The Exquisite Enigmas

The Exquisite Enigmas

 

"Show me where you came from, and I will tell you who you are." For as far as the eye could travel, we were in the midst of mud. The walls of the hut were mud, and through the muddy windows we could see mud. I could see a tree, but I knew in my heart that it was a tree made of mud. Beside the tree was a rock, also made of mud. If a rickety bus were to pass by, I would have sworn it was made of mud too. "How many destinations are there?" he continued. "There's a finity to them, and the connections between them must be finite too. No matter how it starts, there's only one end." He looked about to cough, but nope. We were in the midst of that planet's autumn, among cities and towns, and the windows looked out on mud.

However, it wasn't all that bad. All we had to do was walk across the hut to the front door in order to see the other side of things. Out there, things were active, all right. The streets would be full of people, for it was a market day. If I opened the door and started summing, I was sure I'd be able to count two dozen immediately, at a glance, without even being conscious of doing so. They were out there, but we felt no connection to them; we were better off with the mud. On one side was this, and on the other side was that. Years ago, I lived somewhere else, and that place was also halfway between people and mud. I had a very nice time there, and I'm pretty certain that experience was why I was having that present experience. From whence I'd come, I had arrived.

"Do you remember those long-ago days?" He was speaking to me, though I was looking the other way. I didn't turn my head, since he needed no encouragement to go on and on. It was a small space there, and nothing, not a single hesitation, could go astray. "Remember when things mattered? I remember having my communications fail, which I later discovered was my own fault and no-one else's, such that I could not make a call, a call to my beloved. I went a bit crazy then. I was distracted, as they say, but more precisely I was frantic. There was nothing more important than getting through to her. I left my apartment, looking for some way to call or whatever. I remembered there was an Internet café a couple blocks away, but, before I got there, I had a dog bark at me, which I took as a bad sign. In the café, I handed over some money and got onto a computer, which I swore at because it was so slow. I mis-typed my password twice before getting into my account. I got into it finally, and you know what?

"There was no emergency. I had misunderstood something. It's funny that I can't even remember what the big crisis was in the first place, but all that tension, all that energy, had left me. However, in getting back to 'normal', I lost something electric in myself. Like the chance matter of it all, how I couldn't have predicted beforehand that that day would unfold like it did, had sent me to another plane. I forgot everything about it, and I felt foolish, which is a sense you should get every once in a while, the feeling of total foolishness. And, final note, I should have forgotten all about it, but I think about it all the time. All I got in the end were sore legs from walking too quickly."

That seemed to be the end of the story, so I looked around for my cigarettes. He continued: "Some time later, I was reading a magazine, and in that magazine this writer you've never heard of told the exact same story, though he told it a little bit better than I have. He even had the barking dog, and the sense of a bad omen on the rise. I thought it was a co-incidence, until a little bit later I was watching a tv show you've never heard of and a woman on the show told the same story, a bit more dramatically than I have, and the dog was in that story, too. There was something strange going on, and finally I got the message.

"It was from a pop song I heard on the radio, never mind the station, never mind the singer. The singer sang a ballad, and the ballad was the same story. And, yes, the dog gets mentioned. Four incidents, four cafés, four dogs. Seems extraordinary, doesn't it? And who the hell knows which one came first, which one came last? Maybe I was the fourth, maybe I was the first. I will never know. And if you want to know about the beloved in my case, well, I don't know how it all turned out. What I mean to say is: It all came to nothing, though it was pretty intense at the time, as you can well understand. In any case, what it all showed me was that an event which to me was amazingly intense was nothing more than a copy of another story, other stories, done thousands of miles away. That was all there was to my experience. A copy."

I smiled as if I understood exactly what he was saying and I looked around for my lighter or his matches. I said: "That all reminds me of a test I was given when I tried to join the army." I told him what it looked like. On an 8.5 x 11 sheet turned 90°, a range of seven soldiers, and each one had seven tarot cards beneath it. The deck from which they had been drawn had to have been a double deck, since the 2nd and 4th soldiers both had the two of wands. The problem as it was posed was to give each soldier a direction to discard something, one by one discarding, such that either the soldier had the best poker or rummy hand as compared to the other soldiers.

