My guess is that only a tiny handful of readers among my already tiny netful of readers are familiar with mulleting. Some among you have perhaps witnessed the leaping of mullet, fish very given to aerialism, and fairly common in warmish salt or brackish water worldwide. They are commonly used as baitfish and only eaten by humans with few other protein options—being boney, scaly and oily. [Yum!] Furthermore, they can’t be caught with a baited hook. They don’t so engage.
To nab a mullet or a few, at least on a personal level, one needs a throw net and a good bit of practice. A throw net is circular with weights all around the edge and stout cords attached thereupon which all run to a central hole, thence to the business line to be held in the firm grip of the thrower. The gizmo is flung by the fisherperson in such a manner as to spread wide, saucer-like, thence to, hopefully, land atop a school of mullet. [You will want to hold that “saucer” thought in mind for what follows below.]
The thrower then hauls in the business line [which, assuming sale of the captives is a goal, involves that person’s line of business]. This action pulls the edge of the saucer toward the center. [See note per saucers in previous graf.] This creates a sort of donut, hopefully full of mullet, which the lucky tosser then drags to the beach.
This post, then, is my throw net, and you who have read this far? My mullet? No, I have higher regard for you than that. The mullet I have gained is an idea! If you are one of the three people who read my last two posts [thank you] you know I’ve been puzzling over: 1)Whether to resume this substack experiment, and; 2)How to deal with the tangle of interlocking references in my short stories when they are presented one-by-one, lifted from their embodying collection.
1) Will give it a shot. 2) Have figured a way to deal with Footnotes, if not pagination. [Original footnote numbers will appear in square brackets in footnotes.] So here goes. This is the first story in my most recently published book, That’s Life (as we know it), Brave Ulysses Books, 2023. Good luck. And don’t forget the saucers.
High Assembly Objects
You're probably thinking “smart phone” or “rocket” or “sky scraper” right about now, but I don't want us to get started on the wrong foot. You head down that rabbit hole and the signal strength between writer and reader will precipitously diminish.
What we're dealing with here is ourselves—ever and always the most pertinent subjects in our peripatetic lives.1 Also, “them.”
If and when—very likely when, though exactly when is problematic—we do meet “them,” they too will be “high assembly objects.” Right? Otherwise, how in hell did they get here? Even if they do a Star Trek® “beam me down Scotty,” they'll have to reassemble, (though one supposes that beaming down results in a “low reassembly” of a high assembly object.)
The problem, as Terry ponders it, is whether or not we'd even recognize alien assemblages as high-end in the first place. Sure, if they're quadrupedal in some fashion, and grey-green, and sport inverted pear-shaped noggins … no question. But, here's the thing. Having four limbs seems pretty handy to we who have achieved some measure of dexterity, availing ourselves of same, yet it is the height of parochiality to assume that this is the only way to be.
Consider the neck of a giraffe. See?
What if these highly anticipated extraterrestrials turn out to be shaped like mattresses? Heck, I could be lying on one now and be none the wiser. For that matter, maybe they are already here, undergirding all of us “lucky” enough to have one or a few in our abodes. If an alien race wanted to silently invade there are few ways Terry can imagine that would be subtler than to let the local Mattress Man® outlet distribute your minions.
Then they could study us, up close and personal, learn our deepest secrets, evaluate our strengths and weaknesses, only to rise up at a given signal and take over. This has come to worry Terry to the extent that he mostly sleeps on the floor.
“Go ahead. Laugh.” That's what he'd like to tell you, though he wouldn't, as we shall see. “But don't blame me when they rise up and unceremoniously toss everyone hither and yon! A hard, hard reign gonna fall, for certain!” [His Dylan® ref, not mine.]
(In my experience people who use the phrase “hither and yon” are neither here nor there most of the time. Moi?)
It's always troubling to your author when the first protagonist to pop up in a short story collection turns out to be a little bit off-kilter. I mean, yes, my tales always go downhill, but, as the old rule about bobsledding has it: Start At The Top!
Terry must have some redeeming characteristic, though, truth be told, if he's right about the mattresses, we'll all be glad that at least one among us was already down there on the floor, prepping for the irresistible cataclysm.2
Terry Jepson's work for the Forest Service® gives him lots of time to ponder Big Questions, and the floor he sleeps on many nights is part of another class of “high assembly objects”—at the top of a very long and winding set of stairs. Yes, a firetower!
(Obviously, high-tech satellite3 imagery might already have supplanted the need for people in towers, but for the purposes of this little assemblage4 we need him to be there. Okay?)
(“Why?” you ask. Stay tuned!)
So, while he spends his days during fire-season5 scanning the horizon for puffs of smoke, he thinks—about the mattress people currently likely headed our way from Alpha Centauri, yes (or the planet Serta®?)— but much, much more. Like you—when giraffe necks were mentioned on the previous page—he marvels at the route taken by their laryngeal nerves. That makes no practical sense, does it? Or, spiders. He wonders if they get bored, just hanging around, stock still, waiting for lunch to arrive. Or Carol. A puzzle within a conundrum if there ever was one.
