So much of what I’m about to say doesn’t make sense,
and in normal circumstances, it wouldn’t.
But as your grandfather would have said, “These ain’t normal times.”
 – Uncle Gordo

 

The Clubhouse

1

While surfing the swirling eddies and carved-out channels of the Internet for a hidden tome, a mind-expanding business lexicon that would reveal the ultimate secret to success, I jerked awake from my Internet stupor, pulled away once again from being that close to knowing the meaning of life.  And the definition of MORTIE, whatever that was.

 

The desk phone warbled to get my attention and flashed a red light, its caller ID display announcing Paul O’Reilly, Vice President of the Qwerty-Queue division of Cumulo-Seven.  A/K/A The Zookeeper. The zoo animals – the engineers who Paul managed – lived in metal cages covered in sheetrock disguised as offices on a back hallway and took advantage of the wide berth given them to perform Rube Goldberg experiments. 

 

Some folks at Cumulo-Seven said that Paul’s menagerie performed magic.  Others were less kind.  Because of the extra length of time the Qwerty-Queue engineers took to complete projects – rarely finishing products on time, if at all – some people accused them of laziness and lying.  Until the day they invited me to their Thursday morning conference calls, I thought their behavior naturally reflected the resistance of research animals forced into the world of developing products for human beings.  Kind of like asking a two-year old for advice on how to improve the image of a politician right after you’ve replaced a lollipop with a bowl of mashed green beans – sure, you’ll get an answer but is screaming and a face full of mush really what you wanted? Maybe.  If you have a twisted sense of humor.

 

While using old blown-out guitar amplifiers from tours of The Who, video game consoles stolen from Wal-Mart, computers pieced together from free samples of electronic parts given to them by overzealous sales representatives, parakeet cages pulled from the dumpster of a Kiwanis Club where bird show attendees had bought bags of rat poison mislabeled at a Chinese factory building toy electric ovens for Mattel, cowboy boots pulled off a freshly-dead rodeo star who had skydived while roping a bull (but instead made a bull’s-eye in our office parking lot), pith helmets from the eccentric ex-Marine factory floor supervisor who thought the third shift workers should be shot and hung on his wall as trophies, cheerleader megaphones found in the backseat of a convertible Mustang GT full of passed-out coeds on spring break in Fort Walton Beach, pirated DVD movies of Japanese-anime inspired French art films about the impotence-induced music of superhero Ludwig “The Party Van” Beethoven, bottles of stale beer rescued from the shores of the Gulf of Mexico after Hurricane Katrina, and putrescent, moldy seatbelts from rusted K-cars in abandoned junkyards, one of their experiments yielded the secret of Atlantis – how to hide a peaceful civilization from a world order built for war – with the side benefit of converting people into amphibians who could live in the ocean and drink salt water but the CEO had nixed the product because it didn’t fit into our portfolio of core competencies.  They then built a car that derived power from the vibration of bass shakers but the young employees in the company objected.  How could kids distinguish themselves with their hopped-up rides if every grandma and grandpa on the block was rattling windows while cruising home after a late night playing bingo at the Elks Club?   The Qwerty-Queue engineers gave in to convention and developed a “black box,” an electronic product with functions sellable in the business marketplace, including a few functions of their previous inventions, like being able to look at the screen of a computer half a world away.

 

“You coming to the 9:39 meeting?”

 

The Qwerty-Queue team met at exactly 9:39 a.m. each Thursday.  Odd?  Perhaps.  But then, even odd events have rather normal explanations.

 

In this case, Paul had asked Andrew, “So, when do you want to have weekly meetings?”

 

Andrew Hale had worked as the lead research and development engineer for Remote Research Corporation, a company that had developed a little black box which acted as a long-distance method for operating a desktop personal computer.  A computer user could plug a special electronic circuit board inside his desktop computer and then connect a network cable to the circuit board.  The network cable could be hooked up to an office network or even the Internet and then somewhere else in the office network or somewhere else in the world on the Internet, the computer user could plug in the little black box and then connect a keyboard, mouse and computer monitor to the black box.  The computer user would then be able to operate the desktop PC as if the remote keyboard, mouse and computer monitor were in the same room with it.  Magic, you say?

 

Cumulo-Seven acquired Remote Research and then converted the Remote Research organization into the Qwerty-Queue division of Cumulo-Seven.  Andrew was kept at Cumulo-Seven as the Qwerty-Queue engineering team manager.

 

“How about 9:30?”

 

“Nine,” Paul responded, clarifying that he wanted to move the meeting up 30 minutes.

 

“9:39, it is,” Andrew replied, in his usual defiant tone to Paul, and thus the 9:39 meeting was born out of the push-and-shove relationship between Paul and Andrew.

 

The Qwerty-Queue team felt like the red-headed bastard stepchild of Cumulo-Seven.  One of the founders of Cumulo-Seven, Atlas Elytis, had made a killing in the stock market when Cumulo-Seven went public.  Atlas loved to go off and use his spare millions to invest in cool, untested technology in case he struck gold with the next Microsoft or Google.  Of course, you’ve got to go through a lot of failures to find a success.  Some say three out of 10 startups make it big.  Some say three out of a million.  Really depends upon how much of your own or someone else’s money you’ve got to throw around.  In any case, Atlas had founded Remote Research and used a big investment from Cumulo-Seven to keep it alive long enough for the engineers to develop a product.  He then convinced Cumulo-Seven to buy Remote Research.  Not everyone on the Cumulo-Seven executive team agreed but the purchase price was relatively small, about $50 million, so they signed an agreement with Atlas and absorbed the company within Cumulo-Seven.  After the purchase, the employees of Remote were put on a back hallway and given a dozen odd-shaped offices, an underpowered engineering design lab and a quirky conference room.

 

Every conference room at Cumulo-Seven has at least one glass wall, signifying that all meetings are considered open, with nothing to hide.  The one exception was the Qwerty-Queue conference room.  To enter the conference room, you had to walk in through the engineering design lab.  Or if you knew the secret entrance, you walked down the back hallway, stopped about 10 feet from the end and knocked on the wall.  Someone from inside the conference room would open a door and the hidden wall would give way.  No one knows exactly why the hidden doorway was created (or if someone knows, he’s not telling).

 

1.a.1.1(a)

 

Office meetings.  Some industrious employees see meetings as a waste of time, taking these clever worker bees away from their assigned tasks, as if completing tasks defined the only important part of a person’s job.  Of course, I know better.  People complete real work in meetings.  That is, groupthink and mob mentality in meetings force people out of their ruts, rotes and rat mazes into the realm of Decisions.  Completing a task assigned to you does not comprise a Decision.  Waking up in the morning and thinking about how you’re going to complete your assignments may feel like you’re making Decisions but a sheep feels the same way.  “I wonder how much good grass I’m going to find today that the others wandering the field around me won’t notice.”  In the end, sheep get sheered or slaughtered by the Decision-makers.

 

I never like to attend my first meeting empty-handed.  Already late, I drove to the local Krispy Kreme and bought two dozen doughnuts.  When I returned to the office and entered the Qwerty-Queue conference room, I was greeted with a row of smiles.

 

“Bruce, you have no idea what you’ve just done.”

 

I looked at Paul.  “What do you mean?”

 

“Well, we have an official policy that the last person to join the group has to bring refreshments.  You must have read our minds, or…” He turned to Andrew. “…Or someone told you.”

 

Andrew shook his head.

 

I threw the two boxes on the table.  “Nope.  I have my own policy.  Never attend your first meeting empty-handed.  Learned it from an Irishman. ‘Always arrive with one arm longer than the other’.  So anyway, I brought a dozen glazed and a dozen assorted doughnuts.  Dig in.”  I plopped down in the only available conference room chair, plush by average Cumulo-Seven standards – real leather front and back, padded armrests and adjustable everything – probably carryovers from the free-spending days of Remote Research.

 

“Well, Bruce, let me introduce you.  Guys, you’ve heard Bruce’s voice on the phone.  He’s taking over the program manager position from Carol Stone.  Bruce, this is Hermann LaCie.”  I reached across the table and shook Hermann’s hand.  Hermann was slim, about six feet, two, had curly, blond hair, with streaks of gray.  If he’d had black hair, I’d say he had a “salt and pepper mix.”  From his tan, I guessed he was an outdoors type.

 

“Hey, Bruce.  Glad to meet you.  Welcome to the team.  I won’t believe anything Andrew has said about you until I get to know you better.”

 

I looked at Andrew.  He leaned back in his chair and raised his arms.  “I don’t know what Hermann’s talking about.”

 

I nodded to each one in turn as Paul continued the introductions.

“This is Hyung Lo Nguyen. Been married 10 times, five times to the same woman.  He just can’t stand to live with the woman who should have stayed his wife in the first place but then he finds he can’t live without her.  We’ve suggested occasional separations but he likes having a married woman in the house with him.”

 

“This is Nelville Stiles, our Web browsing expert, especially do-it-yourself sites.  He’s just itching to create a Web sensation.  He claims to have already buried clues on makezine.com for our next big project.”

 

“This is Copus Comix.  Built a house on the Flint River.  The house is disguised as an abandoned silo and icehouse, part of Copus’ wild imagination.  Not only does he like to pretend he’s an imagineer at Disney…or do they still call themselves cast members?  Anyway, he’s also our embedded systems engineer.”

