The Cold Wheels

I was attending a session of an ancient courtroom.  The room was traversed on either side by banks of open stone arches which bore no windows, leaving the room completely exposed to the cold.  It was deep winter and freezing, and the frost and snow dusted into the room.  The gallery of spectators all huddled under woolen blankets as they watched the proceedings.  The advocates, heated by the animation of their arguments, still occasionally wrung their hands to warm them.  They wore grotesque bird masks that made them seem strangely predatory, alien to the affairs of men.  The accused sat recessed in the shadows on the witness stand.  A shrunken creature horrified of the condemnation directed at him, I could just make out the anguished black pools of his eyes and mouth wailing mutely in the darkness.

There was a sense that the case was being rushed along at a clipped pace due to the discomforts raised by the cold.  There was a concern that justice would only be given its most perfunctory due, and that the patience of all parties involved would soon break and the prospect of retreating to warm dens to sit before well fed fires would seem far more appealing than the duty to give this poor man his proper hearing.  A brisk snap of the prosecutor's voice, a number of obligatory bleats of objection and wheedles of outrage from the defense, and a few muffled grumbles from the corpulent judge sitting high atop his bench, appeared to be all the indulgence that the weather would grant to the pursuit of truth that day.

But just as the case was drawing to a close, there was a stirring in the gallery among the spectators.  The judge brought his gavel down to restore order, and just as it hit and the sound of it rang in the grey air, everything else went completely silent.  Startled, I lifted my head and looked around me and I could see that all the figures, the spectators, the advocates, the judge, and the accused alike, they were all figures carved from the coldest stone.  They had been stone all along.  This was a museum piece, a sculpted reproduction of a historical setting.  I had sat here lost in reveries of those long lost days.

I wandered among the stone figures, getting a better look at the scene.  The prosecutor stood defiantly pointing an accusing finger towards the witness stand.  I slid my gloved hand across the smooth contours of the beak of his bird mask.  Ice crystals had settled here and there in the pores of the stone.  I studied that anguished expression on the face of the accused, all those exquisitely rendered wrinkles of pain and worry, all the more impressive because the sculptor had perfectly gauged the effect the figure would produce when viewed from the gallery across the room, all those details subtly suggested from the shadows.

I pulled my hand from my glove and held it to the side of the accused figure's face, almost as much a gesture of compassion as one of appreciation.  The stone was cool and richly lacquered.  The face just stared back with that same expression, the head slightly tilted, as though my touch had only momentarily eased a toothache.  This was the crowning piece of the whole scene.  I turned and considered all of the hostility of the room, all of the hostility of the world, focused on this one figure.  And then I put my hands in my pockets and went out into the snowy fields beyond this exhibit, my footprints trailing through the stone archway behind me.

Witch's Brew

I had invented a game for the Atari 2600.  I was considering either "Cauldron" or "Parabola" for the title.  The game was a top down shooter.  The player would control a small fighter that hovered over the top of a bubbling cauldron which took up most of the bottom of the screen.  All kinds of strange herbs and talismans would rain down from the top of the screen, falling into the cauldron.  The player had to try and dodge these items as well as try to shoot them before they fell into the cauldron.   If enough of these items fell in, the cauldron would start bubbling over, turning from green to red and emitting more and more gaseous, pixilated stars that could come up and hit the player's ship from underneath where they were the most defenseless.  Thus, the player would be constantly be caught between the ingredients raining down from above and the noxious stars bubbling up from beneath.

The major innovation of the game was that, unlike most top down shooters where the player simply glides from side to side, here the player's ship would swing out in a wide parabolic arc above the cauldron.   This would create an interesting maneuvering dynamic since the player would often have to swing off to one side in order to get a good angle to shoot something across to the other.  This would keep the game play fast-paced, fluid, and of course, fun for the whole family.

