NIGHTINGALE

ARTESIAN SPRING

Recently, you have been afflicted with insomnia. Let’s average you in with all the others suffering insomnia across the three time zones in this country. It may surprise you that your windows are open, though for you it’s winter. And you’re not sleeping on the first floor or alone. The one who materializes next to you may be improved somewhat by being the mean, more homogenized than the one you’ve known in the past, losing a few years and some pounds. For those of you who were alone, it may be a tight squeeze, and then again, it may be a prayer answered. Your finances have not changed; they remain vertiginous.

Look out your window. A half-moon has been caught sliding across the pane; soon it will be hidden behind a building. There is some occlusion to the sky, somewhere between sheer nightgown and cataract, but a storm is not due for nine days. The temperature is moderate not requiring the blanket to be higher than your armpits. Kiss the woman sleeping beside you (chances are she’s not asleep, but it’s your conceit that you’re the only one awake in every sense of the word across the whole globe). Kiss her though there’s a significant chance that she’s brought a resentful adolescent from a first marriage into your relationship. Kiss her because where your churning thoughts have taken you during these white nights is real. I am the quantum aviator you were afraid you had conjured. I announce the new day you are falling towards, the one gestating underground before it is delivered by a black sun. Yet, rejoice.

I live in an underworld that a secret, permanent wing of the government has created. I was selected for the very qualities that disqualified me for life topside. Think of moles, sow bugs, Jerusalem beetles, mushrooms, a biology more passive than vital, lacking affections and allergic to the sun. My senses are atavistic; most music distresses me. We are encouraged to take leaves and our responses to life upside are monitored through debriefing upon our return. By our third leave, we are gravitating to Las Vegas or Club Mediterranean. Our underground living quarters imitate those single’s residencies that are planted in wastelands beyond the suburbs, including their gyms and swimming pools. Places like Vegas are the idealized versions. We recognize each other. Many of us have heroic bodies, spending unbroken hours in the gyms, an example of the obsessive behavior exhibited by animals in cages. Attached to these thick necks, as if peeking through the holes in carnival photo backdrops, are timid rabbit heads, often with pink, bloodshot eyes-sunlight requires several days of adjustment after months underground. These rodent-headed idols lounge on deck chairs. I am pale, pointy-shouldered, molded by my pretensions to genius, and have never sat beneath the ultra-violet sunning lamps or used the gyms. On my only visit to Las Vegas, I kept to my room, venturing out only at night to drift through the perpetually muted casinos.

The fourth leave usually is the last. The volumes of empty space by then make us seasick, and the free time is a penal sentence since all connections have been cut. What about family left behind? For those of us who are quantum aviators those first few leaves during which we are encouraged to visit relatives are especially jarring because we can detect the time sutures other aviators have made in our lives. But, even those who cannot spot these seams must feel the awkwardness. The family tiptoes around any questions of where we work or what we do. A new baby is displayed but is not offered for holding. We are perceived to be priests of a sort; there is an assumption that the world appears vulgar and chaotic to us, that feelings are a disgrace to our re-focused attention. These visits leave us with no regrets, but they are redundant, a sentimental legacy of old ideologies. All of us long ago divorced our families. Our histories with them have always been tales of inconvenience and invasion of privacy.

That fourth and final leave we pass in a hotel a few blocks from the airport watching TV, ordering in fast food, and counting the hours until we can board the return flight. Most of us have led sexually diffident lives, and with no subliminal persuasions being applied, admitting to ourselves that our choice to dwell here was predestined, after that last, dismal tour, apply to have vasectomies or tubes tied, completing our removal from the revolving circle. Afterwards, some sport a small badge, actually a red cross pin as nothing official is available, but most consider that an unseemly flamboyance.

You probably have a dim image of what our underground cities are like. Even those of us who live here can add little to your description because there are no unpolished details to snag the eye. No chance visitor ever arrives. There are no coincidental meetings, no rain to force strangers beneath an awning. There are no sidewalks spackled with sticky chewing gum or freckled with autumn leaves and litter. These cities are conceptual fabrications, a designed product, like a space station or shopping center. Even the air is pumped in through filters that would trap a virus.