 

“This is Albert Edwards.  We’re not sure what he’s good at but our team seems to do well with him on the staff.”

 

“This is Gordon Dale.  Gordon is our 3D CAD graphics illustrator and NASCAR aficionado.”

 

 

“So, the first order of business is Bruce’s participation on the team.  I know I’ve spoken to all of you individually and you all seem to be in agreement that Bruce fits the bill to be on our team.  However, I’ve got to put it to a vote in front of him so he can see your responses for himself.  All in favor of Bruce joining our team, throw a doughnut at him.”

 

Before I could cover myself, I was pelted with an array of sugar, cooked dough and yeast, sprinkles, and worst of all, jelly filling.

 

“Yeah, I see how it goes.  This was a setup!”  Not one to miss a good fight, I grabbed the pieces of doughnut on my lap and beaned the guys back, smacking a few of them in their shocked, open mouths.  I picked up a half-smashed jelly doughnut and made sure it splatted on Paul’s starched and pressed dress shirt.

 

“Whoa, Bruce, what was that for?”

 

Andrew laughed.  “You don’t know Bruce.”  He turned to me.  “Way to go, Bruce.  So, now that you’re part of the team, we’re going to take you into the ‘lab.’  Carol never came to our conference room so she doesn’t know about the lab.  You think you can handle it?”

 

“Sure.”

 

“Good, ‘cause I really think you’re going to like it.”

 

Paul spun his chair around, stood up and knocked on the white erase board.  The board swung open like a car hatchback.  Paul lifted the board and stepped over the threshold.  “Okay, Bruce, follow me.  And although it goes without saying, I just want to emphasize that everything you’re about to see doesn’t officially exist on any Cumulo-Seven blueprint so you’ve got nothing to report in your famous notes.”

 

“Goes without saying…”  Although I liked to record the conversations around me and took detailed notes during meetings, I closed the leather cover and tucked my little notebook into a pocket.

 

2

 

Do you remember the first time you saw a garden writing spider?  I was about six years old the first time I saw one.  I told a school mate, Mike, about it and after school one day, I brought him to my house to see the spider.

 

According to Wikipedia, the North American garden writing spider is Argiope aurantia; in England, Argiope bruennichi and called the wasp spider; in East Asia, Argiope amoena and called kogane-gumo; in Australia, Argiope keyserlingi and Argiope aetherea and called the St. Andrews Cross spider.  In all cases, the spider creates an extra-thick pattern in its web known as the stabilimentum.  Various theories exist as to why a spider would waste energy spinning extra strands of thread into its web.  Some believe the stabilimentum serves as a shield to hide the spider from predators.  Others believe the stabilimentum serves as a warning to prevent birds from flying through the web and destroying the spider’s sole means of catching food.

 

We walked up to the opening between the garage and house, normally a welcome site, an invitation to play in the backyard.  Instead, we hesitated.  Scared, we didn’t even dare the other to go first.  Finally, I peered around the corner, afraid the spider might be waiting to catch me.  About ten feet away the spider web stretched a good six or seven feet in length from the house gutter to the top rung of my jungle gym.  Keeping watch over the whole yard, the yellow and black spider swayed with the wind, balancing itself in the middle of its silken trap.

 

I didn’t know if garden spiders could jump but didn’t want to take any chances.  Slowly, I let the purple Converse high top shoe on my left foot press down into the lawn.  I was too afraid to lift my right foot.

 

Mike thought I saw the spider.

 

“Where is it?”

 

I didn’t move.  Mike shoved me into the yard.  I gained my balance and stopped after taking two or three steps, only turning my head to keep the spider clearly in view.

 

Mike jumped out and stopped beside me.

 

“Where is it?”

 

I nodded toward the jungle gym.

 

Mike laughed and jumped up and down.

 

He pointed to the web and then at me.

 

“That thing!  You’re afraid of it?  Don’t you know anything?  Writing spiders don’t attack you when you’re alive.  They wait until you’re dead!  And then they take their time to suck all the blood and guts out of you.”

 

“How do you know that?”

 

“Ricky told me.  He said if someone whispers your name in front of the spider, it will write your name in its web the next day and you will die.”

 

“I’m not so sure about that.”

 

“Oh yeah?  Watch this!”  Mike then walked up to the web and whispered my name several times.

 

I put my hands on Mike’s back and pushed him toward the web.  He fell down and caught a strand of web connected to the bottom rung of the jungle gym.  The web popped and the spider uncurled its legs.  Mike looked up in horror.  I backed away, hoping the spider could only eat one boy at a time.

 

Mike rolled on the ground until he got far enough away that he could stand up.  He rose into a crouch, his feet sprouted wings twice as big as Mercury’s and he flew by me so fast he spun me around like a top.  The spinning made me dizzy and the dizziness made me mad.  How could my best friend just take off like that and not care about me?

 

My anger drove away the arachnophobia.  I stomped over to the spider web, yelled Mike’s name three times and ran off.

 

The next day, I looked at the spider web.  The text in the web said either “WIFE KILLED ME” or “MIKE WILL DIE.”

 

The spider was gone.

 

Mike died a year later while riding his bike at the end of our neighborhood.  His parents organized a search party when Mike didn’t show up after two days.  They found his shriveled-up carcass in the undergrowth of a ditch.  The police officer told my father he had passed by the ditch several times that day but didn’t think anything could have slipped in under a thick spider web without leaving a hole or tearing up the web.

 

Go figure.

3

 

When I stepped over the threshold of the conference room, I was snagged in sticky webbing.  Out of the darkness, I saw the reflection of several pairs of eyes.  “Hey!  Hey, guys, what’s going on?”  I yelled and could hear my voice echoing.  I turned my head around as much as possible, getting my chin even with my right shoulder and saw only a slit of light coming from the conference room behind me, as if someone had pushed the white board down but not completely latched it shut.

 

The eyes came closer.  I detected a slight smell, earthy and musty, like an old cellar or attic.  When the eyes were within a few feet of me, I could tell that the doorknob-shaped orbs belonged to an enormous spider.  I thought I saw the yellow-and-green pattern of a garden spider.

 

Now, if you fear spiders and were in my position, you’d be inclined to think the spider intended to eat you.  Not me.  I trusted that whatever Paul had me into, it wasn’t to be eaten by a spider in the dark.

 

Even so, I was just about to pee in my pants from fear.  Luckily, fear makes me think of something funny.  I remembered all the silly spider scenes from literature and movies, most notably “The Hobbit” and “Krull”.  The spiders always seemed to lose in the end.

 

“You know,” I pondered out loud, “if the spider has any nasty plans for my demise, probability tells me that it’s more than likely going to die.”

 

“No, it’s not,” Paul’s voice resounded from nearby.  “Actually, the spider’s going to blindfold you.  Even though you know about the white erase board passageway, we don’t yet trust you enough to let you know where you’re going next.”

 

“Uh, just how long is this going to take?  I have lunch plans with my wife at 11:30.”

 

“11:30?  Why didn’t you say so in the first place?  In that case, we’ve got practically all day.  Wait, you don’t know what I’m talking about yet.  Okay, White Knees, you can wrap him up now.”

 

Suddenly, the spider darted toward me – making barely audible mechanical sounds as it approached – grabbed me by my waist and legs and started spinning me around, covering the top of my head with sticky, silken webbing, while simultaneously tying my arms and legs up.  Within 10-15 seconds, I wasn’t completely wrapped in a cocoon but I couldn’t get out of the binding, either.

 

I felt myself being hoisted up and dropped onto a hard platform.  The labored breathing sounds around me indicated that I had been picked up by at least three or four people.  The platform started moving.

 

“So where are we taking him…”

 

“Shhh!”

 

As I rolled and bounced along, a song popped into my head, “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” always a good song to sing to myself when I was feeling a bit odd.

 

“… Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious

If you say it loud enough you’ll always sound precocious

Supercalifragilisticexpi…”

 

The platform came to a stop.  I felt something wet dripping on my neck as someone grabbed my head and pulled me up.  “Sorry about that.  We’ve got to coat the knife with oil to keep it from sticking to the spider web.  Here, let me get this off of you.”

 

When the webbing was removed from my eyes, I could see Paul, Andrew and Hermann standing over me.  I looked around – tree limbs were coming up out of the floor, and the view out the window seemed to be of a valley.  “Uh…”

 

“Yes, Bruce?” Paul came back, smiling.

 

“This looks like a treehouse.”

 

“So it appears, doesn’t it?  A bit disorienting, isn’t it?”

 

“How do you do it?  I mean, this isn’t real.”

 

Andrew laughed and cut the rest of the webbing from my body.  “Bruce, you’d think we’re pulling a fast one on you.  But seriously, WYSIWYG.”

 

“What you see is what you get?”

 

“Yeah.  Go ahead.  Go over there and open the window.”

 

I walked over to the nearest window, flipped a latch and pushed the window open.  It smelled like rain.  Giant anvil-head clouds towered overhead.  “I think it’s going to rain.”

 

Paul stepped up next to me.  “You’re probably right.  Guess we won’t be going back to the office for a while, then.”

 

“But my lunch date…”

 

“Oh, you’ll get back in plenty of time for that.”

