The Mind of Bryan Lee Peterson

The Measurer

The measurer didn’t enjoy his job anymore. It wasn’t like what it used to be, wasn’t like what it could have been, wasn’t what he had imagined it to be, but still there was this part of him that continued on with it. The measurer didn’t work for himself, like before. At fifty-five years of age, he felt ready to retire, but he couldn’t retire yet. He wouldn’t reach average retiring age for another ten years. He had a large file on that topic, and on many other topics. Data, and surveys, and graphs, and statistics of all of this sort was easy for him to access. It was his job to supervise acquisition of such information, and then to determine its significance. Some statistics read that he was the best Measurer yet, and public opinion always held high.

The position used to entail travel, and investigation. But now, now more skills were necessary. Faster analysis, more information needed led to the necessity for more people, more desk work. More organization became necessary. Now, most of his task fell to organizing properly so that everything ran at peak efficiency, rather than the analysis that he really loved and in which he excelled. Now he was overburdened with supervising, and he left work later and later at night. His wife, two children, and dog felt neglected, but all statistics showed that followed the trend for executives of his age, especially in the higher tiers of the organizations. He had spent years in the public eye, heading up the latest collection operations. Leading a campaign against the usual token candidate. He never lost more than fifteen percent of the popular vote, and on the average, twelve point three. Always at the end of the his term, they would  speculate if he would run for another five years. He would be seen at the most glamorous events, always the centerpiece, always busy, never a moment to enjoy the places he visited.

He hoped to finish his work just once. He hoped to get to the last piece of paper in the “in” box, but never did, it always accumulated. At the bottom of the box, he joked to himself, was probably an urgent memo from fifteen years ago. He was only two years off. He hoped that, just once before he retired, he could be home before the sun went down, he could spend time with his children. He planned that maybe, just before it came time to finally step down, when his successor was chosen, there would still be time to stop and take a tour of all  the places he had been. He hoped that just once he could eat a warm dinner again because he was home from work on time. He hoped that just once before he retired he could be human again.  But that possibility wasn’t available in the data before him.  He had never determined how to measure humanity.

The Weatherman

The weatherman sat at the news desk. He had no use for maps, satellite images or computer projections. He never had to show exciting footage of tornadoes. Ever since the Weather Service had regulated weather patterns, he merely doled out the schedule for when it would rain, what hours on what days. Everyday he reported facts, and his knowledge was wasted in the oration. Every night he went to sleep, wishing that it might rain on a day when it was not forecast.

Marquis

He should have been a Spanish Marquis come to chance fate because of a mission that only he fully knew, the kind of person that you’d see if you were walking through a bad part of town while clutching your umbrella tighter than usual. You would see him standing under the only working streetlight for three blocks. Swallowing the light, wearing a black hole trench coat, he would consider you passing by from behind the shadow created by his fedora. He would stand there, thumbing his pocket watch and its chain, one leg securely on the ground, or maybe floating inexplicably just above the pavement; and the other leg comfortably folded, resting impossibly on the post. The mission of this marquis, if he really is a marquis at all, could be to make you walk just a little bit faster to avoid the ambush a few blocks ahead. Or maybe he is the guardian angel that convinces you to cross the street so that you will fall into the ambush, which even now readies itself, so that you may learn that you shouldn’t walk in the bad part of town at night.  You’d learn. And then he’d head to the nearest bar for a draught of reconciliation and a shot of vodka because being an angel, being unlimited, in this world is difficult on the conscience.

It was evening where I was when they made themselves known. The sun was setting across the Arizona sky, and the clouds on the horizon were small, purple-blue and broken apart into sparse bunches against the orange-peach background of the mountains to the east. I was at the grill, cooking dinner for the rest of the shift at the fire house. It was my turn, and I didn’t mind doing it. The day had been quiet, not even a single call, and in six hours, we’d be going home from our shift.

“What is that?” Javier asked.

I turned around and saw it, a cloud that was much more regular in shape than the rest, it was something, I couldn’t tell what. Then it dawned on me that it was a spaceship, and not one of this world. I tried to come up with a verbal response, an expletive that was adequate, but my mind was blank. By the time I came up with one, it was much too late.

