Imagine five or six city blocks could lift, with a bump, and float away.  The impression the 804 foot long Hindenburg gives on the ground is that of an airship built by giants and excessive even to their purposes.   The fabric hull and mainframe curve upward sixteen stories high. 

      Meinert and Gnuss are out on the gangway ladder down to the starboard #1 engine car.  They’re helping out the machinists, in a pinch.  Gnuss is afraid of heights, which amuses everyone.  It’s an open aluminum ladder with a single handrail extending eighteen feet down into the car’s hatchway.  They’re at 2000 feet.  The clouds below strand by and dissipate.  It’s early in a mild May in 1937.    — “Love and Hydrogen”   

#1: The Invasion Begins  

     A bubble-helmeted Martian in the left foreground stares out at us and points to the saucer, which is silvery white and spotted along its outside rim with the black ovals of windows.  The saucer stands on four narrow poles, like a tent at a wedding.   A column of Martians in green spacesuits with red scuba tanks on their backs extends to a prosaic ladder leading to an open hatch.  Another saucer is on the ground behind the first.  An easy diagonal of saucers swoops by in the background.  The sky is a deep blue, fading to an ominous yellow on the horizon.  Jagged orange peaks rise in the distance on the right.  The Martian’s pupils are red.  His whites are huge.  His nose and teeth are a skull’s.  His brain is oversized and exposed.  The back of the card is caramel brown.  On it we learn why they’re doing this: buildup of atomic pressures beneath the surface of Mars with an explosion only weeks or months away, no choice, and a reckless overconfidence in the power of their weapons.  We’re told to See Card #2: Martians Approaching.     — “Mars Attacks” 

      Before they came, I went about my business in pond muck, slurry, roiling soups and thermoclines of particulate matter and anaerobic nits and scooters.  I’d been alone for somewhere between 250 and 260 million years.  I’d forgotten the exact date.  Our prime had been the Devonian, and we’d been old news by the Permian.  We’d become a joke by the Triassic and fish food by the Cretaceous.  The Cenozoic had dragged by like the eon it was.  At some point I’d looked around and everyone else was gone.  I was still there, the spirit of a fish in the shape of a man.  I breaststroked back and forth, parting underwater meadows with taloned mitts.  I watched species come and go.  I glided a lot, vain about my swimming and not as fluid in my stroking as I would have liked to have been.  I suffered from negative buoyancy.  I was out of my element.  — “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” 

       The acoustics of empty stadiums were very beautiful.  When a single bird called out, you heard it from wherever you were. In the early morning, or after matches, when the lights were out and the sky was black, from the bench, you heard the wind in the grass.  In the Dutch leagues then, the stadium superstructures were skeletal and intimate.   The advertising panels were like old friends and smelled of wet wood.  The empty balconies overhung the stands so that stray papers blown from above were snared by the seat-backs below.    — “Ajax is All About Attack” 

       It’s 1970.  He’s the glue that holds us together, the UN van pelted with rocks and bottles, the pro wrestling ref floored by the occasional dropkick but always gamely back on his feet and working to keep the eye-gouging to a minimum.  Morning in and morning out, my father’s up and has the coffee made and is reasonably ready for whatever we’re about to, in our misery and impatience and bell-jar self-absorption, dish out.    — “The Mortality of Parents” 

       I was twelve years old when I figured out that the look my brother would get around his eyes probably meant that there was a physiological basis for what was wrong with him.  Six years later as a college freshman I was flipping through Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, fifth edition, and was shocked to come across that same look, Donnie’s eyes, peering out at me fro Gericault’s Madwoman. The madwoman in question was elderly, wrapped in some kind of cloak. She wore a white bonnet.  Her eyes looked away from the painter.  I recognized the hatred, the sheer animosity for everything, unconcealed.  Red lines rimmed her eyelids in a way that did not resemble eyestrain or fatigue.  It was as if the mind behind the eyes was soaking in anguish.  The next morning my Intro to Art History professor flashed a slide of the painting, ten feet wide, on the screen in front of us.  A gum-chewing class went silent.  “How’d you like to wake up to that in the morning?” the professor joked. — “Krakatau”  

        We were the great group for things going wrong. Cancellations, electrical failures, bad weather, broken-down vans, missed dates, slashed thumbs, broken noses, sprained knees, bugger-all equipment, beggary, rookery, penury, and out-and-out thuggery: all just a part of that tag-along high speed death march that called itself The Detours / The High Numbers / The Who.   — “Won’t Get Fooled Again” 