 

Hermann slapped me on the back.  “Yeah, Bruce, I know it seems weird but everything is logical here.  For instance, if you turn around, you’ll see the cart we wheeled you in on is gone.  But if you open that door, you’ll find your lab…”

 

“Not yet,” Paul scolded.

 

“Well, if Paul were to let me open this door, you’d see the cart and everything else.  It’s not as strange as it first looks.  We spend a lot of time toying around with our inventions, trying to stay one step ahead of MORTIE.  Half of our intellectual property is…”

 

“Enough,” Paul retorted.

 

“Anyway, welcome to our clubhouse.”

 

Clubhouse?  Wow, the last clubhouse I’d entered was in the days of my youth.  Perennially occupied by boys aged 8 to 10, the clubhouse sat at the base of a large rock in the woods near my house.  The clubhouse was made from leftover scraps of lumber, picked up from construction sites as subdivisions expanded in our area.  There was only one clubhouse rule.  Any boy could visit the clubhouse but the only way you could gain entry was to bring some stolen item with you.  If you only brought stuff from your parents’ house, you were allowed one free pass but if you had stolen from the local pharmacy or grocery store, you had permanent access to the clubhouse.  The more you stole, the higher your standing in the group.  Five kids could sit comfortably in the clubhouse.  Some boys would smoke cigarettes to prove they were tougher than the thieves.  They had no hang-ups sneaking cigarettes from their parent’s packs but were too afraid to get caught stealing from stores.  I ceded the toughness to them – I wasn’t interested in the hazy falsehood of tobacco.  I’d already seen my grandfather and great uncle die of emphysema.  Besides, I had an angelic face and could steal anything I wanted from the local stores.  I tended toward Mad magazine myself but other kids would get me to steal Cracked.  It seemed like such a ripoff of the original to me but when an older or bigger kid threatens to beat you up if you don’t get him exactly what he wants…well, why be picky?

 

I smacked myself on the forehead.  “But, of course.  You know, I’ve been meaning to build a treehouse in my backyard, and have been calling it a writer’s cottage…”.

 

“We know.”

 

“…and yet, all along, I’ve really been thinking of building the clubhouse I never had.”

 

“Duh.”

 

“So have you guys been reading my mind or something?”

 

“Not really.  You’re the one who’s been sharing your treehouse plans with folks in Engineering.  We’ve just taken your emailed ideas and made it into reality.”  Whenever anyone at work mentioned building a playhouse for their kids, I showed them my treehouse plans, even though I’d never fully built it.

 

I had been working on a design for a treehouse in my backyard.  The treehouse was to have a cross shape, giving nod to my Christian upbringing, with each spoke of the cross to have a different theme.  The bottom part of the cross was a Southern-style shack in recognition of my American Southern roots.  The right half of the crossbar was going to be a Japanese temple, noting the influence of Eastern religion on my beliefs.  The left half of the crossbar was going to be an adobe house, giving thanks to the Native Americans who first peopled these lands.  The top of the cross was a two-story castle turret, in recognition of the Viking/Norse/Germanic blood in me.  Where the two bars intersected was going to be a room with Celtic symbols, showing that I also had a bit of Irish, Scottish, and English in me.  After several trees I’d picked out to host the treehouse had fallen over, exposing termite nests, I’d opted for a cliffhouse, instead, using the 10-foot tall rock ledge at the back of my property for an overhanging writer’s shack.

 

“Cool.  So which part of the building is this in?”

 

“Building?”

 

“Yeah.  Are we still on the top floor?”

 

Paul, Andrew and Hermann laughed and whispered something among themselves.

 

“So I guess we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

 

Paul put his arm around my shoulder.  “Not exactly.  Look, let’s not worry about that right now.  We really do need to get on with the Q-Square meeting…”

 

“Two-Square?”

 

“Nope.  Capital Q, dash, capital S, small q, u, a, r, e.  It’s what we’re calling the second generation of the Remote Research product line.”

 

“You mean Qwerty-Queue?”

 

“Yeah, whatever.”  Paul opened a door beside him but not the one that Hermann indicated.  “Let’s get back to the meeting.”

 

I followed Paul into a treehouse conference room, where all the rest of the Qwerty-Queue guys were sitting.

 

“Bruce, welcome!” Gordon shouted.  “I bet you wonder what the hell you’ve gotten yourself into.”  I looked at Gordon’s red, veined cheeks and couldn’t tell if he was sunburned, an alcoholic, had extremely high blood pressure or some combination of the three.

 

I laughed and broke into my NASCAR accent.  “What the fuck, man.  You all go all out, dontcha?”

 

“Yeah, I just wish my grandkids could see this.  They’d be jealous as hell and want me to build them one of these things.”

 

“Grandkids?”

 

“Yeah, my oldest just turned 19 and had her second kid.  I’m awfully proud of my little uns.”

 

“I bet you are.”

 

Paul cleared his throat.  “So, now that the first order of business is taken care of, Andrew will go over the rest of the action items.  Andrew?”

 

Andrew handed out printed copies of the day’s meeting agenda.

 

“Okay, as you can see, item 1.a, ‘Vote Bruce in or out,’ has been taken care of.  Now we need to consider item 1.b, ‘Give Bruce a new name.’  Bruce, do you have a special name you want us to call you?”

 

“Special name?”

 

“Yeah.  Is there a secret nickname or something we can refer to you when we want to get in touch with you but don’t necessarily want to call you by your Christian birth name?”

 

“Umm…well, as a kid, my CB handle was Pruned Pear.”

 

“What?  That won’t do.”

 

“It won’t?”

 

“No, it’s not catchy.  Besides, we already know you use the fake company name, Pruned Pear Productions, for your books.  We don’t want to confuse anyone.”

                                             

“Gosh, then I’m not sure.”

 

“In that case, we’ll assign you the name suggested by Comix over there, flotsam.”

 

“Flotsam?”

 

“Yes.”  Paul grabbed an Internet tablet from the conference table and turned it toward me as he typed.  “See, here’s the definition from wiktionary, ‘debris floating in a river or sea, in particular fragments from a shipwreck.’”

 

“Well, gee, why didn’t you use jetsam, instead?  I mean what’s the difference?”

 

“Actually, we did debate the difference.  However, instead of referring to you as a specific dumping of ship cargo, we thought the more generic term for ship’s cargo would be appropriate.”

 

“How nice of you.”

 

Andrew smiled.  “We thought so.  On to item 2.a., the marketing campaign for Q-Square.  Any thoughts on the matter?”

 

Edwards raised his hand.  Andrew nodded at him.  “Well, I was just thinking that we could create a bunch more entries on makezine.com and maybe finagle our way onto G4 TV or g4tv.com.  I’ve got a contact at cnet who could hook us up with some teaser articles.  We could set up some booth bunnies at Comic-Con and dragon*con.”

 

“Great suggestion.  Get with Stiles and sort out the details.  Item 2.b.  Oh, I see I left it blank.  Oh well, maybe I’ll figure out what I was thinking about later on in the meeting.”

 

I looked at Andrew.  “Or maybe you just made a typo.”

 

Andrew scowled.  “Maybe.  Item 3.a.  New cable design.  Dale, you got an update on that one?”

 

“Yes, sir, I do.  I looked at the blueprints for this treehouse and don’t see any reference to the IT networks so I don’t know what you’re askin’ for.  It’s like you was askin’ for the Car of Tomorrow and I’ve only got the old Chevy Monte Carlo design to go by.  Kinda makes it hard to win races, if you know what I mean.”

 

“No computer network diagram in the blueprints?”  Andrew laughed.  “I guess I was responsible for the network diagram, wasn’t I?”

 

Everyone smiled but none dared to speak – only later did I find out that Andrew didn’t like others to correct him – no one wanted to hear his tirade of pernicious chastising.

 

“Well, I’ll work on that this afternoon, assuming Bruce’s training is completed by then.  Item 3.b. Old AaBbC cable drawing corrections.  Any updates on those?”

 

“Yes, sir.  I took the resoldered cables from Hyung Lo and have edited the digital photos I made of them.  I should have the 3D renderings done by the end of the week.”

 

“Good.  I’ll let you know if anyone cries for them earlier.  Let’s see, item 4, funding.  Paul, I believe that’s your department.”

 

“Thanks, Andrew.  First of all, I need Bruce to sign this Non-Disclosure Agreement form.  Bruce, the secret entrance from the conference room and this treehouse are nothing compared to what you’re about to hear.  You can sign this form and stay or you can leave.  Even if you don’t sign the NDA, you’re welcome to come back to the treehouse at any time but you won’t be able to go any further.”

 

I looked down at the form and thumbed through its eight pages of gobbledygook.  “Umm, so this looks like a standard NDA.  Is there anything in here special that I need to know about?”

 

Paul grabbed the form from me and flipped to page five.  “As you can see here, if you are caught discussing anything about the source materials and funding for Q-Square, you are liable for all damages caused to the company, the team, the project and the economy.”

 

“The economy?”

 

“Yes, that’s why you’re signing this form.  The work we perform here is not all fun and games.  We have a significant impact on the national and global economy.”

 

I smirked.  “So how am I expected to repay monetary damages on a global scale?  You know what Cumulo-Seven pays.  There’s no way I’ll be able to…”

 

“Whoa, whoa, Bruce.  You’re missing the point.  Are you planning to disclose what we do here?”

