Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

  “Dunno,” I said. “What day is it?”

  “Monday,” she said.

  “I don’t think I’ve looked in on it today. Want to come?”

  She did.

  In the days since we’d staked out the Gadget, more tents and trucks and cars and shade structures and exotic vehicles had gone up all around it, so that its paddock was now in the midst of a low-slung tent city. We’d strung up a perimeter of waist-high safety-orange tape to keep people from blundering into it at night, and I saw that it had been snapped in a few places and made a mental note to get the spool of tape off the post where we kept it and replace it.

  The wind had been blowing hard earlier that day, but it had died down to a breathless late afternoon. The Gadget was standing and creaking softly at the end of its tether, and all around it was a litter of printed panels. Three of its legs were askew, resting atop stray tiles. We gathered them up and stacked them neatly and counted—there were forty all told, which was more than I’d dared hope for.

  “We’re going to be able to put together two or three yurts at this rate.”

  “Igloos.”

  “Yours can be an igloo,” I said.

  “That’s very big of you, fella.”

  “Monday, you said?”

  She stretched like a cat. She was streaked with dust and dirt and had a musky, unwashed animal smell that I’d gotten used to smelling on myself. “Yeah,” she said. “Packing up tonight, pulling out tomorrow at first light.”

  I gulped. Time had become elastic out there on the desert, that school’s-out Junetime feeling that the days are endless and unrolling before you and there are infinite moments to fill and no reason at all in the whole world to worry. Now it evaporated as quickly as sweat in the desert. I swallowed again.

  “You’re going to get up at first light?” I said.

  “No,” she said, and pressed a couple of gel caps into my palm. “I was going to stay up all night. Luckily, I’m not driving.”

  At some point we worked out that Pug and I had three filled solar showers warm on the van’s roof and then it was only natural that we strung them up and pulled the plug on them, sluicing the hot, stale, wonderful water over our bodies, and we took turns soaping each other up, and the molly and whatever else had been in her pills made every nerve ending on my body thrum. Our gray water ended up in a kiddie pool at our feet, brown and mucky, and when we stepped out of it the dust immediately caked on our feet and ankles and calves, gumming between our toes as we made a mad, giggling dash for the van, threw our bodies into it and slammed the door behind us.

  We rolled around on the air mattresses in the thick, superheated air of the van, tickling and kissing and sometimes more, the madness of the pills and that last-night-of-summer-camp feeling thrumming in our veins.

  “You’re thinking about something,” she said, lying crosswise so that our stomachs were pressed together and our bodies formed a wriggling plus sign.

  “Is that wrong?”

  “This is one of those live-in-the-moment moments, Greg.”

  I ran my hands over the small of her back, the swell of her butt, and she shivered and the shiver spread to me. The dope made me want to knead her flesh like dough, my hands twitching with the desire to clench.

  “It’s nothing, just—” I didn’t want to talk about it. I wanted to fool around. She did too. We did.

  “Just what?” she said, some long time later. At one point, Pug had opened—and then swiftly shut—the rear van doors.

  “You and Pug aren’t . . . ?”

  “Nope,” she said. “Are you?”

  “Nope,” I said.

  “Just what, then?”

  I rewound the conversation. I’d already peaked and was sliding into something mellow and grand.

  “Just, well, default reality. It’s all so—”

  “Yeah,” she said. Default reality was cutesy burner-speak for the real world, but I had to admit it fit. That made what we were in special reality or maybe default unreality.

  “I know that we’re only here to have fun, but somehow it feels like it’s been . . .” Important was the word on the tip of my tongue, but what an embarrassing admission. “More.” Lame-o!

  She didn’t say anything for so long that I started to get dope paranoia, a fear that I’d said or done something wildly inappropriate but been too high to notice.

  “I know what you mean,” she said.

