“O Froggy,” Opalith greeted him. “It looked so eerie to see you up on that ladder, balanced on nothing.” And it absolutely had.
“We need a piece of canvas,” Ignatius cried. “We’ll wrap it, that unshpritzable Ritz. Wrapping large buildings was once a popular art form, and we can do it here, my band of brave upholsterers.”
“It won’t work,” said Sammy Flashing Plains. “Don’t you remember the story of my headcloth and the invisible rock point?” He suggested building a housing around the outcropping: a derrick-like structure or a series of scaffoldings.
Ossie noted that this strategy might prove dangerous, especially if the rock began to grow as they built.
“Then I’m going to ask Rowdy Al for some dynamite.” Ignatius wrote a note to the rancher and carried it down the pasture to his big zinc mailbox.
That evening, in the gargoyle-haunted tent, Ossie’s radio announced that new anomalies had made their presence known in Illinois, Texas, Nebraska, and Utah. Other parts of the world also reported more outcroppings. The four pals looked around at one another out of ash-colored faces.
Before going to bed, Ossie Safire walked outside and stood amid the cottonwoods looking toward Rowdy Al’s house of many gables. All its lights were on, and jig music jogged up the rise to Ossie. Further, the silhouette of the heavyset rancher went dancing from one blazing window to another. Rowdy Al, it seemed, was rowdy in private, but you could participate at a distance in his genial rowdiness and commence to glow almost as bright as he.
Ossie crept back into his sleeping bag. To his disappointment, Opalith had again opted to sleep in work clothes.
On the third day they tried dynamite—a crate full of dynamite. On the top of the crate fluttered a tiny card whose handwritten message declared, This is a good idea, but it won’t work. R.A.L.
It didn’t work. Nor had the friends expected it to. (Still, you would have enjoyed watching Opalith and Ossie run off the cows.) However, the experiment blew up in their faces in a different way from what they had expected.
Beneath The-Anomaly-As-Big-As-The-Ritz, Ossie and Ignatius planted four separate charges. Then, after collapsing their tent, they retreated to the arroyo, where everyone took cover under Hope-It’s-A-Diamond. From the dusty gulch, they detonated their charges.
Whumpf. Whuumpf. Whuuumpf. And whuuuumpf. O, it was like a tubercular cow wheezing out the letters of a bovine Tetragrammaton. Afterward, the four diggers scrambled like lizards from beneath their rock to behold what they could behold and saw … well, nothing.
Or no more than several distended balloons of dust drifting hazily through the cottonwoods; those, and the orange rags that lay all over the land. As they came through the cottonwoods on their approach to The Ritz, they did see the outsized pothole beneath the invisible rock: a shallow crater, with lumps of dirt still lumpily in it, clods of clay that the wind had not dispersed.
Said Ignatius Clayborne, “Let’s search for fragments.”
Down on all fours went all four of them, with a few returning, cud-chewing cows looking on imperturbably. Ossie found blades of buffalo grass, sidewinder spoors, heat-steamed cow chips, and one crazily careening dung beetle. But he found no fragments of The Ritz, nor did anybody else.
“Such a shame,” said Opalith Magmani. “Such a shame.”
They discovered, however, that they had altered the dimensions of The-Anomaly-As-Big-As-The-Ritz. Whole chunks around its base had disappeared, like bites out of an invisible mushroom.
“Those missing chunks,” said Sammy, “have to be somewhere.”
“Maybe they went back to wherever they came from,” volunteered Ossie Safire. “Just like that rock point of your papoosehood.”
“Uh-uh,” grunted Sammy discouragingly.
“Explain yourself,” said Ignatius Clayborne.
“Far from ridding ourselves of these invisible crystalline structures, if that’s what they are, we may have facilitated their proliferation, growth, and ultimate imprisoning of the damnable human race.”
“Boy,” said Opalith, “you are one gloomy Indian.”
Back in the vicinity of their dismantled tent, they listened to a National Public Radio announcer report new outcroppings in every state of the union, as well as in every country represented in the United Nations. Two streets in downtown Tulsa had filled with huge, invisible hardnesses, making them impassable; meanwhile, other cities had suffered similar inexplicable clog-ups. “We would say more,” the announcer intoned, “but high-ranking government officials have asked us not to. Anyhow, it looks as if the Rocks … Are … On … The … March.”
