Slum Enterprise - Chapter 18

CHAPTER 18

Tim grabbed Lee by his arm and led over to the base of the hill. On top, Lee caught his breath and sat down on the westward pew, Tim the easterward, they faced each other. It was like ying yang, dark on one side, light on the other. Down below the musicians were tuning up for their next song, the shopkeepers began to pack up the trinkets into large duffel bags and break down the tables, the children made way and danced and played around everyone below. Lee could see the entire Reserve before him, much different now, more vibrant, less drought stricken, birds flew in the sky to roost for the night in nearby trees. Far away in the center of the lake, Lee spotted a White Crane standing on a small island. It was very still and stood up straight, its beak was perpendicular to the water staring at the sky like a statue.

The reserve was a mixture of all the northern wonders into one area. Green tall trees, wetland willows and cattails pattering on themselves and rolling mounds of prairie standing with light greenish color. And, the lake, deep blue in the middle with murky brown and algae covered edges, water fowl of sorts always swimming and diving there heads sticking there tails and butts out jittering for food. Lee saw some geese in the mix. He had a bad feeling about those geese, “the bastards always hissed and flapped their wigs at me if I ever got near them on the Reserved running trail.”

“What was that?” Tim said he was also looking out on the landscapes and didn't know that Lee was talking to himself. 

Muskrats played and took cover in the low brush, turtles found their home base petrified white logs and mounted them. Back over by the White Crane standing on the center island, a perfect circle of black tarnages surround the island edges. They appeared more territorial than the smaller water fowl, they snatched their beaks and made large birds screech if others got too close. Everything had a purpose, a place to be, nothing was not where it should have been, even the families below belonged.

The Island is made of piles of rocks with black dirt filling the gaps and crevices between them to form a sort of fertile land for weeds and flowers to grow on top. It looked like a nicely layered cake. 

There was one tree right in the center, a very old Oak tree that stood straight up with gnarled imperfections of branches that took random directions in the sky with twisting lines like a barber pole. 

When Lee gazed, he could swear he felt a force pulling his clothes and skin towards it, it had a gravitational pull. His body and mind started to urge him to jump into the water and swim towards it and sit underneath the Oak tree. He wished he had a large book with small print and a canoe hidden in the reeds so he could secretly go off and plant a flag at the untamed land. He would sit and read hiding from the sun by carefully following the tree's trunk shadow as it moved across the ground like a sun dial. As he moved with the trunks overcast Lee would pick up little flowers speckled throughout and make a queen flower crown for Jenna back at the cooking tent. The flower crown would weep and melt due to the humid internals of the cooking tent but Lee would stare and think it was beautiful either way. As he orbits the tree trunk he would draw in his notebook the panoramic view of the entire reserve and create a map of it. 

Lee sitting on the westward pew closed his eyes and took another deep breath in and imagined that the tree in the center of the island, practically the true center of the entire Reserve, was an extremely dense object that things orbited around. 

“It could be a sun, no it is too dark, it must be black hole.” Lee imagined that the island was so dense that the Reserved orbited and funneled into the center singularity. 

The canvas tents get pulled from their stakes and start to move fast around the outer edges. While orbiting the bohemia settlement people would accept their new found position as orbiting matter and start to roadeo snatch logs and various trees pulled from their roots and make sawhorses. 

Once the sawhorses were made, they began to saw, strip, and sand long planks of beautiful wood to make orbital canoes. Since gravity didn't really hold the people or things in one position, it looked like a gyroscope spinning. No one seemed to mind after the short period of motion sickness.

The closer any object got to the center the harder it was to pull itself back out to the farther orbital lines. The closer something got to the center singularity of the island the less the object/person wanted to leave. It was slower and peaceful, the linear tangential velocity was slower compared to the radius challenged people and objects way out there on the edge of gravitational influence. 

Lee saw the events of the orbital structures play out behind closed eyelids. Tim didn't say a word, he only produced the sounds of breathing.. Lee equated the orbiting layers to something he learned in engineering school, Bohr's law and model of an atom and how electrons had different energies related to the distance it was from the nucleus.

 The farther the orbit the more energy it had. Being in the far orbits out near the prairie fields required a lot of will to stay there. It was super windy and shards of material would whip past and cut or kill a person if they were not on constant watch. 

Only the large men of the Bohemian families had canoes paddling vigorously in the outer rings trying to tie up logs to bring back to calmer orbits where the women and children settled.

 The Reserve turned into a galaxy. How many billions of years in passing would mold and form the shapes and patterns of the galaxy. 

No one really wanted to stay in the middle orbitals, it was too calm for the adventurous and too rough for the timid.

 Lee created the dynamic system in his mind and smiled. He could see that each change of orbits by the people would release a short energy blast that was like a shooting star burning up in the atmosphere. Lee felt like he was the master of this imagined domain, the alternative reality he must have run into, unknowingly. Lee placed himself in the center island and saw the solar system of the Reserve before him. Then he looked down and saw something next to the base of the Oak tree. It was an old stone walled well. 

He walked over a few paces and peered down the well hole. It was so black it confused him, it felt like it sucked his eyes out. The water in the well at the bottom was like a black crystal. 

Even though it seemed to suck in all light, Lee saw the reflection of his face but didn't recognize himself. His face was blank with dots for eyes and thin dark line for a mouth, it looked like the “shit happens” smiley face. 

The face smiles back at him. Looking past the reflection Lee saw that the pool was hundreds of feet deep that expanded past the throat of the narrow well body into massive caverns. Lee didn't want to look in the well any longer. The well made him feel complete nothingness like the fringes of psychotic break from depression. 

It felt like purgatory, limbo, hell but at the same time a place that maybe the human mind couldn't really understand so the mind had to come up with something so the idea totally didn't break you instantly into a combustible fireball.

Lee squinted his eyes harder, the veins in his temples and center forehead popped. Tim shuffled his body on the pew and just sat and smiled.

An idea manifested, Lee started to equate the infinity equilateral triangles to what he was envisioning. “One must be the upper, the other the lower. The Reserve galaxy was the upper, the well abyss was the lower. The external vs the internal, the outside vs. the inside. Lee Finally understood what this place was.