Tyrannia (22 page)

This is the story of shouted questions and whispered questions finding a home inside the one.

This is the story of the other-ones watching the one with dismay.

This is the story of friendship.

This is the story of the one screaming.

This is the story of the other-people lancing the one with thistled clubs.

This is the story of the other-people puncturing the one with spears.

This is the story of the beetles growing angry.

This is the story of the other-people entering the cage and beating the other-one with thistled clubs.

This is the story of the other-people pushing their spears into the body of the other-one.

This is the story of a gray bird flying out of the one’s mouth and a white bird flying out of the other-one’s mouth.

This is the story of birds flying.

This is the story of the other-people who spent the rest of their lives alone, though they were together, thinking they were right.

This is the story of the people who kept away from the other-people’s pain, and were also alone.

This is the story of the two birds flying up the tunnel, to the light.

This is the story of the birds’ tools: their beaks and talons, which would never be stolen from them.

This is the story of how they learned to love each other.

This is the story of the white bird and the gray bird eating both sadness and joy, now that they were both together.

This is the story of the house of wood and its pit laying in wait for the shifting of the earth, and the cracking open of caves.

This is the story of the people and other-people one day coming together, so that they both died and lived together.

This is the story of the one wondering how she had wasted so much of her life before she turned into a bird, staring at clouds.

This is the story of the other-one becoming friends with the beetles, and flying toward the fallen bodies.

This is the story of the birds flying.

This is the story of the birds flying for us when we fall.

This is the story of our scars.

This is the story of clouds passing over our scars.

This is our story.

The Philip Sidney Game

Several years ago, I started writing a story about a man who was flying into Minneapolis-St. Paul and saw a car crash from above. The plane was about a thousand feet up and was descending when he saw the crash. It was late at night, a red-eye flight, so he could only see the headlights and taillights, and the faintest silhouettes of the cars. One car began to swerve and careened into the opposite lane, grazing the driver’s side of an oncoming car, which halted. The car that caused the accident stalled for a bit but then accelerated again and kept moving forward. While the hit car was motionless on the road, another car from behind slammed into the back of it, pushing it off the side over a small embankment that the passenger could barely discern. Then that car jerked backward and kept driving as well.

The road this took place on was just an ordinary road connecting one suburb to another. There were a few buildings—warehouses, maybe—close to where the crash took place, which were unlit. And a pond in the back of one of them, weakly shimmering. This was what the passenger saw, terrified. The plane continued its landing and made a swooping turn toward the airport, flying away from the scene.

The passenger, buckled in, clenched the arms of his seat. No one else seemed to notice the accident. Everyone on the plane was quiet, sleepy. Then the landing gear went down and soon the plane was on the ground.

This was where I had left the story for a few years (twelve, actually): The man stepping out of the jetway and into the airport, which was still crowded with travelers though it was very late at night. I got busy with other things, other stories that seemed more important to finish. I had left the passenger hanging there for quite a while, in a daze on solid ground. His life was sketchy. In fact I had no idea why he was flying to Minneapolis-St. Paul in the first place. Whether it was the beginning of his journey or the end, or whether he was only trying to make a connection, I couldn’t say.

In a way—if one really thought about it—this suspension wasn’t really fair to him, or the mystery that unfolded a thousand feet below him. Or I guess to the people in the accident. I pretty much forgot about the story fragment, and looking back I’m not sure why that was the case. Maybe something about the story scared me.

But I had found it again when cleaning up some old files on floppy disks. Scavenging the disks for any useful scraps before I recycled them. I actually had to go on eBay to find an external disk drive that would read the damn things. Most of the files were either documents I had transferred over to my MacBook already, or were pieces of ephemera like grocery lists or addresses to fiction magazines, or whatever. What caught my eye about the story of the car crash, though—before I had even read what the fragment was about—was the file’s name: “the_philip_sidney_game.” I didn’t ever remember calling it that, and in fact after reading the file couldn’t begin to think what connection the title would have to that story. I knew Philip Sidney was a poet around the time of Queen Elizabeth, but I was embarrassed that I knew almost none of his work, or what he had to do with a game. I asked my wife Kristin but she had no idea either.

After transferring over the file, I did my best to pick up the thread of the story. I wanted to see where I could take the passenger after he landed. But it wasn’t easy. I had the passenger moving through the airport in a daze, through the Gold Concourse, down to Baggage Claim. (Actually, since I had begun the story twelve years ago, the concourses in the airport were renamed after letters instead of colors. I stuck with the colors.) The passenger retrieved his one blue suitcase and then took a shuttle to the rental car lot. Still shaken from what he saw from above, he tried to consume himself in mundane tasks like showing his driver’s license and credit card to the counter agent at the rental car company. Soon enough he was on the road with a map-brochure in his lap. After about ten minutes he was in front of the business-class hotel that was allotted to him for his trip. The unassuming hotel was in one of the outer suburbs, next to a highway junction and the corporate headquarters that he was supposed to be visiting. The next morning, in the hotel’s computer room, he scoured the Internet for any sign of the accident on any local newspapers’ websites, but nothing was to be found. He began to wonder whether he was imagining the entire thing.

It was beginning to annoy me that the story was set twelve years in the past—I couldn’t give him Wi-Fi. At the same time, I felt that I had to be true to the original intent of the story, which I had yet to discover. I was a very different person twelve years ago, more prone to needless pyrotechnics. Back then, I was also much more likely to pepper a story with self-referential and oblique cues to let the reader know at all costs that he or she was reading a story and not to get too comfortable in the story’s illusion. It was fine, as far as it went—a necessary albeit coy stage in my growth as a writer, I guess—but this time I didn’t want to do that, at all.