 

“Not that I know of.”

 

“Well, then, just consider this NDA very, very carefully before you sign it.  If there is any part of it you don’t agree with, then don’t sign it.  Andrew has actually refused to sign it.”

 

“But Andrew is going to stay here and discuss the budget.”

 

Paul turned to Andrew.  “Uh, Andrew, were to planning to stay?”

 

Andrew stood up.  “No, actually I was just checking my notes from last week’s meeting.  I’m done.  I’m about to leave if you’re going to discuss the budget right now.”

 

Paul held up his hand.  “Wait a second.  So, Bruce, what do you say?  Are you going to go with Andrew or are you going to stay?”

 

I stood up and walked to the window.  In the distance, I could see large moving equipment dragging logged trees down a hill.  I heard or thought I heard the cry of a hawk.  Sure enough, swooping overhead was the full flared out form of a redtailed hawk, with a smaller bird following behind.

 

I turned back to Paul.  “What are they doing down there?”

 

“From what we’ve been observing, it appears to be the installation of a large TVA power line.  If you look there,” Paul pointed to an open patch of grass at the bottom of the wooded hill below us, “you can see a set of short metal poles.”

 

I looked at the tiny Erector set.  “Yep.”

 

“No doubt, that’s going to be a new power substation.  As soon as it’s finished, we’ll go in and sell them our powerline broadband equipment, which will give us another communications network to use.  Why do you ask?”

 

“Oh, I’m just wondering how much I see out there is influenced by this group.  After all, if you’re impacting the whole economy…”

 

“Bruce, you don’t fully understand and unfortunately, you’ll never fully understand what that clause in the NDA means unless you sign it.”

 

I looked at Andrew.  He shrugged his shoulders.  I looked around the room and realized that I was alone with Paul, Andrew and Hermann again.  “So who all has signed this?”

 

“Just Hermann and me.  The rest of the team wants plausible deniability.”

 

Andrew grabbed his notebook and headed to the door.  As he opened the door, he turned back to me.  “And keep in mind that the government has no idea what’s going on here.  If they get a hold of you…”  Andrew stepped out and closed the door behind him.

 

“Well, Bruce, time’s up.  I need to discuss this budget with Hermann.  Are you in or are you out?”

4

 

I sat down in the folding camp chair, grabbed a Red Bull from the table and took a swig.  “Okay, I’ll sign it.”  I flipped to the back page, signed my name, dated it and handed the NDA form to Paul.  He and Hermann signed the two witness lines.  Paul pulled a lighter out of his pocket, set the NDA form on fire and threw it on the table.

 

“What the hell?”

 

“Bruce, from this point on, there is nothing in writing that can track any of us back to what we’re doing.  Hermann, how’s the budget coming along?”

 

Hermann stood up on the table and ground the ashes into the redwood picnic table boards.  He reached up to the ceiling, pulled down on an attic door handle disguised as a ceiling hook and unfolded an attic ladder.  The ladder’s feet rested on top of the table.

 

Hermann motioned to Paul and me.  “Let’s go on a flight and find out.”

 

I climbed up the ladder behind Hermann.  At the top, I stepped off to the side.  Paul followed behind me, folding the ladder and closing the door behind him.  We stood in the entryway of an old metal aircraft hangar.  Its rounded shape reminded me of the hangars from the Second World War.  A bunch of scrap parts was piled up against the wall behind us while parked in the middle of the hangar was a Cessna 182.

5

 

I froze.  Hanging above me from a rusty nail on the hangar wall was some ratty, torn mosquito netting blowing in the breeze.  Like a dancer’s skirt, the netting fluttered lightly, with sensuous undulating pulses almost tickling my nose.  But I was not fascinated by the netting.  Instead, inches from my face, the delicate form of a Diapheromera femorata, the common walking stick, clung to the netting and stared me in the face.

 

That close to me, I could see why some people compared the walking stick to a praying mantis for it did have some of the stretched-out features of that awesome creature that could capture a hummingbird for dinner.  But this walking stick was more delicate-looking.  Its head was not much bigger than a BB.  Perhaps thinking it was resting on a giant spider’s web and waiting to catch the spider for a meal, it used its four hind legs to bind it to the black netting, folding its two front legs together not like a mantis in prayer but more like a monk in meditation, with fingers, wrists and elbows held in symmetrical form, a mantric corpus of sorts.  Antenna rested on those arms like two pieces of hair caught on a twig.

 

I admired the honey-colored body, and carefully studied the green and russet legs.  Most importantly, I paid attention to the position of the backend of the abdomen.

 

I wanted to move but I couldn’t.  You don’t understand the phrase, “paralyzed with fear,” unless you’ve seen the damage that seemingly innocent-looking insects can inflict.

 

5.a-1.001(1)

 

When I was 10, I went on an overnight Cub Scout camping trip into the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.  I had been reading about edible plants and wanted to find some of the wild blueberries that were supposed to grace the hillsides.  After we had set up our tents, the parents let us boys explore the woods and trails, warning us not to stray too far away.

 

I told some of the other boys about where I thought some wild blueberries might be.  We all agreed it was a more exciting prospect than the adventures we’d heard other boys talking about – who could gather the most firewood and who could find a brown recluse spider – so we all studied the map in my field guidebook and headed toward the nearest trail sloping up into the woods.

 

After an hour of steadily climbing switchbacks on the side of a hill, we reached a small cliff.  Sure enough, hanging over the side of the cliff, under the shade of some pine trees, were a few blueberry bushes.  I was elected to eat the first blueberry so I made sure I grabbed the biggest one.  It was delicious!

 

As I started to grab another one, I was joined by a set of greedy hands, all of us quickly stripping the bush of its chances for spreading seed on the hillside that season.

 

I looked at the faces of my grade school friends and knew they weren’t satisfied with just a few berries.  They wanted more.

 

I stepped out on the edge of the cliff and leaned out.  I held on to a pine tree limb and looked up the cliff face.  My 10-year old eagle eyes discerned a few more blueberry bushes hiding beneath a water runoff area.  I was not the best climber so I described the location of the bushes to the most athletic person in our group, Barry, a year older than the rest of us and destined to be one of the best basketball players in our high school history.

 

Barry was not destined to be a conservationist.  He clambered up the rock face, making quick work of his ascent.  He found the blueberry bushes but instead of plucking the berries and putting them in his shirt pocket, Barry tore the two bushes out of the thin ground and brought the bushes back with him, swinging from rock to rock with just one hand gripping vines and pine trees on the way down.

 

Another interesting fact I had read about that area of the mountains was the land had belonged to the children of a local wealthy railroad tycoon, Baron Von Southern.  While most of the other landowners in the area had stripped the valleys and hills of all the timber during the “cut it and cut out” days after the railroads were built, reducing the wooded land down to useless spindly trees and rotting stumps, the Von Southern kids decided to preserve the virgin forests for future generations, thinking that the larger trees of their grandchildren’s time would be worth as much as the gems and minerals dug up by prospectors who’d swept in and laid claim to the surrounding barren fields and eroding slopes.  The Von Southern descendants continued to make millions of dollars from railroad commerce and decided to donate the land to the federal government to honor their ancestor and relieve some of their tax burden.

 

By leaving the Von Southern land untouched, many insect and mammal species of the southeastern United States were saved, long before snail darters and spotted owls had to be used as poster children for conservation causes.  Some consider this a lucky accident of fate.  Others are not quite sure.  Because so few specimens of these species survived, inbreeding became a problem.  In amphibians and insects, scientists observed deformed legs or unusual body shapes.

 

Barry handed the bushes to one of the smaller Cub Scouts.  He reached out to pluck a plump berry to reward himself for his efforts.  Instead, the bush snatched him.

 

Barry yelped and tried to pull away but the claws holding the fingers of his hand were like fork tines stuck in a hot dog.

 

Barry looked around the group for help but we were either frozen in fear or slowly backing away.

 

The boy holding the bushes let go of the one holding Barry.  Before he could drop the other bush, the bush got the drop on him and wrapped two claws around his wrist.

 

All of us had been given basic first aid training such as how to find the major artery of an arm or leg and apply pressure to slow down a bleeding wound and how to create a splint and immobilize a broken limb.  Some of us had even been given lessons at home in home protection, such as how to block a punch or how to shoot a pistol.

 

None of us had been taught how to fight off a beastly blueberry bush.

 

I stood there for five or ten seconds and watched Barry pulling desperately on the bush with his free hand.  The harder he gripped the limb of the bush to pull it off, the deeper it sank its claws into his hand.  I was about to think about the possibility of getting nearer Barry on the off chance that I might get up the courage to help pull the bush off of him when I saw a second limb of the bush slowly reach around and grab the elbow of Barry’s free arm.  Just as it occurred to me that the bush resembled some wild, tropical walking stick I had seen in Brother Bob’s Adventure in the Amazon, the bush or walking stick secreted a foul-smelling substance from the area of the metathorax.  The sulphur-colored slime evaporated as it dripped from the angry beast.  A breeze blowing up from the valley pressed the mustard gas cloud into Barry’s eyes and mouth.

 

The last thing I remember seeing before I turned and jumped off the 20-foot cliff was bubbling ooze that came out of Barry’s mouth.  I heard his coughing gasps and cries for help as I continued to tumble and roll down the hill, shoving brambles away from my face with my bare hands, fighting for air as my lungs burned while I ran faster than I thought humanly possible.

