New Story in Progress....

Sadie said she saw one disappear; that it happened with a sudden gust of wind, one of those winter squalls that came in off the Hudson and barreled mercilessly down West 57^th street, sending shoppers running after a lost bag or hat. The man's clothes fell in a surprisingly neat pile where he’d been walking that brisk, no-nonsense walk of a longtime Manhattanite with somewhere to be, or somewhere he though he ought to be. Sadie bent down to examine the pile of clothes, mostly because the man had been wearing an expensive wristwatch and scarf she knew John would appreciate them, and also because she wondered who the man had been. An ID card encased in yellowing plastic announced him  as ‘Edward Cohen III, Hedge Fund Manager, Cohen & Chase Partners.’ Another hedge fund manager gone. Poof. ‘Like out of a bad movie’, Sadie thought, but she had no time to dwell on reasons. It was all over the news by now anyways. Well, the underground news, as the state had shut down internet and wirecom access after the big networks picked up on the story a few days ago. Some people said they saw spirits of the missing, strange figures and demons moving through the night with their business suits wrapped in an eerie green glow of burning hundred dollar bills. Most of these people were either uneducated or religious though, Sadie thought…. Not that there was anything wrong with the latter, God knew she could use a little faith lately. 

It wasn’t just hedge fund managers that were disappearing either. Self—professed ‘Tea Party’ leaders. Health Insurance company executives. N.R.A lobbyists, Wall Street day traders, Mormon Missionaries, Catholic Church leaders, Coal Mining big wigs, political kingpins…. The list went on. Sadie just hoped John wouldn’t be next. He was all she had, cliché as it sounded. As her daughter Essa had said the morning Sadie first told her what was happening downtown, ‘all those people seem sort of like bad people.’

John was not a bad person. He taught 4^th grade at P.S 115 way up on 183^rd street, in the hood, as his students would say, their voices like parrots, not yet aware of what the hood would really do to their lives. Sadie had wanted to lecture Essa on how ‘people can’t be split up into good and bad so easily, you have to let them change’, as her own mother would have said, but she was tired. She'd just shaken her head wearily. ‘Well, they seem like the kinds of bad people you and daddy talk about sometimes’, Essa said quietly, pulling on her sunflower pigtails the way she did when she knew she was right. 'Fair enough', Sadie though.

Most of the people who had actually seen it happen had been 'committed'.' Sadie hated that word. The State used it with unabashed zealousness on their evening broadcasts, anchorman or woman always hiding a slight smirk at they said it. Committed to mental institutions, to be specific, Sadie thought with a clammy feeling. Or private hospitals, after they’d overdosed on their usual mental health regiment, trying to ‘make the memory go away.’ Sadie wasn’t too troubled though. She’d seen too much in her time to let logic interfere. It wasn’t like it was so grotesque or disturbing anyways, she thought, if one momentarily excused the basic laws of physics and human logic. One minute a ruffled-looking, balding man in his early 50’s was hurrying down West 57^th street carrying a slim Italian leather briefcase and stabbing aggressively at an Iphone, the next minute, one of those boxy-fitting starched Brooks Brothers suits lay in a neat pile beside the curb. The majority of passer bys were too engrossed in their own lives or devices to have noticed what just happened thought, it seemed. Sadie wasn’t too bothered. She’d always sensed that if the end of the world really did come in her time on earth, that it would be both spectacular and mundane; marked in arcane embellishments of the ordinary that most folks simply weren’t paying enough attention to notice.

 ‘Maybe if all the bad guys go poof, daddy can get went contwol and a waise, and we can have weal healthcare!’ Essa had said the night before at dinner, her face stuffed with mac n’ cheese. Sadie had smiled despite herself. Even with the whole microcosm movement really taking shape in their neighborhood, and the pirate Internet she was getting after the blackout, it was all still pretty scary, she had to admit. Supposedly creating illicit, moneyless, hyper-local microcosms was the way to fight the State, the Feds; the cops, whatever you wanted to call them. The point was they were big and we were small.

When Sadie got home, John already had that hunched over, vaguely glazed look of too much time in front of a screen.

‘Sweetie, I thought you were going out with your running group to the park this afternoon?', Sadie asked worriedly.

‘Sadie, you have to see these numbers', John said with mumbled urgency.

 John loved statistics. Statistics and teaching 4^th grade, which was a little like knowing nothing and everything at the same time. He beckoned her over to the screen, where neat columns of an Excel spreadsheet stood out in different themes and colors. ‘94% white males, median age 47.’ ‘Median income: 1.4 million.’ ‘Highest contributors to conservative political causes, and almost unanimous opposition to tax reform, gun law reform, education reform, or healthcare reform.’

'Honey, this is not a coincidence. Something big is starting.'

John loved to say that. 'something big is starting.' It sounded so prophetic and excusatory at the same time.

'Well, perhaps its none of our business', Sadie countered evenly. This was her nature, her Southern good girl no-nonsense upbringing New York hadn't quite been able to shake.

'That's what they want you to think', John said gravely.

'Oh stop it', Sadie said, breaking the tenseness with her warm laughter and hugging him from behind. He stayed focused on the screen but allowed a reluctant smile to play across his lips.

'Well, as my father would have said, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics', John admitted, and they both relaxed instinctively as they heard Essa sleeping next door, her breathing something refreshingly organic in this increasingly rigid world.

 Sadie studied the columns on the screen for a few more minutes before realizing it was a list of all the people who had disappeared so far, probably hacked out of police records by their microcosm I.T guy.

 ‘Besides, I can’t go running today anyways; Rudy is gone’, John said, with a sigh, returning to Sadie's initial question.

 Rudy was John’s right hand man at P.S 115 and his usual running partner. He’d checked himself into the mental health ward at Mount Sinai after claiming he saw a figure with an old man’s body and the head of a bison surrounded by green light from burning hundred dollar bills when he was walking home from his subway stop alone one night last week.

‘Just like the crazy people had said’, Sadie had thought. Rudy was not crazy though, at least not  that  kind of crazy.

Sadie pulled the Rolex wristwatch and cashmere scarf that had belonged to the hedge fund manager out of her bag and handed it wordlessly to John.

'Merry Christmas', she mouthed with a grin. It was August.

'Honey, you know we can't affor-'

'He disappeared', Sadie said calmly, stopping him in mid-sentence.

'You saw it?'