Anyway, the passenger gave his presentation in a beige-colored conference room and during his lunch hour he decided to go hunting for the scene of the accident. He didn’t know the Twin Cities at all, so he didn’t have his bearings to where the crash would have happened in relation to the airport. What was more, it was raining. Cold for early May, or colder than he was used to. He tried to imagine any feature of the road or the buildings that were at all familiar. Or the pond—but he knew that the area had hundreds of bodies of water. He first drove on the highway. But soon he took an exit and found himself on less congested roads. Every intersection
looked like every other intersection, with an equally dispersed amount of gas stations, fast food restaurants, nail salons, and the like. And in between those clusters, houses. Not too large and not too small. Not too opulent and not too desolate. He took roads that wound around knolls, and these gave him hope, because he knew that the second car in the accident—the one that had received the most damage—tipped into an embankment. But nothing looked familiar to him at all.

After a few hours of this, his cell phone rang. Apparently his clients in the suburban headquarters had called his superior back in the home office, because they didn’t have his number. They were upset at his absence. Before much could be said, he turned the phone off.

It was starting to get dark. And the rain wasn’t letting up. At this point in the story, I hadn’t decided whether the passenger was going to find anything or not, any clues about the accident. Or perhaps the accident didn’t happen at all. As the twilight closed upon the passenger, I paused and tried to understand just what he wanted in the first place. It wasn’t really clear to me, this obsession of his. I worried that if I left this matter unsettled, he might be in his rental car for another twelve years before I figured out what should be done.

So with this impasse, I didn’t write anything with this story for a few weeks, and was in danger of losing the thread again. My interest in any particular project always waned or (less frequently) waxed in ways that I never understood. The desire to start something would take over me, but then it always came down to a matter of endurance. I was always impatient, always looking for the next batch of kindling to set on fire until the smoke became thick and redolent, and there were more embers than flames, at which point I would almost always step away, scouring for fresh fuel. It was slash-and-burn agriculture of the mind. Every once in a while I’d circle back and blow on the embers, throw on a few more sticks, and start the cycle over again.

Oftentimes, this was the best I could hope for.

As it turned out, I had my hand forced on this issue when I received a package in the mail. The package had heavy brown wrapping and many three- and five-cent stamps that looked somewhat faded. My address was typed on a mailing label. It had a Minneapolis postmark but no return address. I opened the package and found that inside there was a bubble-wrap lining and a floppy disk. There was no letter or other note in the package and no label on the disk. I was worried about my computer getting infected from the disk, but I decided to take a chance. I couldn’t have very well thrown it away. As the disk whirred in the disk drive, I saw on my desktop that the disk contained three files, named A, B, and C. I checked the properties on each one, but there wasn’t any information about an author. The only possible clue was the file creation date, which was in early May twelve years ago. The date the files were “last modified” was the same. I took a deep breath and opened the first file.

The story picked up where I had left it—not where I had left it a few weeks before, but twelve years ago, with the passenger landing in the airport. I thought about calling the police but the idea upon an instant’s reflection seemed absurd. All I could do was read; no matter how anxious this made me, I could do little else.

In this continuation of the story, the passenger immediately took the car out to search the roads for the site of the accident after he landed. He just drove—all night, relentlessly, without stopping, through serpentine suburban roads that he couldn’t name. When dawn was about to come, with faint gray light filling the sky, he found what he was looking for. He pulled over along the side of the closest warehouse, in a weed-strewn parking lot. He got out of his car and looked for any sign of the cars, or the accident.

Nothing was conclusive. He saw skid marks leading off the road, and shards of red and white plastic, and glass. The sun was beginning to come up. Not sure of what he would find, he walked around the warehouse on the western side of the road, finding no signage on the building except for a letter “A” in a white stencil, about the size of his hand, where a doorbell would normally have been. He even tried the lone door, but it was locked. He did the same with the warehouse on the eastern side of the road, which was identical to the other warehouse except for the letter “B” in the identical place.

He went back into his car and tried to decide what to do next. Then he heard a noise that he first thought was from his car. He turned off the ignition, but the sound kept getting louder. It was above him. He rolled down his window and looked out. High above was a silver propeller plane, like an outdated commuter airliner. From the clouds above that plane came another plane, a black jet, in a tailspin. The propeller plane didn’t evade the second—or didn’t seem to know it was even there—as the black plane grazed the tail with its nose and continued downward. There was a screeching sound. A devolutionary was making its sacrifice. (Those were the exact words of the story: “A devolutionary was making its sacrifice.” Which made little if any sense to me.) The black jet, in its chaotic descent, managed to right itself and arc upward, though still wobbly. The passenger looked in dismay, however, as the silver plane spun around as if drunk. As it fell, the passenger closed his eyes because he knew, at that point, that a third plane would slam into the silver plane and he didn’t want to see that at all. He stuck his head back in and rolled up the window. After a few seconds, with the tornadoes of broken engines getting louder, he heard the debris falling all around him—crashing into the warehouses, in the pond, burning fuel in the damp grass, fragments of planes raining on the road itself.

The passenger was unharmed. The story ended.

After reading this, I stared at the screen for a long while, trying to decipher, in a figurative sense, what I had just read. I worried whether this was some kind of cryptic terrorist threat, an extrapolation from my half-story into the realm of real-life action. However, I had no proof this was the case. I probably wasn’t helping matters by spinning out the worst case scenarios of bodily harm. It could very well have been a prank or an elaborate ruse, though I couldn’t understand how the beginning of my story could have been available to anyone. I had found the original disk, with many others, buried at the bottom of a desk drawer, unused in over a decade.