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“ Jurassic Park,” I said out loud but couldn’t hear very well for all the screeching going on around me.
“Dinosaurs!” Monsters with teeth as big as the baseball bat I still held. Walking houses with serious appetites for anything fleshy. I had to get out of here. In a panic I turned around, pla
Eventually my brain stopped its own screeching in fear. And although I was scared shitless of what might come stomping out of the trees at any minute, I was losing control so fast that there was only one thing left to do-close my eyes. A trick that almost always worked for me when things got so bad I could feel life unraveling. Close my eyes and say, “I am driving my life. I am steering this car. I CONTROL THINGS.”
I started the “I am-” but it was drowned out by the terrible new sound of something very big-and near-coming my way through the jungle. THUMP THUMP THUMP. It was ru
“What are the six questions?”
How did I hear that? The voice had spoken calmly and in no hurry. But I heard it clearly above everything else. What six questions? Who is this? Were they the last words I’d ever hear? WAS IT GOD?
“No, Mr. Gallatin, it’s Beeflow. What are the six questions?”
Thump Thump Thump. I heard bushes crashing, birds crying out like they do when they’re disturbed or attacked. This monster was closer, it was almost here.
“WHAT ARE THE SIX QUESTIONS?”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about! Get me out of here!”
And then the biggest shock of all-I heard him sigh! A disappointed sigh. The sigh of a teacher when you’ve answered a question wrong in class.
“All right, I’ll help you this one time but not again. Name one experience from your past you wish you could repeat. That is the third question.”
“Are you nuts? Now? The thing’s coming! Get me out of here!”
“Then answer the question, and quickly.”
“An experience I want to repeat? I don’t know. Jeez, I don’t know. Help me, willya?” My voice sounded like one of the scared birds up in the trees.
“No, help yourself-answer that question.”
And when he said that, an answer came so clear and calm to my mind that I was surprised I hadn’t known it immediately. “I wish I could have sex again for the first time with Rae. That was the best night of my life.”
“Very very good. Now look in your hand.”
I looked, even though the bushes nearby rustled hard which meant whatever monster was coming had arrived. Instead of the silver baseball bat, I held a black metal cylinder about two feet long. The dinosaur burst out at me like a rocket with legs. Its teeth were even bigger than I had thought they’d be. Its open mouth looked ten feet wide. I didn’t even have a chance to raise the cylinder up to do whatever it might do to fight off the thing. Because it was there.
And then gone.
That’s right-it whizzed right by me. Whatever kind of prehistoric piece of shit it was, the creature ran by and went crashing on into the jungle behind me. It didn’t even stop to have a look or say hello. Not that I was disappointed. I stood there looking after it and then I looked at the black cylinder in my hand, trying to figure out how it played into all this. No answer came. It was just this metal thing that a while before had been a baseball bat.
I stood there listening while Tyra
I looked at it and wondered what kind of magic had changed it from a baseball bat into this without my ever having felt it. I wondered if it had somehow saved me from being eaten. Or had answering Beeflow’s question been the reason? What were the six questions he was talking about? What was this cylinder lying on the ground a foot away? How was I going to get out of the forest primeval and back to my world?
“Don’t turn around.”
I didn’t but sure was tempted. It was Beeflow again. “Why can’t I look at you?”
“Because I told you before, Mr. Gallatin, I am everything ugly about you. I’m your shit in the toilet, the dark side of your moon, the worst lies you’ve told, the hurt you dropped on others. I am everything bad about you and if you want to look that square in the face then go ahead. But I warn you, looking your own evil in the eye is as bad as looking at Medusa. It will wreck you, turn part of you into stone.”
“And you say you’re me?”
“Only in part. I’ve chosen to take all that’s bad in you for the time being so you can face challenges other than your own.”
“Are you, uh, human?”
“I was once, but am no longer. Years ago I had a vision and it changed me forever.”
“What kind of vision?”
“You’re looking at it now.”
I happened to be looking at the cylinder next to me. “That thing? The baseball bat?”
“Yes. I was in a flea market in London and on a table amongst other junk was a brass object. I worked as a travel agent but my great hobbies were inventing and the history of tools. So I was well versed in the function of all sorts of machinery, archaic tools, and the like. I was no newcomer to obscure gadgets. But for the life of me I could not understand what purpose this gizmo served. Written on the side of it in thick letters were the words ‘Heidelberg Cylinder.’ I picked it up and turned it over and over in my hands but its purpose still baffled me. I was perplexed and fascinated, so I paid three pounds and put it in my pocket.
“When I returned home to America and was able to look through the reference books in my library, I discovered something staggering: The Heidelberg Cylinder had been used in every great modern invention. The cotton gin, the first steam engine, the telephone, internal combustion engine. You name it and a version of the cylinder was one of the components. It was the essential piece in every one of those i
“I couldn’t believe that no one had ever made the discovery. And then it hit me-no one was supposed to make the discovery! The Heidelberg Cylinder is meant to be invented again and again in its different guises and then put into the workings of whatever new different machines we dream up in the future.
“Because do you know what the Cylinder really is? The concrete proof of our immortality. The result of the human mind and spirit working as one to solve problems and overcome them. Any problems. Physical proof of the fact we can do anything we want, even live forever if we choose, if we set our minds to it.”
I looked at it and rubbed my mouth. “That thing?”
“Yes, that thing.”
I picked it up, turned it over. It was black and there was nothing written on it. Definitely not any “Heidelberg Cylinder.”
“How come it’s black and there’s no writing on it?”
“Because once you realize what it is, it changes into something else. Something someone else will need to discover its importance. For me it was the brass object I described. For the person who had it before you it turned into a sixteenth-century Persian lock. For you it became a baseball bat.”