There is little, if any, idiosyncratic decoration in our apartments. Hidden natures like ours are only susceptible to anaerobic excitements and grand sedations. Many who think they belong here turn out to have only been reacting to a rejection; they are punishing themselves for being homely. The grandly ugly never volunteer. They spurned chance from the beginning and meet beauty on equal terms. These merely plain will try smuggling in mementoes. We have no laws barring imports, but everything must be inspected for contaminants. It is the unnecessary act of smuggling that disqualifies them, their petty, easily mollified despair in the world, their constricted, sensible ambition. They would have been sufficient for the era of missile silos and underground bunkers-pudgy people with tiny features; back then annihilation was a fairy tale with a moral. Times have changed. Those who aspire to the pretty could never last among the rest of us who know that extinction is the inevitable expression of exuberance. Our rooms are bare. We have our work, only our work and patience.

In my job I reconfigure lives so that our cities will remain figments of fantasy rather than prophesy. I am a quantum aviator and I have woken you to give you good news.

Technically, I am a civilian, but the military and the intelligence agencies have out-sourced so much of their work and the revolving door separating them is so copiously oiled, that this is a distinction without a difference. We wear a suburbanized flight suit, closer to a leisure suit, a single piece, gray polyester with a zipper running from crotch to neck and its own attached belt, elastic with a brass buckle. Our shoes also are issued to us, blocky brogans with crepe soles. An identification tag is pinned over our heart; it must be volunteered to security and holds a microchip that contains all our biographical and biological information. This card has to match a retinal scan for us to move through the thirty-ton blast doors that separate the chambers. The doors slide aside with the smallest suggestion of a sigh, hardly audible. They represent the pinnacle of underground engineering. The new arrival is always given this demonstration. A guard tosses a crumpled wad of paper-a scrap of disorder-through the doorway. The paper never makes it to the other side. The door snaps shut faster than the eye can follow and the wadded ball is crushed against the far wall of the slipway that harbors the door, the juices from its pulpy origins adhering it at the very height it left the guards hands. The message is clear, one at a time, no hitchhiking on another’s ID card. The implacable silence in which this action was prosecuted is an audience with an archaic god. Mars, Vulcan, and Pluto are young compared to this one who cannot be shaped beyond this single will against chaos. He is force closed to appeal; infinity peals from him.

A quantum aviator works alone. He reports to a superior who gives him an assignment, and then returns to his separate room to process it. Once the first quantum computer was built, circularity was established, and it became possible to bring it out of a possible future without ever having the knowledge of how you created it, or to say very much the same thing since contradictory possibilities now existed side by side, having always known how to build one. Contradiction may represent the poles for any given possibility, however between them are an infinite number of coupled contradictions bounded by the first two. It is only the first two that describe the closed circle of necessary solutions possible since the computer came on line; the couplings between attempt to inscribe it by approaching it through another figure infinitely divided. Because actually approaching the two poles would join a contradiction that could not exist, a quantum aviator casts out on the world puzzles and dilemmas that fall short of the miraculous. To us the stitches are obvious; however, our skill increases with quantum leaps. We incorporate ever increasing numbers of pure contradictions in our alterations, and so increase the horizon of this larger circle inscribed by smaller ones-each one minutely changed-so that in much the same way as you do not feel nervous walking on this planet, our assignments walk about in a altered reality without ever reaching an edge that would alert them. There are similarities between our goals and those of plastic surgeons, invisible seams.

Usually, our projects are constrained, almost demure. We sully apostate voices. During my apprenticeship my clumsiness resulted in unnecessary melodrama. I was given a battery of tests to determine if this was systemic or simply a heavy hand. Why discover that an evangelist of nuclear disarmament has been spying for the enemy-a canard that demands a tapestry of alterations to support-when ten minutes in a subway bathroom stall works just as well? And lose the idea of the M-16 found in his closet; shifting objects is beyond our reach at present. Narrative is always a fog of subjectivity; we dispel vapors, presently with circumspection, but our deliberated efforts will one day clear the air. Meanwhile, consistency shows abject faith. Photos of the political radical in front of a poster of Che Guevara taken while he was in college are an improvement, but far better the revelation that his wife employed an illegal immigrant for a hundred dollars a week without days off or a health plan. Be wary of creating a celebrity, a sympathetic character out of a milquetoast blogger or whistle blower. If he is to be found with a whore, be sure she’s not ugly or pretty, rather make her mousy, and dress her as a schoolmarm that swats her Johns with a ruler. Better yet, give him a cross-eyed cat that sheds on his suits and craps in his shoes.

