Sunday, August 30, 2009

Dull-eyed men who clear desert roads

The Atlas of Curiosities: Part 41

We were traveling west across the Gobi desert when a great wind arose from the south.  Carrying with it a mass of sand like a swarm of stinging locusts, it descended upon our convoy and halted our progress.  A great roar erupted as the storm hit our vehicles, and for all we could see the definitive lines that had made up the world had been erased.  All there was to see was a bleak orange, in a way: a timeless site, but in no way one that could accommodate us as beings who drew breath.

We struggled to seal the vehicles tightly.  We tried to speak, but above the roar no sounds could be heard.  We were rendered mute.  The motions of our hands, in that crippling darkness, seemed slower than before.  Time bowed to this terrible force.

Minutes lumbered past.  As we sat, as if in a fever, the noise of the storm began to subside.  The roar faded. All was quiet.

We glanced out of the windows of our vehicles.  The world was naught but orange fog.  Surrounding us, suspended particles of sand at once impeded and refracted light.  The neighboring cars of our convoys were nothing but shadows.  Craning our necks downward, we were dismayed to find that the road was completely blocked by a massive dun set right in front of us on the road.  It had arisen during the storm, like a snow drift in a wintery climate, though heavier, more ancient, more apt to persist, less to melt, subside, or fade.

We could not move.

Minutes passed and then hours.  At first we spoke of our predicament, then we spoke in jest, then sat silent.  The ghostly fog around us persisted.  Orange.  Other worldly.

As silence gave birth to despair, we heard a rumble behind us.  Though we could not see through the suspended sand, it sounded like a large diesel engine, one perhaps powerful enough to move us past our predicament.  We exited our vehicle to wave the driver down, to beg for assistance. 

Those in our convoy acted in a similar manner, so there were many raised arms to greet our savior as he appeared out of the gloom.  Yes, it was a large frame, sturdy wheels and a raised driving platform: a tall dump truck.  We whooped with joy at the thought of rescue.

We were just as easily silence, however, as the truck rumbled up to the back of our convoy, moved right to avoid the trailing vehicles, then began to pass us.  Those who had been passed dropped their arms, dejected, sure that we would not receive help this day.

As the climbed back into their vehicles, the truck advanced to the front of our line and rejoined the correct side of the road.  As it reached the dune which blocked our path it slowed, and with a whine of its brakes and a release of exhaust, it came to a crunching halt.

A long moment passed as we waited to see the driver’s next move.  He climbed down form the truck’s cab, and without saying a word, moved through the dusty air to the back of the truck.  He climbed the chassis and released the hatch.  It screeched and clamored downwards.  Silence followed.

Thought he air was still thick, we could make out human forms emerging from the back of the truck.  Ragged men, in dusty, worn jumpsuits.  Their skin was made leathery and thick by the harshness of the wind, their faces were lined with deep canyons which were the result of days spent squinting against the sun, the dust, and the sand. Without saying a word, they dismounted the back of the truck, and assembled on the road. 

They each carried a shovel.  In number, they were over thirty.  Silently, they began shoveling the sand away from the road.

A slight wind began as they pursued their work, but they did not uttered a word.  Nor did we.  The only sound to be heard was the scraping of shovel and the falling of sand.

When the job was complete, they rentered the truck, like automata, like ghosts.  Their eyes were dull.  It was difficult to distinguish their features, though as the hatch was being shut they looked at us in our eyes.  The noise of the truck’s latch echoed to the back of the convoy, and sent a shiver up our spine.

The driver again climbed into the cab, and the engine sputtered then rumbled to a start.  The wheels whined, and the truck moved off into the distance.  When it vanished into the murk, we were awakened, as from a dream or from a spell.  The truck, no doubt, advanced onwards, and our host later told us that trucks like these roam the desert clearing roads, often without human contact for weeks at a time. 

Saturday, August 29, 2009

The hat salesman who hid his wares all over town

The Atlas of Curiosities: Part 40

“You look as if you could use a hat!”

We started.  Where did the voice come from?  We turned around.

“A hat!” Said a tall, thin man.  “A hat! A hat? Nothing to fear!”