"The goal of the problem," I said: "Was that I could start anywhere, and use any order, so long as I stuck to that pattern through the entire seven sets of discarding. So I knew, from the start, that the cards would have to end up with a particular order of discards, and that order had to be set in place before my first set of discardings. I saw that instantly, but still that kind of worked against the initial problem, which involved having the best hands. It was also apparent there was only one solution to the problem, and that the singularity of the solution meant that all forty-nine cards had to have a particular order of dismissal: one order, and no others. There was no mercy to it. I had to get it right from the start. I told the taskmaster: 'I can't solve this,' and he replied: 'You have no choice.' Needless to say, I didn't get into the army."

He laughed to himself alone. More shadows had crawled into the room during his speech, and I felt the evening breeze was picking up. Soon, soon, we would go out to find a place to eat. I snubbed my cigarette, down to the filter, in the leaf-shaped green ceramic ashtray. He was somewhere behind me; I was still near the mud window, and looking out. I squinted at the sunset and said: "We feel like we can remember everything, but we certainly do not. We remember the highlights. Like Hitchcock said, we can remove the boring parts. What if we tried remembering everything, as an act of pure will? How far could we get with that? Wouldn't it be a thrill if we had photographic memories? On the other hand, would that be terrible? Everything would be out in the open, including all the boring parts.

"However, we'd also remember, as if it had happened just the other day, the tender way she touched us. We were young then, and it might not be wise to go back. Those days of madness are over. However, again, on the other hand, it was a very exciting time. Every day was a new day, and its end-time could not be predicted nohow. Should we give x a call? What shall be our plans? We had a lot more future back then, and everything was experimental. We can look back on those times, and we can immediately see how we, in the intervening period, got straight to here and now. It's an old idea; it's so old, I bet there's a word in Greek for it. A train brought us here, and a train will take us out. We can almost hear its whistle."

He said: "I fell we should be drunk before we start talking like this, don't you?" He was by then standing in the thin mud in what we called the kitchen. Our pipes were more than fine; we had superfluous moisture. It rained every afternoon at four, when the sick wet winds came blowing down from over the valley. Our floors had furrows, where the drips dropped to seek the seas. We'd both come to that mucky hut with our reasons. I never got to know precisely the reason why he was here, and it would work the other way around. We had vague chronologies all to ourselves that we ourselves did not understand, and within the chronologies themselves the orders of events could, to a degree, vary, depending on whatever mood we found ourselves to be in, and our moods were mostly mud. He was right, though: It was time to hit the town.

One would think that with such a decision made, one would start to prepare the excursion. However, things were different with us. He was still standing in the thin mud, and we were silent for a good three minutes. Then he perked up. "Isn't it strange to think about home? There's so much available to be pictured, from one house to another, from one floor to another. On the edge of a city, where land was cheaper, in new houses on former farmlands. We get flashes, and the emotions return first and foremost. I did terrible things, and I can still feel the shame. Also, I saw beauty, and it almost makes me weep to recall." He turned sideways, to the direction of the front door. "Some day, I know it, and it could be today, we will see the heavens open and we shall see the glory of God."

I let him off there. He was being sincere, or sincerely hyperbolical. I didn't have enough in the way of a book mentality that would allow me to quickly do the numbers and pump out the odds. He got that way sometimes, with his visionary and Utopian jazz, and so? It didn't affect my pulse rate or blood pressure; I was as willing as the next guy to all him to ride off in any direction he chose. I was raised to be polite, and to let the other guy have his opinion. The other guy, and the guy in front of me, could be correct in their expectations. Something else making me so hesitant to get into all that God-bothering was that it would be pitch black in an hour and a half, and the stars would once again be throwing themselves at us.

We were already presentably dressed, so far as the place we would wind up in cared. There was plenty of money around, and we were where we were by choice. As I reached for the doorhandle I said: "We sort through them all the time, memories that is. We're always building these pyramids of important events, and though one pyramid could last for three or four days, in the end we would demolish it and use its ruins to build another one. It wouldn't matter if it was a better one; there's two schools to that theory, with no middle ground. Ontogeny follows philology, or words to that effect. Maybe I'll come up with the right word later tonight. Yes, so, all these memories of that other world. It's all five thousand miles away, and five thousand is a pretty big number." I pulled open the door and we went into the town.