However, our mission is ultimately global and tactics must enlarge to strategy. We are not truly bidding our time because we expect soon to be able to control it, and so at present-a concept we have shaved back to a contingency-we have been preparing the ground for the grand goal, the animation, even reification, of mathematics. The recovery of matter from mystical irritation. How were we to hide the birth pains of this new millennium? The first trembles have brought thousands of deaths, but extinctions will follow. We have to hedge our bets. If man had not created nuclear weapons, we would have had to, but instead our labor has been to make the postponement of atomic war unthinkable, the ravings of a madman or a trick by the devil. We have goaded on serial killers and in some cases created them out of staunch citizens in order to wormhole society with paranoia confirmed. Give us some credit, too, for the cult of vampires and ghouls. Remember, we work while you sleep, ghost writers, and helping to engineer a nightmare interpretation of social caste and by extending it past death make it an image of the new Jerusalem speeds our day. We collaborated in systemizing the vision of those who preach “the rapture”, and have helped with their finances. We have revealed aspects of ourselves to conspiracy theorists and spiritualists, including the quantum computer so that the threat should be confabulated with an annunciation, popularizing the theme of passing through death to be reborn. We have encouraged science in its detour into power. Scientists have been good enough even without our tampering to incorporate the coming war into the nature of the universe and thus creation, giving us without asking the meteor extinction of the dinosaurs and the impending destruction of the world by comet or asteroid. War and ethnic cleansing, our rehearsals, pass unnoticed in the shadow of universal doom. Life seems less than precarious, merely incidental or accidental.

And still the news is joy.

“I played.”

“Yes?”

“I played.”

“You were two days late returning. And you were playing. Are you playing a game with me?”

“Do you want to? What game will it be?”

“This isn’t a game. Our work here is dead serious; I’m not playing games with you. Are you trying to play with me?”

“You’re not giving me the chance.”

“We’re trying to help you. We’re regarding this as a lapse, but if you force us, that could change. I’ve stuck my neck out for you. I’m calling this an acclimation problem; we see them sometimes when people return from leave. That’s a favor. But, there are many on staff who endorse a zero tolerance doctrine. Shall we cooperate and call this a transition problem and you just tell me straight out what you were doing and maybe I can get you out of hot water?”

“I hope so, but it’s very hard. You see, I don’t have names for the games, so just where would I begin? Trying to find them?, but that’s not the game at all, it’s a whole other game, and just like that it’s become confusing because you don’t want to play and I’m being dead serious, and the games are running away from me, and I can’t possibly run after them now, and I’m sure if I did they’d get away because I’m too slow. And it’s all too funny because I knew all the games by heart, and how could I when I don’t know their names, and now I just must have forgotten them again because I can’t find the rules, and I’m sure I can’t because I played them by heart and so could not have possibly broken a rule to be remembered and we’ll just have to play them again, if only you’ll cooperate.”

“I gave you a chance. And I’m going to give you one more. I could have you dismissed and thoroughly debriefed and I’m sure you have an idea of what that means. Tell me what you did, no fun and games, and I’ll try to get you off the hook, no guarantees, but better odds than you have now.”

Then he looks directly into the camera that is behind the mirror in these interrogation rooms, right at me, and winks.

“No fun and games, what about you? Come play with me.”

I liked him right away. He shone. We quantum aviators have an argot. It is smug, pedantic, a Thespian arpeggio in a moth-balled aristocratic accent. We reject the vigor of text messaging slang. He was one of us. He had disappeared, and finding him was my assignment. I played the discs time and again to see him and hear his voice that had fastened our argot with a chuckle. Fastened is the wrong word. Given it legs, legs with hocks and hooves. The screen of a quantum computer is a cloud chamber, lead and zinc toned vapors fermenting images that can be compared with those from an electron microscope; although far less etched, they have that acid-bathed colorlessness. I played and replayed the discs of his interrogations to bring his rosy colors into the searing gloom.

I would have incriminated myself had I asked to be recused on the grounds that I liked this man, or so I told myself after the first reluctantly surrendered session at the computer. I could not rush back, the proper measured acquittal of duty was necessary, but yes, I would play with him.