         I am Oberleutnant Heini Opitz of Test-Commando 16 and this is not a war story.  It’s the story of a lunatic revolution — the inmates with Bedlam’s keys — and the boys all call me Pitz.  We fly (Fly?  Ride!) the Messerschmitt 163, the first manned rocket-powered aircraft, the first aircraft in the world to exceed a thousand kilometers an hour in level flight, and in statistical terms the most dangerous aircraft ever built in a series.  We sit in these squat fireworks with wings and are skyrocketed upward eight thousand meters in under a minute to bring down the Allied bombers.  Mostly we bring down ourselves.  (We move at such speeds that they can barely touch us with their defensive fire, and we have little more success shooting at them.)  The emblem of our fighter wing is an escutcheon depicting a jet-propelled silhouette of a flea, bracketed by the inscription Like a flea — but oho!   We strap ourselves in and lock down the canopies and plug our helmets’ RT leads into the radios and give our thumbs up, and before we ignite the witches’ cauldrons behind our rear ends, we shout as loudly as we can into our masks, “Climb aboard the mighty flea!”    — “Climb Aboard the Mighty Flea” 

       First day of FS and where are my good green pants?  In the wash.  I have one pair of pants that aren’t clown pants and they’re in the wash.  They haven’t been washed all summer but today, this morning, they’re in the wash.  It’s too cold for cargoes and everything else in my drawer is Queer Nation, and sure enough I’m the only one on the bus in shorts.  “Scorcher, isn’t it?” a ninth grader asks when he goes by my locker.  I’m standing there like I’m modeling beachwear.  Kids across the hall chuckle and point.  I almost head home right then.      — Project X  

       Guilt, Guilt, Guilt 

        Here’s what it’s like to bear up under the burden of so much guilt: everywhere you drag yourself you leave a trail.  Late at night, you gaze back and view an upsetting record of where you’ve been.  At the medical center where they brought my brothers, I stood banging my head against a corner of the crash cart.  When one of the nurses saw me, I said, “There, that’s better.  That kills the thoughts before they grow.”        — “The Zero Meter Diving Team” 

        Guy’s hurt?  Fuck ‘im.  Guy can’t get up, play’s still going?  Run his ass over.  Whistle’s blown?  Stretcher bearer time.  Grab a blow and let the Sisters of Mercy do their thing, 

        “Faggots,” Wainwright says whenever the trainers come out for someone.  He means the trainers. 

         We’re not talking games, here.  We're talking summer practice, two-a-days, guys keeling over in the heat.  When more than one guy has the heaves we call it Hee Haw because of the sound. 

         “That shit’s not funny,” somebody’ll say when they see us laughing.  Some fat shit, holding his knees, blowing chow.  “Dude for the Vikings died.”  — “Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak” 

         Two and a half weeks after I was born, on July 9th, 1958, the plates that make up the Fairweather Range in the Alaskan Panhandle apparently slipped twenty-one feet on either side of the Fairweather fault, the northern end of a major league instability that runs the length of North America.  The thinking now is that the southwest side and bottom of the inlets at the head of Lituya Bay jolted upward and to the northwest, and the northeast shore and head of the bay jolted downward and to the southeast.  One way or the other, the result registered 8.3 on the Richter scale.  — “Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay

         I am Aeschylus son of Euphorion of Eleusis and I’ve come this day with my brother to take my place in the line with my tribe to meet the invader where he disembarks and drive him back into the sea.  We’ve rested and waited six days in the Herakleion sanctuary on the plain of Marathon, with the Median fleet filling half the shoreline of the bay, even with their ships anchored eight deep.  More men-at-arms are assembling before the Great Marsh than any of us have ever seen.  We’re told that their word for commander means “Leader of the Hosts.”  — “My Aeschylus”  

         Summer camp: here’s how bad summer camp was.  The day I arrived I opened my camp trunk and changed my shirt and just stood there alone and breathing through my mouth in the four man platform tent, just me and the canvas smell and the daddy longlegs, and then I thought that I was the person who I least wanted to be with, and I stepped out into the cooler air.  There was nowhere to unpack anything, and even I wasn’t so scared that I could hang around in the tent.  It was like 104.  Sweat ran down the backs of my knees.  The black metal stays on the tent ropes were too hot to touch. — “Courtesy for Beginners” 