 

I have to describe the town. Downtown was sixteen blocks in all, with train-tracks splitting the whole thing in two halves which were called Our Side and Other Side. We housed in Other Side, some eight-and-twelve blocks away downtown-and-tracks, and so we walked downtown. We talked along the way, but I've never been able to remember a single word spoken during that eight-block journey. We might have talked about tragedies or histories, perhaps cross-referring to the catalogues in our heads, with a shared head between us encompassing common jokes and memories, bits from famous literature, and the general scope of the world. I had no time to pay attention since I was busy preparing myself for the night that lay before us, with all its painful possibilities and pleasures. We were perhaps going into something which was at least not as drab and boring as so many nights and days before.

It was morning and it was evening, day and night, and dawn and dusk. We were in the habit of awakening at six in the afternoon and going to bed at six or perhaps seven in the morning. We were off-kilter by a good twelve hours each and every day, and they flowed by with much the same rhythm as the rhythm you yourself go by, presuming you are a normal person of the daytime, and not one of our fellows. In Other Side, it was not especially unusual for a fellow or a lassie to follow our beaten antes and posts; The genpop of Other Side had its night-exclusive crowd, just as Our Side had its share of daylight addicts. Unfortunately, knowing the difference between night and day is something that is bred into our bones, and you can't mistake one for the other, or so all the books said.

We got to 42nd Street. We'd naturally been looking around before we got to it, so there's no surprise to be had in this sentence. We had two bars with grills looking at us from the other side of 42nd Street; we had been walking up Sunset Boulevard, I should let you know--all our streets were named after other streets, at least so they were named according to us and some others in our milieu--and we had Standard's to our left and the Hacienda to our right. I looked over to this friend of mine, my 'roomie', and we tacitly agreed we were not going into either place, for reasons we recalled out of shame or out of pride. In other words, neither bar had recovered sufficiently from our last visits. Time was wearing away the historical edges of fire and lust, but we hadn't reached that point quite yet.

We crossed 42nd Street to walk Pawn Alley, which the next block was locally called. We'd been curious about the pawn shops for quite some time, but, unfortunately, we'd never had anything to pawn or anything to purchase, so the zone was alien to us. If only one of them had had a violin in its window, things would have been different. I often imagined myself tuning up a fiddle and going out back, into the desert, into the wet wind, to seductively play to no one. It seemed nobody in the town had a violin to sell, which was a sad thing in itself. Perhaps on Our Side some violins were to be had; I imagined they also had a pawn shop or two, with fancier goods and better service, and a feeling of class solidarity that Other Side could never afford.

"What about Moiselle's?" my dining companion asked as he pointed to the left, down along Strand. Moiselle's wasn't quite in sight, but we knew where it was. It was a fine establishment, six stars. I shrugged and replied: "I don't see any objection." We went down Stand and into Moiselle's, which was a fairly large foodery, twelve tables in all, four small tables-for-two and eight larger tables-for-four. Ancient artefacts hung on the walls. Here we had stop signs in foreign languages, stuffed animal pieces, framed newspaper pages kept who-knew-why, buttons from political campaign losers--there were lots of those--and fixtures which may or may not have had structural utility. We set ourselves down in a table-for-two. Music was playing at a barely audible volume, but it could be heard that it was a Chet Baker recording. The place had lost the ability to change itself into anything better or worse; not even a hurricane could have altered it.

A new waitress came by. It seemed Moiselle's had an infinite number of waitresses such that we never saw the same one twice even though we'd been going in there every two weeks or so for two years. She was young and pretty in a fuzzy way; maybe it was only her youth that made her pretty. However, I immediately added to my ratiocination the remark: "Pretty: and pretty fine!" Though there had never been nor would there ever be any advancement athletic-wise to our dinings-out, still I had the sense to make the waitresses feel attractive and womanly. I've never been able to treat men and women as equals, for the most part. I know how to hide it, but it shines through my deceits, and I've come very close to getting into trouble on more than one occasion.

What did we order? I didn't order anything; instead, my compadre did the ordering for us both. He had the gift of eloquence, and I lacked it, as you no doubt can tell. The stranger employed by Moiselle's snapped the trigger of her pen three times--I flinched only once--and turned and walked away, knowing full well where our eyes were fixed. She had a tight little package, and as I started comparing her to packages I had known, my friend, who had similar matters on his mind, made something of a moaning sound. He said: "I had another one of those dreams about Sarah this afternoon. How could past events, however small, not have an effect on the here-and-now? Everything we've done in the past, be it for littler good or for bigger evil, made us what we are today, isn't that right? If my life had made me somehow avoid Sarah, I wouldn't have had such a dream this afternoon, plus I wouldn't be going on like this.

