Korean supervisors at the plant were conspiratorial where they ganged together in corridors and viewed their hired help suspiciously. They interacted but rarely, and spoke through interpreters. They showed particular interest in Liam because he towered over them in their hardhats; and it was to this attribute that they pulled him aside one day.
The American foreman was enlisted to explain to him, “The gentlemen need the assistance of your long arms.”
Liam nodded and followed the man; the Koreans also followed and mumbled among themselves. Whenever the recruit glanced in their direction, their oleaginousness eased into smiles, as to communicate insincere gratitude.
The employee was brought to a corridor where an aluminum ladder ascended into a removed portion of the dropped ceiling. Though he was not keen to climb into the dusty opening, the task seemed straightforward.
“You’ll see it directly,” said the foreman. “Grab it and pull it out.”
An object lay sideways to conduit. It was nothing recognizable, yet was thought by the retriever to be the unfortunate length of a cocooned child. Its surface appeared to be made of smooth pearlescent plastic. However the lightweight fabrication started in life, it had been repeatedly heated by hot conduit in winter and, in a pliable, molten state, repeatedly reshaped.
The Korean men kept their distance, pointing at the biomorph with frantic, quarrelsome words. It was difficult not to compare their behavior to Japanese scientists who stumble over a long dormant adversary of Godzilla buried in a sea cave.
No sooner had the item been dragged to the floor than one in their company darted up the ladder with a lidded wicker basket—
Something from it was unleashed into the crawl space.
Thumping erupted overhead, yet whatever made this sound was soon away over the dropped ceiling.
With less courtesy, the employee was shown away from the area.
Later in the break room, Liam confabbed with his fellow worker over these strange to-doings.
Howard supplied a novel explanation. “The basket possibly contained rat snakes, which is an old tradition in Korean mythology. Eopsin is a black snake deity with ears. She is viewed as blessing a household when snakes are released within it. The practical benefit of kept snakes is that they eat mice, though it is odd that our employers should release them in this setting.”
Liam quibbled, “I should not think that, what I heard, was one or even several snakes. The sound was more like the patter of small feet.”
Howard reared an eyebrow at this description. “A cat…?”
The jab did not saunter across the table to no effect, but it was not the effect the jabber expected. The mention of legs, though precisely their number, loosened a crucial detail in Liam’s recollection. “It was two legged. I am certain,” said he.
The coworker argued, “Nothing possessing two legs would be so small not to tear through dropped ceiling tiles. They are composed only of compressed paperboard.”
“Yet the tread I heard required—simply—two legs; and the treader was not so small as that.”
Howard was prepared to resubmit the snake entity as an explanation when the friend launched further into his unsettled state. “My dream last night anticipated my task this morning, which was to use my height to reach into a dark, miserable place. Do you imagine that something followed us back from the turret yesterday?”
The coworker pondered the question, and was inspired to communicate, “My dream last evening was also unusual. Cottages were staggered along a cliff face, and above them, dark peaks of evergreens were seen against a starry sky. I heard effects of a wind heaving in the mountaintop wood, though felt nothing of it. I then looked in the opposite direction, down to where a village converged on a body of water. I deduced this sea’s presence from the moonlit tip of a white broad sail slipping past silhouetted buildings, and thought the same mysterious wind must have sent a sailboat crashing into the bay. Its mast eerily creaked with the faraway trees.
Frightened, I entered a house where a door stood open. The branch of a coniferous tree sat inside this entrance—it was too large for any large dog or small child to drag it indoors. By appearance, wind might have sheared the trimming from its parent tree and shoved it through the doorway.
I searched its intact needles. They stirred, but only in one small clump at a time—and with nightmarish millipede-like movement that was in no way attributable to a breeze. Something unseen crawled among them.
I penetrated deeper into the house to find a palpable terror shared among its inhabitants. They advised me against going into any room possessing a door. I glanced guardedly into one room, and saw a pale shape draping a bed. My sense was that this was burial clothes. An aromatic emanated from this room, suggesting the fragrant oils used to prepare bodies of the dead.
I was on the verge of unravelling this logic when the strong odor succeeded in waking me. It was a mix of naphthalene (or mothballs) and cedar, such as found in cedar boxes. As soon as I came to full consciousness, both scents evaporated. I do not keep mothballs or cedar, and could only think that the odor was residual from an earlier resident of the house. Yet it was odd that my nose should pick up on these faint smells in the dead of night, fashion a dream around them, and then have the whole matter disintegrate within a minute of my awakening.”
“The sole function of the amygdala region of the brain is to process smell,” informed the listener, “which is a strange prioritization of brain real estate until you think about how our sense of smell is peculiarly heightened during sleep. Doubtless this is due to its prior evolutionary role in alerting us to the smell of predators, fires, or other dangers.”
Howard tacitly agreed, but allowed, “And, too, this olfactory sense has been appropriated to evoke some of our most intense emotional memories: the smell of Mom’s baking pie crusts, for example. Or the fragrance of Niagara Spray Starch wafting off her ironing board.”
“You see a kind of emergent reality being built on top of a baser trait?”
“A smell, perhaps never minted in its association until that moment, springs fully to life,” puzzled the friend. “From whence does the scent arise so suddenly at midnight, and where does it go?”
The listener speculated, “I suppose our dreams bear tenuous comparison. A wind in mine was similarly hypothetical, and doorways supplying it lay hidden in remote regions of a house. If I throw a pan of wash water out a window in my dream, do you think it would rain down through a shower head in yours?”
“It is much like perturbation,” Howard admitted. “Perturbation is something of a workaround in Quantum Field Theory. It is like a thing you cannot see, and whose behavior cannot be known, yet by building up a picture of it through a parallel model, you are able to make testable predictions bearing on it.”
Liam laughed mildly at this explanation. “Like throwing a die in one room and hearing its mate rattle around in another?”
Howard did not pursue the manufacture of this example. “It is comparable,” he supposed, “to using echoes to map the topography of a deep inaccessible well…
I am reminded of a piece of audiotape I once heard involving multiple sightings of a UFO made over a half hour span by different air traffic controllers and pilots, all of whom gave report as this object tracked longitudinally over California, Oregon, and Washington State. The transmissions themselves are short and unremarkable. What is of interest are the silences between them, which, if you listen diligently to the entire recording, resemble a form of transmutation: You feel these massive distances being covered by this flying object at tremendous speed. The thing may have been a meteor. But for all that, it is how the experience is presented as a theatrical trailer.”
The coworker endeavored to constrain the topic. “Regarding this distinction between echoes and their progenitors… Which of our dreams is the known system? I would not disagree with you if you said it was this spooky old factory.”
Howard was not constrained. “By giving (or allowing) shape to an idea in the mind, one lends it a semblance of reality. It’s as if reality is there before the idea comes to clothes it.”
As on cue, a dull thump emanated from the ceiling; both men looked up in its direction.
Liam remarked, “An active imagination might read something into that.”
“There is a high strangeness hereabout,” reasoned the other. “An ill, disputatious wind blows up from The Badlands and colors everything.”
Sufficient breathing space was allowed in these discussions to finish cups of coffee, and a third cup would put neither man closer to a better answer than the ones provided. Sometimes musicality in language conveys greater understanding than the words themselves, and so the recitalists, without diminishing their effect, left the break room, each with a bear claw pastry wrapped in a napkin.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.