Catalytic Conversion
Lost our best friend this week to a shockingly sudden health crisis, so our minds have been on change. It's important to love without limits. Issue dedicated to Ananda. Volume I, Issue 4
When Cate woke, she had been bested only by Mr. Hodge down the street, who never failed to be in his wood shop before dawn, and the birds. The faint chirring hum of wood lathe felt reassuring. The birds’ discordant chirping, however, seemed an overwrought quest to make the sun rise. Despite this, she was in good spirits. Cate jammed on socks, tossed a thick cardigan over her pyjamas and ran downstairs to make tea. For Cate, rising early was an indulgence. Given that, one might expect she’d rise early every day. But work often kept her busy until the Hour of the Wolf, and once the wolves were finally done with her, her world went dark until noon.
But not today. She’d managed to arrange an early night and enough rest to be awake at five. Mug of tea in hand, Cate surveyed the enormous Potential of Everything from her porch. It was dizzying how perfectly possible everything she’d ever wanted felt at that moment, and how perfectly beautiful the world is when it’s still sleeping. Stark silhouettes of leaves from the old elm tree in front of her house framed dawn’s canvas of faint gold behind a dusky horizon. Just left of a motionless wind chime, Cate recognised the one remaining twinkle, Venus. Her mind rested there a moment, contemplating recent news about potential life on Venus. Wasn’t the universe full of fun surprises? she mused. But soon, fantastical visions of giant, stumbling Venusian rock creatures with lava dripping out of their eyes sent her thoughts to comic books she’d loved, which led to books in general, which led to the one she urgently needed to finish writing.
Pangs of anxiety rapped on her door, but she scolded them away. Can’t go there, she told herself. This morning isn’t about that. She’d beaten the world to it, and the day was hers. In the urging calm, the promise and hope of every positive potentiality lived to serve, and she planned on enjoying its every offering.
“She’s a fickle bitch,” the deeply-lined face explained in a gravelly voice, looking over his glasses pointedly. He put Ian’s granola bars into a bag, gripping it firmly while he continued, before letting go and into Ian’s grasp. “She’ll let ya think you can mount her, but at the last minute she’ll turn on ya, cold as ice, and there you’ll be, dick hangin’ out in the wind.”
“Thanks." Ian nodded politely. "I’ll take that under advisement.”
Warnings from a grizzled convenience store clerk weren’t the first. Ian had heard Mt. Washington could be treacherous, many times before. But he felt himself to be an experienced climber, though his “experienced” would be someone else’s “intermediate”. Besides, he told himself, it’s July. It’ll be fine.
Ian had planned this trip with his buddy, Cole, for months—since long before a global pandemic had shut down the world’s exterior. But then, Cole got the virus, and while he convalesced at home and seemed to get well on his own without hospital, he found himself without the wind to go up the stairs, let alone a mountain. Even long after he had supposedly recuperated, Cole’s otherwise very fit body seemed to have lost its normal robustness.
Ian was more disappointed than he let on when Cole explained this. Ian’s grandfather had climbed that mountain, and stories he’d told little Ian about his adventure were some of Ian’s favourite experiences with his granddad, a person he’d looked up to more than any other. So, when his grandfather was killed in a car accident the year before, it became Ian’s Holy Grail to go there himself.
“It’s okay, man, he reassured Cole. We’ll do it next year, maybe.
Ian never brought it up again. Instead, quietly, he planned to go by himself. The consolation he expected to find on that mountain—consolation of the hurt from losing his closest family—spoke louder than good sense. And, while Ian was aware of this potential error, he’d been compiling a list of reasonable justifications for why it would be perfectly safe. Chief among these was the equipment he planned to bring. He knew what to pack, including contingency layers of clothing and high-calorie foods. And he’d even have a back-up battery and portable power core charger with him for his mobile. He’d be prepared. There were lots of people on that mountain. He wouldn’t really be alone. It would be fine.
Ian shook off the clerk’s graphic warning and stuffed the granola bars into his pack before driving off to the trailhead of his planned ascent.
An invisible cloud filled every place Ben went and carried him a foot or so off the ground. Gravity had lost the battle with his emotions.
Last night, he’d seen Amy. They’d been dating for months, but mostly online. The pandemic kept people hunkered down in their abodes like solitary, entombed ants no longer able to work on building the anthill. It was the second time he’d been with her in person. The first was when they had initially met at the book store where Ben worked, when Amy handed him a book she intended to purchase over the counter. Their eyes locked over a copy of The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, and they giggled wordlessly before, in rapid fire, each of them expounded excitedly about the book, about hope, and how much they loved graphic novels, all within the space of 90 seconds. As she waited for an ejecting receipt, she gave Ben her Instagram and told him to say “hi” some time. Ben smiled in wonder as he watched her blonde curls skip off with receipt and book in hand as if the world held no debts in her name.
