UPSURGE

Suddenly the scope’s circular screen became a flutter of whites and yellows, the loveliest spectacle any experimental scientist has ever beheld in any electronic test equipment. How do you quantify a Monet sky? I suspected what it meant immediately. (It would oblige me)..to blaze a research trail far more far out than the one that’s already earned me the distinction of barely-touchable maverick. I feared developing a rep which could cling to my hide like a cloying pheromone strong enough to make any future grant reviewers want to don a hazmat suit before reading my executive summaries. I should get some sleep if I want to avoid being a wreck when we land, but my mind's aflame: it's like when they expected Armstrong and Aldrin to sleep for five hours after lunar touchdown before going out for the first nonterrestrial walk in the known history of life in the universe… Well, I may be a little-known geonaut with nobody watching, but I'm getting a taste of what it's like to be in the pilot's seat on a voyage of spectacular discovery, coming upon a phenomenon both spooky and exciting, as if the first staggering tower tops of Atlantis were to emerge from the ocean in the middle of the night, illuminated only by the moon and internal lights of unknown origin. On the way I saw something that stopped me in my tracks: a dump. A seven-story high Manila dump at night, growing at a rate of millions of pounds per day, serving as home and/or workplace to innumerable citizens of that spectered isle, human scavengers swarming on garbage like flies on a mountainous pile of water buffalo shit. ..I approached it warily, detecting, without the aid of scientific equipment, a panoply of risks to health, safety, and psyche. I couldn't tell if the few lights the city had installed were there for security of the dump or to improve the living conditions of its human wildlife. Kids were crawling all over it, and mothers with babies clinging to their hips were plucking out garbage to wear, eat, or sell. It was a surreal concentration camp without walls, collectively hallucinated by Bosch, Malthus, and Marx on bad acid. Again, I thought of Leanna asking me for an explanation: where is it all going to lead? …The bodyguards in my brain lined up stone-faced in front of the topic and told me to clear out… I ended up keeping myself awake, twisting in the mental fallout of the Manila dump. I recalled that story in the news a couple of months ago, during the jobless riots in Liberia, about a penniless mob plundering some ostentatious estate, and soon my mind was wracked by images of what might happen if a critical mass of destitution’s victims should someday decide they’ve had enough. I saw Yeats’s rough beast pull out of its Bethlehem slouch and really go to town. The press of desperate flesh steamrolled border guards, freeway traffic dodged immigrants, then plowed through them. Looters trampled military police along with some of their own, smashing Christmas windows to get at food and other luxuries while newscasts on the televisions still remaining in looted store windows played on mindlessly, showing government buildings bombed and restaurants and supermarkets machine-gunned. Hundreds of thousands of armed boat people, drenched wraiths in shriven makeshift crafts choked the harbors, landing in the rain on beachheads in the Caribbean, pouring over the stone fences surrounding Mediterranean villas, destroying Tiffany’s and Harrod’s, besieging panic bunkers in Tudor estates in Scarsdale and Palos Verdes where clutches of Forbes Four Hundred unshelled turtles huddled in fear, unprotected by their suddenly useless Merrill Lynch portfolios. Estate gates were littered with the bodies of guards overcome by starving hordes who must have sacrificed meals for weapons. Billionaire families on their private jets panicked as their rprivate island airport runways were flooded with ragtag gunners waiting like crazed hunting parties. Boiling urban freshets of envy joined rivers of madness coursing through cement arteries with gridlocked clots of overheating steel. Hordes roared through Park Avenue lobbies and blasted open penthouse doors, enraged masses climbed up captured fire truck ladders, scaling the architectural masterpiece spiderholes of the suddenly-helpless. Windows were slammed shut against the onslaught as the gasping occupants saw their self-deceptions of security and legacy collapse forever as they discovered, just like the politburo and the Czar before them, that guards can refuse to fire upon their own kind.