Sadie nodded once, a quick nod the way she'd nodded when her mother reprimanded her over some imaginary infraction as a child; a nod both proud and defeated.

'So you're not, like, messed up?', John said in slight awe.

She gave him a look.

'So one minute walking down the street, next minute poof, eh?', John prodded incredulously after she'd told him the story.

She gave him another curt nod.

'Well, nice watch I guess.'

'John, have you heard about the folks upstate?', Sadie asked him quietly.

'No honey, you mean the microcosm crew that drove up to Saranac Lake last week?

'They're missing.'

'What!?'

'Rex said they'd been taken to the facility in Albany', Sadie said, her voice shaking slightly. Life under the spanish moss and roman columns of Charleston hadn't prepared her for this.

'No', John said in disbelief, his hands running through his hair like scissors the way her did when the kids in his class wouldn't settle down after recess.

Rumors were that the feds were cracking down on young microcosm folks who were leaving the city to start splinter cells upstate, they they thought they were radicalizing, or getting ready to call in help from overseas. Other rumors said that 'the feds' were really just a consortium of corporate power brokers, and the president was a hand puppet in a cardboard White House. Sadie didn't know what to believe any more. Maybe she should listen to Essa more, Essa who saw the world as 'good people' and 'bad people' but not in any concrete morality, merely as abstract syllables uttered by people who had an obligation to make the world a better place for her.

John stood from his desk in a single, swift motion that Sadie had always found strangely sexy; that a man whose mild manner and easy likability made him a magnet for 4th graders could execute such a polished, executive motion. He turned and hugged her wordlessly, and brought his lips close to hers with that same gentle urgency.

'We've going to be OK in all this. We've got no real ties to any of that, nor are we Upstate. Essa is beautiful and safe. you're beautiful and safe. Rudy is beautiful and hopefully safe too.'

God, Sadie thought, John was a wonderful man. An elementary school teacher who studied American corporate structure with hopes of dismantling the barbarism from the inside. A straight man who read queer theory and got spat at and harassed at LGBT rally's in the village. A breadwinner who'd break bread with a homeless man on the corner just to hear his story. She knew that together they'd weather whatever was thrown at them, love made them 'New York tough', not money.

'Thanks J-flash', Sadie said through her teeth, her hair mingling around his face, her nose and eyes taking in his smell and the taste of his lips and the delicious feeling of proximity that is only buffered by comfort. She called him 'J-flash' because he could seemingly show up anywhere at just the right moment, out of a flash, or perhaps not the right moment if you were a troublemaking 4th grader with a box of stolen crayons or the classroom pet frog in your pocket.

'Your welcome, Say-dizzle, John said, and did his best b-boy uptown New York swagger impression. They did live in Spanish Harlem after all, or what used to be it before they all got driven out to the Bronx and Connecticut. They both laughed and headed into the kitchen for a French press full of fresh coffee, an evening ritual they both cherished after long days of work and school.

New Story Edit 'One Way'

At this particular hour, Seattle crystallized the way over-boiled maple syrup stuck to the edges of the pot on his boyhood farm in Vermont, both sugary and stubborn.  It was the fog really, Sam thought. In late March it presented such a thorough assault on one’s sense of direction, wrapping everything in its weightless expectation.  

He was going to be late. He doesn’t care. Truthfully, he hoped to be fired, so much more satisfying a fate than the half-assed corporate integrity he’d be subjected to in the form of fleeting, smug admonishment. His boss was tragic- that was the word really. Sam excuses this though, because so much of the country was in shambles right now; frayed in the noblest tatters of liberty. Sam sees his boss Joe as one of those blockheaded, strong-shouldered types from a distant, graying Midwestern suburb who’d moved here for the ‘quality of life.’ From what he can tell though, his work consumes most of this ‘quality’, so the added value seems marginal.

Joe was so earnest, so hopeful when he groveled before the fleshy board members in meetings on the 70^th floor, his comically deflated biceps of former football glory quivering slightly with their approval. They usually shot him down without the slightest remorse- their brand of icy capitalism allowed now room for second-guesses.

Sam strode swiftly up the imposing stone steps in front of the Columbia Tower, the giant revolving doors before him the first step of indoctrination into feeling important and thus no longer having to really feel, he thought. He noted that the protestors seem to have declined in numbers somewhat over the past few days. The private police of the new Republocratic Google Plus © coalition government assembled around the plaza seem bored and distracted. Sam saw the bright glint of their metallic Shanghai Security Systems badges as he entered the revolving doors, and secretly wondered how targeted a pipe bomb planted in their offices on the 10^th floor could be.

The air conditioning was on too high again, Sam noted. 'Air conditioning in Seattle in March. Welcome to the 2075', he thought to himself. This steel and glass heart of Seattle's ego was beautiful in a way, he figured. It was such an affront to the mossy skyline that every citizen of the city seemed to share some hard opinion on it; good or bad. The ride alone up to the 63^rd floor was unusually silent, devoid of the hysterical sounds he felt were necessary on most days to deflate his inner mania so the workday could proceed as it was supposed to.  When he was exhumed from the sleek metal tomb and thrust into harsh fluorescent mediocrity 630-odd feet above the Pacific, Joe was not pleased.

“Sam, look- I really like you, man. You’re a great team player. But this can’t keep happening.”

Sam wanted to yawn, to run, to scream out into the awful rows of white-collar sweatshop partitions, but instead he did none of these things and looked Joe squarely in the eyes for the first time in a long while.

He first nodded gravely, the way Joe’s sons probably did when he gave them some sage bit of coaching at the pewee football league game, wanting to please their father but also part of the cult of middling America. Sam hated all of it right now, himself most of all. He thought he heard the protestors chanting some 63 stories below through the open window, and hoped they didn’t use the tear gas and the dogs today. 

 

 ‘When you are deprived of the space to make yourself whole, he thought, to serve your own needs with equal vigor as you carry out someone else’s plans for your life, then this is what happens.’

 “Joe, I’m really sorr-“ Sam started to say, but he rigidly cut himself off. Sorry was such a limp abomination. “I don’t know if I can do this”, he continued with unsteady conviction. “I’m just not cut out for this type of work.”

He could scarcely believe his impudence.

‘Nobody is. That’s why you have to learn’, Joe countered evenly. Such honesty was rare for Joe. Sam wondered if his depression meds weren't working again.  There was a pregnant pause, weakened slightly by the fabulously gray sheets of drizzle cascading down endless windows towards Interstate-5 behind them. It was beautiful, Sam thought, its boringness so singular and relentless.