They’d been having a non-stop conversation online ever since. The conversation traversed social media to texts, then from texts to FaceTime, but whatever the means, the conversation was seamless and became the most brilliant dialogue either of them could ever have imagined. It created a space of their own, a universe in which they both lived and where every star belonged solely to them. They grew into each other there, their words and thoughts building the platform from which they saw the power and potential in everything.
As social distancing restrictions relaxed, for their second meeting, they had arranged for coffee, which turned into lunch. Which turned into an afternoon of miniature golf. Which turned into take-out dinner on a bench in the park. By the time they extracted themselves from their infinite day, during which it seemed neither could possibly exhaust things to talk about, it was twelve hours later. Neither Ben nor Amy touched the ground on their individual routes home.
As Ben dressed after his shower, his head was so full of Amy, he wondered how he’d ever managed to exist before he knew her. Wearing mismatched socks, his shirt buttoned askew and hair not even combed, he floated toward the kitchen, oblivious to everything that wasn’t Amy. An instinct for breakfast drew him there, but once he’d arrived, he had no idea why. Ben’s room mate was there, though. He eyed Ben up and down and grinned.
“Had a good date with Amy, huh?”
“Hmm? Oh, yeah,” Ben replied with a dumb-faced smile.
“It’s hopeless, man. I can see it in your eyes. I don’t mind saying the field lost its best player when you started talking to Amy. More for the rest of us, though.”
“Who?”
“You, dumbass. It’s okay, man. I’m happy for you. But, uh, you might want to close the barn door.”
Ben looked down, not even embarrassed, and fixed his pants. His mind was full of one thing, and one thing only: telling Amy he loved her. Yep. They’d not yet uttered those words, but today’s the day, he thought. Gonna text her. Or maybe Instagram. Make it official, with a big heart, so everyone can see! Shout it to the world! I LOVE YOU, AMY! I love you forever.
Feeling renewed by her earlier commune with dawn, Cate had finally settled in to her day’s work. But the magic began to wear off soon after. As a freelance writer, she’d managed to carve out a decent living, but sometimes, the work begged her to question her career choices. Her current assignment, portions of a collaborative book with two other writers, had been creating something of a minor hell for the last two months. Her interest in its topics waned in direct proportion with her growing contempt for the other two authors; her relationship with her editor also suffered. Had it been his purpose, he couldn’t have found three less compatible individuals for this project, which by now was causing him to question his own career choice.
“It’s like using scotch tape on butter with you three,” he complained mildly with a nervous laugh at their last video conference. “Look—you guys are all three the best I have. I know you can pull this off. I believe in you 100%. Now, let’s review where we’ll be next week.”
“Maybe you should stop fucking buttering us up,” Cate muttered. Fortunately, she was well-acquainted with the mute button.
That was last week. Despite copious applications of butter, the dissent grew among the three—they couldn’t agree on key points that tied their work together. They even disagreed on the book’s ‘why’, even though such had been established at the beginning. But it had to get done, somehow. Their editor was the magician. He’d have to sort out piecing it together after all was written. All she could think about today was extricating herself from this mess as soon as possible, in the form of finishing all of her portion as soon as possible. A slight problem with that guileless plan existed in the fact that she was already two weeks behind.
She expected Al to text her today, asking for pages. Pages she simply didn’t have. Somehow, knowing that he was going to ask for them only made her desire to comply evaporate further, though her inner voice of reason argued against her rebellion.
You’re a professional—you’ve had weeks to do this.
But I hate it.
You signed a contract.
It’s meaningless bullshit.
You hate disappointing others.
But what about me?
It won’t get done until you do it.
And on and on, the internal argument raged. Cate pressed through it. She put words on pages. She fought nausea. She watched her phone. She was miserable. She kept writing.
The more she pressed, the more came out and eventually, she got into some semblance of a productive groove. It was nearly 8 p.m. before she realised: Al hadn’t texted. Odd. Not that she was anywhere near being done, but still, it felt strange after all that build-up and stress. Wait! Maybe she hadn’t heard it. Now Cate panicked. Rifling through papers and files on her desk, Cate searched for the “damned phone” which by this point had managed to slip away on its own excursion—away from Cate. Finally, she found it, underneath an empty cracker box. Nothing. The phone was on. Sound was on. No record of a call. No text. No messages. Nothing. She flipped through contacts for Al’s number, dialled to hear only a rushing air noise. She checked again. The battery was fine, it had power, but...no bars. She scrolled to its browser. “Network Unavailable” was all it said. Mildly exasperated, Cate went to the kitchen to find something to eat and flipped on a television to hear an announcement in progress.