"She was rotten to me back then, and she was rotten in my dream. But then again, maybe she couldn't help it. I was the one who wrote the dream, after all. About the past, I don't know who the agent was, nor him the sub-agent. In the end, I was practically run out of town, as you know, barely got out alive I did. Just goes to show you there's no hell like a scorned woman. Somehow get one to turn on you, and she'll bleed you bloodless. No matter how I ignored her, she saw me everywhere, and doing nasty things. How could she know anything the nasty things I was up to? I was discreet to the greatest degree, and besides the worlds didn't connect to one another. She was some girl at the office, and my misdeeds were off the clock.

"In the end, I was officially caught, and that was the end of my career in high finance. I had only one way to go, and that was to go down. I was to a degree guilty as charged, but not entirely. Nonetheless, I found another job, a lesser job, but still a job. Then about six months after I was 'dishonourably discharged', I came home to find Sarah naked in my bed. Did I think to ask her anything? I don't remember how the exchange precisely ran, but she implied it had all been a joke and that I hadn't been canned after all. My desk was still at the office, and I was merely on an 'extended leave'. She told me no harm had been done, that it had all been fair, and leading up to my bed."

We were still drinking, always drinking, and it was time to change the mood. To signal the end of the conversation, we stared into our glasses for fifty seconds. Having done so, I commented on the recorded music we were hearing by singing along. Singing along, and it was my own song. I had written it, and I had recorded it, some forty years before. And it was playing in Moiselle's. He looked at me and said: "I guess this is one of your own songs?" I said yes, and he continued: "Here it is, then, I'm hearing one of your songs at last. And what do you know, I remember it. Seriously: this is your song?" I nodded, and continued singing. He said: "I believed you, sure, that you'd had a hit record once upon a time, but I never thought I'd ever hear it. And in Moiselle's, no less."

The night continued magically. We had a bottomless tab all over town, as far as Other Side was concerned. We would be staying out for hours and hours, and the local barkeeps weren't any the wiser about our mysterious pasts. We spoke of our pasts, but we were very selective in what we could say to one another. As I summed it, we had three intentional lacunas in our histories; I never dared ask my friend how he summed it, because I knew the numbers couldn't agree. And thus the mysterious pasts stayed mysterious to all, partly including ourselves, but it seemed the populace could sense our auras of outcast and nameless, of one too many mountains climbed, one too many midnight moves, and one too many aliases. They never listened anyway, because they feared hearing something that demanded to be a gossip.

We bid everyone a fair adios two or three hours later, and we were both feeling pretty good. We tried to remember something we had heard from N about a garden party at someone-or-other's plot, but any precise details were loose. I said: "When I heard the name, I mentally flashed on the street. It's taking place somewhere on the Alexanderplatz. We should be able to hear it." "Then I think that's where we should go. Don't you? Don't we want to see the bright lights tonight? Don't we yearn to hear the insects, the lizards, and the dogs? Wherever this back yard is, if it's on the west side, it backs onto a ravine. Fifty-fifty is much better than my usual bets. As a matter of fact, fifty-fifty is, to me, almost a sure thing. You'll see: it's going to be on the ravine's side, that steady-flowing and delightful ravine."

I laughed, because we were drunk yet again. I decided to hold forth. "I remember, when I was the accountant and bookkeeper on that star cruiser, that we came upon a deserted space station, or so it seemed to be deserted. Not a person was to be found, and not even the remains of any person to be found. However, down in the very bottom of the station there was a holding room, a storage room, and in it--it was really cold down there--all these red tentacles were hanging from the ceiling. How'd those plant get in there? we wondered. In any case, protocol prevented us from putting two-and-two together, so we just went on with checking out the rest of the station. I of course got assigned to take care of the records to see if I could glean any useful information from them.

"I'm looking through the records, not noticing much of interest, but I'm having trouble thinking straight because it's so cold in there. I went to the officer in charge of whatever protocol we were using, and he agrees it's cold. Meanwhile, we're warming the place up just by being there, and someone reports that there's some stirring below. Turned out to be those red things down deep down below us. Those things down there had come up through the floor, and they really loved warmth. They grew and grew, taking up all the atmosphere, and the folks who had been on the station had fled or been absorbed or whatever. In any case, the whole event had been a computer simulation, and nothing ever happened. I hadn't even left the planet. The whole thing was to show me--I was in fact an accountant--that it's the little details that matter, and that sometimes protocol ain't worth beans."

