Sci-fi: Freckles as Constellation

A couple’s noodling in the cone of LED street light: the orange filter stuck on by the good government people peeling to speckle them in cracked warm light cut with the haunted blue of raw diode.

“Do I know y’all from somewhere?” Trink asks, setting down to eat. 

The cicadas, the crickets, lanternflies now nativized, and fireflies and gadflies, the tallgrass hoppers on expedition from St. Mary’s Park, the gargle of toads, the lunar riverlapping, the cry of the lechón man hacking suckling pig and the murmur and sharp laughter of manus, suits and drones on 152nd Street noshing and bulking on pork fat off his machete to earn themselves a profound sleep, gaining the sloth of a hog by the same principle that, eating a rival’s heart, one gains their courage—still, no one could quite give voice to the muteness of nighttime. 

“Excuse me!” Trink sits not a foot from the noodling couple’s embrace with his steaming paper boat of pork. “I coulda sworn I seen you two before.”

Morg and Pina udon. They linguini. Then come up for air.

Morg blinks. “Don’t recognize you.”

But things are getting social. The gutter collects ginkgo fruit and the rainbow bloom of aerosolized oil in leftover rainwater, and joins pig blood in the runoff. 

Trink and Morg and Pina sit on the raw asphalt Indian-style and nursing each a malt beside them amid two dozen or so folks doing pretty much the same, come by divergent pathways to this late sidewalk supper.

“Look,” Morg says, rapping Pina’s shoulder, regained of open sight from the kiss. “There’s only one star in the Bronx.”

“You being cute?” Pina says, through pork, eating again.

“Nuh uh,” he points. “The northernmost of Ursa minor. The pole star.”

Trink burps and looks at Morg’s fingertip.

Through the obscurity of nightclouds, their soft underbellies lit by the Paramus Inferno, is indeed a faint flicker of turtledove-white.

“I swear I know you two.”

Trink had his own special niggling seeing the nightsky even in discrete swathes. He looked by muscle memory, with wildly lollying neck, for “Legs”: nine stars from old Andromeda and seven from Pieces forming the hoof of a pig. It was his favorite constellation, and relevant. The resonance of the Chained Lady waned in a century of freefall and with Chinese influence on constellations worldover. The brief global government that lasted sixteen months in the early 2090s decided with shocking humility for a global government that their goals should be to standardize the meaning of the stars—to ensure, after their inevitable collapse, fundamental peace among the peoples of the world, who’d find it hard to wage total war while agreeing so much in the domain of divination (at least they’d be able to predict where the next blow was coming if war did boil over). Well, it didn’t exactly work out but it stuck. It was one of those sad ironies that as astrology rose, in Trink’s precise generation, being thirty now, the night sky got thicker—to keep the carbon footprint from being fingerprinted and found to be foreign, generating resentment, it was decided to keep our toxic clouds closer to home with the awakening global kumbaya and fear of backlash now that every nation and its grandma had a anxious nuke growing a mustache in silos worldover. Some clever and tax-broken eggheads had figured out combustion from radon, the sluggish gas in our atmosphere; and from the half-decade of that desperate and idealistic experiment, semi-permanent clouds floated low over the sites of peak innovation. Elizabeth, NJ. Shanghai. The South Bronx. So it was the children of Trink’s year, naturalized in reading stars from lower-school on and fluent in the sky’s poetics from high, who for almost a quarter century now were acutely aimless and extra pale, missing casual access to the stars from which to discern some destiny. 

“Don’t point at stars,” Trink tells Morg. “It’s impolite.”

Morg can’t help but laugh at his face whose disapproval is rendered so clearly transparent by the anticipated relish of the spiel he’s about to push.

“You two are what? Seventeen and in love? Pointing stars for a vanilla glimmer of heaven’s smile on your affection? Not so simple. That ain’t Polaris, it’s the Dog Star, shimmered into Polaris’ place by the wobbly vision of these forsaken clouds. You know what that means?”

“Old man,” Pina says, a little blissed, a little sleepy. “We wasn’t raised on charts. Morg crossed a little kitty this afternoon and decided it was good luck, just that once, just for himself. Understand?”

It was her condescension that chills Trink’s heart as someone who preferred to be optimistic by disposition regarding youth’s commitment to culture. He stands up and bows. “Y’all return to noodling. I just coulda sworn I seen you somewhere is all.” Trink looks up, watches the Cetacean cloud cover the star on a westward wind and heads off with his burnt ends wobbling towards Mott Haven.

Pina quickly sobers. “I was too cruel. Worse. I was obvious.”