“...unprecedented turn of events, cell phone coverage has been disabled across America today in what the FCC calls “an inexplicable communications failure”. We go now, live, to our correspondent in Washington, who’s been covering this story from the Federal Communications Commission headquarters...”
“Oh. Right, then,” Cate thought out loud, with a sly grin. Her prison release had been officially announced. She finished making her sandwich, then returned to her porch to watch the dazzling closing titles of the day’s promise. Watching the sun egress in hues of cornflower and fiery red, she felt no tiny bit pleased with what appeared to be ordained insurrection. Cell phones were good for something after all: they knew when to die.
Ian’s climb had begun easily. The weather was perfect—warm enough that shorts were perfectly comfortable. From the summit, the view was astonishing. Ian pulled out a photo of his granddad and sobbed. He so wished he could have experienced this moment with him. Ian wondered how he could manage to even exist in a world without his grandfather, who had loved and taught him how to be in the world better than his parents ever could. He said a few words, and thought a few more, and then made a vow to finish his graduate work and devote his whole life to living up to the principles his grandfather had imparted.
Eyes dried, it was time to head back down. What began well, however, quickly deteriorated. Grief over his grandfather took an abrupt turn toward concern over his descent. A curious fog arrived seemingly with a blink. Cairns that marked the trail became increasingly difficult to find. The trail appeared to drift into nothing. Ian had added layers, as the temperature dropped, but a wind picked up and whipped him about with air that felt like shards of glass.
Ian pressed on. Where he’d encountered other climbers on the ascent, now he met none. Worse, he felt the trail had abandoned him. Fierce wind and now driving rain, visibility not more than ten feet in front of him, the situation became more dire. Ian decided to rest a bit on a slightly sheltered stone and, removing his pack, he pulled out his mobile, debating on whether he should call for help. He didn’t want to believe he’d gotten lost, and maybe his eyes were just playing tricks on him. He debated for a while, but his feet were getting colder and he knew he must keep moving. He attempted descending further, but the rocks had become slippery and he really didn’t feel he was even on a trail any longer. Ian decided to call for help.
Two weeks later, after they’d retrieved Ian from the mountain, his pack was also found, in a ravine, some 20 feet below where he had fallen, with mobile phone clutched in his stiffened, dead hand.
“What day did we estimate he’d gotten lost?” one of the rescue team queried.
“Witnesses put him at the scene twelve days ago,” the crew chief replied. “The day cell phones stopped working.”
Ben levitated back to his room in search of his phone. After much fussing and fiddling, though, he came to the distinct conclusion that the thing didn’t work. Rebooting did nothing. Euphoria giving way to frustration, he headed back to the kitchen. His room mate explained the news. Cell phones were down all across the country. Normally, Ben might have thought this odd. But he was in such a rarefied head space, nothing was odd. Had he discovered that Amy was being held in a castle guarded by a dragon, the result would have been the same: Go. Find. Amy. Now.
An hour later, after Ben had charmingly fumbled his way through expressing his feelings to Amy in person, and after she’d reciprocated in kind, and after the ensuing kiss, Amy looked up at Ben adoringly. “I’m so glad you didn’t do like everyone else. You know, tell me this in a text, or on Instagram. You really are the only one for me.”✿
Intimate light reflecting her grace, Instinctively, tenderness laid to cloth, Legions of sorrows’ pain misplaced, In gleaming swaths wistfully wrought. Brushed soft lines and hues most warm, Savagely twisted her torment in turn, Stars fallen to earth wreak lasting harm, Their jagged edges his unfeigned spurn. Strokes upon tendrils, caressing his face, Interpreting that which she’d failed to kindle, Shadow and light may dance and trace, But in union destined to never mingle. And so, when seeing his rendered visage, He saw not himself, but forfeited privilege. ✿
No one had detected her small figure’s ascent to the building’s roof. Clad in spandex sporting attire—a sort of onesie that covered her head and sported some kind of cartoon baby elephant on the front—this, in itself, was mildly amazing. Hillary had been called eccentric by the best of them; “crazy” by her closest friends, but today, no one was around to witness her odd mix of daring and weirdness, except her camera. Once she made it to the top, Hillary’s confidence soared. Feeling good about this one, Hillary wasted no time in securing lines, readying the drone, and preparing herself for the jump.
