The Static

"The Static" by Katty Pulsar

William is in the driver’s seat, in another world, navigating around the pockmarks and rubble in New War Road like an old sea captain.  I sense him more than see him -- in my mind now he’s set apart within a frame, like an oil painting.  The truck body rumbles and shakes around us, and its physical components start to collapse into pieces.  The steering wheel, a wooden ship’s wheel, splits into splinters.  I focus on my breathing.  I try to let my mind go sideways.

I’m wrapped in papoose and strapped into a baby basket in the passenger seat.  I’m all of 70 pounds, body and head and only the one limb, with a tuft of golden hair.  I’ve been a woman for a long while now, but anyone who sees me reacts as though I’m a child.  I activate their caretaker response, or I repulse.  There’s very little middle ground.  My face is round like a doll’s face.  Where am I pointing?  This isn’t the direction. 

My body is safe with William.  That’s hard to say with a man, but he’s the old kind, who believe there’s right and wrong.  And he’s one of those men who always knows what to do, no matter the surprise.  When I’m trying to engage the Static, he doesn’t disturb me or talk to me or make a sound.  He’s grounded, a man very comfortable with the physical world, and he doesn’t pretend to understand the places I go.  But he properly values the water I return from the well.  William is safe.  It’s safe here, breathe.  “Temple.” 

A wave of imagery catches me off guard.  A pair of legs.  Open legs.  A shaven puss.  A moan like the crash of a wave.  The sound of it pulls me under, and I go wet down there.  I drown in it.  There’s no wrong here.  Shame has no place.  

What’s that?  An animal, a dog?  In its fur, a map of mountains, braille rippling above the globe.  The sound of a steam kettle on a wood-burning stove.  Human faces abundant as krill.

I drop deeper, I feel it like falling through a floor and landing on another floor, stunned.  

I’ve splashed into a shallow streambed, and it’s yellow, the water is yellowed and the mud is acrid, I’ve brought too much William with me, this is not why I’m traveling.  This is video of a memory he could have made once, he told me of his time trucking around a copper mine, a mile across, with a winding road spiraling down into an open mouth, a line of charcoal men trudging lower, stinging mist staining the skin of the land.  These men are so thin, living on an orange rind.  Slag pool, slurry, the gravy on my mash, mother, this place is poison, William I leave your skinny bodies behind.  Don’t slip, don’t fall further.

Across the gray glass stain of the sky, water droplets collect and run as if chased by the wind.  They merge into rivulets.  I reach out, I strain for them with my hair, and (now we’re getting somewhere) I feel the waters of the sky run up individual strands of hair to my scalp and into the veins in my temple, into the sea, and (breathe) I open myself and start to think in a language not my own.

“We’re all Temples today.”  A radio play. Mosquito-born illness.  Live show. Live video.  Ghosts of ideas.  The Static.

Nothing that’s gone is forgotten.  In the times before, there were broadcasts and broadcasts and an internet connecting man’s machines, and the hardware is gone now, but the transmissions of ideas still echo and whisper, if you know, when you know how to listen.  Interpreting, then, is the land beyond.  There’s the gist of each concept, and impressions branching from them out and away, which our biases examine from each their own direction.  Some of us can feel our way in the dark.  As oracles, we autocomplete.  

I’m here.  Everything now has become vibration.  At calm in the Static, I’ve brought one word with me, as my anchor, to remember why I came, why I’m dancing here in the light of so much.  The word is “Temple.”  It’s a place, a place we need to find, I need to know if it’s safe, is it safe, is the temple waiting for us?  

It’s pleasant and warm.

An image arrives out of the haze and surfaces like a whale, mold-colored and musty and barnacled.  I swim through the air toward the ripples on the surface of the water and the place beneath.  It’s not animal, it’s a dwelling, it’s a shack, a shanty.  It has a shaky, splintered door, and it’s dark.  I can see a figure inside through a window, it’s a female form.  Outside I orbit a pink lightbulb dangling from a wire above a clay driveway.  

Distractions bug by, threatening to drag me away down another information stream.  A piece of music, accelerated a thousand times.  A love letter.  A political struggle.  Soaps for sale.  A murder.  Breathe and maintain.  Be where I float outside the window of the shack, trying to see in, bathed in pink light.  I smile at the thought of my useless lump of pink flesh levitating in a pink expanse outside a window where’s a woman. 

She is standing at a stove, and she’s stirring what’s in a low-boiling black pot with a wooden spoon.  She’s all angles, as though she were composed of thin wire someone had bent and fashioned into the shape of a lady, tailored to seduce someone in a sinewy way.  Scissory fingers finesse the rising steam to her nostrils.    

Won’t you show me your face?  Turn this way.  I’m the sound of a moth pelting a lightbulb, you should turn so I can read your eyes.  She’s strong.  She’s matronly.  No, she hates children.  How?  A falsehood, a disguise, even here?   She starts to turn around, there’s something small, precious, and living in her hands.  She intently exhales a greenish stream of smoke, so I can’t see her face through the haze.  There’s something about…

Stop.  Danger.  There’s something else here.  Behind and below me.  Something big and with teeth.  And it’s time to go.  There are things in this place that hunt things like me, I’ve been spotted.  No time.  I curl myself into a cube and expand in all directions.

I’m spinning through the history of aviation, financial records, morse code, norse gods, the languages of birds, swirling in a syrup of numbers, I spot and insert myself into a photograph, its colors washed and without cyan, I flatten, we’re a man with a fish, he’s proud and smiling, I’m the sheen of a scale, I hide in the fish’s gill and quiet my self.  

Don’t be seen, don’t be heard, don’t be sensed, but I feel the gaze of the predator still on me, without hesitating I dive down the throat into the gut of the trout, I become what it has eaten, I amplify my decay, I cast away my exoskeleton and slither blind through the fish’s ass.  I ooze out and become slow, the sap of a tree, lingering patiently on a treeside on a hillside in the sun, forever in defiance of gravity.  I will myself to flow upward at the pace of a decade, and I take space to gather my strength.  

I feel its presence, but I don’t dare look.  It smells of decay and feces.  Startling now, a damp cool towel on my forehead.

“You were kicking, Tadpole,” William says.  The rhythm now is the song of the tires on an old road in the countryside an hour out past the city walls. I’m panting and sweaty and depleted.  

I tried not to look, I know better than that, but I looked anyway.  It was lumbering and dank and pustuled.   And above all else, it was hungry.      

“The building’s still there,” I sign to William using the toes of my only foot.  “But it’s being watched.” 

“Sleep if you can,” he says.  “We’ll be there by mid-morning.”  But I don’t sleep until another hour passes and the sun starts to rise.

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Neil Oldman for the Daydream Misfit blog

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