“Sam… trust me, I’ve wanted to fire you more times than I can remember. You’re too damn good though, I couldn’t do it in good conscience to the board', Joe said.

“What, does the board own your soul now too?”, Sam sneered.

‘Jesus, what is wrong with me today?’, he thought. If he focused on the silvery liquid sheets outside though, it seemed as if another, stronger man was speaking for him. His own body was just a ventriloquist’s puppet, an apparition of the 21^st Century mania. Joe’s eyebrows rose menacingly for a second, but his face was still possessed by some bland, implacable sadness.

 “I regret I can’t give you something more…” he began to say, but trailed off, lost in thought.

Joe paused and his eyes, those little round pinholes between earnest, fleshy slabs of American beef, squinted with indecision. Sam resisted the temptation to complete his sentence for him, as was his habit. So obnoxious, as his ex-girlfriend would have said.

“Interesting.”, Joe finally exhaled, the word a single sad note which caused his looming pectoral muscles to rise and settle slightly beneath his starchy Brooks Brother’s shirt like Saint Helens before eruption.

“One more week”, Sam said flatly. Joe nodded distractedly, his face still sad and indecisive.

They left the little break room next to Joe’s mildly palatial corner office, the cubicle dwellers in the main room quickly returning to their buttons and screens, pretending not to have overheard. Sam didn’t care. They deserved a little entertainment, a slight reprieve from the vague dehumanization of spreadsheets and Powerpoints.

 He should have be ashamed of himself, should have seen his father’s no-nonsense, pockmarked face boring into his failures equally out in the fallow brown fields of northern Vermont or amongst the futuristic angles of downtown Seattle, but instead he felt nothing. It was a wonderful apathy- appalling and stimulating at the same time, like watching porn in the college dormitories while your roommate was out, awaiting their unthinkable interruption. It was, Sam thought, perhaps the hallmark of his generation.

Lloyd smiled at him knowingly as he passed his cubicle on route to the little storage-closet turned office he called his own.

‘Well-played, Sam. You’re lucky he likes you so damn much.’

Lloyd was one of these Koreans adopted by progressive, outdoorsy upper middle class white people and coddled under their nervous umbrella. He’d played all the ‘right’ games- his Yale economics diploma shared equal space in his cubicle with a photo of him aside a half-dozen raucous, red-faced boys clutching a sailing trophy, the wealthy spectacle of Seattle’s east Lake Washington neighborhood playing out behind them. He wasn’t wonderful because he played these games of course, Sam thought, but because he saw the awful inequities for what they were and enjoyed them anyways- the lovely obscenity of pale white capitalism. He was tall and striking, his hair styled in the way only Asian men of a particular social stature seemed capable of doing, both suave and comical. 

On weekends, and sometimes weeknights if ‘corporate morale was low’, as Joe liked to say, they would venture cautiously from their overpriced, pseudo-hip lofts beside the gaudy eye of the Space Needle over to Capitol Hill. There they would rub elbows with beautiful hipster girls and swill cheap beer, the countenance of the starving artist as fun as it was thin. The girls they met all seemed to work in the new fields of retail science and images, the debt of their $500,000 retail science degrees from Harvard or Stanford hanging over them like a scythe. 

Sure, there were ‘real artists’ here though: Sam envied them in secret fury, their easy style, the effortlessness they managed to cast over the shadow of food stamps and teary 3AM phone calls to parents about ‘fucking it all up.’ Regardless of who’d liked a band when or ‘discovered’ some Kafkaesque dive bar in east Cap Hill first, he hoped his style merely overlapped theirs instead of pantomiming it. In a world where consumption trumped all though, he wasn’t sure anyone was really their own anymore. 

“So, you going to the show this Friday?”, Lloyd asked him with practiced casualness.

‘What, RhinoBear or whatever the fuck they are called putting on falsetto’s in testicle-suffocating jeans about some cliché lost love?”

‘Yeah, something like that, Mr. judgmental.”

“Oh stop…”, Sam retorted, but he knew Lloyd was right.

“You’re as bad as me. Besides, I have to finish this monthly by tomorrow afternoon or Joe’s going to can me for real.”

“But isn’t that what we want now, rebellious young one?”

Sam smiled despite himself. He felt flooded, awash in strange emotions not his own, the endless drizzle just a mask he could place at will over life’s absurdities.

‘Yah, ok, I’ll go. You’re buying my ticket though.’

 ‘Oh really? Ok, sillyface.’

Sam respected Lloyd chiefly because while he could hold his own if he wanted to with the Cro-Magnon masculinity of the pimply 20-somethings they liked to call the “finance bros’, he refused to succumb to their mindlessness.

Lloyd and him could talk about anything- the way the movement of Joe’s pecs secretly predicted the weather, which of the timelessly stylish ‘downtown girls’ they’d obsessed over, how they both held their passports at night sometimes when the riots got bad. Sam’s was a gift of his Scottish birthplace; Lloyd’s a vestige of a past and a family who couldn’t keep him.

Returning to his office, Sam drew the blinds of the single meek window. The room was flooded with the ambiguous light of late winter in the inner reaches of the Pacific, the muted pastels that both encouraged and thwarted work. He spent several hours writing diligently, preparing sharp figures and concise numbers on Cascadia Resources latest oil project, a chunk of swampy, foreign land in the Northwest Territories.

 Suddenly, he felt a deep rumble and the 900-odd feet of the Columbia Tower sway slightly, like a house of cards against a breath. He wanted to believe it was an earthquake, the sequel to the big Snoqualmie 7.0 some ten years ago everyone had been waiting for. He stuck his head out the now cracked window and looked down 630 feet of clean, chilly air to the asphalt façade of 5^th Avenue. He wondered how the brief seconds will feel, watching the windows blur as they speed by in increasing finality- first Seattle Light & Power, then Pacifica Investments, and finally the morbid floors where Goldman Sachs created inequity from thin, conditioned air. When the asphalt was finally reached, he wondered how long he would feel- he’d always heard it was instantaneous, but what did instantaneous really mean? The brief pain would be redemption, the way the one ounce gold coin minted by his company he carried in his pocket felt when it pressed firmly against his thigh, its force protection from an enemy world.

