Way Back Mud

This modest plot holds enough food for the entire block. Grown along an invisible perimeter, there are strawberry rows, avocado trees, stacks of rice and corn between beds of carrots and potatoes. If you stick your head into the garden expanse, you’ll be overwhelmed with a hundred smells and a thousand colors, but up here, it’s all brown. Neighbors say the air is browner around our plot. I’m not sure if they mean it as a compliment or an insult, but the general sense is that there is, as the poet says, a gritty realism hanging thick over us in a cloud of authentic brown.

Crickets chirp for ambiance. The thermometer controls the crickets. If they get too quiet, turn up the heat. If things get too awkward when accepting company or too lonely working this plot in the early morning, turn it up. There is a radio, built into the fence, but I never listen. There is a TV right above it, but I don’t watch it anymore. We also have an apple tree standing where the corner of the grass meets the pavement. Neighbors often pick its fruit without asking first.

I tend my garden with the same care my ancestor did on this plot one hundred years ago. We export the food we grow to other times, elsewhen, and eat an organic energy bar with ingredients imported from as far away as the first millennium. The past lives on in present technologies I don’t fully understand. Is it the light that gets recorded, or is there a hole in time that allows me to speak through it?

My best friend is the soft light display shaped like a century-old farmer standing in the corner of the plot. He’s got a funny-sounding name and wears ridiculous clothes, but says the same of me, even though I work in formal wear, and my name is a syllable of sun worship from a time long before he was born.

Hello newfriend, he said. Please accept this capsule for your birthday. He buried my gift in the past and waits for me to open it in the present. Going into the ground, the capsule was bright blue at both ends with a shiny silver base, but here in my hands it is rusty brown, and the engraving on the side is a broken sentence wishing me well on this day of my birthsake. My oldfriend talks corny like that.

Inside the capsule is a wind-up bird. You have to work a tiny crank underneath his tail feathers and he’ll sing you a sixty-second song.

Thank you, newfriend. I will show this to the ladies of the parlor. 

We work side by side, dig dug. Parallel labors in adjacent time zones. Over the span of a hundred years, water and watered by hand. Future scientists devised this method of farming decades from now. My newfriend calls it agriculture de integro with a funny accent. Aevaculture, I correct him.

Everything he does ripples into my here and now, yet he acts like I can’t affect him back, so I play time pranks on him. Over the weekend, I secretly sew a large fish costume to wear over my torso and pretend to evolve into a fishman of some sort, as this was a popular belief in my oldfriend’s time. He believed he was having a genuine mystical experience until I revealed myself.

For payback, he moved his bones from different corners of the plot, so I have to dig them up all over again. I should’ve never told him the date of his death. Yesterday, he hid his bones under the apple tree, half under the pavement. It took me half the day to dig them up, him standing by, laughing at me when I thought I’d dug into his thick skull, but had really hit an underground fiber, one of the long electric worms living below us which power the block.

Neighbors come by looking for radishes, but there are none this week. They ignore my oldfriend and fail to return his friendly wave, as if he doesn’t exist. But he does exist, and they have their own ancestors to hate, a past prejudice all present peoples share, including myself, ever since the Great Reckoning.

What happened during that Reckoning? oldfriend asked with the innocence of an animal granted the gift of human speech, pronouncing every word like awkward poetry.

I’ve told him all this before, but far in the future, so I explain it again for the first time. The First Time was a blight. Everywhere hung the shadow of death. The soil went sour and the skies blackened. There was a strange stillness; where there had been robins, doves, and jays, there was now only silence. It was known as the Zero Age.

I use terms he can understand. Although he is my friend, I can’t help but think my ancestors were dumb, and even now, they are dumb. Granted, he can outwork me, his hands are brilliant, but even the dumbest of my neighbors can think profoundly on the universe. They will ask innocent questions about our mysterious reality too, but their questions actually make logical sense. He tries to solve the problems of lifedeath as a child would. His understanding of timespace is on par with a baby’s. I am no genius, not at all. I became a farmer, because I am big below the neck, not oddly proportioned, but a body type ladies call earthen jar.

The poet from up on the hill walks by our plot and greets the two of us, hey friends, but he doesn’t ask before picking an apple off the tree. He thanks us for it, but then spits on it, and rubs his sleeve over it. Why do people insist on doing that? It doesn’t make the apple any better.

He never asks, my oldfriend commented, from a time when pleasantries mattered. That apple tree is a sapling, he went on. That fruit, but a twinkle in the Eye of the Creator. I don’t know, it just seems wrong not to ask.

To get back at the poet and me in one turn, my oldfriend planted his shovel in the trunk of the apple tree. It grew half-inside and stuck out like a branch, with the handle facing down at you when you pick its fruit. Neighbors are sickened by its surreal beauty, even though the fruit tastes fine. They won’t eat from it, until he undid the cause of the anomaly, and a new version of the same tree popped up in its place, this time without any garden tools growing out of it. I’ll admit it was one of his better pranks, and I’m not sure how he was able to pull it off. He had to have his son in on it, and maybe his grandson too. We breed generations of pranksters right here on this plot, but the idea itself seemed way cleverer than my oldfriend was capable.

