Playtime (3 page)

So Mandy promises again to do something on the
bills, even if it’s just a bit every week, and they make their farewells, which
is good with Blaine. His head is throbbing some. He heads to the bedroom for a
nap. 

 When he wakes up everything is dark, and
squinting at the radio clock near the end of the bed he sees it is almost
midnight. He has slept 10 hours and now is wide awake in the middle of the
night. That’s okay with Blaine, though. He likes this time of night. It’s quiet
and peaceful, and the stores are never crowded. Kroger stays open 24 hours, and
he shops late at night occasionally. The only bad thing is that’s when the
stockers stock, and they always have stuff strewn all over, blocking the aisles
where you want to go. 

 He is a writer, but he can’t always make a living
at that, so three or four times every year, or whenever funds start getting low,
he goes to work shutdowns at one of the many plants in his area or down the
coast. Wherever the work is: though he likes to stay close to home if he can. 

 He has pipefitter and boilermaker skills and good
relationships with several companies that work the shutdowns. They are always
looking for help. 

 This is how it goes: These companies are all
making stuff that brings them in a fortune as long as they are running. So they
fix only what they absolutely have to during the year, then shut down the
entire shooting match for 30 to 60 days every 12, 18 months and fix the rest of
the stuff they can’t get while operating. They open up vessels and do
inspections, put new equipment in. Things like that. 

 To minimize the time they are down, they run
crews 24 hours a day until finished. That’s where Blaine comes in. 

 The operators at these plants are specialists in
operations, not boilermaking or pipefitting. Most are good jacklegs; they can
do some of those things, but the plants hire outside companies to come in and
do the heavy stuff. The companies can’t carry enough guys year-round to work shutdowns,
so whenever they have one going they need extra help.   

 The upside is he can make great money in short
periods of time. During the shutdowns the men work 12 hour shifts, six days a
week. Used to be every day until it was over, but OSHA had finally stepped in
and stopped that. Too many accidents and near misses due to fatigue. It still
is a tough schedule to work.   

 The downside is that he is never entirely sure
when these things are going to happen. The companies have so many
interdependencies among themselves and suppliers and the market that they are
like chess players winnowing through the variations to pick the best times.
Blaine would get word on one date then they’d change it. Also, he never knows
whether he will be working day or night. But it really doesn’t matter much. He
can do either one. 

 Some guys go around the country working outages. You
can make enough money in five or six months to last the year, even though you don’t
have the benefits. 

 The company can be a bit rough, the work hard and
demanding and physical, and there is a very real element of danger. The vessels
and reactors they get into are receptacles for some very dangerous chemicals: cyanide,
ammonia, various acids and such, and if they are not decontaminated correctly
that stuff can still be inside, or in the connecting pipes. Also, the situation
being what it is, there are always guys working who are new at what they do, or
just not very good at it. And the workers at the plants tend to treat the
contract workers as second-class citizens. The contractors usually handle the
dangerous stuff. Not always real pleasant, but it is a way for Blaine to get
some money when he needs some, and has saved him many times from financial woes.
He isn’t complaining. He can make 10 grand from one of these deals then rathole
it. It gives him a measure of control over his destiny without taking too much
bull from an outsider, and some freedom to write, which is what he considers
his real calling, though he hasn’t made much money at it yet. 

 Middle of the night, but he can’t sleep, so he
makes himself some coffee and heads over to the book shelves to find something
on brain function to look at. 

 He loves books, the written word. He has volumes
about almost everything you can think of and a number on the brain and language
and thought itself. He does a lot of corresponding by email to folks here and
there about this and that, and what he has noticed is that the conversations
are much more focused and on point than those you have in person. It’s hard for
him to come up with the best response to a comment, many times, when he is
face-to-face with someone in real time. The emails allow him to compose
sentences and look at them, just like when he is writing something to publish,
and revise and edit until he has said exactly what he wants to say. It is a way
to hone his thinking and communication skills, and he has come to really enjoy
this mode of conversation, though he hadn’t in the beginning. He had thought of
it as a virtual communication, then, replacing real face-to-face, but what he
has found to be true is that really isn’t the case: It is more a supplement
to
the personal.   

 So he picks out three or four volumes on the
brain and takes them to the table to browse through while he sips his coffee.
He has looked through them all before; the human brain has always fascinated
him. 