Carol Saarinen works in the local USFS® office near the trailhead to the tower, implementing the regional management plan, which, predictably enough, is how Terry happens to know her. She's a pro. She's also pleasant, and we all agree that being pleasant is … well, not to put too fine a point on it … is pleasant!6
But she, too, has her quirks, and aren't quirks what make us interesting to each other? Absent quirks we'd all be about as dull as rubber erasers or mattresses. [You can quote me on that.] One of her quirks figures significantly in the reason we need Terry to be in a fire tower, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Another quirk of hers, by the way, is her inclination to write in boustrophedon. (!)
Carol has a Schnauzer7 named Schnallen.8 The dog goes everywhere with her. Even now—if you're reading this between eight a.m. and four p.m. on a weekday—he's Schlummern9 at her feet while she works on next month's schedule. After-hours and on weekends he's either trotting along beside her as she hikes, sitting beside her in her USFS® pick-up truck, or Schlummern at her feet atop either a mattress or an alien (I mean, how would we know the difference?) fear of which neither Carol nor Schnallen entertain.
We can infer that her job takes her in a very different direction than Terry's. While he's gazing into the distance pondering Big Questions, she's gazing at a computer screen considering Big Plans. His questions are unbounded by time or space, while her questions have already been answered after long months of study and public input. While her calendar is structured to move in a predictable and orderly fashion from A to B to C, his days are monotony writ large between alarming incidents of potential disaster (!) when careless campers, or thoughtless smokers or evil arsonists trigger a conflagration.
But opposites are said to attract and attraction there has been. Last week, on his way back to the tower, Terry popped in at the office to ask Carol if she'd like to join him for dinner this Saturday. Her reply, typical for one as calendrically disciplined as our character, was, “Sounds good, but I'll need to confirm tomorrow.” This was fine with one as uncalendrically attached as Terry and he proceeded to his parked car where he donned his heavily laden backpack, put Tweed10 on his shoulder, and hiked two miles or so to his place of employ. Whistling.
What he was pondering on that particular day was the single-mindedness of Champollion, principle translator of the Rosetta Stone. He had to hand it to him. You know?
But I see a hand up in back.
“Bewstrifi-what?”
Boustrophedon.
“Oh.”
I think it's not surprising that Terry was fascinated by Jean- François Champollion.11 As a teen Jean-François was already fluent in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Amharic, Sanskrit, Syriac, Persian, and Chaldean. Then he tackled Coptic. A bit later, while ill, he asked his brother for a Chinese grammar, to amuse himself during his recovery.
Another hand up?
“Boustrophedon?”
Right.
“No, I mean, what is it?”
It's the way Carol writes in her diary.
“Fine. But what in hell is it?”
Take a chill pill, dude. Interrupting is so, so rude. Sigh.
Okay? Okay.12 It's not easy, but Carol isn't easily daunted.
This reminds me of one of my favorite ideas, something I've written about before, but given my book sales this is going to be new for most of you. Not the boustrophedon thing, I only learned about that this morning.13 The hieroglyphs and the Rosetta Stone. Hieroglyphs were interpreted by Egyptian priests but while some images represented sounds others represented ideas and you had to know the underlying idea in order for it to make sense.
Like say
That's super simple, of course, compared to a thousand images on the side of an obelisk. But here's what I am driving at. In a phenomenal book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,14 by the Princeton psychologist, psychohistorian and consciousness theorist Julian Jaynes, the author posits that human consciousness emerged with the invention of alphabetic writing.
[Do know that my explanation, based on a book I read forty years ago, is not going to be comprehensive, but I have thought a lot about it over the decades, being inclined, like Terry, to stare into the distance and mull. Mull, mull, mull.]
The era before the emergence of alphabets is often called the Age of Prophecy. That's when people thought they heard gods or seraphim or spirits or burning bushes giving them instructions or advice. (You'd have to think a burning bush would be saying something like, “Water! Water!”) In Jaynes' framework that experience was one brain hemisphere communicating with the other: the bicameral “two-chambered” mind—left hemisphere chattering to the right. Because it came to people inside their heads when no one else was speaking to them … well it had to come from somewhere.
“Izzat you Zeus?”
The thing about an alphabet, with sounds attached to each letter and combination of letters, is that writing became a recording device. I can read the previous sentence out loud (which I do with all my writing because that's the best way to know whether it flows) and you can do the same and make approximately the same sounds (depending on your accent and druthers: i.e. tomayto, tomahto.)
Suddenly people were able to think in terms of written words and discovered that the ideas bouncing around in their noggins were their own. From that point on the prophets lost much of their audience. (“Oh, Zeke? He's just talking to himself. A nutter.”) Also the high priests lost a lot of status. (Later the mucky-mucks in the Roman Catholic Church® tried to reclaim some glam by insisting the liturgy and so forth was only to be intoned in Latin, regarding which most of their parishioners didn't have a wrinkled clue. “Gosh, it must be the Words of God®!” In Latin! Oh gosh!)
(And still later “speaking in tongues?” Really?)
It's no surprise that Jaynes was a Unitarian®. But I digress.