 

At the bottom of the hill, I stopped to get my bearings.  I pulled a compass and the pocket guidebook out of my hip pack.  Somehow I had ended up 90 degrees away from where we’d started.  We had been climbing the west side of the small mountain.  Now, I was standing on the northern base of it, deeper into the Von Southern Preserve!

 

There were no trails in that part of the woods so I located on the map the dry streambed which ran by our campsite and marched toward it.  Yes, the shortest distance to the streambed was further north but the dry streambed, with its lack of underbrush, would give me a faster route back to the campsite.

 

All my young life, I had seen the woods not as a dangerous place where the rare sighting of a bear or cougar would lead to an extraordinary bloody attack by a wild animal on a human, but a place to explore, to understand, to see animals and plants that didn’t live in my suburban world.  Now, I wasn’t so sure.  True, I had not suffered any direct injury myself but Barry…could he really be in the grips of some insect bent on seeking revenge for our unceremonious feast on the eyes of its brethren?

 

Filled with fear of every snapping twig and crunching leaf, I carefully stepped across the forest floor.  I didn’t know if I should swat at the flies, gnats and mosquitoes flying around my head, scared that a bigger version was standing guard on the backside of a tree, waiting to suck the blood from my precious little fingers unprotected by an exoskeleton.

 

As I approached the streambed, I ran into a stand of Urtica dioica, better known as stinging nettle.  My hopes were raised because the only time I had run into stinging nettles during hikes or tubing down rivers was areas where the soil was constantly wet.  Sure enough, the ground was a little spongy.  I carefully stepped through the nettle keeping my arms held high.  I was about to get through them when I slipped on a rock, dropping one arm to keep my balance and brushing the inside of my wrist against a nettle.

 

Ouch!  I had stung myself.  I gritted my teeth and took two last steps to get out.  I observed the small wounds to see if I needed to pull the needle-like hairs out of my arm to keep more formic acid from getting in my skin.  Instead, I found small seeds hooked into me.  I had never seen nettle seeds getting a ride before so I gently pulled on a seed to get a better look at it.  The hooks of the seed reminded me of the bullhead weed, Tribulus terrestris, which had punctured many a mountain bike tire whenever my friends and I went riding offroad.  The seed itself had the shape of a watermelon seed but was semi-transparent.  I pulled on one of the seeds and it was hooked into my arm fairly securely.  I pulled harder.  The seed broke free from my arm but was attached to me by a curled-up, tubular, wire-like object buried in my skin.  The harder I pulled on the seed, the harder the tubeworm-like thing seemed to pull back.  I jerked the seed and the coil snapped in two.  One piece quickly returned into the seed.  The other piece started to disappear into my arm.  I pinched the end of it in my fingers and pulled hard.  My arm burned as if I was pulling a spark plug cable out of my gut.  I endured the pain until I got the worm or larva or whatever it was out.  I looked closely at the end of the thing.  Covered in blood and tiny pieces of flesh, three or four rows of hook-like arms or teeth about a millimeter in length were rotating and grasping, needing something warm and tender to sink into.  I shuddered and flicked the thing back into the nettle.

There were still three seeds hooked to my arm.  I noticed in each seed a receding entity and knew these tiny worms were crawling into my body.  I grabbed a seed and instead of jerking, I slowly unhooked it from my skin and ever so slightly extracted the worm from my arm, hoping it wouldn’t notice my intent.  I grabbed the next seed and performed the same trick but found the extraction a little more difficult because the worm had made significant progress up under my dermal layer.  Getting it out caused a small rip to open up like someone cutting open my arm for an operation.  The last seed easily pulled free.  Either the seed was already empty when it hooked into my arm or the worm thing was calling me home.

I detected no unusual lumps or movement when I felt around the places on my wrist.  They itched like the dickens but nettle did that to a person.  I used a Band-Aid from my emergency kit to cover the two-inch opening and hide my blood from any vampire bats resting in the trees above.

My curiosity forced me to turn around and look more closely at the nettle.  The seed pods were crawling on the stems and undersides of the nettle.  Clearly, they were more like cocoons than seeds.  Whatever was inside those cocoons must be some type of larvae.  I wanted to collect some of these for science class but then a chill ran down my back as the image of Barry’s face surfaced back to my conscious.  Scientific research would have to wait.

 

I stumbled a few steps and reached the edge of the streambed, climbing up onto a large rock to catch my breath.  From my vantage point, the stream made a sharp turn from the northeast and turned south, forming a sandy beach below me.  The sand was hardpacked, dry as a bone.  I had hoped that some water might be available but clearly no water had flowed through there in a long time.  I could see a stand of stagnant water across the way which probably eddied and formed a deep pool during the rainy season.  I always carried a couple of water purification tablets and a collapsible drinking cup with me on camping trips, for emergencies only.  I had never used them but thought now might be a good time to put the tablets to the test.

 

As I leaned forward to drop onto the sand, a black head stuck out from underneath the rock.  A black snake emerged and slowly slithered onto the sand.  It appeared the snake, which had several open sores and scraped-up scales, was trying to make its way to the rock next to me, also on top of the shoreline, but couldn’t hold its grip on the sand and half-slid down to the bottom while it attempted to move sideways and turn back up toward the rock.

 

I stood up on the rock.  I surveyed the Zen-like setting, similar to the Japanese garden of an Asian neighbor of mine back home.  The rock I stood on was the second-largest boulder in view.  The largest boulder stood in the middle of the stream bed.  Certain that I didn’t want to tempt fate by taking the straight path from my rock to the waterhole and get bitten by a frustrated snake, I determined that I could jump across the tops of boulders and completely avoid stepping on the streambed floor.

 

I picked my left foot up off the gray lichen-covered boulder just as a horsefly the size of a hummingbird landed on my ankle.  I stopped moving.  I hadn’t planned to hold that pose when I lifted my foot and was about to lose my balance when a loud buzzing insect appeared next to my left ear.  Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a dragonfly but this thing had a wingspan of a crow.  It flittered back and forth a few times and then with a flick, it had dropped onto the horsefly and tugged it off my socks.

 

I wasted no time thinking about what I’d just seen.  Instead of quenching my thirst in the land that time forgot, I raced down the streambed, avoiding the space between rocks whenever I dared to look down for snakes and who knows what else that dwelt in the cool shade and not above me for any other divebombers looking for a tasty meal.

 

Back at the camp, I arrived to find the parents standing over a picnic table, pointing at the map and sounding desperate.  None of them was paying attention to me, especially since I was returning from a different part of the woods from where I’d entered.

 

One of the den mothers, Mrs. Bowman, was walking back from her half-ton Chevy pickup truck with bright pink King Kap, carrying a sawed-off shotgun.  She was the only single mother in the group and had grown up on a farm in the outskirts of Newport, Tennessee.  She and I were walking in parallel.  She saw me and gave me a grownup nod.  I then realized I was still holding the compass and map in my hand.  I assumed she thought I was doing whatever frantic adult thing that her grownup friends were doing at the table.

 

We walked up to the table and stood behind the others.  Mrs. Bowman waited for a break between the shouted accusations and pouted fears to cock and load the shotgun.

 

Attentive faces turned toward us.

 

Mrs. Bowman leaned back on her hips with the butt of the gun shoved into her armpit and the barrel pointed at the ground.  She took control of the group and told them to calm down.

 

Two of the boys had returned ahead of me and given an uneven explanation for the absence of the others.  As calmly as I could, I gave an account of the events as I knew them.  I also pointed out on the map where Barry and the other boy had been attacked.  Because I could see the parents hadn’t bought the first boys’ story about attacking bushes, I explained that it looked like a rabid animal might have been resting on the cliff and felt cornered by all the humans standing there and attacked us in an attempt to get free.

 

The parents latched on to my story and enhanced it among themselves.  Mrs. Bowman could see I was worn out and dripping wet so she made me go back to my tent, eat a snack bar, change clothes, and take a nap.  I had never gotten along with her pushy, two-bit hustling son, who was always trying to cheat me when we played cards in the tent at night but I obeyed her without question.

 

5.b

 

I continued to hold my breath as I looked at the walking stick.  From head to tail, it was only about four inches long.  Just like the common walking sticks in the woods in my neighborhood, its jointed tail could curl up like a scorpion but I knew it was a harmless plant-eater.

 

Still, I could recall the perplexed looks on the faces of the medical personnel and police officers who interviewed me after the bodies of Barry and the little kid had been found.  (I dislike referring to the dead boy without a proper birthname.  I wish I could tell you the name of the little kid but I’m afraid that shock and the old mental scar have blocked it from my memory.)  Since I was the only boy who had any recall about the event, they repeatedly asked me to describe the rabid animal I had seen.  Every time, I told them that is was all a blur because it happened so fast before I fell off the cliff myself.  All I could remember was what seemed like an animal that appeared out of thin air with sharp-pointed claws digging into the flesh of Barry and the other boy while they tried to fight off the beast.

 

The police confiscated the pocket knives of all the boys on the hike.  We guessed the police suspected one of us or some of us of attacking Barry and the other boy.

 

Barry recovered and we were allowed to visit him in the hospital.  He asked us what happened.  The other boys repeated my story about the wild animal.

