Someone tells me to be somewhere at sometime, something I did not want to do. Despite this, I was there, on time.
That is where and when I met an old helicopter pilot, Fuzzy "Buzz" Wildster. He used to fly the helicopter over the city that monitored the rush-hour traffic. He would call in his observations to a prominent radio station and they would broadcast them on-air. I remember that his voice sounded just like short-wave radio static; it conjured an image of an unshaven man with wiry, electrified hair and sluggish thick and calloused lips and tongue. The station believed that Fuzzy's reports would help commuters take the least crowded route to their destination, but from the ground it never worked out that way. Sitting in that traffic day after day, hearing his voice over the radio directing traffic to the east then west then to overpass and underpass and lane closure, all it served to do is confirm that I was on the worst possible road and there would be no way out for the foreseeable future.This went on for about 30 years. That distorted voice from the whirling clouds above, like a Russian Jamming Signal, giving directions that nobody could follow, warning motorists of perils that they could not avoid, describing to hundreds of thousands of commuters the suffocating and intractable morass into which they had descended. A human tragedy played out on asphalt each weekday morning and afternoon. Why didn't anyone try to stop it?
That is where and when I met an old helicopter pilot, Fuzzy "Buzz" Wildster. He used to fly the helicopter over the city that monitored the rush-hour traffic. He would call in his observations to a prominent radio station and they would broadcast them on-air. I remember that his voice sounded just like short-wave radio static; it conjured an image of an unshaven man with wiry, electrified hair and sluggish thick and calloused lips and tongue. The station believed that Fuzzy's reports would help commuters take the least crowded route to their destination, but from the ground it never worked out that way. Sitting in that traffic day after day, hearing his voice over the radio directing traffic to the east then west then to overpass and underpass and lane closure, all it served to do is confirm that I was on the worst possible road and there would be no way out for the foreseeable future.This went on for about 30 years. That distorted voice from the whirling clouds above, like a Russian Jamming Signal, giving directions that nobody could follow, warning motorists of perils that they could not avoid, describing to hundreds of thousands of commuters the suffocating and intractable morass into which they had descended. A human tragedy played out on asphalt each weekday morning and afternoon. Why didn't anyone try to stop it?
Near the end of his career, tiring of describing traffic density and determining least congested routes, he ventured into polemics on the morality of various traffic patterns, direction of flow, automobile speed and spacing. During his last year on-air he pronounced judgments upon the vehicles themselves, railing against automobile colors, the shadows cast by trucks, and random skid marks. He found sunroofs to be particularly odious: "They engulf sunlight!"
Well, hearing this every day for years had an effect, and I experienced Motorist's Regret: that prolonged state of sorrow, where color drains out of the world, every image is a grainy negative, your feet are like concrete blocks, as if you are dragging dead weight to the morgue. I felt unspecified guilt, like non-point pollutants, mind-eating bacteria dispersing from the rows of crowded human feedlots downtown. I felt the need to unburden myself, to talk to a trusted friend. And I was not alone. I saw people praying as they changed lanes. Dashboard idols proliferated. Support groups formed. Many listeners contemplated monastic life, heads bowed deep in penance and remorse. Once I called the Highway Traveler Crisis Hotline for relief but the lines were jammed. Somewhere out there I expected that my futile lane choices and inappropriate speed were destined to end in a horrific, slow-motion ball of fire that the firemen could never put out.
Well, hearing this every day for years had an effect, and I experienced Motorist's Regret: that prolonged state of sorrow, where color drains out of the world, every image is a grainy negative, your feet are like concrete blocks, as if you are dragging dead weight to the morgue. I felt unspecified guilt, like non-point pollutants, mind-eating bacteria dispersing from the rows of crowded human feedlots downtown. I felt the need to unburden myself, to talk to a trusted friend. And I was not alone. I saw people praying as they changed lanes. Dashboard idols proliferated. Support groups formed. Many listeners contemplated monastic life, heads bowed deep in penance and remorse. Once I called the Highway Traveler Crisis Hotline for relief but the lines were jammed. Somewhere out there I expected that my futile lane choices and inappropriate speed were destined to end in a horrific, slow-motion ball of fire that the firemen could never put out.
Last week I came across Fuzzy as he was exiting the county courthouse. As he moved the heavy oak door, it bumped my shoulder. I said Ouch, he said, "Oh - sorry, I didn't see you coming." I recognized his face from an interview in the newspaper on the day he retired. A forced retirement after a collision with a giant grain elevator west of the city. Flaming wreckage descended on a housing development below but somehow he managed to walk out of it with just a broken collarbone and a concussion.
