Three men are gathered about a table in a sub-street apartment in East Ann Arbor, three men under dim light, over a rusted chrome-and-Formica table clotted with dried and sometimes colorful pieces of food.
Three small men engaged in dark ceremonies of wire, black tape, soldering iron, and bits of electronic circuitry. One of them is paying close attention to the work. A forgotten, disemboweled, Radio Shack blister pack lies discarded on the carpet, attended by snippets of insulation and heat-shrink tubing.
Outside, fog of the morning rolls in still wearing last night's spongy dress. Steering her drunken Robo-Zamboni, she bears down cloudy over the hood of a green Chevrolet Vega, flooding, stretching, embracing, pounding the tin gracefully into the concrete.
Inside, sheltered from the mist, three men are gathered around a table. One of them is thin, with a Van Dyke, and he is smoking. He wears gold-rimmed glasses and a short-sleeved shirt. His long hair is in a worn pony tail, and he squints one eye against the smoke as he takes something apart with his fingers.
He is tucked into a dark corner almost behind a battered wife of a refrigerator. A dim lamp covers the corner, the table, and its center piece: A copper cylinder six centimeters in diameter. Threaded on either end, it has knurled caps just over a half inch thick. The entire device is nearly eight inches long.
Once a cartridge fuse in an Ohio foundry, it guided steel-melting, arm-breaking gouts of electrical current to blast furnaces in high heat passion sparks of orange, green, yellow, and gold. The foundry has since passed on to silence, on to desolation, on to rubble, on to beyond. From this crucible of honest power a genesis has stepped down to re-define its function.
Three men are gathered here to ponder this mandella. Six arms laid across the table, three parallel pair, three radial points.
One of them is thinking about his wife. He is muscular, shirt sleeves rolled up to just below his elbows. He wears a plain gold band and a white metal Timex Watch.
Picking up the device, he rubs his thumb over a small crack near one end where a pin has been driven. The surface is uniformly smooth to the touch. He is wondering what he is doing here.
The man with the cigarette laughs, the smoke cutting up into his eyes.
Three small men, and one of them has arms of stainless steel from the elbows down, curled into gentle forceps that he drums on the edge of the table, engaged in his own brittle incantations.
The device has been placed back on the table. The end caps have been lined with something translucent, pale, cloudy. What kind of flower will drive through this green fuse?
Outside, the sun is breaking down the street, running so fast she can hardly stay on top her legs. Slowing at a stop sign, she is down now on all fours, reaching, staging, rhythmic and alive.
Smelling the Huron, she smiles, lowers her head, and springs forward. Sleek, small skull of gold and black, ageless in scent and memory, already feeling the deep grass along the river bank, already dodging the trees.
Somewhere else, three small men are gathered over a table. One of them is nearly finished. |