We began with Hide-and-Seek. I got it wrong in the beginning. Only now do I have the language to describe my shortcomings. How does Hide-and Seek appear on the quantum computer? Something like ice-skaters must look to a trout. Plotting these curves is my profession, but as he had said on the disc, I could not keep up if I went about it in the old way; either I matched the mood or I would drop behind into a hopelessly tangled wake. When we tamper with your dreams, we first image them, and with them fixed in place we plot and translate them by a mathematical process akin to numerology. Then pre-fabricated solutions are upholstered to these scaffolds in a rebuilding technique called taxidermy. When these dead facsimiles are implanted, your dreams become underground labyrinths, empty cities at night, and your mind becomes suffused by darkness. These inert elements are the computer’s medium. For such a corpse to join in Hide-and-Seek would have required the cooperation of my playful quarry, and he was having none of it, turning the game into tag, and running circles around me. By his sprightly canter he unraveled puns, havoc for us because they are the hinge for flipping our stencils over your dreams. He turned the uncertainty principle on its head, enabling both optical illusions spellbound in a pun to not simply oscillate, but go about their separate business, or to expect from their selves that they might. Depending on just which pun he chose, the double-bladed cleaving left quarreling couples striving to push the other into an oxymoron and be divorced, or amorous ones vibrant with the oxymoronic feelings of love at first sight. Their attempts to merge, inextricably linked to a fear of losing each other, and the angry couples’ barrages of curses, brought feelings to the clouds of the chamber and created chimeras that resembled creatures found in myth and dream. There was no chance of catching up to him without enlisting their help, and this would require pacts with this menagerie of emotions that had no desire to be tamed. I would need one with wings, and considering the emotional landscapes that in some cases fulminated and in other cases seemed to be serenely self-illuminated, it should be able to swim as well. But, what short of astrology would relinquish wings to the saddle?

It did not do to approach such creatures pre-disposed to purpose; they simply bolted at an outstretched hand riveted in iron. It was antagonistic to their bright new existence, even contradictory. I tell you this in language I have learned, but it took several mutations or transubstantiations to finally jump on board. They existed in a state of excitement. I had to discard experience to get anywhere near them. They were sparkling new; jading repelled them.

The fractious couples were completely pre-occupied with their quarrels which mostly consisted of self-willed definitions of the terms they saw as laying between them, possessed by the desire to prove their uniqueness through contradiction, but all the while delighted with raw energy and vocabulary, and dependent on the other for inspiration. Between them stretched spectrums and octaves, and it was impossible for either pole to surrender middle “c” or green to the other. I was not able to mediate these spats, but conveniently for me, I was called closer for what each considered my axiomatic vote in their favor. Frustrated at allying them to my own motive-they each came to consider me a spy for the other-I joined the fray. A successful pun snaps open a conventional coupling, and that informed the spirit of these quarrels with mischief, and though they did not seem to be getting me any closer to my goal, they did embroil me in festive rebellion, and the settings in which I found myself were far less gloomy than the room behind the thirty-ton blast door where I sat.

I careened through the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant, the couple determined to have it out over cleaver, cleaved, and cleavage, me dodging about in the mayhem, colorful food spilling everywhere. It came to hammer and tongs over cloven, where it had all begun. Suddenly I was in a whole different set-which might have been a consoling Brobdingnagian crevasse had they come to grips at cleavage-but the nuptial blur around cleave being at issue, an irresistible anathema to these recent couplers interruptus, I found myself in a seraglio.

Satiation proved a good deal less than I required for drawing abreast of my quarry. Here were lethargic forms, torpid and voluptuary, and should I rest here, inevitably I would be overtaken by slumber and fall through dream after dream, each dimmer than the last, and if I fell into dreamless sleep, then directly darkness had overwhelmed me. However, here was enough of what needed to be learned, the gambol in flesh, to move me toward the swift puns where the one I chased is leaping.

Found, the unicorn and the winged angels of heaven.

Found, the cub in the tiger’s jaws.

Found, lovers fiercely embracing.

On Jordon’s shore he found me, bright leaper of the fallen temple’s rocks bathed in flowing light, the joyous time. The river boy whose orphan I had made myself, beckoning me since and always from when by prudence I left behind the gold instant of complete faith.

And brightest of all, the one who has pushed you from your slumber in the labyrinths, I found you, brightest of all in your self-creation, rising sun, welder of truth to beauty in the joy of your love.

Come play with me.