Ossie Safire wandered into the cottonwoods and stood looking for a long time at Rowdy Al LeFever’s house. Tonight no lights blazed in the windows, no merry figure hippity-jigged among the rooms, and the house’s yellow paint looked muted and muddy. Even so, the shingles on the roof had a phosphorescent sheen, and the spirit of Rowdy Al hovered spectrally over the landscape, more in control of things than he, Ossie Safire, would ever be. Things were falling apart; no, they were growing together, and something was not quite copacetic with the world.
The-Anomaly-As-Big-As-The-Ritz unsparkled under the moon like a demonic Ferris wheel. But it did not wink at him telepathically, and Ossie emphatically wished that it would. Comfort glinted in those ominous, rocky thoughts.
4
Strew flowers all about,
Heliotropes and hyacinths.
And let that yellow house draw out
Hosannas from the labyrinths!
Boomer Flats Ballads
They awoke the next morning to find that a wall of invisible glass had grown through the cottonwood copse. They walked out of their tent and went bang against it. Ignatius Clayborne collided first and then Ossie. Opalith and Sammy Flashing Plains escaped this indignity. None of them, however, could escape the implications of this new intrusion. Blasted fragments of The Ritz had taken root and bloomed into bulwarks, all viewless and vitreous where they didn’t belong.
“Are we trapped?” asked Ignatius.
“No,” said Sammy, “but plainly it has become dangerous to remain here. Look.” Today, the wind blew hard, but the leaves and limbs of only half the trees around them jiggled. The others stood as if encased in Lucite molds—which, in a way, they were, for that clear rock stuff had flowed right around the old cottonwoods, fixing them fast. “This could have happened to us,” Sammy went on, “and now we’d be nothing but four human aphids in amber.”
“You’re one eloquent Indian,” Opalith said. “Shall we pack up and go?”
“A powwow,” Sammy said. “Everybody sit.”
In the stand of cottonwoods, an invisible wall on one side, they sat in a ring like pipe-smoking shamans. Ossie mused that he and his pals looked like picnickers at a feast of potential panic. How did it feel to have stone lap about you like gin and congeal, with nary an olive for comfort?
“I had a dream last night,” began Sammy Flashing Plains. “In it, Rowdy Al LeFever told me that our anomalies are extrusions of a catty-corner crystalline vulcanism taking place in the continuum next door. A world over there is heaving and groaning and creating so abundantly that it’s splitting its own seams. These extrusions, Rowdy Al said, are extropic in nature and may not soon cease.”
“What’s this ‘extropic’ business?” asked Ossie.
“Our system is an entropic one,” said Sammy. “This other continuum runs on the opposite principle, one of endless creation rather than of unrelenting dysfunction and decay. Its system makes matter out of the great spinning Nothing, whereas ours can only … not destroy matter, but leach away at the old creation until it collapses.
“All this, and even more fabulous stuff, Rowdy Al told me as I dreamt. And as I slept, the crystalline lava of the New Creation flowed into our camp, lapped the trees, and lovingly hardened. It flowed through the seams that we had loosened with our dynamite, through the pressure points opened by the blasts that scattered abroad the shrapnel shards o
f The Ritz.”
“So we’ve abetted our own downfall,” said Ignatius Clayborne.
Sammy Flashing Plains ignored him. “The most fabulous thing that Rowdy Al told me was this: ‘In the New Creation, Sammy, intelligence and nature have melded into an indivisible whole. The flowing lava and the seam-bursting crystal are blessed with sentience; they possess not only the ratiocinative ability but also imagination! They can recombine human language into more compact and meaningful units of ideation—if only we could understand those units. Rocks won’t replace humans over here, but, instead, creative mineral intelligences. In such a domain, Sammy, death itself dies, for death can never conquer that which lacks frail flesh and frangible bone.’ And Rowdy Al urged me to rejoice.”
“In other words,” said Ignatius, “using dynamite was a good idea except for the fact that it didn’t work.”