 

We got onto the Alexanderplatz and started using our fine senses to locate the party. The noises were distant, and then they got nearer, until finally we walked along a lane between houses to find the little bask going on, looking out upon the wastelands just as we had predicted. We didn't know a single person there, and they didn't know us, such were the vague ideas everyone had in that part of town. This might have taken place in a month of May, but it could easily have been June instead; some time near the end of May or the beginning of June, let's call it. It was a cool evening, and everyone there was dressed in light jackets. We weren't, since light jackets interfered with our menacing styles. We quickly found the crate of booze and drank in.

They didn't know us, so we briefly explained we'd been living in Other Side for such-and-such a time, at such-and-such a place. They were welcoming, and they wanted to know more, but we managed to distract them by changing subject after subject. I excused us for a moment, so we could confer, and aside we went to two orange chairs that matched. The party went on, and a little record player played. I couldn't believe they'd haul records to this desolate part of the world. I figure (in afterthought) the records belonged to someone else and they had been stolen. That is the best explanation, but it still didn't quite answer how they had gotten there in the first place. My friend and I conferred, but we conferred silently. We looked over at the others every once in a while to figure out what to do. They took us as invisible, but present. They didn't know anything about us.

He said: "By the way, I understand there's wonderful things going on in the outside world." He turned a little to make sure at least one person was overhearing us. "I read somewhere in some newspaper something about a couple machines in different places that could talk to one another over phone lines. That's right, they're in communication. I don't know what they're saying to one another, because it's all in number language, and I don't talk number language. I know a little Latin language, but I don't know any number language. So anyway, they're talking to one another, maybe telling jokes or something like that, and there's people who are listening in, naturally, and they all swear it's a really great thing to have these machines telling jokes in number language to one another. They say it's going to change everything, but I don't know, since humour has gone as far as it can go, I'd say."

I replied: "That's a fine thing, I'd say, since I can't believe we can ever run out of jokes, what, with all we're doing today and every day. New events come up, you know? And let's take these machines talking, telling jokes, to one another, I'm sure there's got to be some jokes in that in itself. I mean, what if the humour doesn't come across? What if one of the machines doesn't laugh in its number language? Maybe there's a gag in it about: 'I guess you have to be here.' Now that could be pretty funny, I'd say. See, there we are, a whole new bunch of jokes or potential jokes coming down the line, jokes in word language, like nothing that's ever been on earth before. I'm assuming these machines are on earth, and don't answer me because I know that has to be the case."

We drank our fill as freely as we could and at one point we mingled. I talked to a girl who couldn't have been more than sixteen years old, and I charmed her with invented stories about the exciting life I had led. At one point she said: "Didn't you say a minute ago you were never in an airplane? And yet you were a jet pilot?" I had to cover my tracks there for a bit, but it wasn't hard to come up with something terribly fiendishly clever: I told her she'd misinterpreted me. She had her doubts, and I could see them. I took the moment to get another bottle. When I returned, she had managed to regain interest. She was a cute cookie, I'll say, but since I knew I hoped to never see her again, I became unapproachable and aloof.

I went over to stand by me friend to see what malarkey he was spreading. He could make up anything, as I well knew. He, more often than I, could get caught up in some elaborate nonsense, but he always explicated himself from it. I didn't pay any attention to what he was saying as I stood there; instead, I looked out to the wilds and thought about how things were out there, in the browns and greys under a clear sky blinking with stars. He could sense I thought it was time to go, so he cleared off his plate of yarn and turned to me with an excuse to his listeners. I didn't have to say anything. He understood we'd had our fill, and that it was time to move on, and besides all the beer was having an effect on our bodies and brains.

"After all," he said: "we still have a lot to do. There's lots more." He looked around at the folk who were all sitting there, on broken chairs and ten-gallon jugs, talking amongst themselves, hearing the distant music, or staring out wildly. Could any of them give us even the time of day? I was nearly wrong, for out of my right field there came a woman in blue shorts and a white blouse and nothing else I never saw. As if his friend, she made my cohab bend down to hear a sentence or two. We weren't entirely alienated, no? The people on our side of our tracks, though bizarre to a body, had something of us in them, and of them in us. We were a family of cousins near and distant, and we were happy there wasn't a parent in sight.