It looked like a cloud, dark blue, fairly round, but as the wind blew the clouds away, the ship remained, still. You could call it vaguely saucer-ish from the right view, but not like in the movies, not like that at all. You could tell this craft was real, you could see panel lines on its skin, irregularities and flaws, like ships which had just crossed the ocean in a storm, and they hadn’t caught up on painting over the corrosion.

“Hey come take a look at this,” he yelled into the firehouse. Some of the other members of the crew came out. They stood there for a silent minute before any of them even moved.

The silence was interrupted by sonic booms. We knew what those were, the Air Force had scrambled F-16’s from Luke. They went full throttle overhead, direct intercept path and the ship was just over the edge of Apache Junction. The thing itself was silent as a cloud, you couldn’t hear it, at least not as far away as we were. Sound carries a long way out here, we heard the F-16’s from Luke all over the place, from all directions; it bounced off the taller buildings in Phoenix back to us. There wasn’t anything in the desert to absorb sound either. We’d have heard something if it was making any amount of sound.

Some of the others had gone into the station to watch what was happening on the television.

“Rick, Javier get in here,” they called to us. “You can see it better.”

I never did finish cooking the hamburgers. They turned to solid bricks of carbon on the grill.

There were local reporters on TV, broadcasting from the tallest buildings in Phoenix, they had crews rushing out to get just below the alien ships to report from the scene, but this view was enough to put on the air for the moment. They were quickly switching to affiliates all over the country, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Tampa. The ships seemed to be everywhere. They even had shots from Paris, Beunos Aires, Berlin, Tokyo. They weren’t all the same ship, it was a fleet, lots of different shapes and sizes. They were all hovering, doing nothing.

You forgot everything at times like these. Your life, your job, where you were, your name. It was just too far out of comprehension to grasp. I stood there just watching, not a thought passing through my head. You’d think you could come up with a thought of absolute wonder, but no, nothing. Years of training, of running into burning buildings, of dealing with life and death emergencies was just gone. What else could you do? A couple of the guys called their wives and kids, their girlfriends, but it was hard to get through, the switchboards were jammed. And when they did get through, there wasn’t much to say. “I know, can you believe it?” was about all they could get out. The world was never so silent as right then. The roads were empty and clear, you couldn’t hear any traffic noise. Most airliners had been turned around, ordered to the ground, so the skies were clear, except for those ships and the Air Force.

For the first half hour, things went just this way, and nobody could say anything. The news reporters did their job, which was to keep talking. They had nothing that they could say, other than the ships were there, which we could all observe for ourselves. The only new thing they could report was another confirmed ship outside another city. Boston, Madrid, Jakarta, New Delhi, Moscow.

We got bored watching it, so we turned the TV all the way up, left the windows open, and climbed up on the roof. The surface was still hot, even though the sun had long since reached its apex in the sky and crawled back down into evening. We brought up blankets, whatever we could find that would insulate us from the heat. We were so far out from the city that there was an unobstructed view for us all.

My thoughts had collected into something resembling coherence by then. I thought of being a kid, seeing Star Wars, and all the creatures. I wondered what they looked like. Were they bigger than us, smaller, did they have two arms and two legs? Of all things, I remembered an assignment when I was in fifth grade, when my teacher asked me to invent and describe an alien, but I couldn’t remember what I had written anymore, not now.

At one point, they mentioned that a special session of Congress was being called, the President was meeting with his advisers. The stations tried to tap into C-SPAN, but the feed got cut off. They said the government did it, but that was it, no other reason was given.

So far nothing indicated any hostile intent, but nobody was taking any chances. The F-16’s circled, everybody else waited. We were afraid, no doubt about it. We’d seen Independence Day, we’d seen all those movies. They just waited until things were quiet and we let our guard down and they open fired. In the movies we always won, and none of us thought that was really possible with something like this, not with what their technology must be like.
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Note: My apologies to Borges.

The guard approached my cell like it was the last thing he wanted to do. I had gained a Hannibal Lecter kind of rep, and while my past might have earned it, I wasn’t about to make a daring escape set to classical music, killing everybody on the way. I wasn’t going to ever leave this prison. I knew that much for a fact. I looked up at him to see what he wanted.
“Lawyer’s here,” he said.

