CONTENTS
The Green Gyre
Of Gyres and Trash Vortices
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Copyright Notice
Acknowledgements
About the Author
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The Green Gyre
by Saul Tanpepper
© 2013
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If you poop long enough into the abyss,
the abyss will poop back on you.
(with apologies to Friedrich Nietzsche)
THE SPACESHIP that arrived on that bathwater-warm spring day and squatted itself down over Midtown Manhattan for all of thirty-eight minutes wasn’t just big. As one linguist put it: “The vessel’s Brobdingnagian proportions were way beyond the ability of our puny Lilliputian brains to process.”
In the weeks that followed, as we struggled in vain to comprehend the enormity of that inexplicable event, words like colossal and titanic were dismissed out of hand. Ginormous, it was decided, was simply too frivolous a term, and mind-blowing made the close encounter sound like the product of some high school social media mania or a hippy hallucination. Such feeble depictions could never do the object justice — much less the experience — at least for those who had actually been there. And certainly none of the reputable news reporters who later waxed editorial about it would have dared to use such an inadequate word as huge.
But that’s what the alien ship was: huge, colossal, mind-blowing.
And, yes, maybe even ginormous.
When the alien juggernaut came and parked its vast ass over New York City and defecated all over Central Park, it didn’t just blot out the sun or fill the too-small sky. It eclipsed them, consumed them.
Obliterated them.
Mark Williams was on his cell phone prowling one of the park’s compulsively-manicured walkways and crowing like a farmyard rooster when the ship’s umbra swept stealthily over him. It was one of those cloudless days in early June, humid as all get out but not the least bit hazy, and the sun, as it typically did at this time of day, was approaching its zenith. The hottest hours of the afternoon still lay ahead, but Mark was creating his own mini desert climate zone on the ground and, as such, was too preoccupied to notice when the quality of light abruptly changed or when the breeze faltered and died like the last gasp of an expiring Bactrian camel.
Neither did he notice the sudden hush that fell over him when the park’s highly fecund denizens ceased their incessant chattering (which is how he’d always thought of the disease-ridden vermin, especially the freeloading, overpopulating squirrels with their flippity tails and their infuriatingly stupid squeaking, which always seemed to charm the nuts off the never-ending stream of camera-toting tourists). He’d woken that morning to find his entire existence had crashed down around him during the night, and he was now desperately trying to reconcile how something like that could have happened and what he could do to salvage even one eensy little piece of it.
Even though he knew deep down that the damage was already too widespread, too irrevocable.
So it was perhaps coincidental, on that particular day of the alien visitation, that the suffocating sensation which flooded through him with such tidal force was one of unfathomable foreboding: the world was indeed about to end— not just figuratively, but literally as well. It was a situation to which he had no prior exposure, and thus possessed no immunity against.
As he stepped off 79th Street and rampaged into the park, it was all he could do to tune everything else out, both the irreverent and irrelevant.
“Everything’s shot to hell!” he screamed into his new four-hundred-dollar smartphone. He hadn’t yet made the first payment for the thing because, frankly, the corporate coffers had been as empty as a robbed grave for at least the past month. When he’d retired last night in a cognac-induced haze, he’d fully expected them to be overflowing this morning, tomorrow at the latest. Instead, he’d woken to a disaster.
Which meant he was talking on borrowed time as well.
I’m ruined.
Those two words had hit him with such brutal finality that all he could think to do was vent his rage. At the moment, the most convenient target happened to be Adam Dauphin, his Veep of Operations.
Some of the starry-eyed park-goers around him turned their vapid faces upon him and gawked. Some chuffed and made equally nonsensical noises, while others scowled bemusedly at his kaleidoscopic choice of words. He was vaguely aware of them, of course, and more than a little irritated that they would be so entertained at his expense. They were the ones intruding on his unhappiness. How dare they pretend outrage? What right had they to mock his misfortune with their piteous stares?
When Mark pulled the phone away from his ear and glared at it as if he was about to hurl it into the lily pad-stippled cesspool of a pond at his feet, he could sense that more than a few of the onlookers were silently cheering him on.
Fine! Let them!
He blinked and scowled defiantly at them, recognizing preemptively the folly of such an imprudent act as tossing away a phone that might still be returnable, yet at the same time remaining wretchedly ignorant of his own impudence. He didn’t throw the phone — he wouldn’t give the ignorant jerks the pleasure — and he certainly wasn’t going to lower his voice. “Shot to bleeping hell,” he bellowed again.
Adam was currently stuck in stop-and-go traffic on the San Mateo Bridge heading into San Francisco and wishing he’d never answered the call in the first place; an apocalyptic feeling had been building up inside of him all morning, climaxing in the moment the phone buzzed in the readily-accessible nest of his crotch. Don’t answer it, Adam. He was now regretting not heeding this inner prophet and wishing he’d just left the damn thing in his jacket pocket out of reach on the back seat.
“You hear me?” came Mark’s tinny shriek, crackling and distorting as it attempted to squeeze through the inadequate speaker. Adam pulled the phone away from his ear and stared at it with an almost frightening sense of denouement. He wondered what Mark would do if he tossed the thing out the window. “I’ve lost everything!”