He began circling us quickly, jotting notes in a small notebook.  “Your size?” he said, craning his neck to the side, “No matter!  I’ll estimate!  I have just the hat!  The chapeau if you will.”

He ran off down the road.  Along the way he poked his head into various nooks and crannies: glancing into mailboxes, looking through bushes.  We ran after him, checking where he had checked.

“Hands off the merchandise!” he said, looking over his shoulder. In each place we looked we found some form of headgear.  A top hat, a bowler, a cap, or a beret.

Ahead of us, the man was climbing into a tree, which was just beginning to show the year’s first buds. He reached into a bird’s nest, disturbed its inhabitants.

“Pardon!” he exclaimed. “Excuse me!”

He produced a fedora out of the nest, and leapt back down onto the street.

“And here we have it,” he said with a grandiose air.  He was slightly out of breath.

He handed over he hat and held his hand out, apparently for remuneration.  When he received it, he walked off briskly, bowing to anyone he met and remarking upon their headgear.  Everyone in town, we noticed, was adorned with lovely, perfectly fitting hats.

The woman whose feet never touched ground

Atlas of Curiosities: Part 39

In the village, we were told, there was something to see.  We were brought to a certain hut, in which, we were told, was sleeping a middle-aged woman. 

“What is special about her that we have been asked to witness?” we asked.

“When she walks,” we were told, “Her feet are always a finger’s-width above the ground.”

We were ushered on to other things, and thus can’t give an account as to whether or not this was true.

The old butcher and his late wife

The Atlas of Curiosities: Part 38

Arriving in town we were met by a meandering young man who asked if we had a moment to help him.  It was early morning, and there was no one else awake, let alone on the street.  We agreed, and we followed him through the brightening mist to the town square. Once there, he led us to an old iron park bench which was stationed underneath an old-fashioned street lamp.  He paused and pointed to the bench, upon which we could now make out the form of a slight old man curled up asleep.

“It’s my grandfather,” the young man whispered.

We inquired of the young man how exactly we were expected to remedy this situation, which we found exceedingly odd.  The older gentleman was not by any means a hobo or a vagrant.  On the contrary, he was well dressed, wearing silk pajamas and a sleeping cap, after the custom of this area.  He did not seem uncomfortable.

“I have to get him back to his shop,” the young man told us. He began to step towards his sleeping grandfather.  He paused then, and motioned for us to take hold of the feet.

Lifting the snoozing old gentleman, we carried him across the town square and into the entryway of a small butchers shop, where we laid him across a row of chairs.

“Grandfather!” the boy hissed.  He jabbed the old man lightly in the ribs.  “It’s morning!”

The old man woke and rubbed his eyes.  With looking around or acknowledging our presence, he hobbled into the back room, presumably to change out of his pajamas.

“This is….ordinary?” we asked, trying to inquire into the nature of the situation without offending the young man.

“Now it is,” he said.

He told us that his grandfather had been waking up in various locations throughout town for a number of months, and that his father had assigned him the duty of seeking the dozing patriarch and returning him to his place of work each morning.  We asked him if the old man was prone to sleepwalking, and the young man told us that as far as he could tell, that was “Not exactly true.”

Well, we asked him, what could it be then?  The young man sighed heavily and rubbed his hand along the back of his neck.  “You promise not to laugh?”  We promised. 

“Last night, I locked his door,” the young man said. ” And I put a door under the handle.  And I locked the kitchen door and the main door to the house. He could not have comes out that way.”

“Then?”

“Well,” he continued.  “My grandmother recently passed away.  She was a large woman.  Much bigger than my grandfather.  When they shared a bed, she took up the majority of it, and he had only a small sliver.  Before she died, though, she kept complaining that my grandfather was keeping her awake all night.  Because she outweighed him, we thought she was delusional, or suffering from dementia, because she could have simply pushed him out of bed if there had been a problem.  She certainly pushed him around when he was awake.”

The boy chuckled at his joke, then his face quickly darkened.

“Right before she died, though, she told me something very strange.  She told me that my grandfather flew in his sleep.”

“Flew?” we asked.

