To Christine Rost 5/8/1999 Geoffrey Gordon Ashbrook
Diemn [Dime] settled his seat in the wet grass. It didn’t bother him so much the cold as how his ass would show wet. He sat up and moved around to see over the shoulders of the couples and groups and sums and divisors and plotters that sat between him and the small grounded wet po-puddle shade stage, where the musicians talked and tuned and argued lack luster over what to start with. To his side a few children were lighting sparklers, to his other side a girl was unwrapping a melted chocolate bar with a sour look on her face, the chocolate liquefied and falling all over her hands. Further to the right, a small boy was holding a stick out in-front of him. The stick was a light color, smooth but for the occasional knot. The bark was speckled. He held it more or less steady.
A spot of recollection:
Challenge me bar, and come to meet her. We should have backed ourselves in the back of the car but all we brought were a few bottles of water and a double feature paperback with Hamlet and 2001 and all we had to listen to was the sound track to the Star Wars trilogy over and over. And Hedrik kept pulling off to the side when he was driving, two wheels on the shoulder. The windshield wipers were good though, which was good.
Diemn laid back in the wet grass and folded his hands and let them rest on his forehead. All around the field alarm clocks began to sound, the band began to play but then stopped to resumed tuning. The sun came up over a shelf of thick silver clouds, and birds filled the sky and people with cameras rushed onto the large wooden platform, that had been built for just that purpose, and began taking pictures of eachother and the arrangements of food that lay out on rows of folding tables topped by paper sheets.
Diemn took a brown napkin out of his pocket, and tossed it into the air. It rose, then fell, and settled on the grass next to him where it soaked up water in a few select spots and then was impaled by the nail-pole of a lawn-keep-clean-er. Then Diemn took out a pair of glasses and put them on. But the girl with chocolate all over her hands took them off of his face and put them on herself instead, smudging the lenses and her cheeks with chocolate and then laughing. So Diemn took out a large imaginary road map, and opened it, looked it over with a casual perusal, and then lay it over himself as he laid his head back down. The map began to settle over him, with the faint sound of plastic crinkling. And then it began to form to the shape of his body, molding tightly to him and then penetrating in. His circulatory system turned into symbolic roadways, his digestive system become blue prints for the layering of pipes and sewer passages under any large city. His eyes became the developmental maps of the speciation of mammals. His fingers became the extension of city denizens through the streets, -to job -to home -to love. The pores and sweat glands of his skin became the hot and cold running plumbing of every residential and commercial structure on the land. His neck became the cordial and calmly guarded hall that leads into any art museum. His ear lobes became the sands of all the coastlines that ever were, recording and erasing the peregrinations of all organisms and oceanic detritus. His hair became the dense network of electrical and fiber-optic lines which connect human minds across geographical space. His fingernails and toenails became the control decks and windshield-ed cockpits of all above-ground ships for air or space. The bunched skin on his knuckles and his mid-digital hairs became the molten folds of primordial landscapes and the traced lines of asteroidal impacts. His lips became the rolling pages of an interplanetary rolodex containing all information ever recorded in any form. His teeth became the pillars of foundation that lie behind shrewd business deals, banking, and gratuitous observation. His tongue became the lapping of any water, ocean or stream, on any bank of land, and the water reflecting all emissions of animals, insects or plants, communicative or otherwise. His nose became the patron of all tunnels and the transduction of anything through anything else; the bridge of his nose resounding with the hollowness of musical instruments, and the containers of liquid beverages, with lights and railings and traffic reminiscent of any city bridge for common commute.
The grass was wet on the back of his head. A lady called out for the girl to give the nice man his glasses back. He rubbed off the chocolate and put the device back into his pocket, and he marveled at what a child can see in a gesture of the hands. He tucked the wires and fibers back into the sleeves of his jacket, and he handed the girl a moist warm towel for her to wipe her hands and face off with. Under the ground there were the unmistakable sounds of motion, and women with boxes of complimentary peanuts and pretzels began to walk up ramps (from their subterranean ‘stations’). In the sky appeared a giant red form, a terrible arching edifice, in the shape of a no-smoking sign which in a blink changed to a fasten seat-belts sign and then returned to ‘sky, clouds, birds.’ He felt under him in the grass until he found his seat-belt, and he fastened himself down.
Down in front the musicians began to play, and a breeze was picking up so Diemn took out his woolen hat and pulled it over his ears. Under a rock about a foot to his left, where the controller was, he could choose from 18 different airline program stations, but digital-bluegrass was usually his favorite. Vague patterns of blowing leafs off beyond the edge of the field turned to dogs playing and running across the field, turning back to leafs when they reached the other side. In front of him a family was playing a game like chess but where all the pieces were spinning like gyroscopes, reflecting the whole scene from countless disagreeing facets.
Just as the ground heaved with the acceleration of take off, Diemn felt his one breast pocket to make sure he had the piece of paper with her number and address on it. He shut his eyes, and tickled his lips with the tip of his tongue, and wondered if he could muster it to strike up a conversation with some of the people around him, once he could unbuckle and smoke, and move around the compartment with the other passengers. He wandered if he’d forgotten his tin of licorice.
Originally entitled:
Flying The Chocolate Gyro