The usher is using a small flashlight to show people where their seats are. The way he wields it it’s not even a tool, but rather an extension of himself. He has one normal hand, and one lightbulb hand that exists to show people where to sit. In fact when someone approaches him to ask about something not related to sitting, “Pardon me, where are the restrooms?” he uses his lightbulb hand to point up the aisle, and then to the right. That’s not the use his lightbulb hand was intended for, but already he’s adapted. If he had an itch I’m sure he would scratch it using the warm red glow of his lightbulb hand. Later that night he finds himself frustrated as he tries to feed himself with it. Foiled by the lack of articulation in their lightbulb hands, his species will eventually die out, their bulbs fading, eventually, to permanent darkness.

Deaf folk, when they communicate by sign, use the same parts of their brains that hearing folk do when they communicate. So they say. I’ve tried it before just to see if it’s something that I can tap into, and I think I can feel something. In fact I feel the same thing when I try talking with my toes – that sense that I know what shapes to make with them for each phenome. There is only one correct position, and it’s not arbitrary. And the same thing applies to a few other body parts I’ve tried talking with, some of them internal. They don’t always have constructive things to say though, so I tend to keep my conversations to myself.

One thing I’ve noticed is that the mind is sticky, and it hesitates to cede control back to the mouth. This can be a distraction. I used to play Tetris at the office for hours every night just to deaden the day’s accumulated existential agony, and driving home afterward I would always see the cars as Tetris pieces. In my mind I devised strategies for fitting my car into the spaces between the other cars, and anticipated with satisfaction the feeling of blipping out of existence.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that the line between the self and the world is so easily blurred. I think it’s part of the coping mechanism that keeps us from freaking out whenever we see ourselves in the mirror. If we were aware of how freakish we were at all hours of the day, how could we ever get anything done?

“In summary, I think we’re on track to have a really good quarter, as long as we continue to deliver on each… Holy shit! Spider hands! Spider hands – I’ve got spider hands! Ooh, it’s all attached to my brain – I can feel them wriggling! Sharp stones in my wet pink mouth, and jelly sac eyes! I’m a skin bag of meatballs!”

We’d go mad. Thus the mechanism that keeps the reality of it all from becoming too abstract. It assures us that it’s all safe, and everything is as it should be. Even though it’s clearly not. I watch the usher and the first tears fall from my slimy, squishy eyeballs.

My iPod’s wee foam earbuds don’t fit perfectly: the left bud is snug, but the right is a touch too tight. And this isn’t because the appliance is imperfect. My earphones are symmetrical, but I am not. I remember a time when this realization would have been cause for profound concern, because symmetry was just about all I had to rely on when I was a child–it seemed dependable as few things were. But time has given me an appreciation for the misaligned, the uneven, the drifted.

When I was a tyke symmetry was one of my primary diagnostic tools. I might use it to check whether the lump in the left side of my neck was on the right side too. Finding the lump’s twin meant that I was fine–I’d merely discovered another organ or some such. But a single lump was not a good sign. It was a rogue thing acting of its own volition, but most importantly, something that might spell the very end of order. Order without is like an oasis in the desert, but order within is essential during the formative years.

At least that’s what I focused on. The signs of asymmetry were all there if I chose to see them: a brown streak in my right thumbnail that lasted for several years, a mysterious scar high on my forehead that I discovered only as my hairline receded, the snap of bones in my left foot as I walked. Not to mention the Millennium Falcon. And eventually there came a time when I no longer needed the symmetry of my youth, and found value in imperfection. I even entertained the thought of actively exploring asymmetry for a time. I thought: What if I lifted weights only on one side of my body, and allowed the other side–as much as possible–to wither to lankiness? That would be like having two bodies at the same time. Multiple personalities incarnate.

Asymmetry isn’t truly something you have to seek to find however, especially as time goes by. Things do drift, until eventually it’s all you can do to maintain cohesion of form over the course of a day. In fact, occasionally I’ll awaken in the middle of the night and feel an odd pressure in my teeth. Having slept with my head at a certain angle, they have drifted just enough that I can feel them pressing against each other like tectonic plates. Then, in the mirror the single stark light deepens the creases in my face, particularly around the one eye I’m squinting to protect from the glare.