“It didn’t work as we expected,” said Sammy. “The downfall that Ignatius dreads holds embryonic life, and it would have occurred no matter what we did. Rowdy Al said, ‘Sammy, as an Indian you see yourself as a constituent element of the world’s adornment, not as a meddlesome observer with a trowel to poke at this and that. And that’s good, for you’re a part of the New Creation, too. You should daub on the peace paint and whoop the joy whoops, in awe and celebration.’”
“Rowdy Al’s not your ordinary rancher,” said Ossie Safire. “But how did he come to know so much about these invisible extrusions—when the world at large is so vastly stumped?”
“Rowdy Al,” said Sammy, “has lived his whole life on the edge of an extrusion seam. When that seam, one of millions, finally flooded the earth with its faceted magma, Rowdy Al burst with power, too.”
A quietness of great pregnancy sluiced around the four powwowing diggers, which Ignatius at length delivered of a confession: “I don’t understand. And if that’s true, what must we do today?”
“Walk among the walls and marvel,” said Sammy. “This is the Last Day of the Old Procession.”
And so the four friends walked out of the cottonwood copse, half of which stood imprisoned in otherworldly glass, and onto the undulant prairie. Unsparklings abounded in the gin-clear, blue day. The friends walked with their hands out, to feel where the Old World left off and the crystalline walls began. They walked down invisible corridors into unseen cul-de-sacs, marveling that The-Anomaly-As-Big-As-The-Ritz had mounted the sky, capturing midges, eagles, and clouds. Now it towered over woolly Oklahoma like a make-believe Matterhorn. Also, the Hope-It’s-A-Diamond anomaly grew, shoving earth back from the arroyo bank as it snaked glassily along.
Aye anno feyk-meleaved usader intrurping mannakiddies’ Dominuum, but the brightful peniheritariy of the Noocleation, tinkled the Hope-It’s-A-Diamond outcropping as it expanded.
Meanwhile, The Ritz telegraphed this message into their heads: Conseal Ur-shelves in the krowslege that ayn butte-iffal et plat-O-teaudinoose whey of execristence has come to Glas.
And as the four explored the mazes around them, similar allusive thoughts poured like funny water from the rocks.
All the world over, Ossie told himself, this was happening. All the world over, the labyrinths grew. Meanwhile, he and his companions had become separated in their wanderings.
“You should know this about the extrusions, too,” yelled Sammy Flashing Plains from a different maze pocket. “Their facets, no matter the angle of the matrix containing them, lie flush with every dimension of our continuum; thus, their invisibility.” Sammy’s voice sounded diluted and wan.
Ossie Safire, hearing this murky thinness, realized that he and his chums would never come back together—never in this life. Sammy Flashing Plains stood over there, in the middle of the plain, while Ignatius Clayborne knelt over there, down by the arroyo bank, while Opalith Magmani—that beautiful beast of a woman—waved to them all from the cottonwood copse. What a stately woman, favored of forehead, handsome of aspect, her hand raised in a gesture of triumphant valediction, for a fresh extrusion had recently captured her. Lost, but lost to him painlessly, for on the Last Day of the Old Procession they were joined in a marriage encompassing every living creature. He didn’t even need to essay a fifth proposal.
Turning, Ossie noted that the Hope-It’s-A-Diamond outflow had engulfed and lifted up Ignatius Clayborne, who appeared to float in midair, a man holding himself aloft by will alone, an angel of latter-day geology.
Turning again, Ossie saw that Sammy Flashing Plains remained animate and active, although he had shed his work shirt, baring his breastplates to the sun. Now he stared into the white sky with outspread arms and took small sacramental steps that led him around in a slow, wheeling dance. He was one intent Indian, one reverent creature among many of the Old Procession.
“Farewell, Sammy Flashing Plains,” cried Ossie Safire.
He struck out through the unhardened plots remaining before him, going where he had to go. Frozen cattle, suspended mesquite pods, a jackrabbit caught in midleap, and other monsters of eerie delight broke upon his vision. Invisible walls funneled him this way and that. He trod back down the ranch’s whilom grazing area and found himself in front of Rowdy Al LeFever’s house. His head ached with the manifold and mind-rocking thoughts with which the labyrinth had just harangued him.
