms made life, wit, understanding, and dispositions; they made sickness, health, peace, and war.

  Of Loose Atomes

  A “screw loose” somewhere.

  Rough picture, less of a departure

  from actuality. What is the nearest world?

  The one in which kangaroos have no tails

  is not one in which there are tail trails in the sand,

  or tail shadows, but no tails.

  What Atomes make Flame

  Flames consist

  of carbon dioxide, water vapor, oxygen, and nitrogen.

  I am made of all this, and a glass cloche.

  Of Fire in the Flint

  A hard form of mineral quartz, when struck

  against steel, will spark. Flint edge shaves off

  a particle of steel (where, the composition

  that does not unravel?), exposing

  iron. The tongue, a wheel.3 Oxygen, react.

  What Atomes make Fire to burne, and what Flame

  Fossil of fire appears 470 million years ago,

  when land-based flora oxygen flooded the atmosphere.

  (There is this dark void,

  beside which the universe creates itself,

  broken by blue and after-blue.)

  Of the Sympathy of Atomes

  Life only exists as long as atoms are in motion. When Atomes and Motion

  fall out, great disorder reigns: earthquakes, thunder, winds …

  Of the Sympathy of their Figures

  A winter bird balances

  on top of my blue spruce.

  Pierced as the dive of ice, a separate sky.

  There is only a paper grid, drawn by hand.

  All things are govern’d by Atomes

  Suppose night is only black shutters,

  painted so that steel wool could eventually

  remove black and shutter: that is the physicist’s

  work. Then the material blue.

  Accounted for.

  All things are govern’d by Atomes

  Some thirteen years after her atomic poems, Cavendish writes in Observations upon Experimental Philosophy that atoms and a vacuum (always posited so that atoms could move) were “impossible” in nature: parts would never join across the gaps; a “piece of the world would become a singular particular world, not joining to any part besides itself.”

  Motion directs, while Atomes dance

  A kind of backwardness.

  Motion directs, while Atomes dance

  Each gesture makes a quick exit.

  We agree. Until we must unpack it,

  knotholes letting in light,

  and find we agree on nothing.

  Objectivity, our brilliant notion.

  Of the Center

  In Observations, between sections discussing whether fishes can live in frozen water and whether celestial parts of the world can be alterable, between sections titled “Of the Pores of a Charcoal, and of Emptiness,” and “Of the Spleen,” Cavendish finally declares that atoms are “fitter for a poetical fancy, than for serious philosophy.”

  Of the Center

  Suppose what I see out my window is the center

  of the universe entire. Stare at the nucleus of our world

  through thin air—mind of god. All things are thinned.4

  In the Center Atomes never Separate

  Bound together, conscious of self and other.

  Buds clinging to a bare branch.

  The Infinites of Matter

  Ambiguity as to whether Cavendish meant

  “infinites” or “infinities,”

  (little particles, little forevers)

  or, as it was spelled once

  in her manuscript: “Infiniteies.”

  The genesis of an object from one moment

  to the next:

  conjecture, sensed relation,

  light moving along an inner dark dome.

  1H.D., “The Helmsman,” Sea Garden.

  2C. Meinel is credited with this viewpoint in Johnson, Monte and Wilson, Catherine, “Lucretius and the history of science” from The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, ed. Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

  3Cavendish wrote a poem entitled “Comparing the Tongue to a Wheele.”

  4Ronald Melville’s verse translation of Lucretius.

  Radio City

  E. G. Willy

  “My name’s Lollipop. And I’m hot, radio hot. Not hot like you think. Not a girl in a mini. Not a muscle guy with no shirt. No shots on the beach. No steaming sexy hot. I’m the new hot. The hot everyone’s talking about. The dark hot. Like record levels of cesium-137 hot. I mean off the charts, gem. You run a counter over me it will bark and scream like a dog on fire. Snazzle dazzle, snazzle dazzle, rip and roar. It goes like this: kek kek kek kek … shshshsh … kek kek … thika thicka thick. See what I mean? Friggin’ hot. Dead hot. Touch me, you will die.”

  My audience is across from me as I say this. His name is Princess. I have my hand out, challenge him to take it. My death-ridden hand, my fingers of radio death. He takes it, shakes firmly, then snaps his fingers, a message to go on, that he’s cool with my hotness.

  “First day out of the zone I knew it,” I say. “You didn’t need meters to read me. I had it written all over me. People like me are full of understanding. We get it. Like, I saw the Van Breugel 6 pollinator drones lying by the melt this morning, busted and dead from the pulse, more radiation around them than in their ephemeral polymer hides, I saw the situation like it was. You’re raised in a disaster zone, you got only two ways to go. Life or death. Death or life. You see both sides. That’s the nature of disaster zones. They are perfect
and ugly all at once. Good luck. Good night. Jesus, you’re on your own. You and old man Darwin. It ain’t survival of the fittest but survival of the tweakiest. You don’t like it? Oh well. You’re at least alive. No one comes in to rescue you. No one sends food or fresh water. Oh yeah, they say they will but when your disaster comes, you’ll see. Ain’t no governments going in there. Ain’t no safety nets. Sixty million people in trouble, they’re too worried about their own sick selves. And the Army? No way. Those guys are all vomiting blood, swallowing the latest pharma and gobbling iodine and bentonite clay. Dipshit faith believers in broken dreams.”