         We haven’t spoken in three days and haven’t stretched out in two, and that’s forty-four hours we’ve been braced back to back, holding our tent poles, one hand low and the other high, to keep them from snapping in the wind.  They’re supposed to be titanium but at Camp 3 they went off like rifle shots in the night and these are jerry-rigged spares.  The winds are topping 130 kilometers an hour.  The temperature has dropped to 49 below.  We’re wearing three layers of fleece, one of Gore-tex, down bodysuits, insulated climbing shells, and even our overgaiters, with gloves inside gloves inside mittens, and head caps inside balaclavas inside hoods.   I’ve been unable to interrupt the clatter of my teeth.  Jacek’s breathing sounds like someone blowing bubbles through a straw.  Bienek has long since given himself over to a kind of stupefaction.  We store the radio batteries in our underwear and load them only when we need to call base camp.  Once we’re finished, getting them back through all the layers takes ten minutes.  Then we just grip one another and hold on until our testicles warm the battery casings.  The casings conduct the cold with exceptional efficiency.   — “Poland Is Watching” 

         Here’s the story of my life: whatever I did wasn’t good enough, anything I figured out I figured out too late, and whenever I tried to help I made things worse.   That’s what it’s been like for me as far back as I can remember.  Whenever I was about to get somewhere, something would step in and block me.  Whenever I was about to finally have something, something would happen to take it away. 

         “The story of your life is you’re not to blame for anything,” my mother always said when I told her that.  “Out of everybody on earth, you’re the only one who never did anything wrong.  Whatever happens, it’s always somebody else's fault.”  

         “It is always somebody else’s fault,” I told her. 

         “Poor you,” she always said back. “Screwed by the world.”  

         “Hey, Dr. Jaegermeister’s calling,” I used to tell her.  “Bottoms up.”   And she’d just go back to whatever she was watching.     — “Boys Town”  

         My mother and father named me Aron, but my father said they should have named me What Have You Done, and my uncle told everyone they should have called me What Were You Thinking.   I broke medicine bottles by crashing them together and let the neighbors’ animals loose from pens.  My mother said my father shouldn’t beat such a small boy, but my father said that one misfortune was never enough for me, and my uncle told her that my kind of craziness was like stealing from the rest of the family.    — The Book of Aron 

         Imagine you’re part of the Minoan civilization, just hanging out with your effete painted face down by the water’s edge on the north shore of Crete, circa 1600 BC.  Biting flies knit the breeze around your head.  Wavelets slap discreetly ashore.  When the volcanic island of Thera detonates seventy miles to the north, the concussion, even where you’re standing, knocks passing waterfowl out of the air.  Oxen are jolted to their knees. — “Cretan Love Song” 

          Sunday 1 January 

          Fair and very cold.  Ice in our bedroom this morning for the first time all winter, and in the kitchen, the water froze on the potatoes as soon as they were washed.  Landscapes of frost on the windowpanes. 

          With little pride and less hope and only occasional and uncertain intervals of happiness, we begin the new year.  Let me at least learn to be uncomplaining and unselfish.  Let me feel gratitude for what I have: some strength, some sense of purpose, some capacity for progress.  Some esteem, some respect, and some affection.  Yet I cannot say I am improved in any manner, unless it is preferable to be wider in sensation and experience. — “The World to Come” 

          To commemorate Easter Sunday, the captain has spread word of a ship-wide contest for the best news of 1942, the winner to receive a double tot of rum each evening for a week.  The contestants have their work cut out for them.  Singapore has fallen.  The Prince of Wales and the Repulse have been sunk.  The Dutch East Indies have fallen.  Burma is in a state of collapse.  Darwin has been so severely bombed that the naval base there had to be abandoned.  The only combatants in the entire Indian Ocean standing between the Japanese Navy and a linkup in the Gulf of Aden with the Germans, who are currently having their way in Russia and North Africa, seem to be a single Dutch gunboat that we came across a week ago with a spirited crew and a crippled rudder, and ourselves.    — “Telemachus” 

           By the time Gladys May Sparks dropped her soaked leather portmanteaus on the veranda of her new home in Barrow Point, Queensland, the rain had started to come down very heavy.  Her new husband, Tommy, busied himself with a welcoming pot of tea and she remained where he’d left her, a puddle spreading around her feet.  It seemed unlikely that a single item inside the portmanteaus was still dry.  Her first impression was of a place where everything was covered with vines, including the two cane chairs and the breakfast table and the hammock, and out front she noted a mandarin orange tree and a prickly pear hedge.  The rain was now so heavy the mud was strewn with bougainvillea petals, and when she stepped inside the house all the crawling things had come out: a fat bird spider was creeping up the curtains and ants had gotten into the jam.   Tommy helped her with her wet clothes.  Something was wrong with the fireplace damper and as much smoke was pouring into the room as was going up the chimney, and that gave her license to cry.  He put his cheek to hers and his hand on her shoulder.  While he rubbed some warmth into it she looked out the little kitchen window at one of the plots he had cleared.  In the downpour a magpie was bathing in one of the stumps.   — “Intimacy”