Morg shakes his head. “He’s not onto us.”

Wearing skinsmoothers and corsets the informants watch Trink off, loosen their held-in guts and let slouch their baritones. Pina pulls a flask from their tote and gulps six ounces of gender fluid to keep svelte for tomorrow’s psychic sting. 

“My eye was twitching the whole time,” they say. “Had to do a ditzy schtick. Forgot to top off.”

“Don’t worry,” says Morg, “he bought it. Has no reason to figure he’s fingered for fraud. And we got him halfway. He knows stars.”

Some half-blitzed manu comes over, palm out for an alms.

“Scram, buddy!” Pina shouts. “Let’s get out of here,” to Morg.

In summer it’s easy to miss night, there’s only a modicum more silence by the nox decree and heavens dim just 10,000 lux compared to the cloudy daylight because of all the lamps, headlights and neons burning midnight oil. They set off opposite Trink, leaving their pork and malt to be scoured by gnats.

“What do you get from it?” Pina points to the cloud.

“Uhh, a whale.”

“Do you really think our man’s a natural?”

“I’m sure it’s not what the Casino thinks. They threw the book at him. You saw the accusation: numberstims and tarot, psycholudes and mindopeners. Straight astrology is legal, that’s all the dirt we’ve got on him. And just, you know, having a sense of things.”

Pina itches where the silicon meets their face. “Yeah but there’s no stars in Times Square. None you can see over the damn Swarovski even if the do clouds peek apart. And there’s no stars inside the Deuce.”

Deuce Casino ran the chance factory on Good Times Square, complete with cabaret, boards and tables, slots and odds, evens, luckies, and four floors of quantum splits—the orderliness of slick chromium utopic lives in the island’s glitzy highrises sought out a safe kind of danger in the randomness and chaos that the casino was in constant effort to maintain in the rolls, spins, and puts, despite the veerages towards statistical significance that manifested eerily in the extremities of possibility and the penumbras of probability.

“What was his haul?” Morg aks. “If he’s still eating from the Piranha truck, you and I and our friendly handlers at the fraud department must be costing more than his pocketbook.”

At the underpass, squibs and drones are huffing dandelion. Pina stuffs hands in their own pockets, fingering the errant bits of nose, goatee and disguise. Says, “I can’t wait to get out of this ill drag.” 

“You hear my question? They’ll send us just for the principle of it, I guess. The news cast claims the Government doesn’t rig stars anymore out of deference and outcry.”

Pina spits, yawns, stretches. Time to clock out. “Walk me to the ferry, will you?

They reach the old fish market on Hunt’s Point where a millennial smell of shad, herring, sturgeon, flounder and bass steams out of the asphalt despite half those fish’s eradication by plastic and appetite in the last century. The pair is briefly overtaken by nostalgia, as if those fish did wriggle anew.

“Kiss me goodbye for the bit,” Pina laughs.

Morg does. They’d noodled an hour after all.

On the ferry Pina watches the Cetacean cloud clear the dog star. Those fat man-made clouds of exhaust have a minor school of interpretation all on their own, Pina marvels, though they keep pretty much the same shape being so dense. Maybe it’s the breezing being interpreted, not clouds… 

Morning on 42nd Street. The ways begin to fill. The subways. The subsubways. The subsubsubways let people up. 

Pina’s overtaken by the human rush from under, as they set out early the dingy sandwich board reading ten dollar psychic, a recession-proof price. 

Here’s the plan, a relatively standard sting for the cheaters. You have an agent from the casino sit in for their psychic at therapy, wait for the mark to spill the beans in the disclosures before the reading: anybody with half a moral, especially the true believers frequenting the fourth floor walk ups, would warn about alterations in the menses which have, typically, about a week’s halflife. Everybody was in psychic these days, what with all the depressing news from the farmland, the horrible war, and the looming extinction of mangos. You get the confession logged and send it up to the government goons to tin-foil their brain in punishment or worse, depending on the severity. During the astrology years, the Yankee Gov honchos and Corporate heads used to try and influence elections, eating habits and fashion trends, like Roman augury with captive crows, by altering the closer constellations with slim little slow-burning nukes sent to heaven to make new pseudo-supernovas. That was widely condemned as abhorrent and the powerful and secular still had a sore-spot for the incomprehensibility of the universal operation and enforced it, like sour grapes after their failure to fake its opposite, with a ruthless totality, protecting the flat democracy of meaning-making.  

