Monger of 11.78

Monger of 11.78

The room tinkled in the light pouring down the center of the hexagonal tunnel. The proprietress did look up slantwise from behind her curtain of black and silver hair from her perch down in the chains to see the man enter. Her tunnel of wares hung three levels down the center of the mercantile block. Her neighbor to the left hunkered in his cage and sold lamps made apparently of twine glued to twisted plastic and lit with a variety of yellowed-light low-wattage emission bulbs. To the right was silk handkerchiefs and scarves and bolts of color. Just above her was the sound of liquid and oxygen bubbles, but you’d have to enter into the space further to know what Pax Lumini was selling. All around the hexagon was the possibility of experiencing or purchasing something.  It was possible to enter on a wheelchair or on foot, and descend through the shop receiving information available on items directly to the screen you carried, or wore, or on the edge of the lift device. Hen wanted only one thing. He felt he would know it when he saw it. The way to ask her was unclear to him. He could only surmise her. Her role in the matter of exchange was possibly to purchase items from afar, or hang them in her choice of visual display. Hen unfolded and folded his arms, then took a deep breath as he mounted the lift pad and moved through her tunnel of metallic and crystal ornamentation. His calves were solidly rooted but his eyes darted out in furtive expectation. Her arms seemed to pause with purpled iridescent tips in the frames she kept around her skin. He tried to memorize the artifacts devoid of broadcast details revealing on his screen. Her blue antique typewriter did not connect, but the orchids lit with a grow-light did, and the tiny drawers with neat hardware labels that lined her walls were behind heavy encryption. Her eyes however seemed to recognize him completely, and simply avoided forming a memory.  He felt that she must know that this was day 413 of his moments knowing she existed without crossing over that divide and inviting any deeper retrospective. Outside the glass walls he plummeted past, the rivulets and rings of green blurred. He descended expertly to the bottom of the vertical mall, and exited as if coming to a stop at the bottom of a ski slope. He felt the rush of chemistry that tugged his heart and then his hands; sometimes one and sometimes the other. This sensation he had come to know only when moving through past her was more powerful than anything he’d ever known. It was section 3.28. The whole area was commercial, surrounded by pits of fire and trash in steel crucibles and ceramic chute-manifolds that de-natured any toxins as the smoke rose, so that inside the city wall there was actually a verdant labyrinthine landscaping obscuring the pits and smoke, leading to a triple ring of water that was filled with lilies and quietly leaping fish.  There were mostly employees that took up the apartments handily that hung from the great arches of the sector with long gravity elevators that endless moved on silent tracks. He imagined she lived there. Exiting the mall ground-level, he bought some vanilla ice cream from the sweets cart that was always parked outside. This was his favorite five minutes of every day. He’d recorded the sounds, and recreated the entire descent to play at home in sector 11.78, using the old bone-grid names for what was once two hundred miles of desolation. Pretty soon the foot traffic thinned. Almost done with the work day.