Once the drone was in position, hovering some 30 feet away from the side of the building, Hillary prepared herself. A mild day, sunny, no wind—it was perfect. After a final check of carabiners and lines, she poised atop the roof’s stone perimeter, lowered her goggles and leapt, the thick bungee cords that would be her human yo-yo trailing over the side after her.
Hillary squealed with delight. The first fall was her favourite part. That moment when her legs felt like they became detached from the rest of her body, and her body no longer felt corporeal was, for her, a drug. A very short-lived but concentrated high. Today was no different, except that shortly after, her adrenaline levels would elevate for other reasons entirely.
One thing Hillary hadn’t checked a few moments earlier was whether her phone’s keyboard had been locked. It was not. Neatly zipped into a pouch on her side, this might not have been a concern. Except that a particular movement as she initially descended slightly pressed against its glass. Behind that glass was an interface, an interface that controlled the drone.
Like a cartoon figure, the drone began to spin and whirl, diving and dancing as if possessed. Hillary sprang up from the first drop and sensed something was wrong. Down she went again, now realising the drone wasn’t where it was supposed to be. On her second ascent, somewhere near the building’s tenth storey, the drone’s erratic dance sent it bumping into Hillary; her resulting jerking motion began to spin her body as she fell back down. The drone continued buzzing around like a dragonfly in heat until it found her once more. This time, the kinetic energy nearly spent, she was hardly springing when it flew right into her. Kicking and swinging, she found herself contacting the building, and it seemed the drone wanted to pin her to it. Not thinking clearly by this point, she jerked again and pushed herself away from the building with her feet. But it was too much force. Her return swing slammed her right into a glass window.
One could suggest the burning in his loins was because of a woman, but in this case, such stirrings were paired with an otherworldly howl that sent several dozen laboratory rats into hysterics. After his window apparently imploded, a beaker containing nitric acid was one of the many casualties on his bench. Panting and frantic, Professor Garvey dropped his pants before the spilled nitric acid could do any further damage. It seemed his BVD’s were still in tact, though his testicles were reporting otherwise. But as he tried to pull one foot free from his bunched up, faintly smoking trousers, he continued howling and yelling, jumping around the room like a human pogo stick. His fall was inevitable. The subsequent destruction of his lab, no one could have predicted.
Hillary rolled to the ground after she was flung into the room in a Hollywood manoeuvre that would’ve worked well on a big screen. Not that there were any witnesses. All Professor Garvey saw were hot white streaks of pain as he continued bounding around his lab, at one point, banging his head on a cabinet’s corner. Bells rang from the impact. Several shelves of various chemical compounds crashed to the floor simultaneously, most of them inert or otherwise innocuous. However, a large container of glycerine split open upon impact. As the professor jumped around in his panic, in the glycerine’s growing pool he slipped, and was thrust wholly into another bench where a Bunsen burner waited, alight. As his body bent over the bench on impact, part of his hair and lab coat caught fire. While his hair wasn’t actively in flames, the professor’s lab coat wasn’t as fortunate.
Hillary rose and dusted off bits of glass with her gloved hands. She lifted her goggles but could scarcely process what unfolded. What appeared to be a human male, possibly in the midst of a psychotic break, hair smoking, lab coat aflame, pants around his ankles, shrieking and howling like a madman, appeared to recoil backward and away from the chasing flame attached to his collar. Slipping once more, he fell to his backside with a thump. But the momentum, aided by the sublimely frictionless pool of glycerine, sent his buttocks gliding effortlessly and for a couple of yards, until he was stopped, quite abruptly, by a cabinet topped with rows of jars, which now might as well have been bowling pins.
It was definitely a spare. A few jars on one end remained standing.
“Are you...all right?” Hillary stepped cautiously through a maze of broken glass, various liquids and other odour-emitting matter toward the professor.
“Oh! Ohmygod!” She realised suddenly things were certainly still not right. “You’re on fire!”
Hillary picked up one of the remaining in tact jars, which appeared to contain some kind of liquid, removed its stopper and doused his lapel with its contents. His lab coat sputtered and sizzled. Some kind of biological matter from the jar rolled across the floor.
Stupefied, the professor looked up at her blankly. “That was...a brain...” was all he could manage.
Hillary reached down and pulled a banana from his smouldering coat pocket.
“Good thing you didn’t slip on this!” she laughed. ✿
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Additional Credits
Lightning photo by Philippe Donn.
Photo of drone by Callum Hilton.