Unmanifold

I wish that I could say that Bono woke me up at 5:15 this morning, but if I did I'd be lying. It wasn't my iPod connected to the alarm clock, and so consciousness was inflicted upon me by some crooner only Jessie can identify.

At 5:34, I got into a cab. It pulled up in front of the American Airlines terminal at 5:55. The lines in front of the security desks were long, so I worried about finding my way to gate B34 by 6:30, when the flight began boarding. Takeoff was at 7:00, on schedule; we landed at 8:11, Chicago time. We pulled into a gate at 8:53, leaving me seven minutes to deal with the physiological effects of a large cup of coffee before boarding a plane to Tuscon at 9:00.

Space and time are part of a continuum. When one is cramped, the other feels similarly so. Packing my bags had amounted to a failed rebellion against the law that two physical objects cannot occupy the same place. Hearing a security guard demand that liquid containers be removed for inspection made me feel like a Roman prisoner, forced to reenact my folly in front of a mocking Colosseum crowd as punishment for ever chafing against the governing forces in the first place.

***

We landed, we gathered, we piled into a van, we drove off. We arrived at the research station two hours later and had dinner, then made formal introductions.

See you tomorrow, the director said, enjoy the evening. The sun was still out.

What to do?

Orientation: what time is it? someone asked. My watch says eleven thirty, so that makes it...

Three hour difference...

My God, it's that early?

It feels like it ought to be past midnight or something.

The sun set, and so came time to go exploring. Four of us grabbed flashlights and walked ninety degrees from civilization.

I'm not sure how far we walked. It felt like some great distance, but the later trek back took no time at all. On a few occasions we heard noises—something just out of tune with the crickets' background theme—and turned off our flashlights, shifting all mental power from vision to hearing. Everything would go completely black. The trail became a page completely covered in ink: billions of potential stories that would be told if we just threw a little white in between the right letters. After the sound failed to repeat itself, we would turn our flashlights back on, and just enough of the world in front of us would be made actual and real enough for us to go.

After a while we decided that we should go back to find our beds. There was nothing about where we were, nor was it any particular time. It just seemed like something else to do.