  I pause, hold up a cigarette, wait for his reaction. Princess looks at me like he’s heard it before. He probably has. I don’t care. I got to sling this pitch anyway, second generation like I am. This is my standard lonely guy speech. I don’t use it much unless I really have to, you know, just when I’m desperate to talk to someone, when I can’t stand another minute of being alone with myself. Which is right now.

  He pulls out a fresh cigarette, blows the steam off his latte, nods. “Yeah, well,” he says.

  It’s what I expect from a semi-hot low-end pretender. At least he could show me a little respect. I wish low-enders would at least do that. None of them ever understand, not ever. I go on anyway, say, “Gem, there are things in me never seen before in the human genome.”

  “Yeah,” he says.

  “I mean it. You can’t get me.”

  “Sounds familiar,” says Princess. “No offense, but you see what I mean.”

  “Please, gem. I’m a real wonder, the original dangerous pirate material prototype survivor of the nano-chemo generation. Here look.” I pull up my shirt, show my white flesh. “Check that shit out. Wonder how I got that? Nothing to mess it up either. No pre-albinism, no twisted hormones making me all disfigured, no perforated organs, no Kaposi, nothing. I haven’t even been chipped because I’m too hot for it. Nor biometricked either. Nor was I ever GMed, not ever. It won’t last. I’ll burn it off I’m that tough. Freaky sure, but serious out there kickass. And I may look ugly …” I pull my shirt higher, show my cut (I got nobby old shoulders, magnesium skin, hotdog red hair). “But I can roll with the hardest. I can go anywhere. I can eat anything. Take a fish screaming hot with iodine-131 at five million times your New American Standard, I will grill it, fry it, poach it, gourmet myself in it. And it will be delicious and tasty sweet, I tell you. I won’t feel a thing, not even a belly ache. They haven’t seen anything like me yet. Everyone before me has come up short. Just pretenders. They die early. Anemia. Necrosis of the jaw. Acute myeloid leukemia. Papillary thyroid cancer. Nothing to lose. Just goddamned life itself. See what I’m saying?”

  “Who says you’re that hot?” wonders Princess. “Your mommy?”

  “Me.”

  “OK, sure.”

  I light a fresh cigarette, say through the smoke, “You’re not bounty hunting are you?”

  “What?” asks Princess, surprised. “Hell no.”

  “No skin off my ass, but I know how this is. You act bored, like you don’t care, maybe you got a plan. Like, you expropriate me, I will fry the meters. Get it, gem?”

  Princess nods. “Yeah. You need to ask. I don’t blame you.”

  So maybe he is a bounty hunter and he’s hiding in the lie that he isn’t. I’ve seen that before. Low-end shithead trying to make a step up in the world, get close to the GMers. I know I should stop here, keep my big mouth shut. But I have this stupid need to impress him, to show what a tough guy I am because he’s sitting there like a fat turd on wet ground. “My dad was radio hot,” I press on. “So was my mom. And they were expropriated when I was like twelve. So I get the game, gem. Someone heard they had a viable hope and folks came along with guns and hazard suits and took them away. Left me alone in the way deep. I got to throw that out and ask you one last time, you work for someone?”

  “No.”

  “Good to know.”

  “When did they come after your folks?” asks Princess, sucking on his smoke, almost interested.

  “I was like twelve.”

  “Yeah. I see it.”

  “But I adjusted just fine.”

  “I been there. You don’t have to explain. We got more up here,” announces Princess. “Just don’t turn around. Wait. You engage, they get tweaky. Like, they don’t need encouragement.”

  I turn around anyway. I vibe the parade. They’re carrying skateboards and torn up old daypacks, walking quick, skinny like Princess, making noise like they don’t care if someone’s listening or not. Anyone can see they’re damaged material, busted and strong all at once like the crazy burner folks down by the melt. The old diseases re-erupting. Polio. Measles. Smallpox. They said they were hidden but nothing ever stays hidden. But I don’t care. I’m radio hot. I’m used to scum. They’re the only ones who will ever talk to me. Dirt and garbage and trash in them like me.

  “Yo, Princess, you seen Fat Freddy?” calls Syrup, the first to arrive.

  Princess says, “No,” loudly, his back still turned.