Having detached himself from his latest girlfriend, who it seemed had daddy issues, he spoke to his latest: "I promise I'll be back soon. Bonjour, pardner." He came away with me, down the pathway between the houses, until we were back on the Alexanderplatz and Pawn Alley and 42nd Street (etc.), stopping at every umbrella and overhang, and going into every tavern, and bar, and grill, along the way. In each one we knew someone, and we half-knew two others, and we quarter-knew four others, and so on. As long as we kept drinking, it all made sense. We got back down to our accommodations, our half-mud place, and we looked at the travel-clock that was our only sense of time's passage in the entire universe, from the distant stars to the centre of the earth, and we could see that something on the order of six hours had passed, though it had seemed like more.

We both sat down on whatever it was we could find to sit down on, the memory is very fuzzy to me. We must have been talking during the journey home, but about what exactly I can't remember. I must have been thinking about those very matters, because I remember saying: "Why don't we celebrate the anniversaries of our deaths? We could have parties large or small to celebrate the forthcoming day like it was a sea journey. When you do the math, today there's a three percent chance you're on the anniversary of your death today. I think that should call for a party, don't you? Births are far more similar to one another than deaths are, don't you think? Thus, your death is more a matter of you being you rather than like everyone else. Think back on the past, and you'll see what I mean.

"Think about our experiences, our unique experiences, the ones that no-one else had. We remember falling out of a tree. You remember that. You were alone, so it was your experience and yours alone. There was a house there, and a tree fort of sorts, five pieces of plywood nailed together with 2x4s holding the walls to the floor and to one another. The house was far from the fort, the fort was closer to the park than the house. You were climbing up to it one day, and you fell, flat our on your back, but the fall was even, so the force was distributed evenly and you did not break your back. However, you were stunned, surely, and you had trouble catching your breath. Do you remember that? And look there was no-one around for a distance, you suppose, and it was only you, you alone, lying there, gasping, looking up at the bottom of the tree fort.

"You were the only one there, and you could have died, and if you'd died, you would have died alone. This was something you realized later, of course, when you had the time to think back on it and imagine the terrible things that could have happened to you if not, if not for the fact that you'd hit the dirty ground at just the right angle. You were still alive, and you got up off the ground. Your back ached, and it would ache for three days, but you'd never tell anyone about it until a year had passed, and you found yourself at the tree fort once again, but this time you were with someone, to whom you told your tale, but it didn't go over very well, since the person you were with had a hint of scepticism on her face.

"It really did happen to you, and to you alone. No-one else had the certainty you had, or even close to the same certainly. And that's what being altogether alone is being like. Now think about your mind, and what it's doing right now. Whatever it's doing--and I don't even have evidence it's doing anything at all--it's happening to you and to you alone. You're the only witness to whatever is going on in your head, and you'll stay that way forever. Even if I could pull your brainwaves out of your head and read them on an ... oscilloscope, I wouldn't know how they felt to you. I'd have a view, through my own mind, of what you were thinking, because I would be using my own mind to understand your mind. There's no hope to any of it, and it sounds mad, but there it is."

My friend responded: "I understand what you mean, but I can't see how it changes anything. That is to say, I think it's useless knowledge. The only person any of that matters to is the person himself. There's no way to make a system of it that's worth sharing. Yes, these events happened to us alone, and no-one is privy to the information. But what is the value of information ascribed only to oneself? The matters trickle up through your soul, and that's an end of it. There's no escaping from it, it's always there, all of it is of equal value to oneself since it all happens according to the passage of time. What can you do, internally, that will matter? The sentence that is not spoken does not exist. To be something is to do something, and there's no two ways around it."

That was all I needed to hear. The desert wilderness was calling me. The sky was growing light. I dug into a chest of drawers to find the shotgun one of us had procured in long-ago times. I blew the dust off it and made sure it was loaded. I waved my compadre farewell, and walked out into the desert. I walked a long way, for about two hours. Crawling, the distance could be covered in ten hours or so. I couldn't see a thing in any of the ten directions. I aimed the shotgun at my feet, which I had placed close together. One blast would be enough to lame me. I pulled the trigger, and nothing happened. The gun was jammed or some such. I laughed, and threw the gun away. It landed and disturbed a nest of angry scorpions. They came at me, and stung and stung and stung.