Matthias J. Beebe

Bang a gong, that's how you get service downtown. I carry a miniature Tibetan gong around my neck. It associates with all the other bells I've strung around myself—Excuse me—"Oh waiter, a bottle of your freshest Calistoga please, and a cup of wheat grass soup and three breaths of cinnamon flavor in my respirator, thank you."—GONNGGGG! I bang the gong to say thanks, that's the chic way to do it—no it isn't rude; try as you might you can't really be rude anymore. I don't mean that it's impossible to find a way to be rude, it's just that when you do implement some rudeness it always seems to go unheard. The way I see it, these days, one can't holler loud enough, even if with a bullhorn. Of course bullhorns are illegal; you can't very well have 47 billion people mouthing their rudeness through bullhorns—the Gong? The gongs all right, it's discrete and very fashionable.

After lunch I usually take in a digital movie while I waitin' line for the E-rail. The inside lenses of my sunglasses display moving pictures and the ear-chip I had implanted brings in the hi-fi. I don't so much mind the E-rail when I have my movie glasses with me.

I like old flics, clandestine cinema. If I get in a people-jam I just tune out. I'm hooked up on-line so I can tune in any time I want to, say, a digitally re-mastered Casablanca, (where everyone has manners, mind you) or to, say, the set of `Lawrence of Arabia' (A setting far removed from downtown crowds.) I like how in the black and white days no place was overcrowded. I really think I'm trying to escape my own time in any way I can.

I can stand the E-rail; I have no other choice, its standing room only. When it's finally my turn to board I switch off my movie and file in. The few seats in the cabin are already taken up with the elderly and the crippled. The pallor of a woman with feverish eyes tells me she's going to faint. She is old and crinkled. She's as thin and crooked as the cane she leans on. Her eyes hunger for a place to sit, perhaps she desires to plop herself in a puddle of old bones, right in the aisle, but she can't—remember this coach is standing room only.

The door to the cabin gaps, a relentless torrent of human bodies rush the train. They flood like water. The old woman has no elbowroom. The weight of bodies presses on my chest. I try to shove—hyperventilate—see stars. I think about the old woman and how she will be crushed. The cabin shivers, a wave of grunts ululate—the sound linebackers make when they butt. I join the blind pushing backs. I push the flood of bodies as I am pushed. It's almost fun. "Away you fucks," I scream. For the sake of the old woman I put my soul into it.

The incoming herd breaks back into the E-rail depot like an ocean wave on a shore. Then the cabin door snaps shut, damming them all, and we accelerate to three hundred and twenty seven miles and hour.

I check on the crinkled old woman with the cane. She has found the lap of a stranger. It's a maudlin scene, her on his lap like that, something Norman Rockwell would have painted.

In twenty minutes we race past one hundred miles of bumper-to-bumper on the freeway (the word freeway has really come to mean something other, hasn't it?) I keep my movie-glasses in the fold of my robe so they don't get stolen. In certain circles it's very fashionable to ware a robe. These days I like to wear a saffron robe with my shaved head. I have a lot of bells and seashells that I keep around my neck, and of course I have my gong and a little hammer to make it sound. I don't go in for all that fancy modern dress, the liquid jell shirts, the patterns of electronically swirling plaid, all those cargo-pocket decals with advertisements sown in. I enjoy dressing modestly, really, I do.

As we thunder over what used to be a bird sanctuary I watched an orgy of teenagers, adorned in Adventure wear, with the cargo-pocket decals, base jump off a radio tower. Their shoots display sewn-in advertisements for Adventure. Adventure, in case you haven't heard, is the company that just bought Borneo. (They’re building an adventure theme park over there that's going to make Disney look like a mouse.)

I feel fine on my ride home. I'm moving up in the world, yes I am. I used to live in a closet, a walk-in closet of about forty square feet, which I accessed via attic crawl space. I used to drop down into my room via a little trap door in the closet ceiling, that way I never had to bother the other tenants in the apartment. I pretended that I had a studio-flat without windows. The first of every month I slipped five grand under the closet door for rent. It went like that for five years, honest. Now, thanks to my new job, I can finally afford to rent my very own room. I live with a very considerate Vietnamese family of five in a two-bedroom job. I can really stretch out now. Say I want to draw a bath after work, well, sometimes I can, that is if it's not occupied and there's still some hot water in the tank. And I don't mind riding the E so much anymore, or even going downtown, just as long as I have a whole room for myself to sprawl in when I get home.