My Summer Vacation

It was late summer and my family all got together to take a trip, just like we used to do years ago.  We traveled to somewhere east of here, some old unremarkable town, and we stayed at a bed and breakfast just off the main street.  Our cars were all parked about a quarter of a mile away under a grove of trees out behind the football field of the local high school.  In the dim and drowsy evenings we would take long walks down to this school to get things that were still packed away in the back seats and the trunks, swatting at the mosquitoes in the thick air and straying to the sidewalks whenever an approaching vehicle caught us in the beam of their headlights.

There seemed to be some concern over whether our cars would start or how we were getting home or perhaps even where we were.  But the days just passed by in lethargic apathy, the smaller kids having settled in on loose mattresses in a spare room at the back of the house, the scattered socks and picture books and stale air, the adults all sitting around the living room, passing the afternoons amid newspapers and coffee cups as the sun tracked its course across the front windows and that endless paper strip of sky cranked from clouds to stars, another bright day giving way to another humid night, the proprietor's dog curled up under the shadow of an end table, the crickets out there in the dark, no one really feeling the need to talk. 

There was an older couple also staying there at the bed and breakfast, and on one occasion when we were all sitting around considering what to do about our cars, the wife told us, "The only real vacation is the kind where you're not sure how you're going to make it back. And you don't care."  And so it was with them.  The lady passed away the following night, right there in her bed.  They took her out the next morning with the sheet pulled over her head, the ambulance waiting out at the curb. But there were no tears or regrets.  It was just another thing that came and went. 

A Brand New Machine

I went back to visit the old plastic factory where I used to work.  The quality control woman was showing me around the place.  I could see that a good number of the old presses had been removed and quite a few others had been gutted for parts, to the point that I began to wonder how the place could still rightfully call itself a plastic factory.  There were just oily pits left on the floor where the presses had been.

But then she led me back to a spot in the back corner of the shop where a crowd of workers had gathered.  I pushed through to the front and saw what they were all gaping at.  It was a completely new kind of press.  Instead of using the crude method of melting the plastic and injecting it into a mold, this new press assembled the part molecule by molecule from a digital blueprint.  Through the glass I could see a set of metal styluses at work, weaving the part together out of arcs of blue electricity.  After this impressively rapid fabrication, the parts would drop onto a conveyor below the machine.

The woman running this machine sat before a silver bank of levers and dials.  She checked the readings on a display and marked endless figures down a clipboard.  I thought about how it would be to work a shift at this new machine.  I figured it would be easier, most certainly cleaner, but probably as mind-numbing as ever.  I pushed back out of the crowd, and left the shop out through the bay door, and emerged into the bright blue day with a sigh.  

Color Blind Test

Early one Saturday morning when I was still little, my father took me down to the school to have me tested for color blindness.  It was one of those bustling Saturday morning events that schools often have where there are booths set up and people are passing out fliers, and signs made from construction paper are displayed everywhere in the halls.  The classrooms sat dark and the parents sat  in loose groups in the cafeteria, where coffee and donuts were being served.

The color blindness test involved several different puzzles that were set up on a series of different tables.  There were a variety of intriguing puzzles.  There were some where you had to work your way through a maze by following different color paths.  There were others where cards of various colors were laid out in a grid on a table, and you had to add up all the cards of a certain color to arrive at the correct sum.

I moved from station to station, trying my best to solve each puzzle.  For some of them, I even had to get up onto the table and tap the correct answer with the tip of my shoe for some reason.  I was having a blast.  But I sensed that my father was getting irritated with me.  He didn’t see why I should be trying so hard to solve these puzzles when I already knew that I was color blind.  It just seemed like wasted effort to him.  I countered that the point of the tests was to see if I actually had color blindness.  If I already knew the outcome, what was the point of even being there in the first place?

I thought that was a pretty compelling piece of logic.  And so I moved on to the next station, where I had to get back up onto the table and match these pictures on different yellow squares by tapping them with my foot.  Soon I was having a good time again, tapping and shuffling at the cards.  But when I looked out over the crowd of laughing people gathered around the table, I saw that my father was gone.  He had taken off and left me there.