(02) Core Sample


"It looks like something took a core sample," Jukebox said. Legggs noticed that from behind he did look like a jukebox, or like a bulldog. She began laughing and he turned around to look at her, but he didn't seem to anxious to know, just curious. "You laughing at me?" he asked, but now she was laughing so much she couldn't speak. All she could do was nod her head up and down.

After she recovered herself enough to tell him she was laughing because she realized he actually did look like a jukebox, he just looked at her awhile with a bemused expression. "You don't know what it's like," he said, "to be thick as a brick. What's happening is that you're experiencing a bit of shock to be back here. Most of the time you just don't see things that don't fit on your basic templates."

"I'm cold," Legggs said. Her body was shaking out of control. Jukebox picked her up in one easy movement and carried her back a little ways from the opening in the side of the hill. There was a small square pouch attached to his belt and from it he pulled a thermal blanket which unfurled like a genie from a lamp. He wrapped her in it. "Let it shake out," he said. "Don't try to control it, just let yourself go out of control." Her body continued to shake out the tension.

"What is it?" she asked.

"It looks like a drill took a core sample," he said, "because it's perfectly round. But then it looks like it left a shell or lining of some kind in the hole."

"It's smooth as silk," she said, "and it glows like pearl. It's some kind of living thing. I can feel it." She began to laugh again but it was confused with crying sometimes. She was discharging energy. "A core sample," she said, and she laughed more. "I can't believe you think it's a mining operation."

"Hey, I said I was adventurous," Jukebox said with mild humor. "I didn't say I was as smart as you. I come from a family where we were warned about having such high aspirations we'd lose hope."

"Well it's just that we find a perfectly round hole in the earth, and on the inside it's perfectly smooth and it glows, so if we want to we can follow it and see where it goes. But I'm scared to death. I'm so scared that I have to piss right now and I didn't even feel it coming." This is accompanied by her jumping to a squatting position and instantly urinating. Jukebox was respectful enough to not stare at her, but he realized she didn't bother with unnecessary items of clothing.

"Like I was saying," he continued, "you can't usually see anything that you don't have a template for. If it doesn't exist, you don't see it, because if you did you'd have to move to another reality. So maybe there's flying saucers or things we don't even imagine, precisely because we can't imagine them. Maybe our imagination is the source of the future, and of what manifests in the future.

"You can speculate all you want to, but the fact is, when you explore into the unknown, you can't control the outcome, and that makes people who need to control the outcome want to put up a fence and make it illegal to hang out on the far side. That car that was following us was an armored Kyle limo with a four hit team."

"How do you know that?"

"I worked for Kyle. I can spot a Kyle team."

"What did you do?"

"I was a driver."

"I should've guessed that. So, are you saying that I shouldn't have seen that opening, because I don't have any way to explain how it fits into the ordinary world?"

"That's right. There's a story that keeps floating around that might or might not be true, of Magellan and the Indians of Tierra del Fuego, how they couldn't see the big ships out on the bay. They didn't have any template for them so they just solved the problem by not seeing them. They could see the longboats come ashore, because they had a template for boats like that."

"I remember that story, except that I heard it as Darwin and the natives who couldn't see his ship, the Beagle, in the bay. The medicine men saw the waves coming in from the ships, and once they knew something had to be there, they began to see them. I saw the white stones ..."

"There was a trail leading to something, and you saw what it was leading to. Or leading from."

"The only template I have for a trail of white stones is Hansel and Gretel. He dropped them so he and his sister could find their way back out of the forest."

"Maybe you found the witch's house," Jukebox said. "Maybe that's why you're so scared to go inside."

"Don't tell me it doesn't scare you. That isn't any ordinary cave. That's more like something very beautiful and very sensual, but you don't have any idea where it might lead."

"Probably to a digestive system of some sort," Jukebox said thoughtfully. "The problem with the unknown is that the only way to know it is let go of your control."

"Okay," Legggs said. "I've had my anxiety attack. I'm ready if you are."

"I didn't lose nothing in there," Jukebox said. "But I guess I can't resist an adventure."

Posted: Tue - May 10, 2005 at 11:56 AM