 He looks at the familiar picture of the pole that
shot through the brain of Phineas Gage, exploded through the frontal lobes,
back in the 1800s. He had lived, miraculously enough, and even seemed undamaged
for a bit. His intelligence remained intact. Memory also. But it turned out
that the sober, industrious Phineas was gone. He became impulsive and moody and
cursed like a sailor. He was unable to control himself or form long-range plans
any longer, though some later reports indicated partial recovery. Planning and
control are what the frontal lobes are all about, Blaine knows. He is thinking
how lucky he had been in the accident. Maybe it’s time to put the old Shadow to
rest, quit tempting fate.
Not in this lifetime
, he thinks.   

 Blaine sips coffee, flips pages, gets up and
stretches, realizes it is 5 a.m., only hours from dawn, but he feels good; the stiffness
in the neck had been a bit worse when he woke but has eased now. He stretches
some more, decides to get down on the floor and do his routine, and go for a
run. The doctor had told him no physical exertion for at least a week, but he
doesn’t trust those guys anyway. That was one reason he hadn’t let on about
knowing more about brain function.   

 He throws his old shorts on and runs through the session,
the same that he has been doing for years. Pushups, leg lifts, sit-ups, a bunch
of different stretches he had picked up from a yoga book, designed to loosen
him in every direction. Just about 20 minutes of exercise, but enough. 

 The sky is still dark when he heads out the front
door and down the street, though the east is a touch lighter. The neighborhood
is full of dogs, but most of them are accustomed to him by now, and this
particular morning they are quiet. If one starts up, it begins a chain reaction,
and soon dogs blocks away are barking. The canine community doing their job. 

 Blaine has a reflective fluorescent green cap and
white shorts and shirt he wears on night runs, but this time of morning there
isn’t much traffic, usually. The most dangerous thing out is typically the
paper guy: a young bald man who weaves from one side of the road to the other
trying to throw both sides in one drive-by. Blaine has cussed him under his
breath a few times but tries to leave him alone. Live and let live is his
philosophy. 

 He runs by Mandy’s house, brightly lit and
gleaming with the porch light on, but everything else dark. He never did find
out how the tow guy knew his address. Maybe she had told him. 

 End of the street, then another block and into
the rich part of the island, and he starts to find his rhythm, breath coming
easier, legs starting to get loose and not feeling much pain at all from the
neck or spine. His problem with doctors is that they seem oriented towards
fixing you after you break, not keeping you well. And prescribe medication at
the drop of a hat. Nothing to do with all those drug reps calling.   

 He runs through the big, southern-style houses of
the prosperous: houses with pillars spaced along the front, houses that look
like plantations might have looked, two or three stories with the pillars going
all the way up, pools in the back, all the lots huge, many with palms spaced
strategically. Nice neighborhoods, with those signs on the poles warning that
the residents report all suspicious activity immediately to the police. Not
usually much suspicious activity on these streets: people jogging or walking
their dogs, kids bouncing on trampolines in the front yard, landscaping do-it-yourselfers.
The neighborhood is on a line from the poor sections of town down by Broadway
to the beach, though, and occasional stragglers do wander through who don’t
appear to belong: but not often, and the police patrol it well. Blaine has a
.22 mag North American mini revolver that only weighs 10 ounces loaded, and he
carries it sometimes when he runs at what he considers to be the bad times of
night, like 2 a.m. when the bars are closing, and people seem inclined to poor
judgment and bad driving. Straps it into a fanny pack around his waist. Can
hardly tell it’s there. Doesn’t bother him but he usually doesn’t pack it this
time of morning, when quiet solitude is the rule. 

 It is about 80 degrees even this early in
Galveston in June, and he is sweating a bit as he runs through the dark, though
not soaked like he would be in the afternoon sunlight. Sometimes he can make it
through an entire run in the early morning without seeing a car. One morning
he’d been running along when a girl pedaled up beside him on a bicycle and
paced him for a while. He recognized her from years back; she had been
beautiful then and was still real attractive. They had talked for a bit as he
ran, him remembering that he had heard she turned tricks now, recalling seeing
her on a bench on the seawall, stretching this way and that, looking
suggestive. After a couple of miles she invited him to her house. It had been
just a short time before dawn then, and he was thinking she looked like she had
been up all night. He had remembered also hearing somewhere that she had AIDS,
and so he had declined the invitation, regretfully. She had still been a very
sexy woman. He had always thought so. If she had caught him some other morning
he might have taken the risk. Almost certainly would have after drinking a few
beers. But he had someplace to go after his run that particular day. She had
given him the address, and he’d said he would come by. But he never did. A few
years later he heard that she had died.   

