Desmond hiked through the twisted jungle. It swarmed with unrecognizable insects, huge leafy fronds that drooped off twisted plants, and a suffusing heat that would cause an over-inflated balloon to think itself thin. He stomped through the mud, leaving flat footprints, and heard the dangerous 440 hertz tone of a Southeastern Brazilian wasp. He barely recognized an unfamiliar feeling of how the natural scenery seemed to repeat in its trees and plants and trees.
Emerging from a clearing, he was greeted with an expansive view and a chortle of laughter. The cliff side view overlooked a rolling blanket of green velvet, with tiny plots of beige lumber marking isolated homesteads. To his left approached an older man with a spring in his step: the source of the laughter. Behind the decaying old man was a decaying house, rusted and reeking with peeling paint. A fence neatly marked a quaint garden sprinkled with succulents, their leaves circularly unfolding.
“Ah,” Desmond said, “so this is a meeting of the two most brilliant men.”
“Once smartest, once smartest,” the older man greeted Desmond with a nod.
“Once smartest?” Desmond smirked, “They said you were the most brilliant.”
“No, last I checked, once smartest. I left my intelligence behind,” the man turned his hands back and forth, a tilt to his head, “with a machine, who I’m told, used it for good.”
“Well?” Desmond asked, moving closer to the man, pushing aside leafy stalks.
“Well,” the man nodded, glancing at the garden, “thank you for asking.”
“No! What are you doing here?” Desmond whined, “They said you’d have the secret. The infinite problem. The hardest challenge of man. The question and answer to life itself.”
“I dunno.” He paused, squinting at the clouds. “Come walk with me.” The older man led Desmond across the homestead. A billow of graceful steam spilled from a hissing copper machine. Pottery sherds and colourful plastic scraps composed a pathway, and Desmond stepped carefully around a row of tin cups that read ‘DEFINITELY DANGEROUS.’
The man fanned himself with a fern, offering one to Desmond.
“You really did sell your brains,” Desmond muttered.
“It’s a cycle, here. What grows, is eaten, then planted, to grow again.” The old man lectured, passing by a compost bin. “It’s rarely the product that matters but the processing that does.” He petted a cat who brushed his ankles. “I can reuse an old script for words or for paper. Isn’t it all nice? And the sun always shines.”
“Enough,” Desmond said, “shut your trap. I’m leaving.”
“Wait,” the old man said, “there is one machine I have that I’ll never understand.”
The man led him back to a spot near the beginning of their walk to what appeared to be an outhouse. A crescent moon swung from its angled roof, covered in bird droppings. The wood melted into the rich dirt. Walking around the outside, Desmond saw no electrical connections, no mechanical pistons, not a single hint at what might be inside. With a shrug from the older man, Desmond curiously stepped inside.
He closed the door from the inside. It was dark. It smelled like blooming violets.
He stepped out into the brilliantly green jungle, about to utter words of surprise at how he could not figure out the machine. But the other man was nowhere to be seen. He was wearing different clothing–worn old with time. The sun was perplexingly lower on the horizon. What had happened? Further away, he heard someone stomping through the muddy jungle. He heard the 440 hertz buzz of the Southeastern Brazilian bee. He saw a man emerge from the jungle into the clearing.
The older man accepted the truth of it all, and laughed at it’s lacking.