 

I waited until the other boys had left and Barry’s mom stepped out of the room to talk to my mother.  I told Barry exactly what happened.

 

At first his eyes were wide open and he didn’t blink.  Then, a look of determination came across his face.  As I finished the story, he nodded and made me give him a secret handshake only the two of us would know.  I shook his hand.  With my middle finger I traced a B in his palm.  Years later, I ran into Barry at a Dairy Queen where high school kids liked to hang out.  Some of the basketball players were there and were giving my friends and me a hard time because of the old Dodge Dart I was driving.  Barry walked up just as a buddy of mine started swinging at one of the shorter basketball players.  Barry pulled them apart and made his team go back inside the restaurant.  He walked over to me and gave me the handshake with the traced B.  We nodded at each other and he walked away.

 

 

The walking stick didn’t move.  I then remembered that walking sticks are night hunters, remaining almost completely motionless during the day, even when disturbed.

 

 

6

 

“Bruce, you ever flown in one of these?”

 

I shook my head at Hermann.

 

“Well, neither has Andrew.  He says that he doesn’t fly because it’s just another justification for the government’s surveillance of our activities.  I think he’s just afraid of flying.  Are you afraid?”

 

“Are you kidding?”

 

“Oh yeah, I forgot.  You’ve been skydiving.”

 

Paul pushed Hermann and me in our backs.  “Okay, guys, we can talk in the plane.  Let’s roll.”

 

I climbed into the rear passenger’s seat.  As I settled in, I noticed the interior was wrapped in metal foil.  After Paul got in, I tapped him on the shoulder.  “What’s that for?”

 

“Protective shielding.  You never who or what is monitoring us so we’ve added a few precautions.  Grab that helmet in the seat beside you and put it on.”

 

I picked up the black Shoei RF-1000 motorcycle helmet and looked at the airbrushed graphics – a detailed rendition of a shipwreck wrapped from one earhole around the back of the helmet to the other earhole.  Stamped in military lettering above the faceplate was the word, “FLOTSAM”.  I put the helmet on.

 

“FLOTSAM, can you hear me?” Paul’s voice echoed in my ears.

 

“Yes.”

 

“Good.  We wear these helmets so no one can see us and recognize us.  Also, no one can use telescopes, telescopic photo lenses or lasers to read our lips or track what we’re saying.  We’re communicating via an ultra wideband radio system that we borrowed from the folks at UWB Designs.”

 

Despite the cool stuff I had seen that morning, I was beginning to wonder just how paranoid these guys were.  Were they nutcases or were they really involved in secret development?  “What about the plane registration?  Couldn’t they just photograph our number and track us that way?”

 

“Don’t worry.  I’ve got that covered.  Okay, let’s get airborne.”

 

Hermann called to the tower and got us in the air.  After reaching a comfortable cruising altitude, Hermann removed the airplane headset from his helmet.  He looked around the skies and then turned to Paul and me.  “Okay, using the height of that mountain over there, 1802 feet, I calculated that we could use a minimum of three repeaters, bounce the signal 23 times and achieve the signal ratio we’re looking for.”

 

Paul nodded.  “Forty-one and half million.  Excellent.  Any chance we can find another source?”

 

“Well, the addition of the substation gives us two to three more possibilities for amplification but that’s only a guess.  I’m hoping Flotsam could give us some insight into that source.  Flotsam?”

 

I rubbed the back of my neck.  What were they talking about and was I supposed to know what they saying?  I looked out the window and could see we were flying a loop around the valley, with the substation below us.  Was it only my imagination or did the shape of the hill below us make an S-pattern with the new clearcut forming a slash through the S, giving it the overall shape of a dollar sign, with the substation making a period?

 

“Flotsam?”

 

I took a wild guess that Hermann and Paul used the terrain as a sort of hieroglyphic communication system.  Why they didn’t just use Google Maps, MapQuest or some other online mapping system for these discussions seemed a little too much Spy vs. Spy to me…a constant match of wits with an enemy where nobody really wins.  You have to enjoy the one-upmanship more than an absolute victory.  But if that was the game they were playing, I didn’t want to spoil their fun.  “Umm…well…uh…I do know of a source but the hill and the clearcut are not what I’m thinking about.”

 

“No?”

 

I looked at the landscape east of the hill and it dawned on me that I knew the name of the hill, Little Mountain.  “Okay, so if you make a little mountain out of a hill, then following east, the sun rises, right?”

 

“Roger that,” Hermann responded, turning the plane east.

 

Just as I thought.  The intersection of the Flint River green trail and the Robert Trent Jones golf course formed the barest semblance of the British pound sterling sign.  I had some friends at a small company in southern England who were looking to expand their portfolio.  Paul was also familiar with them.  I leaned over and started to point down but Paul grabbed my arm.

 

“No need to emphasize the obvious, we’ve got an idea what you’re talking about.  Okay, let’s get back to the meeting.”

 

With all that had gone on, I was worried my wife would miss me.  I looked at my watch.  It showed the time as 9:39 a.m.  How was that possible?

 

After Hermann landed the plane, we taxied back to the hangar.  He pressed a button on the airplane dash and the hangar doors opened.  I laughed.

 

Paul turned to face me.  “What’s so funny?”

 

“Oh, I don’t know.  I’ve just never seen a garage door opener on an airplane before.”

 

Paul laughed.  “And I forgot you’re originally a country hick from Tennessee.”

 

As we stepped out of the plane, I took a couple of seconds to observe the names on Hermann’s and Paul’s helmets, ICEMAN and THOR.  At least one of the nicknames was obvious.

 

I grabbed Hermann’s shoulder.  “By the way, who’s Mortie?”

 

I could feel Hermann’s neck muscles tense up.  “Not who.  What.”

 

“What?”

 

“Yeah, MORTIE’s not a who.  It’s a what.  And believe me, you don’t want to know what it is.”  Hermann slipped out of my grasp and walked on.

 

 

7

 

Back in the treehouse, Paul told me to sit and wait while he rounded up everyone to finish the meeting.  Sitting in the conference room, I was stuck in my head pondering the events of the morning until I subconsciously noticed that ten or fifteen minutes had passed.  Since my watch wasn’t working, my eyes wandered to the only other timepiece in the room, the image of an analemmic sundial on the skylight.  I looked at the figure-eight outline of the gnomon, squinting to figure out which month it was on the dial so I could find the right seasonally-adjusted time.

 

The automatic recorder in the back of my mind had recorded the shadow’s position when I first arrived in the room.  I had sat there looking up at the skylight, my eyes fascinated by the patterns of the high-altitude contrails.  A passing cumulus cloud disturbed my concentration on the sky.  After the cloud passed, I realized that it was nearly noon and I had probably re-entered the treehouse around 11:45.

 

 

 

 

8

If you had a wonderful relationship with a loving wife who you had grown up with, sharing many of your childhood events together, would you give it all up for a fantastic journey into the unknown that started in the morning of a not-so-special day at work?

9

 

Since it didn’t appear that Paul was returning, I got up and tried the door.

 

It was locked.  I tried the other door.  It was also locked.  Wondering if I had been locked in the room on purpose, I stood up on the table and tried the attic door.  Locked.

 

I walked over to the window and pushed it open.  There was no ledge to step out on.  There were no footholds of any kind.  However, if I opened all the windows, I could climb up to the top of one and use the others to stand on.

 

Did I mention I’m afraid of heights?  Sure, I’ve jumped out of an airplane but the ground is so far away it doesn’t feel like you’re going to hurt yourself when you jump out.  Besides which, I’m not afraid of falling, it’s the ground I’m afraid of hitting.  I took a dare when I was about six years old and jumped off the top of a house under construction.  I was supposed to land on the soft dirt pile but in an effort to show how brave I was, I propelled myself out beyond the dirt pile and onto hard ground.  Luckily, I only twisted my ankles and didn’t break anything.  Still, the mental damage was done.  Dirt hurts.

 

I stepped up on the window sill, spun around and grabbed the top edge of the window frame.  Leaning out as far as I could I saw that the treehouse was shaped like a haphazard Japanese pagoda, each story a little narrower than the next.  The floor above me had a window with a small balcony.  If I could balance myself on the top of the windows, I might be able to reach the balcony.

 

I lifted myself, propping my elbows onto the top of the window.  My motion caused the window to swing wildly on its hinges, smacking the top of my shoulders hard against the window frame and making me slip.

 

I hung from the window with only the four fingers of my left hand keeping me from certain death, or even worse, some nasty dismemberment and permanent maiming.

 

Then it was three fingers.

 

Then two.

 

I’m not a praying man but as I lost my grasp I asked anyone (or is that any One?) to make it a merciful death.  In the same moment, something tickled my ankle.

 

I looked down to see a vine curling around my leg.  Startled, I let go of the window.

 

And yes, I screamed like a scared girl.

 

A few seconds later, I was hanging upside down.  Have you have hung upside down?  Perhaps as a child, you played on a merry go-round or climbed on monkey bars.  Did you ever hang off of a bar with bent knees?  Do you remember the feeling of blood rushing to your head?  Well, it’s one thing when the ground is only a few inches or feet away but when the ground is...say, three or four hundred feet way…well, the rush of blood is the last thing on your mind.