Maybe persistence, as we age, is something that can only be maintained consciously. Maybe the lines deepen when we smile because that’s when we forget ourselves, if for a moment. Maybe we shift toward something eventual only in our sleep because that’s when we forget who we are entirely. Should we awaken too suddenly perhaps we’d find our body parts gone nomadic, scattered like puzzle pieces, eyes in our chests and fingers down our spines.

If symmetry requires so much effort then, isn’t it merely fashion? Because if that’s the case then I have to think that crabs and flounders and Alfred E. Neuman are right, and maybe we’re just not living up to our potentials.

You’re dispirited to hear someone repeating the story they just told you to someone else, particularly because they’re telling it exactly the same way. What you thought was a witty, off the cuff aside is actually part of a script designed to make storyteller seem insightful. You overhear storyteller’s second narration of their interior monologue, every nuance and stammer identical to its first telling, but this time the words are inescapably cloying and dead, like the dark spot of a tick head buried just beneath the skin.

You feel vaguely annoyed at this person, and disappointed that they’ve effectively killed the picture you’d painted in your head. After all, a story is a living thing, and gives one a glimpse of something, while a recital is just a faithful spew of words with neither foreplay nor afterlife.

“So the dealer tells us that we’re no longer a match for the car he’s selling, because we’re just talking about the money, and when it gets down to that then there’s no magic. And I pause, and I’m nodding. Then I point to the words painted on the glass and tell him, we’ll we’re in the finance office, you know? And usually that’s as good a place as any to start talking about money.”

You remember chuckling the first time you heard that, but now you feel like a discarded puppet, and none too unique as you overhear storyteller’s new audience laughing in exactly the same way.

“Then, believe it or not, he grabs his leg and apologizes. Sciatic nerve attack. He’s been having them off and on for a few weeks now. And I’m thinking, I should clutch my chest and start foaming at the mouth. Two can play that game, my friend.”

Puppets chuckle dutifully.

There is no grace here, and the human race drops a few pegs in your estimation. And for what? You think you’re going to enjoy a bit of burlesque but are instead witness to a third rate pole dance.

The art of telling a story must change when your audience is made up of small groups in close proximity. You must know what to leave out of a story – don’t allow your cleverness to make you giddy to the point where your blowing your bundle all at once. Don’t rehearse, don’t augment, and never ever repeat yourself.

And, taking my own advice, the next time I have to tell you this, dear reader, I’m going to do it with my fists.

I put the cookies on the counter and my friend reaches for her pocketbook, but I dismiss her with a wave. “No no, don’t worry about it, sw- I’m buying.”

sw-

Immediately the world dilates into a single sharp white question: What just came out of my mouth?

“You’re sure?” my friend asks. “Thanks, Scamper.”

The part of my mind that most resembles a drill sergeant wrests control away from me, and immediately I’m relegated to autopilot. His voice booms in my head: “Do you have any idea how close you just came to compromising the mission, soldier?” Indeed I do, and it’s getting to be a problem. Apparently there’s enough noise in the cafe to mask the fact that I just came this close to calling my friend “sweetie,” and as I mechanically pay the man at the register I scan my friend’s face with my robot eyes, running a full high-definition analysis of her muscle tension, temperature, and perspiration. I seem to have evaded humiliation this time.

Oh, but my predisposition toward such gaffes goes back a long way. I can still hear my entire third grade class spinning around to face me, like small flowers toward the sun. I had just made the fatal mistake of calling on the teacher for help, only instead of saying her name, my mouth had formed the reputation-shattering syllable, “Mom?” The laughter began, coming from one boy initially, but instantly spreading throughout the entire class. Their little lungs went into convulsions, and they were barely able to keep the snot from shooting from their noses as the teacher shushed them to no avail.