"No problem. At least we only fall a few feet while standing on earth."
He scowled. "And I am stuck down here with people like you."
I chuckled. "Right where you sent me, six hours in the slow lane behind a smoking bus."
"And here is how I get somewhere I can't find you." He shoved past me and waddled down several steps, swirling his arms from side to side to steady his legs.
I called out, "Fuzzy, which way should traffic flow, clockwise or counterclockwise?"
He stopped cold. "Clockwise. Unless you are in the southern hemisphere." He looked back at me. "Why do you ask?"
"Why do you say so?"
"No problem. At least we only fall a few feet while standing on earth."
He scowled. "And I am stuck down here with people like you."
I chuckled. "Right where you sent me, six hours in the slow lane behind a smoking bus."
"And here is how I get somewhere I can't find you." He shoved past me and waddled down several steps, swirling his arms from side to side to steady his legs.
I called out, "Fuzzy, which way should traffic flow, clockwise or counterclockwise?"
He stopped cold. "Clockwise. Unless you are in the southern hemisphere." He looked back at me. "Why do you ask?"
"Why do you say so?"
"In South America, they go the opposite direction. I flew down there for a big city, doing publicity stunts, and I saw that the traffic flowed counter-clockwise."
I looked at my watch. "Maybe they are on the wrong side of the road."
"No, I don't think so, because the pedestrians are all going in the same direction. And they are all circling toward the center of town. And up here it is just the opposite." He leaned on the railing.
"Maybe we cancel each other out, balance the commuters in Argentina. Otherwise we might wind this planet as tight as a baseball core."
He looked sideways at the concrete steps. "Maybe - no. No. I don't know. I know I tried going backwards on the freeway once and they nearly killed me. I had no choice."
I looked at the shoppers and pedestrians marching from right to left. Everybody had their head down. Nobody was paired up. Individual, solitary pedestrians moving in one direction, toward some moving target, maybe a ballgame cancelled by a player's strike or a 50%-off clothing sale on clothes that were marked up 100% yesterday or a job opening that was filled by the personnel officer's nephew or a blue plate special at a restaurant that was closed by the FDA for Clostridium perfringens.
I got to thinking, was there someone at the front of the crowd who made the left or right turn that signaled the rest of the crowd to turn in that direction, or was the movement to the right or left the sum total of a multitude of interactions between individual pedestrians. Up above, the skyscraper windows reflected the dusty brown light from the setting sun. I could see spherical, suited executives looking down at me. "Fuzzy," I asked, "Why did you work with traffic?"
He looked away. A minute went by. "I had to take what I could. I had a wife and a baby on the way. They told me what my job was and I did it."
"Whatever they said?"
"Whatever they said."
In the twilight, the billboards started to light up. Across the city park, a 40-story office building had a billboard on the roof that advertised, "Choose Your Own Genetic Code - Don't Let Others Do It For You - Call GTI - Gene Therapeutics International." I felt vulnerable. I looked at Fuzzy. "If you had to do it over again - "
"- That question. It. I can't begin to think of it. I wouldn't recognize who I was back then and he sure didn't know me. I don't have that past anymore and for all I know it never happened." He pulled a liquor flask out of his coat pocket. He took a swig.
I looked back up at the windows. "They're still there."
Fuzzy slipped the flask back into his coat. "This mass movement, it's left, right, clockwise, counterclockwise, I don't think it matters which way it goes, it's just not like a flock of starlings anymore."
"What?"
"I mean birds."
"Where?" I looked at the windows on the 56th floor.
"Not up there, you fool. Out here. They say that we were once scaly, once feathered, once furry, once leathery. Not now. What do we have in common with anything on this planet anymore? Wasn't this struggle for survival supposed to result in an improved race? Something beyond this hairless epidermis." He tugged at the skin on his cheek. "Maybe plastic sheathing. Yeah. There is enough dissolving in our water supply to replace all of our organs with Styrofoam pellets. My kidney is recyclable. My brain won't sink. I have advanced." He took the flask out again and waved it in the air. "Perfection, it was supposed to bring perfection. Darwin said it, 'As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.' What, did they change the definition of perfection since they wrote that claim? It's like disappearing ink. A Cold War trick!" He took another swig. "Ah." He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "They are saying, 'I know what I meant back then but the words are evolving too.' This is bait-and-switch. Go ahead, sell me my own land while you are at it." He looked at me. "Now that I have been unfettered to live like an animal, how is it that I have become so unlike an animal? Just where are those confounded birds?" He looked up at the skyscraper, now bathed in light from the towers that surround it. Money was changing hands up there somewhere. Wealth was transferring. Enrichment, endowment, enhancement. Lives were improving. He shook the flask at the sky.