 

Before I could shake the feeling of falling, a second vine grabbed my arm and pulled me up to the scaffolding under the treehouse.  With my free hand, I grabbed a horizontal stabilizer bar and clung for dear life.  The vine lifted my butt higher and allowed me to throw my free leg over the bar.

 

I breathed a sigh of relief, a very small sigh of relief.  I was still hanging over near death, stuck in the underpinnings of a clubhouse built on a tree that was growing out the side of a cliff face.

 

The vine uncurled from my leg and arm and slithered back to the rock wall.  I closed my eyes and slowly counted to three, long enough for me to take a deep breath and let it out.

 

When I opened my eyes, I realized my prayers had not been answered.  I had not enjoyed a merciful death.  I was sitting on a piece of wood of questionable strength and I had no immediate means of escape.  Well, other than suicide.  But at that point in time, suicide was out of the question.  In fact, there were a lot of questions I wanted answered before I met my end, such as why my watch wasn’t working and why did the stock market take a dip every time I felt like cashing out of my 401(k) and retiring.

 

I looked around.  Although my first impression had been that the vine had left me, it had, in fact, created a swinging bridge of sorts, leading from my position on the wooden beam to what appeared to be a set of stairs carved in the cliff.

 

I swung my leg over the beam and stepped out onto the vine.  Much sturdier than a rope bridge, the vine provided a secure foot path.  I pushed my hands up against the wooden floor above me and steadied myself as I walked fifty tiny steps over to the stone steps.

 

When I stepped onto the stone, I could feel a low vibration, as if an elevator or tram were being operated in a room on the other side of the wall.  I stopped and held my breath.  I laughed to myself when I realized the vibrations were coming from the equipment grinding up trees in the valley below.  The wall was acting as a sound amplifier, easily picking up the low resonance of the giant equipment below.

 

I felt safe.  I knew I could just walk up these steps and…but wait!  The steps led up to the floor above me, which was on the same level as the rooms I’d entered before.

 

I turned around and almost spun myself off the cliff.  Don’t know if the vine could have caught me that fast.  I leaned back against the wall and eyeballed the measurement of the treehouse.  The 3-4-5 rule works fine when you’ve got a ruler handy but I was using my skewed view of the floor with my eyes about 18 inches from below.

 

Let’s see.  The length of the end digit of my thumb is about an inch.  Counting from my elbow, it looks like about a foot from the inner bend of my elbow to the start of the first digit of my middle finger.  Elbow up to nearest support beam.  Elbow to finger, elbow to finger, looks like about two feet between the 4x4 support beams and they all look evenly spaced.  Hmm…26 support beams long and 13 support beams wide.  Accounting for the 4x4s being only about 3 inches square, the bottom floor covered about 56.5 feet by 28.25 feet – not bad for a little “clubhouse”.

 

 

 

 

 

10

 

When I was contemplating building a treehouse in my backyard, I was fascinated by the construction of treehouses, both of the past and of the present.

 

One of the best-preserved treehouses from the 1600s is the Chene-Chapelle in Allouville, France.  The tree in Allouville dates from the 1200s and yet still serves as a chapel oak today.  With all the termites and determined timber cutters in north Alabama, I don’t think any tree around here would survive more than a hundred years, an attitude that trees should serve the living, n’est pas?

 

Recently, treehouse construction has taken on a vigorous engineering discipline, with special construction techniques being applied, including the use of new tools of the trade such as the Garnier limb, a special threaded metal bar with an extra-large flange – the flange looks like a washer welded to the middle of the bar.  When the bar of a Garnier limb is mounted in a tree such that the flange is flush, the melding of the bar and tree acts as strong as a welded steel beam and can hold a weight many times heavier than a tree limb.  Two- and three-story home offices, hotels in the sky as well as the traditional treehouse for kids have grown in size and complexity due to the use of the Garnier limb.

 

When I started building a treehouse in my backyard, I employed the use of a Garnier limb.  I also built artificial tree limbs that “grew” out of rock and provided an attractive alternative to straight pieces of cut timber to hold up the balcony and play deck overhanging a rock wall.

 

Unfortunately, the lowly termite kept me from finishing my project.  That and the complexity of carved wood beams.

 

As anyone with limited construction or woodworking skills can attest, your appreciation for artisans and craftsworkers grows tremendously when you take on the task of home construction projects.  After ruining a few board feet of wood while attempting to carve Celtic designs with a router, you understand why you wouldn’t want to work as a carpenter and why the carpenter wouldn’t want your computer information worker job.  Despite the Western myth of the idea of individual freedom, we have innate tendencies to excel at certain tasks.  And I know all about Excel but my construction foreman neighbor doesn’t even know how to add two cells together.  If you have to ask…

 

11

 

 

I sat on the stone steps for a while longer, letting my mind wander aimlessly.  I considered my predicament and wondered what I had gotten myself into.  I wondered how it seemed that time stopped here in one sense but was moving along quite nicely in another.  My crotch itched and I scratched it.  My stomach growled.  I panicked for a split second thinking that a spider was crawling along my neck.  I slapped my neck and heard a squeak.  My eyes twitched – did I dare turn around?

 

With my right eye closed, I slowly turned my head to the left.  Staring me in the face was a bloom stalk of a beautiful specimen of Tillandsia fasciculata.  Didn’t know how such a bromeliad ended up in this part of northern Alabama but perhaps it had just recently been planted on the rock and had not enjoyed the freezing conditions of U.S. plant zone 7.  Even so, I had to figure out if the plant had just spoken to me.  I cleared my throat and spoke.

 

“Excuse me?”

 

The bloom stalk did not respond.

 

I shrugged my shoulders and turned back to face the rest of this incredible adventure and how I was going to get back to the office unharmed.  I had just about gotten up the courage to look down the cliff for a vertical escape route when I felt something tapping my shoulder.

 

I snapped my head around to catch the bloom stalk trying to move back into position, like a child who taps you on the shoulder and turns away as if nothing had happened.

 

“Okay, you.  I saw that.”

 

The bloom stalk did not respond.

 

I was beginning to wonder if maybe it wasn’t my coworkers who were going nuts.  Maybe it was just me.  In any case, I was still sitting precariously perched on the edge of a cliff with no obvious exit going up.

 

But wait...if the other parts of the treehouse had hidden entrances and exits, maybe this stone staircase had one, too.  I stood up and bumped my head on the treehouse floor.

 

Immediately, a trapdoor swung open and a rope ladder came tumbling out, bouncing off the stone steps and uncurling several feet below me.  Because the trapdoor had swung open toward me, I could not see up into the treehouse.  However, I figured if I could climb onto the ladder, perhaps I could get inside the treehouse.

 

With my left hand, I grabbed the ladder and pulled it toward me, stepping on it with one foot to test how sturdy it was.  It held fast.  I put my other hand on the ladder and started to climb to the next rung.  The ladder jerked and started descending.  I was committed to the ladder and couldn’t let go in time to grab back for the stone steps.  At first, I thought the ladder had not completely unfurled and was just slipping out to its full length.  But as I bumped and banged my back against the rock wall, I began to think the ladder was actually lowering me.

 

I heard a buzzing sound getting louder and looked up.  Hermann’s Cessna was swooping and diving about a half mile away.  Was he looking for me?

 

At last the rope ladder jerked to a stop.  While the ladder had lowered me, I dared not look down.  At this point, I thought that the ladder might have hit a platform or some other convenient means for my exit.  I cringed and bent my head over.  Nothing but a treed canopy below me.  I flinched when I felt a tap on my right ear.

 

I turned to see the little bromeliad attached to my shoulder.  The bloom stalk bowed, tapped me on my forehead and pointed back toward the cliff.

 

Sure enough, there was an opening in the wall but it was tiny and overgrown with vines.  Probably a small waterhole that formed a waterfall during rainstorms.  I reached out to break away the vines so I could peer in but instead the vines grabbed my arms and starting pulling me in.  The hole was no larger than the old dog door my father had cut out of our basement garage door when I was a kid, about 12 inches square.  As a kid, I could slither in through the door and pop the lock on the door to our house.  As an adult about twice the size of that kid, I saw no way I was going to fit into the cave opening.

 

I pulled back but the vine was too strong and in my struggle I lost my grip on the ladder, hanging from the cliff with one vine-wrapped arm stuck in a hole.  The vine kept pulling.  I ducked my head and allowed myself to be pulled in.  As the vine pulled in, the hole appeared to get larger, showing me that my first impression had been wrong.

 

The bromeliad jumped off my shoulder at the cave hole and climbed up on the rock.  I tucked my shoulders in to keep from scraping my dress shirt.  After my torso was in the hole, I was able to use my other hand to grab the vine and pull myself on in.  The bromeliad climbed in behind me.

 

Ten feet into the hole, the vine stopped pulling, unwrapped my arm and slipped back toward the opening.  At this point, the hole was at least three feet in diameter, allowing me to crawl forward.  While I made tentative steps in the dark, the bromeliad proceeded past me.  As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I realized that the bromeliad’s bloom stalk gave off a very faint glow.

 

I grabbed the bromeliad and put it on my shoulder, using its faint light as the world’s worst low-power flashlight.