Lost in thought, he took a minute to notice Lloyd’s hand grasping his own and suddenly was is running, falling head over heels down flight after flight of crumbling stairs and into an unusually normal taxi whose driver took the hundred dollar bill from Lloyd with sweaty seriousness.

‘The Airport; Terminal B’, Sam heard Lloyd tell the cabbie in controlled tones. His eyes were like razors.

Sam looked up briefly and saw the sad concrete and brick edifices of the Capital Hill projects across the highway, the single smokestack spine of the old lumber mill a middle finger thrust at the tasteless memorials to high-rise capitalism filling the skyline to the west. He heard a low rumble and knows it is the tower, but he doesn’t look back. He thinks it sounds like god muttering; wondering what the hell is going on. The rain is now firm and insistent, driving itself in dull tantrums across the chasms of downtown.

He feelt in his coat pocket for his passport.

Shit.

‘I have it’, said Lloyd quietly. Sam is filled with unspeakable relief. He’d forgotten Lloyd knew he kept it in his office desk drawer.

The airport is a madhouse, the suave efficiency of Seattle blended with the chaos of a Delhi street market. Lloyd knew what they needed to do though, where they need to go, and Sam thought of how he had also has rehearsed this moment in his head so many times over the past few months.

Two tickets to Seoul in hand, they reached customs and the entrance to international departures. Cold-faced Google Plus © police checked passports with grim efficiency. Children wailed behind the neat partitions. Fat, balding businessmen with rivers of sweat between their brows bartered on behalf of their families. ‘Nine hundred thousand dollars’, Sam heard one of them plea. ‘One Million, please, just let us go’, another begged, his wife looking unnaturally bored behind him, her jewelry weighing down injected and polished skin. Sam saw a strong-shouldered man, an unshaken Mr. Clean standing with his wife and two small boys somewhere amidst the chaos beyond the partition. 

Was it Joe? He recalled he had some connections from his military past. Sam hoped he was safe.

They finally reached the agents and the entrance to the secure departures terminal. The policemen had now subbed out with several sharp-looking Chinese agents from Shanghai Security Systems. He handed them his passport as Lloyd did the same. The agent looked at them with cursory expertise. Somewhere beyond the airport, gunfire rings out in eerie regularity.

‘These are one way, right?’, he asks them, the fat man behind them now hysterical and sobbing.

‘One way’, Sam answers resolutely.

December, New Story...

‘Falling off the Edge of the World’

What happens when you fall off the edge of the world? Somewhere, all the neat geometric lines of longitude that divide the globe into inhabitable realms converge to a point, and when you stop falling south you are in Antarctica. Antarctica is different from the northern Latitudes both in physical character and myth. With no history of habitation or significant exploration, it is truly the last wild place left on earth. ‘It is true that we have fouled the extremities of the continent with our egotistical desire to claim and understand’, Frank thought as the wheels of the massive army cargo jet met the ice and sent up clouds of fine white snow, but the vast frozen interior remains empty and pristine.

He felt the familiar green expanse of New Zealand they had left this morning was a world away. He’d chosen to burn a good chunk of his once-impressive retirement on what everyone seemed to think was a frivolous trip to the last reaches of the world. ‘Having just passed 7 decades of existence, I might enjoy a leisurely retirement in my New York townhouse’ he thought as a man announced to the passengers and crew in measured tones that they had just touched down on the last continent. A black and white speckled dot stood a hundred meters or so away as they sped across the ice towards Mcmurdo. It might have been a penguin. ‘How fitting’, Frank thought, and smiled to himself.

The past 4 years of his life had been a whirlwind of unpredictability, and he found myself in similar disarray he’d been in 50 years ago, fresh out of college and uncertain of anything except the momentum of the present. He was divorced now, though it felt odd to repeat the word in his mind, as the papers had just been finalized 3 weeks before he left for Antarctica. They’d been married nearly 4 decades, also known as a long fucking time, Frank thought. He could say truthfully now that I never really loved her, never loved her relentlessly; his feelings for her were like a pot of water set to boil and then kept just a degree too cold to bubble up and announce itself. As dark and self-aggrandizing as it sounded, he thought now that the hum of the city had been removed, replaced by the ice- that perhaps he’d never loved anyone that way.

The penguins were of course a principal attraction. Even around the garbage and machinery-strewn edges of McMurdo, the main research station and U.S outpost here, they gathered in curious groups. Disembarking from the plane in surprisingly balmy 30-degree sun, he marveled at their sleekly engineered bodies and thoughtless familiarity with this alien land. His group leader, a towering, roughly-hewn Norwegian Expat named Thorbjorn, had told him earlier on the plane that penguins, once they find a suitable mate, remain loyal until the end. He supposed he envied this too, but not really, it was just an affirmation of his suspicion that even the wild fringes of nature longed for some sort of dull routine. Thorbjorn also informed them gravely that occasionally deranged penguins who would purposefully ignore the rest of the flock and waddle in a distressingly uneven gait towards the interior, driven by some internal idiosyncrasy, or perhaps just the desire not to be number any more. Frank sympathized with these crazy penguins, since their yearning to be more than another black dot among the millions resonated in eerie clarity with the New Yorker in him. Apparently there were also same-sex penguin’s couples, which he found particularly endearing. The archaic mingling of American politics and religion need not apply to the natural world, he thought with satisfaction. His son was gay, and Frank had always stood up for him, though as he had to admit, growing up gay in New York City was not so bad in many ways.

It was late spring at Mcmurdo, almost the southern summer, and on that unusually clear evening of December 15th Frank wished his vision was good enough to fully comprehend all the strange, oblique shadows of sun on snow, rock and ocean- the enduring elements defining this cold desert. The aesthetics of Antarctica were not as 2-dimensional as he’d expected. Rather, the light constantly morphed around intermittent clouds, throwing its weightless energy around the edges of the mountainous horizon. The weather was fickle and cantankerous; it reminded him of his boyhood summer home on the Coast of Maine, the perennial comforts of warm summer rain and early morning fog sailing in the Atlantic.

Frank took an immediate dislike to the steel and concrete boxes of the McMurdo Station, as they seemed so lewd and out of place in this landscape man was never meant to conquer. He stared at the piles of construction supplies and rubbish that lay strewn about the outskirts of the station. It chilled him to think of how much it looked like the trash he’d seen at base camp on Everest nearly 20 years earlier. The audacity of man to excuse such actions in the spirit of "adventure" or remoteness was unacceptable to him. While his team had not summitted that August afternoon in 1983, he was proud of the fact that they had packed out 100% of their trash. He remembered being almost embarrassed at how easy it had been to practice 'leave no trace' ethics on one of the most difficult peaks in the world.