"I don't want to look anymore." I looked at my shoes, shiny quasi-leather shoes constructed by child labor in some war-ravaged land with smoking tires and mosquitoes breeding in mine craters and limbless old men begging for rice. For a second, I saw myself fifty years ago playing with toy cars on a white kitchen counter bathed in the white sunlight of a fresh spring day. The windows were open and the curtains moved slowly in the breeze.
Fuzzy put the flask back in his pocket. "Our mass movement isn't the same. No, it's alien, better suited to the surface of Venus than here. At least the hot sulfuric-acid thunderstorms would rinse us away. But here, we operate by laws not found anywhere else in the universe. Supply and Demand. Rules of Engagement. Divine Right of Kings. Finder's-Keeper's. To the victor go the spoils!" He raised his fist at the skyscraper. A light went out on the 56th floor. "Onward we push, doing whatever they say, fighting for survival, competing against ourselves. To the marketplace and blood will spill! This is not what emerges from the multiplicity of simple interactions between seven billion people. We are dogs thrown in a pit, to fight to the death. Onward we are driven, toward this, The Global Potemkin Village." He raised his arms and turned a full circle.
My shoulders sagged.
He looked at a couple walking down the sidewalk, hand in hand. "I remember something. I remember something." He closed his eyes. "When we used to sit around on the front porch and watch the sunset and say hello to the neighbors and talk about the relatives back East. Maybe someone would stroll by and join us and then another and I don't know why, but before you knew it our house had fourteen friends and six apple pies and card tables in every room. It went on until midnight or maybe nobody knows how long it went because who carried a watch except to work and it ended when everybody just stood up and said goodnight. Some unseen cue."
I was getting hungry.
"There was space between us back then. A regular space. No crowding. Big yards with a garden. Open land with the livestock and pastures out your back door."
I thought about all of the people that I no longer knew.
"And we worked together. When the community needed a well or a fence or a road, we talked about it and got together and worked at it and it was done."
I looked at my hands, pale, soft and bony. Typing hands.
"And we stuck together. When the river washed away the McGillicuty farm, we all put them up for six months until it was rebuilt. When the grocery store burned down, we all helped run the store from the back of the community building."
I thought, This is what it feels like to be irrelevant.
He cleared his throat. "I don't know why we did it. We just did. Something moved us. And when we did, it was beautiful. Like birds in flight, like a school of fish. Yeah. From us, emerged art." He bowed his head. "And when an explosion wiped out Mr. Marshall's grain silos we all..." He shuddered.
Now I was very afraid.
I looked at my watch. "Maybe they are on the wrong side of the road."
"No, I don't think so, because the pedestrians are all going in the same direction. And they are all circling toward the center of town. And up here it is just the opposite." He leaned on the railing.
"Maybe we cancel each other out, balance the commuters in Argentina. Otherwise we might wind this planet as tight as a baseball core."
He looked sideways at the concrete steps. "Maybe - no. No. I don't know. I know I tried going backwards on the freeway once and they nearly killed me. I had no choice."
I looked at the shoppers and pedestrians marching from right to left. Everybody had their head down. Nobody was paired up. Individual, solitary pedestrians moving in one direction, toward some moving target, maybe a ballgame cancelled by a player's strike or a 50%-off clothing sale on clothes that were marked up 100% yesterday or a job opening that was filled by the personnel officer's nephew or a blue plate special at a restaurant that was closed by the FDA for Clostridium perfringens.
I got to thinking, was there someone at the front of the crowd who made the left or right turn that signaled the rest of the crowd to turn in that direction, or was the movement to the right or left the sum total of a multitude of interactions between individual pedestrians. Up above, the skyscraper windows reflected the dusty brown light from the setting sun. I could see spherical, suited executives looking down at me. "Fuzzy," I asked, "Why did you work with traffic?"
He looked away. A minute went by. "I had to take what I could. I had a wife and a baby on the way. They told me what my job was and I did it."
"Whatever they said?"
"Whatever they said."