You know how crowded it can get on the E, like you can never get to a bathroom and even if you could you wouldn't want to; no one ever seems to be around to clean them. Well, this kid right behind me just screamed his head off about how he's going to burst if he doesn't get to the John. So everyone attempted to move a little to let him pass, but there isn't room. We are sardines in here. So what the mob in the coach did is surf the kid toward the bathroom, they passed him overhead. Well ...worst case scenario ...you get the picture. When the E makes my stop about half the train bolts for the door, no shit...

At home I melt into a puddle. I find I can't get out of bed after these outings. Of course, I had to go. It was my day to go. Tuesday, that's my day. When the C.T.C. (Commission for Traffic Control) stamps a day of the week next to your SS you better not go out any other day. You know all this, but I can't stress how important it is to follow the rules. My cousin got caught in a downtown district on a Friday. It's illegal for him to be on the street on a Friday; he's a Saturday's child. The cops arrested him and stuffed him in prison. For two months they kept him locked in a shoebox underground. "You DON'T want to see the inside! If you want to know what it's like in them cells they cram you in go lay down in a coffin." he said. I believe him; he went a little nuts down there in that space they kept him in, all because he went downtown a day early—scares the hell out of me, literally.

Bully the mob, that's what you got to do to get anywhere, bang a gong. Today I saw a man stepping on the heads of a crowd that spilled out from the door of a government-owned abortion clinic. The doctors inside are notoriously slow. The man, like everyone, was in a rush. It pained me to see him bully those women that way. I feel for them. If they don't get serviced today they'll have to come back next week. The C.T.C. makes no exceptions; after all, the pregnant women of tomorrow are waiting.

You are everyone, that's what the streets say. That's what you hear when you step out your door all crisp in the face your day. From the sky screaming with jet trails you hear it. In ten thousand pairs of heels clicking on pavement you hear it. In the roar of tires on the superhighway you hear it. From anxious streetlights on every corner waiting exasperated you hear it, and you see it. You see the space above your head has been purchased. You see models dance in holographic advertisement in the air, their images projected from an invisible web of laser cameras; robotic gargoyles roost with pigeons in the dizzy fight s of Plexiglas towers that rise for half a mile. Above your head the sky is blotted out. What you see are no horizons; you are nobody.

The incessant shoving at your back as you try to make your way down the street sure helps you feel like nobody, that and the fact that no amount of shoving and gong banging will clear your path; anyone is everyone's obstacle. Why, just this morning I was shoved rather forcefully just ell w my shoulder blade. Snarling I whirled on a cop who was in the act of shoving me again with the nasty cusp of his club. He said if I didn't get a move on he was going to give me a ticket for walking too slow. And do you know that during rush hour that copper can be trammeled to death on his own beat if he doesn't keep his own goddamn pace! I've seen it in the papers, haven't you?

What I do, like right now, when I'm collapsed in a heap of tiredness on my bed, I pull myself up into the lotus position and let my mind wander free and clear. It's very difficult to do unless I first crank up the volume on my electric static-maker (I have one of those archaic devices that amplifies recordings of rain, streams, ocean surf, spawning sounds of the now extinct humpbacks, whatnot.) Also, I hide my ears under high-grade earphones, the kind you see in use on airport runways. This way I drown the sound. And what noise! Five Vietnams in my house, a twenty-lane superfreeway two blocks away, cargo jets tearing the blue out of the sky somewhere beyond this plaster ceiling.

Another thing I do is finger the various sea shells that hang about my neck from a knotted rope of hair, deftly I negotiate their radiating patterns and think of cool, watery deeps where no people have yet lived. I try to imagine a silence as deep as an ocean.

Right now I try to imagine a silence as deep as an ocean. Instead searing images race. I want deep waters in my consciousness, nothing more. Instead a theater door explodes inward. What plays inside my mind? An old black and white documentary about the tempestuous life cycle of ants reproducing a mile a minute, so fast they fill the frame, eat the camera man, lay eggs in the very film that caught their image of escape into the theater of men via hot projection reel. Trillions of mating insects squeal with pleasure as they foam out onto the streets. I climb a flagpole as a wave of biomass forms, crests, breaks, overtakes streets everywhere.