Clearly my term of endearment threshold has been compromised by the fact that there actually is a sweetie in my life, but I’ve been rendered vulnerable because some association has subsequently been made between that term and anyone I feel any degree of comfort around. It’s that degree I’m worried about.

And if this is a neurological disorder – something I’ve suspected more and more recently – then the cards are stacked against me. Sure I’ve lucked out this time, but there’s no telling what kind of damage I may wreak if this behavior is degenerative. What if I call my brother “puddin” by accident? The horror of it would scar us for life. And rightly so, for we are warriors, and affection – even a slip – is unseemly. I can just see myself using the 2nd person familiar with a gendarme when we tour Europe a few months hence. I’ll end up in jail – for life when I refer to the magistrate as “my sow in rut.”

The universe doesn’t care. All of the thoughts we have on cunning or iPods or dirt are so much electrical discharge, no more consequential than static. Humans are incidental material, and their self-awareness is a byproduct of their particular material configuration. If you view Earth on the infrared scale then it looks just a little brighter than Mars. The difference negligible. When you zoom out, any individuality loses meaning and all we see is the collective crust of biomass, like frost on a window pane.

On the other hand, life and frost are similar in that they’re both manifestations of order in chaos. Life seems significant to us because of this, and because patterns provide the basis of one of our primary survival senses. We are pattern-seekers. Life defines itself from inert matter in that it seeks to preserve itself at any cost, while natural order seeks to preserve or encourage a sustainable mechanism. Raw ecological sustainability is most often a factor of this inertia, and choice is usually not a factor in the matter. Humanity, however, is guided by factors beyond mere survival.

We contemplate resource allocation, accumulation, and control. We hoard and obsess and create things that satisfy esoteric desires that lie beyond basic survival needs. We contemplate our own thoughts, and intangibles, and abstractions. Tradition, fashion, ritual, habit, preference all seem geared to cope with (or to manage) the fact that there can be no absolute if the universe as we know it is without perceivable end. But what truly defines us? Is it curiosity? Or sentience? Play? Creativity?

Curiosity – Inert objects do no possess this quality as far as we can tell, but its value seems an integral part of who we are. As we seek to isolate that which defines us we focus on these things. Why do we exist? Do we deserve to exist? Is there a single answer? I don’t think there are absolute answers to those questions, because those aren’t the real questions at all. Those questions form as a byproduct of sentience.

Sentience – The real question will always be: How is it that I am able to question? I think the troubling realization of awareness is behind our collective desire to abstract our reality. Our choice is limited, and is significant not because it exists, but because we are aware that it exists. A lion may choose which gazelle to pounce upon based on whatever factor, but it will not contemplate the choice later. We contemplate our place within a continuum.

Play – It’s worth noting because play is not universal. Does the wind play? Do amoebae play? Do plants practice a slow play that we can’t comprehend? Are they having fun? Do they possess a sense of humor or creativity? Where does play come from? Much of it seems to be about practice: basic survival mechanisms manifesting without the consequences of survival. Play can be about domination (wrestling) and sex (dancing) and food (bonbons) and communication (music). I think these things suggest that play is a primal source of advantage.

Creativity – This seems more an augmentation of intelligence. It means that we may realize that there are manifold, non-linear ways to realize a desired goal. Creativity, its expression and the observation of it, gives us pleasure. It rewards us, which means that it is of some benefit. Why? Simply because the meta goal that drives cleverness and cunning is innovation. Innovation is advantageous, but not always linear.

But those things are only the start. A clearer answer emerges as we examine these factors:

Choice – Of the things above, what we honor – what we choose – is guided not only by our individual perception, which is a factor of our material configuration, but by factors beyond the immediate.

Significance – It implies qualification. Love and beauty and conscience and meaning feel significant to us because they are advantageous to our preservation. Doubt and fear and waste and guilt and pain, insofar as they represent some measure of immediate disadvantage, are troubling, but are no less the byproducts of an overall successful mechanism.