A highly controversial but well-read financial blog, THE TECHNOCRAT, had published a scathing exposé of an internal memo which Mark had drafted after meeting with the Grosvenor’s Investment Group two days before. Sensitive details — details he’d painstakingly kept away from the public’s eye — had been leaked. An anarchist by the name of Auntie Dote had claimed credit; Mark had no idea who this self-proclaimed corporate avenger was, but he was sure he’d find out soon enough. As a result of the blog post, people he’d done business with in the past were lining up to make spurious claims of his supposed strong-arm tactics. “Borderline illegal,” was the actual phrase used. He was called several names. “High Seeds Marauder” was just one of the mildest.
Mark the Shark, indeed, he muttered, sipping his iced latte. I’ll sue this Technocrap blog and its stupid Auntie Dope.
The epithets shouldn’t have bugged him as much as they did, since they weren’t exactly accurate. He had no interest in the paltry few million those stupid angel investors tried to inveigle him with. He needed at least fifty million; a hundred would’ve done quite nicely, thank you.
Yet despite these errors and the false claims that he’d ruthlessly stalked and threatened high-stakes financiers, the damage had been done. The scandal managed to c
ompletely derail a delicate process which he’d obsessively nurtured over the past eighteen months.
And, okay, maybe some of the things he’d done during that time weren’t exactly ethical when viewed by the light of day, but they sure as hell weren’t illegal. Not in New York, anyway.
Now he was taking his frustrations out on Adam, who, Mark would’ve admitted if asked under calmer circumstances, didn’t really deserve the brunt of his unbridled wrath. But the two men had grown up together, had attended college together. They were blood brothers, for God’s sake, having fought side-by-side in a half-dozen boardroom battles. Mark brought the passion and vision, and, as Mark often pointed out, Adam’s strength was managing the mundane details. He was really good at it.
The point was, if Adam couldn’t sympathize with his old buddy’s situation, nobody would.
The deal had promised to net Mark’s nascent waste disposal company a minimum infusion of seventy million dollars, and it came with surprisingly few conditions. Granted, he would’ve had to give up a small percentage of the ownership — a token amount of control, really — but it was well worth the sacrifice considering the return it would bring. That was the nature of speculative enterprise, especially where the environment was concerned. And just think of the government contracts!
He’d been so confident in his ability to broker the deal that he’d leveraged everything he had on it over the past year: his entire fortune, a mortgage on a four-million-dollar condo in the Upper East Side, a marriage barely out of the starter’s gate, his reputation.
“I’ve got a dozen employees who haven’t seen a paycheck in months!”
“I know, Mark,” Adam said, placatingly. “I know.” Of course he did, he was one of those employees— not twelve, actually, but twenty-two now, plus the half-dozen barge crews they’d recently signed. He lived in a tiny apartment in an older neighborhood in Union City, drove an eight-year-old Prius to a garishly decorated (in his opinion) office in the North Bay overlooking the Oakland shipyards. Mark had given him a fancy company phone, but Adam always felt self-conscious using it. On the other hand, his own personal phone — the one he was white-knuckling while a pack of leather-clad motorcyclists split lanes past him at a breakneck, eardrum-piercing pace — was on its third contract extension; it was a modest flip model whose battery barely held any charge anymore, yet, at this moment, stubbornly refused to die on him. So, yeah, he knew what Mark was saying.
“I want her head!” Mark screamed. “This bleeping Auntie Dote!” It had all slipped away while he slept, right through his fingers like so much water, leaving him with the maddening urge — the need — to throttle someone. “Get me the bleeping writer’s name. I want to know who the bleep her source is! Get me the bleep bleeping blog-owner too, while you’re at it! Get me—”
He stopped at the top of the bridge, suddenly aware of the odd shadow preceding him down the walkway, staining the world like an undrinkable claret stains a tablecloth. The leading edge was racing away into the depths of Central Park, engulfing walkways, ponds, and trees in its wake. The world had fallen into a premature twilight, strange, golden, and shadowless. He lifted his eyes and—
“Jesus Christ!”
Ducking, he stumbled but managed to catch himself against the low stone wall of the bridge, his knees buckling beneath him from shock and his teeth clacking together. Blood flooded into his mouth; he didn’t even notice he’d bitten his tongue.
“Sorry?” Adam tried but failed to keep the weariness from his voice. “I got you on speaker, Mark, and didn’t quite catch that last bit. Did you say ‘Get Jesus?’ I don’t think he’s in my contacts.” He laughed uneasily.
But the phone in Mark’s hand was forgotten and so was Adam on the other end of the call. Everything in that moment was forgotten, and not just the park and the people but now his anger over the blown deal and the sharp clot of pain inside his mouth. Everything melted away the instant he’d seen the ship.
An insane thought raced through his mind and, just as quickly, was gone: They’re closing the lid, locking us in.