His group at Mcmurdo was a Kafkaesque assortment of the types of characters one might expect to have fallen off the edge of the world and settled in Antarctica- glaciologists, climatologists, machine operators with PhD's in philosophy, kitchen workers who fought for 2 decades on Wall Street. Everyone seemed to share a collective weirdness, and the details of social etiquette that in Frank’s opinion mired interaction in the rest of the world were refreshingly excused here. He loved their refusal to settle for mediocrity; a spirit he saw so much of in New York. In even the most humble immigrant hot dog vendor or cabbie, Frank thought, there was a shared responsibility to be fresh, to refuse to roll out of bed in sweatpants and drag your feet down the street.

Frank was retired, having climbed the vicious power ladder of New York corporate life for more years than he cared to remember. He’d begun a new lifestyle since leaving Lion Capital, a sort of cleansing of past sins, he mused with vague irony. His days now were filled with 2 unyielding themes- science and humanitarian philanthropy. Things he’d wanted from the start, really. Having served as CFO of one of those companies now being protested in Zucotti Park had afforded him the luxury to help others. He looked at the petty material excess of his past with wanton forgetfulness. Antarctica was a place where death and renewal intertwined dangerously close, and the bad things humans were capable of seemed insignificant compared to the daily plight of the seals and penguins.

Maps had always obsessed Frank. He recalled even as a small child being given a simple globe by his father one Christmas and spending endless hours in his room studying the unspoken corners and wrinkled creases where the greasy wax paper obscured some distant paradise. Everywhere was new and unpolluted and worth exploring then, the political bias of the U.S having not yet colored his thoughts. Even now, the nostalgia of this time in his life remained strong. He’d reasoned for a long time, all the way until the money started really coming in, that the way to overcome travel limitations in life was to stay ruthlessly fit. That meant mentally and physically. Even now at 72, the young men who frequented his neighborhood gym on the Upper East Side, the square-jawed power brokers and hipsters trying to look a little less skinny in their skinny jeans- they all knew Frank. He relished the feeling that aging, while inevitable, was so much more mental than any of us could understand. The psychological part, well, that was more complex. It was a balancing act between the calculated reservation he’d had to exercise in the board room and singing tribal songs with Nigerian refugees at a benefit dinner in Queens, unafraid of judgment from anyone but himself. Lion Capital did not define him, and as simple as this statement sounded, perhaps it took going to Antarctica to fully realize it.

Frank could say it was his boyish obsession with maps and the financial means to do most anything that catapulted him from a pre-war townhouse on 81st street to the South Pole, but really it was a lot more spontaneous than that. He was going to die soon. Well- not soon, but inevitably it was coming, and he did not romanticize the harsh facts of old age, the inevitable decline of spirit and fortitude. Antarctica was a place that had always haunted his imagination; a place free of the predatory ‘lending’ his company had subjected nearly every other continent to. Its singularity remained a growing global anomaly.

It was time for dinner now, and the scientists and government people filled the McMurdo dining hall with curious chatter, much of it directed at what a lone 72-year-old man had been doing on a New Zealand Armed Forces cargo plane headed for an island in the Ross Sea. Frank knew people, and he knew that was all it really took to secure himself a place on a private research-oriented trip south.

His friend Jacques Seviuex, an influential French climatologist and architect of the global climate change movement, had spearheaded the trip and invited him along after hearing secondhand of his interest in visiting the last continent. Frank, or rather Lion Capital, had given his research group a fair chunk of change in the 1980's, which he admitted was mostly a P.R move [big companies never do anything completely altruistically]. It did, however, help a lasting friendship develop. Sevieux had met with Frank in Auckland 3 days ago. As they’d packed and prepared for the trip, he could tell Sevieux was excited not just for his own exploration but for Frank as well. It was good to know ambitious people, Frank thought satisfyingly. With this story, he managed to placate the herd of scientists and fellow weirdo’s at dinner regarding his provenance. They weren’t the types who cared much about credentials or dollar signs anyways, he thought with relief. Frank had recently crossed that wonderful ideological divide of not giving a fuck what anybody thought of him, and he relished the newfound freedom of this classic ‘old man’ characteristic. This was not to say, however, that he didn't want to earn the trust and respect of good people. Au contraire: he could now focus all the negative energy pent up from being nice to assholes his whole career on learning the traits and habits of the best people. People like his companions in Antarctica, he thought, the people who’d fallen off the edge of the world.

He could sense the collective excitement in the air there, as their planeload of travelers disbanded after dinner into their various factions and specialties, eager to begin work and not just spectator of this vast landscape. Frank was not so eager to work, as I he’d worked his whole life and now was just beginning to truly enjoy the fruits of that labor. He was, however, eager to understand, and he slept impatiently that night in his cot in the dorm-like research station. The next morning, the sun and sky looked just like the previous night, and he realized this discontinuity between time and light was going to take some getting used to.

He fit the Antarctic 'street style', he mused, eating breakfast with his teammates in his oversize, neon green Henri Lloyd foul weather gear, the same sort of gore-tex and neoprene armor the World Cup sailors wore. In the balmy 30-degree southern summer though, he felt bit silly clad in layer upon layer of precisely engineered shielding from the environment. He knew though the harshness of this place did not belie any laziness. Just like the young men he saw on my block in New York braced themselves against the constant current of social judgment and fashion whims, Frank had to guard his old self against the elements here- the sudden blinding snow squalls and disorienting shadows of the perpetually setting sun.

After a hasty 7 AM breakfast [it could have been 7 PM for all he knew..], they loaded into 2 A-Star helicopters for the trip to the mainland, and his mind felt almost numb with anticipation and anxiety to actually step foot on the Antarctic Continent. As the choppers filled the air the rhythmic din of their ascent, he watched the ugly pastel prefab structures of McMurdo shrink behind the sun. Suddenly the horizon was huge and immediate, endlessly stretching over the ice cap until some mountain or rock bent the edges into a more forgiving corner. They buzzed low over a rare ice-free inlet to the Ross Sea, and what appeared to be a dirty collection of black boulders coalesced into a colony of thousands of Emperor and King penguins, an abundance of wildlife so foreign to modern man, Frank thought. The excitement he felt now was no different that the nervous anticipation on the summit ridge of Denali, or his first family heli skiing trip in the Bugaboo's in the early 70's, when nothing seemed impossible. He thought of my family now with a sort of framed love, like something placed in one of those little brass curio boxes he’d admired as a child. He cared about them deeply, but his journey now had become singular and removed from others, an internal quest to close the loose ends of his life at the end of the world.