Pina was a pro who lived in one drag or another on various freelance overtime ops so long that their palette and posture had no default and they couldn’t for the life of their musculature manage a resting face at all. The city walkers eyed Pina as one of the stationary as they passed, the human fixtures that stood infrastructurally on 42nd: psychics, vendors, studs and botshines. The handlers had run the spreadsheet on all the molecules crashing around midtown and pinned Trink’s probability of visiting Lavender, a rear-guard psychic off 8th, to hover around the low nineties of likelihood: good enough. Morg’s bit was to hold up Lavender in transit and Pina’s to get dragged in Lavender’s get-up, precision being perfunctory because according to the crunchers Trink had never visited Lavender, let alone a psychic at all, since 9th grade when he was sent there on order of his school counselor for deviations in the brainwave that crashed distracting on the shores of his classmate’s attention (played too rough). And just past nine, here he comes around the corner, and Pina slips inside to fix their face. 

Trink eyes the signage. Future Foreseen. Woes Excavated. Tax Help. Relationships. Are You Worried? It was the last by which he is finally allured, Lavender’s classic sign gilt with the patina of the avenue’s grit and desperation. He follows the arrows four floors up past doorways left open to relieve the inhabitants of stale air, completing their toilette, boiling water, lounged in front of the TV cast’s blue glow in their bathrobes, clipping toenails, gargling dandelion, totally ignorant to his intrusion as he circles the stairwell on a filthy matted mauve carpet wheezing respiratory duress as a physical manifestation of object memory. On the fourth floor there’s a neon revival PSYCHIC sign above a veiled entryway of greasy beads. His eyes closed, he presses his body through and the beads slide over his bare arms, reluctant to part.

Inside: Pina as Lavender, doing their nails.

“Hello. Sit.” Pina finishes the left hand with full attention; softens their face and looks flatly at Trink, sat. With the worn profundity of yesterday’s tagline wisdom, Pina asks, “Are you worried?”

Trink laughs, feels absurd, says, “Uh huh.” Then shrugs. Softens himself. And asks, “Can I just get into it?”

“Oh sure sweetheart,” Pina says. “But first I gotta ask. Any tarot playing, psycholudes, juice, fatchance or mindopener in the last, let’s say, week? It’s for my own protection.”

“Nope.”

Pina pauses. “Any flapjack, earworm, hippo or mash?”

“I’m totally clean. I don’t even have Pepsi.”

“Uh huh…” Well here Pina is stuck with a mark suddenly having to perform psychic. “So get into it.” 

“About a week ago,” Trink starts, though still faklempt from the exotic scenery and freaky aura of Pina/Lavender, “I tripped and fell on one of those new chromium walkways off the Willis Avenue bridge and, getting laughed at by a group of fleeing geese, when I regained my feet, by some one-in-a-billion crook of neck, I found my vision on the world askew so that I saw between reality. I mean my eyesight was aslant of molecules and I was witness to the extra roundness of things. Over the Harlem River, down to the old Randall’s spaceport… And the people on that bridge, looking at me I’m sure quite alarmed, as I cannot fathom the expression on my face, but I am certain, if it came close to reflecting the state of my interiority at that moment, that it could rattle the seat of anyone’s sovereign anonymity… These passersby were extraordinarily profound. As they streamed past me I was convinced at first a kind of trick was being played, that these people were looping the bridge, hologramming or dragging each other—I was sure I’d seen them moments before and then moments after again. Now I can understand that my head was still askew and my perception was tuned to some essential multitude they shared. That day I walked in wonder under the gulls, I left my students in their classrooms, and I went where I was sure I’d find the most unfamiliar human assortment to shock my vision out of this flattening, which began to terrify me. I couldn’t differentiate people. I sought the most fertile place, fertile from the rot of hope, where probabilistic misery drew gnat-like human flukes: the casino. I’d never been, being raised with a healthy relationship towards luck inherited from my father, a number-monger himself. Well, my friend, I lapped up. I sat playing Jersey Hold ‘Em with the winos, skeets and schlocks and the music of the fears played in the proscenium of my empathy. That’s the word: I empathetically read their hands, heads and shook them dry. The guilt was enormous as, you understand, I abused something that, if real, could be used to literally redeem the city, life on earth and human history… When my credit card was red-hot with inputs and searing a rectangle on my thigh, I licked and split. But it was too late, I’d gotten familiar. My neck hurt. I took an ice bath and slept, regrew the armaments of apathy and ignorance that make living in New York bearable. Still, a week later, I could come on a couple noodling and think I fleeced them or that they’d noodled before on some sidewalk of my unmistakable acquaintance. It’s basically worn off. My fellow urban thropopos and I have reentered the security and sanity of the anonymous. Even you, uh, Lavender, I believe myself to recognize though there’s surely no chance. So I’m asking: how can I ignore everybody’s beautiful, hideous, soft, red or purple face again on the subway and lower too?”