He was pretty sure he smelled like fish guts. He left his truck parked about six blocks back from her mall. The sector was packed with midday shoppers. it wasn’t more expeditious to use a ground vehicle. He’d only come in with the 3-ton tank that had a big 15” diameter fish hose in order to restock the rings. His gigs took him all over the province. This was a B-level job. A-level jobs took him up into the mountain sector stocking fish-ponds in every gated resort, and communal enclave where simulated fly-fishing rivers needed actual leaping trout. Hen would spend his nights tying & painting lures to sell them too, with reels of clear & colored line and snippets of feathers from pheasants & brahmin roosters, sex-linked red and zebra chickens, brown sparrow fluff, and artificial raven wing, creating wriggling lures and bobs. The gift shops would stock them giving him a decent percentage and he’d insert his engineered stock of high end bass into the community pool. Sector 11.78 was coastal, mainly desalinated bay. The breaks were obsidian and pumice. Not long ago of memory the fault had blew. The lost generations under the lava vanished, and then the contamination of thermophilic diseases, and radiation from the inevitable human error had rendered he entire area questionable. The affluent fled to inland mountains. It was only the recent time that had Hen among a few others had undertook carefully re-entering what had been a toxic situation. His tanks were pure. He brought in the ecologically unstable waters into his underground cave, remediated it, rehabilitated it, drew it up and grew modified fish from mail-ordered special spat. That was his model. He was meticulous about his arrays of instruments keeping temperature and nutrients and particles at exact levels. As he turned into his driveway and reconnected his Solarwave to the charging module, he mused again over her. Those eyes sent him into otherness he’d never knew existed. He was pretty sure he could be sterile. He’d never had thought of himself as an attractive man much less a proliferator. He thought his jaw was too small, his brow to large and his eyes reminded him of the painful half moon of a tuna’s. He worked instead. He closed the portal gate, entered into the air-chamber, stepped into his shower. Every part of him was always dirty, and sweaty and heat-blasted. The thought of her pearl arms and blue-dark curtain of hair cascading over her ribs, and over her back caused the surge in his heart he thought might be almost concerning. He finished and moved into his rhythm of evening work. There was less need for sleep. He had his rows of tiny drawers, instruments against a pegboard, trays of tiny modeling paints, feathers in glass canisters, an old electric fan that whirred. He marked on the calendar that she had been there. At times weeks passed without her store Camina being open. He wondered if she was off on another continent, browsing like he was through the uncatalogued detritus of ages, memories that avoid becoming the stats on loved debris. The rings sparkling in her shop looked, he imagined, like expensive junk jewelry but there were cut emeralds on 14karat bands, and zirconium inlaid into platinum and none less unique then the next, which she’d hung on dripping silver LEDs so that shooting stars seemed to fall with him as he passed by.  It could be that she’d been bicycling along channels and tracing her fingers along the leathered arms of old hand carved dinner chairs as she worked her slimly curving hips through the piles of heavy antiquities up to the lit counters looking for perfect silver chains and dainty gold rings set with a single diamond that perhaps once tied someone to someone else. She herself, wore none.  He’d only found her by the purest chance. One of his stock fish was an interloper. It had come up in the cave. It was when he’d sliced it open to find a what appeared to be a locket, heart-shaped with no chain or key but locked tight. It fit in his palm. He’d turned it over. On the back, it simply said. ‘Let it go,’ which of course, he could not. He could think of nothing else and wanted to at least find a chain fit for what revealed itself to be silver and steel metal work and simple beauty.  Suddenly he heard the chimes pick up. A cacophony of sound swept across distances. He’d set it up so that through each tone he’d know what direction wind came. This off-bay breeze spoke of sudden tide shifts. He raced out the lock, out through the portal battened his windows with reinforced steel shutters, dropped his cave door through pulleys. A massive storm seemed to have come up through the middle of the day and now landed against his rocks. Large drops of rain stung his face. The tin sounds of the chimes grew into a battleground of wordless speech. He worked the crank, moved silently against the scene and then reentered his reinforced ranch that now looked more like a fire-blackened bunker. He lay on his bed and listened to the wind and the moving of metal as chimes and loose objects hurtled across the brow of his home. He was restless. He got up and put the locket back in his pocket. How it wore on him that he couldn’t move through the screen, through the wall of stars, and skid to a stop and wordlessly place the locket next to her typewriter. He opened the door to the hallway that led down into the fish cave operation. The walls were already cooler. He felt for the lights which were off and settled his eyes on the green sea-glass generator lighting that came up in soft strips downward. He descended metal ramps, steel corrugated steps hearing a watery lashing that seemed unfamiliar. Time now paced his heart beats with each step. He felt a panic rising in his throat as he considered losses. His most unfamiliar sensation and distant memory of fear and pain rippled across his entire body and disappeared. He cast open his tanks. They sat in a quiet three-thousand square foot expanse. He looked with muted joy across their potency. There was movement as they swirled and waited. His black work boots, and thick black jeans mixed in with the dark. Only his hands and face glowed in the milky-green light. He remembered he was hungry still, but wanted to check the cave door. He turned into a darker hallway and moved with his hand tracing the wires he’d laid for himself. He harnessed himself at the end of the ledge, and locked in at the side of a damp cliff, letting himself down with only a light on his forehead glowing. He was a bead of light falling into a midnight sea. When he hit stone, he unhooked and moved along a carved path. The mouth ahead roared. He saw turbulence but the level was holding. A thought occurred to him that he could just toss the worry away with the locket in this underground torrent, and the water howled. He imagined briefly how he’d react if it burst the wall. Momentarily he thought he saw a wall of water come toward him. In several long strides, he was hooked back in, and levitating. It was only fear. In that moment he considered selling the business, and moving from the sea to look into horsemanship, but there was no wall of water. He got back up to the ledge, breathed out, and closed up the descent hatch. Silently he fixed himself tea, and a sandwich, and started tying lures again. Each one he’d paint a tiny heart on it now, for her. He wondered if this was as close as he’d ever come to the old love stories .