Behind the Scenes

Cosmic Chatter, Days of Awe (Chapters 1 & 2)

It is balmy at the end of the world.

It is not fire, but it is surely not ice. The ice is melting.

In the mind of someone who knows it tends to be not only relaxed but tropical. His dreams are languid, having the quality of a jungle painting by Rousseau or a brief vacation on the shores of Punta Cana. Animals come and visit him, and when he walks they walk along with him. When he is reclined, they approach delicately as he rolls over onto his side to greet them with a light smile. There is a gravity to his dreams, but it is not the kind of gravity that keeps things down, it is the kind that holds things together. Up and down are no longer opposites, they are study mates, acrobats who can both toss and observe one another with delighted ease.

Asleep, he is still aware of the buzz of phenomena. He is never that far. Asleep, he is not a hero tending to some distant fire. There are no more heroic journeys behind his fluttering eyes. At times, he can even observe himself dreaming as he dreams. Now he observes himself feeding a young tiger Fig Newtons. The tiger licks his face.

The large man woke up.

He slowly rolled off of cool sheets to enter the cooler morning. Looking out the nearest window he saw the new world bathed in shades of purple, beige and yellow. The sun was inching its way up. In the azimuth of earth and sky, gold bands were shimmering. Between two round hilltops, small and sparse, this playful rubber band of light was starting the day.

The northern New Mexico high desert was being created once again, in time and somehow out of time, and all the life within it was rolling, stretching, yawning with a friendly awesomeness not uncommon to this place, and dawn.

The man splashed his face with cold water. He spoke hoarsely, Hello daylight, let’s go have some coffee. He loved the hot and cold of consciousness, the brisk ante meridiem air, the cool oak floor, the half-icy tap water, and a cup of steaming coffee with just a splash of cream.

He had said years back to his late wife that morning was, in and of itself, essentially compassionate.

Coffee in hand, he turned to a box exquisitely constructed of silver and turquoise ornamentation forged to a titanium shell. He was no longer smiling. He was computing. Able to process several parallel lines of thought, the large man studied the beautiful box with intricate seriousness.

Should he, on this vast and perfect autumn day, open up the lid to this incomparable container and gaze down upon its anelastic, whirling contents, and risk forever altering the world as we humans know it? More than once he had asked himself, What if the quarks and antiquarks do not cancel each other out in this synthetic stew? What if there are no gluons arising, but something horribly unglued? Not everything brand new is welcome in our world.

No answer. The man finished his coffee, turned toward the window once more, scouting along the horizon to take in this dusty expanse of rough magnificence. He saw a creature scurrying in the distance, disappearing behind a crop of cottonwood. The creature was not small. He placed the empty coffee cup on the sill. Then he sat down on a square black mat topped by a smaller round cushion, intending to make his large self be still and silent for the next thirty minutes.

In less than ten minutes, the phone rang.

“Hello. Sid?” The voice on the other end of the line was coming from the northeast. It was fretful, rattled.

Sid Gutman knew who it was right away. He turned his mouth away from the phone, fiercely exhaling to the side like a Nordic wind god about to extinguish all things. Then he paused, trying to be polite when in fact he was only annoyed.

“Yes. Simon. How are you? It’s been a while. What’s happening there?”

“Sid, it’s all come apart. Shit, Sid – you were right. The center wouldn’t hold up. The whole fund… all of them, they’re all finished. I thought maybe you might be able to do something. Fix the math, redirect things. Oh God, help me Sid.”

The large man went quiet for the very next moment. He noticed a fly land on a history book. He heard his stomach rumble and felt his ears begin to burn, and he thought Damn you Simon, but he spoke evenly.

“Simon, you know and I know that this is not a matter of tweaking. There’s no new algorithm for this. This had to happen. There’s no undoing this.”

There was a gasp on the other end of the phone and a voice that was near tears.

“Good God Sid, what should I do? What the hell should I do?”

“Simon, listen. Are you listening right now?

“Yes Sid.”

“Call the SEC. Or… do nothing.”

2 In a Small Adobe-style Home Near Los Alamos, New Mexico

Particles heated from the Big Bang that are still radiating excitedly through the universe can be seen in a portion of the static of any television set that is turned on but not tuned to a station.

Jasper knows. It’s happening on his television set.

In the hissing limbo between networks, in that empty space between any of the 745 channels not being occupied by hucksters or sitcoms or Spanish programming, there you, like Jasper, may find -- grinning back from the farthest reaches of time -- a curious and hopeful lot of renegade primordial particles attempting to say hello.

First comes the astonishment. Then comes the figuring.

Things are plenty old in the desert southwest. This much Jasper knew. There are cliffside dwellings once occupied by people who saw the world much differently than modern folk, and there are arroyos carved by prehistoric rivers, and there are dinosaur bones aplenty, and there are even rocks of a color and magnitude the eye has scarcely seen in any other place, and whose staggering time on earth can be measured in the billions of years.

So it was not the ancientness that riled up Jasper Hitchcock Cummins, it was not the fact that fourteen billion years so simply trumped four billion that made him gulp down all reason. It was the intensity of the effort and the unmatched verve required of antediluvian quarks and other particles pushing their way through the vastness to show their literal face in the present.