Over Trink’s heavy breath the ventilation system comes on, muffling the lowest frequencies. A floor under, a child sings morningbyes accompanying themselves with steampots and induction pans. Pina tinkles in Lavender’s mimicked bangles. 

“How much did you win?” They ask.

“About two month’s salary.”

“So not catastrophic. Nothing to feel too much guilt about.”

“Sure,” Trink answers, sitting back in the chair, spent… 

Pina, after some virtuosic divagating, advises the comfort of astrology. Which practically, these days, means a trip to the country. Would do anyone good.

Trink frowns. Kicks himself for not anticipating the diversion: the new age industrial complex of interconnected outs. No system of divination is left holding the bag entirely. A fresh shame overwhelms the old.

Pina weasels the rest of the conversation, perfectly capable of mocking a psychic, wagging the chameleon of their speech. There’s nothing here for the Deuce, no further threat to the opacity of probability and no evidence of guilt, save for the irrelevant wracking of Trink’s conscience. A cucumber mite from Lavender’s struggling spiderwort silently bothers about Pina’s breath. Trink taps some credits into the machine, decked out in the housing of an orb to ennoble the severance of money with a mystic costume. Leaves with meek thanks. Once the entry beads stop their rattle, solitude rushes in, as if under pressure, to fill the void, to fill the room, to press against Pina’s costume. Alone in Lavender’s, in borrowed clothes, in borrowed skin, Pina lets drip the liquidity of their face, like loosening a notch of identity’s belt.

The past eight years Pina’s been working as a face for fraud has usually ended them up in some dandy den or sidealley with a grimester or bumm hearing the simplest miseries of poverty and greed to put down in the next day’s warrant. The psychic sting was the hardest of all to keep your head on, because it was adjacent temperament types on the job market that would pick psychic or dragger, people who dug getting under skins either way with the only difference being whether you wanted to wear them. Pina feels pronged with forking paths of the past, prodded with their singular line pressing onwards.

Half past nine. They jump up, shed face, tidy the place, recenter the chaise, and sprinkle an evening’s worth of dust from a pocketed spritz back on the surfaces disturbed. They leave Trink’s tip in the orb, a wink. Down the stairs, wearing nobody’s face, Pina passes Lavender, flustered from whatever Morg’s diversion was, clomping up. Pina looks. The hair and chiffon they intuited precisely and imitated; even the laxity in the operation of levator palpebrae superioris that makes the psychic’s blink seem burdened with the heft of extra sight, they’d mimed quite well. Despite their put-on sight, the psychic doesn’t notice Pina, though suspiciously descending from their floor—because Pina’s nude. That stings them for the first time in decades, on account of Trink’s testimony, wriggled through the professional carapace. They slip on an old drag before exiting onto the Avenue, an office drone in their middle forties in an undershirt, with a lively pair of socks to make them indistinguishable whereas, in these fashionable days, complete banality would stand out.    

Long have Americans leaped their circumstances with the sky, which even hung over the most barren grocery store parking lots in the anthropocene. The decades of rolling outages during the fossil troubles made television’s escapism unreliable and we began to depend on the sky again. Now: this damn smog, those artificial clouds. 

Pina looks at the sky. Spits on the sidewalk. Looks at the sky. The human hemorrhage overtakes them anew on 42nd, let out from the subways, subsubways, subsubsubways, omniways and innieways, anyways and transports that circulate humanity in this hub. Suit sleeves and taffeta, polyurethane tops and fringe, tickle and brush Pina’s peach fuzz. Morg nearly misses them.

“Oh goodness. Pina?” He says. “Did I hold her off long enough?”

Pina tells Morg to clear Trink’s name.

“You alright, Pina?”

“Oh yeah Morg. It’s only the, uh, how do you say? Emotional labor of sitting through a psych session.”

Eight years ago Pina, then a Regular Service goon, had tripped on the Willis Avenue bridge too and stood up into the same sight as Trink, their anonymity permanently punctured. What would become of the poor kid? And what are the odds of it being the same bridge? But Pina knew too much to be asking odds. Coincidences are the most basic unit of meaning. It’s not the complexity of understanding them that overwhelms but their bare simplicity. It was to dress up the oblivion of the sky that human beings, from the beginning, made their most touching invention: the constellations. And to this day someone could still find Christ’s face in her toast in Louisville.