  We lay together and listened to the thump of music out in the desert night. She stroked my arm lazily with fingertips that were as rough as sandpaper, rasping over my dry, scaly skin. I could distinctly feel each nerve impulse move up my arm to my spine and into my brain. For a while, I forgot my curious existential sorrow and was truly, totally in the moment, just feeling and hearing and smelling, and not thinking. It was the refrigerator hum that Pug had told me about, and it had finally stopped. For that moment, I was only thinking, and not thinking about thinking, or thinking about thinking about thinking. Every time my thoughts strayed toward a realization that they were only thinking and not meta-cognizing, they easily and effortlessly drifted back to thinking again.

  It was the weirdest moment of my life and one of the best. The fact that I was naked and hot and sweaty with a beautiful woman and stoned off my ass helped. I had found the exact perfect mixture of sex, drugs, and rock and roll to put me into the place that my mind had sought since the day I emerged from the womb.

  It ended, gradually, thoughts about thoughts seeping in and then flowing as naturally as they ever had. “Wow,” I said.

  “You too?” she said.

  “Totally.”

  “That’s what I come here for,” she said. “If I’m lucky, I get a few minutes like that here every year. Last time was three years ago, though. I went home and quit my job and spent three hours a day learning to dance while I spent the rest of my time teaching small-engine repair at a halfway house for rehabilitated juvenile offenders.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Totally.”

  “What job did you quit?”

  “I was CTO for a company that made efficient cooling systems for data centers. It had some really interesting, nerdy thermodynamic problems to chew through, but at the end of the day, I was just trying to figure out how to game entropy, and that’s a game of incremental improvements. I wanted to do stuff that was big and cool and weird and that I could point to and say, ‘I did that.’ Some of my students were knuckleheads, a few were psychos, but most of them were just broken kids that I helped to put together, even a little. And a few of them were amazing, learned everything I taught them and then some, taught me things I’d never suspected, went on to do amazing things. It turns out that teaching is one of those things like raising a kid or working out—sometimes amazing, often difficult and painful, but, in hindsight, amazing.”

  “Have you got a kid?”

  She laughed. “Maya. She’s thirteen. Spending the week with her dad in Arizona.”

  “I had no idea,” I said. “You don’t talk about her much.”

  “I talk about her all the time,” she said. “But not on the Playa. That’s a kind of vacation from my other life. She keeps asking me to come out. I guess I’ll have to bring her some year, but not to the Fourth. Too crazy. And it’s my Blight time.”

  “Your name’s not Blight, is it?”

  “Nope,” she said. I grinned and smacked her butt, playfully. She pinched my thigh, hard enough to make me yelp.

  “What do you do?” she said.

  I hated that question. “Not much,” I said. “Got in with a start-up in the nineties, made enough to pay cash for my house and then some. I do a little contract coding and the rest of the time, I just do whatever I feel like. Spend a lot of time at the hackerspace. You know Minus?”

  “Yeah. Are you seriously rich?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m just, I don’t know what you’d call it—I’m rich enough. Enough that I don’t have to worry about money for the rest of my life
, so long as I don’t want much, and I don’t. I’m a pretty simple guy.”

  “I can tell,” she said. “Took one look at you and said, that is one simple son of a bitch.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Somehow, I thought this life would be a lot more interesting than it turned out to be.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Obviously.”

  “So volunteer. Do something meaningful with your life. Take in a foster kid. Walk dogs for cancer patients.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  She kissed my shin, then bent back my little toe and gave it a twist. “Just do something, Greg. I mean, you may not get total satori out of it, but sitting around on your butt, doing nothing, of course that’s shit. Be smart.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Oh, hell,” she said. She got up on her knees and then toppled forward onto me. “Do what you want, you’re an adult.”

  “I am of adult age,” I said. “As to my adulthood—”

  “You and all the rest of us.”

  We lay there some more. The noise outside was more frenetic than ever, a pounding, throbbing relentless mash of beats and screams and gunshots and explosions.

  “Let’s go see it,” she said, and we staggered out into the night.

  THE SUN WAS RISING when she said, “I don’t think happiness is something you’re supposed to have, it’s something you’re supposed to want.”

  “Whoa,” I said, from the patch of ground where I was spread-eagled, dusty, and chilled as the sky turned from bruisey purple to gaudy pink.