The helicopter circled low over a small cluster of bright red Quonset-hut-like structures, the inland research station, and Frank marveled at how obscene even the smallest intrusion of man was in this monochromatic world.

We landed with a less than gracious thud on the hard ice, and Thorbjorn, Jacques, and myself disembarked from the little glass and titanium bubble of the first A-star; tiny specks on the ice 200 km. south of McMurdo. The jagged teeth of the Transantarctic Range pierced the horizon; blank granite spires with thousand meter walls. They were the terrestrial cousin’s of the massive Volcano's of Oceania, it seemed, their first 9,000 feet encased in solid water as opposed to liquid. It was surreal and almost frightening to think of the almost 10,000 feet of permanent ice than separated them from true terra firma, and yet Frank relished this ethereal separation from the familiar, remembering than nothing was really permanent. People were so flighty and unpredictable compared to the resolve of this place, that not even the climactic wounds humans had inflicted on the earth had softened the frozen grimace of the interior, Frank though. He knew this was not true though- the ice melted here, Lion Capital soldiered on without him, and Julia leaving him was not flighty or unpredictable at all.

The earth was changing, and as convenient as it was to believe it was the invention of scientists and politicians, the indisputable truth was that even thousands of miles from the nearest permanent settlement, a Texas-size hole in the ozone layer lay over Frank’s balding head. It made him angry, yet also filled him with regret of all the oil companies, the coal companies, the transnational resource stealing companies he’d help lend money to. In this place, so caustic and beautiful, it was impossible to be complacent. He couldn’t ignore a sunburn on the top of his head, or a puddle that didn’t used to be there. Perhaps this all went back to his earlier realization of reached the irreversible divide of old age where public opinion no longer swayed him- in any case, he felt changed.

As they hiked across the ice towards a distant rock outcropping Sevieux wanted to same, Frank felt his thoughts drift towards home for a minute. The city was marvelous in so many ways, he thought wistfully. He thought of the young men and women there, the immigrants from some rural speck where people dreamt small and were afraid of change. These young people; they were so used to being an anomaly, a curiosity to the plain faced, hard working people of their hometown's, and the anonymity of the city must have been both refreshing and terrifying. Frank pondered the possibility he might have a heart attack or fall into a crevasse or be eaten by a Sea Lion on this trip, but all in all the risks seemed no different than another day in New York. It seemed his time on earth had passed without the slightest regard for the rest of the universe, his possible re-incarnation as plankton in the South Atlantic, or perhaps one of the 3rd world workers his company had "provided" for.

The sky was so blue around them almost deafened the senses, the way certain feelings of cold are indistinguishable from heat. In the absence of the vicious katabatic winds that usually roared down from the mountains, it almost felt like a giant movie studio, insulated from sound or outside stimuli. After their hike, Frank stood outside the little red hut where they were to sleep and eat for the next week, smoking a guilty cigarette, the last of the pack he’d smuggled down to McMurdo. Standing there, he felt so much more inconsequential than on a New York street corner, another office clone en route to some high-rise.

When he got home, he was going to call Julia first thing, and tell her he was sorry. Sorry for the the mindless sense of ‘family’ that had prevented him from being honest even after Margaret and James had gone off to college and started families of their own; sorry that maybe he couldn't really share his true self with anyone. She would understand; she already did. Tapping the cigarette end the same impatient way he used to do after big board meetings, with the wind announcing its arrival in the building snow squalls coming from the mountains, he felt numb enough to find companionship amongst the ice and sun, as if that would make it all better.

As a child, he’d read stories of adventure with an insatiable appetite. In those days, political and social implications were easily excused in the name of conquest and understanding, and he marveled at how little had changed. He used to think if he bid his time and played his cards right, everything would fall into the right spaces, and doors did open for him in the following years, as he never imagined they would. He decided that when he called Julia, he’d ask if she might want to meet him for lunch. No expectations, just to talk. The ‘sorry’ bit was something that might have been ok before Antarctica. Now he knew he just had to make things right. Life is defined by a lot of things, Frank thought. Luck principally, and just like the lines on the globe that converged to this point; everything now fit into place.

New Short Story

                                                      Bling Bling Eternal 

‘Awww dayyyyyumm! Yeah motherfucker!’ boomed Jerome, and his voice echoed out across the valley, bouncing off walls and resonating with that not-quite-hoodrat twang that said either homeboy or good old boy. The truth was Jerome was neither, and the valley was not his fallow industrial village between the I-70 on-ramp and Denver proper, but a real valley with trees and squirrels and one of the nicest crystals he’d ever laid his hands on resting triumphantly in his left hand. He held the crystal up to the light, and it lit with a pale blue fire under sharp geometric facets that could mean only one thing- Topaz. Of course, Jerome already knew that. He’d been working this spot every weekend practically- weekdays too sometimes, if his folks weren’t home and he knew no one at East High gave a damn enough to try and track them down. The topaz crystal in question had come from a hole- a mariolitic pocket, rather, Jerome would be quick to add, nestled under a boulder on the slopes of Pilot Peak, a craggy knob of billion-year-old Pikes Peak granite that lay largely forgotten in the gray hills southwest of Denver. He didn’t know the exact weight, of course, but he lifted his left hand thoughtfully and gauged the crystal to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 to 400 carats. ‘A Killer’, as Ron might say. Man, wait until Ron see’s this sucker, thought Jerome glowingly. Ron was Jerome’s ‘mentor’, you might say, but not in the creepy or sexual way the word seemed to have taken on meaning in recent years. Ron was a dinosaur, he’d be the first to admit- one of the last real ‘old timers’ in the North Denver Lapidary & Mineral Club, a stoic, scruffy holdout in a 1920’s bungalow off Washington Street which, well, he might have damn well bought in the 1920’s. He knew everywhere to dig, and more importantly, everywhere not to dig. It was Ron who has first told him about the Tarryalls, him who had brought a stubby sky blue crystal out of a hidden pocket in his ancient soup-stained trousers and held it up to the ruddy ghetto sunlight for Jerome to snatch out of his hand and admire with booming ‘WOWWWWW’s. ‘Watch it, kid, that’s the best one I got outta that pocket; big deal in 74’ Ron warned, but his smile betrayed him. He knew Jerome would never steal- in a way he was a dinosaur just like Ron: he knew how to be good and kind and indebted to nature’s endless awesomeness without anyone ever teaching him, without a field trip to the School of Mines Geology museum (though that helped), without nerdy yuppie parents who sent him to the Denver Academy and fed him kale and spinach with dinner.

