PACIFIC PLAYERS
Having released the captives, the room smelled different. They had struggled, one with a tall purple hat leading the fray. But that was the extent of anything very familiar. Gradually it became empty. And worse, all the theories disappeared.
Now at this point, I realize, the jury will be restless.
“Give us the facts!”
Ah, there's a bit of relief. It's been heard before, and makes complete sense. Like the dream. But dreams are inadmissible evidence.
“I'll give you no such thing. You'll have to get your own coffee.
It's
twenty five cents, one coin. Just down the hall, and the facts can
wait.”
“But if it's been quoted, then it happened. Didn't it? Just now?
And what happens is a fact. Isn’t it?”
“People have been convicted on less evidence.”
“Not on my quarter they're not. It's not going to happen. Ethics
and morals,
especially a believable story, are not going to die on my watch!”
(&) (&) (&)
Maybe it was a rhinoceros splashing through that steamy Philippine jungle, with lush green broad leaves passing in review. The Pacific Players had seen soul struggling on my sleeve and tossed a flotation vest, to inflate in the basement, becoming a bomb making Trotskyite. That was the plan.
[The facts are difficult to ascertain.]
Perhaps it was the weather. Mild humidity and mostly blue skies, not a worry about getting cold. In Japan snow had fallen, with its lonely beauty, that called for heating oil. Clark Air Base, on the other hand, was a replica of suburban America, at least where officers and their families lived. Sidewalks were lined with trees around homes that definitely were not barracks. It was a late fifties stage set with no curtain. My part would have its place.
[In a normal court room, everything has its place. Truth is an archeological dig]
But I couldn't play the part, soon discovering that being someone else isn't for me. With some regret, I kissed my budding career goodbye.Trotskyite, indeed! moving on to a new welter of experience.
It was actually sad to have left that vague promise of escape behind. The reality of FM Hill -- antennas, teletype machines -- reassembled itself. I frequented the Airman’s Club and bars in Angeles Pampanga. Jitney rides. Beer. The jitneys were hand painted with rows of red and green dots around the doors, white dots along the fenders in ways that only later, when I had became a dope smoking hippie, made beautiful sense. It was or is a testament to time’s illusion, a play, set with my own props.
[with little white bones scattered about]
Not to spoil the effect, which did include some lush tropical plants, but to be completely fair, there was the cock roach army that scattered to far corners of the mess hall in the morning as the lights came on. A dry rustle that was far too insistent for such small creatures. They could be heard even after they were gone. And then the morning light slanting through louvers. No windows needed with such unfailing weather.
“So you studied German once?”
[The interrogation was brutal.]
“I endured it.”
“And that saved you from acting with the Pacific Players?”
“No. German came much later. But even then . . .” Dove was
sitting on the fence, as often,
gazing steadily. Her feathers fluffed a little in the breeze.
[Could it be said she is a dream? Inadmissible.]
“Even then, dove, there was some slight feeling I couldn’t admit.
If I'd paid attention,
it would have hit me between the eyes.”
She agreed, as hers slowly became slits. Maybe in some improbable way she was remembering Air Force days, and especially that day when landing at Tachikawa. The part to play then was Courier, with a 45 slung on my belt, carrying a very important briefcase. Which almost got forgotten as my foot touched the ground, and in a sudden came this almost unbearable urge to bow and kiss the earth. A thing that is surprising, to say the least, and hard to forget. The whole two years in Japan was definitely a Kabuki play that I half-realized I was in. But like the jitney rides, it took years to finally realize.
Not blinking now, dove was reading my thoughts. [Perjury?]
“I might as well have been an Eskimo or a Navaho or a Negrito. I
never rode the free bus to Negrito Village.
It just seemed they were kept there, off base,
in that place where they were maybe lepers or bonsai elephants.
I mean, aren't humans all people, too?”
“How many pet doves do you know, gardener? Speaking for
myself and friends,
certainly not for squirrel who hogs the feeder, we're definitely
not humans.”
“Well naturally, speak for yourself, dove. But I couldn't accept
what the script called for.
And pretending to be an Airman was a full time farce.
To begin with. There were so few words of German that rubbed
off in college,
even many years after the military gig. The college script
had its prompt: foreign language. So because of a last name
inherited from a grandfather,
who'd been a piano tuner for Steinway in the mother
country . . .”
[The evidence was piling up.]
“And I think you've learned some Spanish, too. Us doves can
sense these things.”
What could I say? Maybe best not to say it. There are six senses. Time wraps around the first five.
A tremble is felt throughout the entire Pacific Player set, a low sonic rumble.
He had been a piano tuner, a fact with little resonance until high school. Where Orrin
Blattner was band director. His almost eponymous instrument was the trombone. He loaned me a silver clarinet to learn on and practice for my sophomore summer. By junior year I had gotten a Leblanc clarinet. By graduation I was solo clarinetist for the band. So German was an exercise in weird English, or in not becoming a Trotskyite, the depths of logic plumbed beyond recognition.
“I grew up here in California, dove, where Spanish is heard. And
I was no more a bomb maker than Negritos
were midgets. But Japanese is closer than -- Spanish --
Japan is rural, or was in 1958. The sound of it, if I may, as
guttural as an oxcart.
It's yang to your yin, dove, and arigato completes a coo."
Weird English, syntax sand in the gears of comprehension. What wants to be said isn't in the script. Hard scrabble East Palo Alto trash talk. Far out doper inventions. Electronic tech talk stuck spinach to teeth. Polyglot NBC News scrabbling cock roach scritch. It all drifts down, Ray Bradbury fish food into depths murking Sunday morning dreams that hang their toes over Ionesco's edge.
“It doesn't sound very respectful.”
“But you do get my drift, don't you dove?”
[The brutality of interrogation with no discernible cause.]
“OK. Let's fly sixth sense free then, a dark matter project.
Go . . .”
The cock roach in early morning evasion. Imagination fills or empties, depending on which direction. A rustling time-thing the stumbling block, everywhere, every bit as much as Negrito Village.
“Coo! Hoop, hoop, Hooooo . . .”
“But,” she continued, “we do keep track of the weather.”
And I wonder if German or Spanish is a thermonuclear possibility in her imagination.
[Oh! A rhinoceros!]
The performance quickens. And just when we thought nature was conquered, the sky hurling down contradictions, truth vanishing, coral reefs [facts on both sides of the coin.]
“No, dove. It's not reversible. Time-travel, as much a fiction as
time-thing, ought to be understood.”
“Oh?”
“Let's just imagine that your bird brain goes . . .”
“I'm not bird-brained!”
“Well patience then, please. I'm getting to that. I was about to
say, though, even if --
your brain is physically smaller than mine. But you are genius
compared to a cock roach.
All brains are temporary, swarms of May flies bobbing,
clouds in the sun. No direction, no separation in brains. As a
matter of development, intelligence claims no permanent
dominion.”
“You're pretty wordy, for a gardener.” Damn bird! But what could I say?
I had to agree, to say what humans might hear, concerned now with our obliteration.
The Titanic was unsinkable, yes? Maybe its direction could have changed, icebergs being dangerous, but not paying attention, this sense too often ignored. Ship captains, generals, presidents all wearing suits for the Sixth Extinction ceremony. A long train of people discussing sardines to halt migrations. . .
It's guidance system, perhaps over a glass of brandy, had missed the obvious.
“Too many words.” Blink. “I know.”
