A hazel planet reckons through the universe. A dashed line shows its trajectory through space and time. This little planet, with a dark, obsidian core, will hurtle within only a couple light years of another planet – this one, violet, and growing. At a precise moment, the little hazel planet with a dark center will emit a package, and this package will progress on its own trajectory, perfectly perpendicular to the trajectory of the planet from which it popped. Some time later, it will crash into the surface of the violet planet, causing large pieces of violet jetsam, which – by the way – have the consistency of the marshmellows in breakfast cereal, to rise up, hesitate and then fall down again onto the surface. A man will approach the package, which has ruptured diagonally across its tough rubbery casing, reach inside, pull away many crumpled layers of cellophane, and remove a small cylindrical plastic item the color of maraschino cherries. The tearaway clear plastic label bears some words in Danish, which the man doesn’t understand, so he tears it away and pulls off the tarty red plastic that envelopes the center of the package. Underneath that plastic is perhaps the most intricately carved and piquantly smelling decorative cheese the man has encountered for months.
...Up and down the length of the cheese are delicate columns with Doric signatures, giving the cheese a façade like a neoclassical temple. Between these columns he sees a hotch-potch of characters from different traditions. Porky the pig’s simple eyes peer up at a gory and scouring Alexander the Great, whose cocked spear is pinched by a sultry diva of 1940’s Hollywood. Under her half-closed eyelids one can see that she is stealing a glance at an emaciated figure sitting cross-legged (is this Ghandi? Or the hunger artist?) on the back of the alligator from Peter Pan. All this between only two of the dozen or so columns that run up the sides of the cheese. The man sniffs at it, noting the lilac color of its scent and the equal elements of torpor and anger in its aroma. There is something of the bitterly reformed drunk about this cheese, and it appeals to the man, so he drops it whole into his filthy rucksack.
The hazel planet is only one of the decorative cheese-emitting planets. There is also a very fast moving emerald planet that fires out a chain of miniature goat cheeses, like petite Chevre, except that when you cut into them they chime a unique tone. A crystal clear planet, which is only in an appropriate dimension on an on-again, off-again basis, slings out thin sheets of blue cheese. These porous sheets of cheese can be lain over a particular page of the Oxford English Dictionary (alas, only one of the 23,000 different editions, and no one knows which), and – by reading the words that appear through the holes in the cheese – read a smutty story set in Pericles’ time. One especially accursed cheese emitter fires out a gargantuan and sweet chestnut-coloured cheese. Once launched, for all its speed and mass, it cannot escape the planet’s strong gravitational field, and falls back to the planet’s surface, bespoiling it and lending it the colour of ground lamb meat.
The universe is not limited to cheese emitters, of course. One star, in fact the only body that could truly be said to be “not moving”, that is, at the very centre of the cosmos, the forever unflinching core of reality, radiates a light that caresses the atmospheres of the planets it encounters, creating an effect in the planet’s sky best described as “silvery hounds at the chase”. From a nebula that swirls around the outer gates of the universe comes a gift basket with assorted small liquor vials and jams and mustards. Granted most of these delicately concocted victuals are smashed into a stew studded with glass shards after planetary impact; recipients generally laugh at this kind-hearted nebulous salesman and dispose of the mess quickly. In fact, it’s what’s expected.
Earnestness like this, and a hearty good-will, are the norm across the universe. As one planetary inhabitant put it: “If you weren’t born with ballerina shoes on your feet, you’d better not try tip-toeing through things all the time.” So long as every planet held its distance, trajectory and will at a sufficiently high value, there would be no troubles. Generosity and good intentions fill the vacuum of interpretation, like making a timely gaffe at a stilted dinner party (“I can’t really recognize my wife’s lap, you know”). This system worked, if failingly – thus the consternation when Ches intentionally misinterpreted things.
“I’m your brother, right, so why do you have to call me to come over and borrow a pancake-flipper?” This aggravated me because, first, we are not brothers, and second, I was borrowing his satellite dish attitude adjuster, not a pancake flipper.