  Syrup stops, then takes a step towards him. She’s got a dirty green shirt on that shows off just a little bit of what she’s got. It’s not much but it looks flash when she lifts up her arm. She’s wearing a pair of broken Panama Jack iGlasses that are so obviously broken that it’s cool. Like she’s pretending to be GM but not and therefore more GM than you can think. You can tell she’s overexposed by the patches of radiation epilation in her hair, white on chestnut red. Not anywhere near my levels, but good enough.

  “What’s wrong?” asks Syrup.

  Princess calls over his shoulder, “That big fat pervert is sick.”

  “He’s sick?” wonders Syrup.

  “Yeah, he ain’t getting up for nothing.”

  “Well damn and hell,” says Syrup.

  Princess says, “This is Lollipop. Before you ask, we’re not poaching him or turning him out.”

  And they all say, “No way.”

  We get into explaining my name, how I am white skinned and red haired like a cherry sucker. And Syrup says, “That shit’s cute.”

  The way she says it, I kind of get a thrill from it, not like I got a thing for her, you know, not like how it was with my old ex Bernadette. I can tell she’s just comfortable to know, what with her dirty shirt and all.

  So Syrup introduces me to the crew: Jeezer, Skippy, Dog Girl, Little Bip, and Flower. They look OK, but Jeezer, I can see he’s hardcore diseased and will go soon. Sixteen but he looks almost fifty. He won’t look me in the eye for nothing because he is worried about this. I don’t care. He’ll be dead soon. So I don’t look him back. Why make problems? Then there’s Dog Girl. Princess tells me she goes doggy for anyone in a car. This because she needs money and likes it. Dog Girl nods when he says this. I don’t explore it any deeper. I’ve seen her type before. Syrup explains Little Bip, ninja verified casualty, one hundred percent twister, only like twelve years old. He’s a thief and a pain specialist, they say. You can beat him silly and he won’t feel it. Next is Flower, ugly redhead like me, all scratched up and torn, dirty old clothes, nasty old arsenic teeth. The crew.

  We start shooting the shit right out there by the melt, you know, hanging. I feel out of place with the clothes I have on. I’m all Diablo Canyon red, and they’re all black, black, black. But they don’t seem to notice nor even really care. And the sand’s blowing around. And the sun is shining.

  So we smoke a couple of cigarettes, check out the melt. It’s calm today and only a little bit choppy. Birds fly in and out of the tide. Just one drone out there still, buzzing and chirping, trying to hang on to GM vision, goddamned pre-melt ideal bullshit. Jeezer scowls when he sees me smoking my second cigarette, shows his sixteen-fifty-year-old teeth, “Yo, little mini bop, what you bringing to the table? We share here. We’re family.”

  I pull out some more peanuts from my bag. And Little Bip rides off somewhere on his cruiser and comes back with some beer.

  Syrup say
s, “You sure that big fat moron Freddy is sick?”

  “You can check on him if you want,” goes Princess. “He looks like three-day-old dogshit.”

  And Flower is all, “Screw that guy.”

  Then Jeezer goes, “I ought to piss on him.”

  Flower says, “I already did.”

  Everyone laughs, me too, though I don’t really think it’s that great of a joke. I’m just laughing because the day is almost clean and I guess I’m kind of desperate to keep these new friends for at least a couple days without having to return to silence. And I appreciate how they’re being nice to me, making me feel like one of them. I need to talk. I need this. It’s lonely in the zone. Terrible distant.

  I glance out at the melt. It’s getting dark. Princess says, “It’s scatter time.”

  Jeezer says, “Amen, brother.”

  Syrup pulls out a pipe. And pretty soon we’re all blowing scatter. I’m not a scatterhead. But I do it to show I’m cool. It goes right in like a glass of water. And now I’m laughing like every couple of seconds.

  Syrup says, “Bip, put on that sick, sick old school music you been carrying.”

  Little Bip has a ghetto blaster that looks a hundred years old. He puts on a pre-melt band called the Acid Surfers. I haven’t ever heard anything like that before, all crazy guitars like the dudes were wired for twister. And the whole crew starts doing a scatter dance, jumping up and down and saying the same thing over and over again, shouting. Words I don’t know but they sound good. I don’t know what to do. I just sit there with my mouth open.

  Princess goes, “Watch this gem dance.”

  He starts stomping around the ghetto blaster like he’s climbing a mountain of imaginary sand. The crew huddles around the box, grinding and twisting. If you get anywhere close to Jeezer, he pops you one like he’s down in the pit, roughing it up with a load of GMers. It’s great sightseeing the crew dance. They look like heavenly ghosts, fatal white, like twig insects snapping in a cool night, like they’re already dead a thousand years. Especially Flower. She has on these big old stompers six sizes too big. They make her legs look like two stretches of fine leather. She pulls off her dirty old jacket, showing all kinds of flesh, white as cream, whiter than me even, but mottled bad like someone’s been whacking her with a garden hose. She looks wicked sick, her cigarette shooting out of her mouth like a hook.