Nope, he was just another ‘Nigga from the hood’, Dayshawn had to remind him all the time, his jeans sagging around his skinny ass and some dumb block ho wrapped around his arm like a child holds a stuffed animal. Jerome hated his skinny ass, hated the way his mindlessly conformist ‘cool’ was so easy and effective at the same time, hated the cute girls always a step behind him. ‘Well you know what Dayshawn, Dis nigga gone found some ROCKS!’, Jerome said to the empty valley and granite boulders, and laughed till be had to sit down on the ground next to his hole, wheezing and reaching for the Gatorade bottle and carrying on talking to himself. ‘And not dat kind y’all prolly be smoking either….bitch!’, he added in his best hood accent. Jerome coughed up the Gatorade and reached for his inhaler, taking a quick puff and looking up directly at the sky right after, just like Doctor Algers had told him too. ‘Man, another ten pounds and I’ll be KILLIN it out here’, Jerome thought to himself, but he knew it was really more like 30. He was a fatass, as Dayshawn, mom, pops, and Janelle never seemed to tire of reminding him. He could dig though, and hike too (in short spurts), and damnit if he hadn’t dug a hell of a hole on some good intuition to hit this pocket.

He looked around instinctively, as Ron always told stories about all those ‘damn claim jumpers, pocket raiders, and crystal thieves’ (including several men Ron wouldn’t name but Jerome had a feeling were now prominent collectors in Denver) that would show up at a time like this. Of course, nobody was around. Just the sound of a distant badly-tuned jeep rumbling up highway 67, and the caw of a lone red-tailed hawk circling high in the turquoise sky above. He imagined a group of collectors though- they could be anything from a gaggle of grad students from the School of Mines, or a bunch of nerdy engineers and doctors out for a little Sunday adventure, or the even-present (and always white) ‘Ya’ll know yer trespassing?’ redneck locals. He imagined them stumbling on him- Third generation Nigerian, 6’1”, 215 lbs, round soft face, big black glasses (but not the cool kind, Dayshawn would be quick to point out), and a ‘fro that looked somewhere in-between Richard Prior and Einstein in his later years. Fierce eyes- his mother always said that; about the most sophisticated thing she’d ever said, it seemed, but it was true- they were an indeterminate shade of hazel; smart, ruthless, angry at the physical confines they’d been fated, ready to find something incredible.

 He figured the handcuffs and trespassing charges would come way before the patient, reasonable explanation of ‘permitted recreational activities on BLM land’ or the explanation of how the ‘ Paragenetic Sequence of Aluminosilicate Minerals in Mariolitic Pockets of the Pikes Peak Batholith’ really was going to be his high school thesis topic. He stuck his chin out a bit, the soft flesh jiggling outward in defiant comedy, at the though of ‘high school thesis topics’, and how flat and vaguely condescending Mr. Johnson’s expression had been when Jerome had gushingly told him his idea. ‘Have you thought of talking to Melinda about the solar cars, or maybe the work they do with students over at St. Anthony’s?’, he’d suggested back. Well, to be honest, Jerome didn’t give a shit about that pseudo-intellectual pretty girl Melinda’s solar car project, or the fact that she’d already gotten in early-decision to Duke, or that some doctors at St. Anthony’s would let him dab at a mysterious petri dish under a hood in the hopes that some famous white guy would eventually get some credit for helping cure people of cancer or something. He just didn’t care.  That was the great thing about rocks, Jerome thought, admiring the miniature chandeliers and mirrored walls that seemed to emanate out of the topaz crystal- they didn’t get cancer, they didn’t have unfair advantages on college admissions, they didn’t have junky parents- they had only beauty, only that sparkling effervescence that made one feel as if one could live forever. He’d brought his research idea to Dr. Haywood at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science as well- he remembered driving over there that freezing cold day last March, the roads all slick and recrystallized under the tires of Dawshawn’s ancient Buick he practically had to steal the key for to borrow for 20 minutes. He remembered Dr. Haywood’s implacable smile when he told him that ‘he was sure Jerome would go great places and was honored that he wanted to volunteer and perhaps have access to study some of their research collection, but they already had 20 geoscience volunteers and unfortunately now wasn’t a good time.’  Never mind that the average volunteer age was about 70, never mind that people of color were grossly underrepresented in earth sciences, never mind that he was probably the first student ever to come to Haywood with a question besides ‘my teacher want me to indentify this rock…’ He kicked the frozen ground hard with his sneakers on the way out the back door of the museum, and turned over a fist-size chunk of shiny purple-grey covellite, a rare copper mineral. Surely a mistake, or something fallen off the cart on the way into the collections room. He pocketed it with a smirk, knowing it would bring at least fifty bucks on Ebay. ‘If you can’t join em’, fuck em’, his dad would say when he was high sometimes, which didn’t really make much sense, but felt good to say in his head that afternoon. He wasn’t about to become some welfare nigga- he was just grateful he didn’t have to hustle the other kind of rocks.