For his birthday, I decide to go all out and turn our plot into the apocalypse. My stage is small and the only available props are in my shed, but during the night I arrange an elaborate scene to surprise him on his birthday morning. A black tarp blots out the sky, the food is scattered everywhere, the ground covered in ash. I enlist the help of the poet to play the part of my oldfriend, lying dead at the foot of the tree. He needed a chance for revenge, and the theatrical mood appealed to his artistic nature. As expected, my oldfriend freaks at the nightmare vision, including his own death, looking much different from the story I had told him of that day, which is actually the truth. All his ancestors and descendants, there at his bedside, saying goodbye, as a bright hole opened up on the ceiling and coaxed him inside. I was just a boy when I met this old dying man, who appears now as a young man, my age. 

Nice get, newfriend. I will have to think up something grand to shake up your timeline. 

Oh, really? I chide him, but I’m excited for what he’ll come up with. 

He points to the tree and before our eyes, the word yes is carved into the base. So what now? Will the fishmen set it back?

There are no fishmen, ancestor. My future friend will reset it and it’d be as if it never happened. My future friend can jump across the dimensions as simply as you and I drift through our air. I don’t even have to tell him about it, because I know we will already discuss this whole affair at some point.

Would he prank us? oldfriend wondered as he inspected the air around us.

I’m not sure if he likes pranks the way we do, living in his cold sterile world of smooth white corners. I’ve never actually met him yet, but I feel him in everything. My future friend helps shape things, but he isn’t arrogant like the Creator, creating one moment and stopping the next, as though it would never be complete until an arbitrary end gets tacked on. Such is the way we go about the day, gardening one moment and giving up to Nature the next, like our modern poet, crafting verses for weeks, then letting them stand one night to crystallize in the critical ears of the parlor ladies. That thing you call time is what we call The Shape, oldfriend. It is not quite a circle, although it loops from one end to the other. Some say it resembles a cube when converted into lower dimensional space. Again, I’m not an expert in these matters. Ask the mathematician at the bottom of the hill. I let my oldfriend know my lack of expertise every time we talk about The Shape, but somehow I come out sounding like a genius to his past-sized brain.

Happy birthday, oldfriend. I couldn’t get you anything, I joke and hand him a fistful of flowers. The flowers fall through his hand until they fell and will one day fall on his gravesite, which I’ll have to dig up because we can’t have an ancestor’s bones polluting our perfect garden.

Thank you for the birthday prank, newfriend. I will get you back before you think up the idea for it.

Is it brown back there? The question confuses my oldfriend. I didn’t mean it metaphorically, but everything I say is meaningful on too many levels for him to comprehend.

The ground is brown, he said with certainty, after looking down.

But is the sky also brown? Does the atmosphere have an ineffable brownness?

My oldfriend felt the air around him suspiciously. He has an opacity around sixty percent, and I can see the garden growing through him. After a few moments, he gives up, thinking it was another prank.

It is more vivid here than in your time. From here, I can see the poet’s house on the hill, which appears quite blue.

It’s true, the poet’s dwelling has a sky of robin egg blue. His walls, floor, ceiling, and furniture are all the same color, as though he were born in a robin’s egg. 

That poet is a genius, oldfriend said. We read him back in our time. Our own poet is heavily influenced by his work. Some might say he is derivative. 

And this is why the ancestors never come to our parlor concerts. Neighbors call them ghosts, but that is deeply offensive. When I mentioned it to my oldfriend, we didn’t speak for a week and he cried openly. He looks adorable when he’s sad. Even when he cries, it is quaintly cute. The choppy way he reaches for a handkerchief, the brown tint in his poorly lit face, it must be a problem with his display, but it all adds to the effect of his adorable sadness. He is adorably sad as I leave the plot and head to the parlor. He weeps while chewing on an energy bar.

Did you forget something, newfriend?

I ask him to go with me, and insist upon it.

Here and then. Apple capsules. Walking brownly up the hill. See, I could write a poem. Parlor soundings on sunslept earth.

A couple out front makes faces when we walk in. The house is familiar, more so than my dwelling. It stands out among the greenstones of the rich, the white municipal buildings of the state, even opposite the poet’s blue egg, this parlor house looks like it could’ve been built at any time from now plus or minus a hundred years.

Ghosts sit off to one side while the rest of us stand, drinking, smoking, and preparing tonight’s performances. The poet, surrounded by ladies, recites verses internally. He may have to improvise tonight. The mathematician draws lines and circles with his finger. The hardest part is explaining it to laymen. My oldfriend joins the ghost section, and greets the people from his own time. They all have funny names and wear the same ridiculous clothes. 