In the twilight, the billboards started to light up. Across the city park, a 40-story office building had a billboard on the roof that advertised, "Choose Your Own Genetic Code - Don't Let Others Do It For You - Call GTI - Gene Therapeutics International." I felt vulnerable. I looked at Fuzzy. "If you had to do it over again - "
"- That question. It. I can't begin to think of it. I wouldn't recognize who I was back then and he sure didn't know me. I don't have that past anymore and for all I know it never happened." He pulled a liquor flask out of his coat pocket. He took a swig.
I looked back up at the windows. "They're still there."
Fuzzy slipped the flask back into his coat. "This mass movement, it's left, right, clockwise, counterclockwise, I don't think it matters which way it goes, it's just not like a flock of starlings anymore."
"What?"
"I mean birds."
"Where?" I looked at the windows on the 56th floor.
"Not up there, you fool. Out here. They say that we were once scaly, once feathered, once furry, once leathery. Not now. What do we have in common with anything on this planet anymore? Wasn't this struggle for survival supposed to result in an improved race? Something beyond this hairless epidermis." He tugged at the skin on his cheek. "Maybe plastic sheathing. Yeah. There is enough dissolving in our water supply to replace all of our organs with Styrofoam pellets. My kidney is recyclable. My brain won't sink. I have advanced." He took the flask out again and waved it in the air. "Perfection, it was supposed to bring perfection. Darwin said it, 'As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.' What, did they change the definition of perfection since they wrote that claim? It's like disappearing ink. A Cold War trick!" He took another swig. "Ah." He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "They are saying, 'I know what I meant back then but the words are evolving too.' This is bait-and-switch. Go ahead, sell me my own land while you are at it." He looked at me. "Now that I have been unfettered to live like an animal, how is it that I have become so unlike an animal? Just where are those confounded birds?" He looked up at the skyscraper, now bathed in light from the towers that surround it. Money was changing hands up there somewhere. Wealth was transferring. Enrichment, endowment, enhancement. Lives were improving. He shook the flask at the sky.
"I don't want to look anymore." I looked at my shoes, shiny quasi-leather shoes constructed by child labor in some war-ravaged land with smoking tires and mosquitoes breeding in mine craters and limbless old men begging for rice. For a second, I saw myself fifty years ago playing with toy cars on a white kitchen counter bathed in the white sunlight of a fresh spring day. The windows were open and the curtains moved slowly in the breeze.
Fuzzy put the flask back in his pocket. "Our mass movement isn't the same. No, it's alien, better suited to the surface of Venus than here. At least the hot sulfuric-acid thunderstorms would rinse us away. But here, we operate by laws not found anywhere else in the universe. Supply and Demand. Rules of Engagement. Divine Right of Kings. Finder's-Keeper's. To the victor go the spoils!" He raised his fist at the skyscraper. A light went out on the 56th floor. "Onward we push, doing whatever they say, fighting for survival, competing against ourselves. To the marketplace and blood will spill! This is not what emerges from the multiplicity of simple interactions between seven billion people. We are dogs thrown in a pit, to fight to the death. Onward we are driven, toward this, The Global Potemkin Village." He raised his arms and turned a full circle.
My shoulders sagged.
He looked at a couple walking down the sidewalk, hand in hand. "I remember something. I remember something." He closed his eyes. "When we used to sit around on the front porch and watch the sunset and say hello to the neighbors and talk about the relatives back East. Maybe someone would stroll by and join us and then another and I don't know why, but before you knew it our house had fourteen friends and six apple pies and card tables in every room. It went on until midnight or maybe nobody knows how long it went because who carried a watch except to work and it ended when everybody just stood up and said goodnight. Some unseen cue."
I was getting hungry.
"There was space between us back then. A regular space. No crowding. Big yards with a garden. Open land with the livestock and pastures out your back door."
I thought about all of the people that I no longer knew.
"And we worked together. When the community needed a well or a fence or a road, we talked about it and got together and worked at it and it was done."
I looked at my hands, pale, soft and bony. Typing hands.
"And we stuck together. When the river washed away the McGillicuty farm, we all put them up for six months until it was rebuilt. When the grocery store burned down, we all helped run the store from the back of the community building."
I thought, This is what it feels like to be irrelevant.
He cleared his throat. "I don't know why we did it. We just did. Something moved us. And when we did, it was beautiful. Like birds in flight, like a school of fish. Yeah. From us, emerged art." He bowed his head. "And when an explosion wiped out Mr. Marshall's grain silos we all..." He shuddered.
Now I was very afraid.
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