He tossed in shackles, and I put them on before he opened the cell door. I don’t mind talking to lawyers. They provided company. We walked out of the death row block,  and eventually made it to a private room that could be locked. I sat in a metal chair, across from a lawyer and a pile of papers. Two guards stayed in the room with us. It was procedure.

“Hello, my name is Tom Meyers. I’ve been appointed to direct the appeals process of your case,” he said. He was young.

“No appeals,” I said.

“I’ve noticed a few technicalities of your case that we might be able to use to commute your execution.”

“It won’t stand up. I know.”

“But…” He was confused.

“I did it all. Not entirely like they said in the case, but it was close enough. I wouldn’t sweat the details.”

“You don’t want appeals?”

“Won’t change nothing. You’re the third one they sent. I’ll tell you the same story as the others, and then you’ll go back to your office, have a shot of that 20 year scotch you like so much, then probably another, and then you’ll try to forget me, but you won’t be able to.”

He looked at me funny, wondering how I knew. I smiled back at him to set him more at ease.

“I can’t drop it. The Office of the DA will need a full report,” he said. “Start at the beginning.”

“You’ll see,” I told him.

“There are neighborhoods that are dead ends. You know them. You probably lock the doors when you drive through, if you ever found a reason why you’d have to drive through them. You don’t want to break down there. You don’t want to get off at the Dunton exit on the freeway, that’s why the freeway goes clear past. If you saw my neighborhood in your windshield, you’d turn back. I don’t know what business outsiders have there anyway. And if you were born in a neighborhood like mine, you were dead before you even got started. It’s just a matter of time. You can talk about the crime, the poverty, the drugs, the pollution, they’re all parts of the same beast. The neighborhood is a predator, it’s always stalking you. All around you are its claws and fangs, its hot breath seeping into your lungs, and the sound of its heartbeat that lingers in the back of your mind. It gives you fear. We all live scared there, no matter how much we deny it. Read the rest of this entry »

The Oral History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

By Bryan Lee Peterson

Polonius paced the dressing room space nervously, trying to pull his lines back up from memory. He’d been going like this for the hour since he’d arrived with Fortinbras, who lay asleep on a hard wooden bench.

“And keep these precepts in memory: Look after your…thy character. Give your …thy thoughts no tongue, and no unappropriate thought an act. Be familiar, but in no way vulgar. The friends you have, their adoption tried, Bring them into thy soul, and hold them like steel. Do not dull thy palm with the entertainment of every new hatched, un?edged comrade. Beware entrance to a quarrel; but, finding yourself there, bear it in mind that the opposed may be wary of thee,” Polonius said. He scratched his head and then started over. He’d never been this nervous before a performance in all his time in performance.

“I hardly remember these lines. How long has it been?

Fortinbras lifted his head only enough to directly address Polonius.

“Too long,” he said, and put his head back down. He had large bags under his eyes, they hadn’t let him sleep either.

“I’ve lost track of the last time we did this. When was the last time we were even together? I was in the camp for months, I know. Before that, there was a time where I never saw day or night, and I lost track of time. None of us knew what day it was. There were only days.”

He shook his head.

“I lost track as well. After a while I stopped wondering, it caused too much pain.”

“There are so many lines to recall. Why was I cast as Polonius, anyway? He just goes on and on. He’s a prattler, and I’m not a prattler by nature.”

“Sure you’re not,” Fortinbras said.

“Maybe a bit when I’m nervous.”

“Sure,” Fortinbras said with a sly nod, and a slight wink. “When you’re nervous.”

“But there’s so many lines to remember. It just feels so much like it was another age when we last did this. So much has happened to us.”

“Hm,” Fortinbras grunted in agreement. “Last time we had better accommodations.”

“We’ll never get back to that, will we? This performance can’t possibly change anything for us, right? I’d like to think that we could somehow make it out, but that doesn’t seem very likely.”

“To thine own self be true,” Fortinbras said.

“Is that the next line? I wish I had a book somewhere.” Read the rest of this entry »