Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
The Tale of the Astrolabe
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010
Beyond the city lay fields of grain watered by irrigation tunnels from under the mountain. Between the fields and the herdsmen’s savannah stood a line of towers, roosts for owls who kept the fields clear of mice. Tower-keepers patrolled with slings, killing any snake that might climb up to raid eggs from the nests.
A boy named Saan was one of the few not born into the role–his mother and grandmother arranged the job, hoping he might be the first male in five generations of their family not to be devoured by lions while tending the herds.
One evening, as he walked the path between towers, he saw an owl disappear down a dry irrigation tunnel, an astrolabe in its talons and he ran after it, thinking that whatever magus had lost the instrument would pay a good reward for its return.
Down he ran and down, not realizing how far he’d gone until the dog-headed guardians challenged him with riddles. Saan had heard enough stories to know that the first answer was always “death;” the second, “fear;” the last, “hope.” As he answered the final riddle, a cart drawn by dozens of fennec foxes drew up. He climbed on, and they rolled away into the darkness.
The cave went on, a moonless, starless midnight desert of salt dunes. The only light was an occasional ruby glow deep under the salt-sand, by which Saan could see his fellow-travelers–a pair of elderly troglodyte women, a baboon in a filigree robe, and a scorpion-man with translucent carapace skin and sting-tipped fingers. They rode for hours, and Saan’s stomach rumbled with hunger even though the baboon had shared some dates and the scorpion-man had passed around a bowl of candied scarabs.
The cave narrowed to a tunnel which brought them to the shore of a silent, faintly luminescent sea, along which stood a line of towers like those he’d left above.
“We have arrived,” said the scorpion-man, and the others nodded.
“Where?” said Saan.
“The place of your training,” said the baboon.
“Of your testing,” said the troglodyte women in unison.
Saan saw that the fennec-drawn cart stood near the passage back to the salt desert.
“Can’t I just go home?” said Saan.
“Anytime,” said the scorpion-man.
Then Saan saw that the entrance to the cave passage was carved like the mouth of an immense lion.
“I guess I’ll stay,” he said.
C.R.E.A.P.
Monday, April 5th, 2010
A chilly spring morning. I was in the back of an ice cream truck midway through the big dig tunnel under downtown Boston, and we were doing 37 miles per hour–I could see the speedometer and a bit of the driver’s shoulder through the sliding window into the cab. Apparently top speed, because we were being chased by a stolen public works street sweeper, which was gaining on us.
“We’re doing youse a favor,” said Moze, my captor/host. He had an accent like a B-movie Mafioso and tattoos of alchemical symbols spiraling up both arms. “Not everybody gets to be a part of dis kinda thing.”
“Dis kinda thing,” being, in this case, the resurrection of Grover Cleveland, the twice and future president. Whose frozen head lay in one of the coolers, a basketball-sized gold-foil-wrapped mass. I wasn’t sure how much of a favor it was, particularly not if the sweeper caught us.
“Sol invictus!” shouted the driver.
“Sol invictus,” said Moze.
The two of them were members of a group who considered the U.S. presidency the modern equivalent of the ancient concept of sacred kingship. They venerated old Grover, the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms, as having risen from the political dead, and had been working to help him come back from the literal version.
And me? I’d Googled a little too aggressively while writing a paper on new age revivals of Mithraism, chatted a little too long on discussion boards I never should have found.
“Time for counter-measures,” said Moze. He meant the milk crates full of half-melted treats we’d emptied from the coolers to make room for the anointed one.
We dumped them out the back. The sweeper was too close to dodge, and skidded on the ice cream sandwiches, sherbet push-ups and SpongeBob SquarePops, sideswiping the tunnel wall.
Clouds of dust boiled out of the sweeper, and a crescendo of horns rose from further back in the tunnel. We pulled away.
“’Victus!” said Moze, and held his fist out for a bump.
“Sorry, man,” I said.
At that moment, I wished I’d researched the Mithras stuff before working on that Watergate paper. But I tasered him, then the driver. We stopped rather abruptly.
When the sweeper crew pulled up and unloaded the cooler with the head, we left a vintage 1972 sticker on the ice cream truck’s bumper: Nixon — Now more then ever.