Oh, how my mind does wander! I think about my job. I try not to, but it is with me. It's such a simple job, not the kind you must take home with you. I don't really know why I think about it. I manage the operation of an underground fresh air facility. I work eighteen hours straight, one day a week. Tuesday that's my day. The rest of the time I'm on welfare like everyone else.

I'm a botanist. I grow a hearty ivy that produces copious amounts of oxygen. The oxygen my plants produce is pumped out to the mobs on the streets; in turn dirty air is siphoned from the outside and pumped into my greenhouse.

I wear an aqualung when I tend my subterranean garden. The hot, steamy air down there is as thick as margarine; I cut through it. I can hardly see what I'm doing. I scrape my head on low ceilings and bump into the naked light bulbs that pipe in light. After work my hands still carry the smell of manure. I don't mind. I'm proud to have a job that allows me to work in the dirt.

It's an important job. Without the vents from subterranean greenhouses the Downtown's would choke to death on tailpipe smoke, and in the low spaces, where the foot traffic jams up in tunnels beneath overhanging buildings, there is some danger that people will breathe up all the air.

There is one fantastic experience that my work has afforded me, one of those once-in-a-lifetime chances to do something unforgettable, the kind of experience that stays with a person, lifts them up from time to time—times like this, home from a long Tuesday, legs stuffed in lotus position just trying to unwind, get to relaxing and thinking about that one fantastic day in my life—sometimes enough to levitate my soul up out of this room, up so high I can see the roofs of all the buildings fall off horizons in every direction, and roads below flowing like the live veins of some great organism, and tired streetlights melding together, and beyond to the stars that from my bedroom window are not allowed to shine, but that I know must certainly exist.

My name was randomly drawn from a pool of fifty-eight million applicants. Looking back on it now I realize that the whole thing most certainly was not rigged; I've never had any connections in the academic world. I was nothing but a face at the back of classroom auditoriums. When I applied for the drawing I thought, "Why bother, these things are always rigged. The son or daughter of a powerful family will win." I couldn't believe it when my school announced that I had won. Lady Luck had smiled on a sub-par student of botany in undergraduate school—me! I was the guy you tier about in passages of gossip, down whispering halls, the lucky bastard that was going to get to spend three days in paradise.

There's a fold of land in the Tellis Valley that does not feel the weight of the human foot, and neon lights don't rule the night. The only thing there that rushes is the wind. Cargo jets don't rip apart the sky. The ground doesn't quake with the passing of freight. Holographic advertisements don't play in the air. Buildings don't lean over streets. There are no streets, no corners. The earth does not crawl with humans.

The reason I went to the Tellis Valley Reserve? I was supposed to study a particular strain of hardy weed that carpets the ground, and the soil it grows in. I was supposed to gather data, take photos and write a paper. "This is a great opportunity to study," the university people said. It was a simple, stupid assignment they gave me. As soon as I arrived I forgot all about it.

What I did was squint in the sunlight. I watched scrub oaks wave in a breeze. I admired the natural arrangement of granite boulders, how they seemed to clump together like live families.

On my second morning in the Reserve I stole off to climb a small hill, from its untrammeled summit nature spread out before me. My eyes roamed in every direction. I was alone!

Silence settled down on me, real silence. The whole land was full of silence, so much silence it was crazy. I felt so odd. I thought `wow, this is what it's like to go crazy.' I could hear myself breathing; I could hear my heart beating, most of all I could hear myself thinking. I felt like a self. I guess I can't explain it. It's the feeling one has when one is alone in a great, open space.

I guess I'm somewhat of a celebrity now. People think I'm brave, or crazy. I tell them that I'm no different than anybody else—a little more fortunate, that's all. I tell them about how I spent all day up there, all by myself. I tell about how dark it was when the sun went down, and how the stars came out. I tell them my thoughts got very loud, and how terrifying that was at first. I tell them that I could think very clearly, rather loudly, and for a very long time. I tell them how crazy I was, how I just sat and thought and thought about thinking, and how exciting it was, and how after a time I stopped being afraid. I tell them that I did get a little lonely, but it was a good kind of a lonely feeling. I try to explain that loneliness feels different in a place where there is no evidence of other humans. Thinking about the time I had a greedy gulp of this planet all to myself help's me meditate. Right now I concentrate on how I felt up there, and with my headphones on I can almost shut out the cargo jets thundering by. I can almost, just almost ...think.