  She pinched me from where she lay, head to head above me. I was getting used to her pinches, starting to understand their nuances. That was a friendly one. In my judgment, anyway.

  “Don’t be smart. Look, whatever else happiness is, it’s also some kind of chemical reaction. Your body making and experiencing a cocktail of hormones and other molecules in response to stimulus. Brain reward. A thing that feels good when you do it. We’ve had millions of years of evolution that gave a reproductive edge to people who experienced pleasure when something pro-survival happened. Those individuals did more of whatever made them happy, and if what they were doing more of gave them more and hardier offspring, then they passed this on.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Sure. At some level, that’s true of all our emotions, I guess.”

  “I don’t know about that,” she said. “I’m just talking about happiness. The thing is, doing stuff is pro-survival—seeking food, seeking mates, protecting children, thinking up better ways to hide from predators . . . Sitting still and doing nothing is almost never pro-survival, because the rest of the world is running around, coming up with strategies to outbreed you, to outcompete you for food and territory . . . If you stay still, they’ll race past you.”

  “Or race backward,” I said.

  “Yeah, there’s always the chance that if you do something, it’ll be the wrong thing. But there’s zero chance that doing nothing will be the right thing. Stop interrupting me, anyways.” She pinched me again. This one was less affectionate. I didn’t mind. The sun was rising. “So if being happy is what you seek, and you attain it, you stop seeking. So the reward has to return to the mean. Happiness must fade. Otherwise, you’d just lie around, blissed out and childless, until a tiger ate you.”

  “Have you hacked my webcam or something?”

  “Not everything is about you,” she said.

  “Fine,” I said. “I accept your hypothesis for now. So happiness isn’t a state of being, instead it’s a sometimes-glimpsed mirage on the horizon, drawing us forward.”

  “You’re such a fucking poet. It’s a carrot dangling from a stick, and we’re the jackasses plodding after it. We’ll never get it though.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I think I just came pretty close.”

  And that earned me another kiss, and a pinch, too. But it was a friendly one.

  BLIGHT AND HER CAMPMATES pulled up stakes shortly thereafter. I helped them load their guns and their ordnance and their coolers and bales of costumes and kegs and gray water and duffel bags and trash bags and flaccid sun showers and collapsed shade structures, lashing about half of it to the outside of their vehicles under crackling blue tarps. Her crew had a storage locker in Reno where they’d leave most of the haul, only taking personal gear all the way home.

  Working my muscles felt good after a long, wakeful night of dancing and screwing and lying around, and when we fell into a bucket-brigade rhythm, I tumbled directly into the zone of blessed, tired physical exertion, a kind of weary, all-consuming dance of moving, lifting, passing, turning, moving . . . And before I knew it, the dawn was advanced enough to have me sweating big rings around my pits and the cars were loaded, and Blight was in my arms, giving me a long hug that continued until our bodies melted together.

  She gave me a soft, dry kiss and said, “Go chase some happiness.”

  “You too,” I said. “See you at the Burn.”

  She pinched me again, a friendly one. We’d see each other come Labor Day weekend, assuming we could locate each other in the sixty-thousand-person crush of Burning Man. After my intimate, two-hundred-person Fourth of Juplaya, I could hardly conceive of such a thing, though with any luck, I’d be spending it in the world’s first 3D-printed yurt. Or igloo.

  PUG GOT US EARLY admission to the Burn. From the turnoff, it seemed nearly as empty as it had when we’d been there in July, but by the time we reached the main gate, it was obvious that this was a very different sort of thing from the Fourth.

  Once we’d submitted to a search—a search!—of the van and the trailer and been sternly warned—by a huge, hairy dude wearing the bottom half of a furry monkey costume, a negligee, and a ranger’s hat—to stay under 5 mph to keep the dust plumes down, we were crawling forward. No GPS this time. During the months that we’d spent in L.A. wondering whether the Gadget was hung up, crashed, stuck, blown away, or stolen, so many vehicles had passed this way that they’d worn an unmistakable road into the Playa, hedged with orange-tipped surveyors’ stakes and porta-sans.