At its root, choice involves using certain criteria to arrive at a decision when presented with multiple options. But can it not be more than that? Creativity, intelligence, and an awareness of significance – of persistence within a continuum – provide a choice that lions cannot conceive. To a lion the decision to go for the smallest, closest, or meatiest gazelle depends on a given set of circumstances. But we can arrive at a choice born of something more than circumstance: intuition, projection, sacrifice, or curiosity.

What if we go after the fastest gazelle, with the realization that our chances of catching it are slim, just to see how fast it is? We might learn something from that that will add to the overall body of our knowledge, which will provide advantage in the future. What if we were to go after the second closest gazelle because our friend isn’t as fast as we are, and we are willing to act in a way that we both may eat? Is that sacrifice? What if we intimidate the gazelles until they become mentally weary, and then pick off ten of them at a time? Perhaps it’s not ecologically sustainable, but we are no longer acting as part of the ecology alone when behavior transcends mere survival.

Our unique advantage is that we’re able to perceive a greater whole than ourselves, and have the capacity to understand that an immediate loss might somehow preserve or benefit this greater whole. The conscious notion of this possibility in combination with creativity might lead us to ways that we might provide others without detriment to ourselves.

But why? If this whole thing is an accident, and there’s no goal, no absolute right, nor wrong, why bother? Maybe for the fun of it? Or maybe because doing good feels good because it’s most efficient. I don’t know. How can we be fulfilled while avoiding pain? Can we give more than we take? Can we help more than hurt?

Having said that, I’ve just swatted a gnat.

She’s not there.

It stops me on the sidewalk. I stare through my reflection into the cafe, but the table is empty. Actually I don’t think I would have thought of her if she had been there. She’s taken lunch there nearly every day for the past seven years, at the same time and at the same table. This I know because I’ve been walking the same route for ten.

Except for her regularity she never struck me as remarkable. Regularity is noteworthy because it’s so fleeting–it’s really nothing more than a drawn out pause. But it’s around these ephemeral axes of stasis that other changes happen, and are all the more noticeable in contrast.

Resisting inertia and entropy to enjoy a sandwich takes gumption. Doing it for seven years straight takes something that I understand all too well, except in myself. She’s gone, and the distress comes at the fear that my chances of understanding stasis have vanished along with this girl, though the answer could never have existed until she left. The answer comes at the moment of change, at the realization of will.

I wish I could interview her now. “What is it that made you walk past your table today? Is something going to happen? Is it something you’ve considered before? Did you ever think about how it might affect someone you didn’t know?”

“Can I help you?” One of the staff have come to check on the funny little man staring in through the plate glass window. I merely wave and continue down the sidewalk with the feeling that I’ve left something behind.

I’ve started paying attention to my other hand.

It comes and goes, my ability to observe, and eventually I know I’ll forget to. Becoming aware of things outside my usual field of vision is like stumbling across the method by which I might regularly experience a lucid dream. Suddenly it’s easy, and I’m having them every night. Then, inevitably, there is the lapse, and I find myself caught up in a night’s intricate fiction… and my lucid dreaming seems at an end.

But for now I have the knack.

The arrow always fits precisely into the wound it makes, according to Kafka. And so it is that I fit into my life, and what I see is governed by those things I’m predisposed to seeing. But am I affected only by those things? How could it be any other way? And yet there are ways one might catch a brief glimpse of the world outside. An accident happens–I trip over the cat and gain a view of the underside of my bed that would not otherwise have sought. Why, there’s that drawing I made in grade three, shoved up into the box spring’s torn lining. And so it’s a happy accident, but who am I now that I’ve made it outside? If I am my point of view then I can’t be certain I am who I think I am.

I think it’s safe to say that most of what’s going on is beyond our perception, unless we’re falling down stairs or being shot at constantly. Being that such days as those are well behind me, I must rely on other means to affect an expanded awareness. Triggers, if you will, to remind me to look for the things invisible to me.