He crouched, mouth agape, his hand stuck to his ear as if glued there. The strap of his satchel slipped from his shoulder to his elbow. The bag — and the expensive computer inside of it — slammed into the cement with a muffled crack! He didn’t notice this either. He’d lost all sensation, all motor control. Indeed, he might have emptied his bladder right there on the bridge overlooking the duck pond if he hadn’t already relieved himself at the coffee shop on 5th Avenue moments before. The tiny shop didn’t have the greatest beans, but they did have the cleanest restrooms within a five-block radius, and they still used real paper towels instead of those stupid eco-friendly-my-ass air dryers. The iced latte he’d purchased there was now a dark spray pattern soaking into the flagstone walk, muddy droplets on his carefully polished shoes, tan foam on the hem of his slacks.
The plastic cup it had come in rolled to a gap in the stone railing, balanced on the edge for a moment, then dropped silently to the water below, where it promptly disappeared under the bridge.
The ship’s leading edge was now a half mile ahead of him and quickly gobbling up what little remained of the morning’s pristine sky.
Closing them all in.
Mark spun on his heels and waddled awkwardly forward, forgetting that he was still crouching. A bolt of pain shot up his leg as the sharp edge of the sole of his shoe caught on a crack and wrenched his ankle.
He winced, then dropped his gaze and took a moment to scan around him. For sanity’s sake, he needed confirmation that he wasn’t the only one witnessing this. He wasn’t. Thanks to his six-foot-five frame and his vantage point at the top of the stone bridge, he had a clear view out into the park. Not a single person was paying him any heed anymore; everyone was now looking up at the ship.
Growing up in Connecticut, he’d always been the tallest boy his age. Even into adulthood he’d rarely experienced situations where he felt undersized. His freshman roommate in college, a basketball player-turned-football star, had given Mark a fleeting sense of the smallness others felt when they were around him. He didn’t particularly favor it, so, returning for his second year, Mark had sought out a new roommate. He found Adam, made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Adam was a more manageable five-foot-nine and had no remarkable athletic skills; he was the perfect sidekick.
But now . . . .
Now Mark felt smaller than he’d ever felt before. Insignificant. Inconsequential.
Puny.
The craft couldn’t have been any closer than a quarter of a mile — still high enough above him that it easily cleared the tops of the tallest skyscrapers — and yet it was so immense, so imminently there, that Mark felt he could reach out and touch it. His hand rose to his shoulder of its own accord before he drew it back. He knew he’d go completely insane if he found that the sky had indeed solidified and dropped to street-level. If his manicured nails somehow contacted that polished surface and tapped against it, if his fingertips squeaked along as it passed, he knew his mind would simply shatter.
Behind him, between the maple and oak trees lining the walk, past the small hump of Cedar Hill and out over the marble and granite edifices lining 79th Street, the shallow keel of the alien vessel — for how could it possibly be manmade? — extended as far as he could see.
Ever so slowly, as if afraid of drawing attention to himself, Mark straightened to his full height and turned once more in the direction he’d been heading. There was no more sky to be seen anywhere, only the vessel’s mirrored underbelly reflecting the city underneath. The perfectly slick shell of the thing was scored by an irregular pattern of floodlights. They reminded him of the recessed canisters in the low ceiling of the ballroom of the Carcher Hotel in Edgemont, site of his first multi-million-dollar deal. The diffuse yellow glow they cast down turned the noon day into dusk.
By now, people were streaming out of buildings, piling into the streets and staggering onto the paths from hidden park benche
s and maple-canopied grassy knolls. They were gawping, craning their necks and crooning, bulging their eyes out in naked wonder. The full impact of what they were seeing hadn’t yet hit them — would not for at least another ten seconds — just as it hadn’t yet hit Mark. For the moment, panic was fashionably late in arriving to this particular ball.
“Mark? You there?”
Mark blinked. It was Adam, again, or still, his voice reedy and thin, as if he were buried deep underground.
“Are you still there, Mark? God, you’ve finally given yourself a heart attack, haven’t you? I swear, one of these days—”
“Shut up,” Mark snapped. “Are you seeing this?”
He realized he was shouting, but his voice sounded far away, even to his own ears. Others on the street were also shouting, and yet he could barely hear them. The car alarms and the sirens of the emergency vehicles as they flashed past on 5th Avenue were curiously muffled. They sounded . . . small, diminished. The ship must have had some sort of noise-dampening mechanism, which explained why it made no sound of its own.
“Seeing what?”
“Turn on the goddamn TV, Adam!” Mark screamed in his faraway voice.
“I’m still in the car.”
“The radio then! Jesus Christ, turn on the radio!”
By now, the alien vessel had paused in its interminable advance and had started instead to slowly rotate directly over him. Or at least it appeared to be rotating. Mark couldn’t be sure because of the absence of discernible features on its gleaming underside other than the lights, and those seemed to be moving in disparate directions, as if floating unanchored in a sea of mercury. He felt a moment of vertigo and nearly tumbled over the railing into the duck pond.
“Flipping through stations, Mark,” Adam relayed. “Can you give me a clue what I’m supposed to be listening for? Financials? Useless traffic reports? What?”
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