In which the people of the Coast realize that the new way of walking was so much like how a bicycle coasts, that when they even looked at the bicycle parts in their refuse bins, they wondered why it had taken them so long to discover.
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Before we met Delilah, we all suffered the misconception that the object in front of us, filtered through our pupils, would replicate the idea stretched behind our foreheads. The Company Artist was one of the few aware, and the beauty of this disparity was why—he claimed—he painted. Though he squinted now, he could not stamp, on the 36 x 48 canvas, the image of this new way of walking.
He was on deadline! He dipped the walrus tusk’s tip into the black ink barrel. He tried to force the canvas thought stretching behind his face—hooked onto each eyeball edge and mouth corner—to match up with his brainstorm. The tusk dripped, pattering paint onto the garbage bags under his boots.
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The popcorn thoughts begin life as stalks—these are the rules we learn from the elders. They push against the scalp’s top and curl. They brush behind the screens of our eyes, seeking sun. Delilah too heard the hiss of thoughts simmering when she cupped her hands over her ears. In the silence, the leaves brushed her eardrum. Then the kernels of thoughts steamed and popped. So what we call a brainstorm is actually a smattering of ideas tossed across our scalps and exploding.
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The Company Artist imagined another walrus sleeping on the Coast’s edge, hauled her by her tail up to the roof, stamped his foot on her snout. Then he sawed off her tusks. He charged the carcass, rolling her off the Compound and into the ocean. He trudged back to the rooftop entrance, wiping musk off his hands, the tusks tucked under his arms knocking together. “At least I know what I see is real and not merely a thought, since I’m an artist,” he said. Company Artist, his scalp singsonged. Why visualize whole walruses instead of simply their tusks? This would be a less wasteful thought. The Company Artist stared at the sea. “I’m a fraud,” he said.
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When Delilah awoke that fateful morning and watched the daylight dance on the ocean, she selected the word lustrous. Then the sun reflected off the sidewalk busystones on the ocean’s surface; they appeared almost black, like the backs of wet frogs. This image lingered in her mind and, quite suddenly, she appeared in her kitchen. She followed a thin track back to her bedroom window.
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The Company tried to imprison the most virulent and incendiary bicycle thought by shutting Delilah in the only open cell—an oak boardroom where there had evidently been a party. Gold and blue streamers dangled from a ceiling fan. Her sentence was to be for five years. Her room was next to his.
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He knew immediately who she was. He sat on the floor with his back against the connecting wall. “That word you used instead of I,” he called over. “Bicycle. How did you know?”
“It just appeared in my head,” she said, her muffled voice low. “All at once like a struck match.”
“But … of course you’ve never seen a bicycle.”
“Oh no,” she said. “But sometimes things, new thoughts come to me and I catch them, pry them out, but they only appear … half-done.”
“Like the dolls?” And the Company Artist shuddered. “God help us.”
“Yes. Nothing like what I’d imagined. But even then, those can be the best, the most useful thoughts—the ones which come out different. Do you know what I mean?”
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One day, she asked the Man Who Thought He Was a Fraud in the cell next to hers, “But what about your mandates raising the fence walls? Surely the Company had to forecast that?”
“No!” he said. “We … did not. We just told you all the steps to take, using clear, precise language. The color of the extensions and the posts would be raised two feet …”
She mouthed “two feet” along with him, and would recall them, twenty-five nights later while they turned together under his itchy blanket.
He continued, “When you use words to describe something you just about make it real.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
The townspeople now know that Delilah had the first bicycle coasting thought. It wasn’t how they normally envisioned the incendiary ones—the tangled clumps of carbon or steel the Company would repossess in their trucks by the refuse fences.
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He was in love with the fact she understood how trapped they were on the Coast. Delilah recognized so much about their lives it was damaging. She knew how the townspeople’s spines could become chains and their lungs two pedals. She knew that, using their spine’s chains, they could pull thoughts from their stomach’s depths.
“I want to give you something,” he said, opening her door on the seventh day. She unclenched her fist, prying away one finger at a time. Then his hand covered hers. She smelled soap. It was a small, black figurine. “This is what a walrus looks like.”
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Before Delilah, we moved by walking on two raised ramps which spanned the length of the Coast: one ramp for GOING and one for COMING. We hated them because they shaded the grove where walruses sunbathed. So the Company said they would make them more palatable. These beautiful pavers, they claimed, would feel cool against us. They may have been telling the truth, but we had to take their word for it, because, when we’re moving, we have no thoughts.
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When the Company found a bicycle thought in the Artist’s refuse amongst the tusks, they executed him for treason. When they took him apart, there were two grease-smelling doll hands clinging inside his face, clamped to the back of each eyebrow.
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The Company mandated that we bag the thoughts separately according to type—“for our own security.” Tied plastic bags of popcorn thoughts appeared. Doll legs were dropped, clattering into the cans. Bike parts, dandelions, and crabgrass.
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Delilah’s hair blew back and her shirt stuck to her chest as she approached the ocean. The map thought in her mind distorted the busystone’s bends and curves where she’d lived for more than nineteen years, five of those imprisoned in the compound. Zipping past everything at once drew a new mind map.
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The tree branch thought, with many leaves which were choices, grew until it brushed the Company Artist’s scalp just under the crown. “I’m happier with you than I ever was. Now I’m not afraid to die,” he said. If Delilah hadn’t looked into his eyes then, she would not have caught the leaves blurring. The pressure would’ve blinded him. She’d grabbed his ears and touched his lips to hers.
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None of the Townspeople could’ve predicted that their infant’s arms and legs would look like tires.
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The last residents of the Coast who learned were the very old and the very poor. Since the doll parts clasped behind their eyes were already so fully formed, so solid, it was harder for the people on the Coast to replace those thoughts with coasting, harder for any of us whose thoughts had become malleable once Delilah first demonstrated from the rooftop.
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The accident involved a young librarian and a student who had not yet learned. By the time of Delilah’s escape, the Company had certainly outlawed coasting, so the library smuggled classes for seniors out on walrus-infested International Waters. “You’ve got to think about coasting,” he said to the five barefoot seniors standing on floating chalkboards. “See yourself doing it. Now, the first thought that comes to your mind, don’t trust it! Throw it out. Bad thought.” He looked up toward the hulking Company with its wide metal roof, barricaded by bags of doll parts, popcorn, and bike tires, and spat. He pulled from his head a coiled tangle of aluminum. “It’ll be recycled. Don’t worry,” he said, and set it next to him. In twenty-five minutes, tire tracks scuffed the chalkboards. That’s when it happened. One senior skated off the board into the sea. Splash! The librarian dove in to rescue her. Walruses flippered toward them, honking and hungry. The student and librarian were nearly lost.
Perry Genovesi (he/him) works as a librarian in Philadelphia, USA. He serves his fellow workers in AFSCME District Council 47 and plays in the empty arena rock band, Canid. You can read his published fiction in the Santa Monica Review, Dream Pop, Home Planet News, and collected on tiny.cc/PerryGenovesi. If there is an afterlife, he hopes there is an award for one who was at least always kind to cats. Twitter: @unionlibrarian.
Image: cbc.ca
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Heavy Feather Review 