  The sun was straight overhead, the air-conditioning wheezing as we crept along, and even though the sprawling, circular shape of Black Rock City was only 10 percent full, we could already make it out against the empty desert-scape. In the middle of it all stood the Man, a huge, angular neopagan idol, destined for immolation in a week’s time.

  Pug had been emailing back and forth with the Borg—the Burning Man Organization, a weird cult of freak bureaucrats who got off on running this circus—all summer, and he was assured that our little paddock had been left undisturbed. If all went according to plan, we’d drop off the van, unpack it and set up camp, then haul bike-trailers over to the paddock and find out how the Gadget had fared over the summer. I was 90 percent convinced that it had blown over and died the minute we left the desert and had been lying uselessly ever since. We’d brought along some conveniences that could convert the back of the van into a bedroom if it came to that, but we were absolutely committed to sleeping in the yurt. Igloo.

  We set off as quickly as we could, in goggles and painter’s masks against the light, blowing dust. Most of the campsites were empty and we were able to slice a cord across Black Rock City’s silver-dollar, straight out to walk-in camp, where there were only a few tents pitched. Pug assured me that it would be carpeted in tents within a couple of days.

  Just past walk-in camp, we came upon the Gadget.

  It had changed color. The relentless sun and alkali dust had turned the ceramic/polymer legs, sails, and base into the weathered no-color of driftwood. As we came upon it, the solar panels flickered in the sun and then did their dust-shedding routine, spinning like a drum-major’s batons and snapping to with an audible crack, and their dust sifted down into the feedstock hoppers, and then over them. They were full. Seeing that, I felt a moment’s heartsickness—if they were covered with dust, there’d be no power. The Gadget must not have been printing.

  But that only lasted
a moment—just long enough to take in what I should have seen immediately. The Gadget’s paddock was mounded with tiles.

  “It’s like a bar chart of the prevailing winds,” Pug said. I instantly grasped what he meant—the mounds were uneven, and the hills represented the places where the wind had blown the Gadget most frequently. I snapped several photos before we swarmed over the Gadget to run its diagnostics.

  According to its logs, it had printed 413 tiles—enough for two yurts, and nearly double what we’d anticipated. The data would be a delicious puzzle to sort through after the Burn. Had the days been longer? The printer more efficient?

  We started to load the trailers. It was going to take several trips to transport all the tiles, and then we’d have to walk the Gadget itself over, set up a new paddock for it on our site, and then we’d have to start assembling the yurt. Yurts! It was going to be punishing, physical, backbreaking work, but a crackle of elation shot through us at the thought of it. It had worked!

  “MASTER, THE CREATURE LIVES!” I bellowed, in my best Igor, and Pug shook his head and let fly with a perfect mad-scientist cackle.

  We led the Gadget back by means of a pair of guide ropes, pulling for all we were worth on them, tacking into the wind and zigzagging across the Playa, stumbling over campsites and nearly impaling ourselves on rebar tent pegs. People stopped what they were doing to watch, as though we were proud hunters returning with a kill, and they waved at us and squinted behind their goggles, trying to make sense of this strange centaur with its glinting single eye high above its back.

  We staked it into the ground on our site on a much shorter tether and dusted it off with stiff paintbrushes, working the dust out of the cracks and joints, mostly on general principle and in order to spruce it up for public viewing. It had been running with amazing efficiency despite the dust all summer, after all.

  “Ready to get puzzling?” Pug said.

  “Aye, Cap’n,” I said.

  We hadn’t been sure how many tiles we’d get out of the Gadget over the course of the summer. They came in three interlocking sizes, in the Golden Ratio, each snapping together in four different ways. Figuring out the optimal shape for any given number of panels was one of those gnarly, NP-complete computer science problems that would take more computational cycles than remained in the universe’s lifetime to solve definitively. We’d come up with a bunch of variations on the basic design (it did look more like an igloo than a yurt, although truth be told it looked not very much like either) in a little sim, but were always being surprised by new ways of expanding the volume using surprisingly small numbers of tiles.