He frowns. “What? You look like you smell something funny. Are you going to ask me what I had for dinner last night? Huh?”
“I didn’t even think about what I smell. And I don’t care what you ate last night.”
“Oh, because I thought you’d want to know what I had for dinner.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not what I ate.”
“What?”
“What I ate isn’t what I had for dinner.”
“Well, what did you eat?”
“That’s it. I’m not proud of it. I’d rather tell you what I had for dinner.”
“What did you have for dinner, then?”
“Nothing.”
“Great.”
“Do you want to know what I ate?”
“No. Does this attitude adjuster run on normal AC electrical supply, or do I need to do something special?”
“Now I’m not going to tell you.” Ches had a talent for closing his mind, and he was doing it now. He began making a world of trouble about scooping up a pile of styrofoam peanuts that were strewn across the table.
In our midst dozens of employees of the Mayflower Moving Company were lounging on box-tops and in corners of the room. Each carried on a lively narrative with pantomimed gestures and theatrical swoops.
“…rock steady. Rock steady! That’s what she said! So I sold it all on to the Asians, and it turns out she was right. It wasn’t rock steady. Merely corruptible.”
“…little hooks on the tips of his fingers, but I’m not sure that this would actually work. Neither am I entirely certain, well, let’s just say confident, then, that spiders have things like that…”
“…but it turns out Europeans don’t even eat peanut butter. So here’s my wife carrying around all these bottles of peanut butter all over Europe like a regular Johnny Peanutbutterseed..:”
Ches picks up and moves now and then, like a good American, but not because he has to, like most Americans. He’d lived in Canton, Smyrna, Roswell, Toledo, Athens and Montrose – any place with a name connected to antiquity. Once established, he’d consult the local printing press, turn out a few tons of fliers in pastel hues and plaster his signs up and down the community. Canton New Classical Society. Smyrna Rhetorical Guild. Roswell Ecloguic Team. Toledo Unreconstructed Hoplites. Athens Few Citizen-Philosophers. Montrose Templars. It was this last group that he was currently moving from, after newspapermen at the Montrose Weekly Sentinel began running pieces about the Templars’ efforts to obtain handicapped-parking passes for its members.
I love Ches because I love by-laws. It is the pseudo-legal science by which all things diffuse and ungovernable gain rights and procedures and process and motion and feelings and states. Take the room we sat in, an otherwise inhibited space on the plane of medium-sized town America. Countless organisations and scientists and technicians and buildings works practitioners could weigh in on the dimensions of this one, “ochre-colored by default” room. The damp beams and relaxing corners (not even 90 by 90 by 90 to begin with) suggest that the builders were polite and well-meaning professionals, but truly vulnerable to a whole range of liability claims. Take for instance this rule drawn directly from the manual for quality management for independent contractors (a regime that most builders pay lip service to): “…and the contractor shall document efforts to determine the provenance of contributing materials, the date of their production and source location, if and when these are not acquired or produced internally…”. Did the builders of this room follow this rule to the letter? No. And thusly do I love Ches.
He is still preoccupied with the styrofoam peanuts – the bounty of a civilization of lightweights.
Outside the rain has begun to fall. In the South, the rain doesn’t exactly fall so much as the Earth lifts up its wetness to God, and is spurned. Across the road a crumbling wall of burnt orange clay is glazed by water so that it looks like a radiator made out of gelatinous harm. And above it is a fringe of forest floor, which leans over with pine straw feelers and threatens to pitch down into the slimy clay channels. Pine trees sweat upwards, downwards, outwards in the rain – extending themselves in every direction during the sudden freedom of a thunderclap. The state highway frizzes like a Coca-Cola as afternoon traffic zips across it. The air fills with gravel and pick-up trucks.
“Will you come with me?”
“Of course I’ll come with you.” A woman shrieks from a passing car, as if to emphasize my point.
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