“Yes,” he said.  He nodded earnestly.  “She said he flew every night just when the stars came out, and that he would lift out of the bed and bring the covers with him.  She said that she had to stay up all night just to pull him back down, and she said she was afraid that one night she would miss his grabbing ankle and he’d fly right out the window.”

He looked at his feet.

“I laughed at her,” he said.  “I said, ‘Oh gram. Don’t tease with me.’”

“But you know what?” he said.

We waited.

“When I went into his room this morning, the sheets were all off the bed.”

The old man emerged from the back room, wearing a butcher’s smock.

“Hello my boy,” he said in a warm voice. “I just had the most marvelous dream.  I floated around town as light as a feather, and seeing only by starlight, I looked into chimneys all over town.”

Saturday, August 22, 2009

The man who lived only with mannequins

The Atlas of Curiosities: Part 37
He was the keeper of a warehouse of window models, plastic human beings who wore clothes well, like toys, or like ghouls, depending on your point of view.  His point of view was unique.  The sole man living in this warehouse, and a worker here since a very young age, he had never seen the outside world.  His universe consisted of the four walls of his small room and the wider warehouse, with its towering floor to ceiling shelves of dark metal.  He knew only the cavernous roof which capped the chamber… and the mannequins.

There were no other workers to dissolve his solitude, nor did he receive visitors from the outside.  Deliveries arrived without accompaniment, and shipments were sent in the same manner.  He kept company only with the rows upon rows of stationary and static human beings, in various poses, with whom he was forced to establish a strange camaraderie.

The shelves were lined with one blank stare after the next, and the man walked up and down each day, greeting them by name, asking them questions, even quarreling with them.  Nearly every mannequin was taller than he was, and given their position on the metal shelves, they towered over him in a manner that was almost demeaning. Still, he moved back and forth through the shelves, roaming in order to keep up the inventory which existed in his mind. His footsteps echoed, and the words that he mumbled to himself were lost int he vastness of his enclosure.

His isolation had become so extreme, we heard, that the shock of true human contact might cause him great distress.  As a result, we prepared a written message which our host graciously slipped under the warehouse door.

Late that night, a reply came written in what our host described as a childishly formed Mandarin script.  In translation, it read:

“No one is home.”

Our host sighed at reading this.

“Imagine,” our host said. “Not a single time has one of his jokes been met with laughter.  At his touch there is no reaction, not even revulsion, to signal that he is not alone.”

“Why doesn’t he leave,” we wondered.

“Perhaps he might pose the same question of you,” our host mused.

We laughed.

Monday, August 17, 2009

The leaves that bore an ancient script

The Atlas of Curiosities: Part 36
We heard rumors in neighboring villages that a certain type of leaf was being saved, and indeed, upon entering several homes in the area we found quite a few bundles of this variety of leaf tied together with twine, ribbon, or thread. We were told that the leaves, which were in various conditions, were prized for the unique way in which their veins were woven throughout their flesh.

We maintained a curiosity about these leaves, and were thus intrigued to find that upon departing the lower regions farmland and heading into the foothills of the mountainous region we encountered many travelers carrying these same leaves. We inquired time and again into their purpose, but were rebuffed by shrugs and unknowing smiles.  We resolved to follow these villagers, who were growing more numerous as we ascended the mountainside.

Soon, the trickle of travelers fed into a steady stream, and we observed that a sort of queue had formed up the side of the mountain.  We joined this queue in the hopes of discerning the meaning of the leaves.  While we were there, an old woman who spoke our language agreed to discus with us what she knew.

“The veins of the leaves,” she told us, “are written in the script of a forgotten language.  It is perfectly legible and beautiful rafted, but we cannot read it.  The people of this area believe it to be so miraculous that they save each leave in order to have it translated into our tongue.”

“All of these leaves have writing?” we asked.

“Yes,” she said.  We followed her up the hillside to a small hut.  Inside, we were told, lived an old man who was the sole keeper of the ancient script borne upon the leaves.

Finally entering the hut, we surprised the old man by revealing that we had no leaves.  He looked up from where he was seated.  Around him were piles upon piles of dried leaves.  Discarded, perhaps, or perhaps kept for a particular poetic or philosophical quality.  The man wore thick glasses over pin prick eyes, and he moved slowly but deliberately to look at us.  He beckoned us to approach, and we gathered that he was not used to receiving visitors bearing our style of dress or mannerisms. When he found that he had nothing for him to translate, he began to wave us away, but since we were accompanying the old woman, he indulged us by hearing a few questions which she translated.