 

Another twenty feet in and I realized that I could hear more than the rustle of my pants and shoes on the cave floor.  There was a low resonance sound, similar to the one I heard when the construction equipment was grinding up trees in the valley.  I could also feel the vibrations through my hands.  I shook my head and moved on, impressed that the equipment could be so strong that it could be felt and heard this deep in the rock.  Either that, or there was an opening between them and me…or should I say us, the bromeliad counting as another sentient being?

 

With the beat of the equipment as a musical guide (a lot better than the crack of a whip in a slave ship or shout of a coxswain pushing rowers along in a race), I crawled along.  I know I should have counted the tiny steps I was taking but having not eaten in a long time, I was more focused on my next meal, not even sure why the vine and bromeliad seemed to be leading me down into the cave.  What if there was a conspiracy among plants to capture and kill humans?  What if H.P. Lovecraft’s tales of grotesque sepulchers surrounded by blood-sucking vines had an ounce of truth?

 

I shuddered in the damp, cold chamber.  Looking behind and ahead of me, I could only see a foot or two at most.  The bromeliad sat on my shoulder and did not move.  Thank goodness, it didn’t speak, either!

 

Something buzzed on my right hip, lights flashed below and I jerked and jumped, swatting at whatever was there.  When I heard the telltale sound of plastic smacking rock, I realized it was my Treo 650 cellphone.

 

I picked up the phone and entered the unlock code.  The time showed 1:15 p.m.  That was weird.  Why was my cell phone clock working but my wristwatch not working?

 

With full signal, I tried to make a call, first and foremost to my wife.

 

“Hello?”

 

“Darling, is that you?”

 

“Yes, dear.  What is it?”

 

“Am I too late for lunch?”

 

“Lunch?  It’s not even 10 a.m. yet.  Can you wait until noon?  I have a meeting at 11 that should last about an hour.”

 

“Well, I’ll do what I can.  I’m in a meeting with the Qwerty-Queue folks and…”

 

“That’s wonderful.  So you got the new program manager job?  Does that mean you’re not still running the Huntsville test lab?”

 

“Oh, yeah.  I’m doing both for right now.  I’ll explain more after the meeting.”

 

“Noon is okay, then?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Okay.  Love ya.”

 

“Love you, too. Bye.”

 

I decided not to go into details about where I was.  I knew that an anthropomorphic plant tale would sound a little far-fetched, no matter how sober we both were.

 

I slid the cell phone back into my hip holster and crawled on.

 

The vibration stopped.  I could hear a humming, instead.  I stopped crawling.  Dang, the humming was my own tinnitus, amplified not by rock but by the silence, or so it felt.

 

Is tinnitus real?  I used to dispel the theory, placing tinnitus right up there with people who heard radio signals in their braces.  Then something happened.  Was it high blood pressure?  Could be.  Loud rock music?  Maybe.  Psychosomatic tendencies?  Remains to be seen.  No matter what the cause, the symptoms had gotten worse as of late.  Perhaps job stress, iPod nano and Bose QuietComfort 2 headphones on trans-Atlantic flights or heavy earwax were the cause.  Bottom line was that I could not discern certain sounds from the tinnitus in my head.  The wah-wah of our emergency weather radio and the ding-a-ling of our clothes dryer have long since lost their importance to my ears.  If something was near me, I might not be able to…

 

The bromeliad tapped my ear.  I looked at it.  The bloom stalk was pointing straight ahead.  I shook my head and peered into the dark.

 

Not again!  I could see the shiny orbs of spider eyes approaching. I considered turning around and crawling back toward the cliff but I knew the spider had the advantage whether I was facing it or crawling away from it.

 

The cell phone rang and I jumped.  The spider stopped crawling toward me and that was good.  I answered the phone.

 

“Hello?”

 

“Bruce, Bruce.  What are you doing?”

 

“Paul?”

 

“I can see you sitting there in the dark.  Are you smoking a cigarette?”

 

“No, I don’t smoke.  Why?”

 

“Then what’s that glow?”

 

I hesitated to answer.  I wasn’t sure if Paul knew about the active lives of the plants around the treehouse.

 

“I’m not sure.  I think it’s something I brushed up against in the tunnel.”

 

“Well, look.  I’ve got a meeting to finish up and you’re really trying my patience.  I hate to do this to you but my spider friend’s gonna have to wrap you up again and bring you back to the clubhouse.  Don’t make her want to eat you, okay? Just lie down on the floor and don’t move.”

 

“Sure.”

 

“Good.  We’ll see you in a few minutes.”

 

I put the cell phone back in the holster and lay down.  The bromeliad curled up and crawled into my pants pocket.

 

12

 

 

I happen to like bromeliads, probably because both my grandmother and my best friend in grade school had liked them and introduced me to them.  The plants were unusual enough that I didn’t see them in every tropical plant shop or botanical garden I visited with my parents, who were always on the lookout for rare plants to put in their lean-to greenhouse at the back of the house.

 

“Dad, why do we have a greenhouse?”

 

“Well, son, I guess it was to keep your mother happy.  She likes her tomatoes to be fresh all year.  You know me.  I’d rather have a plot of land to plow under in the fall and till in the spring.  There’s nothing like the fresh smell of dirt to get a man’s blood flowing.  Speaking of which, you’re nine years old this year.  It’s time you got the tiller oiled up and filled with gas and tilled the soil.  I want to get those early spring plants in the ground and time’s a wastin’.”

 

“Sure, Dad.”  I walked out of the living room and down the narrow stairs to the basement where Mom smoked cigarettes next to the fireplace, as if she was somehow still hiding her smoking habit from her parents.

 

“Mom.”

 

“Yes, dear.”

 

“Why is that we have a greenhouse?”

 

Mom exhaled smoke up the chimney.  “Well, darling, your father likes to get the spring planting done early and I didn’t see a reason to clutter the house with plats of radishes and peas.  Why do you ask?”

 

“I don’t know.  It just seems like the greenhouse sits empty most of the year.  I was reading about a way to store energy in greenhouses by stacking 55-gallon drums full of oil and circulating…”

 

“Empty?”

 

I lost my train of thought.  “What?”

 

“Do you think the greenhouse sits empty all year?”

 

“I suppose.”

 

“You know, dear, you just gave me a wonderful idea.  I’ve always wanted fresh flowers in the house but didn’t have the budget for it.  I bet if we grew flowers from seed, we could save money and have colorful blooms all through winter.”

 

And that’s how Mom and Dad got on the kick to collect and grow unusual plants.  At first, they raised traditional seasonal flowers like daffodils and mums.  But they grew tired of the same old cycle of plants.  They bought a few tropical plants, including Asplenium nidus (bird’s nest fern) and Spathiphyllum (peace lily).  My grandmother donated a few orchids.  With some of my neighborhood lawnmowing money, I joined the American Orchid Society in order to help my parents understand orchids.  I still remember the little copies of Mary Noble’s You Can Grow Orchids and You Can Grow Cattleya Orchids arriving in the mail, available for $2.00 and $3.50 at the time.  Hard to believe they cost $12.95 now.

 

When you study the growth and reproduction of plants like orchids, you end up learning a lot.  Long before I took any science classes in school, I was studying the difference between a bulb-based plant like a daffodil versus a rhizome-based plant like a cattleya orchid.  My grandmother grew native orchids in her backyard in south Florida.  She hadn’t told me the names of the orchids she gave my parents because she hoped I could identify them one day.  The only one I ever nailed down was Epidendrum rigidum.  She later told me one of the other ones was Epidendrum conopseum and had hoped I would get it to bloom so we could smell the sweet flowers.  Even though my parents tore down the greenhouse several years ago to make room for their ever-growing pile of firewood, they’ve kept a few epidendrums growing in a downstairs window, along with a couple of succulents I had collected along the way.

 

Even though we had the greenhouse, I grew bromeliads in terrariums.  That way, I could control the humidity, light and exposure to fungus.  Although the bromeliads grew remarkably well in their little contained worlds, none of them had ever thanked me for my upkeep and maintenance of them and I had never been hurt by their lack of gratitude.  My only reward was interesting blooms and reproductive offshoots or pups that I could break off and pass on to friends and family.  I certainly never expected a Cryptanthus, Billbergia or Neoregelia to step out of a pot and give me a bow.

 

13

 

 

“Ah, here we are, safe and sound, back at the ranch.”  Paul patted me on the shoulder and pressed against the wall.  The white erase board opened.  Paul pushed me forward and I stepped over the threshold back into the Qwerty-Queue conference room.  I looked down at my watch – it showed 9:47 a.m.

 

Paul stepped in beside me and closed the door.  “Okay, looks like this was another short meeting.  Bruce, thanks for joining the team.  I know that we’ll be talking about some great ways to optimize our development schedules, thanks to you.  Okay everybody, what’s the plan for lunch?”

 

Andrew turned to me.  “Bruce, you coming with us?”

 

“No. I’ve already made plans with my wife.”

 

“We’ll let you get by with it this time.  However, next time you’ve got to make plans to join us.”

 

“Okay.”  I turned around and faced the door.  I looked down.  My pants were filthy.  I brushed the dirt and dust off my pants legs.  I started to reach into my pockets to empty out any dead leaves and remembered there was more than my coin purse and pocket knife in there.

 

I walked out the door, through the engineering lab and into a hallway that was very familiar.  I hurried along.  I needed to get to my office, close the door and try to sort out this new weekly Qwerty-Queue meeting I’d agreed to attend.