   The last of the beef jerky and sour patch kids washed down with the end of the ‘Xtra Gulp’ size Gatorade (note to self, bring healthier lunch next time Jerome thought), Jerome returned down into the hole, which now spanned almost a body-length across and just as deep. The boulder under which the pocket had lain now sat perched precariously over the hole, half of its thousand or so pound mass looming over his head. He thought he saw it shift slightly as he climbed down and imagined it rolling onto him with an anticlimactic thud and him being crushed forever on the gray slopes of Pilot Peak; the months or years it would take to find his body. ‘Fuck it’, he thought, and took the strong end of the crowbar and used it to lever the boulder back a few inches onto more stable ground. He thought of the young hustlers gunned down on the concrete blocks of his neighborhood, the high school dealers in shiny new Navigator’s and Mustang’s dead from some DUI, the junkies that never actually died but just seemed to pass into a pale drawn-out nothingness that was worse than death itself. There were so many worse ways to die than succumbing to the gentle pressure of the earth, entombed in a crystalline cavern the universe had set aside a billion-odd years ago. He wasn’t going to die though, he reminded himself, but Ron might when he got a look at this crystal wrapped up in old newspapers in his rucksack.  He reached up towards the sunlight and grabbed the small duffel bag with the ‘pocket tools’: screwdriver (‘Flathead, never Phillips’, Ron had warned him), brushes, chisels, chrome-moly steel Estwing pick. Digging carefully into the soft clay of the pocket floor, he felt something sharp, and then feeling a little more, a smooth, glassy face amidst the wet clay and ‘kitty litter’ granite rubble. Pulling gently, he lifted another smaller crystal out of the hole and into the building sunset. Dirtier, for sure, with some tenacious-looking iron coating the termination, but still probably 200 carats and a ‘cutter’ through and through under the dirt. A cutter not in the sense that Jerome’s left pinky now dripped sticky red blood at odd intervals from the spiky quartz shards that littered the bottom of the hole, but in the sense that Ron’s garage-turned-lapidary workshop could pull a good-sized gemstone out of its stony heart. ‘If I ever let him get near it with the saw’, Jerome thought, wrapping this one carefully in the full page spread for ‘Buy one get one free Chicken Wings!’ of the ‘Downing Supermart Saver-News’ they were always pushing at people in the hood.  ‘Imma be buyin’ more than chicken wings with this’ thought Jerome smugly, doing some quick mental math at a ballpark 90 cents/carat and finding the numbers quite satisfactory.

Just then, he heard a rustling in the bushes downhill and the unmistakable sound of cowboy boots scraping across lichen-y granite. George Dunhill. ‘Ohhhhhh shit’ though Jerome. A pinprick of sweat broke out just below where the fro’s edges met his forehead and worked its way down his ear and under his armpits, and a strange ringing seemed to fill his ears. ‘Ohhh fuck.’ George Dunhill, or more properly, George Carter Dunhill III, was the owner of the claim just down the hill, and as far as he was concerned, he owned every square inch of Pilot Peak- public land boundaries be damned. The mean-looking dog and meaner-looking 9 mm. he kept near him at all times helped reinforce that this was still the West and white men made tough by god and a handgun made the rules. The truth was this was not Dunhill’ claim; it was United States National Forest and the only people he could get in trouble with for digging a hole here was the federal government. Didn’t matter now though. The boots click-clack-clicked overhead with a slightly arythymic sound- Jerome remembered he had a bit of a limp- and eventually faded off over the edge of the mountain.  The sound of a dog howling somewhere in the distance made more needles of sweat spread around his brow, but by now Jerome was pretty sure that Dunhill was just passing through en-route to his claim. Still though, if he saw him… well, he didn’t want to think about what might happen. 

The sun was in its terminal decline now, fading lazily over the edges of the giant Taryall valley to the west, the sagebrush and distant fences saluting his discovery in silent golden applause.  He reached down and pulled out one last crystal for the day- perhaps the last of the pocket, but he hoped not. It was small- perhaps a half-inch high but with brilliant cerulean color and a complex termination that looked like the angles in one of those early Nintendo game worlds. It certainly didn’t seem of this earth, and Jerome knew as soon as he picked it up it would be a gift to Therese. Oh, Therese, Jerome thought with sudden self-consciousness, despite the thought being strictly in his mind and the absence of anyone else for miles, not counting a crazy redneck vigilante and his dog. She was ‘so dang fly’, as Dayshawn might have said, but only cuz calling a girl fly was now old-school and Dayshawn was too preoccupied with what everyone else thought of him to come up with his own style. Lustrous, that’s what Jerome thought of when he thought of Therese; the word that described the brightly mirrored reflection off a really good crystal’s surface, but also had something of the ‘lust’ it contained. She shone in this strange half-ghetto-booty-half-ethnically-ambiguous-smart-girl-you-see-on-college-admissions-pamphlets kind of luster, one that made Jerome scared and obsessed at the same time. She was so ‘out of his league’, but she seemed neither inspired nor offended by his company, just happy to share a few neutral words about the next science Olympiad meeting or college admissions news. He hoped her words would be a little more than neutral when he handed her the crystal in class next Monday. He wondered if she’d know what it was, if she’d measure it’s distinctive heft and steely blue luster in her hand knowingly and smile a knowing smile his direction, one that would be so much better than the weak smiles Dayshawn’s girlfriends gave him when he tried to impress them with a little knowledge of the particulars of the bling they always wanted more of. ‘Why she always lyin’ though, tellin’ me they diamonds, when they really rhinestones’ he whistled to himself, quoting Kanye as he packed up the rucksack and started to made his way downhill towards the rusting Buick at the end of Forest Road 273. 

short freestyle poems

1.)

Right and Exact
karate chop hand jam
Feldspar crystals and blue sky
deadly desert blue
cacti could care less
upward thrutching
sofa sized ledge
redneck vehicles amble by
smiling
first ascent?

2.)

Truck hums over
neoconservative pavement
sandstone fades
junipers gesture
'ayyy yewww....'
I see them stumbling
like that drunk down the street
pocket vibrates
welcome back to Civilization
passionate, most are plastic
rearview mirror slices
of paradise found.

3.)

Money melts
But but not like snow, burning
into October leaves,
the saddest orange.

4.)

Nostaglia
for something so foreign and close
choices only matter
when the light is just right
not too low
not too high
not too fast
not too slow
an old soul 45 winding down in tangerine light
on a Sunday afternoon
'Whhhhhhheeeerrrrzzzzzzummmm'
pick the needle up
close the door
3 speed cruiser with the milk crate held on by electrical tape
kid from down the block
'what choo dewwwwin mister?'
as if the doing was already done.

5.)

'Please List your Professional Qualifications.'
oh son..
hold up
no hollllld up.
I'm qualified.
oh yes.
{Interlude}
'Romney, where you at homes?'
pause.
'Yo Mitt?'
pause. fumble. static.
'Sir do you understand how this could effect your credit report?'
scuffle. neoconservative finger puppet show.
'Bitch have you SEEN my credit report!?'
'Please list dates of attendance, degrees received, GPA and relevant coursework, and computer program proficiency.'
Do you know what it is like to be truly crazy?
freedom.
yup.
I'm qualified.