JOHN ROCK

(Dear Everyone: Below is the opening of my novel REPORT THE EARTH)

–for Samantha–thankyou for all the inspiration

Aira

Converging. Everyone converging. What you think is convergence may be something else. Everybody converging to drink from a spring. And when you leave the spring are you like water flowing out, disappearing, reaching out like an appendage? Springs. Sources. Everything a spring. Look at this desert. It is a spring in itself. It is appearing. It is born. But then I am born, too. And history is born. Converging. Making love. To converge is to be a spring. With sun and moon and stars and everyone who comes to drink it. Sometimes I go up to the reservoir on the mountain, the lake on top this desert mountain, to use these gills. And they break out of my skin and it’s like Ahhhhhhh! So good! And down inside that mountain lake in the middle of this desert it’s like listening to Earth. The voice in the center. It’s like getting a report, a report on the state of this being we’re on, a report on myself. You can’t put it into words.

Mira

Altarberry. That’s what he named himself, out of the blue. One day he just said My name is Altarberry as if that made him some type of bigshot, bigger than the rest of us. It’s strange—Altarberry is like the humans that were here in this place a long time ago. When the mountains were cities. When there were more people than plants. When what is now beneath the plants shone in the sun. Metal. Glass. Things strangely symmetrical. I can see them in my dreams and when I look at the fabrics. So many people like Altarberry. Millions. Billions. But now I don’t know anybody like him. In fact, nobody’s really alike. Maybe a few. So maybe Altarberry doesn’t really stand out. There just used to be a lot of them. A lot of Altarberries. But back then in that era, humans didn’t look all that alike anyway. Just the same number of eyes (generally), the same number of feet, arms, things like that. Things that don’t mean anything.

Aira

That memory of choosing this life. I know the process I remember is not what really took place. It’s more like a translation. So much of it is constructed in reverse order from where I am now, from the perspective of this perception. The important thing is the choosing. That I know it was a choice. In a way, it sets you free. Not in all my lives, especially the human, do I remember I choose it. But then events, events after the choosing—are they lessons? That’s what you may think. I chose this life to learn freedom, to learn acceptance, to learn captivity, to learn pain, whatever, to learn to be aquatic, to learn to be on land, to learn androgyny—but it’s all more exciting than that. It’s all more personal than that. I know it. And by personal I mean it could never be defined as one lesson, or even multiple lessons. It’s all much vaster. Sometimes I think more than anything I chose Earth. And that these gills that break out, these webs and scales, that grow when I touch the water—that grow into the water—they’re just part of the agreement, the collaboration. Like I chose Earth and then we got together and came up with this physiology, and beyond that it’s all improvisation. Reporting, experiencing, may have nothing to do with learning.

Mira

Of course, people talk to me. Inside. From other places. It’s hard to put into words. Altarberry says people only talk with words. Outloud. Which is a really weird belief he has cause almost everybody talks with their minds, like telepathically. They might makes sounds or movements or whatever, but it’s usually just a small part of what’s happening from mind to mind. I used to talk back to the people from other places who I couldn’t actually see in front of me, people from other histories and fabrics. I had to cut it down to just one, although I do converse with other people at times from a distance inside like that. Unless I can see them—then that’s different, then we usually talk inside each other anyway. And if I talked to everybody, if I let everybody speak inside me, it’d be totally endless. There’s billions of voices to speak to that you can’t see just like there were billions of humans on Earth. And some people are boring. Some don’t have bodies even in other places. They’re not actually in other lives. Some who don’t have bodies think they know more than you do, or they try to make you believe it. But some of them are scared to have a body, like a body of their own. So I don’t talk to them. Sometimes I wonder about Altarberry, like maybe people talk to him and he doesn’t even know it. Like why the hell did he call himself Altarberry? Or maybe it’s just his History. His History’s talking to him. He thinks he’s smarter than me but I gotta be the one to figure it all out.

Mira

Sometimes I walk around the dreams and fabrics and really think about them. That world that Altarberry thinks he came from, you can make it like looking at music, music all laid out. But it’s full of strange, weird sounds. Is Altarberry really the same as that world? If you placed him next to the humans I think you could say that. But what about everybody else? Like the foxes. I love them. Somehow I feel they’re still here in this world. But somewhere far away. Once in a dream I looked out of one of their eyes. They have two eyes. That’s funny. Altarberry has two eyes. I have one eye. My one eye is bigger than four of those type of human eyes put together. It’s like four or five Altarberry eyes. All the worlds are like music and you can lay em all out. If you have time. It’s like with the voices. You gotta choose things. Put it in your repertoire. But only if you think it’s worth it. Altarberry’s world is just one. There’s so many. It’s like diving in an ocean of fabrics, layers and layers, shimmering folds and contours, everything, every color, every form you could ever think of. I don’t know how he does it. How can you go in there and choose just one? And keep track of it? Sometimes I think that’s why he’s older than me. Like really we’re the same age. But since he’s focused on this History thing he’s older.