The lopsided house leaned. Its foundations no longer touched the earth. White daylight congealed between the house and the ground. Slowly, the house rose, as if on a column of translucent fire. Ossie knew the column for an extrusion whose crystalline body had sufficient power to obliterate gravity.
“Ossie!” a voice shouted. “Ossie, my lad!”
Rowdy Al LeFever clasped his legs about a lopsided gable of the climbing house. He waved, and as Ossie Safire looked up, the rancher called down through the solidifying chasms. His burnished boots shot out stars of light. His face was refulgent.
“This is the New Creation, Ossie! And what you’re seeing is only its magnificent leftovers, the excess and overflow of an eviternal birthing beyond our imagining!”
“But it’s only rocks, Rowdy Al!”
“These rocks have life, Ossie. They’re physical manifestations of the time-beyond-time in which that other creation is taking place. Look under my house, Ossie! You and Sammy heard them thinking, didn’t you? In the beginning of this world, as the Book says, was the Word, and likewise at the beginning of the New Creation. The Word is what fends off death, the Word is what creates, and right here on my ranch you can see the Word at work.”
The house kept climbing, alarmingly a-tilt. It appeared to pull out of the very bowels of the earth an assemblage of unlikely, frozen-in-place creatures, which rose into the sky in ranks beneath the gaudy yellow house. Trapped in crystal, these creatures had come through the distended seam between continuums from the other side! A sea beast, a one-horned camel, a butterfly with three vulturine heads, a furry pterodactyl, all perfect and beautiful, rose in the ascending column.
“On the other side,” Rowdy Al cried, “creation does not evolve. It self-evinces spontaneously, simultaneously, and everywhere. Whatever the mind may imagine, that you find there. Look again, Ossie. The sooner you do the better Sooner you!”
The house continued to ascend on its widening column, which displayed in an up-rush of solidified time-beyond-time its hard-to-imagine wonders—not fossils merely, but the things themselves. A family of the pre-people People, a school of thalassapithecines (hairy critters with prehensile fins and eyes like tarsiers), and fish with wheels. Whatever else Ossie saw, he forgot—except for Rowdy Al LeFever waving his Stetson in farewell and singing at the top of his inexhaustible lungs a cowboy paean in praise of the universe and its glorious abundance. And then the singing modulated into the telepathic babbling of the crystals as Ossie was engulfed and fixed for all time.
For here on the edge of the Order of Unbalanced Abundance, it was the First Day of the New Creation.
Simply Indispensable
NO ONE SHOULD HAVE TO DEAL SIMULTANEOUSLY with a spite wall, a
boomeranging lover, and the coming of the su’lakle.
No one.
Between Beirut and Damur, I own a faux-adobe towerhouse on the Mediterranean. Its picture window takes in my shelf gardens, a switchbacking mosaic walk, the crude but cleanly hovels below my cliff-chiseled estate, a strip of tawny beach, dozens of jumbled floating docks, and the green and creamy cloisonné waters of the Med itself. Every time I behold it, this panorama storms me like a SWAT team: it completely takes me over. If I were deprived of it, I would … well, who knows?
Thing is, Bashir Shouman wished to deprive me of it. A month back, he’d bought a wedge of cliff below the limestone wall at the bottom of my property. He paid eight homesteader families in the scrap-and-cardboard hovels there a total of three million Lebanese pounds to abandon their shambly homes.
Not, mind you, because he wished to build his own magnificent dwelling on this stony ledge, but because the purchase enabled him to nettle me. To stab me in the heart. You see, he’d hired a crew of fellaheen—Arab coolies—to raise a cheap ugly wall between my tower and the sea.
“Why?” asked Lena Faye, in response to my grousing.
“To block my view,” I said. “To stand atop it and thumb his ouzo-ruddied nose at me.”
Lena Faye Leatherboat had concorded in from Tulsa to share the view with me. No. I lie. Actually, she’d come to talk me into returning home from Lebanon to take up my old anchor post with Okla*Globe. And, as I soon found, to recharge an affair that had gone lapsed-cola flat months before Levant Limitless Broadcasting, Entertainment-and-News (LLBEAN to our wise-ass competitors) spirited me off to Beirut.
“No,” said the leanly fey Ms. Leatherboat. “I meant, why does this Showman fella—?”
Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories Page 27