 He thinks about seeing the pictures of the
recently deceased in the obits and the tendency he has to read something … unfinished
into them. They had died after all, and are gone, or if not, then are at least
someplace else, somewhere that they can’t be reached. As far as he knows. Looking
at their pictures, he often peered at their faces, searching for some telltale clue
to their ending, and therefore lack of good fortune, in some form or fashion.
Not the old folks that died: that was normal and expected. But the youngsters,
those cut down by this or that before their time. He couldn’t help but look for
something in their expressions, some sign. Maybe it was politically incorrect,
but he couldn’t seem to shake the urge. But they seem no different than anybody
else. There is no reason to be found. 

 Blaine has never told that to anybody. And it
fights the natural feeling of sympathy that is present when he sees some young
person cut down in their prime, by disease or accident. That feeling is inside
him also, alongside his sense of their misfortune. For what could be worse than
to be young and alive and full of vigor, with all of it stretching out in front
of you like an interstate highway going cross country, and to get brought down
before you really even got started on your journey. 

 And of course he is thinking about himself and
how lucky he is to be still here, alive and running down this road in the
lightening darkness, on the rich side of town, with the sweat pooling under his
arms and on his back. The stars are twinkling up above in a clear sky,
unimaginable distances away as he runs easily now, makes his turn and heads for
home. 

 He had almost been one of those pictures in the
obits. Folks would have been gazing at his likeness, and he would have been
willing to bet that some of them would have felt that same sense of his loss
that he feels when he looks. It had been so close. That is what he knows. He
doesn’t remember specifics. Maybe he never will. But he knows he had been gone.
Like he knows the breath coursing in and out in steady streams through his
lungs now. What he
doesn’t
know is how he made it back into the land of
the living. The force that reached out and pulled him back into this wonderful,
chaotic mess. Maybe the answer is hidden somewhere inside of him, and he will
find it. If he does, it will be an answer he never expected to have.  

 He showers up, puts fresh jeans on, and sits at
the table reading about mirror neurons. These are the neurons that fire when
you make some action. The funny thing is that the same neurons fire, also, when
you watch somebody else make that action. Different theories about how they
came to be. The one Blaine likes is that they started out when we were living
in the trees as the neurons that coordinated when we swung through the
branches. You know, you had a visual map and a motor action map, and they
charted onto one another. If they didn’t do that, we wouldn’t have lasted up in
the air very long. The other thing is that those kinds of cross-mappings would
have given a good base for metaphors way later, which is a subject dear to
Blaine. Metaphor isn’t just a figure of speech. He thinks it is the basis of
the human ability to think abstractly. Metaphor is the way we get from concrete
to abstract. The stuff writers do is more important than they realize. But back
to the mirror neurons. Then sometime long after that, probably, they developed
the capacity to mirror other individuals' acts, and the beginnings of empathy
were born. The beginning of that theory of mind that humans had to have to become
the social beings they were. 

 Because we spend so much time, he thinks, dealing
with other people, and thinking about what they know, and what they know we
know, and so on, and that type of system would never have gotten off the ground
without something like the mirror neurons. 

 And his studies of the brain had led him to the
opinion, expressed by many scientists, and true in a historical sense also,
that
concepts
, the divisions that we had made in the world down through
our evolution as a species, were
prior
to language, and the beginning of
our
language, the places where we had first hung our labels. The spots
where our language grounded out, so to speak. 

 You have the facts, he thinks, and you have the
stories. We are all heroes of our own tales. The facts are like needles stuck
into the terrain. They are permanent. But the stories are like threads that run
through the eyes of the needles. They can go any which way, through any
combination of the needles. They are the stories of our lives, and the ways
they go and the needles they go through are largely up to the teller.
Scientific theories are the same way, he thinks. They are stories about the
facts. Explanations of the facts. They are always provisional. 

 Language is the double-edged sword, in Blaine’s
mind. The can’t live with it, can’t live without it. For better or worse, it is
one of the things that make us what we are. Perhaps the one crucial element.
And that is the delicate wire that he walks whenever he writes. See, the thing
about scientists in their work is that they are forever searching for this
shining star called truth that seems to hang beyond their reach. They kept
reaching, though, getting closer and closer, and it is inspirational to Blaine.
But people, you need to watch
people
. People aren’t about truth all or
even most of the time. People are about survival and self. Not to say there aren’t
good folks: there are plenty. But they do bear watching.