Aira

All those past lives—they’re always changing, shifting, growing, giving me nutrients like I give to them. It’s just I’m me. All those lives—almost like birds, and I’m like a hollow, living tree that they want to nest in, preen themselves on my branches. In some lives I never knew about the rest of us, the other lives—almost like a family—existed. In some lives I knew more, or focused on it more. Like my awareness was a musician of lives. But now I’m me. I know. I feel. But in a lot of ways I leave it all alone. Just living is reporting. Reporting the earth.

Mira

But Altarberry’s different. He had parents that came from here a long time ago. He says he was born here and then taken away and brought back. I know in one history, the one he believes in, all the humans on this planet died. Some were taken off on ships.   Altarberry and his parents were with them. That’s what he says. The space people took them off, saved them, and then his parents brought him back. Who knows why. He says the space people were humans who had colonized another planet. But I’m not so sure about that. But the Earth—it was like the Earth shook it’s skin, blinked its eye just in the right way, and all those humans disappeared. Billions. That’s the History that Altarberry loves, the time when the humans were still here, more humans than anything. It’s a funny history because I could be human, too, except for my eye—it’s too big and I only got one, and I can’t really talk like them, even though I try cause Altarberry’s my best friend. Those humans really liked to talk. And my arms, too. And my tongue, I guess. I know they wouldn’t let me be a human.

Aira

The sea. I know it exists. I’m listening from the desert. The girl so far away who lives in the city, the mountains, against the sea.   Mira. So much space between me and it. Between me and her. Although we never met. Just her voice. Just speaking to each other from the desert to the sea, from this desert mountain to her mountains green, wet, covered with moss. Speaking yet not addressing each other. Reporting, and yet to everything. I know the sea is out there. So deep.   And this life here in the desert so deep to have stayed in one place so long. And if I travel to the sea, to Mira, I’ll feel the stretching. But now, I climb up to the lake. The lake on top this desert mountain. It’s night. It’s like climbing up to the stars. Up here I’ll be able to hear it. I’ll listen with my gills. Movement. Fresh. Cold. Music passing through. All this time on land. It’s stretched me. So many past lives. So many future lives. Like songs. The thing about land is trying to keep your bearing among all the lives that you lived, that you will live—all those lives want to use your body as a home, as a station. On land you remember all these things, into the future, into the past. In the water it’s different. This trail. It’s been here forever. Even when it was only stars. Only space. Before the earth existed. Maybe that’s in the future. Climbing into the future. Discerning the past where the future is and the future in the past. This trail in the past may have been a comet burning through space until it turned to earth. To this trail. Rocks. Hardening. Pinions flaring their cerulean illumination. Like desert candles. Just this trail pouring from the bowl of the mountaintop filled with the lake. And grains of night shimmering like moon-rain. All the flowers drinking so deep. I climb to the top, the lip of the mountain, and look out. So high in the high desert. So many miles. I was here in the desert for a brief time in another life. My only other earth life. Not my only other human life, but my only human life on this earth. For most of it we lived deep underground. That life was just like a glimpse.   Like a tiny solo in existence’s vast symphony. A human. Now there’s no reason to call myself anything.

Mira

I think the desert girl thinks those thoughts for me, the history of before I became this form—other lives, other experiences, other planets, if I had any. But really, I think I just appeared. Right now, and maybe for the rest of this life, that’s all I’ll need to know. I’ve looked around myself for fabrics that belong just to me but there isn’t any. That’s how a lot of us come here—we just appear. She thinks about the past and future, like her own. And her thoughts are like flowers inside me where in certain places, certain regions, before, I thought there was nothing. I could adopt them like children, all these past lives of hers, or these other lives that I’m supposedly connected to just because they’re flowers and just because I decided to listen to the desert girl, but I got all my own life, and I gotta figure things out for Altarberry, too.   But everybody thinks about something and you can just take it up if you want to, take it on, like I got all these fabrics, all these worlds and variations I can see, of everyone around me, so thick, it’s like my own ocean, my own form.