This is what riled him. The sheer gumption. That and the mystery.

Why had they come? Why now? And why, for the second time in two weeks, did the TV static go from soft herringbone patterns to coalesce – and form a face? Were they, a very unfamiliar they, just sticking their little tongues out, or were they messengers? Why had these rascally little building blocks of energy and being come to visit him, and what in God’s name do they wish to impart?

The evening of this enchanted land was as deep as pitch, and nearly as thick. In the generally rough landscape of nighttime New Mexico the sky appeared as if it were a smooth black gel dotted with the littlest diamonds. Stars pulsed with a faint light here more than they glowed, and the pulses could easily be taken as a form of odd Morse code, a message repeated so often to a long cord of heaven-gazing generations that one would think the message the stars meant to convey could be grasped by someone at this point. But no, it was not.

And now this? Messengers from the eerie beginnings of time?

It took humans hundreds of thousands of years to realize that the stars were not gods, nor were they tiny pentagrams of decorative light, but distant suns. How long would it take to grasp the language of primordial particles making faces?

Jasper Cummins thought, My God. Go ahead and figure out how they got here. But please, don’t even try to figure out what they are attempting to say.

Jasper knew that his ghost neighbors, the ancient residents of Tsankawi, the cave dwellers who long preceded the uninvited virus of white Europeans, might have had the right-sensitive ears to hear, but even they might not be able to meaningfully translate.

The stars were tough enough to figure. Were constellations large bodies or vast neighborhoods? For centuries of humanity they were sky guides. Celestial navigation was one thing, but this, this was something else. Jasper quickly surmised that these were buzzing messages clearly indecipherable to modern ears and by a species innately mud-stuck and so very dense.

So Jasper Cummins focused on the time factor. This led the owner of the area’s largest Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning business to pause and consider the nature of time. He thought, Time is the keystone here, but not like time as we normally consider it.

Jasper Hitchcock Cummns came from a long line of reckoners, and so he knew enough to reckon that a straight line is not the only version of time there is. Just because we have 365 day calendars, age and die, doesn’t imply that the larger trajectory of things always goes off plumb, in one direction. Clearly now, there must be circles and figure eights and fancier loops, and even receding lines that vanish into a hurricane void that is more like a tunnel to somewhere else than a blip that dies.

Yeah, so, he then asked himself.

Apparently, he answered, they knew some shortcuts.

Later that evening Jasper quietly studied his wife. It was clear to him that Clarissa had not seen them. Clarissa was not one to sit and watch static. Either way, Jasper was not completely sure what he’d seen, but he desperately wanted to tell someone, someone who might not only understand but clarify.

Two days later, a nearly coherent version of his looping, non-linear insight is what Jasper shared with his gangly, hook-nosed neighbor, Antonio Gelato, PhD., formerly of the Department of Physics and the Linear Accelerator Center at Stanford, a man who always felt drawn to Los Alamos, the primal shadowland of the American southwest high desert.

But old Gelato did not clarify a thing. He appeared to listen closely to the entire excited 15-minute rant. But listening as he did, nodding a few times, maybe three times, scratching once under his ample nose, and intermittently holding his right knuckles thoughtfully under his chin, the physicist asked no questions. Once the tale was unspooled, Gelato just smiled at the exasperated layman who lived two doors down, and said only, “Yes, of course.”

Jasper asked, “Well, what do you think? A face?!
Gelato smiled once more, shrugging his skinny shoulders.

So for a time Jasper was left all alone with the large New Mexico moon and his visitors from antiquity.

To Jasper, some big, vague essence had been rolling in his general direction for weeks; things had felt differently for some time. But this particular night was more than just different.

The night they first arrived was no ordinary autumn night in this strange and scruffy quadrant of New Mexico. Things that did not normally shimmer were shimmering. There was an insistent glow to the night that was more akin to a gleaming bugle of light than a quiet radiance. Things that were not supposed to talk and tell tales were apparently talking. He wished he could speak to his wise Mom, but she was seven years gone.

As Jasper’s Missouri-born mom would surely have put it: The buzzin’ remnants of Creation had come a-callin.’

Jasper wanted to talk to Clarissa about this – he was aching to, he and his good missus shared just about everything -- but he thought this odd snippet about extraterrestrial happenings might get her upset or cause her to think he was fit to be tied. As in tied and taken away.

Every night, right before she fell asleep, Jasper rolled over, ready to tell his tale. But each night, he just kissed her on her cheek, said nothing, and rolled back over to his side of the bed.

Finally, several nights later, prior to bedtime on a very cool evening with stars nearly everywhere, Jasper Hickock Cummins left the den, climbed the stairs, went quietly into the bedroom earlier than normal, walked over to the end table on his side of the bed, opened the one drawer and pulled out a lined yellow pad.

As Clarissa watched one of her detective shows below him, still wholly unaware of the time travelers trying to make contact, Jasper sat on the edge of the bed, both legs squeezed together to form a desktop, and wrote down four questions and a single statement on the yellow pad at just past nine in the evening of October 24^th in north central New Mexico:

Who else knows they’re here?

Are they hungry after all this time?

If they could speak English, would they spill secrets or would they just chitchat?

And why does it never end?

Here’s what I think: Because it loves to keep happening.