I’m up first. The wind-up bird flies out of my pocket and the ladies in the parlor go woo. He’s so brown and so cute. His sixty second song plays for them. They woo again. 

I talk with the ladies later on, about how you know when certain berries are ripe, and about that time my oldfriend planted a shovel in the apple tree, but my farmtalk bores them, and they ask to see my bird once more so they can hear his song again. The blonde has a name as sweet as birdsong. I lay my intent down at her feet, to sleep together tonight. I lean in for a kiss on her red cheek, but she squirms my advances, and says she’s going over there with her friends. Within minutes, she’s talking to the poet, distracted by verses, verses floating in the air. See, I can be poetic too.

The mathematician is up next. He does the same routine he always does, which always gets a strong reaction. Meanwhile, I’m expected to produce an exciting new object from history’s compost pile. Maths! he shouts as colorful vectors streak from his fingertips and bend perpendicular to the corner of the ceiling. Spirals of gold uncoil from an exposed dimension. His hip shakes and hand gestures are all for show. I can follow the number line easily and without distraction.

One of the ghosts, who isn’t rude, but doesn’t know when to speak, made a comment during the performance, speaking of his own time way back mud, and even though he misspoke, not one of the other ghosts corrected him, and he carried on as if nothing happened. The ladies of the parlor laugh nervously, unable to conceal their contempt for this rough man of the past.

After hearing this strange phrase, the poet abandons his original idea and improvises Way Back Mud as the title and theme. His poem causes a fit of laughter, and I find myself laughing along, because it seems genuinely funny until I see my oldfriend’s reaction. The crowd repeats the phrase, having a good laugh amongst themselves, until the ghosts begin to catch on, that this is some clever mode of ridicule they don’t quite grasp. My oldfriend is the last to leave, but he sat through the entire poem as if digesting the offense, maybe pondering a way to get back at him from across the ages.

A small blip on his forehead follows him home. It’s still there in the morning when we pick and ship out the parsnips. It gets worse the following day on avocado day. Scratches and blurs appear on the left side of his face and his skin is all grainy. Our technician comes by to fix the display, but my oldfriend ends up blipping out all together, the light of his life turned off like a generator switch.

I killed him, the tech jokes. I killed your ghost.

Don’t call him that and don’t joke about that.

I can see myself in the empty TV screen as the clock flickers, the radio hisses, and the underground fibers go off for a moment of relief. Have you ever felt this silence? The electric ether which surrounds us dissolves, and below us the worms are still.

The tech crouches down to fiddle with the box, but he knocks out other power lines.

This plot is missing squares and everywhere we’ve grown food we’ve reaped sadness. On the ground, the sky-kissed ground. Poetry.

I think I’ll reset it, he says. The entire block blacks out for an instant, before you’re able to register it, but you remember it happening, the blip, and a little taste of death. Is this what it’s like to die, oldfriend?

The poet comes by, concerned about his lights. He shakes a bunch of apples loose. I am the red heart of the tree chewed up by this feeble man. He fails to thank me, saying he’d better leave us to it. The mathematician is also concerned about his lights, seeing as how they’re off and all, but he’ll leave us to it, as he picks up a fallen apple which he fails to give thanks for.

The crickets chirp and everything’s back on again except him. Shut up, I switch off the heat. The clock reads ten minutes since he disappeared. Every second is a century. Time is a mouth digesting space. The Shape stirs in place. It eats, eaten. Its coils cleave my flesh and lodge between my ribs, making a top out of my torso, a spin-toy to show off to the ladies. I crank up my wind-up bird and immediately wish it would stop. What if he couldn't fix it and my oldfriend was gone forever? Our last memory together would be of the parlor incident. In my desperation, I am reminded of a time when I was very young, my parents brought me to a house I’d never been, and everyone was sad, because an old man was deathly sick in the bedroom, how worn his flesh was, face covered in pox, and sunken yellow eyes barely able to focus, but my father made me sit at the edge of his bed and offer up my hand to the dying man, and only when I touched him did my hand stop shaking, and the echo of familiarity rang out on my fingertips from later on as the hole in the ceiling opened up and the light rained down. Oh Nils, I need you to pass the time against the day, to talk to of future friends and past lives, of snuck strawberries, and the endless surprise of what is becoming.

Where’s my friend, oldfriend?

Elsewhen, elsewhen!

It takes about an hour to turn him back on, and when he returns, he does so on top of me, emerging wispily from my chest. It’s as close as we’ll come to embracing. He was here the whole time, delighted by his invisibility and amused at our malfunctions. His laughter infects the technician, who laughs even harder. They teamed up against me, just when I was feeling guilty over the parlor incident and my use of ancestral slurs.

I crank up the wind-up bird, his birthday gift to me, and stomp it apart on the ground.

Oh Sol, oldfriend said. As the toy song plays in poor quality, another echoed in even poorer quality. In his hands, my gift was intact, ready to go into the ground and be gifted again. I didn't prank you, newfriend. But way back mud, we used to kick the birds too.