“What do the leaves say?” we asked.  “What is their message for us? From where does their meaning come?  Are they from God?”

The man laughed and answered in his own language.

The old woman translated.

“They are translatable,” she said. “But it is mostly nonsense.”

The centipede that lived in a man’s mouth and curled around his tongue as he spoke

The Atlas of Curiosities: Part 35

It would be correct to call the man a story teller, as every night he was in the local tavern explaining this or that or regaling his audience with some tale of triumph or misfortune.  We noticed, however, a number of children in the audience, as well as some people from out of town, who did not speak the language.  We drew closer in an attempt to see why they watched him so closely. 

In his mouth was a long black centipede which glistened with his spittle.  It curled around his town as he spoke, and during dramatic pauses, stood up and bared its fangs at the listeners.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

“The nebula is where stars are born”

The Atlas of Curiosities: Part 34

“The nebula is where stars are born.”  Knowing this made the man feel peaceful, so he wrote it everywhere.  We understood this impulse, as we had a similar practice ourselves.  “The nebula is where stars are born.”  That was why he was in jail.  He had written it all over town.  Upon walls.  On cars, statues.  He wrote it on the trunks of trees.  Now he was in jail for it.  We were let in to see him. The walls of his cell were covered in his chicken scratch.  He was smiling.

The city that turned black and white

The Atlas of Curiosities: Part 33

The street was black.  The air was white.

It was the middle of the city and the burning of the rice fields had started just outside of town.  Also, the cars had been moving, back and forth, since we could remember.  Now the city was black and white.

You could hear the clamour of traffic through the dreariness of the monotone city.  The building were black.  The spaces between them were white.

It sounded like the braying of animals being driven through the city.  And in some senses it was.  We had made them out of metal, but they were still beasts of burden.  The street was black.  The cars were white.

Despite the noises that crept through the gloom, other things were silenced by our altered perception.  Footsteps were silent.  The flights of birds were silent.

The footsteps were black and the birds were black Where the footsteps fell it was white.  The birds flew through white.

We looked across the river and began to cross a bridge.  The left side of the river was black.  The right was white.  We tried to discern where the sun should be.  The sun was black.  The sky was white.

The city was black. We were white.  The city was white.  We were black.  There was no color.  There was no sound.  There was just white and black.  There was smoke.  And there was silence.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

The introduction of a compelling invention

The Atlas of Curiosities: Part 32

In the remote step of Kyrgyzstan, we came upon a yurt that was made in the style of the nomads of this area.  It was built of a wooden frame and covered in skins and tarps and was designed to be easily dissembled and moved.  Outside, a herd of goats congregated, bowing their heads against a strong wind that whipped up dust and sand.

We pushed aside the flap that covered the primary entrance to the dwelling, and it fluttered noisy in the gale.  Once inside, however, things were still, and the yurts own greeted us with a warm cup of tea.

Through our host, he told us something incredible.

“I am glad you came,” he said.  “I have been working some time on this.  It has taken me a very long time to gather all of the parts that I need.  I had to travel many days to get some of the necessary pieces.  When I show it to you, you must be very courageous, because it can be difficult to witness what you are about to see.”

He went to the far side of the tent and moved a tarp to reveal a wooden box with two holes cut out.  From the interior, a glow emerged, clearly bright, but small, as if from a point source.

“What is it?” we asked.

“It is a box,” he said.  We laughed.  He did not.

“What does it do?” we asked.

“It allows you to see yourself as if you were someone else,” he said solemnly, and he blew into one of the holes.  A puff of dust came out the other.  He sat back, looked at us, and raised his eyebrows.

“Do you want to try it?” he asked.

There was a long silence.

“I will warn you” he said.  “It will reveal things that are not expected.”

“Like what?” we asked.

“Well,” he said.  He sipped his tea.

“Well,” he said again.  “For one thing, it will show you how strange you look and sound.”

We laughed.  He did not.