When I hear the word “gales” I immediately face the opposite direction–turning my back on my proper life and facing instead the invisible. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen behind my intended world. There is a grace in the motion of things there, and the light casts a particularly warm glow. But it is a fleeting vision–soon the enchantment must die for being witnessed, all except for a vague impression. When seeing what you should not see, the trick is knowing what to see.

When I see something red next to something yellow I remember to ask a stranger a question. It can be any question, as long as it’s presented eloquently, and is compelling, humorous, and self-effacing. I’ve always had a facility with conversation anyway, but my conversations with familiars have never been as sweet as those I’ve held with complete strangers. Everything they tell me is a secret, and the bond of trust is implicit. People glow when they tell me their stories, and I can often wander away without their taking any notice at all.

And when I shave in the morning and think of my step uncle, long dead of AIDS–and this happens more frequently than you might expect–I am reminded to look at my other hand. The idle hand. Here is an emissary from the hidden world as close as it can be. While one hand conducts the shave, this other is a frozen spider stirring from dormancy only to twist in sympathy as I maneuver around the contours of my chin. But, having become aware of my other hand, I can now feel the tendons pulling muscles to maintain its position – the energy it takes to keep my hand locked in that position. This other hand of mine is not performing any necessary function like the beating of my heart, yet its choreography is driven by a hidden part of myself.

Eventually I know that I will forget to remember this–may even lose the ability to do so–but for now there are two of us, and we live in two worlds, side by side.

I get paid to watch people. I’ve watched thousands in my day, for business and for pleasure, for their own good and to learn just enough about them to bring about their destruction. Sometimes both. But the line between the two eroded long ago, and when that happens it’s hard to feel engaged in the process at all.

On the return trip I am again visited by anti-cruise, and I see that the young woman making the announcement enjoys informing us of the plane’s delay. She’s getting off on it. Oh, she’s masked her glee with some skill, but it is no less evident to me. Good for her. The knowledge fortifies me against the wait.

I take a solo seat at the edge of the freshly stirred crowd and entertain myself by playing the survival game. That is, what if the plane went down in the mountains, and we were forced to survive by relying solely on each other? It’s simply a way to pass the time, but this time the odd people are out in force – something that may change the social dynamic entirely.

• giant fat man with his cellphone tucked into the tortured waistband of his sweat pants
• priest with the traditional collar, only he’s smoking and wearing a beret
• stumpy woman in skirt with lumpy, rippled varicose legs
• fidgety guy fiddling with his keys, flips them onto the floor, then waits a moment before coolly picking them up
• mother trying to control her unruly child by whispering sharp rebukes through her teeth, scanning the crowd to see who might be taking too much interest in it
• woman in black, sweater around shoulders, holding a football
• pretty slouching girl with Heidi braids gesticulating with frustration at pay phone
• small pack of ex frat friends yell in unison in reaction to sports event on hanging bar tube
• wallpaper pattern-wearing bird lady who meets up with fat cellphone man
• prim businesswoman with too many travel accessories becomes visibly frustrated, retrieves real estate materials from her carry-on, then puts them away again, gets up, leaves
• man with shockingly sloppy cold eats pizza, says hello to woman throwing away garbage in adjacent receptacle, checks out her ass

Somehow this disparate selection of humanity hums and flourishes, but only because no one can read another’s mind. What a thin and fragile wall that is. I know for a fact that the football woman would be the first to take blood if we were to crash in the mountains, and that it would be for a seemingly minor infraction by one of the ex frat boys…

But I’m suddenly unable to concentrate on the details of that scenario – I’ve been staring too long and, unable to look away, it’s made me blind. Now I’m noticing things on a larger scale. I’m seeing trends. Patterns. There are only archetypes before me.

They stand tugging at their gold chains, tipping their indoor sunglasses, cursing into their cellphones so that everyone else can appreciate the facility with which they wield the accoutrements of advantaged social standing. Have things suddenly taken a turn for the worse? Indications are grim, and I look for clues within the madness. The patterns have changed, and I am left adrift, eyes darting in search of something significant.