Terry was using the self-reflection made possible by his consciousness to ponder his own trajectory. Was he ever going to find something that drew him helplessly forward as Champollion's pursuit of language had done? When he was honest with himself he had to admit to being more a dreamer than a doer. “Face it,” he said aloud as he reached the top step, “It doesn't matter if I'm right about the mattresses from Alpha Centauri, because no one would believe me. Also, if things warm up between me and Carol wood floors are not ideal for diddling.”15
We see here both self-awareness and a practical bent.
Another hand up in back? It's no wonder this story is dragging. Okay, shoot.
“Giraffe neck? What nerve?”
Laryngeal.
“What about it?”
Were you born in a barn? [Funny how this “put-down” conflicts with, assuming one both deems it a “put-down” and embraces certain religious views, say, the Jesus in a stable thing.]
Anyway for the benighted and confused amongst you: A giraffe's laryngeal nerve goes a long crazy way.16
So we see that Terry is hoping that his budding romance with Carol will bloom and grow, such that at some point they will become lovers. Perhaps on a mattress. Or maybe a sofa if he can steer her around the alien landing zones. Maybe a beanbag?
When he read17 the previous sentence, or more accurately “sentence fragment,” Terry became agitated.
True. Beanbag “chairs” are less common than mattresses, but they observe more of our lives, positioned as they are in disparate settings, and also, and more threateningly, when we are settled therein we are totally at their mercy. We might not be tossed aside but rather, absorbed. What if “they” are the “them?”
“Crazy how?”
The beanbags?
“No, the giraffe's whatchamacallit. Why does it go a long crazy way?”
Evolution.
Terry has begun to cast a very wary eye at the beanbags he encounters at friends' homes. And, obviously, if that's the only structural option offered in terms of seating arrangements, he plops down on a rug.
“That is a very unsatisfying answer.”
Are you anti-science?
“No. But you can't expect me to accept a one-word answer about something as evidently complex as a giraffe's neck.”
I think it's really obvious, but whatever. The recurrent laryngeal nerve first developed in fish, OK? It went from the brain, looped around the heart, which was, at least in the first fish, probably about an inch or less toward the rear, and then forward to the gills—so maybe a two inch anatomical loop. Max.
Later on some curious fish (lately identified as Tiktaalik) climbed up on a beach walking on its fins, like your modern day walking catfish, and discovered that there weren't any predators yet, which was a distinct improvement. So the fins turned into legs and so forth and so on, and the fish turned into dinosaurs who all got wiped out when the big asteroid landed near the Yucatan, but for some little guys the scales had gradually turned into fur and etcetera and etcetera, and eventually they turned out to be kind of like horses but there was a lot of competition for the low hanging fruit and some of them grew long necks. Okay?
So, where was I? The next day, about ten in the morning, Terry heard footfalls on the winding stairs and inferred he had company “coming up.” He knew better than to peer down because, due to the spiral, he wouldn't be able to see his visitor until the person reached the last run.
“You didn't really explain the nerve thingy.”
Oh, come on. It still loops around the heart so now it's about 15 feet long. Makes no biological sense whatever. It is one of the best examples of unintelligent design.
Anyway, I think it will come as no surprise that Terry's visitor proved to be Carol, though, given that we haven't discussed the status of their relationship it might come as a surprise that she hugged and kissed him (!) before saying:
Then she picked up Schnallen, who is much better at ascending than its reverse, turned and headed back to her office. And that's why we had to have Terry two miles up a trail and a hundred feet up on a high assembly object. See?
But, hold it. Doesn't that have to be the second thing she said? It could be. On the other hand those in love often share little endearments. I suspect Terry is just crazy about the way Carol talks in boustrophedon.18
1 [5]To which the “That's” in the book title refers.
2 [6]We'll need a clear-eyed leader at that moment. And as we discover in the next paragraph, “clear-eyed” is a professional asset for our guy.
3 [7]These “high assembly objects” are piling up now!
4 [8]First appearance of français in the current volume! We're off to the races!
5 [9]Which we here note is quickly becoming a January to December affair.
6 [10]This isn't français, it is italicized for emphasis. [For readers unfamiliar with my writerly ouvrir, most italicized words in my work are foreign.]
7 [11]You can tell this is Deutsch because it is both capitalized and italicized.
8“[12]Buckles” in Deutsch.
9 [13]Snoozing.
10 [14]His cat.
11 [15]See how much more français the name sounds typed in italics?
12 [16]Notice that this bit of boustrophedon includes both Ελληνικά (Greek) and français.
13 [17]About 4:30 a.m., 12 March, 2022.
14 [18]Houghton Miflin, Mariner Books, 1976
15 [19]Only on page 18 with footnote 19 coinciding (glad we don't subscribe to numerology in these parts) to discover the first reference to steaminess, for which your author is well known. Stay tuned. Much more to come!
16 [20]Some would say the same about this tale.
17 [21] I always let my characters proofread.
18 [22]To tie this all together,the human laryngeal nerve, perhaps two feet long, loops the heart as in our fishy forebears, and is involved in speech as well as protecting your airway when you eat or drink. And Jaynes' theories are still taken very, very seriously by researchers studying ancient history and civilizations and modern psychology. There is method in my madness, whether obvious or not.