Salvation: As if on cue, two men come to a stop just a few feet in front of me. They have just met and already have found common ground. They speak of old car engines while I marvel at the speed with which they were able to tease out this morsel of shared interest. They speak and it’s like I’m watching a play, or an articulated parade float made to stop right here in front of me, their momentum having left them just so. They’re bumpkin chess pieces, white hair, worn plaid shirts, and a slow methodical way of talking, referring to each individual engine part as if it were sitting right there in front of them.

The announcement comes: the plane will be delayed by only two hours. There is a collective exhale, and the community excitedly compares notes. Hardship has brought them together, but I resist it. I will not share in this. Community seems like the easy way out at this point. Isn’t it obvious? How do we so easily fall for it? Who has the advantage, the community or myself at the periphery, watching them?

The answer is unclear, but I’m pretty sure I could take them if it came to that. I’m already looking at them as if I were reading about them later, for being in the moment is too costly a forfeiture, even if the reason is elusive.

One of the flight attendants rushes by me, and I hold my breath out of habit. The idea is that I should keep my lungs free of their air. It’s an ingrained behavior – actually something I came up with back in elementary school. A behavior that has lasted so long must surely be advantageous to survival, and no one knows about this but me. But in the end I love them because they do not know my secret, and I need them because I wouldn’t have a secret otherwise.

Odd-shaped people staring at their watches. I know it’s subjective, but the truth of it is inescapable: these people are odd-shaped. It doesn’t seem to phase them though. They’re all doing their thing, as if they haven’t noticed what I’ve noticed. I survey my surroundings and the evidence mounts–normal-looking people are now in the minority. I’m not sure when the transition happened, but to some degree everyone in my immediate vicinity is odd. Old guy with a baseball cap placed just atop his head muttering into his cell phone, and then looking into the handset after each sentence. Slumpy guy poured into his overalls, straps hanging from rounded shoulders, abdomen like a beach ball. Three globe-shaped women with matching frosted perms and fragile stick legs. Muppet-looking adolescent wearing short-shorts and a midriff shirt, fidgeting and wriggling in platform tennis shoes. A band of leather-faced hunchbacked matrons in sunglasses, gossiping. An old bald woman in a wheelchair. An albino.

What’s going on? Where am I? I struggle to maintain my own sense of normalcy, but I’m starting to feel odd-shaped myself. My whole body is thrumming and live, and I can feel every joint. Pin pricks in my feet. The vertebrae in my neck piled on top of each other like phone books. Dry skin on my face taut and itchy as they announce the four hour delay.

Moans from the odd-shaped folks. The carnies are disappointed with the news. They’ll be late for their respective sideshows. Visions of hapless performers sleeping in rank naugahyde chair-benches. I can’t summon an emotion though, because they’ve already thrown me from the narrative of subjectivity. Now I’m an outsider, and I’ve lost the privilege of contextual reaction. So: fog. The delay may blow away, they say, but it may not. The odd-shaped people look at each other. I’m invisible. A four hour delay from what? Aren’t we already here?

I am hungry though. I still have a stash of peanuts in my jacket pocket. A freezer bag of Mom’s monster chocolate chip cookies in my suitcase. I’m good.

Who are all these people anyway? Leopard prints and sideburns and military men shaved bald. Every time I try to get a handle on the culture it grows stranger, pulling away from me. Tantalus’ eyebrows furrow as his fingers play at the cookie bag.

Some people are all right. Some do provide calm rather than throbbing discomfort. Look over there: the affectionate Asian couple lost in the moment. I respect that. They’re going to make it through this.

But the majority are too wrapped up in the moment. “Delayed five minutes,” whispered conspiratorially, one odd-shaped individual to his odd-shaped familiar. Why waste the breath to say it? Marking the passage of time. Reciting the obvious, the inevitable. “Here I go breathing again. There’s more air to breathe. I breathe it.” Breathers all around me. Billow bags scuffling about looking at things with their jelly-filled eyes. Taking it all in. If one of them touches me I’ll scream.

But now I’m quite hungry. A cookie.